Saturday, May 25, 2024

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Arthur Miller - Juarez: Thunder From The Mountains

 Thunder From The Mountains 

In 1867 on June 19th as the light of dawn broke over the peak of mount Popocatépetl death by rifle fire was administered to Ferdinand Maximilian last emperor of Mexico. With it came liberty to a nation. More than any other, one man was responsible. He was Benito Juárez and it is his ever glorious story told here.

Having been going through nostalgia for playwrights of you youth,  I've gotten to Arthur Miller.   Instead of looking for radio versions of his most famous plays I've been looking for the ones he actually wrote for radio.   I'm not a huge fan of the "golden age of radio" production style or the acting style but I know a lot of people like it.   Orson Welles has the title role.   

I'd like to hear a more updated production of it.  The hokey music doesn't add much to it except distraction.   

Update:  Here's another one

Mayer Island And Back 

 

Friday, May 24, 2024

How Come "Trad-Catholic" Men Aren't Told They Should Follow Joseph's Example?

LONG TERM READERS of what I write will know that I detest American football because of the inherent violence of the game when it is played according to the rules.  It goes in a category with boxing and a few other sports in that, also hockey as played in the North American style, which isn't inherently violent but in which violence is routinely allowed, encouraged and which has become a major feature of the, um, "game."   So I'd never heard of this Harrison Butker jerk until he made that speech at the little right-wing Catholic college a few days back.   When I found out he was a kicker, a guy who got paid millions of dollars to, every once in a while, strut onto the field to kick a ball once - and that's all - everything else he said was no surprise to me.  While I'm aware there are a few nice guys who play football (one of my favorite in-laws did) and even professional football, and a lot who are like most of us, more morally ambivalent,  there are an unusually large number of conceited, spoiled, assholes in the game (like one of my less likable ex-in-laws), especially at the professional level.   That he is obviously a right-wing game-playing white, rich boy whose own family didn't follow his dictates for how a good Catholic is supposed to live,  someone whose own career choice is definitely not in line with the Gospels and Epistles,  it didn't surprise me that he's a jerk.

But along with his dictates for how Women are supposed to live, in line with the growing cult of the "trad-catholics"  and especially "trad-catholic wives"   "trads" being big on the cult of the Virgin,  I was wondering if his own trad-wife might not want to consider this letter that appeared in today's National Catholic Reporter. 

Trad wives traditional?

I found the article about the "trad wives" both interesting and horrifying. I do have a question though about the supposed devotion to Mary. If I recall correctly, Mary (according to Catholic tradition) is a perpetual Virgin.

If these women are so devoted to Mary, surely they should be following that path, with their husbands also following Joseph's example of chastity?

I find it interesting that this hard core devotion to motherhood is modeled after a woman that had ONE child and never had sex.

DALE CEBULA
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

You've got to wonder if his wife read that letter and took it to heart, how eager would this Butker boy be for taking the role of Joseph?   My guess is, not so much. 

If you have to wonder as to why Joseph isn't considered as a role model for "trad-husbands" you should try thinking less hard about that.  

Thursday, May 23, 2024

Semper Idem, Semper Simps

I KNEW SIMPS would go to tired old Dalton Trumbo and the script he wrote for Sparticus.  It's one of the very few very worn tricks he's got in his little bag of them.  Another one is Phil Spector being a murderer.  I can reliably get him to repeat that and several others, too.  Maybe next time I write something I know will set off Simps I should embed a coded prediction into it of which of his predictable moves he'll make will be so I can point that out afterwards.  

The last time he pulled that on me I got the pleasure of pointing out what the old commie said complementing Christianity in the very part Simps tried to goad me with.

Lazare-Lévy plays Claude Debussy, La Soirée dans Grenade

 

 

Lazare Levy was one of the most convincing Debussy players I've ever heard live or, in his case, through his far too few recordings.   Nearly perfect technique and totally convincing musicality.  

Unfiltered Rant - Started out as a response, but continued as I was listening to the news

