Simels is apparently nostalgic for atmospheric nuclear testing, Bull Connor tearing black people apart with dogs, KKK murders, Bloody Sunday, the Vietnam War, The assassination of Patrice Lumumba and its horrific aftermath, the invasion of the Dominican Republic and its horrific aftermath, The Assassinations of JFK, RFK the Reverend MLK jr. back alley abortions, women being kept in the pink collar ghetto (those who weren't toiling in horrific conditions in the blue collar version of that) etc. etc. etc.
No doubt it was a relatively good time to be a straight, white, middle class-upper middle class male - I remember such things as a TV show called "It's A Man's World," No women reporters or news readers. Nancy Dickerson got about a 4 minute News spot as the soaps were on. And here's a hint, when they talked about "a man's world" not only did they not mean any men of color, they didn't mean anyone in the LGBT world. And, yeah, it really sucked in many ways to be LGBT back in the legendary 60s. Especially for LGBT people of color.
And, Steverino, there's good music in every decade but most of it always sucks. The 60s had at least if not more than its fair share of that crap. Lots of the movies sucked. While TV managed to get suckier the longer it went on Newt Minnow didn't call it The Vast Wasteland back then for nothing. And, good Lord, the food, the chemicals, the sugar, the heart attacks! The 60s were one of the worst decades for food in the U.S of A.
Nostalgia is a stupid and cheap and easy form of sentimentality that never remembers it as it really was. If you're going to make up stuff why not get creative about it instead of indulging in Simels' favorite genre, the tiresomely derivative.
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Walter Brueggemann - Willard Lecture 2018:
Come for the excellent lecture loaded with that radicalism I was talking about as found only in the right religious contexts, and stay for the excellent panel discussion.
There is nothing being discussed on the secular left that is as a radical advocacy for making economic justice and equality real as this.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Old Hate Mail - Never Again Will Only Happen If We Make It So, So I'll Never Stop Pointing This Out As Necessary
Oh, for crying out loud, I've hardly used even all of the widely known material that proves the Nazi genocides were Darwinian in their origin. There is this infamous declaration made by Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference of why, after they'd murdered all of the Jews who had no economic utility to the Nazis they'd either work those to death or kill those who survived even that culling. His thinking was absolutely Darwinian, expressed in terms of natural selection.
“during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.”
That's not something that some creationist made up, it's something quoted from the Holocaust Museum website.
NATURAL SELECTION IS DARWINISM, IT IS THE CORE OF DARWINISM, it is the origin of eugenics including the Nazi eugenics of which their entire policy was made. All of it, from murdering those deemed unfit among Germans to the elimination of those considered biologically inferior to "Aryans" so they could not "pollute" the German people,* to murdering possible rival groups in a Darwinian struggle for life . . . exactly in accord with Darwin's book in which he set out his theory, beginning with the title. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Heydrich, the architect of the earlier stage of the genocide carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and one of the main planners of the "final solution" intended the "Aryans" of which he believed himself to be a superior example (Hitler favored him due to his "Aryan" appearance as well as his amoral depravity) to win any "struggle for life" because they were the "favoured race". Darwin would only disagree on the basis of his belief that his own group was pretty favored and his list of those races which were to disappear was somewhat different. As I pointed out the week before last, it's remarkable how those who believe that natural selection is a real thing instead of an ideological delusion inevitably include whatever groups they like as the "favoured races" (inevitably including their own) and which are expendable. That's inevitable whenever people believe that natural selection is a real thing. We've had more than a hundred fifty years to prove that in real life. And real life has proved it.
Anyone who isn't willing to face the factual truth of that is more than slightly willing to have it happen again, they're just hoping it happens to someone else, apparently.
* The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations."
“during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.”
That's not something that some creationist made up, it's something quoted from the Holocaust Museum website.
NATURAL SELECTION IS DARWINISM, IT IS THE CORE OF DARWINISM, it is the origin of eugenics including the Nazi eugenics of which their entire policy was made. All of it, from murdering those deemed unfit among Germans to the elimination of those considered biologically inferior to "Aryans" so they could not "pollute" the German people,* to murdering possible rival groups in a Darwinian struggle for life . . . exactly in accord with Darwin's book in which he set out his theory, beginning with the title. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Heydrich, the architect of the earlier stage of the genocide carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and one of the main planners of the "final solution" intended the "Aryans" of which he believed himself to be a superior example (Hitler favored him due to his "Aryan" appearance as well as his amoral depravity) to win any "struggle for life" because they were the "favoured race". Darwin would only disagree on the basis of his belief that his own group was pretty favored and his list of those races which were to disappear was somewhat different. As I pointed out the week before last, it's remarkable how those who believe that natural selection is a real thing instead of an ideological delusion inevitably include whatever groups they like as the "favoured races" (inevitably including their own) and which are expendable. That's inevitable whenever people believe that natural selection is a real thing. We've had more than a hundred fifty years to prove that in real life. And real life has proved it.
Anyone who isn't willing to face the factual truth of that is more than slightly willing to have it happen again, they're just hoping it happens to someone else, apparently.
* The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations."
Monday, August 20, 2018
Aaron Copland - Something Wild
Aaron Copland conducts his musical score for the 1961 movie "Something Wild".
TRACKS
1. New York Profile 2:49
2. Park At Night 1:27
3. Subway Jam 2:16
4. Marry Ann Resigned 2:01
5. Incarceration And Nightmares 7:07
6. Escape Through The City 7:24
7. Love Music 1:58
8. Walk Downtown 3:11
9. Episode On The Bridge 4:52
10. Mother Alone 0:58
11. Reunion 1:04
I saw Something Wild on TV, it must have been on Saturday Night At The Movies, back when network TV showed good to great movies. I remember the music being extremely effective in the context of the movie which had a really strange and disturbing plot. We're going way back, though. I haven't seen it in more than 50 years.
Some recent comments on IMDB judge it by contemporary standards, I'm not going to argue that that's inappropriate, though I don't remember anyone judging it by those standards in the early 1960s. I've got no problem with judging movies by contemporary standards, we're alive now and things change. Movies stay the same. That changes nothing about the music, which is fine music on its own. By the standard of movie music, it's on the highest level.
Some of the thematic material showed up later in the decade when Copland wrote his Duo for Flute and Piano. But the duo hadn't been written yet, or even commissioned when the film score was written.
Woodstock Nation,
bullshit sales slogan.
I will never understand young people born decades later who maintain nostalgia for the 1960s. I was there and I don't understand why anyone my age would be nostalgic about the 60s anymore than I can imagine anyone being nostalgic for the Reagan years. Mistakes to not repeat that get repeated, that's what the 60s mostly were.
Why Lawyers So Often Are Scumbags
Paul Manafort's scumbag defense lawyer, Kevin Downing, should be punished for his violations of ethical rules in trying to nobble the jury, the public and Trump to get a pardon for his scumbag client.
The legal profession, which I used to have a lot of sympathy for, is disgusting when they go from defending their clients into getting off the guilty, especially when they are guilty of what Paul Manafort is known to have done to empower murdering despots. If Manafort is convicted, even by the machinations of lawerly lying he's guilty and, considering the gravity of what he did for enormous amounts of pay, deserves to rot in prison.
I don't think we demand that lawyers behave as if they're dedicated to producing justice nearly enough, in prosecutors, when the accused are innocent as charged, by defenders when the accused are guilty as charged. The line that it's not their job to do anything other than get their clients off is inadequate. There isn't any reason to respect what they do or the whole business of the law on that basis.
Downing is as big an asshole as I accused the judge in the Manafort trial as being, with what he did in the last few days, more so.
The legal profession, which I used to have a lot of sympathy for, is disgusting when they go from defending their clients into getting off the guilty, especially when they are guilty of what Paul Manafort is known to have done to empower murdering despots. If Manafort is convicted, even by the machinations of lawerly lying he's guilty and, considering the gravity of what he did for enormous amounts of pay, deserves to rot in prison.
I don't think we demand that lawyers behave as if they're dedicated to producing justice nearly enough, in prosecutors, when the accused are innocent as charged, by defenders when the accused are guilty as charged. The line that it's not their job to do anything other than get their clients off is inadequate. There isn't any reason to respect what they do or the whole business of the law on that basis.
Downing is as big an asshole as I accused the judge in the Manafort trial as being, with what he did in the last few days, more so.
