"In the mid-1970s, the tiny Canadian town of Dauphin... acted as guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called 'Mincome.'"

"For a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks to supplement their earnings."

Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.

Evelyn Forget is such a great name that I almost want to believe what she's selling. But I'm one of those people who fear the lost incentive to work. I remember a professor here at UW some years ago propounding a guaranteed minimum income of $20,000. He just assumed most people would work so they could have more than that. What if you were just starting out in life and knew you could go work-free if you were willing to live on $20,000?

I'm sure if that deal were offered to me when I was 20, I'd have taken it. I'd have worked at living on that $20,000. Oh, yes, eventually I might have wanted to write a book called "How to Live Well on $20,000 a Year" — because it would have amused me and I wouldn't have minded some extra spending money.

But who knows what the psychology of it all would be? It's one thing to experiment on a tiny town in Manitoba, but what happens when it gets bigger... and less Canadian?

What paper are you using for your drawings these days?

For example, Ben Blake draws on coffee filters.

Decades ago, on the theory that it's the best paper, I used to draw on money. Then I got scared that it violated a criminal statute, and I chickened out. The limitations period is long past, so don't come after me, feds.

What nonpaper are you using for your incredibly lame little confessions these days? I'm using Blogger.

Notes on success from 2 Scotts — Adams and Fitzgerald — and one Bob.

"In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success."

Writes Scott Adams, who followed his passion and invested in a restaurant that failed, then started drawing a comic strip — "Dilbert" — as "just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try" and became passionate about cartooning as it began to make him rich.

So Adams advises us not to take the advice "Follow your passion." Then he moves on to rejecting the advice that one ought to have goals. What you need is a system.

That's a pretty amusing column at the link, and I see it's adapted from a book that's coming out next week — "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big."

***

There are only 2 Bob Dylan songs that use the word "success" and they are both on the same album which is probably the album that made the deepest impression on my mind when I was a malleable teenager, "Bringing It All Back Home":

1. "She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all."

2. "Get dressed, get blessed/Try to be a success/Please her, please him, buy gifts/Don’t steal, don’t lift/Twenty years of schoolin’/And they put you on the day shift...."

Naturally, after 12 years of schoolin', I went to art school. After 16 years of schoolin' and 5 years unschooling, I went to law school. There's a "Bringing It All Back Home" "Highway 61" song with the word "lawyers":

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known...

After 19 years of schoolin', it took 20 years of professing — looks liked or not — to get to blogging, which included, inter alia, The Gatsby Project, which never officially ended, so here's another sentence:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

"What’s the best book about the law ever written?"

A question asked of Scott Turow, who answers: 

“A Theory of Justice,” by John Rawls. It’s not beach reading, but I don’t know of a more lucid articulation of the intuitions many of us share about what is just. Among works of fiction, Melville’s “Billy Budd” would be my first choice, especially in the present day, when the sexual undertones that once dared not speak their name are so apparent.

Because if you want to do some great law writing, you're going to want those sexual undertones. 

Also, I'm interested that Turow cites of "The Count of Monte Cristo" as the book that has had "the greatest impact" him, because that was my father's favorite book. Apparently, it's quite thrilling. I've never read it. I'm adding that to my Kindle. Why have I always resisted reading the one book my father encouraged me to read? How would my life had been different if I yielded to just that one suggestion (let alone all the other things my father would have encouraged)?

Mystery photo of the day: Ann Arbor, 1956.

I'm 5 years old and delighted by an activity that my sister and that other girl don't seem to find all that exciting.



What were we doing?

AND: Thanks for all the efforts at answering, but I'm not surprised no one could guess. There had been a storm and many big tree branches scattered about on the ground. To me, the 5 year old, this alone was an amazing new world. Somehow we got started stripping the bark off branches, and we marveled at the beauty of the bark-free branches. In the 5-year-old mind, this seemed like an important project that would be celebrated all over the world. We would be famous and beloved for our fabulous transformation of the branches!

Mystery photo of the day.

ADDED: This picture is from 1956, and I'm surprised commenters aren't finding it easy to tell which one is me. (Here's another picture from that day.)

Mystery photo of the day.

IN THE COMMENTS: David looks ahead to the next photo in the series.



ADDED: The top picture is November 1951, my parents' failed attempt to make a photograph that could be used in a Christmas card. (I've tweaked the very dark original to make the image reasonably visible.) The second picture is September 1951, at Niagara Falls. For reference: I was born in January 1951. The other child is my older sister.

"What are you pretending not to know?"

The first of Jason Nazar's "35 Questions That Will Change Your Life."

