Q: Haynes has seemingly taken radical shifts in direction from film to film. Is there a commonality that can be found in each of his works?

White: Roughly speaking, Haynes alternates between films about “rock’n’roll suicide” (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) and domestic melodramas (Safe, Far from Heaven, Mildred Pierce). Then there are Poison and the TV short Dottie Gets Spanked, which make up a kind of early 1990s “New Queer Cinema” interlude. The music films are narratively complex mosaics whereas the family movies are linear, and that difference reinforces the pattern of alternation. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to split his work like this but of course it’s not a hard and fast division. There are numerous interconnections and one in particular comes to the fore in my book: it’s the drama of leaving home—which is both a specific story incident in almost all of Haynes’s films and something more symbolic. This ordinary life event takes on a larger metaphorical significance as a defining act of social noncompliance.

Home in Haynes’s films isn’t a happy place, even when it’s loving and protective. It’s a place of danger, especially for the misfit (though normality is tough too). Sometimes home is horrible or haunted—somewhere to get trapped or go mad. In perhaps the most powerful scene in the glam-rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine, away from all its music-industry glitz and glamor, the teenage Arthur (Christian Bale) is humiliated by his father. Soon afterward he escapes on a bus from Manchester to London, and while the scene is made poignant by the fact that his mother runs after the vehicle to wave goodbye, it’s a scene of liberation, temporary and insufficient though it proves to be.

A more complex example is the journey Safe’s Carol (Julianne Moore) takes from her affluent life in southern California to a recovery community in New Mexico. Her conventional life has become unendurable—the comfort of it has actually started to make her sick—but her search for something better is much more risky than she realizes. Through such stories, Haynes dwells on the fundamental political question of what it means (and costs) not to belong, and I very much wanted in the book to stress the
consistency, coherence, and seriousness of this preoccupation in his work.

Q: How useful is the “New Queer Cinema” label to describe Haynes’s work?

White: Haynes’s place in gay cinema is somewhat paradoxical and this goes for the narrower question of his affiliation to New Queer Cinema too. The difficulty is that Haynes doesn’t dwell on gay subject matter in the obviously direct (and oppositional) fashion of New Queer Cinema films like Greg Araki’s The Living End, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, or Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Haynes’s gay stories and characters are more ambivalent or tangential. For example, the men who have sex with men in the “Homo” storyline (adapted from Jean Genet) of Poison couldn’t be called role models. Then there’s tormented Frank (Dennis Quaid) in 1950s Far from Heaven, who meets a young man by the pool while on holiday and later admits desperately to his wife before he leaves her that only now does he comprehend what love is. Self-hatred and inhibition are burdens it’s hard to imagine ever lifting from him.

The problem is only resolved if “queer” is understood to be something that encompasses but goes beyond homosexuality itself. In a Film Quarterly interview published in 1993, a year after critic B. Ruby Rich baptized the New Queer Cinema movement, Haynes said: “People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film. . . . I think that’s really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?” Queer is perhaps most usefully thought about in relation to Haynes’s films not as a sexual orientation but as a general name for refusing social and artistic norms. (After all, gay people can be just as
conservative as straight.) Once the idea is broadened like this, the heroically rebellious queers in Haynes’s films include not only the centrally important character of Richie in Poison’s “Hero” story, a boy who kills his father and abandons his mother, but also Carol in Safe and even, perhaps, for a little while, Mildred (Kate Winslet) in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce.  

Q: Unlike many “serious” filmmakers, Haynes does not shy from melodrama. Why does he embrace this cinematic tradition?

White: Haynes’s relation to melodrama really needs a whole book to itself. Haynes inherits both from directors like Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls—emigrés who mastered the Hollywood domestic melodrama after World War II—and from the validation of their work in the 1970s by radical film critics and by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder as stinging critiques of the American mainstream rather than apolitical lightweight entertainment. (This question of the politics of melodrama continues to be debated, particularly in regard to Sirk: some insist that there’s no true subversive force in his films, though I certainly disagree.) Fassbinder updated Sirk in films like The Merchant of Four Seasons and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by making the attack on normality more explicit: the depiction of social cruelty and regimentation isn’t ambiguous in Fassbinder’s melodramas, as it mostly is in a Sirk film such as All That Heaven Allows. Haynes knowingly revives a lot of the Sirkian ironic varnish, but in full consciousness of and
affinity with Fassbinder’s less guarded reinvention.

Perhaps the crucial thing is that cinematic melodrama allows its exponents to play on
two boards: sympathetically exploiting the dramatic pathos of family strife at the same time as exposing the dark side of small-town conformism. Perhaps what appeals to such intelligent directors about melodrama is precisely that it can work in different and even conflicting ways at the same time. You can consider Far from Heaven, Haynes’s most direct homage to Sirk and Ophuls and Fassbinder, to be mainly a playful postmodern pastiche full of knowing allusions; you can be moved to tears by the characters’ struggles; or, as I do, you can regard the film as Haynes’s most hopeless and disturbing account of social entrapment. Maybe you can even do all three, and no doubt there are other alternatives too.

Q: You interviewed Haynes at length for the book: what struck you most about his responses?

White: There were three interviews, which were eventually edited together. The first two
occurred when the writing was underway, the last when it was nearly finished. Talking to the subject of a book of criticism is of course both rewarding and potentially inhibiting because of a certain “anxiety of influence.” Even by the high standards of many directors, Haynes is precise and persuasive about the intended meanings of his films—his DVD commentary tracks are particularly interesting and absorbing. (There wasn’t a commentary available on Velvet Goldmine for a long time, but fortunately for my research the 2011 Blu-ray edition put this absence right.) We discussed each of Haynes’s films, including his high-school effort (which unfortunately wasn’t available to view), The Suicide, and his graduation film, Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (which I did see and so could identify its traces in the subsequent Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There). As it happened, by the way, Haynes’s comments about Safe ended up being the most directly influential on my interpretation.