What Show Biz Is All About
When people started pointing out the Trump regime's use of "whataboutism" the tactic of deflecting criticism of their actions and policies by saying "but what about Obama or Clinton or anyone else," more often enough through a lie sold through the media, some people thought it was some kind of innovation in American politics, some said he'd learned it from Putin's mastery of that technique of lying, I wondered why people thought they were seeing something new. "Whataboutism" is a basic means of lying that is widely employed by liars of all ideologies and, in the case of Trump and his puppet master, Putin, criminal proclivities.
It doesn't always take the form of "whatabout" explicitly but the same structure of coming up with a deflective stream of distraction is widespread. Since this piece is calling attention to what I wrote about the movies and their real life effect in politics, I'll deal with that.
In doing a wordsearch of D. W. Griffith with other search terms this morning, I came across this video DEFENDING DW GRIFFITH & JOHN FORD with Arthur Lennig (who I'd never heard of before about five this morning) emeritus professor of cinema at the University of Albany. You'll need to listen to what is said to understand what I'm going to say.
As documented in last night's brawl in the comments, there is no questioning the fact that the man who revived the KKK, William Simmons said that he was motivated by seeing the movie, Birth of a Nation, nor that that kind of thing was the intention of the racist who wrote the novel it was based on nor the racist director who filmed it. You don't make that kind of movie without wanting it to have the effect which it did, actually, have. The KKK, one of the most infamous terrorist groups in the history of the United States in both its first and its second incarnations. The second version regularly used D. W. Griffeth's movie to promote itself.
But listening to Lennig, you will hear that he starts with a huge "whatabout" about another infamously racist director of racist movies, John Ford in a movie I used as an example a few years back, Judge Priest. And you can hear just how dishonest it regularly gets when the topic is the cinema by the discussion of black-face and the use of vicious racist stereotyping of black men who want to rape white women - one of the most infamous pieces of racist propaganda which was so dangerous that Ida B. Wells Barnett had to debunk it in writing about the terror campaign of lynching as it was at its height. Lennig, a "professor emeritus" in Cinema at a respected university goes through so many twists and turns to defend D. W. Griffith from people who discuss one of the most obvious things about his career as a movie maker, THE PRIMARY REASON HE HAS ANY RELEVANCE TO POLITICS OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. The emeritus guy does that so baldly and so flagrantly that he makes Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Guliani sound like amateur night at the Liars Club.
If Lennig had named a thousand and one other racist directors, authors, artists, etc. it wouldn't have made Griffith or his movies one bit less racist than they were nor changed the evil they were in American life. Whatabout" doesn't exonerate anyone of what they did. But that argument is pervasive among those who want to defend, especially, profitable depravity and evil.
The emotional attachment that people have to their shows and, in the college credentialed culture-set, to the legend of "the cinema" produced such ridiculous nonsense long before anyone heard of Trump.
It is directly related to the "free speech-free press" bullshit lines about the moral impunity of porn or racist lies, often in lines like "whatabout all those people who look at porn or listen to neo-fascist racist incitement to violence and don't rape-murder people"? That direct relationship takes its most obvious form in paying lawyers to say such stuff in court, to fund "expert witnesses" who will say that on the witness stand or in depositions or in newspaper and magazine articles. I don't know if the now just about extinct porn barons like Heffner and Guccione still inflate the massively overpopulated world of awards with those given to those who lied to their profit or not.
Of course most of the people who listened to Hitler in a newsreel or watched Triumph of the Will never murdered a single Jew (or Pole, or Roma or disabled person, or all of the other the designated forgotten) but that does nothing to cut the causal connection between watching those and the people who did get up and do those things BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY WERE TOLD IN THE MOVIES. Ariel Castro did what he was instructed to believe he had a right to do in porn, he said that was what inspired him, the man who murdered Kitty Genovese was informed by porn, as well.
Hardly anyone who watched Jodie Foster movies went out and tried to shoot Reagan, though the guy who did was motivated by watching her movies. But those weren't carrying the intentional message to kill anyone like Reagan.
Birth of a Nation and other racist movies carry that messaging that gets people killed by intent. Yet the fans of free speech and the cinema want to exempt them from any responsibility for what they produced. I think we see in Apocalypse Now as filtered through the mind of Donald Trump, when violence is made cinematically exciting and dramatic, with Wagner's music (for Pete'sake) the spectacle won't lead the audience to get a positive message, they'll be too excited by the spectacle and music and directorial manipulation of them to be paying close attention to an implied message.
I think word for word show biz has generated more lies than just about any other influential thing in life. I think so when it is done unintentionally as in Francis Ford Coppola's movie, D. W. Griffith's intentional promotion of not only racism but white supermacist violence and in John Ford's racist movies but I think an even higher level of lying takes place in the defense of such stuff by "professors of cinema" newspaper and magazine scribblers who make a living off of the movies, and by the lawyer-liars who are hired to defend the movies from people who are damaged by them or who are appalled by their real-life effects when people take their intentional messaging as a how-to do what is promoted in them. And I certainly include the judges and Supreme Court members who have been a part of that earlier and far bigger and every bit as dishonest "whatabout" campaign. Donald Trump is a direct result of that effort. He, as the public persona who was sold by lies to be president is a 100% American show-biz product, produced under the period of "more speech" in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and its high-point in the American media as it gave way to the reaction starting in the late 1970s, when racist comedians began pushing the envelope back to where it was when Griffith was working.
No one should be surprised by Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Giuliani and the massive lying that has become so dangerous under Trump, it was pioneered by a long line of liars, many of them taken to be of the left as well as those on the right who benefitted by some of the legal tactics meant to enable the left, such as the "free speech" absolutism promoted by that left. It might have been an unintended side effect, like Trump's misunderstanding of Coppola's big cinematic spectacle, but his misunderstanding is an understanding of it. Why anyone would have expected giving lying in the mass media protection from even civil remediation wouldn't lead here is what led to probably the stupidest thing any smart, moderny people have ever done. Especially as they had the whole depraved history of the 20th century under the influence of electronic mass media to inform them. Movies, TV, the girly magazine owners, and the rest of what has become of "culture" had everything to do with that. They paid the lawyers to lie us here. We were suckers for them, that's what show biz is all about.
It doesn't always take the form of "whatabout" explicitly but the same structure of coming up with a deflective stream of distraction is widespread. Since this piece is calling attention to what I wrote about the movies and their real life effect in politics, I'll deal with that.
In doing a wordsearch of D. W. Griffith with other search terms this morning, I came across this video DEFENDING DW GRIFFITH & JOHN FORD with Arthur Lennig (who I'd never heard of before about five this morning) emeritus professor of cinema at the University of Albany. You'll need to listen to what is said to understand what I'm going to say.
First, this is D. W. Griffith, the director of Birth of a Nation which was not only the inspiration for restarting the moribund Klu Klux Klan, it was one of its most potent promotional tool. Despite what my volunteer in everything wrong with the secular left says, that was known from the start of the thing, the NAACP regularly protested and picketed it from even before its release.
In 1913, Dixon sold the motion picture rights to D.W. Griffith, a wildly ambitious and prolific director who, as the son of a former Confederate officer, shared Dixon’s view of Reconstruction as a crime against the South. What really stirred his blood, though, was Dixon’s description of the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of persecuted white Southerners—an image he believed was crying out for the big screen. The Clansman began shooting on Independence Day 1914 and was scheduled to open in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 1915.
The local branch of the NAACP, however, had other ideas. Dixon’s previous work was so notorious that the civil rights group tried to have The Clansman (it was retitled shortly afterward) banned before having seen it. When the members arranged a screening on Jan. 29, their fears were confirmed. It was, they claimed, both “historically inaccurate and, with subtle genius, designed to palliate and excuse the lynchings and other deeds of violence committed against the Negro.” They sought to have it barred on the grounds of public safety. When their efforts failed, they urged the NAACP’s national headquarters in New York to take up the fight.
As documented in last night's brawl in the comments, there is no questioning the fact that the man who revived the KKK, William Simmons said that he was motivated by seeing the movie, Birth of a Nation, nor that that kind of thing was the intention of the racist who wrote the novel it was based on nor the racist director who filmed it. You don't make that kind of movie without wanting it to have the effect which it did, actually, have. The KKK, one of the most infamous terrorist groups in the history of the United States in both its first and its second incarnations. The second version regularly used D. W. Griffeth's movie to promote itself.
But listening to Lennig, you will hear that he starts with a huge "whatabout" about another infamously racist director of racist movies, John Ford in a movie I used as an example a few years back, Judge Priest. And you can hear just how dishonest it regularly gets when the topic is the cinema by the discussion of black-face and the use of vicious racist stereotyping of black men who want to rape white women - one of the most infamous pieces of racist propaganda which was so dangerous that Ida B. Wells Barnett had to debunk it in writing about the terror campaign of lynching as it was at its height. Lennig, a "professor emeritus" in Cinema at a respected university goes through so many twists and turns to defend D. W. Griffith from people who discuss one of the most obvious things about his career as a movie maker, THE PRIMARY REASON HE HAS ANY RELEVANCE TO POLITICS OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. The emeritus guy does that so baldly and so flagrantly that he makes Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Guliani sound like amateur night at the Liars Club.
