Monday, November 23, 2015

I should post a warning that I'm off work all week long.  It's my experience that the week of Thanksgiving is one of the weirdest in blogging so anything could happen. I will post something substantial but usually things posted this week go largely unread so it's a reason to save it for the weeks after. 

In the mean time, MOP HEADS.  

Update:  Hey, it wasn't me who was a fan of Guy Lombardo,  it was that guy who Sims, apparently, considers a musical ignoramus,  Louis Armstrong.  


Louis Armstrong Loves Guy Lombardo
Elijah Wald


Louis Armstrong often referred to Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians as his favorite band, but this fact is rarely cited and almost never pursued. Critics and historians who celebrate African American music tend to dismiss Lombardo's music as boring, mainstream pap, unworthy to be treated alongside the masterpieces of Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Thus, while celebrating Armstrong, they ignore his musical opinion—and that of the public, which made Lombardo's orchestra the most popular dance band not only of white America, but also at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. How have such prejudices affected our views of the past? How has our understanding of black musicians been limited by an insistence that they fit modern definitions of hipness or authenticity?

I merely pointed that out to Simps, one time.  If I had to choose between Steve Simels and Louis Armstrong to influence my aesthetic development, I'd be a simp to not choose the greatest genius in the history of Jazz over, well, the Simp. 



10 comments:

  1. Hey Sparky -- I'm in the process of re-reading William L. Shirer's BERLIN DIARY, which is the definitive on-the-ground history of the rise of Hitler's 3rd Reich. You know, because, Shirer was a journalist who was actually there witnessing in horror the whole thing, between 1934 and 1941.

    Guess what -- there's not one word about Charles Darwin or anybody's crackpot theories of eugenics being responsible for Nazi anti-Semitism.

    Quel surprise!!!!

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    1. You know what, dopey, first, neither William Shirer nor anyone else writes a "definitive" account of a long, complex historical event, so that's wrong. There is no possibility of anyone knowing enough about what had and would happen to write such an account in 1941 as even the worst of the mass murders hadn't happened. If Shirer didn't understand the nature of the T4 program, which was thoroughly based in Natural Selection, he didn't understand much about the motivation of the Nazi eugenic murders, of which the various ethnic slaughters were an extension.

      I don't know how much Shirer knew about that, to tell you the truth, even by the time he wrote his far more comprehensive The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is valuable but, now, somewhat out of date as so much more work has been done.

      A hint as to the Darwinian nature of eugenics was that infamous incident I mentioned when the pseudo-historian and holocaust denier, David Irving, called, not an historian but the antisemitic evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald as his only witness in the libel case he brought against the real historian, Deborah Lipstadt. Evolutionary psychology is a field saturated with the dogma of Natural Selection, as with eugenics, nothing, whatsoever in evolutionary psychology makes any sense without the assumption of Natural Selection, a field which had contained and nurtured and accepted MacDonald's antisemitic trash as science for years before he was exposed to the wider world by his defense of Irving.

      Charles Darwin was responsible for the dogma that the deaths of groups of people on the basis of their biological heredity would make the surviving generations superior to what came before, the very essence of Nazism. As Rudolph Hess, probably the least insane of Hitler's inner circle said, Nazism is merely applied biology, meaning Natural Selection.

      Of course that all went sailing right over the spire which is your head. I only wrote it for the amusement of people who find that sort of thing amusing. And because it happens to be the truth.

      Now, aren't you ashamed that the neo-Nazis like William L. Pierce know something about the Holocaust - which they pretend to deny - that you don't?

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  2. Last time I looked, that asshole Pierce had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Except that he was a fan.

    And BTW, I actually read "The Turner Diaries" back in the late 70s, because asshole psycho racist anti-Semites interest me in a perverse way. In the same way that Holocaust revisionists like you interest me.

    Now please to be go fucking yourself.

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    1. 1. I knew you didn't understand what I said.

      2. I don't believe anything you say without verified evidence.

      3. I doubt you could have understood the nature of the Nazi genocides or the survival of the advocacy of doing that into the present day by neo-Nazis because you are too stupid, too bigoted and too superficial to have done the research to do that.

      4. You know, I should tell you, Simels, I don't think I've ever thought of you as being Jewish but as an asshole. In fact, you are the kind of person who I always figured put the "ass" into assimilation. Perhaps the "simil" in it isn't just a coincidence. You are a disgrace to any group you associate yourself with.

      Delete
  3. Well, you never stop digging, Sparky. At least you're consistent.
    :--)

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    1. Ooh, let me guess, I know, I know, you're going to say something at Eschaton, aren't you. Oh, me, oh my, I'm ever so in peril. What am I ever going to do.

      If it's a threat of some kind of action, everything I said is true, I do think those things of you, Simels, it is a fact that that's what I think. And you know how I developed that opinion of you, Simels? From what you said.

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  4. "I doubt you could have understood the nature of the Nazi genocides"

    Oh sure. Me being Jewish and having relatives who died as a result of the Nazi genocides. How could I possibly have understood better than you?
    :-)

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    1. So do millions of Germans, Polish people, Roma, Slavs, etc. whose deaths you discount as important, thus denigrating the Jews who were their fellow victims.

      You don't understand anything, you've never brought a single fact to any of this discussion. You are too lazy to understand any of it, depending on the line of bigoted ignorance you spout in place of fact and evidence.

      Delete