General Archives
May 3, 2007
What's Right With the World
July 6, 2007
Raindrops on roses
One of my heroes is Alois Podhajsky. Podhajsky was the Austrian colonel who, during WWII, focused his considerable energy and passion on...horses. It's almost enough to make one laugh, or even get angry. There is the world, tumbling down, all too many innocent people dying and being killed everywhere in horrible ways, the great powers battling, good and evil duking it out. And this fellow, drafted by the Anschluss into the de facto status of a soldier on the wrong side, thinks and works entirely toward the end that the Lippizan horses of Austria, the Spanische Hofreitschule of Vienna, and the ancient art of dressage shall not perish from the earth. Is this not Quixotic, not to mention trivial?
December 22, 2007
Unto us a Child is born.
The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.
— Chesterton
Merry Christmas to all!
January 10, 2008
Child Molester Given Probation by Wac[k]o Jury
An 82-year-old child molester, Tommy George, has been given a sentence of PROBATION by a jury here in Waco, Texas. (Read all about it here). How can this happen? A friend and colleague at Baylor offers an answer: "This is a Texas-Jury: `This is a guy we all like from the community; we know his kids; we can't lock him up.'"
Here's what one courtroom witness wrote online after the sentence of probation was handed down last October:
I was in the courtroom when the jury handed down the sentence of probation for Tommy George. After the decision was read, all of the lawyers and Tommy George went into the judges chambers for a few minutes. As he strolled out of the judges chambers, Tommy grinned and gave his family an energetic two thumbs up.No jail time. Just a little money, a few days in court, and one night a year with the other perverts at the Halloween Pervert Party. Unbelievable.
Bill O'Reilly should know about this.
February 21, 2008
My wife, Frankie's, stained glass work
You can find it here.
March 14, 2008
Dept. of Not Sure We Should Go There
Via Rod Dreher:
I'll confess to having a mild Luddite streak, which ranges from indifference to antipathy, where some modern technology is concerned (somehow, I suspect that this will not be altogether surprising to everyone); hence, while I can perceive the benefits of such technology, I harbour ambiguous premonitions of the possible misuses of a mature version of the technology. Regardless, the video clip is fascinating, in a tech-geek sort of way.
March 27, 2008
Lighter Fare
Abigail Lavin, writing in the Weekly Standard, reviews Oliver Lutz Radtke's Chinglish, a guide to misuses, miscues, and mutilations of the English language in China.
So far as I can tell, Chinglish falls into two categories: instrumental and ornamental. Instrumental Chinglish is actually intended to convey information to English speakers. Ornamental Chinglish is born of the fact that English is the lingua franca of coolness. Meaning aside, any combination of roman letters elevates a commodity--khaki pants, toilet paper, potato chips--to a higher plane of
chic by suggesting that the product is geared toward an international audience.
This is also a pop-cultural phenomenon in the Former Soviet Union, albeit on a much lower level of frequency. It typically involves nonsense phrases in English emblazoned on articles of
clothing, intended to convey an air of youthfulness and joie de vivre.
Such usages often aim for a certain effect, not so much of transgressiveness as of chic, though the means often veer off into the transgressive:
Lighter Fare II
Prima facie I find it difficult to fathom this level of hostility toward a mediocre rock band - and this is, in fact, what the group in question are: neither among the best nor among the worst in the genre, particularly by comparison to what else was current and on the Homogenized Corporate Radio playlists between 1997 and 2002 or so. I can comprehend being put off and scandalized, perhaps, by mediocrity, having spent seven years studying classical piano; but the hatred - even granting that Suderman is piling on the hyperbole - strikes me as excessive. Seriously, if we're talking about popular acts, past and present, thriving and lingering, there are legions of others far more deserving of detestation. Spice Girls, anyone?
April 1, 2008
What's Wrong with the World to Close
Dear Readers,
Effective at 10:33PM Central Time, I will be closing down What's Wrong with the World. The domain will go dark completely at midnight. Backups of the database, comments and site layout have been sent to the editor, Paul J. Cella if he wishes to continue this site elsewhere.