If Lennig had named a thousand and one other racist directors, authors, artists, etc. it wouldn't have made Griffith or his movies one bit less racist than they were nor changed the evil they were in American life. Whatabout" doesn't exonerate anyone of what they did. But that argument is pervasive among those who want to defend, especially, profitable depravity and evil.
The emotional attachment that people have to their shows and, in the college credentialed culture-set, to the legend of "the cinema" produced such ridiculous nonsense long before anyone heard of Trump.
It is directly related to the "free speech-free press" bullshit lines about the moral impunity of porn or racist lies, often in lines like "whatabout all those people who look at porn or listen to neo-fascist racist incitement to violence and don't rape-murder people"? That direct relationship takes its most obvious form in paying lawyers to say such stuff in court, to fund "expert witnesses" who will say that on the witness stand or in depositions or in newspaper and magazine articles. I don't know if the now just about extinct porn barons like Heffner and Guccione still inflate the massively overpopulated world of awards with those given to those who lied to their profit or not.
Of course most of the people who listened to Hitler in a newsreel or watched Triumph of the Will never murdered a single Jew (or Pole, or Roma or disabled person, or all of the other the designated forgotten) but that does nothing to cut the causal connection between watching those and the people who did get up and do those things BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY WERE TOLD IN THE MOVIES. Ariel Castro did what he was instructed to believe he had a right to do in porn, he said that was what inspired him, the man who murdered Kitty Genovese was informed by porn, as well.
Hardly anyone who watched Jodie Foster movies went out and tried to shoot Reagan, though the guy who did was motivated by watching her movies. But those weren't carrying the intentional message to kill anyone like Reagan.
Birth of a Nation and other racist movies carry that messaging that gets people killed by intent. Yet the fans of free speech and the cinema want to exempt them from any responsibility for what they produced. I think we see in Apocalypse Now as filtered through the mind of Donald Trump, when violence is made cinematically exciting and dramatic, with Wagner's music (for Pete'sake) the spectacle won't lead the audience to get a positive message, they'll be too excited by the spectacle and music and directorial manipulation of them to be paying close attention to an implied message.
I think word for word show biz has generated more lies than just about any other influential thing in life. I think so when it is done unintentionally as in Francis Ford Coppola's movie, D. W. Griffith's intentional promotion of not only racism but white supermacist violence and in John Ford's racist movies but I think an even higher level of lying takes place in the defense of such stuff by "professors of cinema" newspaper and magazine scribblers who make a living off of the movies, and by the lawyer-liars who are hired to defend the movies from people who are damaged by them or who are appalled by their real-life effects when people take their intentional messaging as a how-to do what is promoted in them. And I certainly include the judges and Supreme Court members who have been a part of that earlier and far bigger and every bit as dishonest "whatabout" campaign. Donald Trump is a direct result of that effort. He, as the public persona who was sold by lies to be president is a 100% American show-biz product, produced under the period of "more speech" in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and its high-point in the American media as it gave way to the reaction starting in the late 1970s, when racist comedians began pushing the envelope back to where it was when Griffith was working.
No one should be surprised by Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Giuliani and the massive lying that has become so dangerous under Trump, it was pioneered by a long line of liars, many of them taken to be of the left as well as those on the right who benefitted by some of the legal tactics meant to enable the left, such as the "free speech" absolutism promoted by that left. It might have been an unintended side effect, like Trump's misunderstanding of Coppola's big cinematic spectacle, but his misunderstanding is an understanding of it. Why anyone would have expected giving lying in the mass media protection from even civil remediation wouldn't lead here is what led to probably the stupidest thing any smart, moderny people have ever done. Especially as they had the whole depraved history of the 20th century under the influence of electronic mass media to inform them. Movies, TV, the girly magazine owners, and the rest of what has become of "culture" had everything to do with that. They paid the lawyers to lie us here. We were suckers for them, that's what show biz is all about.
Sunday, August 19, 2018
America This Is Your Mind On Hollywood
I'm doing something I think I've only done once or twice before, reworking and reposting a piece the day after I first posted it. Having a lot of trouble with my eyes, the last few days and looking at what I wrote on a big screen, yeesh!. This is nothing I am happy to be writing about but given we are being governed by those suckered by TV and Hollywood, it is important.
Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.
Francis Ford Coppola
Back at the height of my reading of the lefty magazines, a period which began to ebb in the 1990s and still hasn't ended, entirely, I'd have told anyone who predicted that twenty years later I'd be depending on Esquire more than The Nation for important news that they were insane. Shows how reliable the prediction business that seems to obsess the news media in the United States probably is.
I know the estimable Charles Pierce gets more repetition but I've come to really value Jack Holmes as someone who often gets it just about perfect. One of his recent pieces about Donald Trump's mind and its formation in TV and the movies tells us a lot of why we are in such danger from Trump.
After recounting the horrific story of how Trump, responded to veterans plea that there be more support given to service members damaged by the United States spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam out of his mis-remembered viewing of the movie Apocalypse Now - even Robert Duval's famous line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" didn't register with the grad of one of the Ivys as he repeatedly told some of the audience, some of the Vietnam veterans some of them must have been wrong that they weren't spraying Agent Orange in the movie. because of what he remembered from watching it - Holmes goes into some detail about the consequences of having the reality TV star as president in horrifying specificity:
It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.
Obviously, this has some negative consequences for, say, veterans. The Vietnam vet groups in the Apocalypse Now fiasco meeting were trying to improve treatment for vets exposed to Agent Orange. It does not appear they made progress, and Weidman says they now struggle to get the president's ear at all. One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.
It's bad. Really bad. And I don't mean the Omarosa angle, I'd certainly trust her more than the three businessmen thugs Trump lets run the VA. Well, it being Omarosa, "trust" isn't the right word, though "more" is.
But what's worse is a country which has an effective electoral margin (along with the putrid, anti-democratic Electoral College) which handed the country to the biggest liar and phony in our history on the power of his TV presence, his fascist Boss-man "Apprentice" character along with the long running subplot of the media in which Hillary Clinton was not one of the most dedicated public servants to ever get the nomination of a major party, but that she was written a role something like what I'm told was Omarosa's stock character of evil black woman villain.
Our system, and by that I don't mean only the putrid, corrupt vote-suppressing states and the Electoral College (now subject to Supreme Court rigging, as well) but also the media, from highest to lowest (and, it seems most influential) has produced Donald Trump through media saturation of the collective American mind.
Donald Trump is able to do what he is doing BECAUSE of the "free-press" which now, thanks to the innovative language and creation of neologisms of the "free-speech-free-press" industry means the media, including FOX and Sinclair, Breitbart, etc. They installed him, they sustain him and the people who put him there, billionaires domestic as well as foreign, used the media they control, knowingly using the corrupt elections system as their tool box to do it.
I don't know what Francis Ford Coppola intended in making Apocalypse Now but I doubt he intended it to inform the ignorant and pathological criminal depravity of the Trump regime, though obviously it does that. I don't generally go looking for quotes that I never read to illustrate a point but here's one from James Gray
'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.
How anyone could maintain a view permitting ambiguity about the moral depravity of the characters in that movie or have the intention of leaving the audience with an ambiguous view of what they presented is disturbing.
I think it's related to that thing that Terry Eagleton talked about, the pose of suspended judgement and decision that is such a big part of the folly of modernism and the demands of the materialist-scientistic view of life. The claim that unless something has the status of proof required by nothing but pure mathematics, we are not to assert the truth of something. If that was what Coppola got out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it leaves me to wonder if the fault was his or Conrad's. Which is one of the reasons I've come to wonder about the efficacy of using fiction to make points about such serious life or death truths and about the entire project of modernism, as can be read in the quote by Jack Levine right under the blog header above.
I would like to hear Coppola on this, on how dangerous such stylish ambiguities are when a reality-TV president misremembers the directorial the auteurial intent in the movie.
