I wrote about half this post earlier this morning, then deleted it, but this item from Feministing sent me over the edge. So here's the question: to what degree domost non-obviously racially oriented insults contain racial content?

I don’t know any more what exactly motivated my friend and me several years ago to visit the American Museum of Natural History at Central Park West and 79th Street, a place favored primarily by dating lovers and families with children. It was one of our several forays into NYC’s tourist zones of attraction, quite inappropriate for us, as we were permanent inhabitants of the metropolis and its region. Most likely, we were procrastinating vis-à-vis some urgent due dates or hell knows what. But we took a boat tour around Manhattan, climbed with a crowd of innocent tourists to the top of the Empire State Building, gazed at the artifacts in the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, and then one day came the turn of the American Museum of Natural History. The experience was so traumatic that it stopped our urban adventures for years-- including a planned visit to the Bronx Zoo.

What follows are reviews of all the covers of The Decemberists' song “Engine Driver” that I've been able to find on YouTube. The original is to the right, in case you don't know the song; though you may want to wait and reconstruct the original from its descendants (easily enough), below.

Everyone’s excited about the new president, but I’m hoping that his presidency will turn out to be boring, at least most of the time. I don’t just mean that life gets “interesting” when things start going wrong, but that most of what good governance involves isn’t what most people would consider exciting. Especially now, it seems to me, what we most need to work on as a country includes a lot of projects that lack wow: energy reform, healthcare reform, infrastructure. Precisely, in other words, the wonky stuff that a lot of Democrats are good at but that don’t make for debate zingers. The proposal, planning, and construction are all pretty dull, and the completion doesn’t grab any national headlines either, unless something goes wrong.

In a thoughtful, somewhat agonized article in The American Scholar (Summer 2008), Charles Johnson offered the view that the classic African-American experience narrative—slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, civil rights, Dr. King, unrest, Black Panthers, painful rises and frustrated struggles—doesn’t correspond in its totality with the histories that many self-designated black people living in America today carry with them. Black immigrants from various parts of Africa, Haiti, the other West Indies, England, France, Brazil, and why not Canada, emerge from different histories and conceive of their belonging, or not belonging, here in various ways. Johnson comes back at two or three points in his article to the image of Obama as the man who embodies the non-classic version of blackness that fits our times.

My daughter's preschool class cast their votes for president the same Tuesday that everyone else did. I'm not sure when her teachers called it for the Democrat, but the outcome was the same as the official one only more so: Obama 13; McCain 4. I wasn't all that surprised by the result (her school is in lower Manhattan, after all). But I was struck by how tenacious the moment was for her. She'll happily tell you who she voted for and who is her first president.

For some, the recent election of Barack Obama is a victory against racism in America. To me, it shows the opposite just as well: that a black man must be ten times better to have an equal shot. He must be handsome, eloquent and Vulcan cool, at once intellectual and inspirational, and lastly a brilliant strategist who makes few mistakes and recovers from them almost immediately. He must be all of these things in order to defeat his white rivals who had life handed to them on a silver platter and rose with every failure.

In view of the historic inauguration on Tuesday, January 20, we here at printculture will be posting all week on all things Obama. Join in on the conversation in the comments section.

To kick things off, I have just a couple of quick thoughts:

In a Spanish university town the other night, I went down a side street and wound up in the middle of a protest march against Israel’s attacks on Gaza. There were students, grizzled militants, moms (some in purdah) pushing strollers, and a lot of banners with slogans. But what caught my attention were the shoes held aloft on sticks (in one case, on a crutch): shoes, now the international symbol of contempt for American-abetted greed, vengefulness and stupidity. In some spiritual sense the embattled farmers of Concord must get some of the credit. But Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who, as every schoolchild knows, fired the shoe heard ‘round the world, crystallized in his instantaneous gesture the frustration that a lot of us had been feeling since the strange election of 2000.

As far back as I can remember, I have dreamt about being inside a modernist painting. Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams (!), whose protagonist walks inside Van Gogh’s paintings, suggests that I might be not alone with this type of obsession. However, my dream has always been about modernist deconstructions of the city. Whenever I looked at Ludwig Kirchner’s slanted Berlin streets, Lyonel Feininger’s hovering tenement buildings, or Giorgio de Chirico’s empty, geometrically unhinged plazas, I felt a deep longing to experience exactly this destabilization of urban space from within the painting.

The social sciences, when they get quantitative, often seem to be taking the long way round to express a perfectly obvious observation with percentages and verbiage—“A stitch in time shown to save 8.7 stitches,” and the like. Or such was my first take on reading this piece about emotional contagion: of course, if you’re always in the company of a complaining, negative, passive person, you will begin to feel that life is tiresome and you probably aren’t worth much. (For example.) But then it occurred to me that the argument is better expressed in the negative: not that we acquire our feelings, judgments, assumptions and attitudes from the people we’re in contact with, but that we don’t have much of anywhere else to get them.

Everyone who comes to New Haven should stop at least once at the Duncan Hotel on Chapel Street. It is one of the city’s oldest curiosities and landmarks-- along with York Pizza with its old photographic displays of the juvenile sportive herds of would-be presidents in tight football pants (some of them signed by real presidents) and the used record store Cutler’s with its unique, first-hand photographs from the Black Panther trial era. All these institutions exude the charm of local Americana and cultivate a kind of palpable shabbiness that taps into the deep longing of ivory-tower intellectuals for real life. New Haven offered many more such escapes into the non-cerebral and non-corporate from a corporate university’s intellectualism and money when I first came to town in the Fall of 2000.