Speak­ing in New York City, David Simon, the cre­ator of The Wire, was­n’t shy about tak­ing the city to task. “There is no city more vain about its posi­tion in pop­u­lar cul­ture, more indif­fer­ent to oth­er real­i­ties, more self absorbed than oth­er cities.” “Man­hat­tan is [now] one big pile of mon­ey,” which leaves it divorced from the real prob­lems fac­ing oth­er Amer­i­can cities. So why are so many sto­ries and tele­vi­sion shows still cen­tered in New York, and how can they tell the real tale of urban Amer­i­ca in 2010?

This talk took place at The New School for Lib­er­al Arts in NYC.

via The Dai­ly Dish

Recent­ly a friend of John Meroney at The Atlantic dis­cov­ered this 1954 episode of Gen­er­al Elec­tric The­ater fea­tur­ing Ronald Rea­gan and James Dean.

Dean’s per­for­mance is superb, and the episode (edit­ed to 6 min­utes) is a para­ble of the cul­tur­al ten­sions of the time — with drugged up, beat­nik delin­quents invad­ing the home of a decent cou­ple to sub­ject them at gun­point to jazz and slang: “man,” “fake it, Dad,” “you dig me,” “that’s crazy,” “don’t goof on me now.” It’s a quite fit­ting scene, espe­cial­ly giv­en that Rea­gan went on to be the icon of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, while Dean became emblem­at­ic of the rebel­lious youth cul­ture to which Rea­gan’s move­ment was a reac­tion. But while the overt moral les­son of this episode is anti-rebel, there’s no doubt that pow­er­ful depic­tions like these–in which Dean’s expres­sive­ness is as charis­mat­ic as it is frightening–only con­tributed to mak­ing rebel­lion cool.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Insti­tute for the Study of Psy­cho­analy­sis and Cul­ture. He also par­tic­i­pates in The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, a pod­cast con­sist­ing of infor­mal dis­cus­sions about philo­soph­i­cal texts by three phi­los­o­phy grad­u­ate school dropouts.