A lot of recent hit songs aren’t really songs in the truest sense of the word, in that if you were to strip away all the ear-candy sounds and the, erm, posing, there isn’t actually a song structure to speak of; if one were to play with one finger on a piano the – putative – melody of one of these songs, there’d be nothing resembling a song that anyone could remember. In contrast, the old folk songs from the oral tradition had to pass through a kind of multi-generational human filter; they only lived on, in the years before the advent of recording and playback, because their inherent, pleasing treasures could be released at any time by anyone at all, using just melody, words, and rudimentary chords.
Tonight’s musical selection, by Maine-based American songwriter David Mallet, is a modern-era song that would definitely survive in the oral tradition even if there was no recorded music. Over the last forty years or so it’s been sung with pleasure, around a million campfires and family get-togethers, by amateur singalong-ists with just the barest of guitar skills, for one simple reason: the words and melody unite to create a timeless, heartfelt song that speaks to people of all ages, from two to two-hundred. So gather up your loved ones and celebrate the yearly miracle of rebirth by singing along with Tommy Makem & Liam Clancey’s fine version of The Garden Song.
You are invited to plant your Reader Tips in the comments.
Where’s the vat with the Green C?
Peter Singer, writing in the New York Times: “Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all….No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?”
Jim Jones, speaking in Jonestown, Guyana: “It’s been done by every tribe in history, every tribe facing annihilation. All the Indians in the Amazon are doing it right now. They refuse to bring any babies into the world. They kill every child that comes into the world, because they don’t want to live in this kind of a world.”
Peter Singer: “Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely.”
Jim Jones: “I don’t think it is what we want to do with our babies. I don’t think that’s what we had in mind to do with our babies. It was said by the greatest of prophets, from time immemorial, ‘No man takes my life from me, I lay my life down.'”
Peter Singer: “Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off — for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations — and it doesn’t make anyone worse off, because there won’t be anyone else to be worse off…”
Jim Jones: “So my opinion is that we (must) be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to in ancient Greece, and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act…”
Peter Singer: “Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?”
Jim Jones: “There’s no use, Christine, it’s just not worth living like this … not worth living like this…We had, we had some value…but now we don’t have any value…I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of…”
The jet-setting prince of Canadian politics
During last Thursday’s session in the House of Commons, world-opinion-channeler Michael Ignatieff, who apparently believes that the opinions of those in the rest of the world should be one of Canadians’ primary concerns, opened Question Period with his usual internationalist name-dropping: “Mr. Speaker, six Nobel laureates are calling on this government to put the environment on the G20 agenda. The Mexican president and the UN Secretary-General called for the same thing here in Ottawa a few weeks ago.”
He was just getting started. In his very next question, this one about the cost of the summit, the great citizen-of-the-world jetted in even more international opinion: “Even France is saying that the costs of this summit are getting out of control, and France knows something about extravagance. Its foreign minister is making jokes about the lake…”
Stephen Harper addressed the cost issue, then added:
“As for extravagance in France, I would not know about that, but perhaps the Leader of the Opposition, at his home in Provence, could tell us all about it.”
Reader Tips
Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips thread is a patriotic song by American songwriter Randy Newman. While the Los Angeles-based Newman, a prototypical Democrat, wrote the song during the years of the Bush Administration, the song is actually a defense of the long-term ship of state, as he uses historical context to take a shot at – or at least, to plead the case against – the naysayers around the world who constantly criticize America and characterize its leaders as the most immoral in history.
Sad, funny, and touching in turns, here’s Randy Newman’s A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Servility and democracy
In his essay Morals & the servile mind, published in the New Criterion, Kenneth Minogue suggests that the current state of democracy in the west is different than that of a hundred years ago in important ways. Our inherited moral values, he notes, are increasingly challenged by “politico-moral” public policies that are “both morally obligatory and politically imperative.”
…while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns….many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.
“Rulers are losing patience with us” – in Canada we see this whenever an out-of-power Liberal leader lectures Conservative politicians, and by extension conservative voters, about who we are as Canadians, and, especially, on what the Canadian view is on various “issues” dear to the brand – whether it be “our” view on global warming, or “our” view on aboriginal issues. This sort of royal ‘We’ attitude is, Minogue suggests, a misapprehension on the part of politicians:
Our rulers are theoretically ‘our’ representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves.
