There is a mass exodus underway at The New Republic, with more than 30 editors resigning from the distinguished liberal institution on Friday.
The resignations were prompted by Thursday's big shakeup. Longtime editor Franklin Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier each announced that they were leaving their posts amid some sweeping changes at the century-old magazine.
Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo News executive who was hired as TNR's CEO in September, announced in a memo that the magazine would cut its publication schedule in half, going from 20 issues per year to 10. Vidra also said that the Washington institution would relocate its headquarters to New York City.
It's a watershed moment for TNR and its owner Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012. Hughes has made no secret of his digital-centric vision for TNR. In an interview with the New York Times last month, he said he no longer refers to TNR as a magazine, instead describing it as a "digital media company."
The moves, and the way Foer and Wieseltier were reportedly treated by Hughes and Vidra, have angered many veteran TNR contributors.
According to The Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove, Foer didn't discover he had been replaced as the top editor by Bloomberg Media's Gabriel Snyder until Gawker reported the rumor on Thursday afternoon. After seeing the Gawker post, Foer called Hughes to get confirmation.
On Friday morning, ahead of a scheduled 10 a.m. ET staff meeting, 10 contributing editors, including New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait and The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, submitted their resignations to Hughes.
There is a mass exodus underway at The New Republic, with more than 30 editors resigning from the distinguished liberal institution on Friday.
The resignations were prompted by Thursday's big shakeup. Longtime editor Franklin Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier each announced that they were leaving their posts amid some sweeping changes at the century-old magazine.
Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo News executive who was hired as TNR's CEO in September, announced in a memo that the magazine would cut its publication schedule in half, going from 20 issues per year to 10. Vidra also said that the Washington institution would relocate its headquarters to New York City.
It's a watershed moment for TNR and its owner Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012. Hughes has made no secret of his digital-centric vision for TNR. In an interview with the New York Times last month, he said he no longer refers to TNR as a magazine, instead describing it as a "digital media company."
The moves, and the way Foer and Wieseltier were reportedly treated by Hughes and Vidra, have angered many veteran TNR contributors.
According to The Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove, Foer didn't discover he had been replaced as the top editor by Bloomberg Media's Gabriel Snyder until Gawker reported the rumor on Thursday afternoon. After seeing the Gawker post, Foer called Hughes to get confirmation.
On Friday morning, ahead of a scheduled 10 a.m. ET staff meeting, 10 contributing editors, including New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait and The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, submitted their resignations to Hughes.
...By Friday afternoon, the number of reported resignations had swelled to 45.
Friday, December 05, 2014
TNR Mass Exodus
TNR sold their souls two decades ago. In recent years, they tried to backtrack a bit from the vileness of 2004, but their god Satan is a jealous god, and they couldn't pull away from neoconservatism. And now they are in collapse. As they should be!:
A Lot Riding On This Winter
The 3.49" of rain Sacramento received is the largest storm seen since the 4.40" received early in December, 2012, which is good, but the San Joaquin Valley didn't get much rain. It's still below average everywhere, but much better than last year's catastrophic shortfall. I just hope some of these birds and fishes can hold out long enough to benefit. The tri-colored blackbird, which used to number in the millions at one time, and was still the most-common bird in the Woodland/Davis area 20 years ago, was granted emergency protection a few days ago, because there are virtually none left (145,000 in scattered groups), and if we don't get adequate precipitation, NOW, it's going to go extinct.
Maybe some optimism.Strange Things Did Happen Here
It's astonishing when the oldest style of Appalachian lament debuts at No. 12 on the Billboard charts!
A Breaking Bad/ Las Humanas Analogy
(draft)
Vince Gilligan may have used dark episodes of Native American history as sardonic commentary on the follies of his own anti-hero, Walter White. If Gilligan's choices weren't necessarily conscious choices, they nevertheless seem to fit a pattern.
(This is an extension of the same line of thought regarding my Breaking Bad/ Anasazi analogy post).
In Season 5b, episode 15, "Granite State", Walt flees Albuquerque for an isolated refuge in New Hampshire, where he slowly wastes away under the assault of cancer. The law is hot on his trail.
In time, he decides to reestablish contact with his family, and journeys to a bar in a small town eight miles from his refuge and makes a pivotal phone call to his son Flynn.
The bar chosen for the filming was the Ponderosa Bar, on Highway 337, about five miles northwest of Chilili. Thus, the filming takes place just within the realm of Las Salinas, the salt lakes of central New Mexico, east of the Manzano Mountains. In the 1600's, the Franciscans based 25 miles south of Chilili at Quarai had a sporadically-visited visita at Chilili, so the region of the Ponderosa bar was just within the Spanish orbit.
