Once upon a time (last December), we went out looking for a managing editor for this website, and we met a ton of amazing people. Long story short: we now want you to meet Carrie Frye, who has written and edited previously at About Last Night and Asheville’s Mountain Xpress. She can be reached at caaf at theawl dot com.

Hi and hello! I completed orientation over the weekend (“Core-ee Seek-a”) and now it’s just a thrill to be sitting here at a desk with my Awl stapler and pen set, filling up the calendar with items that, while we’re enjoying a mood of excessive first-week politeness, the guys will be reluctant to spike (“Feb. 23 — Balk’s “American Idol” live-blog”).

I have tremendous affection for this site, and I look forward to confabbing with the people that I’ve read here and planning new great things to entertain and edify Awl readers. And if I can be earnest for a moment — I’m originally from Wisconsin, and it’s nearly impossible for a Midwesterner to get through anything like this without some earnestness — if you’re a shy writer who has for whatever reason been hesitant about sending out your work into the world, I hope my inclusion here (and my fairly obscure media profile, Southern Appalachian location and all) will bring out the “what the hell, why not?” in you and hearten you to pitch more, send out your work more, share your ideas more. Life is short, best to be brave.

by Phoebe Connelly

10. Middlemarch

9. The Way We Live Now

8. The Buccaneers

7. Bleak House (2005)

6. Wives and Daughters

5. Daniel Deronda

4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (The 1980s Jeremy Brett Granada Television version)

3. A Room With A View/Howards End (watch them as a pair, please)

2. Jude

1. North & South

Bonus: Cool as Ice.

Phoebe Connelly would appreciate it if Netflix made Brideshead Revisited (1981) insta-watch.

“This is the easiest of connections; I don’t even have my thinking cap on. Apple is the most valuable technology brand in the world. Their products are sold to People Of Wal-Mart but the aesthetic still shimmers diamond-hard, like faith beyond reason. When the first iPhone came out the cast of the Apple store applauded every buyer.

Radiohead is the most valuable band in the world. Their music references the phone book but sounds like nobody else. They’ve turned hard sell/soft sell into their own loud-quiet-loud solution. Their intelligence burns even at street level; the more they refuse to dumb it down the less they alienate even dumb people.”
 — Apple as Radiohead, Radiohead as Apple.

“The mass popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt and the uprisings shaking Bahrain and Libya at the moment are contributing to sinking the culturalist mythologies of this intellectually exhausted generation of militants turned into detached, sour commentators. Not all wines age well. One also hopes that these world-historical events will contribute to overcoming the simplistic binary logic of interpretation which have dominated public discourse on opposite sides of the political spectrum for so long: external causes vs. internal ones, imperialism and colonialism vs. Islam, political logics vs. cultural ones. The recent popular uprisings have contributed to the disintegration of what now became the old culturalist myth.”
 — Fadi Bardawil writes that the past two months show that Arab society is not what anyone thought it was. The dictatorships, the Western analysts, the former revolutionaries that make up the aging Arab intelligentsia — all wrong. Time for them all to fade away. Meanwhile, yesterday’s protests in Benghazi alone are estimated to have left 60 dead and hundreds injured.

Deep Silver, the publishers-to-be of the videogame “Dead Island,” claimed yesterday that they hadn’t yet sold film rights to their as-of-yet unfinished and unreleased product, in development since basically forever, despite reports to the contrary. Here’s a working theory about this unusual event (the “Dead Island” trailer: has like 2.5 million views, from the last five days): “My theory: Deep Silver knew Dead Island was in video game purgatory and they needed something to gauge the interest in it to determine if they should shelve it or issue yet another release date. So they came up with this bit of cinematic genius, something that would go viral and get people talking about their game again. Even if the family featured in the trailer has nothing to do with the game, even if the game is not quite ready for prime time. It was a bit of manipulative genius to put this out there, sort of like a girl who’s not quite sure she’s ready to date making a match.com profile to see if she can reel in anything worthy enough to make her try. The Dead Island trailer was bait. And we all took a bite.”

by Abe Sauer

Read all of our Wisconsin coverage here.

It’s already been a long weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. Protesters slept on the capitol floor and some Republican state legislators, after attempting to hold an illegal vote on Friday, made excuses for why they would not be seen in the communities they represent.