I decided after the first interview not to quote from these new discussions in my analyses. There were a couple of reasons for this decision. The first is that the commentary tracks have a particular immediacy—Haynes is there actually watching the film while commenting—that gave plenty of detail to engage with. The second is that to partition analysis and interview in this way offers the reader the opportunity to consider Haynes’s statements without my explicit commentary on them. The separation obviously isn’t complete, the interviews permeate the analyses, but I hope this decision makes the reader’s experience more interesting. In any case, at the heart of my sense of Haynes’s work are representations in his films of mysterious solitude and psychic remove—but I
think it’s fair to add that the author himself doesn’t stress these depictions to the same degree.

What was very interesting to me about the interviews was Haynes’s undiminished
commitment to a radical critique of society—for example, when he affirms the continuing inspiration of Jean Genet or says: “The society is telling you that if you do these things you’re gonna be fine, and everything’s good, and you’ll be accepted, but you never really believe it, and we’re haunted by that.” But such remarks aren’t surprising, finally. Of all his films, I’m Not There probably has the bluntest political edge and for a while it could have seemed like Haynes was mellowing. But then, in many ways unexpectedly, along came the really tremendous Mildred Pierce, which is as edgy and haunted as anything Haynes has made (and in many ways the best synthesis yet of the different strands of his work). It’s just a masterpiece and I absolutely relished the opportunity to write about it early on in its life.

*****

Photo courtesy of Rob White.

Q: What is the Wheeler-Lea Amendment that was passed in 1938?

Stole: The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 had given the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) jurisdiction over advertising, but only in cases where one business used advertising to gain an unfair advantage over another.  This meant that the FTC lacked the authority to intervene on consumers’ behalf when they were wronged, even harmed, by false and misleading advertising.  Thus there was considerable momentum for stricter advertising regulation by the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933.  In June of that year, a bill to amend the 1906 Food and Drugs Act was introduced in Congress.  The measure called for new labeling laws and mandatory grading of goods to help guide consumers in the marketplace.  It also sought to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prohibit false advertising of food, drugs, or cosmetics.

Major manufacturers generally had no objection to a ban on false advertising, but their reaction to the proposed ban on the use of “ambiguity and inference” caused strong and adverse reactions.  It was exactly the use of clever advertising to create enough ambiguity for consumers to infer the desirability of one product over another, even if none existed, that drove most of the consumer industry, and thus much of capitalism in general.

This set the stage for a five-year legislative battle, with congressional hearings on several revised versions of the bill.  Helping the advertising industry’s cause was a set of well-developed public relations and lobbying strategies combines with considerable influence
over the commercial mass media. Few among the general public were fully informed about the issues at stake.  With each new version of the bill, industry concerns took the front seat, and the issue of consumer protection, which been the original impetus for the measure, gradually faded from the agenda.  Despite demands from consumer groups, New Dealers, and government regulatory agencies, advertisers survived the battle with surprising ease.  The Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act was passed in 1938, but it only minimally affected existing advertising practices.  Although false advertising was banned, the bill did not outlaw the use of “ambiguity and inference” and the call for commodity grading never materialized into law.  Today, 75 years later, The Wheeler-Lea Amendment is still the reigning law on advertising in the US.

Q: Did it have the intended effect on the advertising industry?

Stole: Although the FTC managed to crack down on the advertising practices of some big national advertisers and slap them with rather mild fines, the mass media, with their
close financial ties to these manufacturers, did not publicize the cease-and-desist orders. Because of this, the lengthy appeals procedure might be well underway before the public ever learned, for example, that the FTC had found several advertising claims by Listerine antiseptic to be unsubstantiated or that it had ordered a stop to Helena Rubenstein’s claims that its “Eye Lash Grower Cream” would cause the lashes to grow and that one of its face powders would prevent skin blemishes.  The immediate and somewhat ironic result of the law on advertising copy was a tendency to glamorize products and employ indirect assertion.  Because it was relatively easy to check the truthfulness of verbal claims, advertisements relied more heavily on illustrations to get around the law.  A pictorial illustration could pass whereas a verbal presentation might not.  This practice revealed the shortcomings of the new law as well as its general failure to encourage advertisers to provide consumers with more factual information.

Q: How did the advertising industry come to support the U.S. war effort during the 1940s?

Stole: After having secured The Wheeler Lea Amendment as legislative victory, the advertising industry faced a set of new and severe challenges.  During the Great Depression, the advertising industry and its business allies, with strong support from the advertising-based news media, had stressed the importance of advertising as a tool for creating consumer demand and eventually getting the economy back on track.  By early 1940, with an impending war on the horizon, the argument was unraveling.  Raw materials for domestic consumer goods had quickly become in short supply, causing the government to impose rationing and price control.  Thus, for advertisers to promote products that were scarce or unavailable might have an inflationary effect and possibly cause black markets. Although desperate to keep their brand names before the public, the advertising industry  worried that product advertising might be viewed as problematic, if not downright unpatriotic, by the American public.

The government’s need for increasing revenues added to the industry’s concern.  Ever since the First World War, businesses had been allowed to claim their advertising as a tax deductible expense.  By all accounts this had the effect of dramatically increasing the amount of advertising that businesses did.  Now, however, considering the limited need  for advertising, advertisers faced the possibility of having this tax-deductible privilege revoked.  Moreover, in a period in which the government was begging, borrowing and taxing at unprecedented levels to support the war effort, the notion that businesses could deduct advertising expenses from their taxable income when advertising served no purpose was problematic.  In November 1941, a few weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, key members of the advertising industry met to discuss their dire situation. The meeting produced the outline of an industry-wide public relations program to protect  advertising.  The crucial idea was for the industry’s leading trade associations to establish a new group to advance the industry’s PR agenda.  Then, within weeks, America was embroiled in an all-out war.  Soon thereafter, and to the advertising industry’s surprise, the government’s newly created Office for War Information (OWI) approached the industry, asking for help in mobilizing popular support for its home front campaigns.