Like the Anasazi relied on their trademark blue turquoise, the Native Americans at Quarai and neighboring locations also relied on the mineral trade, but the mineral was white salt. Salt was a vital commodity, especially necessary for preserving buffalo meat, and sought by traders throughout the region. A variety of languages were spoken in ancient times in this area - Tiwa, Tano, and Tompiro - with Tompiro dominating (Kessell, 2011). There were likely Las Humanas (sometimes spelled Jumanos, or Xumanas) tribal influences as well.
The color theme of "Granite State" is also white (but from snow).
Even though the Tompiros at Las Humanas (Gran Quivira Pueblo) received visitors from over a wide area, there are indications they were unusually-resistant to adopting changes in material culture. Their pottery, for example, displayed designs and methods that were several hundred years behind potteries in the neighboring Rio Grande Valley and San Juan Basin. This conservative bias may have been born from the general conservatism of Puebloan peoples, plus their unusual isolation, plus the likelihood Las Humanas had incorporated in prior centuries Jornada Mogollon peoples from the south, who adopted the Puebloan ways, but appear to have resisted new innovations from their Puebloan cousins in the Rio Grande Valley.
When Spanish Missionaries arrived, Las Humanas nevertheless cooperated with the Europeans and adopted Catholicism, until 1660, leavened with the kinds of concessions the Catholic Missionaries displayed elsewhere in the New World to ease people's acceptance of the new religion. For example, at the various Las Humanas ruins, kivas can be found, sometimes adjacent to churches. It's unlikely these kivas were used in exactly the old ways, but their presence would surely have been a comfort.
And so, together, the Las Humanas population and the Spanish Missionaries started building churches. Large churches. Barely within their means.
These activities also coincided with the rise of the Apache in the Southern Plains and Southwest in the 17th Century. Increasingly, the Las Humanas way of life fell under direct assault from these raiders, particularly as the Spaniards began exploiting the salt resources to a greater degree and disrupting Apache access to salt (Flint, 2008). Thus, Las Humanas may have had a choice: build fortifications, or build churches.
There is little sign of a focus on fortifications. They chose churches. Their faith was pure and strong.
And they were defeated. Bled beyond endurance, the remaining Tompiro refugees fled to the Rio Grande Valley, with many ending up at Isleta del Sur, near El Paso, and abandoning the region entirely (Bletzer, 2013). (Ironically, the Apache would suffer a similar fate a century later, with their own refugees thronging the canyons of the Manzanos as they fled from the assaults of the rising Comanche.)
Thus, the color white, apart from other connotations of purity, etc., also signifies defeat and surrender, both with Las Humanas (salt) and with Walter White (snow). Both pushed the limits of the possible too far.
Yet, upon witnessing Elliot and Gretchen's gloss on his own history, Walt dug deep and found enough spite to fight back.
Perhaps by abstracting the color scheme further one can make a general statement about instances of use of Native American history in "Breaking Bad".
I've written about how the opening scenes of "Breaking Bad", filmed at To'hajiilee, reflect the history of the Dine Anai (the so-called Enemy Navajo). The general color theme of those episodes is the widespread burnt-orange/ red of the classic Colorado Plateau. The Navajo can't be said to rely on mineral trade in red sandstone, but to the extent the colored rocks have brought tourists to their realm, they've been in position to possibly profit.
Thus:
Blue - Anasazi
Red - Navajo
White - Las Humanas
The kind of coincidence that might appeal to a filmmaker!
References:
La Salina of the Estancia Valley, New Mexico, Richard Flint, New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 1, Winter 2008, pp. 39-55.
'The First Province of That Kingdom' - Notes on the Colonial History of the Piro Area, New Mexico Historical Review, Michael Bletzer, Vol. 88, No. 4, Fall 2013, pp. 437-459.
A Long Time Coming - The Seventeenth-Century Pueblo-Spanish War, New Mexico Historical Review, John L. Kessell, Vol. 86, No. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 141-156.
Vince Gilligan may have used dark episodes of Native American history as sardonic commentary on the follies of his own anti-hero, Walter White. If Gilligan's choices weren't necessarily conscious choices, they nevertheless seem to fit a pattern.
(This is an extension of the same line of thought regarding my Breaking Bad/ Anasazi analogy post).
In Season 5b, episode 15, "Granite State", Walt flees Albuquerque for an isolated refuge in New Hampshire, where he slowly wastes away under the assault of cancer. The law is hot on his trail.