In any democracy these politicians who summon us to reform ourselves are, of course, elected. When Minogue describes people who “forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned” he is describing of virtually every Liberal/NDP voter in the country. Even though he’s from London England, his own view is a reasonably accurate description of the essential views of the Tea Party movement, and of most Canadian conservatives:
The point…is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit.
The enduring screech
I used to think that the most annoying sound on earth is a mosquito hovering in the dark near my ear, but that was before I heard the “bellowing and enduring screech” of the vuvuzela, a one-note plastic trumpet that mindless African fans at the World Cup have been playing nonstop. Anyone who’s ever been kept awake by a bunch of braying, idiotic drunks knows that fully half of of the annoyance comes not from the volume but from having to hear such stupidity; similarly, the problem with the ungodly din of the vuvuzela isn’t just the decibel level – a single vuvezela is capable of 120 decibels – it’s hearing the audible evidence of the damnable stupidity of the IQ-challenged African fans who think it’s a good idea to make that sound nonstop for hours on end during a soccer match.
It’s little wonder that Cape Town shops are “running out of ‘vuvu-stopper’ earplugs. Spanish player Xabi Alonso’s description of the noise as “unbearable” is almost an understatement. To my ears it sounds like a giant swarm of metre-long robotic mosquitos with mechanical problems hovering six inches above my deathbed, but everyone’s got their own description: Martin Parry of AFP thinks it sounds like “a swarm of angry bees,” while Germany’s The Local describes it as being like a swarm of angry hornets.
Calls to have the vuvuzela banned from the World Cup – “the incessant single-note tooting drives me to distraction” – are widely shared. If you want to know why, listen to the stadium sound at around the 30 second mark in this video. Are you ready to confess yet?
Causing discomfort and annoyance might actually be the whole point: “To foreign coaches and players they could be a curse, (but) to South Africans they might yet be the secret weapon…” The South African coach says “We have to reinforce that advantage. We want it
Reader Tips
Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips comments thread is a song about a unhappy fellow who has been dumped by his girlfriend. It’s not touching, poignant, or heart-rending in any way; no, we’re talking pure catharsis. Here’s a video of Ben Folds Five, fronted by – wait for it – Ben Folds, performing Song For The Dumped.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
The end of an era
As the World Cup tournament was getting underway Egyptian Cleric Mus’id Anwar explained that soccer is part of the Zionist plot for world domination:
As you know, the Jews, or the Zionists, have The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Over 100 years ago, they formulated a plan to rule the world, and they are implementing this plan. One of the protocols says: “Keep the [non-Jews] preoccupied with songs, soccer, and movies.”
Mus’id Anwar was obviously unaware that the secretive, all-powerful group had in fact disbanded in March of last year:
“We had a good run,” said one senior Elder, reminiscing over old photographs of world leaders in his musty, wood-paneled office at an undisclosed location. “Maybe we ran the world for just a little too long. Anyway, now it’s Obama’s problem.”
The announcement comes after a year in which many of the Elders’ most prized institutions suffered disheartening failures. The vaunted global banking system, which lay at the heart of Jewish world domination for almost two centuries, collapsed with astonishing rapidity, requiring trillions of dollars in bailout funds. The newspaper industry, through which the Elders have controlled world opinion, is in shambles, with prominent papers declaring bankruptcy and forcing millions of readers to form their own opinions.
Plus, as happens so often these days, the kids just weren’t interested in taking over the business:
“World domination just doesn’t resonate with the younger generation of Jews,” said Marvin Tobman, a professor of non-profit management at San Diego State University and expert on Jewish communal life. “They want the fun of fixing the world, not the responsibility of running it.”
At long last, the world gets to watch a World Cup tournament without undue Jewish influence. As liver-spotted Elder “Morris” said, “The only thing I’m looking to dominate now is a Pina Colada.”
Reader Tips
I’ve always favoured Arthur Rubenstein’s interpretation of the Nocturnes, so much so that I was always disappointed with other pianists’ recordings. Then, two years ago, a friend played me a recording of the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau that floored me with its beauty. Rubinstein’s interpretations of Chopin might be a bit more tranquil and liquid and luxurious, perhaps, and Arrau’s a bit more forceful, but those are highly relative terms; both are superb.
