A pinball table that had been operated on location in Alaska. When the plastic flippers and drop targets broke they were replaced by functioning hand carved wooden replicas.
The table is the 1979 Totem, themed after Northwest coastal woodcarving
So when I first moved to LA I lived in Los Feliz and I don’t know why but there was def. a 24 connection. Looking it up I don’t think it had sets at Prospect Studios, but maybe the LA location shots were based out of there?
Anyway, “drunk Kiefer Sutherland” was the neighborhood mascot, I was there once when he bought the bar a round at the Drawing Room. Across the street, when an episode aired Ye Rustic Inn would do a thing called “Jack Bauer Power Hour”, you put your money down and get a shot of beer each minute, a shot of whiskey every time he kills or tortures someone and some other things, some of the crew came out to witness the finished production that way
Also Mary Lynn Rajskub, the indie comic who played girl-in-the-van Chloe, had one-woman shows at the atheist church down the street, the “Center for Inquiry”. I remember the one about giving birth and becoming a mother was called “Mary Lynn Spreads Her Legs”
paleglanceaustereface asked: ell we're living here in AllentownAnd they're closing all the factories downOut in Bethlehem they're killing timeFilling out formsStanding in lineWell our fathers fought the Second World WarSpent their weekends on the Jersey ShoreMet our mothers in the USOAsked them to danceDanced with them slowAnd we're living here in AllentownBut the restlessness was handed downAnd it's getting very hard to stayWell we're waiting here in AllentownFor the Pennsylvania we never found. What's your opinion on it?
You know, I was aware of that song but I never really paid attention to it. Never liked Billy Joel or the whole ‘80s working-man’s rock thing anyway.
I should clarify that the Pennsylvania I grew up in wasn’t all that beat down. Thrived during my tenure, even.
I grew up in Doylestown - the seat of Bucks County directly north of Philly at the end of SEPTA’s R5 line, it’d been around since colonial times so had an actual town center, though when I showed up it was a little hollowed out by shopping centers and malls. Longstanding summer retreat for Broadway and other New York arts folks - I can point out the field that inspired the “corn as high as an elephant’s eye” line from Oklahoma!, though it’s an office park now. Henry Mercer and his Moravian tile and concrete castles, the Pennsylvania Impressionists nearby in New Hope.
As Philadelphia emptied out of the middle class, the farms in the surrounding communities became subdivisions, bolstered by tax refugees from the New Jersey pharmaceutical and telecom industries. Toll Brothers, the pioneers of the “McMansion”, were based locally, which means that as new classmates moved in and I visited their houses I noticed each new innovation in the form as it appeared - the 3 car garages, the vaulted entranceways, the vaulted living rooms with rear stairs and balcony.
Doylestown being the existing regional center (and not as crowded as New Hope) aimed at becoming the nightlife and cultural hub for all this, and seems to have hit the mark - built an art museum and library in the old prison, got a “resort town” designation that lifted Pennsylvania’s per-population cap on liquor licenses. You go back to the center of town today it’s all signs and facades and streetlights that just drip “historic” - which is funny because I first encountered them clad in ‘70s modernism - boutiques for the kind of people that send their daughters to riding lessons. The duplexes and modest homes on the hill by the old rivet factory and the Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks plant (the first became a parts warehouse for a local car dealership chain, the second was torn down to build a garage for the courthouse, which was in turn torn down to build a new courthouse AND garage) being bought up and torn down and built out to the lot lines.
FOR ALL THAT, I did one time head up to Allentown, driving with my friends one summer day because modems were still 33.6k and that’s what we did when we were bored. Headed to see what it was like, and the biblical cities - Bethlahem and Nazareth - and Hellertown, where our AP Physics teacher grew up and turned into this whole mythology for example problems - shooting rats in the quarry, riding the roller coasters at Dorney Park, his buddy flying a helicopter in ‘Nam.
