02.28.07
Giving children their childhoods back
Suzanne Fields and Kathleen Parker each have great Townhall columns today on the tarting up of our culture.
02.27.07
Their hatred blinds them to the fact that their country is being warred upon
Michelle Malkin has a roundup of coverage of the Afghan suicide bombing, including some of the disgusting comments from Huffington Post and Democratic Underground about Vice President Cheney’s having survived. How do people become so poisoned that they develop this kind of hate for someone who has embodied character, vision, and humanity as much as anyone who has ever served in American public life?
The Bent Notes Manifesto
Here it is, all in one post: the worldview that informs the way all observations are made here at Bent Notes. If there’s ever any confusion about how an assertion has been arrived at, readers can refer to this for clarification.
1.) Freedom is the essential condition for human fulfilment. It is more important than fairness.
2.) The human being is compelled by an innate yearning to seek nearness to, and understanding of, that which created him or her.
3.) The economic system put forth in the works of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman – what we call free-market economics – is the only sensible and fair way to look at the exchange of goods. It maximizes the opportunity for individuals to see to their well-being.
4.) Any infrastructure of legal/economic/cultural customs, norms and rules that asserts the equality of men and women must take into account that, generally speaking, men are more aggressive and analytical, and women are more emotional and other-oriented.
5.) The family is the primary societal unit for learning such values as sharing, compassion, humor, humility, encouragement, receiving and providing security, self-respect and tradition. The ideal family consists of a wife and husband and children that they either procreated or adopted. Healthy exceptions to this do exist, but are not the norm. The legal code of a municipality, state or country should be geared toward affriming the family’s primacy.
6.) There is a body of literature, historical scholarship and scientific discovery and inquiry that includes, but is not limited to, the Holy Bible, the works of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Magna Carta, the works of Galileo, Shakespeare, Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution, the speeches of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln, and the works of Sir Winston Churchill. This body of writing comprises the great canon of Western civilization and, taken as a whole or considered by each of its parts, has done more to benefit the world than any other human communication.
7.) Art – that is, the range of human aesthetic expression: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, drama, dance – is essential to human spiritual nourishment. For that reason, those undertaking the crafting of it should regard their work as a high calling.
8.) There is an innate impulse toward flawed moral behavior in the human being. Jews and Christians call this sin. Becuase of this impulse, societies will always find it necessary to maintain state agents of force – police for internal situations and military organizations for international situations.
Further thoughts on the larger point
It may occur to some to come back, in response to the post below, with something along the lines of, “Now Bentnotesmanhisself, we happen to know one of your favorite musical genres is postwar jump blues. You know full well that a lot of that stuff had risque lyrics with barely concealed sexual references – ‘I Love My Baby’s Pudding’ by Wynonie Harris, ‘Big Long Slidin’ Thing’ by Dinah Washington, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’” by Tiny Bradshaw.”
Here’s the difference: That stuff was kept at the level of double entendre. It was performed by acts that dressed up in suits and ties and evening gowns. That is, they looked like professional grown-ups. And the snicker-snicker-stuff was clearly for adult consumption, made available in clubs and on radio way after the kiddies had gone to bed.
That said, I am aware that that was the beginning of this musical form we call R&B, which is where this “raw like me” stuff is going on nowadays. So there’s no ignoring the question of whether it paved the way for The Pussy Cat Dolls and the Black Eyed Peas and Outkast and all this stuff that shouldn’t exist.
Which gets to the big question I’ve posed a couple of times in posts here. Has rock and roll, as the most concentrated form of the cultural developments of the last fifty years, been, overall, a humanity-enhancing phenomenon or a blight?
02.26.07
In a world that wasn’t sad and cold and oblivious to the darkness surrounding it, people wouldn’t cook up this kind of thing
A BN commenter said, under my post about getting our moral and intellectual rigor back, that “old f—- always tend to think the new generation is leading things to hell in a handbasket.”
It’s beyond that now. It shouldn’t take an activist group of fathers of young girls to get toymaker Hasbro to scratch a line of dolls based on the filthy-and-utterly-without redeeming-value Pussycat Dolls singing group. That’s the age we live in now. That’s what I mean.
02.25.07
Latest column
My latest column for The (Columbus, Indiana) Republic is in today’s edition. It’s entitled “Have We Expected Too Much From Music?” (Doo-dah alert: It’s one of those sites where you gotta either register or log in if you’re already registered.)
The larger point
A commenter asked, under my post on Anna Nicole and Hefner, what my point was. In its largest sense, it’s this: along with the particular obscuring of basic truths about human nature, and, indeed, the nature of the universe, that a large swath of us have bought over the last fifty-plus years, what other stuff that just ain’t so have we swallowed? Put another way, how do we get our moral and intellectual rigor back?