Making a movie to make a point is about the most lavishly, expensively inefficient and incredibly stupid ways to make a point that have ever been dreamed up. Writing an opera to do that is probably less of a waste of resources, effort and time. Making a TV drama series must be at least as bad, especially if it goes into more than a couple of seasons. Though presenting Trump as a fascist boss-man seems to have gotten across with a dangerous number of people. If the point was about the depth of evil of the characters in Apocalypse Now, built off of the presentation of evil in Heart of Darkness, I doubt that more than a minority of the audience gets the point. That is even more true when it is a high-budget extravaganza with audacious and memorable effects of the kind that will be adjudged to make it a great movie. The part those play in the ambiguous take away from the famous "Ride of the Valkeries" scene of the movie is probably one of the main contributions to Trump's use of it in his gawdy, vulgar mental furniture and, as a result of people buying his TV persona, in his use of it in governing us, including the veterans Jack Holmes wrote about.
-------
Is the left any better? I'd have thought so back when I subscribed to four lefty mags, before I went online. I don't think so now that I've read a lot of the lefty thinking, only instead of producing electoral victory and powerful presidencies, the left produces electoral impotence and (perhaps as a result) impotent presidencies such as those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The Trump regime is just the most recent and extreme in a series of disastrous presidencies since the high point of American liberalism, the Johnson administration got suckered by the Harvard boys and some Generals into sinking it in the mire of the Vietnam war. One of the strongest tools they used to talk Johnson into increasing the American presence there was his fear of the media calling him weak, saying he "lost Vietnam" and empowering the Republicans who were not yet overtly fascist. The American media was wildly supportive of the Vietnam war in the early 1960s and, I would say, well into the Nixon administration, that is after they helped use opposition to the war to end Johnson's plans to run in 1968 and then to defeat Hubert Humphrey when he got the nomination in his stead.
The part that the "new left" played in that self-defeating idiocy was no where near as important as the role that the media played in it, and I would include Hollywood which has never been remotely liberal in general and when it has been it's generally been pretty stupid about it. I mean, Susan Sarandon is hardly the only one, Aaron Sorkin is as big a tool in his own way. Never, ever trust a Hollywood liberal, especially one who wants to prop up an updated version of JFK's Camelot, which was a lot of hooey even before his assassination. In his own way, I think Obama or at least many of his supporters thought it was going to be President Bartlett and CJ and Leo and Toby and the team as they elected Jimmy Smits who won narrowly over the noble Republican (it was that big a pile of bullshit) Alan Alda who would be offered a job and CJ got to be chief of staff. Well, in the real life that such TV produced, we got Trump. Shows you how realistic that show was.
The left are as big a bunch of suckers for show biz as the right, it's just they like different shows. Even some of the best of them, such as the crew at Majority Report show signs of it. The lower quality rungs of the left are as wallowing in show biz as the right. I doubt there are many of them serious enough to miss or give up their shows to save egalitarian democracy. I used to think it was all that pot we smoked, now I think it's all the TV and movies that sank the left, and the lefty magazines that were running their own old movies of lefty classics on a loop through their heads. Look at the movies the Hollywood lefties were making, look at the hagiographic junk produced about losers like Emma Goldman and the Hollywood lefties. John Reed, for Pete'sake, that total and complete asshole douche-bag John Reed!
Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.
Francis Ford Coppola
Back at the height of my reading of the lefty magazines, a period which began to ebb in the 1990s and still hasn't ended, entirely, I'd have told anyone who predicted that twenty years later I'd be depending on Esquire more than The Nation for important news that they were insane. Shows how reliable the prediction business that seems to obsess the news media in the United States probably is.
I know the estimable Charles Pierce gets more repetition but I've come to really value Jack Holmes as someone who often gets it just about perfect. One of his recent pieces about Donald Trump's mind and its formation in TV and the movies tells us a lot of why we are in such danger from Trump.
After recounting the horrific story of how Trump, responded to veterans plea that there be more support given to service members damaged by the United States spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam out of his mis-remembered viewing of the movie Apocalypse Now - even Robert Duval's famous line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" didn't register with the grad of one of the Ivys as he repeatedly told some of the audience, some of the Vietnam veterans some of them must have been wrong that they weren't spraying Agent Orange in the movie. because of what he remembered from watching it - Holmes goes into some detail about the consequences of having the reality TV star as president in horrifying specificity:
It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.
Obviously, this has some negative consequences for, say, veterans. The Vietnam vet groups in the Apocalypse Now fiasco meeting were trying to improve treatment for vets exposed to Agent Orange. It does not appear they made progress, and Weidman says they now struggle to get the president's ear at all. One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.
It's bad. Really bad. And I don't mean the Omarosa angle, I'd certainly trust her more than the three businessmen thugs Trump lets run the VA. Well, it being Omarosa, "trust" isn't the right word, though "more" is.
But what's worse is a country which has an effective electoral margin (along with the putrid, anti-democratic Electoral College) which handed the country to the biggest liar and phony in our history on the power of his TV presence, his fascist Boss-man "Apprentice" character along with the long running subplot of the media in which Hillary Clinton was not one of the most dedicated public servants to ever get the nomination of a major party, but that she was written a role something like what I'm told was Omarosa's stock character of evil black woman villain.
Our system, and by that I don't mean only the putrid, corrupt vote-suppressing states and the Electoral College (now subject to Supreme Court rigging, as well) but also the media, from highest to lowest (and, it seems most influential) has produced Donald Trump through media saturation of the collective American mind.
Donald Trump is able to do what he is doing BECAUSE of the "free-press" which now, thanks to the innovative language and creation of neologisms of the "free-speech-free-press" industry means the media, including FOX and Sinclair, Breitbart, etc. They installed him, they sustain him and the people who put him there, billionaires domestic as well as foreign, used the media they control, knowingly using the corrupt elections system as their tool box to do it.
I don't know what Francis Ford Coppola intended in making Apocalypse Now but I doubt he intended it to inform the ignorant and pathological criminal depravity of the Trump regime, though obviously it does that. I don't generally go looking for quotes that I never read to illustrate a point but here's one from James Gray
'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.
How anyone could maintain a view permitting ambiguity about the moral depravity of the characters in that movie or have the intention of leaving the audience with an ambiguous view of what they presented is disturbing.
I think it's related to that thing that Terry Eagleton talked about, the pose of suspended judgement and decision that is such a big part of the folly of modernism and the demands of the materialist-scientistic view of life. The claim that unless something has the status of proof required by nothing but pure mathematics, we are not to assert the truth of something. If that was what Coppola got out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it leaves me to wonder if the fault was his or Conrad's. Which is one of the reasons I've come to wonder about the efficacy of using fiction to make points about such serious life or death truths and about the entire project of modernism, as can be read in the quote by Jack Levine right under the blog header above.
I would like to hear Coppola on this, on how dangerous such stylish ambiguities are when a reality-TV president misremembers the directorial the auteurial intent in the movie.
Making a movie to make a point is about the most lavishly, expensively inefficient and incredibly stupid ways to make a point that have ever been dreamed up. Writing an opera to do that is probably less of a waste of resources, effort and time. Making a TV drama series must be at least as bad, especially if it goes into more than a couple of seasons. Though presenting Trump as a fascist boss-man seems to have gotten across with a dangerous number of people. If the point was about the depth of evil of the characters in Apocalypse Now, built off of the presentation of evil in Heart of Darkness, I doubt that more than a minority of the audience gets the point. That is even more true when it is a high-budget extravaganza with audacious and memorable effects of the kind that will be adjudged to make it a great movie. The part those play in the ambiguous take away from the famous "Ride of the Valkeries" scene of the movie is probably one of the main contributions to Trump's use of it in his gawdy, vulgar mental furniture and, as a result of people buying his TV persona, in his use of it in governing us, including the veterans Jack Holmes wrote about.
-------
Is the left any better? I'd have thought so back when I subscribed to four lefty mags, before I went online. I don't think so now that I've read a lot of the lefty thinking, only instead of producing electoral victory and powerful presidencies, the left produces electoral impotence and (perhaps as a result) impotent presidencies such as those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The Trump regime is just the most recent and extreme in a series of disastrous presidencies since the high point of American liberalism, the Johnson administration got suckered by the Harvard boys and some Generals into sinking it in the mire of the Vietnam war. One of the strongest tools they used to talk Johnson into increasing the American presence there was his fear of the media calling him weak, saying he "lost Vietnam" and empowering the Republicans who were not yet overtly fascist. The American media was wildly supportive of the Vietnam war in the early 1960s and, I would say, well into the Nixon administration, that is after they helped use opposition to the war to end Johnson's plans to run in 1968 and then to defeat Hubert Humphrey when he got the nomination in his stead.
