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I'm a freelance writer. I blog at nerdseyeview.com.

The Mike and Carol Brady Art Collection

Mike and Carol Brady in front of a gem from their art collection.
Mike and Carol Brady in front of a gem from their art collection. (ABC)

Taking obsession with The Brady Bunch to a whole new level, blogger Kirk Demarais dissects the art collection used on set in Mike and Carol Brady’s glorious modern home on We Are the Mutants.

To point out the generic nature of the Brady’s artistic taste isn’t to say they weren’t on trend. After World War II, art was industrialized like never before in order to meet the demand for something to cover the walls of tens of thousands of new American homes. Companies like Turner Wall Accessory produced and reproduced hundreds of prints with the home decor market in mind. During this era, original art was often replicated by an assembly line of contract artists working under shared pseudonyms. The subjects were intentionally innocuous in contrast to the art world at large, where bold personalities emerged to break every conceivable convention. Like most Americans, the Brady’s humble art collection largely consists of commercially produced prints. This makes the family seem real and relatable to the viewer—until you remember that they have a live-in housemaid.

The production designers didn’t construct the Brady aesthetic from scratch. According to the The Brady Bunch Blog, the sets are full of props and artwork that previously appeared in other Paramount-produced television shows. There’s little chance of finding intentional parallels between the characters and their surroundings, but that needn’t stop us from applying our own meaning. It’s also worth noting that much of the art is repeatedly repositioned throughout the course of the show. It is unclear whether this is the result of less-than-vigilant set dressers or a class five haunting.

Mom always says don’t play ball in the house, Bobby. She wanted to protect this precious collection.

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Mars Needs Women… Scientists

Astronaut Yvonne Cagle (left); Jennifer Harris (center); the Mars 2001 Operations System Development Manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Astronaut Ellen Ochoa (right)
Astronaut Yvonne Cagle (left); Jennifer Harris (center); the Mars 2001 Operations System Development Manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Astronaut Ellen Ochoa (right) via NASA.

The March 2017 issue of Vogue Magazine has a number of glorious spreads celebrating powerful women, but my favorite is this one on women working at NASA:

By the ’80s, though, NASA got better at recruiting women. “I remember that when I first came here, I was the only one in my group,” recalls Luz Marina Calle, the lead scientist and principal investigator of the Corrosion Technology Laboratory at an outdoor exposure facility. “When I used to answer the phone, people thought I was the secretary, and I would say, ‘No, in fact, he is my colleague.’ ”

We still have a ways to go, but thanks to women of science, we could make it as far as Mars — and beyond.

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What Does the Women’s Strike Mean?

Women's March, Seattle
Women's March, Seattle, by Pam Mandel

What makes a strike work? Large crowds, a focused goal, and inclusion. The evolution of the Womxn’s March on January 21, 2017, had a bumpy start, but evolved to have a focused, intersectional mission. Similar questions face the strike; who’s it for, who gets to go, and what’s its purpose?

Women’s strikes have typically succeeded when they have some clear idea of what women’s work is, some obvious problem that will become clear through women’s strategic withdrawal—for example, a French strike in which women left work early (to symbolize the time of day they stopped getting paid, as compared to men with the same job). Without a specific, labor-related point, after all, a “strike” is just a particularly righteous personal day.

In Elle, Sady Doyle looks at the history of women’s strikes and the complexity of who they serve even while finding praise for the current movement.

It’s also worth noting that the Women’s March itself was initially criticized for the fuzziness and non-specificity of its goals, and it still became the most successful protest in U.S. history.

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16 Documentaries by Steve Bannon

Partially filled movie theater
Getting Ready for the Movies via Wikimedia by Belinda Hankins Miller (Creative Commons)

Sean Nelson at The Stranger watched them all so we don’t have to.

It will surprise no one that the cinema of Steve Bannon consists entirely of conservative nationalist propaganda tracts designed to advance the values of the Tea Party movement, unacknowledged contradictions and all: small government, low taxes, militarism, isolationism, Christianity, self-interest, patriotism, contempt for America, everyone who disagrees with you is an elitist, immigrants are a threat, outsiders are the only real heroes, free-market capitalism is essential, regulation is tyranny, society is too permissive, Wall Street is corrupt, Democrats are hypocrites, liberals are fascists, Barack Obama is a fraud, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are worse than a thousand Hitlers. But above all, liberty. Always liberty.