I SUPPOSE I'LL ALWAYS have to point out that in rejecting "modernism" I am not any kind of advocate of the daffy idea of returning to some imagined past.  And every idea of the past is the product of imagination. I doubt there is any past period of human history which the majority of those who experienced it didn't want to get to a better future, fast.  You can't return to the past and I don't believe you're supposed to try to return to it.  It can't be done, for a start, and yearning for it is silly romance based on a fantasy of the past.   It is a foolish kind of imagining up stuff.  I remember back when supposed "channeling" of imagined past lives was popular with Hollywood types inclined to that that there were an extraordinary number of those who had been royalty or nobles or aristocrats in their past lives.  Probably a lot more of those than had ever existed in the real human past.  People didn't seem to much remember being slaves in their past lives, or oppressed Women or babies left to die of exposure because they weren't wanted.  The hankering after the Constitutional status quo of the 1790s or before the 1930s or before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are exactly the same kind of stupidity with a generally far more evil motive, and such bull shit dominates the Supreme Court and much of the legal orthodoxy of our day.  Not that I buy for a second that any of them actually believe it,  such "originalism" or "textualism" is a mere pretense of them reinforcing the oligarchy of the rich, the white, the Republican-fascist, as overtly partisan and self-interested as the actions of the slave holders on the Supreme Court before the emancipation proclamation and the dominant coalition of white-supremacists and financier-class servants for almost all of the rest of that court's sordid history.  A history that has been covered up with blatantly dishonest public relations and romantic bull shit of a related kind.  

No, I don't want to return to any past because not only is it impossible to do that, I don't think we're supposed to want to do that.  I think if we were meant to hold any part of the human past as a steady state, that would have happened.  I think God intends for history to go forward because life is change and that change is for a reason.  I think our and every other state of being has been contingent and a product of choices we have made, that we are always given a choice between what is right and what is wrong to the extent we can know that and that, as well, is a part of the working of history.  It is clear from the terrible history of the 20th century we went through, a prelude to the perils of the 21st century, that we are allowed to make the wrong choices and suffer the consequences.  That not a little of that evil was a result of the romantic notions of glorious national and racial pasts accounts for much of the worst of the past and the present.  Nazism was a mixture of the theory of natural selection mixed with daffy, romantic period notions of linguistics and the snobbery of vainglorious ethnic identity, the cheap self-esteem of nationalism and parochial patriotism.  Communism was a mixture of similar things under the guises of patriotism and nationalism, sometimes minus the Darwinist content.  Personally, I never knew a Marxist who wasn't a conceited snob and either rather stupid or amoral.  Other fascisms and the more criminal behaviors of the so-called "liberal democracies" trafficked in the same kinds of romantic notions of pasts, often overt and transparent lies sold through show-biz and PR, two of the greatest venues of lying in the history of our common species.  I think that, as well as learing the evils of facism, Nazism, Communism and Marxism, we are supposed to learn the evils inherent in "classical liberlism" the libertarian liberalism of "liberal democracy" the kind of democracy that, in the American context had both genocidal land stealing and slavery and male supremacy as integral parts of it, parts that were not extingushed in the altered liberal-democracy from the Warren Court years.  Indeed, some of those rulings considered the greatest boons such as the permission given to the mass media to lie with impunity, has been the major engine in the resurgence of our own overt form of fascism, white-supremacy and its allies in the billionair-millionaire financed and mass media promoted benefit for the richest among us.  

I have always been a leveler, favoring total human equality on every basis, sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, bodily condition, . . .  and, most radically of all, since it encompasses all of those, economic justice based on economic leveling.  Concentrations of wealth are one of the greatest dangers to equality, democracy and a decent life for all.  So, you see, I'm not only a radical, I'm the most extreme kind of radical there is.  One who believes all People are not only metaphysically equal but rightly made equal at the highest material, economic and spiritual level of equality that we can attain, leveling billionaires and millionaires out of existence and treating People as equal, protecting egalitarian democracy from all dangers, including the ideas of those who would destroy equality and democracy.  

The ACLU, Holmes-Roberts Court notions of protecting ideas while leaving People and their lives at risk from fascists, Nazis, white supremacists and those who have no real chance of gaining power in the United States, Marxists, out of the daffiest notions of "justice" and "fairness" only enables the rich to destroy equality and democracy, the goal of the Roberts Court which will have the rote acquiescence of the "liberals" on that court out of some of the stupidest orthodoxy in human history.   I can be both an anti-communist and an anti-anti-communist, basing the later on their anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic intent.  So, I am consistent in that.  That's a lot better reason for opposing them than the vulgarity and sleaziness of those who mounted the red-scare campaign and that Hollywood movies tell you the old white-collar commies who scribbled for the movies were some kind of heroes.  Since just about every one of them supported Hitler's rival and perhaps  record-holder of most People killed, Stalin, as his crimes were being accurately reported, they were no heroes.  They were in many cases, the exact moral equivalents of the American Nazis.  The old-line anti-communists were really the precursors of today's Trumpian Republican-fascists a few old-line Democratic dupes of that thrown in to that mix.   I am very much over the Kennedy mystique, not least of which on the basis of their anti-communism but for other reasons, as well.  


Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Arthur Berger - Suite for Piano 4-Hands

 

 

David Kopp & Rodney Lister, piano

I realized I forgot his birthday this year so here's this suite.  I miss him.   Apparently I'm not  alone in that.