Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Then again, hindsight shows the conditions that were coming into place to make for the squall.
Surely this news item about the situation between Israel and Hamas will gain prominence among the headlines over the next hours and days.
This development is surely noteworthy and related as well.
We’re giving Michelle Obama her own category here at BN, because she’s becoming the proverbial gift that keeps on giving. Every time He Who Walks On Water says something astoundingly wacky, about a day later she tops him:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTViZjhhNGI1Y2QxYjE0ZDc0YmMwMjJiNmUyZjQ3MmU=
What He Who Walks On Water would be looking for in a Supreme Court justice nominee.
Senate Republicans prevented the passing of the mess-with-market-forces bill.
I see that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is prepared to sign into law a bill – put forth by a Republican state legislator, interestingly – that would create “arts and cultural districts” throughout the state.
I’m not sure I’m on board with this. I know its a trend. Other states have done it, and municipalities in our own state have already instituted such districts. It just makes me unesy for a few reasons, all of which really kind of come together in one overarching reason.
I think it gets arts councils and arts commissions licking their chops for that grant money, seeing an efficient conduit for state funds to flow their way. I’m no more keen on government funding for arts and culture than I am for any other human endeavor that ought to be undertaken privately for a profit. That’s why I don’t have much use for such federal-level institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Conversely, it sets up the possibility for revolving-door careerists who go back and forth between being dispensers and recipients of this largesse. This creates the possibility of an ever-more concentrated cabal of arbiters of standards in theater, music, painting, etc. An elite that passes judgement on what projects or institutions are worthy of government support just has the faint odor of Sovietism about it.
Even when one considers that much, even most, of the money flowing through these districts might be private-sector capital, the isolation of aesthetic activity into publicly designated little islands runs counter to the way good art is made, it seems to me. The best American music, literature, painting and sculpture has risen organically from environments is which those so inclined set out to express themselves. Vine Street in Kansas City, Harlem in New York (or, for that matter, Broadway in its golden age), Storyville in New Orleans, Beale Street in Memphis or Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis didn’t get official designation or funds from some bureaucratic agency in order to become vibrant and fertile places where creativity flourished.
This whole notion of cities having “hip” districts has been gaining currency for a while. I know I’ve been to some cities where people wear buttons that say, “Keep __________ weird.” I’m not sure weirdness is the highest type of cultural richness, but even if it’s what you’re after, you’re not going to get genuine weirdness if it’s preplanned by a committee of marketing and administrative specialists.
This whole phenomenon of the officially designated arts-and-culture district puts such places on the list of “community amenities” that economic-development types can use to lure “young professionals” (known as YPs in the luring trade) to the locale, right alongside the bike paths, good schools and faux-gentrified retro neighborhoods, with the row houses and picket fences. The whole thing is just a little too tidy somehow. One gets a vision of one of David Brooks’ bobos saying to his spouse, “Well, okay, honey, after we go out to the six-lane bypass and pick up a few things at Crate & Barrel, PetSmart and Circuit City, we can head back into the cultural district and have an ethnic meal and then take in an edgy play or a reception for a groundbreaking art-show or a jazz performance with world-music overtones.”
Am I against clean, safe communities where people work and have fun with genuine zest? Of course not. I just think it comes from individual people coming together as they become fired up about some idea, be it a musical project, a neighborhood-improvement effort, an innovative school, or a mutual health-and-fitness pact.
You can’t plan something like real artistic contribution. The muses do not sit in agency offices poring over budget figures and grant proposals. You have to give those who show us new ways to experience our humanity some elbow room. They’ll find each other and get a scene going. They always have.
Mickey Mouse stars in his first cinematic outing, Plane Crazy (1928). His costar, of course, is Minnie. We can see that Mick did a lot of growing up in public over the years. It’s clear from this romp that he had a thing or two to learn about courtship, not to mention piloting.
And speaking of great Americans, I know at least one of the contributions in the comment section under our who-were-the-most-influential-Americans post listed Walt Disney, and he gets some confirmation for that when one views this work. The doodler from Kansas City knew just how to depict the range of Mr. and Ms. Mouse’s experience, from wackiness to terror to tenderness to that quintessential American trait – inventiveness.
This guy is off the charts. Surely the vast majority of Americans can smell the stench of Freedom-Hatred wafting off this stuff.
Surely.
Please tell me I’m right.
William F. Buckley, Jr. is dead at age 82.
This one’s huge and personal. What I’m experiencing feels like genuine grief.
