First up: Clare Coffey on Philadelphia’s clubs: “Philadelphia is a city of clubs, Sandy Smith told me over scotch, and as he is the city’s premier real estate journalist, he’s the man to know. The metropolitan club grew out of the eighteenth-century coffee house, E. Digby Baltzell tells us in Philadelphia Gentlemen, a 1950s ethnography of Philadelphia’s upper class. There’s the Junto, of course, Ben Franklin’s self-improvement and everyday philosophy society. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fire brigades, too, presaged modern fraternal organizations; they were as much mutual aid and brawling societies as they were public safety apparata. In Governed by a Spirit of Opposition, Jessica Choppin Roney contends that voluntary and civic associations provided a way for ordinary citizens of a stratified and fragmented city to participate in direct political action and control.’

Rock has been dead for forty years, Dominic Green writes in The Critic. Deal with it: “‘Rock and roll will never die,’ Sha-Na-Na insisted at Woodstock in 1969. ‘It won’t fade away.’ But it did. Copyright, the golden seam that ran through the rock business, ended with digital file-sharing in the late Nineties. Rock music now survives in two museum formats, the big-ticket bucket-list gig and the anniversary boxset: see them before they die, hear why the offcuts were cut off in the first place. Rock fans — middle-aged men, invariably — will recite the Sha-Na-Na catechism and remain happily deaf to the obvious. To anyone with ears, it’s clear that rock completed its natural development decades ago and has been fading away ever since.”

How Margaret Beaufort made the Tudors: “Of the clutch of female powerbrokers who emerged during the civil wars of the English 15th century, the diminutive figure of Margaret Beaufort stands out: first, for her spectacular navigation of the repeated regime changes of the Wars of the Roses; and second, for the act of political opportunism which saw her help her son Henry Tudor to the throne, in the process founding a new dynasty. She herself became the epitome of a dynastic matriarch, a pious, self-assertive figure of immense independent wealth and power.”

Chris Mautner takes stock of Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown: “Even when Ware first came upon the indie comics scene in the early 1990s it felt like a shock to the proverbial system. Who the hell is this guy who created such striking, formally daring work that seemed of a piece yet completely alien from what anyone else was doing at the time?”

The mysterious Pieter de Hooch: “A contemporary of Johannes Vermeer, De Hooch has long been recognized as ‘the other’ great Delft artist, who in a remarkably short period in the second half of the 1650s created a series of masterpieces on which his fame now mainly rests. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century De Hooch’s works commanded higher prices than those of Vermeer. Surprisingly, there has never been an exhibition devoted to De Hooch in his homeland. This has now been remedied by an enthralling show at the Museum Prinsenhof Delft featuring nearly thirty of De Hooch’s paintings, now widely scattered through public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.”

College clearly boosts earnings. What about wealth? Far less than before, a new study finds: “The paper, by William R. Emmons, Ana H. Kent, and Lowell R. Ricketts, is an exercise in pulling apart averages. As a general point, college graduates earn more and are worth more than people without college degrees. And, as a general point, the college earnings and wealth premiums—meaning how much more a person with a college diploma makes and owns than an otherwise similar person—are large. But upon close examination, terrifying generational and demographic trends emerge. The college earnings premium has proved durable and considerable overall. White people born in the middle of the century got more of an earnings boost for attending college than white people born in the 1980s—but the boost for both groups was big. (‘People’ is close-enough shorthand here; the authors use a more technical household comparison.) And black people born in the ’80s got a similar income bump, compared to black people born in the ’40s and ’50s. But the wealth premium has collapsed precipitously over the past 50 years. White graduates born in the ’30s were worth 247 percent more than their non-college-educated peers; white people born in the ’80s were worth just 42 percent more. Among black families, the wealth premium sat at more than 500 percent for those born in the ’30s and fell to zero—yes, zero—for those born in the ’70s and ’80s.”

Essay of the Day:

Owning fewer things doesn’t make us happy, Kyle Chayka writes in The Guardian. Life is messy, and no amount of cleaning or reorganization will change that:

“For some of its devotees, minimalism is therapy. The spasm of getting rid of everything is like an exorcism of the past, clearing the way for a new future of pristine simplicity. It represents a decisive break. No longer will we depend on the accumulation of stuff to bring us happiness – we will instead be content with the things we have consciously decided to keep, the things that represent our ideal selves. By owning fewer things, we might be able to construct new identities through selective curation instead of succumbing to consumerism.

“At least, that is the model popularized by Marie Kondo’s books, social media accounts and the instantly famous Netflix series that launched at the beginning of 2019. The KonMari Method, described in Kondo’s English-language debut The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, is curiously rigid, with a ritualistic appeal from the process of handling each item in turn and deciding if it stays or goes. Only by following Kondo’s disciplined tenets can the reader be fully successful. Despite her claims that everyone should find their own version of tidiness, she critiques those who follow “erroneous conventional approaches” to cleaning. One must begin with clothes, then proceed on to books, papers and household miscellany. Sentimental items such as photographs or memorabilia are last, because only by the end will you have built up the appropriate sensitivity to joy being sparked to evaluate such potent objects.

“Kondo promises the illusion of choice. You decide what stays in your house, but she tells you exactly how it should be folded, stored and displayed – in other words, how you should relate to it. When you pull everything out of its nooks and crannies, you realise just how much stuff you own, and how much of it you do not really need. It is like learning what actually goes into junk food: being forced to think about what you put into your life is enough to instill the habit for ever. Kondo boasts that none of her clients has ever relapsed. ‘A dramatic reorganisation of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective,’ she writes. Readers trade the orthodoxy of consumerism for the orthodoxy of tidiness. KonMari might be vaguely anti-capitalist, but then there is the fact that you have to buy a suite of Kondo books to practise it. She has been fully transformed into a brand: her company now sells luxury Kondo boxes to organise your stuff in, certification classes for would-be Kondo acolytes and a range of crystals, as well as a ‘therapeutic tuning fork’.

“Minimalism was already being commodified when Kondo emerged, however. She was only the crest of a larger 2010s wave of writers adopting the idea. Her English-language predecessors emerged out of the online lifestyle-blogger community, with blogs such as Joshua Becker’s Becoming Minimalist, starting in 2008; Courtney Carver’s Be More With Less, in 2010, and The Minimalists, who had already self-published their book Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life in 2011.

“The literature of the minimalist lifestyle is an exercise in banality. It is saccharine and predigested, presented as self-help as much as a practical how-to guide.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Arlington Row

Poem: Sally Thomas, “Epiphany”

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