Republican Senator Alberta Darling canceled her weekend plans to attend an event in Menomonee Falls, a city she represents. She tweeted, “I will not be attending ChillyFest in MF tomorrow. I have to be ready at a moment’s notice to go back to Madison to do the people’s work.” Maybe because she was born in Indiana and grew up in Peoria, Illinois, she’s unaware that Menomonee Falls is even closer to Madison than her home near the lake in River Hills.

Once it became clear that Democrats would not be seen in public, the state patrol was ordered to retrieve them and drag them back to make quorum. That State Patrol is newly under the command of Stephen Fitzgerald, one of Governor Scott Walker’s latest appointments. Stephen just happens to be the father of Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald — Wisconsin’s most powerful Republicans. (After being trounced by a 2-to-1 margin in the November election for Dodge County sheriff, Fitzgerald was rewarded with the State Patrol position.)

Welcome to the New Wisconsin Idea, where intellectualism is a handicap in a state now leading a reactionary revolution. Somewhere around 60,000 people each day turned out for the GOP’s all new show, where the marquee event is watching middle class workers, private and public, rip each other to shreds while the vampiric money class sops up the blood.

Famous national acts old and new showed up to attach their faces to the goings on in the Badger State. Jesse Jackson. Andrew Breitbart. The one thing the legacy acts had in common was that, whatever happened, they won’t be worse off financially.

Breitbart, presumably taking a break from his recent promise to “obtain justice for the truly and legitimately discriminated against American black farmers,” was joined by Madison’s right wing radio host Vicki McKenna. Mckenna, as we noted last week, had manufactured a claim that liberals were calling for Walker’s assassination. Their pro-Walker rally drew several thousand.

Don’t let Breitbart or anyone else complain about a lack of coverage of the tea party counter-protest. The Wisconsin State Journal, ran an entire photo journal titled “Saturday protests at the Capitol” — which contained photos only of the Walker supporters. It also contained a statement about the reading of “a letter from Alaska Governor and TEA Party supporter Sarah Palin during the gathering.” (The Journal apparently forgot that Palin resigned years ago.)

Milwaukee AM 620 radio’s Charlie Sykes reported on a Madison where “mobs roamed the halls” and “a senior senator was spat on.” (Video or it didn’t happen.) Noting the garbage in the square, the account exclaimed, exasperatedly, “This is one of the most beautiful Capitol buildings in the country.” That Governor Scott Walker has announced the unprecedented plan to give his budget address not in this “most beautiful Capitol” but at a private (inaccessible) business is an irony probably lost on almost everyone at the channel.

Sykes’ report also claimed that legislators “had been told to clear the Capitol because the new groups coming in overnight are filled with with people “who aren’t afraid to be arrested’.”

(Back in reality, one person at the rally who definitely knew about getting arrested by Madison police was Vicki McKenna herself. Back in June of 1997, when McKenna’s job was pushing the fart button for the Z104 FM morning show, she was booked under her real name (Vicki Pyzynski) for drunken and disorderly conduct and resisting arrest — at a U2 show. The arresting officer called McKenna “verbally and physically combative.”)

In any event, by 6 p.m., Andrew Breitbart was already off for Chicago, which brings the total time he found worth investing in Madison at around five hours, at best.

Meanwhile, in the rhetorical trudge, the Washington Post wins the weekend with the Stephen Stromberg column, headlined: “Wisconsin’s governor is not Hitler.” We can confirm that that is correct.

It will certainly bum out Breitbart, Mckenna and Fox News to learn that, in the end, the demonstrations were peaceful. On Saturday at 6 p.m., Madison police reported that, with an estimated 60,000 people in attendance, not only were there no arrests, but also “no major incidents.” Think about that for a minute. Nearly 60,000 impassioned and angry people arriving in a venue that did not plan for them resulted in zero arrests.

Some who could not be there for the protest showed support for the tens of thousands of cheeseheads in the most appropriate way possible: with cheese. Gooey, gooey cheese. By late day Saturday, Ian’s Pizza at 115 State Street reported taking 40 orders for pizza to be delivered to the demonstrators at the Capitol square.

L.A. comedian Jen Kirkman sent a pizza. Demonstrator Christine thanked her for it.

Through the weekend, calls to fire all of the Madison teachers who called in sick to protest were repeated. That this demand was of Madison teachers could not be more preposterous. Madison graduates 94 percent of its high school students (compared to a national average of around 70 percent). Just three years ago Forbes named Madison the second best city in all of America in which to educate a child. This is just one of the high rankings of Madison nationally — from safest for children, to elderly quality of life, to live music, to most innovative to, simply, best all around.