No one could have designed a more perfect founder for the modern conservative movement. As the linked obit points out, he was a renaissance man (magazine founder, columnist, sailor, harpsichordist, spy novelist, television show host), one of the planet’s most formidable intellects, handsome, suave, socially gracious and, when the situation called for it, a little impish.
Most of all, he was the complete conservative. In this election year, we’re hearing a lot about the three pillars, or stool legs, of fully thought-out conservatism:
- a sense of world affairs, history, and American and Western exceptionalism informed by an accurate understanding of human nature
- free-market economics
- the conviction that absolute right and wrong exist, as does almighty God, the author of the universe
His most significant legacy, National Review magazine, indisputably the most important periodical in America for the last fifty-two years, is in good hands with its current staff of editors and contributors.
It’s such a pattern, and fittingly so, to see one spouse pass shortly after another in marriages characterized by the deepest and most affectionate companoinship, and this has been the case here, Buckley’s wife Pat having passed in April last year.
It’s time for me to straighten up, quit fooling around, give more than lip service to this giant’s function in my life as an example of being an excellent human being.
I really and completely believe in what he stood for. I hereby vow to his memory to more consistently act like it.
And this modest blog will never flinch from upholding and defending it.
He Who Walks On Water gets specific regarding his nuclear-weapons policy.
File under: really scary stuff.
This is a subject I think about a lot. As a working player and someone who writes about music, I see a lot of efforts by people involved one way or another to get their brains around what an infrastructure that sustains broad success might look like.
Just this morning, I got a sales pitch in my e-mail from some guy who has a consulting business. He has a “coaching” program, replete with one-on-one sessions, videos and other materials. To hear him tell it, he’s made stars out of thousands of hopeful twangers and warblers.
I don’t know. With free and easily downloadable music everywhere, and with ever-less-expensive recording software making it possible for every three-chord Johnny up and down the block to cut a “professional”-sounding record, I just wonder how music can ever resume its place as an arena of the honing of standards and the shaping force of a central culture in which we all participate.
Melanie Phillips doesn’t see any good coming from the rush to recognize Kosovo’s independence.
George Melies, the French film director who, four years later (1902) would introduce the feature-length film with the ever-delightful and fascinating A Trip to the Moon, shows he already had his stuff going on in this where’s-my-head-short, Un homme de tetes.
The always-brilliant Heather MacDonald looks at the manufactured rape crisis on American campuses.
She makes a point toward the end of her piece that is well worth examining: The same leftist mindset that wants to entrench the V-Day / take-back-the-night / Vagina-Monologues / crisis counseling center set of assumptions is the very same mindset that also holds pornography symposia and condom classes and publishes campus sex magazines.
In the comment thread under my post “Very late in the day,” I assert that the likeliest scenario for the Iranian nuclear threat being addressed is for the US to give Israel permission to fly through Iraqi airspace so it can strike all the Iranian nuclear facilities it knows about. (And Mr. Dings, do reconstruct your last comment there and resend it. Sorry I accidentally deleted it. It was buried in the middle of a septic tank full of spam. I’ll post it pronto if you can do that.)
Given the sharp escalation in menacing Iranian rhetoric directed towards Israel, the website Infidels Are Cool – and some others to which it links – are taking the position that, December NIE notwithstanding, W is morally obligated to remove this threat breathing down Israel’s neck before he leaves office, given the too-strong possibility that a Freedom-Hater will succeed him. It would be the honorable thing to do for our only real friend in the region.
What do The H-Word Creature and He Who Walks On Water have in common? They both learned at the feet of Saul Alinsky.
Neither the IAEA nor the European Union are known for hard-headed, steely-eyed realism when it comes to the current threats on the world stage. That makes the latest pronouncements from each (here and here) on Iran’s nuclear program all the more eye-brow-raising.
And know this: no one in this entire world is doing anything to stop what’s going on.
The non-story in the New York Times about the lobbyist from a decade ago who was hanging around John McCain comes mere days after that paper had “endorsed” him as its favorite Republican candidate. It’s quite obvious now that that “endorsement” was all about softening him up for the kill. Pinch, Keller and the rest of the NYT’s gang of Freedom-Haters no more want to see McCain elected President than they do Duncan Hunter.
This whole episode points up a central truth we hammer home here at BN every chance we get: “reaching out” and “crossing the aisle” is an open invitation to have your entrails clawed out.
There is only one way to relate to Freedom-Haters: defeat them. They have no interest in us other than silencing us.
It’s not encouraging to see this nation’s only hope for not becoming a socialist dictatorship respond by saying he was “disappointed.” Senator, if that’s the best you can do, you’re in for a lot more “disappointment” on the way to your defeat and this nation’s ruin.
