Saturday, May 26, 2018

I'm Out For Memorial Day Weekend

I won't be able to post anything until Tuesday, I've been having a tumultuous last couple of days and I need some time off.   And there is still my computer problem.

Until then, here are lectures, sermons that are entirely relevant to the current illness of the United States.   They are all about the dangers of remembering things in an unrealistic, willfully self-deceiving manner, something which couldn't possibly be more relevant for the Memorial Day weekend as America is being brought to another, probably even more horrific war with Iran.

Memory as Temptation to Amnesia 


Memory as Temptation to Nostalgia


I will try to post a radio drama during the week.  I haven't had a chance to look up one that would be appropriate for the time.   I would love to be able to post what is probably the greatest of radio dramas I know of,  The Man Outside (Draussen vor der Tür)  by the great writer Wolfgang Borchert.  There are recordings of it in the original German online  but I can't find one that is posted in English.  Maybe next year.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

America Gone Stupid

You take a few hours off to take care of your dying cat and the next thing you know exactly what you predicted many weeks ago happened. 

When the media wet its collective pants over Trump saying he'd meet with the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, I told people I bet it didn't happen. It was when I heard that it had happened unexpectedly, all of a sudden as Trump met with South Korean national security adviser Chung Eui-yong I was pretty sure I knew how it had happened.

Trump was meeting with the guy, he got bored with listening to important stuff, he wanted to get back to his TV and in-bedded Big Mac and, knowing nothing, having no idea what he was saying he'd do he either said "sure" to a proposal or he said they should have a meeting on his own so he could end the meeting.  Anyone who thinks there was more thought put in it than that hasn't been paying attention. 

I think it's good that the Koreans on both sides understand that since the United States is putting total idiots into the presidency, idiots who could start a nuclear or disastrous conventional war, getting millions killed, maybe setting off World War III (presumably that last such war before we cause our own extinction), they're on their own.  And if not them then the rest of the world. 

This is a consequence of allowing the major super-power in the world to fall into the state of decadence the United States has, trained by lying TVs and hate talk radios into stupid, racist, paranoid, envious fascism.  Putin, of course, helped but Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the American Media did most of the ground work that allowed him to do what he did.  

That whining over my first post yesterday isn't unusual, how many places have you read anyone admitting that everything Putin used was something we permitted to our domestic fascist billionaires and the American corporate sector.  It just took one Citizens United decision to open up things to everything Putin took advantage of and we did that all by ourselves.   The pseudo-liberal, liberalish-libertarian civil liberties industry deserves a huge amount of the discredit. 

I doubt we'll learn our lesson if we survive this.  America's gone stupid.  It didn't take invasive mushrooms or Goof Gas, it just took choosing to not value the truth over lies. 

Paul Cooper - Love Songs And Dances

I.  Slow And Accelerating 




II. Fast  


III. Without Measure And Slow



Cleveland Chamber Symphony
Edwin London, Conductor 


Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Stupid Mail

I wonder what the septuagenarian failed hipster in his dotage equivalent of pearl clutching is.  Whatever it is, that's what Simps inevitably does when he characterizes something I'm supposed to have said.  "Lies" will do for now but he goes all outraged when he's prevaricating.  He knows his fellow Dunconian dolts will nod in agreement.  

What he doesn't know about 20th century composers of classical music is encyclopedic.  So he is consistent, grant him that. 

Taking Up The Roth Challenge

I have nothing much to say about Philip Roth.   I read exactly two of his books.  Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy.  They didn't impress me much.  I don't think I've thought about him much except once or twice to tease straight guys with issues . . . "more issues than Alexander Portnoy."   I'm dubious that his work will endure. Most doesn't. 

There was the time when Dick Cavett quoted Roth criticizing Saul Bellows to Bellows, his response was "What hath Roth got?"  What, indeed? 

The Late Afternoon Slump

I know it's a come down from the Play-Doh post but this is what Duncan Black's house prevaricator claims I said:

Did you know the Rolling Stones were nothing more than racists and sexists who did nothing but rip off black music?

