Shut up about Brooklyn already. We all know about Brooklyn, that shining city on the hill, where everything is made only of awesome. Yes, there are beards and clunky eyeglass frames and lawyers who skateboard and grandpas with noise bands. The hipsters run-off freely now, the cheesecake is largely appareled American and vice now has a market cap. There's even a successful sitcom that purports to be set there, which is as large a cultural signifier as anything—Brooklyn may be located on the western-most tip of Long Island, but where it actually lives is dead solid in the middle of the zeitgeist. It's now, it's hip, it's hot, it's happening. There is no mystery of Brooklyn to it. And this is why shut up about Brooklyn already.

Part of what put Brooklyn over the top where it is now—both beloved and reviled, a migration target and the butt of jokes—involved a fat shirtless guy being knocked out of his shoes, in front of not so many people.

Brooklyn is back to where it was in the middle of the 20th Century: the capturer of imagination. Back then, the awesome was equivalent but in different flavors. The Dodgers played in Flatbush, the longshoremen looked like Marlon Brando and that burly Brooklyn squonk of an accent was not just uniform in the borough but popular among the entertainers of the day. Back then, Brooklyn served the purpose that Canada does today.

But this was not always the case, there in Brooklyn. There was a time in between these two times when the crime rose and the neighborhoods unsettled. There was a time when all Brooklyn had going for it was the opening credits of "Welcome Back Kotter", when it was living not only in the shadow of Manhattan, but also of its former glories, and this time stretched right up to the turn of the century. READ MORE

January 1

At Philadelphia -8.5 Washington
The bad dream's over
in Philadelphia.
Fire Andy Reid!
PICK: EAGLES

At Atlanta -11.5 Tampa Bay
I wish they'd open
a Waffle House for us in
Brooklyn, NYC.
PICK: BUCCANEERS

San Francisco -10.5 At St. Louis
Rams will probably
fire Coach Spagnuolo and
the Giants will hire him.
PICK: RAMS READ MORE

In October of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was about to give a speech in Milwaukee in support of his reelection campaign under the newly created Progressive “Bull Moose” Party when a bartender named John Flammang Schrank walked up and shot him in the chest. Roosevelt of course was not killed, but neither his survival nor Schrank’s claim that he was instructed by the ghost of William McKinley to prevent a third term for the two-term former president were the most extraordinary parts of the whole affair. It was the fact that Roosevelt decided to deliver his speech in the Milwaukee Auditorium anyway, for an hour and a half, with blood seeping through his clothes. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he began, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

Reading a transcript of the speech is probably more comical than it should be, or than it would have been at the time. Having concluded from the fact that he wasn’t dead that the bullet had not penetrated any vital organs, Roosevelt spent the better part of the first half of his prepared remarks assuring the alarmed crowd and the various dignitaries and medical personnel pleading with him to leave the stage that he was not dying and in fact not much affected by the bullet wound. “Don’t pity me,” he said, “I am all right. I am all right, and you cannot escape listening to the speech either.” READ MORE

In the long summer vacation of 1971, I "worked" on a construction site in the English countryside where they were proposing to build a new hangar for the U.S. Air Force, and used the proceeds to take a holiday in Greece with my friend Charles. Originally, the idea had been to hitchhike, having crossed the channel on the boat and made our way from Calais to Paris by bus. We soon found out what I had been warned of, that the French can't abide hitchhikers. After sleeping in the Bois de Boulogne we fluked a short ride to a small town by the name of Auxerre, and there our luck ran out. We stood by the side of the road and for the rest of the day stuck out our thumbs in vain. There was a storm that night, the worst they had suffered for many years, and, abandoning the woods, we laid down our dampened sleeping bags on a narrow strip of shelter by the pumps under a gas station canopy which rang all night with the fusillade of golf-ball sized hailstones. Having stood by the side of the same road for most of the next day, we got tired of looking up Gallic nostrils and spent some precious money on train tickets to Dijon (in the south, named after the mustard). Amazingly, even after dark, we got a lift from the eastern outskirts with some clergymen—they were Belgian, not French—stayed the night for free at their monastery in the mountains, and arrived in Lausanne the next day full of warm feelings for les Belges. The Swiss, too, were much less snooty than the French, and it took no more than a couple of hours to get to the border town of Brig, where we were picked up from the Shell station at the foot of the nearby Alp by a truculent Italian workman in a Fiat, who drove us to Bologna without a word. And that's when Richard Nixon stepped in. He decided to take the U.S. dollar off the gold standard, and as a result, for a couple of days, nobody would change any money. All you could get in the cambio for your travellers' cheques or your leftover francs were Italian shrugs.

If you'd asked me at the time why the bureaux de change had shut down, I'd have had absolutely no clue, nor did I spend any time wondering about it as we wandered, hungry, about various piazze looking for somewhere to get lire. The fact that my holiday had been financed by the U.S. Air Force didn't occur to me as being in any way related. But the "Nixon Shokku", as the Japanese called it, was a historic event. It marked the end of the Bretton Woods international currency system put in place by a passel of politicians and economists at a conference in New Hampshire some 27 years before, in 1944. READ MORE

Wherever you went in 2011, you could hear Adele’s 21 catapulted at you from every open car window, open apartment window, and open mouth. That album has its charms, but I see a much more long-lasting and powerful influence in Rufus Wainwright’s Poses, and its tenth anniversary has passed without appropriate fanfare.