That's a great question. Nazar is 35 years old, and I remember becoming aware, when I was about that age, that I had many perceptions that felt as as if they belonged to another person. This other entity had a different vantage point, seemingly from above, looking on at everything, including at me, and the me that felt like me, the character who participated in life, somehow did not know all these things.

That sounds absurd (if not crazy), but once you become aware of this absurdity, you can integrate yourself and become as wise and knowing as you really are and stop playing the somewhat naive character you've allowed yourself to be in your various decisions and interactions.

"It would be obscene to pine for the urban agony that fomented [Norman] Mailer’s run [for Mayor of NYC]."

"But imagine if the present-day city, so bright and neatly quantified on the surface, so excluding and unequal just underneath, were to produce even one candidate with his brio and originality."

Writes Lee Siegel, in a NYT op-ed titled "When City Elections Were Fun."

I'm blogging this in part so I can show you (once again) one of my favorite old pictures:



That's the 4th time I've put that picture on the blog. (Previously: "The 51st State," "Norman Mailer died," and "Althouse in 1970.")

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says: "Althouse looks like a member of the Manson Family in that 1970 photo." And I say "That’s exactly what I thought when I was putting the picture up!" Also, discussion of where I am, what color was may hair, and what was I holding in my hands 43 years ago. 

Did "Free to Be You & Me" imply getting a lot of work done to one's once perky face?

When did you first encounter Marlo Thomas? Did she look like this?



That is indeed her, in 1960, on an episode of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," but you're more likely to know her from the late-60s show, which was infectiously popular when I was in high school, "That Girl":




(Look at the image on the kite at 0:38 and you'll see what got me onto this topic: the question, raised in the previous post, of what the Lululemon logo looks like. Sidenote: those opening credits were totally ripped off by Mary Tyler Moore, who kind of also stole Marlo's whole concept of the modern woman.)

Obviously, she needed to get some work done to look like "That Girl" and not that girl that was on "Dobie Gillis." Look at her father:



I grew up watching his show, "Make Room for Daddy." Anyway, Marlo went on to that "Free to Be You & Me" project, which began in 1972, when I was 21 and not interested in that sort of thing, and not just because it was for children and parents, but because it was square and middle class. I don't think I have ever listened to a single track on that record, but I know it had a huge impact on younger people. (I wonder if Obama's mother played it for him. I'll bet she thought it was too square, too middle class.)

Here's an example of a blogger — Melissa at On the Rag Mag — who idolized Marlo Thomas:

I grew up worshiping her because of her involvement with Free to Be You & Me. OH MY! How I loved that album and the show. To say that I was obsessed with it would be an understatement. To tell you that pretty much anyone associated with the project brings tears to my eyes, warmth to my heart, and a tingle to my nether regions would not be a lie.

For someone who loves Marlo not because of "That Girl" (or "Dobie") but because of "Free to Be," it's stressful to look at what she's done to herself:



Melissa says:

Marlo Thomas is a woman of her generation, and the way she chooses to age is up to her. I was really sad to see her stretched and snipped beyond recognition, but that is her choice. No one can stay young forever, and we all deal with the aging process in different ways. It’s a mind fuck no matter how you go at it, and it’s her face so who am I to say anything?

Oh, bullshit! You did say something. Quit pretending you didn't. It may be "up to" Marlo to decide what to do, but she did it precisely to affect what we see. She did it to us as well as to herself. We can complain. We can try to influence others not to make the same awful mistake. And there's just so much hypocrisy, or at least that's what I would say if I had any familiarity at all with the songs on "Free to Be You & Me."

As to whether "the aging process" is "a mind fuck no matter how you go at it," if that's the level of wisdom you've reached, that doesn't speak well for the foundation you acquired from "Free to Be You & Me." One more reason why I will continue to refrain from ever hearing "Free to Be" and to believe that it's drivel.

"She wasn’t pretty, didn’t wear the right clothes, couldn’t find dates; and she had no intention of becoming a debutante..."

"... which was the dream of Mrs. Harris’s life. As a defense, Julie escaped into acting. As an actress she could be anyone she wanted to and her mother couldn’t stop her."

From the long NYT obituary for Julie Harris, who died yesterday at the age of 87. Her mother was a socialite (in Grosse Pointe, Michigan). Her father "was an investment banker who was also an expert on squirrels and a curator of mammals at the museum of zoology of the University of Michigan."