When this whole incident is done, it will probably force many residents of Madison (maybe justifiably) to double down in the belief that so much of the rest of the in-reverse state can just go disappear up its own anus.

* * *

One thing that’s been lost in all the bluster about the union busting measures was all the other juicy stuff in the bill itself. The very first detail not to be mentioned is that the “unreasonable” Wisconsin Education Association Council, Wisconsin’s largest teacher’s union — the one that Walker insists will not negotiate — just two weeks ago announced that it supports both merit-based pay reform and measures that would streamline the firing of under-performers.

It is all of those other juicy, and difficult to fully grasp, measures that probably had Walker pushing the bill through so fast. Jack Craver, of Madison’s favorite free paper, the Isthmus, asked on Saturday: “Could the threat of union-busting be a ruse to extract the most painful pay cuts from public employees in recent memory?” Craver’s theory is:

Walker went ahead with the most radical plan possible. And why not? His GOP majorities should have assured him victory, and who cares about unions anymore, he must have reasoned. Less than a fifth of Wisconsin’s workers belong to them, and most of those are in the public sector, meaning their suffering could be framed as a victory for everybody else.

Backing up this scenario: new polling data indicating public sentiment shifting against Walker’s bill, results the governor is now trying to explain away Dick Nixon style with “quiet majority” theory.

But I’ll do Craver one better and propose that Walker’s hard line on the whole union battle is a trick of complete misdirection from provisions in the bill that look much more dire. Just like a writer who hates being edited will include a garbage paragraph to protect the copy he or she really wants preserved while allowing the editor to feel useful, Walker’s union attack may be a ploy to distract from his “administrative rules” changes regarding Medicaid.

Wisconsin’s union employees are upset about a loss of collective bargaining and a mandated increase in benefit payments, including for health insurance. But at least these employees would still have health insurance. What has been widely ignored about Walker’s bill (in part because of the speed with which he’s fisting it down Wisconsin’s gullet) is a sneaky provision that paves the way for him to cut, or eliminate, Medicaid and BadgerCare healthcare benefits for low-income people.

Administrative rules changes sound about as interesting as the words “administrative rules.” And Walker’s “administrative rule” change is the kind of complex, procedural legislative legalese that few reporters are sickly masochistic enough to slog through. (And it’s especially true that nobody reports on America’s rising war on the poor. This was evidenced by the fact that major network stars have yet to appear in Madison, and, until this weekend, the tens of thousands sleeping in the capitol warranted segment bites equal in length and depth to the latest update on reporter Serene Branson’s migraine.)

So in short: Walker’s administrative rules change would allow the Department of Health Services, via the overwhelmingly GOP-controlled budget committee, to change state laws unilaterally, skipping the legislative process altogether. In terms Vicki McKenna can understand, this means Walker’s bill will allow the governor to subvert the legislative process and make his own laws without going through the tiresome and long American tradition of lawmaking. But wait, there’s more!

Not only should there be no doubt Walker would do this, his statements foreshadow who he would blame it on. On Feb 11th, before Madison got in the labor movement time machine, the governor said, “The alternative [to state employee health and pension changes] is to look at 1,500 layoffs of state employees or close to 200,000 children who would be bumped off Medicaid-related programs.” At the time, PolitiFact Wisconsin asked, “But can he remove children from Medicaid, the state-federal program that pays medical bills for low-income individuals and families?”

Not without the administrative rules change he can’t — the changes he’s going to get when this bill passes. The advantage of this approach to gutting Medicaid is that it avoids the nuisance legislative process that is currently gumming up a similar war on the poor in Texas.

In all Walker’s talk about private industry providing health insurance, and trimming back state outlays to health care, one fact that doesn’t get answered is exactly what the tens of thousands of people with private industry jobs who are also on state health assistance are to do. The apostrophes in Wisconsin employers like Menard’s, Roundy’s, McDonald’s, Land’s End and Kohl’s don’t ever precede the term “health insurance plan.” Those businesses have thousands of employees who are listed on the rolls of BadgerCare. BadgerCare recipients listed as employed at Wal-Mart alone number just shy of 10,000.