It was the oddity of the singer’s name and his striking picture that enticed me to buy his first CD with not even a minute between first look and printed receipt. What I heard when I popped the CD into my stereo was astounding and peculiar, a heady mixture of Jon Brion-produced clangs and strums and insistent beats. But most of all, there was that voice, a robust croon that was somewhere between two Kings—Nat Cole and Carole. I had seldom heard such a distinctive tone, deployed by someone whose music was, as many critics attested, a worthy heir to that of the Tin Pan Alley era.

That debut effort, though thrilling and highly ambitious, was merely an aperitif to the gorgeous album that would follow. Poses somehow manages to portray exactly the kind of disillusionment—born from an air of glamorous emotional detachment—that embodied New York in the summer of 2001. Beautifully enough, it did not lose its relevance afterwards; it still shows how the landscape of one’s romantic devastation persists despite all larger events. Knowing the potentially superficial tendencies of his concerns, Wainwright nevertheless finds fair weight in them, making songs that read specific and universal at the same time. Yes, it is very much about Rufus Wainwright, troubadour and gay man-about-town, but it captures the milieu of New York at that time with the utmost breadth and accuracy. READ MORE

Lou Reed wore black. He moved slowly and a bit stiffly through the darkness that had descended on the Great Hall, a sheaf of paper in his hand. For the last thirty years he has looked like an ageless lizard but now I felt concern for him at the sight of his stiff gait. He entered the circle of light and put on reading glasses, gold rimmed.

Just a few minutes earlier the audience had been treated to several facts. One of them, shared by the Dean of Cooper Union, was that Abraham Lincoln had spoken in this very hall. I have been to a number of events at the Great Hall over the years and this fact has been reported on every occasion. The space—a scooped out amphitheater underground, slightly redolent of a bunker, with a domed ceiling and gothic arches—resonates with the evocation of Lincoln’s speech having been spoken into darkness over and over for decades, centuries. The other fact was that although the program listed him later in the evening, Lou Reed would now go first because of another commitment. Immediately I began to imagine what this commitment might be, if it was another public appearance, or a dinner with a friend, or some complicated mélange of professional and personal socializing, or if he was just tired and wanted to go home and watch TV. At any rate it was going to be an evening of circling around and engaging with the avant-garde, and Lou Reed was a fine ambassador for this world, whose literary iteration has always made me feel a bit uncomfortable, even reproached. I was one of the presenters that evening, so in this encounter I felt somewhat beyond reproach. I was eager to see how it would all look when freed from the defensive position.

Reed began to read “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by Delmore Schwartz. Behind him were three huge screens which were now filled with a photograph of Schwartz, dapper in a suit and tie, luscious full lips and no sign of the madness that was to undermine him. The mood of the moment was that of the early minutes of an art house film, black and white, scratchy and intense—an analog atmosphere. I half expected to see a credit for Janus Films or New Yorker Films appear followed by the somber opening shot of something from Goddard, De Sica, Jarmusch.

Maybe I felt this because “In Dreams Begins Responsibilities,” itself takes place in a movie theater. The narrator settles in to watch a film of his parents’ life before he was born. Scenes from a courtship, with commentary from its offspring.

Of all the material in the New Directions catalogue, whose 75 years we had gathered to celebrate, and which includes such familiar names as Ezra Pound, Borges, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Roberto Bolano, and Tomas Tranströmer (who just won the Nobel prize), this book by Delmore Schwartz, and in particular this story, is the one with which I am most familiar.

Reed read in his monochrome Long Island accent. The sound system was excellent. His tone was conversational, matter of fact, pitched just a little towards tension. We sat in the dark watching Reed in his pool of white light at the podium, hearing about a man sitting in the darkness watching bright images on the screen. The movie theater, and the movie, are set in New York City. READ MORE

January 1980. A nation nurses a sepia-hued hangover. It’s the dawn of a new decade, and while the polyester may not be packed away just yet, change is in the air. For the first time in history, there’s an erection in the pages of a glossy magazine.

Playgirl is eight years old and boasts a circulation of 10 million. It’s clearly hit some kind of cultural nail on the head, borrowing Playboy’s patented aspirational hedonism and appropriating it for the fun ‘n’ flirty feminist set. This month, the centerfold is a sun-kissed California blonde named Geoff Minger. He reclines, shinily, on a set of clean white sheets. In one shot—in pointed contrast to the afternoon light on the drawn venetian blinds, the purple flowers on the bedside table—his penis just stands there, like, yeah? READ MORE

Rumors have circulated that Madonna, recording artist, will sing with M.I.A. at the Super Bowl. Nicki Minaj is also implicated. Both artists have had success, but can either bring back the monoculture? Leaving the fleeting sensation of a Lynn Hirschberg truffle-fry ambush aside, if M.I.A. were interviewed by Barbara Walters, who would care? Neither M.I.A., a self-consciously “edgy” singer of extraordinary gifts of curation, nor Nicki Minaj, a self-consciously outré rapper of extraordinary gifts full-stop, have cultivated personae beyond “hardworking,” “talented,” and (in M.I.A.’s case) “prone to ignorable political pronouncements.” It’ll be a good show, but no one should expect an iconic moment on par with Madonna heaving in a wedding gown or re-enacting Versailles to the tune of “Vogue.” Having marketable personality upon which to hang a moment is, now, left to those “famous-for-being-famous.”