In time, he decides to reestablish contact with his family, and journeys to a bar in a small town eight miles from his refuge and makes a pivotal phone call to his son Flynn.
The bar chosen for the filming was the Ponderosa Bar, on Highway 337, about five miles northwest of Chilili. Thus, the filming takes place just within the realm of Las Salinas, the salt lakes of central New Mexico, east of the Manzano Mountains. In the 1600's, the Franciscans based 25 miles south of Chilili at Quarai had a sporadically-visited visita at Chilili, so the region of the Ponderosa bar was just within the Spanish orbit.
Like the Anasazi relied on their trademark blue turquoise, the Native Americans at Quarai and neighboring locations also relied on the mineral trade, but the mineral was white salt. Salt was a vital commodity, especially necessary for preserving buffalo meat, and sought by traders throughout the region. A variety of languages were spoken in ancient times in this area - Tiwa, Tano, and Tompiro - with Tompiro dominating (Kessell, 2011). There were likely Las Humanas (sometimes spelled Jumanos, or Xumanas) tribal influences as well.
The color theme of "Granite State" is also white (but from snow).
Even though the Tompiros at Las Humanas (Gran Quivira Pueblo) received visitors from over a wide area, there are indications they were unusually-resistant to adopting changes in material culture. Their pottery, for example, displayed designs and methods that were several hundred years behind potteries in the neighboring Rio Grande Valley and San Juan Basin. This conservative bias may have been born from the general conservatism of Puebloan peoples, plus their unusual isolation, plus the likelihood Las Humanas had incorporated in prior centuries Jornada Mogollon peoples from the south, who adopted the Puebloan ways, but appear to have resisted new innovations from their Puebloan cousins in the Rio Grande Valley.
But the mingling of diverse elements does not necessarily produce a virile strain. From a cultural background similar to that of other Tanoan speakers in the Rio Grande valley, the Jumano had developed a direction, a "slant," or cultural personality that was akin to that of the Rio Grande up to 1300. During this same period the people of the northern Jornada had become increasingly Puebloan in some aspects. The mingling of these two groups resulted in stagnation of the Jumano. The Jumano were henceforth Pueblo in material culture and architecture and largely Pueblo in the socioreligious use of the kiva. On the other hand, they contained regressive factors—traits that had limited the Mogollon to transmitters of culture, however important these may have been; traits that led them to adopt an increasingly Pueblo aspect and which finally permitted their disappearance as a cultural entity.
After the development of Chupadero Black-on-white, a fairly widespread and long-lived local pottery type, the Jumano failed to participate in further ceramic developments spreading from the Rio Grande. At about the time Chupadero Black-on-white came into vogue, a widespread change from mineral paints to carbon paint—a change that had slowly diffused eastward from the San Juan region of the Pueblo area—reached the Rio Grande drainage. The new paint type was adopted there in all but the extreme north and east sections in the vicinity of Taos, and along the tributaries of the Canadian (Wendorf and Reed, 1955: 144). The use of carbon paint, however, was not adopted by the Jumano, nor was it adopted in the Saline area farther north or on the east side of the Manzano Mountains. Also neglected in this general region was the slightly later influence of Mesa Verde decorative style—the employment of heavier design, less use of hatched elements, a tendency toward panel layout, and ticked rims.
By 1300 early glaze paint pottery was making its appearance in the Rio Grande, and while its use spread to the Jumano area, it was not made there; the actual source of Glaze I Red was probably the Rio Grande, and of Glaze I Yellow, the Galisteo region (Shepard, 1942). We cannot date the point at which glaze-paint ware was first made locally in the Jumano area, but it was probably not until the advent of what Shepard calls the Late Group—typical Glaze IV and later, from about 1550. The Jumano were not only slow to adopt glaze-paint ware, but, more important, they also clung to the production of black-on-white pottery as long as they existed as a group. This is in marked contrast to the Rio Grande, where black-on-whites were abandoned with the advent of glaze paint in all areas except Jemez on the western frontier, and among the Tewa north of Santa Fe, where Biscuit Ware was followed by a matte-paint polychrome in historic times.
When Spanish Missionaries arrived, Las Humanas nevertheless cooperated with the Europeans and adopted Catholicism, until 1660, leavened with the kinds of concessions the Catholic Missionaries displayed elsewhere in the New World to ease people's acceptance of the new religion. For example, at the various Las Humanas ruins, kivas can be found, sometimes adjacent to churches. It's unlikely these kivas were used in exactly the old ways, but their presence would surely have been a comfort.