But wait! Just who has Walker appointed to head up the newly powerful Department of Health Services? A villain as innocuously named as the term “administrative rule” itself, Dennis Smith. As Capital Times reporter Shawn Doherty points out in a woefully overlooked piece, Smith is a fellow at The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank hostile to Medicaid. How hostile? In 2009, Smith himself authored a paper titled “Medicaid Meltdown: Dropping Medicaid Could Save States $1 Trillion,” which concludes “failure to leave Medicaid might be viewed as irresponsible on the part of elected state officials.”

Yes, irresponsible.

To review: Walker argues that his bill’s benefit cuts are to bring public employees more in line with the realities of the state’s private workforce — while acknowledging that one of those realities is that hundreds of thousands of those in the private workforce rely on low income benefit assistance from the state. Meanwhile, the same bill making this argument paves the way to cut — without opposition, debate or legislative due process — those very same benefits.

What Walker really means when he says that Wisconsin is “open for business” is that Wisconsin is “closed for poor people.”

UPDATE: Sunday Night
As a follow-up of sorts: Tonight the Governor defended his bill by tweeting a link to a post at The Heritage Foundation.

The post, titled, “Myths vs. Facts of the Wisconsin Union Protest,” supports Walker’s bill by, in part, arguing that few opponents understand the gravity and size of the budget deficit.

Tweeting throughout the day, the link was one of only four links Gov. Walker provided to information or opinion defending his bill.

It just happens that Tina Korbe, the author of that Heritage piece, graduated with a BA in journalism from the University of Arkansas… in 2010.

More? As late as 2006, Korbe was a “Top 8 finalist” in the Arkansas Jr. Miss pageant. The year before, she was a semi-finalist in the Miss Arkansas’ Outstanding Teen Pageant. No worries though, she already was Miss Teen Diamond Lakes 2005.

So, to put that in perspective, when the governor of the entire state of Wisconsin finds time to defend a bill that could severely impact the financial well-being of hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin workers, not to mention instituting the most sweeping changes to the balance of the state’s labor relations in 50 years, who does he point to? An 22-year-old (at best) who grew up in Arkansas and graduated with an undergraduate degree in journalism less than a year ago.

No coincidence that the $43,000 Walker received from the Koch Brothers during his campaign (making them his second largest donor) and the fact that The Heritage Foundation is funded, in the millions of dollars, by the same Koch Brothers?

It’s slowly becoming quite clear. Walker is far too much of a nincompoop to have alone concocted such a surgical attack on the middle class and poor as this bill represents. The only explanation is that the governor’s actions only come on behalf of whichever Koch brother’s hand happens to be inserted up his rectum, working the puppet.

Top photo from anti-teacher rally via. For updates throughout the day follow #wiunion or #notmywi. You can reach Abe Sauer at abesauer [at] gmail.com.

• You learned how to comment on the Internet.

• You met Fire the boxing diva.

• You sought forgiveness for your sins.

• You mourned 11 dead rappers.

• You reflected on the end of winter.

• You envisioned the big gay conservative future.

• You returned to the scene of the Egyptian revolution.

• You feared the coming rule of The Machines.

• You watched the war against labor in Wisconsin.

• You pondered the vicissitudes of love.

Photo by Jeff Gunn.

Feb 16, 1912: Margaret Q. Adams, LA County Sheriff’s first woman officer, takes oath. Her badge, pix & obit: http://bit.ly/cJZZiKWed Feb 16 17:12:40 via web

La Angelena
LAhistory

It’s very likely that you don’t live in Los Angeles! So many people don’t these days. But it’s a fascinating city, and even nonresidents can play along with this Twitter feed of LA history. What I love about it is it tells little stories.

Her obit, “In man’s world of 1912, few enclaves more exclusively masculine than sheriff’s dept & Mrs.Adams…was something of special case.”Wed Feb 16 17:13:44 via web

La Angelena
LAhistory

THAT’S WHAT WE CALL “VALUE-ADDED” IN THE BIZ, BABY.

And like this:

Feb 1, 1885: Charles Lummis arrived in Los Angeles, after walking 3,507 miles from Ohio.Tue Feb 01 20:07:38 via web

La Angelena
LAhistory

Charles Lummis chronicled his walking adventures in his book “A Tramp Across the Continent.” Available online: http://bit.ly/ezKOX0Tue Feb 01 20:09:13 via web

La Angelena
LAhistory

Lummis was LA booster, publisher, Indian-rights advocate, preservationist, writer, museum founder, womanizer & all-around colorful rogueTue Feb 01 20:37:36 via web

La Angelena
LAhistory

If you’re really interested in going deep, you can follow LA City Nerd too. In my mind, these two Twitter proprietors despise each other. It’s probably true! Fun!