A real-time Sunday morning Iran roundup
They don’t worry about the kind of stuff discussed in the post below in the theocracy by the Gulf. They send out agents to crack down on ‘inappropriately’ dressed women.
And Iran brings the “w” word into the proceedings.
Vickie Lynn Hogan, Hugh and us
In late 1953, Hugh Hefner got the first issue of his specifically-men’s-interests magazine off the ground. Typical of such enterprises, it was done on a shoestring, at his dining-room table. Because the centerfold picture was a four-year-old photo of the by-then-really-famous Marilyn Monroe, with the promise that subsequent issues would feature such shots of more recently-photographed nude attractive women, the advertising revenue started pouring in, and by the end of the decade, he was ready to launch the nightclub chain and venture into television.
It’s inaccurate to call him an uninteresting person. Over the years, his magazine’s interview section gave us insights into such history-making personalities as George Lincoln Rockwell, Miles Davis, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Daniel Ortega. He gave us the Playboy Jazz Festival, which has made for some of the richest moments in American culture. He championed such hard-to-pidgeonhole creative geniuses as Lenny Bruce and Shel Silverstein.
But at the core of the empire he built was this impossible notion of “sexual liberation.” Once the first few years had passed, with the va-va-va-voom-type centerfolds, the magazine’s “pictorial” sections came into a mid-sixties vibe of these fresh-faced twenty-year-olds who came across like your best bud’s sister. Or maybe cousin. In any event, they were smart, clean, fragrant, personable gals who happened to be supremely attractive. They were posed poolside, at dining room tables, on stairways, by the hi-fi, out on the patio, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to invite you, the “reader,” to join them in some oh-so-casual carnal frolic.
Along about the mid-to-late seventies, the tone of the “pictorials” changed. They became more glossy. The backdrops started looking more like those of heavy-metal album covers. Attitude-laden poses. Care taken to make sure the hair was blown back at a particular angle relative to the model’s shoulders. Also more shots that approached the gynecological in their graphic specificity.
And all this didn’t happen in a vacuum, of course. We quickly went from Bob Guccione to Ralph Ginzburg to Larry Flynt. And then came Vivid and all that.
Anna Nicole, aka Vickie Lynn Hogan, came along in the midst of these changes. There was nothing fresh or vibrant about her. From the get-go, the thrust of her appeal was that suggestion of tawdriness, that strip-club background.
Why has Playgirl never reached anything close to the circulation of Playboy or any of its competing skin mags for men? (I just thought of a not-altogether-unrelated question. Why has the Womens’ NBA league never garnered anything near the ticket sales or media coverage of what we without thinking call the NBA?)
I’d like to sit Hugh Hefner down and ask him for an answer to that. I think in his heart of hearts he knows. Men are more visual in the way they become sexually stimulated; that’s clearly the first level of the answer. But if you dig deeper, you come to know that men are capable of completely capable of separating lust-driven intimate activity from any feelings of I’ll-be-there-for-you-type commitment. Women can do it to varying degrees, but not completely like men can.
And therein lies the exploitative nature of what Hugh hath wrought. For fifty-four years, he has put women in photographically artificial situations, inviting men to create impossible scenarios involving the very real bodies of the women sitting at those dining room tables and stepping out of those showers. It could never be in real life, but men insisted on being able to indulge in the next best thing for the price of a magazine.
It was bound to devolve to the Anna Nicole-level quality of woman. Yes, you read that right. I’m setting up levels of class here. Some of those early women bought into the notion of the possibility of perfectly-healthy-frolic-without-consequence, but that was all gone by the time Anna Nicole came along.
And now we have this beyond-disgusting media circus surrounding this dead druggie Playmate, and the founder of the empire that made her career possible living out his last days holed up in his mansion surrounded by a harem of platinum-and-sylicon-enhanced twits who wouldn’t warrant the attention of the floor-sweeper at your local pizza parlor were it not for their willingness to undergo the procedures necessary to make them important to the most vile creatures among us.
02.24.07
A quick look around
And, while we’re talking about the Dragon Lady from Little Rock, Tammy Bruce shares a list of purple invective she’s spewed over the years that a reader passed along (with sources).
The London Telegraph is reporting that Israel is considering that the time to smack the mullahs’ nuke program may be fast approaching. Read the linked Con Coughlin piece about the sense of girding of the loins that underlies the seeming calm of Israel’s public life.
