From the Life Happens While We Are Making Other Plans Department comes this:

LIFE UNDER TARP
A kind, debonnair, well-dressed gentleman friend who plies the photography trade when not bedding down Danish supermodels recently revealed that he has, going on many years, slept under a tarp on a roof in the once-boho East Village. As rain poured down this Wednesday evening here on the Native American isle of Manhatta, my friend revealed that his particular tarp had a hole in it. Which prompted the Crotty to inquire, "Didn't you receive a tarp bailout?" As in, we have trillions to bail out Wall Street failures with TARP, but no money to bail out equally creative (though not as leveraged) New Yorkers living under tarps? Any intrepid journalists care to take on this blazingly metaphorical story? Write to the Crotty, if so.

SPEAKING OF SARTRE
There is something beautifully nostalgic about tired old leftists pontificating about the glory days of Paris in 1968. Though I've long been a fan of the Frankfurt School -- Teddy Adorno, Herbie Marcuse, et. al. -- and their cynical, but realistic, view that all revolutions within advanced capitalism will be spit back as even more advanced capitalism ("turning rebellion into money" and so on), those earnest apologists for Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism (the revolution in each case just needed to be tweaked a little) are occasionally worth a listen (even if you must bear their laughable lauding of thugs like Fidel Castro) This is especially true when such standard-bearers had access to leading thinkers of the past century. Such was the case Wednesday night at Revolution Books (recently and tenuously re-located to 146 W. 26th St. in Manhattan), where Professor John Gerassi held forth at LENGTH on the '68 Paris Revolution and myriad other subjects covered in his new work, "Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates," just out from Yale University Press. A review of Mr. Gerassi's work will be forthcoming in a future CFR. In the meantime, visit Revolution Books. You may be knee-deep in playing the capitalist game for fun and profit, but it's always enlightening to hear the other side, however tired and doctrinnaire it can be at its boorish worst.

THE DEATH OF HIP IS SO REDUX
http://guestofaguest.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/hipster1.jpg
I guess the Guest of a Guest folks didn't get the e-memo. Boring olde Utne Reader did a Death of Hip piece, oh, like, well, almost two decades ago. And they were late to the Death of Hip proclamation-a-looza. Quite obviouosly it's become a signature badge of the proto-hip to the be the first to declare the Death of Hip, which actually officially died with the death of the jazz hepcat, which happened back in the late 50s when Phoebe Bushwick's grandparents were pretending to be beatniks by sitting Zen, snapping their fingers, and shooting dope.