If Western civilization survives another five years, it will be because of the likes of Debbie Lee.
It’s one I’ve been having in my head all day. Let’s label the participants A and B.
A: The thing that puts me off about conventional Christianity is this notion that I’m sullied by sin from the get-go. That all humannkind is. Orginal sin, Calvin’s doctrine of the Total Depravity of man, all that stuff. I’m a pretty good guy. On balance, I’m inclined toward good. I consciously strive to cultivate virtue within myself. What is this sin business all about, anyway? It looks to me like human behavior falls along a continuum from evil to good. You just get the ones at the bad end of the spectrum to get with the program and stop being jerks. That’s the end of the story, isn’t it?
B: What does the Bible have to say about how you should live?
A: Oh, for heaven’s sake. Pun intended if you care to take it that way.
B: Just trying to answer your question about “this sin business.”
A: Alright, then. Well, let’s see. Here in Deuteronomy 5 is The Ten Commandments. And in Deuteronomy 6 is The Great Commandment. And here in Matthew 5 it says to love your enemies. Here in 1 Corinthians 7 it says that if you can’t resist the urge to touch someone of the opposite gender, marry her or him and rule over each other’s bodies. Hmmm. Now I’m finding all kinds of places where it says to do this and not to do that.
B: And do you follow these various commandments, and admonishments to the letter?
A: No, certainly not.
B: How does that play out in your life?
A: Well, I think there’s a pretty direct correlation between that and the fact that sometimes I feel empty inside, alone, confused.
B: You have lots of friends and loved ones who care about you. Could any of them give you perfect advice as to a way out of those feelings?
A: Well, no. They fall prey to them, too. In fact, everyone does.
B: So what kind of being could provide such guidance? Have all your years of meditation and materially induced mystical states provided such guidance?
A: They have not.
B: How about God, as depicted in the Bible?
A: Well, dang it, nowhere in the Bible does it once and for all say, “In a nutshell, here is the essence of what or who God is, fully defined in the way that water is defined as two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.” This God of the Bible, you can’t see him! It’s absurd to invest energy in communicating with a being no one has ever seen.
B: Moses saw him. He conceived a baby with Mary.
A: Well, a lot of good that does the millions of us who have come down the pike in the thousands of years since. How can I learn more about the nature of this God no one can actually see?
B: May I suggest this Bible that has figured so prominently in our conversation? A good deal of it is in fact devoted to describing Him, providing indications of His nature. Psalms is full of such stuff. Rock and Redeemer, Most High who knows the number of hairs on your head. Likewise the Gospels: a Father who loves you in spite of your waywardness.
A: But in what sense is this Bible the word of this God? I mean, what did the inspiration that infused the humans who wrote it down – over the course of many centuries, I might add – look like? What is the scientific explanation of how that happened?
B: You and I may not know the details of that, but there are only two possibilities: either they really were inspired by God, or they had some set of lesser, merely human motives – in other words, they were jiving us.
A: Ah, I still can’t take literally certain things. I’m just not a fundamentalist. The most glaring example of that is the six-day creation depicted in genesis.
B: Fine. You’re in solid company. C.S. Lewis doesn’t do creationism, either. But does that get you out of either adhering or not adhering to the broad and consistent outline of what the Bible tells us about God and our relationship to Him?
A: No. There is indeed a coherent story that is told throughout the course of the sixty-six books, even though they were written under disparate circumstances. I’ve definitely thought enough about this to see that the New-Thought-there-is-no-sin-or-need-for-redemption denominations are glossing over what they want to in the Bible, and in some cases adding stuff to it.
B: Anything else still bugging you?
A: Well, the fact that there’s no way I can comply to the letter with all the laws and instructions God has handed us in this Bible. By ten o’clock every morning of my life, I’ve taken his name in vain. I cut all kinds of moral corners. Not a day goes by that I don’t see some fellow human being of the female persuasion and think to myself, Man, what bliss she would be in the shower!
B: Again, you’re in good company. There’s a few billion of us throughout history who are in the same boat. Think about this: the only perfect person who ever existed suffered the full consequences of everything we’ve ever done. We’ve been sort of sleazing along, kind of getting away with our rebellion against He who created us, in the sense that we rise to face another day, get our three squares and such. That one perfect guy, though, on a Friday afternoon that, everywhere else in the world besides that hilltop at Calvary, proceeded much like any other Friday afternoon, took the full heat for us and made it all okay with The Big Guy.
A: Wow. da–
B: Don’t, man.
