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One-time mailman John Prine was the best of a generation Chicago songwriters because of the depths that he reaches — in himself and in us — with disarming lyrics and melodies. Around the time that this video was made, a young Bonnie Raitt made it a signature work.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoS71sBKESI&eurl=http://www.mocoloco.com/index.php?page=3]Great BBC video (via MoCoLoco) on Marc Newson and the Lockheed Chair.
Note: Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Band was the original Urban Spaceman. While you’re at it, enjoy them as well:
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Andrew Sullivan has been insightful about Obama for a while now. He gets to the heart of the matter today:
I’ve learned for two years now not to underestimate Obama. I watched from the very start of the campaign how he strategized a path to achieving his goals partly by eschewing the kinds of tactics that Washington has come to see as political skill. I think of him in some ways as the Un-Rove. Karl Rove mastered the art of petty and nasty political tactics in the South of the post-Reagan era. And he never had a solid grip on conservatism as a political philosophy or of political strategy. And so Rove today endures as the architect of the biggest and deepest political implosion since the Democrats in the 1970s. It was all tactics, no strategy; all politics, no governance. He remains the worst single political strategist of modern times.
Now look at how Obama has framed the debate since the election. Every single symbolic act has been inclusive and sober. From that speech in Grant Park to the eschewal of euphoria on Inauguration Day; from the George Will dinner invite to the Rick Warren invocation; from meeting the House Republicans on the Hill to convening a fiscal responsibility summit; from telegraphing to all of us Obamacons that he wasn’t a fiscal lunatic to … unveiling the most expansive, liberal, big government reversal of Reagan any traditional Democrat would die for.
Smart, isn’t he? He won the stimulus debate long before the Republicans realized it (they were busy doing tap-dances of victory on talk radio, while he was building a new coalition without them). And now, after presenting such a centrist, bi-partisan, moderate and personally trustworthy front, he gets to unveil a radical long-term agenda that really will soak the very rich and invest in the poor. Given the crisis, he has seized this moment for more radicalism than might have seemed possible only a couple of months ago.
The risk is, at least, a transparent risk. If none of this works, he will have taken a massive gamble and failed. The country will be bankrupt and he will have one term. His gamble with the economy may come to seem like Bush’s gamble in Iraq. But if any of it works, if the economy recovers, and if the GOP continues to be utterly deaf and blind to the new landscape we live in, then we’re talking less Reagan than FDR in long-term impact.
It’s going to be a riveting first year, isn’t it?
Post that charts Case-Shiller home price index by city:
Via Seeking Alpha.
Rare 1958 Borgward Isabella TS Coupe featured on Bring a Trailer.
The rumor is that Carl Borgward’s wife loved Luigi Segre’s design of the Karmann Ghia, VW’s attempt to make a sporty car built on the original Beetle chassis and engine. The result was the TS Coupe. What it lacks in design it compensates in rarity, especially in the eyes of those in and around Bremen, Germany, where Borgward was manufactured.
Thanks to Bring a Trailer.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKCG3zMEsYs&eurl=http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/]Blame Ringo is a band and this is their first video. Find out more about their first disc ‘Lucky Number 9′ here.
Steve Levitt introduces UofC colleagues Doug Diamond, Anil Kashyap, and Raghuram Rajan who assess the Geithner banking plan. From Levitt’s Feb. 12 Freakonomics column in the Times.
Some clarity in an overly noisy world.
The March issue of The Atlantic has a cover story by Richard Florida discussing the economic crisis and its impact on the United States. Network effects will accrue to the coasts, to high-tech centers like Austin/Dallas, and to cities with divesification and heft like Chicago. Woe be it to those in cities that grew as a result of the last great downturn — Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis — and those still struggling to attain critical mass.
He’s especially provocative on what he calls ‘the next economic landscape:’
The housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making, and now well past its “sell-by” date. The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy. And not least, it created a workforce too often stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold, at a time when flexibility and mobility are of great importance.
Ansel Adams, Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California, 1944
Art Blog by Bob writes about photography as art, in particular how familiarity obscures depth — Ansel Adams as a prime example.
Thoughtful and worthwhile.
Via