For decades, Ms. Harris worked almost constantly.... Her film credits include “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1962), a boxing melodrama with Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Gleason, in which she played a sympathetic but manipulative social worker; “The Haunting” (1963), as a spinster beset by evil spirits; “Harper,” a detective story starring Paul Newman, in which she played a nightclub entertainer and addict...

 

... “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967), an adaptation of a McCullers novel set on an army base in which she played the sickly wife of an officer, played by Brian Keith, who was cheating on her with another officer’s wife (Elizabeth Taylor); “The Bell Jar” (1979), an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel, in which she played the mother of a suicidal young woman; “Gorillas in the Mist” (1984) in which played Roz Carr, a friend to the murdered zoologist Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver), and “HouseSitter” (1992) a romantic comedy with Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin — she played his mother.

I loved Julie Harris, an actress from back in the days before all the plastic surgery, collagen, and botox, when it was so much more interesting to watch the faces in the movies. Harris was always the one who was not too pretty, though she was pleasant enough to look at. She seemed fragile and wan. I've never seen "Reflections in a Golden Eye," but that's the type-casting they did: She's the sickly wife, and the other woman is Elizabeth Taylor (who was incredibly beautiful, back in the days when great beauty was natural and rare).

By the way, when I was in high school, we did the play version of "The Haunting" — which was called "The Haunting of Hill House" (which was based on the Shirley Jackson novel and should not be confused with the very amusing, campy Vincent Price film "House on Haunted Hill"). I got the role Julie Harris played in that movie. I'd also played Laura in "The Glass Menagerie" the year before, so our theater teacher must have seen me as the fragile, wan type. That's a hell of a self-image to inflict on a young girl, but who notices when it seems so exotic and satisfying to get up on the stage?

"Feminism, in short, doesn't just empower women. It empowers me."

"It allows me to take on roles that have traditionally been associated with women. It gives me more flexibility in my career. As a man, feminism has had a huge positive effect on my life. It seems like the least I can do in return is own it."

Writes Noah Berlatsky under the heading "All the Selfish Reasons to Be a Male Feminist," posted at Slate's XXfactor. He's certainly not telling us all the selfish reasons, since I can think of at least one additional reason: You can get your free-lance writing published at Slate's XXfactor.

Berlatsky talks about having a wife with a full-time job and health insurance benefits and his own role as primary caregiver for their child while he does his writing, and that catches my eye, because it's the family life I had from 1981 to 1987. He says:

There was a time not so long ago where doing any of those things would have made me the object of ridicule, and quite possibly self-loathing as well. Today, though, it's no big deal — and the reason for that is feminism.

Well, there was feminism back then too, but it didn't save men from the inner turmoil of switching traditional gender roles. We thought we were really sophisticated, advanced, hip, and evolved in the early 1980s. Does that come as a surprise to you, Noah? You say, "it's no big deal," but you're writing at XXfactor, where it's in your interest — you have a selfish reason — to say that. But these things work until they don't work, so don't be smug, and good luck. Have you really thought deeply about your masculine self-esteem? Because, to my ear, your thanks feminism sounds shallow.

Strange ideas of the paranormal.

My Google alert on "roadside memorial" turned up this item at examiner.com:



I've already blogged about the underlying story (as another in my long series of posts about makeshift death-site memorials). This post is about the mistake of putting the story under the already stupid "astrology & paranormal" tag. Did somebody at the Examiner think actual ghosts — to the extent that makes any sense — were involved? Like, maybe it was some college town variation on the old "Ghost Riders in the Sky" legend:

"(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend" is a country and cowboy-style song [that] tells a folk tale of a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the spirits of damned cowboys. One warns him that if he does not change his ways, he will be doomed to join them, forever "trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies."

Here's Marty Robbins singing the song. Or if you prefer: Johnny Cash. Or here it is by the singer who possesses the voice that is the first singing voice that I ever heard and thought: This is the greatest voice ever. I must have been about 4 years old at the time, considering the year that the greatest recording ever — as I saw it — came out (1955).

But back to "Ghost Riders." Here are the lyrics. I'd love parody lyrics applicable to apparitions of college-town bike riders.

"It’s hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be."

"Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique,' eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home."

All this seemed possible because the pill had just become widely available, and for the first time women had control over whether and when they had a child. (I will never forget finding that oddly shaped, Pez-like dispenser in my mother’s bedroom right after the birth of my youngest sister; my mother called her “That’s It” for weeks before giving her a name.)

