Results tagged “books” from Uncivil Society

If Marx had written about the withering away of the bookstore, he might still be regarded as a sage.

Cody's is dead. The Harvard used book scene is a pale shadow of its former self. And now Hollywood's Book Soup is up for sale.

Book Soup, for those who have never been, is a gem--a truly essential shop for anyone with a serious interest in the dramatic arts & design, not a mention a hub for local arts scene. It was a steady haunt when I lived out there and remains a mandatory drop-by whenever I'm back in the area.

Which got me thinking. Book Soup still makes a profit, and it's an integral part of both the artistic community and the region's various arts-related industries. Perhaps one way to maintain its integrity is for a charity to buy it, such as the California Community Foundation or even the Academy Foundation.

Above: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel. Music would never be the same . . .

I'm focused on writing & class prep, but as usual my breaks have been equally rich with fascinating stuff. First, on my way back from the events yesterday morning I came across the autobiography of Grandmaster Flash at ye olde NYPL. Music, business, the public good and the higher self--his story brings 'em all together in a poignant and compelling mix.

Do-gooders who ridicule rap and hip hop really should pay more attention, because these communities have done more for social improvement than fifty social enterprise bakeries put together. Don't get me wrong--bakeries and such have their place, but to make such ventures the limit of social enterprise is just another way of saying "Let them eat cookies."

Ever since watching last week's Saturday Night Live, I've also been paying more attention to Beyonce's creation of an alter ego, Sasha Fierce. It's the latest in a long line of pop other selves, winding back through Prince, David Bowie and James Brown to--as this wonderful new bio notes--the pathbreaking professional wrestler Gorgeous George.

As with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five--along with a host of other noted rap, hip hop and pop artists--Beyonce's Sasha Fierce blends synchronized action with an ethical sense. Consider "Single Ladies," the video below, and how it links marriage and enlightened transformation. There's little sense of marriage as servitude evident in this nineteenth century folk song.

This round-up of Islamic art is most compelling. If you want to understand Islamic culture, you can't just read the Quran--the art and architecture are essential if you want to grasp the nuances of the social order. I've done a bit of research on this; perhaps I'll write about it here or elsewhere eventually.

The Renaissance lawyer & art theorist Leon Battista Alberti liked linear perspective to a civic assembly. The analogy is apt--politics, like the visual arts, transforms separate elements into a greater whole.

Nowhere is this more evident than in civic art. The Library of Congress offers this retrospective of comic art responding to the September 11 attacks.

The Superman Homepage has the scoop on Brad Melter's charity auctions to restore the home of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. More at Brad Meltzer's OrdinaryPeopleChangeTheWorld.com, whose very name illustrates one reason why a site by a social enterprise professor has posts about comics pretty much daily.

In related news, Meltzer's book tour for The Book of Lies stops at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan tonight at 7. Barring an encounter with green kryptonite I plan to attend.

If the kryptonite's red I'll still be there, just with an ant head.

I have a new post up on Blog@ re the newly rediscovered Superman stories, and the post includes another set of documents with truly historic stuff. Also up today is a wonderful set of unique Superman pages from a now lost project that Tony Isabella assembled for a museum exhibit in the 1980s.

Another thing that impressed me: Entre Comics has translated the entire Detective Comics/Siegel correspondence into Spanish & provided commentary. Another reminder that yes, you can write straightforward explanatory articles about corporate ethics, but stories and documents can be more powerful, not to mention more likely to be read.

The new group that's formed to deal with sexually inappropriate behavior at comic conventions: kudos! Other nonprofits can learn from this.

Finally, there's some good historical material about intersecting scifi & comics networks--plus a picture of the Siegel house--in this Collectors Society thread.

And yes, I know that the image in this post is a serious spoiler for the rediscovered museum pages. The reason I chose the image: the theme of obligation, particularly the language of "trust." Some folks in the charitable community have expressed bewilderment at my comics material on this site. Besides the organic connection between design and identity--much more about which this upcoming year--comics have done more to propagate the meme of social responsibility than most do-gooder groups. To understand why, read Marshall McLuhan's "neglected masterpiece" From Cliche to Archetype, which examines how so-called junk media change the world.

Still, I did think about changing the picture, but then I remembered that this site is called Uncivil, so . . .

Great topic, great cover, must read.

Convicted wife-and-unborn-baby killer Scott Peterson has a blog. Top of the page since Christmas: his confession that he & his wife (!) didn't do enough for charity back in the day, followed by a conditional commendation of his mother-in-law for reportedly planning to give a charity all the profits from her book.

Y'know, even if you maintain your innocence, using your prison blog to say the victim didn't do enough for charity doesn't exactly improve your public image.

