Blogging Beyond Theocracy: Technical addendum

 Last paragraphs revised 20 April (around 4:00 AM)

Birth of Dionysos (at center, getting pulled out of Zeus's thigh, with his crown already on). Apulian red figure kraton, late fifth or early fourth century B.C.E., via theoi.com.

The following statements are all probably untrue:

(1) When Zeus's pregnant girlfriend Semele saw him in his full divine splendor, the sight literally burned her to death, so he snatched the fetus and sewed it up inside his thigh in order to bring it to term.

(2) When Mrs. Bennett heard that somebody was moving into the big house at Netherfield she immediately decided the new guy ought to marry one of her five daughters. 

(3) When the Moskva blew up and sank in the Black Sea, nobody knew what caused it to happen.

But they are untrue in obviously different ways, with obviously different functions, even if it may be difficult to say what the functions are. 

The last, the lie, is the easiest: it's meant to deny the truth, which is that we know very well what caused the ship to sink, two Neptune missiles fired by Ukrainian forces. 

Pitch: Woke Pork

 

My forthcoming political gothic, Pajama Boy, recounts the adventures of Kyndle, a patriotic Christian blonde first-year law student at Rutgers (she should have gone to Princeton, but Law Students of Color had snatched up all the spots, with their heartrending sob stories of deprived youth in lieu of good LSAT scores, no doubt, not that hers was that great, but it just had to be better than most of them—why, most of them didn't even know they owed the Civil Rights Act to Republicans! Or asked her some of those snotty Critical Race Theory questions like "So, what parts of the Civil Rights Act do you support?" just because she happened to mention how she didn't like affirmative action and it turned out that was actually in the Civil Rights Act, which just shows how sneaky they've been all along.

Anyway, when Kyndle runs into Fivush, a skinny boy with too-curly hair and a flannel shirt she spots trying to register student voters on campus, she knows right away she's witnessing one of those voter fraud operations that steal elections from real Americans, and she's determined to stop it by any means necessary, and that's where the shenanigans start. Because it's so hard to figure out what he's doing that's illegal—no dead people or noncitizens showing up at his booth. In fact he even registers her, after she's openly told him she's a Republican, like he doesn't even care. She needs to go deeper and deeper underground, until she's somehow spending a winter weekend at his parents' house, in pajamas, drinking cocoa, and helping the old folks sign up for Obamacare, and before you know it she's finding out that Fivush has chest hair and she has a G-spot, and how's she going to explain that to Biff, the anal-oriented football player she's been dating since they were 14? Biff probably thinks a G-spot is a Bitcoin denomination!

And next comes the time when she's a couple of weeks late and Fivush just calmly says he's glad abortion law is so easy in New Jersey and it's against Jewish law to oppose abortion in any case. And he's really awed by the multiorgasmic thing but he's made a vow never to produce a child that's unambiguously white. Now what's she going to do?

I think I'm going to call the series "Woke Pork".

"woke pork" https://t.co/EN05DjhXev

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 13, 2022

Conservatives in Caves

 

This can't possibly be real, can it? It's like David Lynch hacked Shapiro's email account. pic.twitter.com/bXxnGjIbwe

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 24, 2021

Hey, gang,

You're familiar with me as the guy on speedballs and helium who can rant on the day's Murdoch talking point for eight minutes without taking a breath, displaying astonishing erudition and common sense as I disembowel the liberal line, and I know how much you treasure that experience, because you're an essential part of what has made my enterprise and my self the incredible successes we are today. And I am one hundred percent that guy, but I'm so much more. For example, I like to just hang out shooting the shit with my Intellectual Dark Buds in the den. In my new series, Conservatives in Caves Having Coffee, we'll be setting up the camera in my basement and you'll get to be a fly on the wallpaper as I share some of my most intimate thoughts with friends like Dr. Jordan Peterson in his suit and sweater vest. 

Instead of the harsh light and monochrome background for my talking head, we'll have a softer and more relaxed set, though with masculine furnishings like the classic wire wheel coffee table, and I'll be in lighter makeup. Jordan doesn't drink coffee, but maybe I can talk him into a cup of bone broth, and even if he's not drinking anything, it'll be a thrill for you to hear us chat about the masculinity crisis and stuff like that. Stresses of modern marriage. How to raise your kids with the moral backbone they'll need to survive the coming radical left gay trans socialist takeover of our country.

And speaking of child-rearing, you'll be crazy about Badminton? Goodminton!, my new show where I lead my kids and their friends in backyard net games like badminton and volleyball, filmed in natural outdoor light, and you'll get to see me in shorts and sneakers engaging with some of the most precious people in my life. You'll get a sense of what it would be like to have me as a fun but firm father, enforcing the rules but leaving time for hearty laughter. And every once in a while I'll throw a stick at the camera and you can pretend you're the dog.