From a long WaPo article by Elsa Walsh titled "Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life." The quoted part describes the author's mindset, which later changed. I chose to quote that because: 1. Her mother sounds so cold, calling an infant "That's It." (A child called "It"!) and 2. The author makes her college age self sound like a nitwit. She says she was 15 when Roe v. Wade came out, so I figure she was born in 1958. I was born in 1951, and I always thought the Gloria Steinem presentation of women's liberation was a women's magazine pep talk. Friedan's book begins as a rant about the bullshit in women's magazines. If you had a brain at the time, you didn't take this stuff at face value. I don't accept Walsh's assertion that oh, if you were only there back then in the 1970s, you'd have been thoroughly intoxicated.

There were other feminist writers back then, and there were plenty of readers interested in feminism who didn't like Steinem and who didn't bother going all the way back to Freidan. When I went to college (circa 1970), the new books young women get excited about where "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch," and the older book we went back to was "The Second Sex." These books had some critical edge and were not simply cheerleading women about having a conventional middle-class life modernized with the addition of a great career and planned, delayed reproduction.

Walsh is working off a false premise about what life was like back then. She has a book to promote, and I can understand the urge to write a book that acts like it's discovered something new. But, really, the problem with the idea that you can't really "have it all" has been well-known all along.

"How Roger Ebert Embraced Black Beauty" — another headline I misread.

I'd forgotten I had the page open to "The Root." An hour ago, I'd clicked from the front page of The Washington Post on a teaser that read "Time for Jay-Z to set down the mike?" and I'd opened a tab that had the more stolid headline "Jay-Z Is More Interesting as a Mogul Than as a Rapper," which I didn't feel like reading. So a person I'm not interested in is more interesting one way rather than another. The teaser made me think Jay-Z had said something that might be bloggable.

(By the way, I notice that on The Root page, the spelling "mic" is used, though on the main WaPo page, they use "mike." We've had this spelling discussion on the blog before — more than once. And I noticed a few days ago, Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the subject: "We in broadcasting spell the abbreviation for microphone 'mic,' m-i-c. We don't say m-i-k-e.")

Anyway, a tab was open — among many open tabs, things I hadn't clicked off and might get around to — and — without realizing I was at The Root, the WaPo offshoot that specializes in issues relating to black people — I glanced at that headline in the sidebar:  "How Roger Ebert Embraced Black Beauty."

I know that Roger Ebert was married to a black woman. Here's a nice Buzzfeed piece: "Roger And Chaz Ebert's Beautiful Marriage, In His Words."

But in my experience, "Black Beauty" is the title of the book that lined up next to "Heidi" on the bookcase in my sister's childhood bedroom, which made it seem to me like one of the 2 most famous and revered books of all time

I grew up thinking everyone idolized the girl Heidi and the horse Black Beauty. Whatever else I have learned over the years, that's how my brain is wired.

How Roger Ebert Embraced Black Beauty...

Wrong image!

From the "Black Beauty" link above:

Black Beauty is the prettiest young horse in the meadows, and spends many happy days under the apple trees with his friends Ginger and Merrylegs. But this easy life comes to an end when Beauty is sold and goes from farm to inn to cabhorse in London, enduring rough treatment from foolish and careless masters. Beauty remains faithful, hardworking, and full of spirit despite his trials, and through him we learn that all horses and humans alike deserve to be treated with kindness.

Oddly enough, Black Beauty sounds like the Uncle Tom of horses.

"Every cloud has a silver lining, and one of the benefits of the exclusion of women from most professions..."

"... was that we had wonderful teachers, especially the women who today would probably be CEOs."

Justice Antonin Scalia, remembering his school days, in NYC, circa 1947.

He also talks about playing street hockey, camping in vacant lots, and sledding in a cemetery:

It was pretty much devise your own amusement. I’ve never been a parent to go to all the soccer games and all that, because my parents never came to my street-hockey or pickup softball games; they just said go out and play.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s in Delaware, and it was the same thing: You made your own amusement. The only difference, at least in my family, is that we weren't told to go out (or to play). If you wanted to stay in and if you wanted to work or do nothing, my parents wouldn't say you should do something else. I'm not sure why my parents refrained from pushing us out into the fresh air, and it's too late now to ask, but sifting through the evidence I have, I think that they didn't like being told what to do. I know my mother, as a young girl in the 1930s, was told not to read too much and she wanted to read. Maybe in my old age, I'm seeing my departed parents in a golden light, but what makes sense to me now is that they were staunchly libertarian.

"Boys have historically been trained to think that they needn’t obey rules or work hard because..."

"... men used to be able to drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women, thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction and travel. That’s not the case anymore."

Time for everyone to recognize the great gift of the women's movement:  Everyone needs to buckle down, work hard, and follow rules. 