Pro tip: Stop at the concession stand and get some Skittles before you start your film festival.

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Gen-X: We’ll Win in the End.

Still from the 1985 movie, The Breakfast Club
"The Breakfast Club"/A&M Films, 1985

I know, I know, another screed from embittered Gen-Xers. Give us a chance, and we’ll happily tell you what we think of our siblings on either side of the gap. David Barnett takes a familiar swing from his middle seat in The Independent:

The millennials, on the other hand, see the moomers as a rapacious generation that’s pretty much ruined everything for them. They’re living too long, taxpayers’ money is gushing into looking after them. They’ve kept house prices high, meaning young people can’t afford to buy. Workplace pensions are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Boomers are, by and large, Brexiteers and Trumpers. They remember when Britain was great, and think coming out of Europe will be a doddle. They want to make America great all over again.

It’s not much more than a snack, it’ll take you five minutes to read. But as a textbook Gen-X, it made me laugh.

Boomers live in the past and have ransomed the future. Millennials fear the future and are ignorant of the past. Generation X acknowledges what has gone before, learns from it, and resolves to shape the future into something better. We don’t throw our hands in the air and say the job’s a bust, let’s give up. We know we can’t go back to mythical halcyon days and we know we can’t just rip it up and start again. We work with what we’ve got and try to make it better. We change things from the inside out.

For what it’s worth, I don’t blame the boomers for all our woes any more than I’d say all millenials are vapid snowflakes. And I certainly don’t think Gen-X qualifies for some kind of savior status. I just like a good rant.

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Pittsburgh, Listed

Pittsburgh and the Duquense Incline
Pittsburgh as seen from the Duquense Incline via Wikimedia.

You know the drill — your city is included on some top ten destinations list and you can’t resist. You click through and the Space Needle is touted as a can’t miss site as opposed to home to a dated museum with a view that might be worth it if the day is clear, but you could just go to …

Plus, the character is all wrong.

In Pittsburgh’s City Paper, Alex Gordon surveys 150 years of writing about his city and whether or not this type of boosterish frivolity helps the city’s residents — specifically people of color.

In 2014, Damon Young, editor-in-chief of the digital magazine Very Smart Brothas, penned an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled, “Oblivious: Black people love Pittsburgh, too, but can’t help but wonder how much Pittsburgh loves them.” In it, Young expressed his ambivalence about the growing trend of Pittsburgh praise.

“Even as we boast about living in America’s ‘Most Livable’ or ‘Most Welcoming’ city, we question whether it is truly livable for and welcoming to us,” he wrote. “This is largely due to the fact that Pittsburgh’s relationship with its Yinzers of color has always been, for lack of a better term, complex.”

There’s also mention of a WPA project that ended up on the cutting room floor:

“The Negro in Pittsburgh” is not travel writing, but it includes one component that is routinely omitted from travel writing: the perspective of residents in their own words. The final chapter, “The People Speak,” offers a fascinating insight into what life was like for black Pittsburghers in the 1930s.

While it wasn’t published at the time — the FWP was shut down before the piece was completed — it’s pretty remarkable to consider a government project that documents the brazen inequality of an American city.

I still kind of want to go to Pittsburgh, preferably with a thoughtful local guide.

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Greetings from Alabama

Alabama State Capitol
Alabama State Capitol via Wikimedia.

Overwhelmed by pieces that tell you how little you understand voters from “the other side”? Yeah me, too.

Here’s a different perspective. “The Alabamafication of America” compares that state government’s history of populism, corruption, and Evangelical roots with the attributes of 45’s administration.

