Limited, Inc.

A couple of months ago, we were riding on the new tram which goes from Santa Monica to downtown LA. The route passes by the USC campus. A guy on the tram began to talk to us about the neighborhood. He was a young black guy, who’d been raised in the USC neighborhood. If you have seen the neighborhood around USC, you’ll be struck by the fact that it is very multi-ethnic and working class. According to the guy on the tram, there used to be a pro-USC spirit in the neighborhood. It isn’t that a lot of people could afford to go to USC – but they could afford to go to USC games, and they felt like USC was part of the neighborhood. USC, however, had other thoughts, and has begun a process that rich universities love to engage in, of expansion and squeeze. You can no longer go to USC events, and you can go and shout at meetings against USC plans for expansion but those meetings are run by supposedly “liberal” types who are totally psyched about the prospect of gentrification and USC expansion.

In the documentary American Revolution 2, there is an incredible scene in which a white Appalachian labor group hosts a speech by a Black Panther, Bobby Lee. The time is 1968, and the place is Chicago. And this isn’t an accident.  Nor is it an accident that these were white Appalachians. We all know about the Great Migration, where black people fled from hard apartheid in the South to soft apartheid in the North. Less vivid in the national imagination was the flight of the white proletariat from the South – West Virginia, Kentucky, Southern Illinois, etc.  In the 1960s, this was not a blank in our national imagination, but a reality that any community organizer had to deal with, and any business, small or large, took the opportunity to exploit. In Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (which my friend Scott Saul, the guy who wrote Becoming Richard Pryor, had me watch), one of the enduring motifs is the relationship between the reporter and this very southern accented poor white woman. I’m

There’s a party game called twenty questions. One person goes out of the room, and the people in the room then discuss among themselves and choose an object in the room. Then the person is recalled, and he asks the people in the room up to twenty questions – classically, of the kind : is it bigger than a breadbox – in order to guess the object. John Wheeler, the physicist, spun off another game that he claimed was closer to the quantum world, or what at least it meant to investigate the quantum world. The structure of sending a person outside of the room remains constant. What this person doesn’t know, however, is that in this version of the game, all the people in the room pick their objects and don’t speak to each other. When the questioner is called in and asks the questions – for instance, is it bigger than a breadbox – the person who answers changes the object, in as much as his reply makes the other people in the room silently repick their object. So say x has chosen a matchbo

There’s a party game called twenty questions. One person goes out of the room, and the people in the room then discuss among themselves and choose an object in the room. Then the person is recalled, and he asks the people in the room up to twenty questions – classically, of the kind : is it bigger than a breadbox – in order to guess the object. John Wheeler, the physicist, spun off another game that he claimed was closer to the quantum world, or what at least it meant to investigate the quantum world. The structure of sending a person outside of the room remains constant. What this person doesn’t know, however, is that in this version of the game, all the people in the room pick their objects and don’t speak to each other. When the questioner is called in and asks the questions – for instance, is it bigger than a breadbox – the person who answers changes the object, in as much as his reply makes the other people in the room silently repick their object. So say x has chosen a matchbo

Back from Atlanta. Something weird was going with Nature so far as we saw it driving from our rental in Decatur to Gwinnett to visit my brothers: although I was assured on all sides that Atlanta was dry as a bone and undergoing a drought; though Stone Mountain park, for the first time in my memory, was banning grills, bringing about a once in a lifetime event of a hotdog and hamburgerless Park; though I’d been told of ominous fires in the forests north and east of the Metro area; the leaves were spectacular. In the Vermont category. Supposedly, leaf color depends on a well watered spring and summer, or so I’ve been told. Nonetheless, everywhere (and I mean everywhere, as Atlanta sometimes seems more like an inhabited forest than a metropolis) trees were flaunting extraordinary yellows and oranges and reds. I’m not complaining, mind. I loved it. This was planned to be a heavy family week, Thanksgiving and a memorial service for my old man. Both, against the betting, went off splendid