Front Page Magazine hosts a symposium of the foremost Iran observers – Michael Ledeen, Steve Schippert, Kenneth Timeerman, among others – on the question of how to proceed. They have diverging viewpoints on some finer points, but they all have one central belief in common: no legitimizing of the current regime; in fact, vigorous efforts to undermine it at every turn and bring about its end as soon as possible. Schippert makes the important point that neighboring Pakistan ain’t in such stable shape – what with the little accords being worked out with tribal warlords in the unmanageable western territories that give al-Qaeda and the Taliban a fresh foothold – and that if Musharraf falls, we’ll be dealing with a ready-made nuclear terror state ready to give the Iranian mullahs a really big boost.
02.23.07
They demand this, mind you
A big-time Muslim group in Britain insists on certain “reforms,” shall we say, of the educational system. And a government official says, “Gee, how can I facilitate the implementation of your nice little requests?”
UPDATE: Diana West’s Townhall column today points out something very Mark Steyn-esque about all this. The document enumerating the “reforms” starts out by saying that implementing them would be a good idea because nowadays British students of white or mixed heritage (i.e., post-Christian students) don’t place as much importance on religion as Muslim students.
02.22.07
The urgency of cultivating virtue
As I was driving through town this afternoon running errands, I got in one of those liiter-spotting moods. Longtime readers of my column in The (Columbus, IN) Republic know that litter is, in my book, one of the signs of the great peril in which Western civilization finds itself. It’s a sign not only of the litterer’s lack of respect for his fellows in society, but for himself. To drop food containers and wrappings on the ground is to say, “There is nothing refined about me. I am not worthy of gracious treatment.” In that respect, it’s a lot like body piercings, tatoos, gratuitous profanity, ninety percent of rock and roll, and a good seventy percent of the fast food from which most litter is generated. (See my post on KFC bowls in the Food category.)
As I stopped several times in the middles of thoroughfares to pick up bottles, cups and such, my mind started to turn to such other outposts of coarseness in our modern public life as the below-blogged-about Britney and Anna Nicole, as well as such foul-mouthed leftist blog-world inhabitants as Amanda Marcotte and the Fredericksburg, Virginia stalker-of-Republicans Andrew Stone (and, yes, I’m aware that there are some foul-mouthed and juvenile righties; they further prove the point I’m making here).
About the time my indignation started to rattle me, I paused to consider my own weakness and fallibility. I lapse into unsavory states and harbor impulses I’m not proud of many times daily. Ah, let’s be real honest. Hourly.
I thought about that and then my mind went back to the bigger picture, to the fact that our civilization is past its peak and we’re now headed back to the kind of times in which crudeness was more prevalent than refinement, dignity, innocent fun and good old human warmth. It occurred to me that I have an obligation to the human race to keep my guard up against the temptations to indulge my garbage side. I’m either contributing to the possibility of an upward climb toward another peak of human virtue and civilizational splendor, or I’m casting my lot with the downward pull.
Knowingly giving into one’s garbage side breeds cynicism. It breeds the “People are gonna . . . ” mindset to which I devoted an entire post a while back. And cynicism destroys one’s ability to see possibility, and ultimately to care about one’s fate.
And, beyond the obvious desires to deserve one’s own self-respect and not to live in a garbage culture, that is why anyone who still thinks about such things is obligated to keep his guard up. Our enemies smell cynicism and decayed will among us like pirhannas smell blood.
02.20.07
Britney
Shaved her head over the weekend, now in rehab. This is on the heels of custody battles with that yay-hoo she was married to, along with the crotch shots stepping out of the limousine.
You know where I think her troubles started? Follow me on this. Her funny name. I’m starting to think that people who give their kids jakey-ass names do a disservice to not only those kids but American culture as a whole. Bill Cosby has included this factor in his jeremiads to black parents. It goes for anybody.
But, Bentnotesmanhisself, aren’t you coming down a bit hard on Mr. & Mrs. Spears? Britney is pretty normal compared to a lot of handles out there – think Jon-Benet.
Well, think about it. The proper spelling is Brittany. The idea behind spelling it the way the Spearses did is that it’s cutesy and fluffy to kind of abbreviate it. To say nothing of the fact that the name, even spelled properly, is faddish and fluffy.
No, this kid was saddled with an existential handicap from the get-go. She was destined to think that cultivating depth and substance in herself consisted of rehearsing her pointless dance routines rigorously. Once she developed a bod and an attitude, the eventual outcome was not in doubt.
Guess he doesn’t feel he needs the Jewish vote
Sheesh. You’d think that, on the heels of the Amanda Marcotte debacle, he’d be so wary of gaffes he’d be micromanaging his every utterance. But John Edwards shows his Christopher-Reeve-will-walk-again-someday-if-we-fund-embryonic-stem-cell-research side with this doozy to a Hollywood audience.
“Who believes what and why?”