One thing that struck me was just the steepness of the density gradient of these places built before the automotive era. You’d be passing through hills, and fields, and over small bridges over creeks, and then there’d be this huge rusty coking plant, smokestacks rising to the sky, girded with pipes running everywhere, looking for all the world like… …well like a fucking coking plant, I guess, that wasn’t a thing we had a reference for, maybe the 1989 Batman or Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. The outlying edges of cities looked about the level of suburban density we’d expect but when you’d hit the center you’d have an incongruous few blocks that looked like someone dumped a bit of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, tall stone and brick hotels and offices.
We agreed the plant would be a great place to play paintball, went to Hellertown and this ball field that was part of the mythology, there was a little league game going and the concession stand was open, had some ice cream. The place was depressing. It wasn’t menacing or decayed like Kensington or West Philly, just depressing in the way cloudless days in winter make the blue sky itself a bit grey. Before the Doylestown retail economy picked back up in the mid-90s, I was used to houses and businesses that looked like they last updated in 1982, there even the clean and well-lit stuff looked like 1967.
Like, the whole conceit of the song is “Our fathers went off to WWII and in return the country moved heaven and earth to make them patriarch-princes, we went off to Vietnam and now we’re treated as disposable.”
(He’s forgetting Korea in between, but that’s OK, everyone does.)
And given the title the focus is on the fall of the unionized Rust Belt heavy industry, but look at this line
met our mothers in the USO asked them to dance danced with them slow
this is literally, 100%, a lament for when we had government-provided gfs
The morale-boosting USO, now best known for in-theatre concerts and airport lounges, ran homefront clubs and canteens near soldiers’ postings, and a major role was providing the troops with female attention, recruiting girls from the area to free dances with regularly paid soldiers, hiring staff hostesses whose job was to flirt.
(This in a period where “courtesan” jobs like taxi dancer or cocktail waitress, with a career path culminating in marriage, were more of a thing)
And it wasn’t just the USO. Part of the point of the WAC was to match the supply of single women to the demand of support roles, freeing men for front-line service, part of it was just to have some young women on base. (Here I vaguely gesture at Miss Buxley, General Halftrack’s buxom secretary in Beetle Bailey)
Then there were nurses. Male military nurses in the war had a reputation as twinkle-toes homosexuals, drawn by the constant flow of strong yet vulnerable young men in uniform far from home to comfort. The male ones, of course. (Florence Nightingale’s innovation wasn’t young women going abroad to tend to soldiers – field armies ALWAYS drew trains of camp followers to attend to the men’s needs – but rather an idiom to do it compatible with Victorian sensibilities)
Like, guys, the government very much did try to provide gfs. And it didn’t stop with the war.
There’s this Rosie the Riveter impression that women streamed into factories in WWII but faded at its end, in fact post-war female factory employment was lower than before the buildup. (If women in factories started with WWII, how would you explain the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911?)
And this came amidst government pressure (from an extensive wartime central planning system) to clear out women and make way for returning men. There was a fear the Depression would return (this is why the war economy was never unwound) to a country of battle-hardened men and provoke Communist revolution; it was a high priority to keep men occupied, loyal, and rewarded as patriarchs.
Daniel Moynihan took shit over his famous report for suggesting the solution to the black community’s ills was government-backed patriarchy, Earl Butz took more shit for putting it thus:
“I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.“
For how colorful the language might be, though, that formula – “rising standards of living through improved access to consumer goods and women” was the exact same deal the United States made with its whites, as the basis of the postwar golden age.
I could talk about the postwar expansion of high schools and the creation of the “teenager” and all the courtship stuff there, hosting proms and football games and teaching how to dance in gym and how to wife in Home Ec and showing film strips and Coronet 16mms on how to get a date, but that’s a bit of a stretch. The point remains, though, under the New Deal social compact, from the Depression into the 1970s, the government was ABSOLUTELY in the gf-providing business.
