09.30.06
Posted in Culture, Food at 9:20 pm by Administrator
One reason I’m no more optimistic than I am about Western civilization’s resolve to preserve itself is that the rapidly shrinking core of Westerners who have some kind of basic notion of God, who understand free-market economics, who have some grasp on the value of their freedom, and who have some kind of refined aesthetic sense permits itself to be bullied into behavior change without even token resistance.
I think about this often (perhaps to the point that it consumes me), but this afternoon my focus on it was sparked anew by a CNN feature on trans fats. The reporter who had put together the piece trotted out all manner of scientists and nutritionists who have opted to become finger-wagging do-gooders about the matter of trans fats’ prevalence in fast food. One might expect this, given what they know. Still, couldn’t they take off their health-expert hats and put on their thoughtful-citizen hats before shooting off their mouths about how private business that sell food to the public must change their ways?
The one that really enraged me, though, was the Chicago alderman who is pushing for legislation to make his city trans-fat-free.
I knew the anti-smoking jackboots’ victories in recent years – class-action lawsuits, exorbitant taxes, city-wide bans – would embolden the food fascists.
We roll over at the first sight of ire from any and all who would seek to remake human nature using force or the threat of it. The German opera company that shut down its edgily modern version of the Mozart opera (which, while it might be seen as mocking religion, does give equal time to Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and the antient Greek pantheon), the Vatican rushing to placate worldwide Islamic opinion after the Pope’s speech in Germany, NBC’s censoring of the Veggie Tales cartoons (but not the upcoming Madonna special) are but the most recent examples of this cowardice.
The lack of spine by itself bodes ill for our prospects, but it also spawns another condition which likewise portends undesirable developments: the muddying of simple common sense and decency, so that the absurd can become the norm.
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Posted in National Security at 5:26 pm by Administrator
I’d thought this assessment of where Iran’s nuke program stood was pretty thought-provoking when I came across it the other day, but I think this one is even more so.
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09.28.06
Posted in National Security at 11:42 pm by Administrator
Al-Reuters thinks it’s really cute to give a podium to a really lame moral-equivalence notion. It involves Israel; are you surprised?
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Posted in National Security at 8:21 pm by Administrator
The EU’s Javier Solana just concluded another round of talks with Iran’s nuke negotiator, Larijani. No deal was reached, but by golly, Solana, determined not to deviate from his identity as an utter fool, says he looks forward to more talks. This, nearly a month after that big bad UN deadline for the mullahcracy to stop uranium enrichment.
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Posted in Culture, Music at 3:46 pm by Administrator
This is my second go-round as a staff writer for Indie-music.com. I have to watch it that I don’t lapse into the jadedness that plagued me the first time.
About every three months, I get this big box of promo kits in the mail from my editor. Some are quite polished and some are haphazardly assembled. Some are done by the artsist themselves and some by publicity agencies. I read the copy, go to any websites mentioned, get out the enclosed CDs and listen to them and then write my reviews.
It’s not just a matter of most of the acts not being ready for prime time; that’s certainly true, but in most cases I get this sense that even if they polished their thing up to the standards of mass commercial viability, I still wouldn’t want to listen to their music.
Maybe this Indie-music.com involvement is just bringing up my stuff regarding the larger cultural issues. The music business is so different from the way it was forty years ago. In some ways, that’s good, I guess. It’s more democratic for artists. The cost of recording, packaging and distributing an album has gone down to the point that huge numbers of people are now doing it and it’s really played hell with the notion of record labels calling the shots. The indie sector of the biz is here to stay.
On the other hand, there are fewer arbiters of standards through which to filter the content. And even those arbiters that are there – the remaining big-shot A&R people and talent scouts – themselves grew up well after rock had become the normative basis of popular music.
Sometimes I say – maybe not so flippantly – that 88% of rock during the genre’s first seventeen years – 1951 to 1968 – was crap, and since then it’s been 98%. How’s that for jaded?
I can wax nostalgic with the best of them, reveling in the vibrancy and richnesss of the era that brought us the British Invasion, Motown, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, southern soul, and such. But let us not forget that a lot of the biggies of that era, as finely as they honed their craft, given the tools at hand – the Beatles, for instance – were musical primitives, learning chords by the seats of their pants. And, in fact, in many cases, the biggest influences on them – Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Hank Williams – were themselves musical primitives.
All I know is that the state of things today is that you have these teeming multitudes of musical hopefuls – angry Goth-metal bashers, sensitive coffee-house acoustic-guitar strummers, fresh-faced, oh-so-healthy adventurers blending jazz, ambient, and “world,” smooth neo-R&B warblers, thuggish hip-hop moguls-in-the-making, message-driven Christians – all descending on events like South-By-Southwest, or entering contests, or sending their CDs to Indie-music.com, hoping someone will get that special something that makes them unique within the vast constellation of human beings who have opted for the creative life.
Would that that something special would truly appear and make music consistently fun again.
