08.28.07
Blackmail, pure and simple
The Taliban and the South Korea government work out a deal to free the sixteen Christian missionaries. And to think that we’re depending on SK to help us stand up to nuclear North Korea.
08.27.07
Faith, proof and the formation of worldviews
I had another one of those experiences yesterday (Sunday) that once again plunged me headlong into the whole nature-of-God morass.
A friend of ours, who works in an international-sales capacity for a large manufacturing corporation and has a strong science-and-engineering background, invited us to come to the local Unitarian church to hear him give a talk on the evolution of his spiritual views. It’s an ongoing series they have there. I did it once about five years ago. (In fact, that was sort of like a homecoming to me; about twenty years ago, I was involved in that congregation to the point of being president for a year. My experiences during that time had a lot to do with my catapult onto my present ideological vector, which may figure into this post as I proceed.)
This fellow was quite upfront about the fact that he’s always required proof for pretty much everything, including matters of the spirit. He said he can’t sign onto something just because
a.) it seems plausible at initial glance
b.) important people are espousing it, or
c.) it makes one feel pleasant to embrace it.
I’m sort of inclined to agree, but his case is not so airtight as it first looks, it seems to me. Let’s take – oh, how about the letters of Paul? (Out of the vast 66-book scripture known as The Holy Bible we could choose any number of things for this exercise, but I’m inclined to at least start with something not so glaringly supernatural and subject to historical debate.) Now, Paul’s letters are written in a style that makes it clear his heart is singly directed – toward spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. All his admonishments, kind words to those starting churches around the rim of the Mediterranean, eloquent expressions of wonderment (I’ve always dug the one about all creation groaning toward this moment) come together to indicate a supremely strong sense of mission. Now, let us pose the question of how such zeal came to fill Paul’s heart to a hypothetical person of yessterday’s speaker’s empirical inclination. I think he would say something like, “I freely admit that that exceeds the limits of my knowledge.” (I say this, because the actual guy speaking yesterday freely admiitedthis about general limits to his knowledge.)
To which I say, “Bingo!” Such a person is in the same boat as a faith-driven individual who comes up with the same answer.
If I may venture a larger observation related to all this, it would be that we are still left with the matter of good and evil. There’s not a secular humanist in the world who wants to see anarchy reign in any human society. Human beings either cultivate virtue or give themselves over to darkness and chaos. And, seeing as how each of us likes our own individual comfort and safety, we have a stake in our fellow humans cultivating virtue. Out of this arises orderly societies, and, at their pinnacle, societies governed by the rule of law, free-market-economics, and, to come full-circle, a love of God, the author of virtue as well as life itself.
You have to have all three pillars for an ideal society. It just doesn’t work if you hand over the foundational principles of your civilization to a bunch of hyper-rationalists.
Now, to get back to the Unitarians: they’re odd, because a lot of them come by their spiritual skepticism in the same way as yesterday’s speaker. This makes a lot of people go the libertarian route, in which you have your belief system and I have mine, and even if they are as different as night and day, it’s our mutual respect that guarantees our shared freedom. Alas, the bulk of Unitarians go more in a moonbat direction, extolling top-down socialism and pacifism on the world stage. What’s up with that?
Then there’s still the matter to which this line of pondering always leads. How literally shall we take the Bible? Are you going to buy the stuff about all the animals on the ark back there in the old days, or an actual, physical throne of judgement in the days to come?
Ah, but I’d better not go there right now. I have a bunch of work to do this afternoon.
Which brings me to another irony: Does it not seem like the amount of time alotted to us to ponder ultimate reality is insufficient to the pondering that needs to be done?
Stay calm, daddy; there’s a button for this somewhere
I still don’t have a cell phone or an ipod. Maybe someday. I’ve never been in a hurry to get up to speed technologically. I was still listening to vinyl and cassettes a good eight years after the rest of the civilized world had gone to CDs. I rarely hook my effects pedal up to my guitar. It’s just me, my Les Paul, my Peavey Envoy 110 and a clean signal.