By early 1942, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) officially formed the Advertising Council Inc., which was renamed the War Advertising Council (WAC) between 1943 and 1945 and  positioned as a private adjunct to the government’s war information efforts, in part to protect the advertising industry from regulations.  Because the OWI had too small a  budget for the task at hand, it wanted the Advertising Council to serve as a de facto part of the OWI.

Q: Were the advertising efforts successful?

Stole: When war ended in 1945, the advertising industry believed it had done its patriotic duty and was not afraid to say so.  During the 1,307 days of war, it had encouraged the  American public to purchase more than 800 million war bonds and to plant 50 million victory gardens, as well as raising several million dollars for the Red Cross and the National War Fund Drives.  It had also fought inflation, recruited military personnel, spread information about a wide variety of salvage campaigns, and enlisted workers for industrial war-plants.  All in all, the (War) Adver­tising Council had been involved in more than 150 different home-front campaigns and, by its own estimate, had contributed more than $1 billion in time, space, and talent toward the war effort.

While the advertising industry proudly reminded the public of these contributions to the war effort, it was less likely to publicly discuss the PR rewards it had reaped from its war related activities.

Q: What were the long term postwar effects of the advertiser/politician relationship?

Stole: Largely as a result of the Advertising Council’s relentless work, the advertising industry enjoyed improved relations with the public as the war faded from view.  Moreover, and just as importantly; the intimate working relationship between industry, and government leaders continued into the postwar era, growing ever more congenial.  The Council continued its cooperation with the US government into the postwar era, working on campaigns to defend “American values” and capitalism at home and abroad, blurring the lines between industry goals and government concerns.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Stole: Writing this book made me (increasingly) aware of the advertising industry’s political and economic impact.  To the extent that advertising is discussed in our contemporary society, it is a conversation that tends to focus on advertising’s symbolic nature; how certain advertising images help shape people’s views of themselves, other and society in general.  While interesting and important questions, they fail to address the issue of why we have the kind of advertising we do or why advertising, which after all is a regulated industry, has assumed such a central role in our political economy.  My work on Advertising At War has confirmed the importance of historical research to fill some of the gaps.

L. Andrew Cooper

Q: How does Dario Argento’s work fit into the genre of “giallo?”

Cooper: The “giallo” is an Italian crime thriller set apart by violent, extravagant set pieces. “Giallo” means yellow, and the term refers to the yellow covers traditionally associated with the crime novels (often Italian translations of English-language originals) that inspired many of the films.  Argento’s directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) took the giallo to new levels of intricate mayhem, and his fifth feature, Deep Red (1975), experimented with nightmarish visuals that helped make it one of the genre’s most successful films.  Giallo conventions appear in almost all of Argento’s films, but Suspiria (1977) and other supernaturally-themed films stray too far from the giallo’s core of crime and mystery to qualify. His purest later gialli are probably Tenebre (1982), which features one of Argento’s easiest-to-follow (yet still awfully baroque) storylines, and Sleepless (2001), a late return-to-form that has helped to keep the giallo alive in the twenty-first century.

Q: Argento is thought of mostly for his horror films.  Is his work in other genres overlooked?

Cooper: Argento has often said that he can accomplish everything he wants to do with character and imagery in horror films and gialli.  His one feature outside these genres, The Five Days of Milan (1973), is worth seeing because it carries the director’s visual and narrative eccentricities into new territory, but it is a minor work.  In Argento’s films, genre provides a platform for stylistic experimentation unbounded by the norms of realism and rationality.  Horror is a starting point for thinking and feeling in Argento’s films: looking at where each film goes from that point, rather than focusing on genre as a limitation, might be the best way to approach Argento’s work.

Q: Early in his career Argento was called “the Italian Hitchcock.”  Was that a valid comparison?

Cooper: Yes and no.  The giallo, like its American cousin the slasher, builds explicitly on Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).  Because Argento gave the giallo visual intensity akin to what Hitchcock typically brought to his subjects, Argento was branded as “the Italian Hitchcock” almost immediately after The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  As I argue in my book, Bird is already in dialogue with Psycho and the traditions it inaugurated; the label “the Italian Hitchcock” helped to extend this dialogue throughout Argento’s career, culminating in Argento’s film Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005).  Despite the obvious importance of Hitchcock in Argento’s work, however, the comparison is somewhat superficial.  Popular perceptions of Hitchcock frame him as a master storyteller with acute psychological insight.  By contrast, Argento’s films privilege neither story nor psychology, preferring disorienting, abstract imagery and narratives that defy human agency and logical sense.

Q: Who are some filmmakers which Argento has influenced over his long career?

Cooper: Filmmakers around the world acknowledge Argento as an important influence. George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, 1978), John Carpenter (Halloween, 1978), James Wan (Saw, 2004), Pascal Laugier (Martyrs, 2008), Mick Garris (Masters of Horror, TV, 2005 – 2007), Takashi Miike (Audition, 1999), Eli Roth (Hostel, 2005), and Quentin
Tarantino (Death Proof, 2007) are only a few of the filmmakers who have  explicitly acknowledged Argento’s contributions to their stylistic development.

Q: Many of Argento’s films are both violent and visually striking.  His critics have claimed his  excessive visuals are at the expense of narrative.  Is this a valid criticism?

Cooper: The many critics who condemn Argento’s films for bad storytelling and bad acting miss one of Argento’s most important contributions to the history of cinema: over several decades, his work has developed a sustained critique of narrative and psychological conventions.  My book explores this critique in detail, so here I’ll limit myself to saying that Argento gives horror/grindhouse audiences what Michelangelo Antonioni started giving arthouse audiences in the 1960s.  Like Antonioni’s, Argento’s films explore untenable searches for truth amidst the fragmentation of (post)modern
existence.  The two filmmakers’ generic and visual vocabularies differ radically, and they don’t always point toward the same conclusions, but their attacks on traditionally accessible narrative follow similar courses.

Q: How does Argento handle sexuality and gender issues in his films?