Here's the post for posterity:

12/26 - Perhaps a Commendation

Laci and I enjoyed supporting education.

I believe that we both volunteered at elementary schools during our high school years.

Later, we were lucky enough to do some things for our college alma mater.

We could have, we should have, done more.

We gave money in our twenties, not time, and time truly is more valuable.

I was pleased when a scholarship fund was established in Laci's name at the

high school from which she graduated. Thank you to those who did this.

It hurt when my donation from jail to this fund was almost rejected, but it was

finally accepted. I assume that this fund is active and productive, I hope so.

The fund is at Downey High School in Modesto, any donation to it is

a wonderful way to carry forth the memory of my wife.

This is titled "Perhaps a Commendation" because if a rumor I heard is correct,

my Mother-in-Law, Laci's Mother, deserves applause. The rumor is that all the

profits from her forthcoming book will be given to an educational charity,

perhaps the fund at Downey High. I hope that this rumor is true.

Some people have done things to profit off of my wife

and son having been taken from me and murdered.

The profits from this possibly going to charity would counter this

disgusting trend. If the rumor is true, what a wonderful act.

- Scott

Via Book Patrol, here's an investigative report alleging that the Strand's current management "has worked harder than anyone to transform the Strand from an intellectual oasis to a profit-producing machine."  The core problem, they say, is Nancy Bass Wyden, who used to work at Exxon and is said to be imposing corporate business practices on the store:

Going from working for a giant oil company to running a giant independent book store is alone a recipe for disaster.

“They focus more on making money than on the enjoyment of running a bookstore,” said Trexler Chisholm, 26, who works in the rare books room on the third floor.

One of Bass Wyden's major initiatives was to ramp up the Strands books by the yard program, the "selling of books arranged decoratively on shelves to the rich and famous," which has nothing to do with books and everything to do with interior design. It just doesn't seem to be about the books anymore.

This is fascinating stuff on any number of levels. For example, many say the future of charity lies in remaking it in the image of for-profit business--in short, the very thing now decried at the Strand, which is, let's face it, is a commercial business.  If a culture clash erupts at a bookstore, how much more can we expect a stronger backlash in the nonprofit world?

There's also the reaction against the evolution of the book.  Folks familiar with the past generation of media theory know that the Strand's subtle shift to books-as-decoration reflects the book's evolving nature as a vehicle for conveying information.  Heck, McLuhan called this development almost fifty years ago; one person's selling out is another's cultural shift.

Maybe it would be nice to run the Strand as a so-called social business, with an emphasis on the social.  It could be an oasis in the commercial urban desert, a literary salon devoted to the love of books and treating all employees--and customers--as family.  Personally I'd enjoy that, at least for the year or so it would last before the Strand went bankrupt and was replaced by a bank. 

In 1994, getting university press books was sheer hell. Grad students bogarted all the best ones at the Yale Library, and the bookstore--well, if they didn't have it in stock (and back then, chances were they didn't--the old Yale bookstore branded itself as the region's best place to buy cheap mass market remainders), you could place at special order to arrive six-to-eight weeks later.

Amazon changed the game. Now we could get academic books whenever we wanted, and the old Yale bookstore died.

One was commerce to serve a charity. The other, a commercial start-up. But for my money, the real social enterprise was Amazon.

Via TechCrunch, Jeff Bezos' Usenet job solicitation from 1994:

Via Russia Abandoned

A hearty welcome to students from both of my classes!  As I mentioned today, I'll be posting additional material here regularly for fun and not-for-profit.

It's been a long day, so for now just a few quick notes.  

• Computer class folks in 102W curious about what I meant by CSS might want to check out the free Lynda.com vids on the subject by Eric Meyer, whose print guides on CSS are essential toolkits for coding web design.   The "What is CSS?" vid offers a crisp 5-minute intro, and the "Installing the Web Developer toolbar" shows how you can easily trick out your Firefox browser to read & experiment with CSS on any site on the web.
  
• If the design on this website seems pretty simple, that's because it is.  All I did was download the latest Movable Type install, pick its blue minimalist template and arrange the widget sets to taste.  Pretty soon you'll know how to do this yourself, if you don't already--with this alone you could set up a basic blog for yourself or an organization.  Templates can be your friend even if you're an expert coder--for example, uber-geek Wil Wheaton built one of the largest and most loyal followings on the web with just a slightly modified old Movable Type blue minimalist template, followed by a newer template on Typepad.  Of course, Wordpress and Blogger templates are equally popular.  
  
• As promised, everything we covered in today's Law for Nonprofit Managers class will be on the web soon enough, with useful additions.  Here are the sample articles of incorporation from the IRS that I mentioned in class, and here's the Tony Mancuso book from Nolo Press.