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09.19.06
Posted in National Security at 4:43 pm by Administrator
Pretty much what I expected. Very cool the way he forthrightly said that Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution was primarily a tossing-out of the Syrians. He was also very pointed in his certainty that Iran’s uranium enrichment is headed toward nukes. Also showed he harbors no illusions about Hamas and Hezbollah.
Why nothing about North Korea, though? Or Venezuela? Maybe we’re at some touchy moment behind the scenes in those situations.
Still, I say again that in World War III, you can’t take your eye off any of the fronts.
Not that I doubt that W is keeping a constant eye on all of them.
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09.17.06
Posted in Culture, National Security at 2:38 pm by Administrator
Absolutely the clearest explanation of what he said, how the Islamic world’s been reacting, and what it all portends for the West.
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09.16.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:00 pm by Administrator
Why do car commercials so frequently use obnoxious hard rock music for soundtracks?
Cats are generally more adept than dogs at vying for power vis-avis the humans in a household.
If an organization has both of the words “peace” and “justice” in its name, its mission is to suck up to the bad guys.
When you consider the worldwide Muslim reaction to the pope’s speech in Germany and how it comes on the heels of the worldwide Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons, it’s clear that we’re all dhimmis in their eyes.
The Nonaligned Nations meeting in Havana has turned out to be a real sewer of anti-West sentiment. Everybody – from The Castros to Chavez (who worked the crowd like he was running for something; must still have that UN Security Council seat on his mind) to Bolivia’s Morales to Ahmadinejad to the North-Korean second-in-command, who used the occasion to tell the assembled that NK won’t be coming back to no stinking six-way talks as long as the US has a problem with NK making counterfeit US money – on the A-list of the bad guys’ side in World War III was preening on the runway. A bunch of them will be in New York next week for the UN General Assembly confab. How about that?
Why does the mail come late in the day when you’re looking for a check?
Judging from having had several male guitar students in late childhood/early adolescence, the ones with fathers at home married to the moms have notably more ability to focus.
When Kroger puts steaks on sale, they sure look fattier than the same cuts during full-price time. Don’t know how I could scientifically prove this, though.
Valuing the keeping of one’s word is at a premium in this world.
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09.15.06
Posted in Culture at 3:04 pm by Administrator
Oriana Fallaci, the Italian intellectual who has caught so much grief the past few years for telling it like it is about Islam, has died, just as as another figure who has resided in Itly for many years, Pope Benedict XVI, is now catching it.
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09.14.06
Posted in Culture at 9:18 pm by Administrator
Today’s Hot Air really sticks it to Rosie O’Donnell, and does so in a View-type coffee klatsch setting, with Michelle Malkin and Mary Katherine Ham.
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09.03.06
Posted in Culture, National Security, Politics at 4:45 pm by Administrator
I think I may be shifting my perspective on the function of this blog. When I first got it going, I was hot to link to every spot-on, super-cogent, in-depth, up-to-the-minute report and piece of analysis I came across. A few things started to happen. One is that the flurry of events on the world stage became so intense that I felt that I should either become selective about such linking on some basis like geographic region, relevance to domestic politics, level of urgency, or relevance to my personal concern for some aspect of our culture, or not address any of it. I concluded that to take either course would be to give short shrift to things that would still need to be brought to the attention of anyone and everyone with half a molecule of concern for the present juncture at which humanity finds itself. Then there was the fact that bloggers and journalists with far more time and informational resources than I are providing nearly instantaneous scoops on all such situations.
As I’ve said in a previous post, any of the links listed on the right-hand side of this page will provide you with the very latest factual stuff and/or a sharp and deep view of developments with which I’d concur.
So I’m left with the question of how a jazz guitarist / arts journalist / culture historian in the midsection of the United States of America in late-summer 2006 should most meaningfully contribute to a world in a condition of hair-trigger peril.
There’s the nuclear-threat level, on which Iran and North Korea are currently seting the tone.
There’s the flurry of networking between Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leftist leaders (Castro, Morales), Iran, Syria and North Korea, and Western self-haters like Cindy Sheehan, Harry Belafonte, Ken Livingstone and Harold Pinter that is solidifying an overall anti-Western coalition on strategic and intellectual levels.
There is the vast array of underground Muslim terrorist organizations, some Sunni and some Shiite, that have in common a desire to destroy Western civilization.
And then there’s the badly eroded will of the West itself, as exemplified by the above-mentioned friends-of-Hugo, as well as those currently lavishing hospitality on former Iranian president Khatami as he visits the US.
Part of me wants to shut all this out and just woodshed and play gigs and write about the arts. About the time I start down that attitudinal path, however, a little voice within me says, “You see the whole picture too clearly not to invite those who partake of your work to converse about it.”
So that’s what I’m doing. And the reason I’m doing it is that we need all hands on deck. As brainy and well-intentioned as Condi Rice and John Bolton and Don Rumsfeld and W and John Howard and Tony Blair are, they are mortal human beings with the same number of cubic inches to their skull space as you and me. To not think about where we are as a world is to declare one’s existence to be meaningless.
So, let’s talk.
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