Due to recent changes in my political philosophy, I can no longer, in good conscience, continue to run this site.
Notes on Music
Apropos of recent discussions of the vocation of the artist under the conditions of modernity, it would be well to note that Sunday was the birthday of Josef Haydn, while today was the birthday of Sergei Rachmaninov.
Without delving into comparative criticism of various recordings and performances, I'd recommend, well, anything by Haydn, but especially the Masses, the magnificent oratorio, The Seasons, and the sublime Piano Trios. For Rachmaninov, I'm partial to the settings of the Divine Liturgy and All-Night Vigil, particularly this performance of the Liturgy by a Russian church choir and this recording of the Vigil.
Elsewhere at Taki's, Richard Spencer takes up the question of just why contemporary music is so dreadful, providing links to a pair of aural atrocities that are not to be missed. The first, in particular, had me descending into the torments of migraine in less than 30 seconds. Among other things, he observes that
There’s also no evidence that our age is any more “commercial” than the putatively golden one—Die Zäuberflöte was a beer-hall musical; Verdi was always questing for the latest “blockbuster”; and even Wagner, the ultimate anti-social composer, brought out mechanical floating Rheinmädchen for the premiere of his Ring sage.
It is an observation which I must contest. The difference between our aesthetically blighted age and that of these composers, for example, is precisely that between a society coasting on the legacy and forms of an aristocratic, Christian civilization, and one in which commercial, quantitative values have pushed art to the fringes, where one might compose a helicopter string quartet. Die Zäuberflöte may have been popular fare of a sort, but this was because higher expressions of popular culture were then authoritatively shaped by those Christian-aristocratic hangovers; grace, we might say, elevated nature. In fine, an aesthetically traditionalist nobility was a tremendous boon to artistic excellence, while the displacement of that nobility by liberal, modernizing, commercial elites - a gradual process, to be certain - set the timer on the vitality of the Western tradition. The contemporary version of an aristocracy, the meritocracy, will not get the job done, first, because where the old aristocracy saw patronage of the arts as a function of its social position, the meritocracy can only view such patronage voluntaristically, and second, because the meritocracy is an elite premised on the very quantification that banishes the arts: IQ, test scores, credentials, the most materially remunerative positions, etc. The meritocracy is the distillation of the utilitarian, calculating ethos of the age, which remains inimical to art.
April 29, 2008
Baubles of the Meritocracy
I have a modest collection of comparatively modest mechanical timepieces, having been fascinated by them since childhood, when, at that early age, my interest in them prompted me to reflect upon the goods of craftsmanship, the wastefulness of the disposability/planned obsolescence culture, and the impermanence of material things generally. Yes, I did think about this stuff in elementary school. Yes, I was a weird kid, something impressed upon me by my peers, and ratified by the adults in my world, who occasionally remarked that I was growing up before my time. Hence, my interest in this story about a $300,000 watch that doesn't tell time, and therefore isn't really a watch.
What’s most impressive about the Day&Night is its complexity, given its absolute uselessness. The watch features two tourbillons — devices that overcome the ill effects of earth’s gravity on a watch’s accuracy — connected by a differential mechanism. Instead of hands, the watch has a “contemplative tourbillon operation whereby the ‘Day’ tourbillon operates for 12 hours to symbolize working life, while the ‘Night’ tourbillon takes over afterward to represent an individual’s private time.”
May 11, 2008
Housekeeping
The purpose of this notice is to announce that the comments feature of my earlier post, At What Point Does This Slot Into a Larger Narrative, has been disabled, not as a means of foreclosing upon discussion, but because, the discussion having arrived at first principles, it will be more fruitful for it to continue in a new thread. A new entry elaborating on that earlier discussion should be posted later today, although it will probably have to wait until I have prepared dinner for my wife and my mother - it being Mother's Day, after all.