And then for evenings we'll be streaming My Date With Ben, a series where I go out with my wife, Dr. Shapiro, for some wholesome entertainment. You'll be sharing our table at the tango club as we nurse our glasses of Malbec and joining us on the dance floor trying out some fancy moves, or giggling with us at the bowling alley as I score strike after strike. Or some nights simply behind our heads, perhaps, when we're on the couch relaxing with some Netflix. You'll be wondering if you could make me as happy as Dr. Shapiro does, holding hands and enjoying some fresh-popped popcorn, repeating our favorite lines from whatever the film happens to be. I love her a lot, obviously, but I do love you too. Facts may not care about your feelings, but I do, and I always will.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Lindsey's Song

Sen. Lindsey Graham: "President @realDonaldTrump has been more right about China than probably anybody in the last 30 years." pic.twitter.com/ct7fMAZ94a

— The Hill (@thehill) April 18, 2020

To the tune of:

a kook, a crook, a piece of shit
a mook completely out of it
and presidentially unfit
I've looked at Trump that way

but now I think he's always right
a source of wonder and delight
I pray to him most every night
and talk him up by day

I've looked at Trump from both sides now
in spite, in love, and still somehow
I'm not quite certain what I think
I guess I'll pour myself—a-a drink

my tastes are wet, my humor's dry
I take my pleasures on the fly
I've always been espoused to my
political career

but now I'm feeling so forlorn
my friends all stare at me in scorn
I'm sorry but I wasn't born
to be a mutineer

I've looked at Trump from both sides now
from high, from low, and still somehow
I can't remember what I think
I guess I'll pour myself—a-a drink

MOMA

Transfigured version of the Monet room, via Quartz.

Jordan Orlando's big piece on the newly renovated and expanded Museum of Modern Art and the "paradoxical alignment of capital and counterculture", "The Once and Future MOMA", has arrived at newyorker.com, or you could always read it on paper if you wanted to wait until Tuesday, but digital access to the magazine is available for fifty bucks a year, so don't deprive yourselves any longer. Life is too short.

Until 2020!

Haven't done a New Year concert in years. Hope you enjoy these! Warning, some lengthy ones in the middle. See you in 2020!

Fireworks



Listen for snatch of The Marseillaise around 4:50.

Drink


Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča (saw her Carmen 3-4 years ago) in a tidbit from Offenbach's La Périchole.

Interlude

Oh, Brahms. In 1890, at 57, having grown his famous beard, he thought he'd retire from composing, not in any despairing way, but just feeling he'd said what he needed and wanted more time doing nothing—he was dating, in fact, for the first time since his broken engagement of 1859, a 28-year-old mezzo-soprano, Alice Barbi, whatever that may have meant in Vienna in 1890, and hanging out with the most famous pop musician in Vienna at the time, Johann Strauss II, who was eight years older than he was. But when he went to a music festival in Meiningen in January 1891 and heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld playing the Weber concerto and the Mozart clarinet quintet, the dark intimacy of the instrument's sound with a genius player gave him a longing to do that thing, and he unretired himself, writing a trio, a quintet like Mozart's which is the one I love best, and two extraordinary sonatas, of which this is the second. Among a bunch of great pieces that are not for clarinet.

OK here's the trio too.

>

Interlude

Well, in 1747 Johann Sebastian Bach, then 62 and not looking for a more interesting job than the one he'd held for almost 25 years at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, heard from an old acquaintance, the polymath Lorenz Christoph Mizler von Kolof, the first person after the Renaissance to lecture on music history at a German university, and at this point in his life court physician to King August III of Poland, and the founder and permanent secretary of the Corresponding Society for the Musical Sciences (Correspondierende Societät der musikalischen Wissenschaften); Bach was invited to become the society's 14th member. In return, he presented the society with a work of fantastical complexity and weirdness, Some Canonic Variations on the Christmas Song "Vom Himmel Hoch", and a portrait of himself, the famed painting by E.G. Haussmann, in which he is shown holding a copy of another one of those crazy last works, the triplex canon for six voices BWV 1076.

The melody had been composed by Martin Luther a couple of centuries earlier, and Bach apparently liked it a lot, having set it several times in church music works. A canon is a polyphonic work in which different voices play or sing the same melody starting at different times (Row, Row, Row Your Boat is a canon) and often at different pitches and sometimes different tempos. These five start off as two-part canons in the organist's left and right hands while the feet play the original Luther melody on the pedals, but they get more complicated. The graphics in this video do a brilliant job of showing how it works:

For the Record: Devin's Farm

Apparently Devin Nunes, scourge of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and special secret emissary of the White House to the Hill, has gotten tired of all those people mocking him for claiming he's a Tulare County family farmer just because the family dairy farm moved to Iowa some years ago without him, where it's generally worked by undocumented immigrants, while he himself stayed in California growing fragrant and multiflowered paranoid fantasies about President Trump and the FBI, so he's bought himself a spread of acres in his district, well, maybe half an acre:

Nunes, R-Tulare, reported on a newly released financial disclosure form that he owns a Tulare County farm that generates no income for him and is worth less than $15,000.