I never said that's all they were, they also ripped off of white musicians, too.  As for them being racist and sexist, I'm kind of amazed that Stupes has never listened to the lyrics in all these many, many decades.  Either that or he's impervious to even the most blatant expressions of racism and sexism.  He's incapable of identifying with groups that he figures don't appertain to him.

Update:  You just knew there was going to be an update, didn't you.  Stupy cites a 1974 piece by an alleged feminist that says the Rolling Stones weren't sexist.  Yeah, how non-nonsexist they were can be heard all through their lyrics and if that wasn't enough of a clue, there was the publicity from their Black and Blue album two years after that, including this image:

Related image

With the caption, "I'm Black and Blue from the Rolling Stones – and I love it!" which such groups as Women Against Violence Against Women and most of the women I knew at the time held was violently misogynistic and a promotion of extreme violence against women.  I wonder if the author of the piece he cites ever revised on the basis of that. 

I remember 1976 quite well, it was well into the backlash against second-wave feminism.  Only a total idiot would have not included in that backlash Mick and his old Stone's using the promotion of extreme violence against women with bondage as sexy.   

As for the racism,  Brown Sugar would be enough to clinch that aspect of it.  

Better Living Through Chemicals

They're saying that Hasbro has trade-marked the scent of Play-Doh.   Having wondered why supermarket cake always tastes like Play-Doh smells I think that horse left the barn a long time ago. 



And I didn't mean that in a good way.

Makes you wonder why the library paste people haven't trademarked that smell.  I mean, I actually knew kids who would eat the stuff.

Do they even use library paste in schools now?  

Rachel Maddow Might Not Tell You This Terrible Truth But I Will

I listened to Rachel Maddow's interview with James Clapper on the internet this morning.    One of the things that got left out in the discussion of how the Putin mafia regime swung the election to Trump is that they used Twitter and Facebook and planted stories in the American media through the entirely predictable behavior of the American media and under the theory of  "freedom of the press" that has been built up over the past half century. 

The American media was everything from a willing participant, in the official right-wing media, or a willing dupe, including the most august organs of the American media.  The American media is as guilty of playing a part in Putin being able to install Trump and the complicit Republican Congress as any of the political operatives and goons who have either pled guilty or are under investigation for what a Constitution that was the product of the experience of the corporate, mass media and the ingenuity of the enemies of democracy would denote as treason. 

Rachel Maddow, bless her, as every other professional journalist, has a direct interest in not calling attention to the part that that theory of the First Amendment has played in the treasonous collusion with a foreign despot, the foremost promoter of fascism and neo-Nazism, a massively wealthy mafia boss who became one of the richest men in the world by corrupting and manipulating the Russian people through the corrupt Russian media.   It should be no shock that Putin did that so successfully, he is anything but stupid.   He and his crime mod, no doubt studied what other billionaires, American and otherwise did with the legal regime that the Supreme Court, first liberals and then, as they saw the opportunities for the Republican oligarchs they served, conservative justices created at the behest of such groups as the ACLU and lawyers who worked for the corporate media. 

Rachel Maddow may feel some understandable hesitation to tell you the horrible truth on that count, I won't hesitate to tell you that. 

Putin saw what oligarchs here and imported, none more so than Rupert Murdoch, have done to sell lies and libel for the profit of American billionaire oligarchs and millionaire wannabees.  He saw what a useful political tool lies told with total legal impunity have been for American fascists and right wingers and as the Supreme Court opened up more opportunities for even foreign despots to work the American legal system and media for their own profit and benefit, he took full advantage of it.  Allowing anonymous and pseudonymous bots and proxies and spoofers through the corrupt media of Facebook and Twitter, directed by British and other companies that would do the work of anyone, no matter how evil or corrupt or anti-democratic for pay and all of the rest of it flows directly from the "civil liberties" industry theories of the 20th century and the lawyers and law theorists and judges and justices who adopted that. 

