Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

I began reading these two elegantly composed, deftly researched studies around the same time, with absolutely no sense that they might speak to one another. But despite the vast difference of their subjects, they form fascinating bookends to the history of American music in the 20th century. David Suisman's Selling Sounds shows how the music industry taught Americans to understand recorded music as a commodity. On the other side of the century, we have Arthur Russell, the composer and musician whose work and life are given deservedly serious, thoughtful treatment Tim Lawrence's excellent biography. >>

A Review of "Capitalism: A Love Story," directed by Michael Moore

Crimes have been committed in this building. I am here to make a citizen's arrest.

In the final scene of "Capitalism: A Love Story," Michael Moore drags police tape around city blocks that house the corporate offices of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Wachovia, and J.P. Morgan Chase--all recipients of taxpayer money used by the federal government as part of a "bailout" package. Moore's stated purpose is to make a "citizen's arrest" of the criminals who, when faced with the ramifications of their own financial faux-pas, "backed an armored car up to the US treasury" only to leave with 700 billion dollars of "our money." Moore figures each corporate building as the scene of a crime, leaving us to ponder the implications of what William Pietz once called the "forensics of capital..."