The part that the "new left" played in that self-defeating idiocy was no where near as important as the role that the media played in it, and I would include Hollywood which has never been remotely liberal in general and when it has been it's generally been pretty stupid about it. I mean, Susan Sarandon is hardly the only one, Aaron Sorkin is as big a tool in his own way. Never, ever trust a Hollywood liberal, especially one who wants to prop up an updated version of JFK's Camelot, which was a lot of hooey even before his assassination. In his own way, I think Obama or at least many of his supporters thought it was going to be President Bartlett and CJ and Leo and Toby and the team as they elected Jimmy Smits who won narrowly over the noble Republican (it was that big a pile of bullshit) Alan Alda who would be offered a job and CJ got to be chief of staff. Well, in the real life that such TV produced, we got Trump. Shows you how realistic that show was.
The left are as big a bunch of suckers for show biz as the right, it's just they like different shows. Even some of the best of them, such as the crew at Majority Report show signs of it. The lower quality rungs of the left are as wallowing in show biz as the right. I doubt there are many of them serious enough to miss or give up their shows to save egalitarian democracy. I used to think it was all that pot we smoked, now I think it's all the TV and movies that sank the left, and the lefty magazines that were running their own old movies of lefty classics on a loop through their heads. Look at the movies the Hollywood lefties were making, look at the hagiographic junk produced about losers like Emma Goldman and the Hollywood lefties. John Reed, for Pete'sake, that total and complete asshole douche-bag John Reed!
The Far Left Isn't Radical Enough To Work
Anyone who reads my blog who thinks the reason I don't read the lefty magazines as much as I did in the 1990s is because I'm more conservative obviously doesn't read my blog.
The reason I gave up on the "secular" left, the atheist-materialist-scientistic-quasi-Marxist left is that they are not radical enough. They aren't as radical as the liberation theologians and, as Marilynne Robinson rightly pointed out, the liberation theologians aren't as radical as the economic justice of the Mosaic Law and that isn't as radical as the Gospel and the Epistles. And as Elizabeth A. Johnson pointed out in her feminist hermeneutical reading of those, the full meaning of those in terms of radical justice isn't yet exhausted.
On the rare occasions I read The Nation or In These Times or The Progressive (Madison style radicalism, ha!) I see why their left has failed and will always fail, the reason that despite an individual candidate here or there, the Democratic Socialists are going to prove as disappointing as that left always has been. It's not radical enough and its ideological basis in materialism and scientism will rot out any better intentions from the bottom. You've got to really believe that life is not the same as non-living matter, that rights and the moral obligation to respect rights are real and absolutely binding in order to get you ass up out of your computer chair or off your couch and do the unglamorous, unexciting work of making real justice. As I've pointed out, they don't even seem to be able to notice that Marxism in real life wasn't much if any better than Nazism in real life when judged on things like people murdered. How much more obvious does it get than something manifested in tens of millions of murders?
Naw, that left is no left anyone should have any faith will do anything in the future it hasn't already done. Or, rather, not done.
The reason I gave up on the "secular" left, the atheist-materialist-scientistic-quasi-Marxist left is that they are not radical enough. They aren't as radical as the liberation theologians and, as Marilynne Robinson rightly pointed out, the liberation theologians aren't as radical as the economic justice of the Mosaic Law and that isn't as radical as the Gospel and the Epistles. And as Elizabeth A. Johnson pointed out in her feminist hermeneutical reading of those, the full meaning of those in terms of radical justice isn't yet exhausted.
On the rare occasions I read The Nation or In These Times or The Progressive (Madison style radicalism, ha!) I see why their left has failed and will always fail, the reason that despite an individual candidate here or there, the Democratic Socialists are going to prove as disappointing as that left always has been. It's not radical enough and its ideological basis in materialism and scientism will rot out any better intentions from the bottom. You've got to really believe that life is not the same as non-living matter, that rights and the moral obligation to respect rights are real and absolutely binding in order to get you ass up out of your computer chair or off your couch and do the unglamorous, unexciting work of making real justice. As I've pointed out, they don't even seem to be able to notice that Marxism in real life wasn't much if any better than Nazism in real life when judged on things like people murdered. How much more obvious does it get than something manifested in tens of millions of murders?
Naw, that left is no left anyone should have any faith will do anything in the future it hasn't already done. Or, rather, not done.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Aaron Copland - Piano Variations
Marc-André Hamelin, piano
I doubt anyone has ever played this piece better than Hamelin did. Great, unflinching, unsparing, uncompromising. I love this piece so much.
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Seeing In The Dark
I've posted this before, it's one of the best radio plays I've posted here. Gordon Pengilly's work should be better known than it is.
Gordon Pengilly reading a scene from Flesh and Ghost
No posts matching the query: Korngold.
That is what doing a word-search of my blog for "Korngold" will get you*. I don't recall ever making a comment about Erich Korngold or his music. Steve Simels regularly makes up stuff to claim I said which I've never said because he is a. an habitual liar, b. a bigot, c. stupid.
Update: Only because it's raining and I can't be out weeding, I fact checked the schmuck's claim in the only way the dolt might do so, if he went to even that much bother which he obviously didn't, Wikipedia. First, as an example of what I said above, what Stupy claims:
Jascha Heifetz. The Korngold violin concerto. Gorgeous, but since the music was originally written for a movie, totally "vulgar," if you're a fucking snob. So That Idiot From Maine© has no idea whether he thinks this is good or not.
Korngold had vowed to give up composing anything other than film music, with which he supported himself and his family, until Hitler had been defeated. With the end of World War II, he retired from films to concentrate on music for the concert hall. The Violin Concerto was the first such work that Korngold penned, following some initial persuasion from the violinist and fellow émigré Bronisław Huberman. Korngold had been hurt by the assumption that a successful film composer was one that had sold his integrity to Hollywood, just as earlier he had been hurt by many critics' assumptions that his works were performed only because he was the son of music critic Julius Korngold. He was thus determined to prove himself with a work that combined vitality and superb craftsmanship.
The concerto was dedicated to Alma Mahler, the widow of Korngold's childhood mentor Gustav Mahler. It was premiered on 15 February 1947 by Jascha Heifetz and the St. Louis Symphony under conductor Vladimir Golschmann. It received the most enthusiastic ovation in St. Louis concert history.[2] On 30 March 1947, Heifetz played the concerto in Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Efrem Kurtz; the broadcast performance was recorded on transcription discs.
I wonder if finding out it wasn't written for a movie will make the ass lower his esteem for it.
* Before I wrote this post.
Update: Only because it's raining and I can't be out weeding, I fact checked the schmuck's claim in the only way the dolt might do so, if he went to even that much bother which he obviously didn't, Wikipedia. First, as an example of what I said above, what Stupy claims:
Jascha Heifetz. The Korngold violin concerto. Gorgeous, but since the music was originally written for a movie, totally "vulgar," if you're a fucking snob. So That Idiot From Maine© has no idea whether he thinks this is good or not.
Korngold had vowed to give up composing anything other than film music, with which he supported himself and his family, until Hitler had been defeated. With the end of World War II, he retired from films to concentrate on music for the concert hall. The Violin Concerto was the first such work that Korngold penned, following some initial persuasion from the violinist and fellow émigré Bronisław Huberman. Korngold had been hurt by the assumption that a successful film composer was one that had sold his integrity to Hollywood, just as earlier he had been hurt by many critics' assumptions that his works were performed only because he was the son of music critic Julius Korngold. He was thus determined to prove himself with a work that combined vitality and superb craftsmanship.
The concerto was dedicated to Alma Mahler, the widow of Korngold's childhood mentor Gustav Mahler. It was premiered on 15 February 1947 by Jascha Heifetz and the St. Louis Symphony under conductor Vladimir Golschmann. It received the most enthusiastic ovation in St. Louis concert history.[2] On 30 March 1947, Heifetz played the concerto in Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Efrem Kurtz; the broadcast performance was recorded on transcription discs.
I wonder if finding out it wasn't written for a movie will make the ass lower his esteem for it.
* Before I wrote this post.
Perhaps Why Radio Drama Is Better
The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.
Francis Ford Coppola
Not having the time to do real research on this I looked at what the official source of online . . . Oh, mercy, I'll have to say it "culture" says about what constitutes a "low budget film," Wikipedia. It has figures like $60,000 (Blair Witch Project) $20,000 (Chan Is Missing - which I liked a lot when I saw it) as the lowest of the "low budget" films. It being the movies, it relates those figures not to the quality of the ideas involved, no matter what Coppola says, but how much money the movies made.
Micro-budget films - which I doubt was the kind of budget Coppola was talking about, are mostly a 3rd World category, $7000 (El Mariachi) and $3000 (Pather Panchali) but as that movie was made more than sixty-years ago I don't know if that's in 1955 dollars or today's or what the budget in 1955 India means in the United States in 2018. My guess is that $3000 got you a hell of a lot more production value in 1955 India than it would get you in even 1955 America.