No wonder they had to drop the word "liberation" from "women's liberation movement." Who could have imagined, circa 1970, that what we'd end up with was grim drudgery for all?

Except the guys won't play along, will they? Consider the strategies. An obvious one is to scale down, never marry, never have children, and live a circumscribed life with a not-too-challenging job, and enjoy however much sex you want via online dating services. Meanwhile, the women can work for their entire lives as hard as they worked in school, just keep going and going, shoehorn in a couple children, work harder and harder to pay for everything they need, including childcare. Work work work.

Grim!

If I were a young woman, I'd be tempted into exactly what I was tempted into when I was a young woman: a life that values beauty, love, and freedom over work. I'm thinking of the hippie movement and — a book I read in the 1970s — "Your Money Or Your Life" (which I see is "Revised and Updated for the 21st Century" — not sure what that means).

The man who played trombone with Glenn Miller and the theremin with The Beach Boys...

... was Paul Tanner, who has died at the age of 95.

Tanner's involvement with electronic musical instruments began in the '50s, when he was drawn to the sound of the theremin, with its eerie, sliding notes. (It was notably present in the film scores for "The Lost Weekend" and "Spellbound.")

Fond of its unique tonal qualities, he was bothered by the theremin's playing technique, which required the performer to control it by waving one's hands. Working with inventor Bob Whitsell, Tanner designed an instrument that initially he called the electro-theremin. Eventually, it also received the name Tannerin, although Tanner preferred the title Paul's Box. Unlike the theremin, its method of playing was closer to that of traditional keyboard instruments.

Much as I understand the ease of the keyboard, I love the hand waving used on the original Theremin, which you can see played here by its inventor Leon Theremin:



Here's a terrific documentary about the Theremin. And here's how it looked when The Glenn Miller Orchestra played "In the Mood":



Not an electronic instrument in sight. This was my parents' favorite music, and I wish I had videos of the arguments I had with my father in the 1960s in which he took the position that if the instruments were electrified, it was — as a matter of definition — not music at all, and I got extremely exasperated, staunchly refused to submit to the playing of his old records, and repeatedly asserted that I liked rock and roll because of "the sound." The sound? Define your terms!

Here's a 10-CD set of Glenn Miller music for less than $20. You'll have to use electricity to play it, but I think my father would approve.

Edward Koch has died.

He was 88.

With his trademark — 'How’m I doin?' — Mr. Koch stood at subway entrances on countless mornings wringing the hands and votes of constituents, who elected him 21 times in 26 years, with only three defeats....

I lived in Koch's legislative district in the early 1970s — before he became mayor — and I remember going to work, needing to get down into the subway, and he'd be there at the top of the stairs wanting to shake hands. Want to ride the subway? You'll have to get past Ed Koch. It seemed so small-time, such a corny, unlikely way to get somewhere in politics.

The 3 defeats were: "a forgettable 1962 State Assembly race; a memorable 1982 primary in a race for governor won by Mario M. Cuomo; and a last Koch hurrah, a Democratic primary in 1989 won by David N. Dinkins, who would be his one-term successor."

Black leaders were... unhappy with Mr. Koch’s decision to purge antipoverty programs and comments he made that they considered insensitive. He said, for example, that busing and racial quotas had done more to divide the races than to achieve integration, and that Jews would be “crazy” to vote for the Rev. Jesse Jackson in his 1988 presidential campaign after Mr. Jackson’s 1984 reference to New York as “Hymietown” and his call for a Palestinian homeland in Israel....

[I]n August 1989, a black youth, Yusuf K. Hawkins, 16, who went to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to see a used car, was attacked by a group of white youths and shot dead.

Mr. Dinkins, pledging to bring the city together again in a “gorgeous mosaic,” narrowly defeated Mr. Koch in the primary and went on to beat Mr. Giuliani, who ran on the Republican and Liberal lines, by a slender margin in the general election.

“I was defeated because of longevity, not because Yusuf Hawkins was murdered six weeks before the election, although that was a factor,” Mr. Koch wrote.... “People get tired of you. So they decided to throw me out. And so help me God, as the numbers were coming in, I said to myself, ‘I’m free at last.’ ”

"Sally Starr is an icon, and she will always be remembered as an icon. She was someone who was pure."

"Her persona was always Sally Starr. She understood the importance of being a personality on and off the air. She was always in costume. She represented the true style of what it was to be a personality."

Goodbye to Sally Starr, who died 2 days before her 90th birthday. When I think of days in the 1950s in front of the television, I think of "Popeye Theater" and Sally Starr, "your gal Sal," forever in our hearts!