Cooper: Controversially.  I believe that the man himself has views of sexuality and gender that most people would call progressive, but the man’s views are less important than the difficult depictions of sexuality and gender in his works.  He most often comes under attack for the films’ graphic violence against women, whose bodies are objectified and torn apart in film after film.  As a result, some critics dismiss his films as misogynistic.  Such  dismissals rarely take into account the self-conscious strategies that the films use to call attention to the cultural processes that dehumanize women and men alike.  Some critics also see the frequent appearance of queer characters as symptoms of homophobia, but they also fail to account for ways in which the strikingly frequent appearance of queerness undermines sexual prejudice.  In Argento’s films, aestheticized violence turns toward ethical ends, and those ends include exposing misogyny and homophobia as shallow and ignorant structures of feeling.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Cooper: Argento is one of the most written-about directors in popular cinema, but very little of that writing is academic.  Academics are often blinded to his work’s cultural significance because they can’t see past (or see with and through) the lowbrow status of the horror genre or the disturbing violence of the horrific imagery.  What surprised me most is how consistently and pervasively Argento’s films speak to academic critics’ concerns.  I find a lot of “auteur” criticism uninteresting because it indulges in myths of solitary artistic genius and fallacies of intention, but even as Argento’s films raise questions about the possibility of individual agency and the desirability of coherent narrative, the corpus as a whole is individually distinct and offers a remarkably coherent vision.  I don’t really care whether this vision was born from Argento’s conscious intent, but I see the vision clearly across his works, and the longer I look at this vision, the more profound it seems.

Mary Sue Welsh

Q: Who was Edna Phillips?  

Welsh: By joining the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1930 as its principal harpist, Edna Phillips became not only that orchestra’s first female member, but also the first woman to hold a principal position in any major symphony orchestra in America.

Q: Was her addition to the orchestra controversial?         

Welsh: In 1930 it was almost unheard of for a “regular” (meaning all-male) orchestra to hire a woman, even at the local or regional level. For an orchestra as prestigious as the Philadelphia to hire one and put her in a principal position was definitely controversial. It had never been done at that level.

During the first half of the twentieth century a majority of male musicians and their audiences believed that women were incapable of holding their own in professional orchestras because they lacked the stamina, power, and reliability to do so. That (plus the strong likelihood that male musicians didn’t want their jobs jeopardized by competition from women) meant that most female instrumentalists in the 1920s and ‘30s never had the opportunity to play in a professional orchestra. The only way they could do so was to join one of the all-female professional orchestras that had come into existence at that time.

Q: Did she experience sexism from within the orchestra?

Welsh: When Phillips first arrived at the orchestra, she experienced hostility from some of the men who made it obvious that they regarded her as an unworthy intruder and who resented her taking the place of a well-liked male colleague who had been with the orchestra for seventeen years. Even Stokowski, who had hired her, poked fun at her as “a foolish virgin” during one rehearsal, but his attempted joke didn’t work. She subtly called his bluff by maintaining her composure instead of reacting with dismay and embarrassment as he had expected her to do.

Q: How was the Philadelphia Orchestra regarded at the time?

Welsh: In 1929, Sergei Rachmaninoff called the Philadelphia Orchestra “the finest orchestra the world has ever heard.” Whether that was absolutely the case, the Philadelphia Orchestra was held in extremely high regard throughout the musical world. It
was considered a major orchestra, a category that at that time included the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Philadelphia.

Q: The book presents the many challenges orchestra members faced working with Conductor Leopold Stokowski. What one stands out most?

Welsh: Probably his intensity and a certain amount of relentlessness. He imposed the highest standards on his players and expected them to be able to respond instantly to his direction, often jumping through different parts of a score in rehearsal and expecting his musicians to immediately find the correct spot many measures ahead and begin playing without pause. He would work relentlessly to mold certain sections of a work in rehearsal and leave other more routine sections for the players to master on their own, forcing them to pay extraordinary attention to him in concert to make sure that the piece unfolded as the maestro wanted it to.

Q: Was there something about Phillips’s personality that helped her thrive as “one woman in a hundred?”

Welsh: Phillips was very savvy. She seemed to know instinctively how to take care of herself. In 1927 she played for a brief spell in the Roxy Theatre Orchestra in Manhattan, joining her teacher at the time, Florence Wightman, as the only women in an orchestra made up of 110 men. It was a terrible experience. Forced to dodge aggressive passes from her colleagues, she fled after six weeks, vowing never again to play in an all-male orchestra.

Eventually her teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, the brilliant and wily
Carlos Salzedo, talked her into auditioning for the Philadelphia Orchestra by assuring her that there would be no “Roxy Romeos” there. When she did join, Phillips devised a plan for deflecting possible passes that worked well with the men of the orchestra, but not so well with Maestros Stokowski and later Ormandy, both of whom made overtures toward her that could not be deflected so easily. What can a female member of such an organization do when the leader of that organization makes a pass at her – say no and possibly get fired or say yes and eventually be “thrown away like an old shoe?” It was a conundrum that Phillips handled with wit and much aplomb.

Q: What contributions did Phillips make to the performance of the harp?

Welsh: In order to expand its repertoire, Phillips and her husband, Samuel R.  Rosenbaum, commissioned fifteen works for the harp, including what is today considered to be a masterpiece for the instrument, Concerto for Harp and Orchestra op. 25 by Alberto Ginastera, as well as significant works by Nicolai Berezowsky, Norman Dello Joio, Erno Dohnanyi, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Ernst Krenek, Harl McDonald, José Serebrier, and Paul White, among others.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Welsh: How fascinating the behind-the-scenes life of the Philadelphia Orchestra was during the 1930s and ‘40s when seen through the eyes of an astute observer who relished the humorous incidents that occurred as well as the greatness that surrounded her.

*****

Author photo credit: Susan Beard Photography

Q: What is the “renegade union” of the book’s title?

Phillips: Local then District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union AND of the Distributing Processing and Office Workers AND of the United Automobile Workers AND of the Distributive Workers of America. It changed its affiliation several times throughout its history.