Madonna’s last great moment, ever, of being famous-for-being-a-famous-singer (a category no longer in existence) was in 2003. Her performance at the VMAs ended with shared kisses with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, a performance viewed then as the bestowing of the Queen of Pop crown upon the two leading princesses and most easily viewed now as the dying gasp of the monoculture. Madonna’s Super Bowl gig feels rather like charity and she no longer has the pull to recruit whatever 2012’s pop princess manqués might truly be (Adele and Taylor Swift? Beyoncé and child? Lady Gaga and a Lady Gaga impersonator?); Christina Aguilera is a tippling, toppling reality-TV Miss Havisham; Britney resurfaced this year for a zombified album and a guest spot on a single by Rihanna, which even Rihanna’s devoted fans, resilient as they are, can view as a comedown. The road from the early 2000s to the early 2010s, from ménage to Minaj, has treated none of the once world-beating trio well. READ MORE

I recently attended a wedding, and it was, as weddings are wont to be, an almost transcendentally beautiful occasion. It was held on the grounds of a giant sandstone Federation house (who can honestly call something with guest quarters off-site a house?) sitting on miles of pristine green acreage. Fairy lights in the shape of love-hearts hung from the trees. The air smelled of freshly cut grass. Butlers stood with umbrellas armed for the possibility of rain to escort you the few feet to the bathrooms. The food was unlike any food I’d ever tasted. The country estate on which is was held, several hours outside of Sydney, was secured by its owners when they outbid Kylie Minogue.

Earlier, as the sun went down, a string quartet struck up at the appearance of the barefoot bride. And because the couple were so young and so filled with hope and optimism, and also because it would have been the dickest move in the world, I could not bring myself to say that the choice of song—U2’s With or Without You—despite its popularity at this exact event and countless thousands of others over the last 25 years, is such a weird choice. A weird, weird choice of wedding song. Because it is, like many other songs written by U2 that would be loosely labelled a "love song," about a sadomasochistic sexual relationship.

This may cause you some cognitive dissonance if your perception of U2 is one of sexless, God-bothering, self-serious blowhards, or of an increasingly irrelevant U2 cover band (and over the last decade, of the latter you’d be right), kind of like finding out that Bart Simpson is a woman. It’s easy to think of them that way if you only slide down the surface of things. READ MORE

I.

On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb test took place in the Tularosa Basin of the Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, New Mexico. Just three weeks later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be bombed: the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war. The test was code-named Trinity, and it forced a radical shift in the way that human beings came to regard their place on earth; from that day onward, for almost seventy years, we've lived in the uneasy knowledge that a very few people might gain the power to destroy all civilization—all life, even. The events of this day produced the chief wellspring of every kind of modern-day political and cultural anxiety, cynicism and depression. At that moment, humankind was forced to grow up, whether we knew it or not.

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the bongo-playing, safecracking amateur magician and Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman recalled his experiences at the Trinity test site. He was twenty-seven years old.

They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn’t see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can’t go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.

Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, “That’s not it. That’s an after-image.” So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and disappear again—from the compression and expansion of the shock wave.

Starting today, to keep you entertained in this dark week, a short series of essays on the topic, fairly loosely, and some short, some long, of "Milestones"—very recent little bits of history that reverberate today. Enjoy, with our thanks for a long and overall wonderful year.

Photo by JNT Visual, via Shutterstock

As an Amazon affiliate, we get a wee percentage of sales from people who click through from our site to Amazon. But better than that, we get a report from Amazon about what people have purchased! (Don't worry, it's all anonymous: there's no information at all passed on about the purchaser's identity.) One thing we can guarantee: you people buy things online. Here are just a few excerpts from the year 2011, here with quantity, title, media and cost.

1 Chupacabra (HD), Amazon Instant Video, $2.84

2 "Top Chef: Don't Be Tardy for the Dinner Party," Instant Video, $1.89

1 Buffalo by David Bitton Men's Bridle Strap Belt With Leather Plaque, in brown, size 38, $29.99

2 Joe's Jeans Men's Malcolm Rebel Relaxed Fit Jean, Malcolm, 38, $158.00/each

1 Honda CRV Heavy Vinyl Spare Tire Cover w/ Honda CR-V Logo, $19.95

1 Got2b Rockin' It Dry Shampoo, 4.3-Ounce, $5.61

3 1Q84, Haruki Murakami, $16.04

1 At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Danielle L. McGuire, $17.30 READ MORE

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Joe MacLeod, aka Mr. Wrong, can converse with you via many medias.

Photo by viviamo, via Shutterstock