America would’ve won a total nuclear war in 1951 and MacArthur shoulda forced *Truman* to resign
the trick is realizing it woulda been a close fight ‘cause between war weariness and communist sympathy, there’d be rebellion on the American home front
like there was hella backlash after WWI which was already resisted by a big international pacifist movement
(in America we repressed but also invented the idea of the “conscientious objector” to accommodate them; in the German Empire they were hanged as traitors)
and WWII seemed to be leading to reward
(tho there was a HUGE urban affordable housing issue in the late 40s, LOL)
but Korea was kind of a weird draw, first we (= the UN, which we managed to align as ‘The First World’ here, which is why we keep the UN around and what Bush the Elder thought he was following through on with Desert Storm)
okay what was I saying? First we were “ra ra, we’re so modern and advanced, check out how far we can project power, a front-line army in SE Asia!”
and then Russia/China were like “bitch we live here and we’re huge and you’re getting too close, deal with these huge waves of infantry and tanks”
And we got the shit beat out of us but we did this cool leapfrogging combined arms transport with ships and helicopters and it was like “ha ok still kinda modern tho”
And we called it a tie and forgot about it
But point being going into Vietnam it wasn’t just feckless kids not wanting to die who shunned it but but their “Greatest Generation” (or “Silent”) parents who knew that war could pay off, but weren’t sure this one would
They hadn’t seen Saving Private Ryan yet, so
(also along the way we bombed the everloving shit out of Korea, like, the peninsula, it was the real test case for “back to the Stone Age”and we really did kill a lot of people and bring hell to a lot more in the name of securing a foothold for a vicious right-authoritarian regime, so)
Underexplored tension that the patron saint of the dirtbag left’s “drop the woke, hammer on economics” is… neoliberal sellout Bill Clinton
That’s what “it’s the economy, stupid” was about – reminding him that Dems still had an edge on economic issues, especially after the Volcker shock, Reaganomics, the rusting of the Rust Belt, the S&L crash, the early 90s recession…
But that voters had decisively renounced them for 3 presidential elections over existential but not narrowly economic subjects – visions and policies around the basic structure and purpose of government, of crime, and the social and sexual and racial order.
And that Democratic positioning on the latter corresponded to a hegemony among a left-of-center “leadership class” and intensely engaged but narrow pressure groups but NOT among even regular Democratic voters as a whole. So by shedding (or at least “triangulating against”) the latter, he could ride the former to victory.
(And then rig a national machine where left donors gave directly to the party and party-approved NGOs rather than funding rabble-rousers. In exchange for… benefits. My thinking on Epstein stuff is “if they were sweeping this under the rug, imagine what they were doing on building permits”)
And it worked, and he was able to raise taxes, and the minimum wage, and at least try for nationalized healthcare (and, uh, NAFTA). And then the Republicans took both houses of Congress, which no Dem president had faced since Truman (who still had more New Deal/WWII authorities to employ). And even then you had things like the now-vilified crime bill, where both the “more cops on the street” and “midnight basketball” provisions were a return of federal grants to big cities, after they had been allowed to starve under Republicans.
Even in less “economic” more “identity”, or at least minority rights areas, he saved Roe! Casey v. Planned Parenthood was expected to be the awaited repeal but it was just a narrowing, because Justices knew a 5-4 majority could revert back quickly and if constitutional law turned over with administrations like the Mexico City policy it would undermine Court legitimacy. Clinton shored up the court’s left wing and held the line here. (Admittedly, replacing 2 retirements, though a Republican administration through 1999 would’ve outlived Blackmun) Effectively saved Affirmative Action too. DADT, the infrastructure for civil unions, more AIDS research funding might have been less than sought, but they were forward steps at all for a movement that was arguably politically further back on its heels in 1992 than 1978.
And this was all stuff that would not have happened during a Republican administration (well, the minimum wage and research funding I could see in a second term of Bush the Elder), such as if a Democrat did not win the 1992 election, as Clinton did on “it’s the economy, stupid”.