I do a little introspection about this occasionally, because it is intriguing. I love to stay current – as in within a half-hour frame – on world events, governmental maneuverings, economic developments and cultural occurrences. And the BN community knows I’m rabid about good music. I’m just not easily impressed with new means of delivering these things to me.
I think a lot of it has to do with my basic disdain for figuring things out. Except for matters of music theory, I get irritated if something that shows up before me isn’t readily understandable. I sure as hell don’t get into puzzles.
This is not the same thing as a lack of curiosity. I’m immensely curious. I explore all manner of life’s levels and aspects all the time. But I’m constantly looking for patterns and threads. Slowing my brain down to the doo-dah level of following an instruction manual drives me up a wall.
Mrs. Q doesn’t much care to be around when I’m on the computer. I routinely run into something that bewilders me, and then I’m careening headlong into the damn-it zone.
A few days ago I got a laptop. All the cool bells and whistles. 160 GB hard drive. A cool, state-of-the-art processor. Also a software suite called Nero 7, which has my creative juices flowing – up to the point of having to figure stuff out, that is.
I dove right in, starting collections of music, photos and videos. The thing is, each of these files gets stored in multiple places: the My Music folder, the Windows Media Player library, HP photo center, whatever. And all these applications exhort you to organize your files. Organize your pictures! Organize your videos! Organize your music!
I thought the way to categorize the music I’d put on my hard drive so far was to divvy it up into 50s jazz, 60s jazz, classic soul music. But these folders show up in some of these applications and not in others. I can’t find everything in every place where it – it seems to me – ought to be stored. Then there’s this thing I signed up for called emusic. The stuff I download there goes somewhere else.
So my first big attempt at having a nice, neat collection of creative projects and cultural artifacts has turned into a bunch of disparate tidbits strewn across my hard drive.
How many gizmos do you need to to produce or consume good music and writing?
How’s that again?
Miss teen South Carolina can’t stress strongly enough that, I mean, you know . . .
I’m not the only one to harbor this dream
Ever since I first read Witness by Whittaker Chambers over twenty years ago, I’ve thought it would make a fantastic movie. Turns out someone much closer to the cinema industry than me has had the same vision.
08.25.07
If the MSM wanted to have a field day with this, they sure could
But, as Powerline points out, it would mean dropping the pro-Intifada stance.
“Stunted modes of behavior” are everywhere
In her column today, Diana West very effectively ties together several recent sociocultural developments and show how they spell “The Death of the Grownup.” She’s covering much the same ground that the always-marvelous Joseph Epstein did in a 2004 essay for The Weekly Standard called “The Perpetual Adolescent“, but these new observations of hers add substantive elements to the argument.
You know perfectly well what it is
A Western Civilization Studies department struggles to be born at – ready for this? – the University of Colorado at Boulder, but is likely stillborn due to – are you ready for this – the obstruction of a couple of Republicans. What’s up with this disingenuous questioning: “Just what is Western civilization?”
08.24.07
Max Roach, R.I.P.
The drumming giant, bebop pioneer and cultural icon passed away August 16 at age 83. Where to start with the magnitude of his contributions? Of course, he was there at the dawn of bebop, such a key element of those late-40s Bird and Miles sides. Those mid-50s records with Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins, the essence of hard bop. His partnership, marital and musical, with singer extraordinaire Abbey Lincoln., His 1960s involvement in the civil-rights movement. Scoring plays for works by the likes of Sam Shephard.
We are a richer people for his time on this plane.
Willfully choosing to betray an innocent being’s idolization
I haven’t really weighed in on the Michael Vick situation, and now I don’t have to, because Jonah Goldberg has provided the first and last word on its significance.
08.23.07
Wanna read an erudite, passionate, wisdom-infused, historic speech?
W was on top of his game when he gave this.