Nunes has never before claimed a farm as one of his assets in annual financial disclosures, according to public records dating back to 2007.

That suggests he either bought a small part in a farm recently or he improperly filed previous financial disclosures, according to Delaney Marsco, legal counsel on ethics for the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center.

“Either he had a tiny stake in this farm all along and he’s been improperly filing financial disclosures, or he bought a tiny, tiny farm this year in order to protect his reputation as a farmer in his district,” Marsco said.

Except the reporters couldn't find any records that he or his wife had bought any land in 2018 either, so who knows? Anyway, I just couldn't really resist:

For the Record: Rehearsal

A couple of years ago, at the height of the #MeToo movement, when I found myself accusing myself of complicity in the case of the Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine, an abuser I sort of knew was an abuser but whose victims I never gave any thought to, I mentioned some video I'd seen of him rehearsing the soprano Kathleen Battle, as an example of how an artist who is a bad man can also be a good man, and a great artist can also be a person of extraordinary tenderness and generosity, on the job, but I didn't post the video, or even look for it, and I just happened to run across some of the same tape, a longer thing featuring not only Battle but also the wondrous Jessye Norman, in the 1988 Met production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, and I wanted to post it now, for the record, by way of trying to explain the thing I couldn't articulate. I guess that means open thread.

Two American Songs

Remember being on a long cross-country drive, family, and singing? In my time, we had a real repertoire and would go on thematic jags—all the songs you know focusing on a woman's name, or state names, which we'd try to do in alphabetical order, or animals. If people could do that today and I were leading a cycle of songs on American cities, I'd be bound to come up with these two wonderful works that keep popping up in my mind today, each a remarkable fusion of lyric and melody and iconic of the place it celebrates—the Randy Newman with its deep self-deprecating modesty and generosity, the Marty Robbins with its self-conscious biculturalism and the extraordinary combination of white-hot romanticism with cowboy deadpan.

Memories

OK sometime exactly that many decades ago I was a participant in a dance contest in Germany with my colleague Kathy in which this was the tune. We had never heard of Rod Stewart so we obviously didn't know he was in the band, if he was, which I think was not yet the case (he joined along with Ron Wood in 1970 when they had become The Faces). I would not have cared, though I probably would have been interested in the keyboard player, Ian McLagan. Kathy and I won second prize though I must acknowledge that there were only two couples on the floor.

Break

Brooks on Contemporary Art

Torey Thornton, “There’s Solid Militia Fashion, but Come On, Domestic Like Focus Always”, via Buffalo News, whose critic didn't like the artist's 2016 debut show much, but I like this one a lot.

So two Manhattan contemporary art curators (Jewish Museum and Whitney), two New York–based conceptual artists, and a Brooklyn-based painter, Torey Thornton, walk into a bar. No, really, they walk into the New York Times newsroom, equipped with their lists of ten "works of art that define the contemporary age", toward the project of compiling a master list of 25 in a couple of hours for the Times's style magazine, T, and

Unsurprisingly, the system fell apart. It was impossible, some argued, to rank art. It was also impossible to select just 10. (Rosler, in fact, objected to the whole premise, though she brought her own list to the discussion in the end.)... this list of works is merely what has been culled from the conversation, each chosen because it appeared on a panelist’s original submission of 10 (in two instances, two different works by the same artist were nominated, which were considered jointly). The below is not definitive, nor is it comprehensive. Had this meeting happened on a different day, with a different group, the results would have been different.

Also there were hardly any paintings, sculptures, or works on paper, and hardly any of the artists were very famous (or famous in peculiar and tendentious ways, including Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons but rejecting Gerhard Richter), leading world-famous art critic David Brooks ("Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?") to lament

Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded.... Artists have always taken political stands, but in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone — and these are the truths that keep us sane. Now one gets the sense that not only is the personal political, but that the political has eclipsed the personal. What’s missing from most of these pieces is human contact and emotional range.

Which might have some point to it, notwithstanding the clichés in which it's expressed, were it not for the fact that this is T magazine ffs, from the Times style department, and represents the actual art world no more than that recipe for guacamole with peas represented contemporary gastronomy.

Hakuna Potato

Warthog and suricate or meerkat from the photorealist Lion King that opened this week. Terrible as the cartoon was, this one has to be far worse. 