I wasn’t able to record my set at Candyball 11 in NYC, so here are the same tracks used in a studio mix. Enjoy!
1. Like It Loud - Gammer & Alex Prospect Remix - Alex Prospect & Becci 2. Dreams Of Reality - Sash Dee & Alex BassJunkie 3. Suma Ov Love - Teenage Twins 4. Good Time - Nobody 5. I Dont Want Nobody Else - Original Mix - Aural Kaos 6. Call Me - Original Mix - Modulate feat Jay Jacob 7. Sincerely Yours - Prospect & Pinnacle 8. Higher (Pulse Remix) - Electrux 9. The Key, The Secret (Fracus Remix) - Urban Cookie Collective 10. You Gotta Know (2012 VIP Mix) - Haze 11. Other Things (Kicks Mix) - Firefly 12. I Will Wait - Fracus & Darwin Remix - CLSM 13. Keep It Comin’ - Original Mix - Fracus & Darwin 14. Eye Opener - DJ Brisk and Trixxy 15. Part Of Me (Joey Riot & Tom Revolution Remix) - Nobody 16. Sunshine On A Cloudy Day - Eufeion Remix - Bang 17. Heaven On Earth - Dougal & Gammer feat Jenna 18. Rush - Adam J & Freestyle 19. Dont Stop - Original Mix - Fracus & Darwin 20. I Just Do It Like This - Original Mix - Chris Unknown 21. Set You Free Again - Anon 22. Can’t Hold Us - Spree 23. Airhead (S3RL Remix) (Spree edit) - DJ Brisk 24. Stay With Me - Greg Peaks Funked In The Sun Remix - AB 25. When The Sun Comes Down - Hardcore Mix - Lady Dubbz 26. Love Of My Life - Brisk Mix - Northern Lights 27. When love takes over - Nock off nigel
This was the source of my high school senior yearbook quote: “Ride the rainbow to the stars/keep the faith right in your heart”
At the time it was an amazing own on the concept of yearbook quotes and immediately afterwards I was embarrassed by it bcuz there’s no proof it’s ironic but now know what? It doesn’t have to be.
Notice that cost on the left margin means it costs 7 more unless you have the Politics resource (land), which unlike the other 4 resources (colours) had no game effects other than making celebrity pilots and “orbital bombing” direct damage cheaper
Somehow at the time this was not obvious as a metaphor for the post-Cold War “New World Order”, because the comparison set was like On The Edge and Illuminati and Netrunner and Illuminati and the X-Files CCG
The ‘90s were paranoid conspiratorial as hell, just like the ‘50s shit doesn’t make sense without that
Anonymous asked: As the original insult anon I want to disavow the impostors and once again drive home the central point that the surface characteristics of your narcissistic self obsession are neither interesting nor reflective of reality nor worthy of extended reflection and it will ultimately destroy you
> To follow up that and be a little bit more helpful: your secondary problem is that you want to World the conform to your identity, when you need to make your identity adapt to the World. Letting go of your unearned sense of enormous self regard and special-child-with-a-destiny uniqueness is the first step in this and one you should have accomplished by twenty eight at the absolute latest.
How successful was the early 20th century attempt to purge America of Germanism?
Well, successful enough that to this day historians can get away with saying that American federalism must have been inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy, confident that their audience won’t stop to note that the international statesmen and men of letters who defeated the Elector of Hanover to establish a compact of sovereign states loosely led by a supreme executive selected by electors were probably at least aware of the Holy Roman Empire.
if they made anime girl personifications of positive and negative feedback loops the positive feedback loop anime girl would have huge breasts and the negative feedback loop anime girl would be jealous of them. to be clear I don’t like this but it’s true
As a pair of fear and loathing objects, both “the blac bloc antifa” (anonymous collectivity, coming from and returning to shelter in community structures) AND “the lone wolf shooter” (expensively equipped individual acting autonomously but in line with shared ethos, then discarded) are such perfect synecdoches of leftism and rightism tho