08.22.07
More thoughts on the downloading industry and middle-aged consumers
I understand what Hugh Hewitt is saying in his observations on this news item. He’s simply stating the reality that the overwhelming majority of music commerce is engaged in by young consumers. But his statement “Pursuing the 40 demographic is a dangerous business,” while probably accurate, seems to me to reinforce the notion that music is an idle pastime, for which those in middle age are too busy. Also the notion that the whole human enterprise of music-making has been given over to those who can dispense what’s-happening-right-now-type music. You know, the stuff you see not only in the little box on your web-browser home page enticing you to check out so-and-so’s latest hit – usually some candy-coated white pop-singing chick, or some hip-hop thug with diamonds in his teeth.
As I said in the previous post, I’d like to stand up and be counted as someone who takes ample time every day of his life to immerse myself in the splendor of Debussy, the squeal and honk of Big Jay McNeely, the offhand eloquence of Wes Montgomery, the bleary-eyed honky-tonk of Webb Pierce, the warm samba breeze of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the stride piano of James P. Johnson.
Music is so integral to a rich experience of human existence. It makes me sick to see the whole realm abandoned to the purveyors of the ephemeral.
By the way, a little futher down in Hewitt’s blog he posts a YouTube video of The Beatles’ historic Shea Stadium concert in the the summer of 1965. (A lot of great stuff on Hewitt lately. I leave it to you to do your own scrolling, though. His permalink URLs are a bear to type, and a sure shoo-in to a damn-it moment when I discover I got one character wrong.) Along with great performance footage, it shows reporters asking teenagers if they think the group will ever go out of style, and why they like the group so much. A lot of footage of young girls screaming and crying.
So multi-layered in cultural significance, that concert. I don’t think we can deny that it established once and for all the motif of the adolescent screaming for entry into the pop idol’s perceived extra-worldliness. But then consider how a crowd that size – representing a worldwide groundswell of pining, crying teenagers – gazing in near-worship of one musical act – is something you could never pull off today. Also consider how that concert marked the beginning of the end of the time-honored notion of show business and ushered in a music industry completely informed by the rock paradigm. Think also about how The Beatles, surrounded by bodyguards and police, playing “Twist and Shout” for the teen fans, were stoned to the bone and already exploring Indian music, the “social awareness” of their new friend Bob Dylan, and the possibilities of studio technology.
Music is a lot like sex. It can be engaged in with a sense of awe and an understanding that it ought to aspire to the highest forms of human interaction and expression, or it can be debased and turned into a commodity. If we go the latter route, it doesn’t take long to sap it of its flavor and then who starts the process of bringing the flavor back?
Hugh and company have me thinkin’
Two thought-provoking posts – one from Dean Barnett and one from Hugh – at Hugh Hewitt’s blog this evening. Respectively, they deal with the lastest blow to The New Republic’s stature as one of America’s premier opinion journals, and the battle between Apple’s itunes and Rhapsody for the older demographic.
These subjects are disparate and shouldn’t be treated in the same post. Plus, I’m beat after a long day. It’s 12:30 now. Prep for the semester’s first blues-history lecture. A Jazz from Bloomingtom board meeting. Shopping for and installing new multimedia software for the new laptop. Some administrative stuff for Mrs. Q’s salon.
Let me say this to get my – and your – thought processes started. With regard to TNR and in particular this Scott Beauchamp debacle and editor Franklin Foer’s handling of it, it’s of a piece with the whole east-coast, journalism-is-a-sacred-calling / the-establishment-must-always-be-regarded-sceptically-except-when-it-is-us mentality that we see in examples such as Newsweek’s recent cover story on the supposed minority of the scientific community that’s sceptical of global-warming claims. Hugely agenda driven. Big-time issues with”powerful corporations.” And so on. As I say, I will properly deal with this in a post dedicated to this matter.