Q: What was the biggest problem the union faced in organizing its workers?

Phillips: Fitting in within the larger labor movement. It always held great appeal to the workers it organized but had to organize so differently from other labor unions that an
almost constant tension existed between it and the larger labor organizations with which it attempted to affiliate.

Q: Is there something about New York City–vs. other large cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, etc.–that made the creation of this union possible? 

Phillips: New York, especially Manhattan where the union’s organizers started, wasn’t a manufacturing or meatpacking center like Detroit or Chicago. New York’s businesses and shops were relatively small and diverse compared to big auto or steel plants more typically associated with union organizing in the mid 20th century. That meant that District 65′s organizers had to develop different strategies to pull in the people it organized.  Not only were they incredibly low paid, they worked in small 10-15 person shops and warehouses.  Some packed merchandise, everything from clothes to toys to costume jewelry. Others worked in wholesale shops stocking merchandise and doing other odd jobs. Few worked for the same “boss,” in the same warehouse, or in the same industry but they all faced similarly degrading work conditions and within a few blocks of one another and that’s what the union’s organizers were able to tap into.

Q: How many people were in the union at its peak? 

Phillips: 40,000 people working in 1000s of different shops and establishments under 1000s of different contracts.

Q: Did it eventually join forces with a larger union organization?

Phillips: Yes, it was affiliated through most of its history with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) which was an AFL-CIO union.

Q: Was there anything unique about District 65 that still makes an impact today? 

Phillips: Its history is key to understanding how labor organizers work today in a service and distribution-oriented economy. There are more and more people working in small retail and wholesale establishments and in warehouses in the service and distribution industries than there are people working in large manufacturing-based settings so the union’s strategies are incredibly instructive for what’s happening today with American workers.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book? 

Phillips: It was fascinating to learn about how people from such different backgrounds (men, women, black, white, Puerto Rican, Jewish, Italian) and working for different people could create a sense of camaraderie and come together to try and pressure their bosses to improve their working conditions. They didn’t have strength in numbers the way auto workers did to shut the plant down and walk out. They didn’t have a common “boss” to despise. None of that but a collective sense of pushing their “collective” employers to improve conditions in the whole of segment of the industry in which they worked. What an undertaking!

Q: What is John Brunner known for?

Smith: Brunner is best known for three near-future novels, all of which now seem eerily prescient. His Hugo Award-winning Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is set in 2010 and feels very contemporary in its handling of media saturation, urban overcrowding, terrorism, and genetic modification. The Sheep Look Up (1972) paints a grim picture of unfolding ecological crisis that takes in everything from the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria to the collapse of bee populations and fish stocks. The Shockwave Rider (1975) is a forerunner of cyberpunk. It finds Brunner imagining a “data net” resembling the Internet, coining the term “worm” to describe self-replicating malware, and broadly engaging with the idea of information society.

Q: How did you first become acquainted with Brunner’s writing?

Smith: I first read his Ace books—novels such as The 100^th Millennium (1959), The Atlantic Abomination (1960), and Meeting at Infinity (1961)—long after their original publication. I also remember reading two story collections, No Future in It (1962) and Now Then (1965), early on. I mostly worked forward from there. I probably differ from other Brunner fans of my generation, who seem more likely to have read Stand on Zanzibar or The Shockwave Rider first, or to have worked their way back to the better-known novels from The Crucible of Time (1983) or 1980s reprints of The Traveler in Black.

Q: Do you think this circumstance influenced your understanding of Brunner?

Smith: Definitely. His early fiction is often dismissed as little more than the work of a competent journeyman, while Stand on Zanzibar is praised as a masterstroke of unforeseen brilliance. I don’t think that’s the case at all. Brunner’s early stories and
novels are uncommonly good for their day and strongly anticipate his later work. In fact, Meeting at Infinity, with its use of multiple viewpoints, intersecting plot lines, and a false
protagonist, is arguably a trial run for Stand on Zanzibar.

Q: What else is new or different about your account of Brunner’s career?

Smith: I examine Brunner’s troubled relationship with the British New Wave, a loosely-defined SF vanguard of the late sixties. Stand on Zanzibar was received in some quarters as a quintessentially New Wave novel, but it met with a cold reception from some New Wave writers. To an extent, Brunner’s distinctive approach—which combined the best elements of the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance—got caught up in and obscured by crosstalk about the New Wave. Also, Brunner’s best-known novels from the late sixties and early seventies cast a long shadow on his later career. My account gives due attention to Brunner’s significant but neglected later works, The Crucible of Time, “The First since Ancient Persia” (1990), and A Maze of Stars (1991), among others.

Q: What is an unusual or interesting fact that you learned about Brunner while researching the book?

Smith: In late 1955, Brunner submitted his proto-cyberpunk story “Fair” to legendary British editor Ted Carnell. Carnell didn’t like it, accepted it only to fill out an issue of New
Worlds, and forced Brunner to publish it under a pseudonym reportedly plucked from the phonebook–Keith Woodcott, specifically. After “Fair” appeared, Carnell received a deluge of positive letters about it and accidently listed Brunner’s real name next to the story in the magazine’s next reader poll, unmasking Woodcott in the process. Brunner found the situation highly amusing and savored the recognition that followed. Later in his career, when he needed to publish some of his Ace books under a pseudonym to avoid overexposure, Brunner revived the Keith Woodcott name, perhaps as something of a private joke.

Q: Has Brunner’s work been influential in the SF field?

Smith: I think so. In Brunner’s day, his body of work was often considered
difficult to categorize. Now, it looks ahead of its time—like a precursor to cyberpunk,
slipstream, and biopunk. I’m not suggesting Brunner invented these subgenres, but his penchant for working across genres and for blurring the boundaries between hard and soft SF certainly helped open up avenues for their emergence.

