What are the elements of a group’s sound? If you listened to all the records by the Postal Service, you’d think that the unifying force was spastic electronic beats and Ben Gibbard’s dulcet tones. If you listened to every Radiohead … Read More
There’s a particular brand of shame that comes with being a tourist, particularly as an American. Especially in Europe, American tourists are almost universally received with a mixture of annoyance and exasperation, the kind usually reserved for flies buzzing around the ear or children crying on airplanes.
First Exhibit. Here is the July 1, 1933 issue of Das Neue Tagebuch, a newspaper for German exiles in Paris. We read of a Jewish dentist, Maier, who was forced into poverty through a ban on Jewish practitioners. In mid-July, with his wife (also a dentist) on a quick vacation, Maier clandestinely worked in her office, but was later kidnapped by four S.A. men during lunch at his own apartment. According to the report Schwarzschild received, the men had stabbed Maier twenty-one times, broken his feet by crushing them with a copying press, and shot him in the head, causing his skull to explode.
As sad as it is infuriating, people living comfortably usually dismiss thoughts of poverty, disease, and war. Luckily, we are sometimes shocked out of emotional detachment and we think twice, maybe truly mournfully, about the helpless people we hear about … Read More
Two things occurred to me as I watched Wilco perform at the Tower Theater outside of Philly last Saturday: one, Jeff Tweedy is really old. And two, I hate PDA.
“Displays of public indecency jolted me more than I’d like to admit. Living in the city this summer, I felt I was experiencing patriarchy as I had as a little girl—as something new.”