A biography at the Princeton University says of Arrau,
One regards him as a sort of miracle; the piano is the most machinelike of instruments except the organ – all those rods, levers, little felt pads, wires, no intimate subtle human connection with it by breath, tongueing, or the string player’s direct engagement with speaking vibrations. But Arrau makes it live, like God teaching Adam on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel roof; liquid, mysterious, profound, alive.
From a 1997 Philips Classics release, here’s the late Claudio Arrau playing Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 9, No. 2.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Reader Tips
In a Reader Tip thread a few weeks ago commenter Black Mamba referred to Baker Street’s “horrible, catchy, self-enchanted, faux-passionate, gloopy saxophone bit.” The description was apt. Tonight, as a palate cleanser, we offer up a soothing saxophone poultice in the form of a Duke Ellington song which showcases the end-of-the-world expressive skills of the late Johnny Hodges. Do yourself a favour and listen to this one: from his 1960 album Blues In Orbit, here’s Duke Ellington and his band playing the deep, achingly beautiful Brown Penny.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.
Reader Tips
It’s been said that the definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion but refrains from doing so. This rule of thumb certainly doesn’t apply to Belgian-French accordionist Gus Viseur, whose musette-style accordion music turns everyone within earshot into a continental sophisticate. So grab a seat at a sidewalk cafe, order a glass of red, stick a lit Gauloises in the corner of your mouth, and dim your eyelids in a world-weary way as you watch the world go by to the accompaniment of Gus (Gustave-Joseph) Viseur and his group, as they breeze their way through Django Reinhardt’s Djangologie.
Don’t mind the video dropouts – it’s the terroir, non?
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
The wisdom of those who wish to rule
Economics professor Daniel B. Klein and Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic recently surveyed nearly 5,000 people who variously self-identified as progressive/very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, and libertarian. Respondents were asked to answer eight questions about basic economics. Responses were rated not on their adherence to any particular left/right ideological view, but in terms of their knowledge of basic, observable, real-world cause-and-effect. Rather than looking at correct responses, or at responses that could be seen as arguably correct, the researchers focused on the responses that were, as they put it, “flatly unenlightened“:
How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.
Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.
Yes, the same left who relentlessly campaign to establish an economic caliphate with them in charge.
This next finding goes a long way towards explaining the current state of affairs in the US:
The survey also asked about party affiliation. Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.
(h/t ghostofaflea)
Reader Tips
American actor Jim Backus, perhaps best known for his portrayal of slightly-addled upper-crust gentleman Thurston Howell III in the 1960’s sitcom Gilligan’s Island, had other famous roles as well. He was the voice of the bumbling, good-natured cartoon character Mr. Magoo, and he co-starred in the iconic Academy Award-winning film Rebel Without A Cause in which he played a cursedly ineffectual father whose bourgeois conformity drove his son, played by James Dean, into paroxysms of incoherent, scenery-chewing rage.
Backus also released two novelty singles, one of which is tonight’s musical selection. The humor in the odd little soundtrack-vignette stems from both its lack of context – all you can glean is that an unnamed man and woman are drinking champagne at a cozy table in a restaurant – and, especially, from the over-the-top giddiness of the euphorically tipsy couple, who give the impression that they’ve gotten away with something spectacular, perhaps a cleverly-engineered tryst.
From 1958, here’s Jim Backus and an unidentified actress performing the cartoonishly carefree Delicious.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Reader Tips
As a kid I always loved Rolf Harris; I remember listening to his performances on the radio when my parents thought I was asleep. I loved the sound of his Perth-accented voice, so lively and mischievous yet sincere. Tonight’s Reader Tips companion is Harris’ 1969 version of a song about unquestioning, unflagging loyalty to the bitter end. It may be too childish and sentimental for some people, but I’ll always like it. In a time of post-ironic, too-cool-for-school attitudes, it’s remains a pleasant, perhaps rosy-tinted, reminder of what seems in hindsight to have been a more straightforward, upright time.
Here’s Australian entertainer Rolf Harris, performing the touching 1902 song Two Little Boys.
The thread is open for Reader Tips.
The Love Boat
Debbie Schlussel:
A giant fact about the HAMAS Gaza Flotilla continues to be kept quiet by the mainstream media: Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf – the leaders of the “Free Gaza Movment” and the organizers of the HAMAS Gaza flotilla – and their organization harbored several Islamic terrorists and homicide bombers, including those who blew up a Tel Aviv Bar.
