That Canon was much too short. We need a somewhat larger dose of Bach here.
How about Maria Stader (1911-1999) doing Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51, the soprano aria from Bach’s Cantata for the 15th Sunday after Trinity “et in ogni tempo” (“and at any time”), with Karl Richter and the Münchener Bach Orchester and recorded in 1959.
Curtis Lindsay explains what piece of music Bach is holding in his hand in the famous portrait.
This, perhaps the most famous and authentic portrait we have of J. S. Bach, was made in 1746 near the end of the composer’s life by Hausmann. Hausmann was employed as the official portrait painter of the city of Leipzig, where Bach had been living and working for more than 20 years.
Bach holds the complete, very short manuscript for a “Canon triplex a 6 voci,†that is, a triple canon for six voices. A canon is essentially a round, where the voices enter in a staggered fashion, one after the other (think “Row, Row, Row Your Boatâ€). However, in the score, only three voices are indicated (you can see that the score contains only three staves of music). This is curious, since the “a 6†designation is clearly visible in the title. Where are the other three voices?
One might assume that Bach is holding the score away from himself, pointing it toward us, so that we can read it. But look closely at his face, at his mouth. There is a visible tension at the corners—he is suppressing a grin that wants very badly to burst forth. That is because Bach knows something we do not: the other three voices, the missing ones needed to make six parts out of three, are created by simply turning the score upside down, the way Bach would be looking at it in this picture. He grins because he can see the answer right in front of him, hidden from us in plain sight, as it were. The result of combining the written materials with their inversion—combining Bach’s view of the music and ours—is a charming, cheerful, harmonious little groove loop which to me actually sounds like Bach wryly chuckling to himself. …
Bach was an extremely expressive composer, but his musical expressivity has very little to do with the kind that we encounter in Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, or even Mozart for that matter. Virtually everything in Bach’s output is an exercise in taking established procedural rules for music-making and then bending them to his own purposes, often while consciously obscuring from us the means through which he did it, with the added vexing caveat that the stuff has to sound good and be danceable. Bach’s music is onion-like in this idea of layers: not just the actual musical layers of polyphonic imitation inherent in the music itself, but in the aesthetic and philosophical layers of thought and consideration that went into his work. There is always a sense in which Bach is consciously trying (and, in my view, invariably succeeding) at being more clever than we are, at achieving iconoclasm through synthesis and sleight-of-hand rather than a more turbulent or destructive course of action. I think that this comes across in his music, whether the listener is conscious of it or not, and it is quite off-putting for some listeners. There are times when it can become trying or tiring even for me, about as big a Bachophile as you’re likely to encounter at large in the world.
Bach is a continuous stream of process, not a punctuated string of big moments. He never gives us exactly what we want; he is continuously pushing us further back from the goalpost: there is a sense in which his music is deeply human, but also a sense in which it refuses to join us on our own ground, and I think that’s a valid, if perhaps short-sighted, criticism.
Bach is about taking modest means, in terms of materials and musical rules and procedures, and generating the greatest possible variety and scope of results from them, rather like the biological world as understood through evolutionary thinking. He is a musical MacGyver, to be honest. There is something in Bach which will tend to appeal more to those who understand music as a vocation, an interest, or an occupation (in the literal sense) than to those who value music more as catharsis, release or statement. That’s not intended to be a value judgment: it’s just the nature of the music in question, I think.
King Prawn, at Ricochet, identifies by metaphor the key distinguishing characteristics of The Public Good.
Whether you work in an office, a shop, or a store, you’ve had this experience. Every break room, lunch room, and food mess has one: the community fridge. The chair I occupied in the lunch room today was right next to one of these things, and every time the door was opened I was reminded of what a perfect metaphor it is for any contrived public good. Let’s review a few of the similarities:
Everyone uses it whether they like it or not
No one takes responsibility for its upkeep
Everyone claims a disproportionate amount of the good
Individuality and property rights disappear within it (I ate a sandwich named Steve…)
Unwanted personal items are often abandoned here
Over time, the condition deteriorates to a completely unsanitary state
Everyone complains about the conditions
Everyone expects someone else to deal with the problem
Eventually those who use it the least end up cleaning the thing out
The smell never completely goes away
In over 20 years of gainful employment, I’ve never seen a common work refrigerator that did not fit this description perfectly. Every experience I have had with a contrived public good has been exactly the same — be it public transportation, public restrooms, or public recreational facilities. We can now expect the same in our healthcare.
