06.30.06
Aw, jeez, can we now please be done with this worthless outfit?
The UN, with its newfangled human rights outfit, shows that it’s even more ready for euthanasia than ever. Like a sickly yet still ready-to-strike snake.
Very cool moment in international relations
I think it’s a great way for Koizumi, and by inference, Japan, to affirm American culture to request a trip to Graceland as part of his current state visit. Seems W dug it, too. I don’t get all gooey in a personal-worship way over Elvis Presley the Hillbilly Cat (last time I was in Memphis, I had time to tour either Graceland or Sun Studio; chose Sun and am still glad I did), but he is one of the supremely original icons of our culture. Great news item to kick off Independence Day weekend (which I do get all goey about. Can’t get through the Declaration without blubbering and reaching for the crying towel.)
06.28.06
Most succinct yet thorough take on NYT treason
I provided some links about the latest New York Times situation a couple of posts ago. Haven’t really tried to come up with anything original to say, because so many are covering it so well. I did just go to Teri O’Brien’s blog to see if she had a typically razor-sharp one-stop take on it, and of course she did.
This ought to be required before you can take rock history
Just got my instructor’s copies of the textbooks I’ll use in my course this fall, American Popular and Urban Music. I’m using the new biography of John Hammond, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music by Dunstin Prial, and Little Labels – Big Sounds by Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt.
I’ve never taught this course before. I’m kind of tailoring it to suit my vision of what an American ought to know about his or her musical heritage. If I had my druthers, a course like this would be a prerequisite to taking any of that rock-history stuff the university really likes me to teach (packs the kids in). I’ll get the chance to really stretch out on the stuff I start rock history, blues history and jazz history out with anyway – Dr. Isaac Watts and the development of the hymn, Rev. Richard Allen, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, minstrelsy, how the Broadway musical developed with shows like The Black Crook (1866) and Evangeline (1874). Ragtime, black musical comedy, the sentimental ballads of Charles K. Harris and Paul Dresser, marching-band music, George M. Cohen, Will Marion Cook, Tin Pan Alley, Ralph Peer, George D. Hay, Uncle Dave Macon and America’s introduction to hillbilly music, race labels and blues. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. Irving Mills, Lester Melrose.
Man, thinking about how to structure this course gets me back on my jag about the decline of American culture. We have no sense of the richness of our culture, the full panoply of human feeling and how it’s been expressed in our musical works. And when that goes on long enough, no one is infusing current music with that depth of expressiveness. And then our lives are cheapened and coarsened.
Ah, I guess that’s why I play music as well as teach and write.
Does that sound too quixotic?
06.26.06
Just thought of another category
Then there’s the New York Times’s smart-ass, elitist way of commiting treason, which we can file under “We may just collapse from within.”
While waiting for more actual news
North Korea still hasn’t launched its Taepodong-2 missile and Iran is still jacking around regarding the EU3 mostly-carrots intitiative. In the absence of forward movement on either of these situations, which are the world’s most pressing, the 24-hour-cycle-driven news industry is filling its headline space with stories that fall into such catergories as “Well, duh,” “Ain’t that awful,”and “Ain’t that nice.”
Under “Well, duh,” we have the rejection by Iraq’s Sunni terrorists (excuse me, “insurgents”) of Prime Minister Maliki’s reconciliation offer. Also, the Israelis having to go back into Gaza to put the squelch on the kidnappings and rocket attacks.
Under “Ain’t that awful,” we have upheaval in Timor. Also the flooding in the D.C. area.
Under “Ain’t that nice,” we have Warren Buffet’s contribution of gobs of money to Bill Gates’s foundation.
But keep sharp your sense of how to prioritze these things. At some point sooner rather than later, something will break on either of the nuclear-brinkmanship fronts. It will merit your attention.
A nation starved for true aesthetic richness
In her most recent Townhall column, Lorie Byrd gives her take on the latest Dixie Chicks dust-up. It’s soundly thought out and I concur with much of it (except for the fact that I never dug their music even before Natalie Maines shot off her mouth). She points out the noteworthy fact that an early harbinger of Maines’s inclinations was her disparaging remarks about Toby Keith’s song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.”
At this juncture we come upon a point that makes me wince to state: Maines was onto something in her remarks on Keith’s song. Not for ideological reasons. You don’t have to be a Stalinist pervert to deem ”Courtesy” a boneheaded, hamfisted, utterly artless piece of yee-haw-ism. And with such efforts, country music does itself a disservice. It feeds into the “cornball and proud of it” image held by some (who usually don’t know squat about country).
For heaven’s sake, can we quit pitting various forms of American music against each other as vehicles for polarized political stances? Not just because it adds more cacophany to our national conversation, but because it diminishes music’s role.