To the ilk who hide their motivations, with the complicity of the news media, behind terms like “peace activist,” such “giant facts” aren’t even motes, they’re utter irrelevancies; to Israel’s most committed opponents, acts of targeted murder like the one at Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv, where three Israelis were killed and fifty injured, are effectively humanitarian aid bombings.
They don’t use those exact words, of course – at least, the pink ones who aren’t from the region don’t – but you can be sure that in thirty or forty years, western countries will see a senility-induced outbreak of Helen Thomas-style honesty. It will be a relief of sorts.
(h/t SDA commenter The Joel)
Beauty
A Tea Party member and former Marine steps forward:
Reader Tips
Welcome to SDA Reader Tips. Tonight’s musical accompaniment comes in the form of a song by the late Judee Sill, a remarkably talented but largely unheralded musician whose beautiful voice and spiritual, baroque pop songs are so beautiful, gentle and clear-headed as to be hard to reconcile with her dark and troubled life.
Tim Page, in the Washington Post:
Tom King’s “The Operator,” a 650-page biography of David Geffen, who founded Asylum and signed Sill as the first artist to record on his new label, devotes only one sentence to her, calling her “a former prostitute and reformed junkie.” King might have added “stick-up artist,” “drug dealer” and “street hustler” to his capsule biography, for Sill led a troubled and unsettled life. And yet…she was also an artist of extraordinary gifts, one whose best songs are suffused with a radiant, prayerful and excruciatingly tender innocence, all the more affecting because it must have been so hard-won.
The immediate temptation is to classify her with some of her more famous contemporaries — Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Carole King — and, indeed, the similarities are there. Yet Sill’s body of work is both more limited and more perfect. Virtually all of her songs are intensely devotional; along with J.S. Bach and Mahalia Jackson (two of her acknowledged influences), Sill believed that the purpose of music was the glorification of God. Instead of sharply etched social vignettes or cosmopolitan evocations of modern life and love, she wrote her own sort of hymns — guileless, urgent, naked, absolutely personal.
Here, for your Sunday evening pleasure, is the late Judee Sill’s 1971 release Jesus Was a Cross Maker.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips. Please read on for an important note:
Adding insult to injury
So, you’re lying there on the roadside…
Researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute have developed a manufacturing process that injects microcapsules containing malodorous oils into the (bike) helmet itself, causing it to stink when damaged — alerting you that it’s time to replace it…
(h/t The Null Device)
Reader Tips
Welcome to Reader Tips. Tonight’s music is a song about exuberantly reckless driving in the fifties era, back when the typically boat-like and seatbelt-less cars were designed for pleasure and not safety. Even though the singer describes speeding drunkenly down mountainsides at night, in the rain, and passing other cars on blind corners, what sounds like a cautionary tale has little or no effect on his own driving habits: when he requests plasma from his hospital bed he’s just a hip daddy-o asking to be primed up for another bout of driving.
It’s to laugh. Here’s Nervous Norvus’ 1956 novelty song Transfusion.
You are enjoined to provide links to your Reader Tips in the comments.
Reader Tips
Welcome to SDA Late Night Radio.
The best version of Green Green Grass of Home that I ever heard was at a bar in Whistler where, during some band’s scheduled break, a non-musician local dude – a large, affable snowboarding wildman of about 25, with long blonde hair – was goaded by his buddies to go onstage for what was obviously a reprise performance of a regular event. As the backing tracks played through a cassette machine, the dude – who, along with his buddies, looked three-quarters of the way through a keg – cradled the mic in both hands and delivered the most unashamedly emotional onstage performance I’d ever seen. As he barely choked out – almost barked – the last line of the chorus, his verklempt buddies teared up and rocked back and forth, shaking their heads, like they were hearing the Sermon on the Mount and couldn’t physically endure the ineffable beauty of it.
Truly one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen – you’d figure these guys would have been into speed metal, or something – but you had to hand it to the guy for putting it out there.
Alas, here’s no video of his performance, so tonight we’ll hand it over to a pro: here’s Welsh hotty von-hottenheimer Tom Jones taking his own run at Curly Putman Jr.’s oft-covered Green Green Grass of Home.
You are invited to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.