My kids were Disney-aged through the string of animated hits of what I guess were the Katzenberg years, Little Mermaid through Pocahontas, and I saw them all, some repeatedly, in addition to reading the book versions aloud, and mostly really hated them for various reasons, especially the disloyalty to the sources—they seemed to me to be working to destroy the sources, from Hans Christian Andersen to colonial history of Virginia, and replace them with perverted simulacra.

For instance in the case of Beauty and the Beast, Mme de Beaumont's Enlightenment fable of falling in love on grounds of moral affinity rather than being distracted by the superficialities was transformed by changing the character of the Beast. In the original he is a Beast because of the completely arbitrary malice of a wicked fairy, but unfailingly kind, generous, and self-effacing, which is why the Beauty comes to love him and the enchantment is overcome. Disney makes him into a cruel person who is bestified by a very judgmental fairy, as deserved punishment, and he becomes handsome again because he's making an effort to be nicer. The moral of the story turns out to be that if you're ugly it's probably your fault because you were mean to some old lady, and serves you right.

But the one I hated the most was The Lion King, for really political reasons at first.

Fourth of July

The third movement of Charles Ives's symphony New England Holidays, depicting a small-town Connecticut Fourth from early morning to a collision of at least two parades (one of the great things about this video is the two conductors), takes its time getting where it's going, and by the time it arrives it's practically over, but it's a wondrous piece of music.



And here's the whole symphony (couldn't find one with any video worth looking at though)

In which I agree with Bari Weiss

Photo by Robert Cherny for The Frisc.

Sort of. "From the left," as you might say, with Weiss's views ("San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History") on

the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

It's about the 13 fresco murals painted in 1936 inside George Washington High School in San Francisco by Victor Arnautoff, a Communist student of Diego Rivera, under the auspices of the WPA, depicting a less sanitized version of the life of George Washington in which the Father of Our Country is shown managing the enslaved workers on his tobacco plantation at Mount Vernon (not cotton, as too many reports including Weiss's claim), and as a land speculator pushing the colonization of the frontier literally over the dead body of a murdered Native.

Lowering the Barr

From Mary Ellen, our attorney general:

I hope Twitter will let me post my cartoon without demur. pic.twitter.com/sTq5hu5eUE

— Mary Ellen Sandahl (@blueeyedgrass) May 18, 2019

Another Villanelle

Speaking of villanelles, I went on a Google quest to get a clearer idea of what their evolution was, and found a 19th-century (post-Romantic or "Parnassian") poem by Théophile Gautier that has exactly zero in common with the villanelle (three eight-line stanzas, no refrains) but I happened to recognize it as the text of one of the best songs ever written, which I know as music instead of poetry, the first number of Berlioz's Nuits d'Été. I had no idea it was entitled "Villanelle" but it is and I had to post it because I love it so much, plus it's pretty short and seasonally appropriate (weather in New York is chilly and rainy and so awful I'm cooking chicken soup for the old lady, but we know spring is here). The soprano is the pretty famous Véronique Gens, and she sings the whole wonderful cycle (about half an hour) here.



"When the new season arrives, and the cold has vanished, the two of us will go, my beauty, to pick the lilies of the valley in the woods, breaking the morning pearls of dew like grapes under our feet, and hearing the blackbirds—

Whistle!

Spring is here, my beauty, the month that lovers bless, and the bird, smoothing its wing to silk, recites poetry on the edge of the nest. Oh come sit with me on this mossy bank and talk about our lovely love and tell me with your sweet voice—

Forever!

Going far, so far, letting our path wander, we'll frighten the hidden rabbit, and the stag, bending to admire his big antlers in the mirror of the spring, until, happy and at ease, fingers entwined, we get back with a basket of strawberries—

From the woods!"

(my translation, French text here)

At Long Last

To the tune of:


This is a marvelous recording of a Cole Porter song I didn't admire that much before hearing this interpretation, spiriting ordinary cabaret into jazz heaven.

My lyric is inspired by that great line in today's telephone story, as in the NBC version:

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke Friday and both agreed "there was no collusion" between Moscow and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

as if it was a kind of mystery to the two men whether they had colluded together or not, but they checked their calendars and neither one of them could find any.

"Vova are you colluding with me?"
"I'm not sure, does it matter?" https://t.co/jMCm9wbhU9

— I Feel Snitty Oh So Snitty (@Yastreblyansky) May 3, 2019

Is this a tour de force
or only a tour
is it like grabbing pussy
or more like garroting the poor
Is it a Marx Brothers script
or just Bud and Lou
is it an inaccurate refrain
or merely untrue

Is it some juicy gossip
or is it the math
Is this a golden shower
or am I taking a bath
is it petty financial fraud
laced with confusion
or is it at long last
collusion?