And so, together, the Las Humanas population and the Spanish Missionaries started building churches. Large churches. Barely within their means.
These activities also coincided with the rise of the Apache in the Southern Plains and Southwest in the 17th Century. Increasingly, the Las Humanas way of life fell under direct assault from these raiders, particularly as the Spaniards began exploiting the salt resources to a greater degree and disrupting Apache access to salt (Flint, 2008). Thus, Las Humanas may have had a choice: build fortifications, or build churches.
There is little sign of a focus on fortifications. They chose churches. Their faith was pure and strong.
And they were defeated. Bled beyond endurance, the remaining Tompiro refugees fled to the Rio Grande Valley, with many ending up at Isleta del Sur, near El Paso, and abandoning the region entirely (Bletzer, 2013). (Ironically, the Apache would suffer a similar fate a century later, with their own refugees thronging the canyons of the Manzanos as they fled from the assaults of the rising Comanche.)
Thus, the color white, apart from other connotations of purity, etc., also signifies defeat and surrender, both with Las Humanas (salt) and with Walter White (snow). Both pushed the limits of the possible too far.
Yet, upon witnessing Elliot and Gretchen's gloss on his own history, Walt dug deep and found enough spite to fight back.
Perhaps by abstracting the color scheme further one can make a general statement about instances of use of Native American history in "Breaking Bad".
I've written about how the opening scenes of "Breaking Bad", filmed at To'hajiilee, reflect the history of the Dine Anai (the so-called Enemy Navajo). The general color theme of those episodes is the widespread burnt-orange/ red of the classic Colorado Plateau. The Navajo can't be said to rely on mineral trade in red sandstone, but to the extent the colored rocks have brought tourists to their realm, they've been in position to possibly profit.
Thus:
Blue - Anasazi
Red - Navajo
White - Las Humanas
The kind of coincidence that might appeal to a filmmaker!
References:
La Salina of the Estancia Valley, New Mexico, Richard Flint, New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 1, Winter 2008, pp. 39-55.
'The First Province of That Kingdom' - Notes on the Colonial History of the Piro Area, New Mexico Historical Review, Michael Bletzer, Vol. 88, No. 4, Fall 2013, pp. 437-459.
A Long Time Coming - The Seventeenth-Century Pueblo-Spanish War, New Mexico Historical Review, John L. Kessell, Vol. 86, No. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 141-156.
Thursday, December 04, 2014
Things That Make You Go Hmmmmmm....
I was puzzled by what I saw at Target: a fellow wearing "Hello, Kitty!" pajama bottoms. His girlfriend wore a wool "Toy Story" poncho.
Surprised By Rainbows!
Driving to Yuba City yesterday at about noon, I was struck by all the rainbows. Rainbows are scarce at noon. In general, the sun has to be low on the horizon to see rainbows, and noon isn't the time. EXCEPT when you are approaching winter solstice! Then the sun remains low enough in the sky, even at noon, that you can catch glimpses of the peak of the rainbow arches.
Sometimes we are blessed by amazing spectacles in the sky, but we have our heads down and don't even notice.
Sometimes we are blessed by amazing spectacles in the sky, but we have our heads down and don't even notice.
Can't Praise "Mockingjay - Part I" Enough!
Easily, the best movie of 2014:
I like how they put Lorde in charge of the soundtrack. The girl from Devonport (NZ) is the perfect choice!
I like how they put Lorde in charge of the soundtrack. The girl from Devonport (NZ) is the perfect choice!
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Farewell Kathi And Tony Davi!
Bon voyage to New York City, and the reunited family unit (with Melody and Mara)!
Kathi Davi, Jori Gonzales, and Tony Davi
Kathi Davi, Jori Gonzales, and Tony DaviDon't Mess With The Dude In The House
2:40 a.m. Trying to go to sleep Sunday morning, but over the dripping rain kept hearing - noises. Looked out the window and - Aha! - saw some kind of large mammal in the back yard! Went out the back door (trying a quiet approach) and startled three raccoons in the yard! One bolted towards the corner of the yard, where the tree (and safety) were, looking backwards in open distress, tail extended in alarm. I eased out the door onto the back porch, and a second raccoon skulking in the shadows under the porch panicked and chased after the first. I started coming down the steps into the back yard from the porch. Fearing being cut off from safety, a third raccoon, trapped in the garage, fled, and chased after the first two. I followed the raccoons and tried (but failed) to get good photos. If raccoons number four or more, there is a chance they will take a stand and attack, but three could be panicked.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)