Needless to say, even by the standards of high-production radio dramas as are produced only by a few of the large national radio services, now, the budgets of "low-budget" films are massively financed. The entire budget of the BBC's Radio 4 is smaller than the budget of a modestly financed major studio movie and their Drama department is only a fraction of that. I would bet that lots of producers would drool over a budget of $3000 for one production, I'd be curious if anyone knows what kind of financing we're talking about for a typical radio drama production. If there are many independent producers of audio-drama who spend hundred dollars on an episode (or perhaps a whole season) I'd be surprised.
Like in the movies, the largest number of audio-radio dramas are pretty empty of ideas or originality or of much worth for anything but, perhaps, practice for those involved in producing them, if that. [Stephen Spielberg's practice movie, Duel, had a budget of $450,000, according to Wikipedia, ] But I think there's more of a chance you're going to find more in a good audio drama than you'll get in an allegedly intelligent movie. Even back when there was actual, for-profit, network-radio drama in the United States, Rod Serling said that he was able to do a lot more by way of ideas BECAUSE IT WAS LOW BUDGET. The money men were only interested in the money and having something on to fill air time. If it were possible to do an idea per dollar ratio I'll bet the one for audio drama, even with the massive amount of crap in that category, it would break into measurements in whole numbers per dollar. The movies, with those budgets and the idiocy of almost all of it, I don't think you could measure that in whole numbers without going through an epoch of hyper-inflation.
Francis Ford Coppola
Not having the time to do real research on this I looked at what the official source of online . . . Oh, mercy, I'll have to say it "culture" says about what constitutes a "low budget film," Wikipedia. It has figures like $60,000 (Blair Witch Project) $20,000 (Chan Is Missing - which I liked a lot when I saw it) as the lowest of the "low budget" films. It being the movies, it relates those figures not to the quality of the ideas involved, no matter what Coppola says, but how much money the movies made.
Micro-budget films - which I doubt was the kind of budget Coppola was talking about, are mostly a 3rd World category, $7000 (El Mariachi) and $3000 (Pather Panchali) but as that movie was made more than sixty-years ago I don't know if that's in 1955 dollars or today's or what the budget in 1955 India means in the United States in 2018. My guess is that $3000 got you a hell of a lot more production value in 1955 India than it would get you in even 1955 America.
Needless to say, even by the standards of high-production radio dramas as are produced only by a few of the large national radio services, now, the budgets of "low-budget" films are massively financed. The entire budget of the BBC's Radio 4 is smaller than the budget of a modestly financed major studio movie and their Drama department is only a fraction of that. I would bet that lots of producers would drool over a budget of $3000 for one production, I'd be curious if anyone knows what kind of financing we're talking about for a typical radio drama production. If there are many independent producers of audio-drama who spend hundred dollars on an episode (or perhaps a whole season) I'd be surprised.
Like in the movies, the largest number of audio-radio dramas are pretty empty of ideas or originality or of much worth for anything but, perhaps, practice for those involved in producing them, if that. [Stephen Spielberg's practice movie, Duel, had a budget of $450,000, according to Wikipedia, ] But I think there's more of a chance you're going to find more in a good audio drama than you'll get in an allegedly intelligent movie. Even back when there was actual, for-profit, network-radio drama in the United States, Rod Serling said that he was able to do a lot more by way of ideas BECAUSE IT WAS LOW BUDGET. The money men were only interested in the money and having something on to fill air time. If it were possible to do an idea per dollar ratio I'll bet the one for audio drama, even with the massive amount of crap in that category, it would break into measurements in whole numbers per dollar. The movies, with those budgets and the idiocy of almost all of it, I don't think you could measure that in whole numbers without going through an epoch of hyper-inflation.
America This Is Your Brain On Hollywood
Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.
Francis Ford Coppola
Back at the height of my reading of the lefty magazines, a period which began to ebb in the 1990s and still hasn't ended, entirely, I'd have told anyone who predicted that twenty years later I'd be depending on Esquire more than The Nation for important news that they were insane. Shows how reliable the prediction business that seems to obsess the news media in the United States probably is.
I know the estimable Charles Pierce gets more repetition but I've come to really value Jack Holmes as someone who often gets it just about perfect. One of his recent pieces about Donald Trump's mind and its formation in TV and the movies tells us a lot of why we are in such danger from Trump.
After recounting the horrific story of how Trump, responded to veterans plea that there be more support given to service members damaged by the United States spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam out of his mis-remembered viewing of the movie Apocalypse Now. Even Robert Duval's famous line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" didn't register with the grad of one of the Ivys as he repeatedly told some of the audience, some of the Vietnam veterans some of them must have been wrong that they weren't spraying Agent Orange in the movie. because of what he remembered from watching it. Holmes goes into some detail about the consequences of having the reality TV star as president in horrifying specificity:
It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.
Obviously, this has some negative consequences for, say, veterans. The Vietnam vet groups in the Apocalypse Now fiasco meeting were trying to improve treatment for vets exposed to Agent Orange. It does not appear they made progress, and Weidman says they now struggle to get the president's ear at all. One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.
It's bad. Really bad. And I don't mean the Omarosa angle, I'd certainly trust her more than the three businessmen thugs Trump lets run the VA. Well, "trust" isn't the right word, though "more" is.
But what's worse is a country which has an effective electoral margin (along with the putrid, anti-democratic Electoral College) handed the country to the biggest liar and phony in our history on the power of his TV presence, his fascist Boss-man "Apprentice" character along with the long running subplot of the media in which Hillary Clinton was not one of the most dedicated public servants to ever get the nomination of a major party, but that she was written a role something like what I'm told was Omarosa's stock character of evil black woman villain.
Our system, and by that I don't mean only the putrid, corrupt vote-suppressing state states and the Electoral College (now subject to Supreme Court rigging, as well) but also the media, from highest to lowest (and, it seems most influential) has produced Donald Trump through media saturation of the collective American mind.
Donald Trump is able to do what he is doing BECAUSE of the "free-press" which now, thanks to the innovative language and creation of neologisms of the "free-speech-free-press" industry means the media, including FOX and Sinclair, Breitbart, etc. They installed him, they sustain him and the people who put him there, billionaires domestic as well as foreign, used the media they control, taking the corrupt elections system into account to do it.
I don't know what Francis Ford Coppola intended in making Apocalypse Now but I doubt he intended it to inform the ignorant and pathological criminal depravity of the Trump regime, though obviously it does that. I don't generally go looking for quotes that I never read to illustrate a point but here's one from James Gray
'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.
How anyone could maintain a view permitting ambiguity about the moral depravity of the characters in that movie or have the intention of leaving the audience with an ambiguous view of what they presented is disturbing.
I think it's related to that thing that Terry Eagleton talked about, the pose of suspended judgement and decision that is such a big part of the folly of modernism and the demands of the materialist-scientistic view of life. The claim that unless something has the status of proof required by nothing but pure mathematics, we are not to assert the truth of something. If that was what Coppola got out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it leaves me to wonder if the fault was his or Conrad's. Which is one of the reasons I've come to wonder about the efficacy of using fiction to make points about such serious life or death truths and about the entire project of modernism, as can be read in the quote by Jack Levine right under the blog header above.
I would like to hear Coppola on this, on how dangerous such stylish ambiguities are when a reality-TV president misremembers the directorial the auteurial intent in the movie.
Making a movie to make a point is about the most lavishly, expensively inefficient and incredibly stupid ways to make a point that have ever been dreamed up. Writing an opera to do that is probably less of a waste of resources, effort and time. Making a TV drama series must be at least as bad, especially if it goes into more than a couple of seasons. Though presenting Trump as a fascist boss-man seems to have gotten across with a dangerous number of people. If the point was about the depth of evil of the charters in Apocalypse Now, built off of the presentation of evil in Heart of Darkness, I doubt that more than a minority of the audience gets the point. That is even more true when it is a high-budget extravaganza with audacious and memorable effects of the kind that will be adjudged to make it a great movie. The part those play in the ambiguous take away from the famous "Ride of the Valkeries" scene of the movie is probably one of the main contributions to Trump's use of it in his gawdy, vulgar mental furniture and, as a result of people buying his TV persona, in his use of it in governing us, including the veterans Jack Holmes wrote about.