Previously

by Phil Freeman

Despite not liking Britney Spears’ album covers, I like her new video quite a bit. Yes, I hate the lyrics just as much as you do. The joke chorus is awful, and the verses are a string of clichés. But at least they’re not “I’m rich and in the club” clichés, like pretty much every other pop song released in the last three years. And anyway, the music is good enough. It’s a nice little trance-techno track that, released as an instrumental, would make people who like to go out and dance (not me) very happy indeed.

But I want to talk about the video, because there are a few dark and tantalizing things to talk about in there.

First (after the pointless meteor-striking-the-earth opening, which just seems like director Jonas Åkerlund jacking up the budget, and the “setup” shots, where she stands there like a wax dummy as the dancers assemble and the lights are set up, etc.) there’s the opening dance sequence, which is cut at epilepsy-inducing speed to camouflage the fact that Britney can’t really dance anymore. Watch it slowly, and you’ll see that she basically does one thing each time the camera’s on her. She’ll lift her arms over her head. Or cock her hip. Or turn her head to the right and look at one of the backup dancers who are whirling and thrusting around her. But more than one movement per one-second burst of digital video is beyond her capacity.

Britney seems to really be in her comfort zone when she’s in what I choose to call the “pedestal dress,” standing surrounded by a zillion video monitors, each showing one of her old videos. It’s like she lives in a private, self-sealing universe, forever haunted by her own past. (Aren’t we all? Each of us is forever confronted by images and memories of a younger self — sometimes these are happy memories, and other times they’re horrible, awkward things you did and said when you were a teenager that can still rocket you out of sleep, coated in sweat, even though you haven’t seen those people in a decade or more and they probably don’t even remember the thing that still stabs you in the brain. Oh, but YOU REMEMBER. See, Britney is just like us.)

The introduction of Space-Mutant Britney (her eyes have two irises! She has black glittery nail-claws! She lives in a porthole made of microphones, as though Britney Spears is someone from whom journalists clamor for quotes!) sends us right into the realm of J-pop. In fact, both this bit and the pedestal dress remind me of costumes Ayumi Hamasaki, the queen of J-pop, would wear.

Within the pedestal/monitor chamber of horrors, there are blind dancers. Have they blinded themselves to avoid having to stare at a million Britneys, endlessly? I don’t know, so let’s skip straight to the Britney-on-Britney fight scene, and the way it causes pedestal-dress Britney to collapse in a heap after spraying multicolored paint from her fingertips. What does this symbolize? Neither battling Britney seems particularly identified with an earlier phase in her career — it’s not Schoolgirl Britney vs. Toxic Britney or anything like that — so this whole bit is inexplicable.

But it could be seen as the inevitable result of staring at your own refracted image for a million years (or however long Britney has been trapped on that pedestal, surrounded by monitors) — eventually former aspects of yourself will attempt to seize control of your mind, and battle for dominance. It’s happened in a zillion sci-fi movies, and probably at least once in real life.

Finally, post-battle, post-collapse, we get yet another Britney, wearing some kind of pleather minidress and “dancing” (again, super quick cuts to camouflage her general lack of affect and atrophied skills) on a flame-shooting “rock concert”-style stage. Is this her fully actualized self? The winning persona coming to full life? If so, that gives the video an element of real tragedy. All that psychic struggle — Britney’s personalities beating the hell out of each other within her mind, as she stares into a soul-crushing vista of endless Britney-ness — and this is the result? This video makes me feel more sorry for her than any TMZ footage ever could.

Phil Freeman is the editor of Burning Ambulance and a freelance writer for the Village Voice and lots of other places. He will harangue you at great length about the superiority of Japanese pop if you let him.

“On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as ‘o.k. (all correct)’. OK may have originated from a comical misspelling How this weak joke survived at all, instead of vanishing like its counterparts, is a matter of lucky coincidence involving the American presidential election of 1840.”
 — I prefer to spell it “okay,” because it’s a word I don’t think should stand out so much. But Allan Metcalf’s etymology of “America’s Greatest Word” is so interesting, however he chooses to spell it is just fine with me.