On the populist scandal side:

Back in the 1940s and 50s, Governor “Big Jim” Folsom was one of the most popular men ever to hold the position. To this day, many Alabamians say that if another Folsom ever runs for office, they’ll vote for him, because Big Jim famously paved rural roads to underserved places (including my grandparents’ childhood homes). Big Jim was also famous for his vices—in a televised debate with George Wallace, Folsom showed up drunk and failed to remember the names of his many children. His apocryphal line—“if they bait a hook with whiskey and women, they’ll catch Big Jim every time”—remains prominent in Alabama lore.

The lesson is simple: populism rises above all other concerns in Alabama. Demagoguery has a long track record of success in the South, and a politician who sufficiently channels that energy can say and do most anything—“grab them by the pussy,” for example—and still win by a landslide. George Wallace’s racism cost Alabama millions in economic development and outside investment, yet his populist appeal won elections. He served several nonconsecutive terms as governor, including one as late as the 1980s.

Trump won the election with the same flair as Folsom. With his cabinet picks and his agenda, it looks like Trump will govern like an Alabamian as well, with the classic strategies of a Montgomery politician.

And on how to keep your own safe when they might be up to no good:

Newt Gingrich has suggested that Trump pardon his family members in advance for any violation while he is in office.

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Milo. Kind of Our Fault.

The Beach Boys, 1965
The Beach Boys, 1965 via Wikimedia.

Iain Martin, former senior editor at The Sunday Telegraph and current columnist at Reaction, muses on finding the Beach Boys on YouTube, why the Telegraph made room for incendiary characters like Milo Yiannopoulos, and the impact of doing so.

The voracious appetite for clicks hasn’t been without cost.

Milo had plans for Telegraph blogs. Lots of plans. And suddenly, for a brief period, he was the Telegraph’s visionary guru handing out internet kool aid to us baffled and sceptical hacks and to the seriously talented people then in charge of the site. He was parachuted in to meetings with the company’s leaders where he mapped out his vision of a Telegraph at the forefront of a millennial media revolution.

This all sounds ridiculous now. Hell, it was ridiculous then. But it was before we had all realised that Facebook and Google were not our friends. They were going to suck up all the ad money and kill all but those with the sense to charge for quality content. We didn’t know that then. Anyway, the ferocious pace of change in media at that point, and the need for novelty, for an answer, any answer, meant that a character like Milo (a charismatic conservative chameleon) could walk right in.

With hindsight, I failed miserably in my responsibility as comment editor and should have made a stand. I was not alone in this. Quite a few other experienced executives thought the Milo for clicks experiment would blow up but we agreed in the pub that there was no point being near the scene of the explosion.

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Poem on the Range

Old cowboy boots
Cowboy Boots by Chauncey Davis via Flickr (Creative Commons)

She doesn’t write on command, can’t write your friend a birthday poem or an ode for the centennial celebration. She writes when the words strike her, making sure to keep stacks of paper scattered around the house. And she writes with pen and paper, never a computer, though she does email and knows enough about Facebook to know she hates it, the way people share every detail of their lives.

American Cowboy profiles Elizabeth Ebert, the “Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry”  — and takes the required detour to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada.

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, Baxter Black — maybe he’s the Prime Minister of Cowboy Poetry?  — had a segment on our public radio station. His short weekly bit is how I learned about the festival; this piece reminded me that I’ve long wanted to go. I added it to my calendar for 2018.

“Above my basement stairwell is a little cubby hole in which I put junk I don’t know what to do with,” she begins, “and I take the box out every once in a while and I ruffle through it, and one day I found a little notebook that said ‘21st Anniversary.’  The poem went like this:

We have reached a majority.

Twenty-one conglomerate years of marriage.

Good times and bad, sickness and health,

Joy and sorrow.

Sometimes I’d like to try for twenty-two

(Winchester, bolt action right between his eyes.)

Ebert sounds like, well, a pistol.

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Some Pig

Cover of 45 rpm record of Three Little Pigs

This story is very short, but it’s ridiculous and wonderful.

Derek was a magician and I thought I’d convince him by saying a mini pig would be perfect for his act. The two of us had met at a smoke and rib house where I worked as a waiter. But when Derek came home he was furious that I hadn’t spoken to him first. The pig (whom we later named Esther) looked like hell. She had a ratty pink collar, sunburned ears, her nails had chipped varnish and she looked so sad.

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