-------
Is the left any better? I'd have thought so back when I subscribed to four lefty mags, before I went online. I don't think so now that I've read a lot of the lefty thinking, only instead of producing electoral victory and powerful presidencies, the left produces electoral impotence and (perhaps as a result) impotent presidencies such as those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The Trump regime is just the most recent and extreme in a series of disastrous presidencies since the high point of American liberalism, the Johnson administration got suckered by the Harvard boys and some Generals into sinking it in the mire of the Vietnam war. One of the strongest tools they used to talk Johnson into increasing the American presence there was his fear of the media calling him weak, saying he "lost Vietnam" and empowering the Republicans who were not yet overtly fascist. The American media was wildly supportive of the Vietnam war in the early 1960s and, I would say, well into the Nixon administration, that is after they helped use opposition to the war to end Johnson's plans to run in 1968 and then to defeat Hubert Humphrey when he got the nomination in his stead.
The part that the "new left" played in that self-defeating idiocy was no where near as important as the role that the media played in it, and I would include Hollywood which has never been remotely liberal in general and when it has been it's generally been pretty stupid about it. I mean, Susan Sarandon is hardly the only one, Aaron Sorkin is as big a tool in his own way. Never, ever trust a Hollywood liberal, especially one who wants to prop up an updated version of JFK's Camelot, which was a lot of hooey even before his assassination. In his own way, I think Obama or at least many of his supporters thought it was going to be President Bartlett and CJ and Leo and Toby and the team as they elected Jimmy Smits who won narrowly over the noble Republican (it was that big a pile of bullshit) Alan Alda who would be offered a job and CJ got to be chief of staff. Well, in the real life that such TV produced, we got Trump. Shows you how realistic that show was.
The left are as big a bunch of suckers for show biz as the right, it's just they like different shows. Even some of the best of them, such as the crew at Majority Report show signs of it. The lower quality rungs of the left are as wallowing in show biz as the right. I doubt there are many of them serious enough to miss or give up their shows to save egalitarian democracy. I used to think it was all that pot we smoked, now I think it's all the TV and movies that sank the left, and the lefty magazines that were running their own old movies of lefty classics on a loop through their heads. Look at the movies the Hollywood lefties were making, look at the hagiographic junk produced about losers like Emma Goldman and the Hollywood lefties. John Reed, for Pete'sake, that total and complete asshole douche-bag John Reed!
Francis Ford Coppola
Back at the height of my reading of the lefty magazines, a period which began to ebb in the 1990s and still hasn't ended, entirely, I'd have told anyone who predicted that twenty years later I'd be depending on Esquire more than The Nation for important news that they were insane. Shows how reliable the prediction business that seems to obsess the news media in the United States probably is.
I know the estimable Charles Pierce gets more repetition but I've come to really value Jack Holmes as someone who often gets it just about perfect. One of his recent pieces about Donald Trump's mind and its formation in TV and the movies tells us a lot of why we are in such danger from Trump.
After recounting the horrific story of how Trump, responded to veterans plea that there be more support given to service members damaged by the United States spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam out of his mis-remembered viewing of the movie Apocalypse Now. Even Robert Duval's famous line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" didn't register with the grad of one of the Ivys as he repeatedly told some of the audience, some of the Vietnam veterans some of them must have been wrong that they weren't spraying Agent Orange in the movie. because of what he remembered from watching it. Holmes goes into some detail about the consequences of having the reality TV star as president in horrifying specificity:
It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.
Obviously, this has some negative consequences for, say, veterans. The Vietnam vet groups in the Apocalypse Now fiasco meeting were trying to improve treatment for vets exposed to Agent Orange. It does not appear they made progress, and Weidman says they now struggle to get the president's ear at all. One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.
It's bad. Really bad. And I don't mean the Omarosa angle, I'd certainly trust her more than the three businessmen thugs Trump lets run the VA. Well, "trust" isn't the right word, though "more" is.
But what's worse is a country which has an effective electoral margin (along with the putrid, anti-democratic Electoral College) handed the country to the biggest liar and phony in our history on the power of his TV presence, his fascist Boss-man "Apprentice" character along with the long running subplot of the media in which Hillary Clinton was not one of the most dedicated public servants to ever get the nomination of a major party, but that she was written a role something like what I'm told was Omarosa's stock character of evil black woman villain.
Our system, and by that I don't mean only the putrid, corrupt vote-suppressing state states and the Electoral College (now subject to Supreme Court rigging, as well) but also the media, from highest to lowest (and, it seems most influential) has produced Donald Trump through media saturation of the collective American mind.
Donald Trump is able to do what he is doing BECAUSE of the "free-press" which now, thanks to the innovative language and creation of neologisms of the "free-speech-free-press" industry means the media, including FOX and Sinclair, Breitbart, etc. They installed him, they sustain him and the people who put him there, billionaires domestic as well as foreign, used the media they control, taking the corrupt elections system into account to do it.
I don't know what Francis Ford Coppola intended in making Apocalypse Now but I doubt he intended it to inform the ignorant and pathological criminal depravity of the Trump regime, though obviously it does that. I don't generally go looking for quotes that I never read to illustrate a point but here's one from James Gray
'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.
How anyone could maintain a view permitting ambiguity about the moral depravity of the characters in that movie or have the intention of leaving the audience with an ambiguous view of what they presented is disturbing.
I think it's related to that thing that Terry Eagleton talked about, the pose of suspended judgement and decision that is such a big part of the folly of modernism and the demands of the materialist-scientistic view of life. The claim that unless something has the status of proof required by nothing but pure mathematics, we are not to assert the truth of something. If that was what Coppola got out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it leaves me to wonder if the fault was his or Conrad's. Which is one of the reasons I've come to wonder about the efficacy of using fiction to make points about such serious life or death truths and about the entire project of modernism, as can be read in the quote by Jack Levine right under the blog header above.
I would like to hear Coppola on this, on how dangerous such stylish ambiguities are when a reality-TV president misremembers the directorial the auteurial intent in the movie.
Making a movie to make a point is about the most lavishly, expensively inefficient and incredibly stupid ways to make a point that have ever been dreamed up. Writing an opera to do that is probably less of a waste of resources, effort and time. Making a TV drama series must be at least as bad, especially if it goes into more than a couple of seasons. Though presenting Trump as a fascist boss-man seems to have gotten across with a dangerous number of people. If the point was about the depth of evil of the charters in Apocalypse Now, built off of the presentation of evil in Heart of Darkness, I doubt that more than a minority of the audience gets the point. That is even more true when it is a high-budget extravaganza with audacious and memorable effects of the kind that will be adjudged to make it a great movie. The part those play in the ambiguous take away from the famous "Ride of the Valkeries" scene of the movie is probably one of the main contributions to Trump's use of it in his gawdy, vulgar mental furniture and, as a result of people buying his TV persona, in his use of it in governing us, including the veterans Jack Holmes wrote about.
-------
Is the left any better? I'd have thought so back when I subscribed to four lefty mags, before I went online. I don't think so now that I've read a lot of the lefty thinking, only instead of producing electoral victory and powerful presidencies, the left produces electoral impotence and (perhaps as a result) impotent presidencies such as those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The Trump regime is just the most recent and extreme in a series of disastrous presidencies since the high point of American liberalism, the Johnson administration got suckered by the Harvard boys and some Generals into sinking it in the mire of the Vietnam war. One of the strongest tools they used to talk Johnson into increasing the American presence there was his fear of the media calling him weak, saying he "lost Vietnam" and empowering the Republicans who were not yet overtly fascist. The American media was wildly supportive of the Vietnam war in the early 1960s and, I would say, well into the Nixon administration, that is after they helped use opposition to the war to end Johnson's plans to run in 1968 and then to defeat Hubert Humphrey when he got the nomination in his stead.
The part that the "new left" played in that self-defeating idiocy was no where near as important as the role that the media played in it, and I would include Hollywood which has never been remotely liberal in general and when it has been it's generally been pretty stupid about it. I mean, Susan Sarandon is hardly the only one, Aaron Sorkin is as big a tool in his own way. Never, ever trust a Hollywood liberal, especially one who wants to prop up an updated version of JFK's Camelot, which was a lot of hooey even before his assassination. In his own way, I think Obama or at least many of his supporters thought it was going to be President Bartlett and CJ and Leo and Toby and the team as they elected Jimmy Smits who won narrowly over the noble Republican (it was that big a pile of bullshit) Alan Alda who would be offered a job and CJ got to be chief of staff. Well, in the real life that such TV produced, we got Trump. Shows you how realistic that show was.