With regard to the HH post about Apple and Viacom vying for the over-40 demographic, let me start with this, and, of course, I’ll get into it in proper depth soon: Maybe I look like some kind of way-off-the-radar-screen blip to industry trend-watchers and even cultural-observation pundits, but I take my music seriously. I don’t mean just as some kind of it’s-all-about-me consumer with little earplugs glued to the sides of my head and tastes that grow more persnickety by the day. No. I take music’s role in the development and heritage of our culture – any culture – so seriously that I think abandoning the field of what downloadable music is going to be made available in cyberspace to a bunch of twits who think American music started with Depeche Mode or Jewel or what the f— ever is dangerous for national security reasons.
As I say, it’s late. I hope it doesn’t take too long to get back to each of these subjects in the detail they deserve.
08.18.07
Just show a return to your shareholders
Nick Nichols explains the dangerous fallacy known as corporate social responsibility.
08.17.07
The Hillbilly Cat
I guess I ought to say something on the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.
How’s this for a highbrow reflection? It’s in primitivism that American culture finds the truly gorgeous, noble and lasting blend of its various elements.
Elvis had no formal musical training. He went to church with his mother Gladys most every Sunday, first in Tupelo, Misssissippi, and, by high-school age, in Memphis. He heard some pop records from various places, presumably the radio for the most part. (Remember that the legendary one-off demo he went into Sam Phillips’s studio at 906 Union Avenue to cut that summer day in 1953 was his rendition of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” by the Ink Spots.) He heard country on the Louisana Hayride (which made him a regional star and served as the launching pad for his status as an icon) and the Grand Old Opry.
It was blues, though, that ran like an underground stream through it all. You couldn’t avoid it if you lived in or adjacent to the cotton belt in the 30s and 40s. Where the hell does a white boy who is ostensibly into pop and gospel get the notion to start foolling around with “That’s All Right” by Big Boy Cruddup during a break at his first professional recording session?
Elvis loved to wander down to Beale Streat and admire the gabardine suits in the shop windows, go hear visiting R&B giants like Pee Wee Crayton and Wynonie Harris – and take in the black variety shows emceed by local star Rufus Thomas – at the Handy Theater.
This vein was in the boy’s blood, if I’m not mangling metaphors too much here.
What I mean to say is that Elvis Aaron Presley, dubbed the Hillbilly Cat during his brief (1955) stint on the Louisiana Hayride out of Shreveport, was indispensible to the American fabric. I’m not the first to put him in the same category with Babe Ruth, John Pemberton (or at least the product he invented, Coca-Cola), Ernest Hemingway, George Washington, Frank Sinatra, and a handful of others we can kick around in the discussion thread, but I hereby assert he’s in that pantheon.
Cue up “Mystery Train” on your i-pod and let the chills spread down your spine.
08.16.07
Does this surprise you?
Abbas wants to patch it all up with Hamas. And Olmert doesn’t like it one bit. A little late, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Prime Minister?
08.15.07
Once, very long ago, there was a thing called Western civilization
Footbath accommodations for Muslim students in the washrooms at U of BC. One school official says that it’s not so different from what they’ve done for transgendered students.
08.11.07
The charm of the duo
Played another great gig with violinist Carolyn Dutton last night. We tried out some tunes that were new for us, and got into some of the spontaneous arranging that can only happen telepathically after playing with someone several times.
I still would like a full working band at some point, but I have to say I’m spoiled by the duo setting. It’s mainly how I’ve performed for the past three years. Some gigs with Carolyn, some with bassist Ron Kadish, some with keyboardist Monika Herzig. Certainly the money thing is part of it. You just plain take home more. The main appeal, though, is the ease and quickness with which synergy can get going. A quick exchange of eye contact to confirm that the other player is going where you think you hear them going. Room for a soloist to take an extra chorus to complete an idea.
There are two main ways to make music. One is to follow a set lead sheet or score and present the listener with a predetermined package for whatever purpose (dancing, enjoyment of a symphony, affirmation of one’s lifestyle of demographic identity), and the other is to call a tune and have that be the basic road map for a conversation fraught with the potential for exciting, unforeseen excursions, inviting the audience to come along for the journey. You get that in concentrated form in the jazz-duo setting.