John Derbyshire has an incredibly thought-provoking piece at NRO today on the intersection of religion, politics and science. His aim is not to settle any issues that arise at said juncture, but rather to examine “who believes what and why.”
He points out that science is a far less natural human activity that religion or politics: “It’s only in the last 400-odd years that methodological scientific inquiry has been undertaken.”
He concludes that “[o]ne thing the human heart wants is an explanation in terms of human-like agency for the more mysterious kind of natural pehenomenon.”
Most interesting reading I’ve come across so far today.
02.19.07
History, culture and color
There’s an interesting article and poll at the MSN Mens’ Lifestyle page on the American public’s ambivalence about Black History Month, and an interesting discussion thread about it at Free Republic.com. For instance, Morgan Freeman and Bill Cosby are against it.
I’m pretty much in the camp of those who say singling out any group, particularly groups that at one time had ligitimate claims to beleagured-minority status but are now well beyond that, exacerbates the problem of Balkanization in our society and perpetuates all that pity-the-victim/liberal-guilt nonsense.
You may find this interesting coming from the author of a novel in which all the significant characters are black, and which celebrates the cultural vibrancy of a distinctly black community. I would just say that I hope what I have wrought comes across as a thread in the overall American fabric. There’s a scene in Chapter Ten where Marvin, my protagonist, is at a hip white people’s loft party in New York, talking with a white artist who tries to patronize Marvin for his innate musicality. Marvin lets him know that he doesn’t view his work as a jazz trumpeter as some kind of “speaking for his people.” He says, “If I’d grown up roping cattle in the Tetons, my music might have a gallop rather than a swing.”
All this does raise some interesting questions. I belong to a jazz-appreciation organization in a nearby city – a university town – and we recently brought the Godfathers of Groove to town. Seasoned veteran session players – Bernard Purdie on drums, Grant Green, Jr. on guitar, and Rueben Wislon on organ. All black guys. We put it on at the campus black cultural center. And our turnout was almost exclusively white. Is it just a case of younger black music fans being interested in more up-to-the-minute forms of r&b and/or jazz, or did they feel we were doing a clumsy job of outreach and broadening our group’s membership base? Did we come off like the artist in the loft?
I think the bottom line is that our culture keeps evolving. There may be a lot that bothers me about today’s, say music scene, or literary scene, or art scene, but even if they were just hunky-dory, I wouldn’t expect them to look like the scenes of bygone times.
And part of that evolving is a constant shifting and blending of ethnic and demographic influences. You can’t hold a piece of artistic contribution up to someone and say, “You should dig this because of your color.”
That said, I do think it’s supremely important to properly recognize the contributions of great American musicians like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye. It’s certainly an important part of my work.
02.18.07
Shocker: the State Department does something principled and sensible!
To her credit, Condi stuck to her guns at the three-way meeting about this new unity government for the Palestinians.
A most memorable evening
Photos by Robert Pulley
Some pix from last night’s gig. It was the inaugural concert of a series Robert Hay-Smith will be doing approximately monthly on Saturday evenings in the sanctuary of the Unitarian – Universalist Fellowship of Columbus, IN. A great facility for this sort of thing.
It was my first time in a while to be a sideman rather than project leader. The format for these shows consists of a set by a combo doing standards, and then another set by a somewhat different group doing one of the suites in Claude Bolling’s series of jazz-duet suites. Last night the Bolling selection was the Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, with those duties enchantingly handled by Kathy Dell and Steve Reen respectively.
Our first-set group consisted of moi on guitar, Robert on bass, Monika Herzig on piano, and Louis Morgan on drums. Set list included “Tenor Madness,” “Hello Young Lovers,” “In A Sentimetnal Mood,” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
Robert is an Englishman with some interesting credentials. He accompanied the skiffle pioneer Lonnie Donagan on many tour dates back in the day. He was in an incarnation of The New Vaudeville Band, which was basically an aggregation of British studio musicians that had a one-off 1966 novelty hit called “Winchester Cathedral.” A few years ago, he conceived a children’s story about bees and turned it into a musical stage production called Pollen, complete with a charming score and produced it out-of-pocket at the Buskirk-Chumley theater in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. You can hear his bass chops over at my main site, on the Audio Clips page. That’s him on “It Could Be That Way,” a tune from back in my soul-shouting days. Robert has the sort of impish presonality that allows him to get away with the corniest of jokes when emceeing a show like this.
02.15.07
Some nice arts-mag coverage of High C at the Sunset Terrace
The cover story in the latest issue of INTake Weekly is on the glory days of Indiana Aveue and devotes several paragraphs to my novel. Some great photographs, too, for those non-Indy-area readers. Also some nice coverage of David Williams, whose collection of posters, photos, and records is the most comprehensive documentation of this rich musical scene to be found anywhere.