Here’s another way of putting it: I want to see The West, and particularly The United States of America, prevail in this current world war. I want to see freedom, strong families, free-market economics and a grown-up’s view of God thrive here and all over the world. But a huge part of what I see us struggling to defend and protect in this conflagration is the great tradition that gave us Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Sonny Rollins, Chuck Berry, Etta James, and, certainly, the Carter family, Uncle Dave Macon, Hank Williams (Sr.), and George Jones. Rich, deeply human music steeped in heritage yet each type of it pioneering in its own way and time.
Neither an ignorant and ungrateful twit like Natalie Maines nor a citizen / performer with laudable sentiments like Toby Keith serves us one tiny bit when they cheapen music in order to swell the crowds at our cultural standoff.
06.20.06
When a culture loses its aesthetic compass, it can be sadly funny
An all-too-unsurprising tale of critical pretentiousness. Would we recognize real art if it came up and bit us on the tail end?
06.17.06
Why the term World War III is appropriate
It looks like North Korea is going to test a long-range missile this weekend. So many disparate hot spots in today’s world, you say? Ah, leave it to Venezuela’s Chavez to tie them together.
06.15.06
More Gore refutation
Another piece on how there’s nothing like a consensus on gobal warming. It quotes an entirely different set of scientists from the link in my post “Cool guy of the week.”
06.08.06
Time to veer away from the carrots tack
Well, we can see that publicly laying out incentives like agricultural technology, security guarantees and light-water reactors didn’t do a stinkin’ thing to change Iran’s attitude or behavior. Rather, Ahmedinejad is reeling us into a web of obfuscation with his assertion that his regime will never negoitiate its “right” to uranium enrichment but is ready to chat with the West over “issues of mutual concern.” So now can we please knock it off with the Madeleine Albright-wannabe schtick? It’s getting awfully late in the day.
Count on al-Reuters to wet-blanket good Iraq news
Reuters’ report on the impact of Zarqawi’s death has the whiff of relishing the prospect of more mayhem. His status as a martyr will inflame young jihadist recruits! Experts from various think tanks are quoted to support this assertion. Not one quote from an Iraqi government official or anyone from the U.S. military or government. It doesn’t look to me like those who filed the story even considered that there might be a groundswell of good cheer and optimism resulting from this event. That kind of groundswell can gain momentum and strength too, ya know.
06.06.06
A very cool musical development
Starting July 20, I’ll be hosting a weekly Jazz Night at 4th Street Bar & Grill in downtown Columbus, IN. Each week, I’ll put together some combination of my friends, depending on the jazz flavor that seems right for the occasion. For the first week, I’ve enlisted bassist Ron Kadish, and for August 17, I’ve signed up violinist Carolyn Dutton. This is a most exciting development. If you live anywhere near these parts, drop in for some tunes!
06.04.06
Cool guy of the week
Robert Bradley is president of the Institute for Energy Research, an organization that understands things like the free market, nature, science and the political and cultural forces that try to keep the public from understanding such things. Here’s his website and here’s a piece he wrote for today’s Houston Chronicle exposing Al Gore as a socialist goofball.
06.02.06
Condi’s gambit
Of course I’ve been availing myself of as much analysis of the announcement that the U.S. will join the EU3 negotiations over Iran’s nuke program (but only after Iran stops uranium enrichment) as time will allow. I think the general consensus among sources I respect sounds about right. This is the extra mile, the big last stroke of diplomacy, the most finely-wrought effort that can be crafted to see if Iran might somehow, against every bit of evidence to date, be interested in a civilized outcome to this situation.
It may take a few months to play out. That’s good, at least from a psychological standpoint for all of us in the West, because what comes after that may involve some, shall we say, turbulence.
Back from the Rockies
It was a good time. Did the gamut: a skittish tiptoe across the bridge at Royal Gorge, the mineral baths at Hot Sulphur Springs, some live jazz. The step-grandson’s graduation went off smoothly; he’s now headed to New York to study photography.
My boyhood bud with the keyboard chops didn’t find us an open-stage jam, but we did go hear the combo of his former piano teacher at Jay’s Bistro in Ft. Collins. The vocalist is a gal who used to be in the group Rare Silk.
Lots of good meals. May I recommend MacKenzie’s Chop House in Colorado Springs, Hapa (a sushi place, at which I had an elaborate production called a Multiple Orgasm) in Boulder, and Bisetti’s in the Old Town section of Ft. Collins. (Check out the Harvest Squash Ravioli with the sage cream sauce.)
Oh, we also took in the Body Worlds II exhibit at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Incredible. Real human bodies dissected and cross-sectioned every which way. Specific organ systems, such as nervous, digestive and respiratory laid out in dispaly cases. You get a keen sense of just what a great design engineer the Great I Am is.