1. What makes college basketball and college football vulnerable to game fixing scandals?

Figone: Spectator sports in the United States have involved gambling on their outcomes from their inception. Boxing and baseball were almost destroyed by individuals who took a dive and fixed games; professional wrestling turned into an exhibition because of gambling; and pedestrianism (i.e. today’s marathons) were at times rigged as they were bet on.

During football’s early history in the late 19^th century, the lack of organized supervision allowed college athletes to play on professional teams for money. Gamblers and bookies made money on these leagues as gambling and rigging final scores were prevalent. Undoubtedly, player and gambler connections from these leagues carried over to college
competition. Opposing college players gambled on the games’ outcomes, among
themselves and bookies, and gamblers attended practices and games to proposition players, and obtain inside information. Virtually every meeting of college authorities in the first 40 years of college football included a discussion on how to rid the parasite of gambling from the sport.

The annual Army-Navy game at Yankee Stadium was cancelled because over one million was bet on the game in 1947—the last year of the series.  Gamblers were spotted in hotels looking for players to do business was one of the reasons for suspending the game. Intersectional games played in off campus sites commanded the attention of big-time sports gamblers.

During college basketball’s early history, its players were not paid to play. They earned extra money playing professionally and often walked among the spectators before games to solicit wagers. As the sport gained popularity in colleges, betting on the sport and the point spread emerged as early as the 1920’s.  Betting on college sports significantly increased during the 1930’s as many bookies funded their trade with profits from the illicit sex and liquor businesses that emerged during Prohibition.  Many bookies remained in the trade when Prohibition was repealed in 1931.

During World War Two, the fixing of games increased in college basketball and college football.  Law enforcement’s attention was focused on the war effort, college authorities dismissed the rumored or actual game fixing primarily because of small team sizes, and more bookies switched to college sports as the government shut down horse racing. The point spread’s reported invention about 1939 (some authorities contend it was earlier) exacerbated betting in each sport. During the post-war period from 1945 to 1951 and thereafter, betting on college sports continued to grow and was ignored by the NCAA and law enforcement at the local level.

In many jurisdictions such as New York City, the police departments were paid by bookies allowing them to conduct business as they pleased.  Other cities such as: Lexington, Toledo, OH, and Portland, OR also winked an eye at the activity. The 1951 Basketball Scandal was exposed by a newspaper editor—not the New York County DA’s office. The DA began wiretapping in February 1951 and two years of investigations by the New York Herald’s crime reporters produced tons of evidence showing many college players in New York and Philadelphia were doing business with gamblers. Sports reporters in the 1940’s and 1950’s shielded the problem from the public by treating sports fans like mushrooms about widespread fixing in basketball and covering them with manure. The 1961 Basketball Scandal was twice the size as the one 10 years earlier. Bookies had quickly learned how to avoid detection while the college establishment demonstrated a remarkable learning dysfunction regarding gambling corruption in college sports.

From the early 1940’s until the 1980’s, the most common reasons for fixing games were: making extra money (i.e. everybody is doing it), fixing of games in specific regions of the U.S. were part of college basketball’s culture (i.e., New York, Lexington, KY, Portland, OR Louisville, Kansas City, Chicago, and Detroit), lack of institutional, conference, or NCAA attention to the problem, civil statutes that made sports bribing illegal were not enacted, and many police departments and politicians were receiving payoffs from bookies (i.e. Kefauver Commission in 1951 revealed the extent of the corruption). Many coaches ignored their players’ rigging games even as bookies smelled a fix and reported their suspicions to them. Everett Case of North Carolina State is the only coach on record to report his suspicions that three of his basketball players in 1961 were manipulating final scores. He contacted the North Carolina Bureau of Investigations and his suspicions were confirmed.

1980′s to 2000: Football and basketball players increasingly gambled on sports with campus bookies, college and professional sports gambling increasingly became socially popular, some players had become addicted to gambling while incurring gambling debts (i.e. from many types of wagering) which made them vulnerable to fixing offers, and some athletes have been risk takers like a Sociopath (i.e. I’ll beat the system). Many players observed their friends betting sports and did not know betting on sports for a college athlete was illegal.

Include factors such as players: with no money, bad grades,  see no future
as potential draftees,  know their efforts produce big profits for others, observing rules and laws not enforced uniformly (i.e. athletes are protected after committing criminal acts), and some coaches gamble themselves and strategize during the game according to the spread—a perfect storm for a scandal.

Recent gambling trends in the 21^st century have also contributed to the problem: many athletes have been sports gambling since elementary school, feel alienated from teammates because of race, jealousies, and other reasons, and many have been softened with money, booze, and women from gamblers. Increased payoffs to players for recruiting and playing render the gambling menace more dangerous than ever in 2013.

Keep in mind, the problem involves 1% of all college athletes out of the estimated 430, 000.  Some critics believe this number may be as high as 5%. The biggest issue is that fixing a game and not playing honestly undermines our core beliefs about sports, society, and ourselves. Game Fixing is the Mother of All Scandals.  We don’t accept payoffs
from boosters, coaches violating NCAA rules, athletes not belonging in college, etc. But, we are led to believe these transgressions can be fixed by the colleges and archaic NCAA rules.

2. Is it always about the money?

Figone: No! other reasons include: hatred for a coach for varied reasons: broke recruiting promises, picks on certain players (i.e. at times has been a racial or other issues),  makes athletes feel powerless, is abusive emotionally and physically, and arranges for boosters to pay big money to a team’s high profile players such as: quarterbacks, running backs, or high scorers.  Thus, ignores paying players extra money that are instrumental to a team’s success and  see the system as exploitive.  High performing athletes have trained for over 10 years, now work for about $8.00 an hour, and keenly aware and reminded by fixers millions are made because of their efforts.  In a few instances, athletes will rig games for the thrill of the scam.