The left are as big a bunch of suckers for show biz as the right, it's just they like different shows. Even some of the best of them, such as the crew at Majority Report show signs of it. The lower quality rungs of the left are as wallowing in show biz as the right. I doubt there are many of them serious enough to miss or give up their shows to save egalitarian democracy. I used to think it was all that pot we smoked, now I think it's all the TV and movies that sank the left, and the lefty magazines that were running their own old movies of lefty classics on a loop through their heads. Look at the movies the Hollywood lefties were making, look at the hagiographic junk produced about losers like Emma Goldman and the Hollywood lefties. John Reed, for Pete'sake, that total and complete asshole douche-bag John Reed!
Friday, August 17, 2018
In Music Sound Isn't Everything It's Only What It's Made Of
I thought I'd post a performance of Jascha Heifetz and compare it to a couple of others. I chose the Brahms Sonata 3 op 108 (for one thing I've performed the piano part so I'm very familiar with the score) and I've posted a couple of other performances of it over the years.
Here is Heifetz rather equally matched with the younger and very great and tragically short-lived William Kapell in the first movement (you can hear the rest at Youtube).
Here is Heifetz rather equally matched with the younger and very great and tragically short-lived William Kapell in the first movement (you can hear the rest at Youtube).
Knowing the piece, there's nothing to fault in terms of fidelity to the score, the several instances of portamento in Heifetz's playing is, actually, typical of the playing of the period when it was written so I would almost guarantee that Brahms would have expected it, though it fell out of fashion later in the 20th century only to be reintroduced by some performers as a part of authentic performance practice.
The sound of Heifetz's playing is gorgeous, there's no other word for that, it is refined and never rough his technique is magnificant. Did he violate anything in the score? Nothing I can see or hear. Would this be my favorite recorded performance of it? No. I'd certainly listen to with a lot of pleasure but there is something missing from the performance that you might hear from the other two performances. I will say that I might not kill to be able to play the piano part like Kapell did but I'd think about it.
Here is one of my favorite performances of the piece, with the great David Oistrakh, violin and one of my piano heroes, Sviatoslav Richter, piano
There is no doubt that despite the extreme beauty of Oistrakh's tone, it is not as golden and smooth as Heifetz's, the tempo isn't as fast (Brahms didn't specify a metronome marking, as I recall he officially opposed posting those). But the performance is far deeper and far more varied, I would say that in terms of how the tone and technique is used in service to the music is far more beautiful. In Richter's playing were're getting closer to where I'm considering murder to be able to do what he does. Good Lord, what a great pianist he was.
Here is a recording that I had never heard until a couple of years ago by Adolph Busch and the piano player I once wished I was (and occasionally still do when I'm listening to his recordings), Rudolph Serkin.
So different. For a start there is the tempo which is the fastest I've ever heard the fast movements of this piece played. I noted when I posted it that both Adolph Busch and Rudolph Serkin's pedagogical history placed them far closer to both Brahms and Joseph Joachim for whom he wrote the piece and, as I recall, with whom Brahms, himself, performed it. They learned from people who knew Brahms' playing from hearing it, from working with Brahms.
The performance is so great, so radically spot on that the sound of Busch's playing is hardly worth mentioning for all of its beauty. It is sound in service to the music. The effect is terrifyingly direct, I'd go so far as to say they present you with about as direct a path to the mind, the soul of Brahms as you're likely to get. I can't do it justice by describing it. I'd have to listen to it a lot with the score to get used to the tempos used in the last movement but the only thing I can think to say is that it is supernatural compared to the other performances.
Update: I couldn't find the fascinating recording of the Brahms Trio op. 87 by the Busch Trio where they were joined by Adolph Busch's brother Hermann Busch on cello but if you think the Brahms was fast, there's the first movement of Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio op. 70 that is on the flip side of the LP I have of it.
That is what I'd call "bracing". I'd be looking for a victim if I thought committing murder would get me the ability to play like Serkin did there.
I don't do Discogs or the such, but you can find it here.
Update: I couldn't find the fascinating recording of the Brahms Trio op. 87 by the Busch Trio where they were joined by Adolph Busch's brother Hermann Busch on cello but if you think the Brahms was fast, there's the first movement of Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio op. 70 that is on the flip side of the LP I have of it.
That is what I'd call "bracing". I'd be looking for a victim if I thought committing murder would get me the ability to play like Serkin did there.
I don't do Discogs or the such, but you can find it here.
. . . hoser is a hoser is a hoser . . .
. . . Stupy says something stupid, I knock it down, he waits a while and forgets that so he says the same stupid thing, I knock it down . . .
It's been going on like for going on a decade. Obviously in our go round about Heifetz yesterday I was the one familiar enough with his style to know there were critics who noted that his extremely polished style, which is what Virgil Thomson's only real critique of his style was, what he compared to luxury goods, was in service to fidelity to the score. Stupy was the one stupid enough to introduce that issue into the brawl, not knowing enough about music to understand he'd just knocked the legs out from under his dunce stool. I knew it as soon as the ass posted the comment. It's not for nothing I've been a musician all my life, though the pay might make you think that's what it was for.
More And Further Whine Stains
Here's a rule to live by. Whenever a psychologist or a group of psychologists (probably especially when it's a group of psychologists signed onto a paper or research program) comes up with something like "speed of cognitive processing" your first reaction should be to wonder if it's something real or if it's something they just made up. How does this "speed of cognitive processing" manifest itself? If it's something like a friggin computer generated diagram, that's not evidence that it is what they say it is. The machine metaphor for life is so ingrained in Western culture, since the 17th century, that even scientists don't understand that's what they're doing as they do it. The semblance of clarity achieved through it is deceptive, there is no reason to believe that any of that is really what is going on. In the use of the term I've been refuting, they don't seem to be able to correlate "speed of cognitive processing" with either the bogus scale of measurement of intelligence, IQ or educational achievement or real life achievement, apparently. My skepticism is in light of that lack of correlation. Not to mention the idea that if there is such a "speed" that it is a constant or that its average speed in an individual mind is reliably measured within the time frame of their research protocol. I think anyone who bought such a "thing" on the basis of the description is probably kind of slow on the uptake.
But the problem didn't start with that one made-up entity. It is more basic than that. For a start the idea that "cognition" is a "process" is an unfounded metaphor, founded in the ideological position that the mind is like manufacturing of a machine and, as psychology is want to do, they then pretend that the metaphor is what is real and that it is a secure base from which to start building conjectures, and with psychology (and all the behavioral sciences) that process has meant there is no limit in the extravagance of the imaginary structures they'll build in their city of conjectures. That is until the basic problem of the ideological metaphor is exposed and the thing collapses, except for those whose professional status is dependent on what was built, those derelict structures can house entire professional establishments. Rorschach testing is still around and its junk science status was obvious from the get go. For crying out loud, there are still Freudian snake oil salesmen making good livings out of that derelict old mansion of the mind. Having the designation of science means it never goes away, especially when there's money and professional status involved.
Update: Look at what the 1970s innovation "Evolutionary Psychology" which creates invisible, undocumented "genes" and even "gene complexes" to, unseen, undocumented BE the physical origin of "traits," those "traits" also being invented at will by similar ideological processes along with elaborate scenarios in which unspecified animals in the forever lost past benefited (I'd say "or not" but they never seem to imagine "or not" scenarios in evo-psy) and produced a greater number of offspring - all existing nowhere but in the self-interested, I'd say fevered imaginations of the scientists, and all that being SCIENCE.
But the problem didn't start with that one made-up entity. It is more basic than that. For a start the idea that "cognition" is a "process" is an unfounded metaphor, founded in the ideological position that the mind is like manufacturing of a machine and, as psychology is want to do, they then pretend that the metaphor is what is real and that it is a secure base from which to start building conjectures, and with psychology (and all the behavioral sciences) that process has meant there is no limit in the extravagance of the imaginary structures they'll build in their city of conjectures. That is until the basic problem of the ideological metaphor is exposed and the thing collapses, except for those whose professional status is dependent on what was built, those derelict structures can house entire professional establishments. Rorschach testing is still around and its junk science status was obvious from the get go. For crying out loud, there are still Freudian snake oil salesmen making good livings out of that derelict old mansion of the mind. Having the designation of science means it never goes away, especially when there's money and professional status involved.
Update: Look at what the 1970s innovation "Evolutionary Psychology" which creates invisible, undocumented "genes" and even "gene complexes" to, unseen, undocumented BE the physical origin of "traits," those "traits" also being invented at will by similar ideological processes along with elaborate scenarios in which unspecified animals in the forever lost past benefited (I'd say "or not" but they never seem to imagine "or not" scenarios in evo-psy) and produced a greater number of offspring - all existing nowhere but in the self-interested, I'd say fevered imaginations of the scientists, and all that being SCIENCE.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)