The use of the First Amendment to destroy democracy is probably the greatest irony of the American Constitution after the all too temporary demise of Constitutionally sanctioned and encouraged slavery, indeed, Trump's installation as that of George W. Bush eighteen short years ago, was directly done through the Electoral College, one of those slave-power imposed aspects of the Constitution. 

The idolatrous and pagan civic religion surrounding the cult of the Constitution is a direct danger to the later, authentic formula of democracy,  government of, by and for THE PEOPLE.   Organized crooks like Putin hate democracy because corrupt government is easier to work to steal from The People, so do American billionaire oligarchs, so do Republicans.   The Constitution, especially as interpreted by the civil liberties industry in the past half century, is as dangerous to egalitarian democracy as Putin's billions and the industry of corrupt social media and mass media manipulators such as Breitbart and Cambridge Analyitica who work for them for pay. 

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Paul Cooper - Cycles


John Hendrickson, piano

I am so tempted to go back to G. Shirmer's and order a bunch of his music.  I think I'll use his textbook for the next student who wants to study theory with me.  I looked at my very old, much, much annotated copy of it.  I love how he introduces real musical experiences into introductory theory, tone color, melodic lines from the full range of musical history, counterpoint, rhythm. . .  It sure beats telling the kid to get a copy of Piston's Harmony and having them spend two years drawing dots, circles and lines on music paper.  I think I'm going to post more of his music this week.  His birthday would have been on May 19th.   He died in 1996. 

Monday, May 21, 2018

Paul Cooper - 4 Impromptus


Dr. James Umble Faculty Recital with
Carolyn Warner, Piano

I had known that Paul Cooper was a composer though before I heard this I only really knew him through his fine and unconventional theory textbook, Perspectives in Music Theory. 

I wish I could hear more of his music now that I've heard this.  It's a very fine piece and this is a wonderful performance.   It's a good reminder of how many fine and dedicated composers there have been whose music goes unperformed or under performed.

Carla Bley - Intermission Music


Trumpet – Sergio Orlandi
Soprano Saxophone [Soprano Sax], Tenor Saxophone [Tenor Sax] – Giulio Martino
Piano – Arrigo Cappelletti
Double Bass – Adrian Myhr
Drums – Tore Sandbakkeni

I love this piece from Bley's great composition, A Genuine Tong Funeral.

Update:  Chorale For Carla


Brained Rust

Simps is still going on and on about me reposting the photo of himself he posted yesterday while accusing me of being the idiot involved.   

Yeah, he's like that bratty 2-year-old who can't get enough attention, even when it's negative attention and he's in his 70s.  And his fellow rump Eschatots are buying it.  

Yet they wonder why the world doesn't do as they think best.

Update: I never expressed hatred of Leonard Bernstein, I just said he was a self-indulgent conductor who went for audience effect over what composers indicated as to how their music was to be played.  Something which Gunther Schuller amply testified to, both as a musician who had played under the early Bernstein and who minutely and carefully analyzed recordings of his performances following the score,  along with the performances of dozens of other adulated and less well known conductors.  

As I have noted before, in his great study of the problem,  Schuller said:

Bernstein, one of the most overrated and adulated conductors of recent times rarely practiced what he preached – a sad fact given his enormous basic natural talent, musical and conductorial/gestural.  In his Joy of Music, he wrote, for example, “perhaps the chief requirement of all is that [the conductor] be humble before the composer;  that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience;  that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning – the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence” (The Joy of Music, New York, 1954, p. 156).  It is as perfect and beautiful a statement about the art and philosophy of music as can be found.  It is all the more saddening and perplexing that Bernstein rarely followed his own credo.


Gunther Schuller, The Compleat Conductor p. 89

And as a composer, Bernstein also squandered his enormous talent as he rarely  did anything more than produce pastiche, borrowing in a way different in quality, though not in kind from the kind that Andrew Lloyd Webber produces.  I will admit it tended to be a better grade of the stuff but still.  