3. Do the players involved in point shaving scandals typically show remorse
when they are implicated?

Figone: Yes, because 90% of them believe they can beat the human sports betting system. The illusion: If 52.4% of money bet on human sports is won, a person will be slightly ahead. Win 60% of bets placed on sports and one wins big money. The remorse is for getting caught because the commercialized system has immunized the 1% from any loyalty to the program or institution. The media including the NCAA has “spun” to the public that Alan Athlete is highly committed to Tech U for mythical reasons. Unfortunately; most athletes don’t look at long-term consequences when they agree to play illegally. Many who threw away a future in which they could have a made a lot of money or have been labeled fixers have experienced emotional and physical problems in their lifetimes.

4. Who is the highest profile college coach to be involved in a college gambling scandal?

Figone: Take your pick: Nat Holman, Lou Rossini, Clair Bee, Adolph Rupp (most wins in this group), Everett Case, Gerry Bush, Joe Lapchick, Tom Davis, Norm Ellenberger, Fordy Anderson, Frank Ramsey, Bill Frieder (Steve Fisher’s predecessor), Buck Freeman, and many lesser profile people like assistant coaches, directors of athletics, trainers, team doctors, etc.

5. What is the most unusual case of game fixing that you encountered?

Figone: St. Joseph-Bradley game in Philadelphia in January, 1951. One of the Englisis brothers Nick, worked for one group of fixers and his job was too line up Bradley’s players to fix games in 1950 and 1951.

Nick arranged for the Bradley players to not cover the spread or win by less
than the spread as the group he represented bet big money St. Joseph’s. Bradley
was a heavy favorite. Meanwhile, in New York City, his brother Tony was working
for a group of fixers headed by Jack “Zip” West, a notorious mobster who believed he was double-crossed by Nick’s group who informed him the money was on Bradley to beat the spread. Furious about the double-cross he seized Tony at gun-point and told him to call Nick in Philadelphia to call off the rigged game. West undoubtedly would kill Tony if Bradley’s players covered the spread as the gangster would have lost a lot of money. He could not change his bet and held Tony hostage in his apartment.

Contacting his brother just before game time, Tony explained the circumstances and told Nick to call off the fix. Nick didn’t tell his backers, or they would have bought him a burial site in the East River. But, to make his backers think the game was a lock for them,
the Bradley players performed so badly that at the first quarter break; they were behind, 17-5. St. Joseph’s record was one the worst in college basketball while Bradley was ranked number one in the country. They did everything but shoot the ball for St. Joseph. At the break, Fordy Anderson asked the team: “Is everything okay? Is something wrong?” Obviously, he didn’t want to hear the players were rigging the game. But to save Tony’s life, Bradley stormed back and won the game by a big margin.

6. Is the current NCAA rulebook an impediment to ending these scandals?

Figone: Yes and No. No because the NCAA rule in 2013 states: An athlete is ineligible
for life if caught gambling on any sport, conspires to fix a game, or gambles on his own team, etc. But, what occurs is that the NCAA along with a few money hungry schools make rigging a game inevitable. How? Because hypocrisy of the system is most evident
to athletes as the NCAA has passed rules to label athletes sham amateurs.

How many people treated grossly unfair in the workplace, have busted their tails for over 10 years, and are theoretically slaves, but classified as amateurs, would not listen to offers to fix games? Especially when approached by a slick emissary representing a group loosely defined as organized crime. How many individuals will say no, not withstanding that they will not report the offer if they refuse it because they don’t want to be fitted for a pair of cement shoes?

A scholarship for athletics is worth more than $200,000 if one values a degree. What if the athlete has no intention of obtaining a degree and does not understand what an education means? The high level athlete has learned that recruiting is similar to negotiating as a free agent. He is represented usually by a loosely defined Talent Scout and looking at who has the most money?  If the athlete cares less about education and looks at million dollar contracts, where will he turn when his dreams turn to cruel reality before his eligibility expires? Maybe to rigging a game or two.

And, the schools really don’t make a profit from athletics. In any one year about 10% of the 325 Division One institutions that sponsor commercialized football and basketball end up in the black financially. At least 50% end up in the red as they are competing in sum-zero games. The same to eight or ten football programs who play in the BCS and the rare basketball programs that end up in the final eight are profit earners. About 10 in each sport.

7. How did your experience as a college coach inform your writing of Cheating the Spread?

Figone: I coached baseball. And, I was very knowledgeable about my players’ behaviors and technical executions on the field. If one played below his usual level, not his best, or simply looked like he was zoned out, etc., he was removed from the game and received running medicine at 3:00 a.m. around the library carrying a bat over his head. This
scenario occurred infrequently, but not for gambling reasons; maybe, the player violated a team rule. The point: In my opinion, every one of the coaches whose players worked with gamblers knew it when it was occurring. Some were even told by their players it was happening.

During the 1957-1958 season, St. John’s Joe Lapchick was told by his players two starters were doing business with a gambler. Even the sportswriters told him the two players, Billy Chrystal and Michael Parenti, had been rigging games for three years. He felt and acted powerless and was unable to coach the team during games and had a player make all the strategic moves. He could have informed the New York DA’s office who could have wiretapped the two players. And, possibly prevented the massive 1961 gambling scandal in basketball.

8. What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the
book?

Figone: Most of the material Judy Karren, of factfinderresearcher.com, an excellent and very thorough   researcher, and I uncovered was not too surprising. The book allowed us to see the gambling problem from a perspective of looking at college football’s and basketball’s gambling history from the late 19^th century until today. No one event defined the scandals. It was a combination of: corruption in the two sports in question, social, economic, and political factors in higher education, and gambling vulnerabilities in many individuals that could influence a final score.

In my opinion, 98% of college sport historians have not written a comprehensive accounting of the gambling problem to the delight of: illegal bookies, NCAA, boosters who gamble on the team they fund, the college establishment that earns billions, television, and attendant industries. Why?  The events surrounding the scandals are not contextualized and placed in the realm as isolated incidents (i.e. “It’s a few bad apples”). People don’t create notable historical events. People emerge from historical events as victims, a few as extraordinary leaders rising above their peers, and the events change people’s behaviors very slowly over time.