I think Roger Sessions' comment that Bernstein chose "a life of fame and worldly success over [artistic] achievement" is spot on.  I can't imagine anyone who performs one of his pieces has ever had their life changed by it, their artistic life, that is.  Though several have used them as publicity stunts.  

I don't hate him, I just think it's absurd to over-rate him this long after his death, the same way they do Glenn Gould.  People say that when he talked to you at a party he really gave you his attention, he wasn't looking around to see if there was someone else more profitable to pay attention to.  That's a nice trait.  

He's Like The Bastard Child of Ron Popeil and Paul Popenoe Mating with Enzyte Bob: Totally Creepy Jordan Peterson Makes Case For 'Enforced Monogamy'

Jordan Peterson is so friggin' bizarre his cult status should be considered a public mental health crisis, that is if Trump and people falling for the Putin mafia regime's promotion of fascism throughout the world isn't already the definitive diagnosis of that.

This is one of the creepiest of all of the things I've heard about this U of Toronto's most absurd contribution to unlightenment, untellectualism in a while. 


That any accredited faculty at any accredited university, anywhere, could maintain such a person as a faculty member in an alleged science as the entire so-called intellectual community, world-wide doesn't use him as Exhibit A in the case that such a science at such a university isn't a total fraud is an indictment of the entire intellectual edifice that allows such crap to be peddled as intellectually  respectable.  No wonder idiot boys in the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions buy this crap.

I am still dealing with huge computer problems without the aid of someone under 30 so writing will be minimal for the foreseeable future.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Trigger Warning A Senile Senior Made A Spectacle Of Himself

He posts a picture of himself looking senile as well as stupid in a silly shirt with a silly message on it while wearing his Roger Stone beret and he calls me an idiot.   Yeah, the whole world can see Simps is a genius in that display.  Here, you just have to see it to believe it, reduced in size because some of you may find it disturbing

Thumbnail


Lennie might have liked it, he adored attention so much but I'd guess there's an even chance he's the one who would have hated it.  As far as I'm concerned if the  guy who libels me at Duncan's hundreds of times a year wants to expose himself as their village idiot, I'm powerless to stop him.  He's another two year old who figures negative attention is still attention.  I can report that I'm nowhere near that ugly and lumpy.

Update:  And, checking the in-box, "General Zod" got mightily pissed off over my little post linking to the CBC piece about the former High Rabbi of Ireland, anti-apartheid activist, etc. Rabbi David Rosen, promoting veganism as being so ethical that it should be considered a the appropriate standard for modern dietary laws.

Rabbi David Rosen, one of the leading Jewish interfaith activists, would like Jews to consider veganism as the new kosher. He joins more than 70 rabbis worldwide who have signed a declaration urging Jews around the world to embrace veganism.

"Today, there are important ethical reasons why the whole world should be living according to a plant-based diet.

"But from a Jewish perspective, there are specific particular concerns that relate to specific Jewish injunctions which are born out of the religious tradition of Jewish practice law ... that should demand that people should no longer if you like, collaborate or party to an industry which is problematic ethically, environmentally, even in terms of economic justice," says Rosen.

Rabbi Rosen is the International Director of Interreligious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee in Jerusalem.  He's also the Honorary President of the International Jewish Vegetarian Society.

Perhaps by chance the CBC Sunday Edition program had a pretty good long-piece report about veganism as a means of feeding the world and what a disaster meat eating is for the environment as well as it being an aspect of inequality.  I don't know how I feel about the "meat without killing animals" aspect of it except to say I've been a vegetarian for about a half a century and I don't have any interest in eating such, perhaps, cruelty free flesh of the future.  Though I can't think of any moral problem in what the report said about it.

I have to confess, it wouldn't upset me if "Zod" is even more unhappy with this addendum to this morning's post.

Vegan Is The New Kosher

Vegan is the new kosher, rabbis worldwide declare

Computer is still crashed,  I just erased four lines of complaining about that and I hadn't even gotten started.   

This story from the CBC's Tapestry show is more worth while.  

I'm beginning to think I should go to podcasting as my eyesight goes.