The colleges in 2013 have not solved the gambling issue. Questions that lead to solutions have not been crafted as gambling only goes away if it destroys a sport or an institution stops competing for entertainment dollars.  I’m not sure we know how to successfully stop the 150 billion plus illegal gambling problem with the present system in commercialized college sports.

Previously unknown issues about this problem: The openness of bookie operations, especially in big cities, how coaches winked their eye, ignored, and denied their players were rigging games; even as spectators spotted the funny play, and the naiveté of the NCAA and college establishment about the problem. Fixing has not stopped. It’s simply more covert and sophisticated in 2013.

Our next book: The Underground Economy in College Football and Basketball: Playing For Illegal Gambling and Hypocrisy will selectively examine the entire history of the gambling problem in college sports. We’re attempting to link widespread and specific instances of corruption in the two sports with the fixing of games.

For example, how can the FBI, Las Vegas, and other law enforcement agencies today track the large number of college games wagered?  The University of Toledo scandal involved two Detroit gamblers who bet over $400,000 on the university’s basketball games from December 2005 to January 2006. There were assisted by four football and four basketball players. The FBI uncovered the two gamblers in the course of investigating their connection to organized crime. This was a mid-level Division One basketball program that escaped the attention of the legal books and the FBI. The mid-level programs may become the next targets of fixers.

College programs play for gamblers to the tune of at least 150 billion a year. And, only 10% are profitable. Sadly, this is higher education’s legacy in 2013.

Q: What is your definition of organized crime?

Lombardo: I use the term organized crime to define the political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in large American cities from the second half of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century.

Q: Conventional wisdom traces the roots of organized crime in large U.S. urban centers to the Sicilian mafia. What’s wrong with this paradigm?

Lombardo: Tracing organized crime to the South of Italy ignores the historical record. Organized crime in Chicago existed before Italian immigration, and it existed in Chicago’s black community independent of Italian participation for a period of almost 50 years. Additionally, much of the information upon which this “importation” model is based comes from popular, non academic sources.

Q: When did reports of organized crime first surface in Chicago?

Lombardo: In 1873 Michael Cassius McDonald organized Chicago’s saloon and gambling interests into “Mike McDonald’s Democrats,” and elected their own candidate, Harvey Colvin, Mayor of Chicago. With Colvin in office, McDonald organized the first criminal syndicate in Chicago composed of both gamblers and compliant politicians.

Q: Al Capone is synonymous with “Chicago mafia.” Are there more influential figures about which the general public is unaware?

Lombardo: Mike McDonald for sure, but also Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly. Kelly “franchised” all vice activity in Chicago to the Capone Syndicate during the 1940s.

Q: Do related crime syndicates still operate in Chicago today?

Lombardo: There may be some bookmakers and old-time gangsters still around, but traditional organized crime in Chicago is largely a thing of the past. The Chicago Outfit as the progeny of the old Capone Syndicate is almost dead. They have been destroyed by law-enforcement efforts.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Lombardo: What I found most interesting was the untold story of Lt. Joe Morris and the Chicago Police Scotland Yard detail under Mayor Kennelly. Had they not been disbanded by Richard J. Daley, they would have drove the Chicago Outfit out of town.

The publications of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series from the University of Illinois Press have advanced into this unknown territory. Each of these editions of major sketchbooks contains a color facsimile of the original source reproduced at full size, together with an interpretative transcription and extensive commentary. Since the facsimiles provide access to the visually fascinating but cluttered and highly revised manuscripts, the transcriptions can inquire into the meaning and not just the letter of Beethoven’s inspiring brainstorms of activity. The accompanying commentaries place this new material into the context of parallel sources and biographical issues, recreating for the reader the composer’s creative struggles.

These new editions can be compared to the first probes of Venus or Mars, since instead of isolated glimpses, the entire surface of the object of investigation is revealed for the first time. The first such edition targeted Beethoven’s major sketchbook of 1820, Artaria 195: Beethoven’s Sketchbook for the Missa solemnis and the Piano Sonata in E Major, Opus 109. The editor, transcriber, and author of the commentary is William Kinderman, general editor of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series.

The second edition of the Beethoven Sketchbook Series makes available the most famous of the composer’s sketchbooks, the “Eroica” Sketchbook used by Beethoven between 1802 and 1804. Startling new insights are revealed in this edition, which was completed jointly by Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman. Fresh insight is offered into the genesis of not only the “Eroica” Symphony, but the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the composer’s sole opera Fidelio, and various fascinating unknown and fragmentary projects. Lockwood and Gosman’s edition, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Sketchbook: A Critical Edition, will be published in early 2013.

Recent research has moved beyond Beethoven and beyond music. Kinderman’s new book from the University of Illinois Press, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág, explores the creativity of major composers from the eighteenth century to the present. He shows that a view of the arts confined to isolated canonic masterpieces is seriously impoverished. At the same time, many secrets about and fresh perspectives on deceptively familiar canonic works can be gained through research that sees cultural products as a struggle emerging out of history. This approach, dubbed “genetic criticism” in France, is a fruitful alternative to the rigid structuralism that so easily blinds commentators to the important spontaneous aspects of artistic activity. A recent interdisciplinary exploration of this approach is Kinderman’s edited book with Joseph E. Jones, Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater from the University of Rochester Press.

Kinderman has recorded as pianist Beethoven’s major keyboard works from the period of the Artaria 195 sketchbook: the final trilogy of Sonatas in E major, A-flat major, and C minor, opp. 109-111 (available on Arietta Records).  For the second movement of the Sonata in E major, op. 109, an innovative website allows the user to explore all stages in Beethoven’s creation of the music, tracing the process from initial sketch to finished work, acorn to oak. The facsimiles of the sketches, transcriptions of their content, and realization in sound of the music are coordinated, drawing on the material from the three-volume edition of Artaria 195.

Another much-praised recording by Kinderman of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is also available on Arietta Records. Kinderman’s book Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations from Oxford University Press and his CD recording of this work were a major influence on Moises Kaufman’s much-performed play, 33 Variations.