JoeMonster.org presents a wonderful series of photographs of WWII weapons and helmets which have become part of the Polish forest.
The Polish language texts reads:
Nature versus war
Looking at these pictures we have no doubt who’s the winner. Nature destroys everything that could hinder its development, even old military equipment.
Intriguing picture, currently on Push the Movement, but it has apparently been circulating on the Internet for a couple of years with a variety of attributed locations, so the “drunk man” part and the “India” part are almost certainly not true.
Urban Legends:
Depending on which version of the story you read, the overstuffed python above swallowed a drunk guy in India, an unknown woman in South Africa, an unknown man in Qujing, China, a person of unknown gender in Indonesia, or a 4-year-old child in Malaysia.
All of the above can’t be simultaneously true, obviously. The photo, which I’ve not yet been able to trace to a definitive source, has been circulating online for at least two years and more likely than not documents a python digesting a goat or a deer.
“What do you call an Italian hooker? A pastatute!”
Adam Weinstein (It figures!), at Gawker, tries to console Obama-voting-bedwetters for the holiday prospect of encountering unassimilated-American, politically-incorrect relatives. He suggests that dining with his racist, sexist uncle will make the pillow-biting liberal stronger, if it does not destroy him.
We are nervous about our racist, sexist old uncles.
“America needs Obamacare like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask!”
We wish they’d go away, letting us enjoy the undercooked poultry and over-sugared ambrosia in some semblance of utopian progressive peace.
But let me tell you why that’s a terrible idea, America. Why you need your racist, sexist old uncle.
First, your racist sexist old uncle focuses your anger on the right things. Let’s face it: As socially liberal as you are, you will always find some reason to freak the fuck out on your family at the holidays. Holidays are stressful. They cost a lot. The weather sucks. The travel is hard. And at the end of it, there is your mother, offering unconditional love and advice on how to care for her beloved grandchild, your obvious neglect of whom has caused the flu in her, and that’s okay, because Nanna has drawn an ice bath with mustard seeds, because that’s how the Amish did it, and it was good enough for them, and of course you couldn’t know that. …
If you had no racist, sexist uncle, these perils would be more immediate. The holiday conversation might border on the minutiae of domesticity — your baby is so big! The yams are so big! Would you like to see Dad’s photos of our big Cozumel cruise? This ancient pyramid with these trinket-hawking natives is so big!
All the time, there would be no acknowledgement whatsoever of the fateful role in our lives played by Obamacare, Benghazi, Trayvon Martin, FEMA camps, the Fed, and those sorority girls with their silly accusations. You might be forced to acknowledge the gaping canyon of nothingness that stands between you and the alien zephyr of life that animates these blood relations, these strange meat sticks whom society holds up as the biological and ethical raison d’être of your person-ness.
Fuck that. Your racist, sexist uncle is throwing you a lifesaver. Don’t let yourself drown in a turbid sea of Updikean suburban malaise. Seek refuge in your racist, sexist uncle’s miasma of burped-up Jameson and slutty Italian jokes, the only thing that broke his six-month catatonia after Wife No. 3 went down the shore to Brigantine and never came back.
He is a sacrificial anode, your racist sexist old uncle is. Absent his intervention, we would be pitted and wasted away by the smaller destructive forces of the holiday season.
But beyond the blessed distraction that he provides you in his grace, your racist, sexist uncle makes you a better person, engaging you in an elaborate staged mimesis of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. For if there is no racist, sexist uncle, then there is no comparative challenge, no middling standard of ugliness, against which to prove your culturally enlightened nature. Without the counterpoint of his rusted-out V8 Firebird with the “NO FAT CHICKS” bumper sticker, your low-emissions Subaru with the “YES WE CAN” magnet is just another car in the jammed-up driveway.
“What do you call two blacks on one bike? ORGANIZED CRIME.”
Your racist, sexist uncle is the oval track, and you are the sprinter. Your racist, sexist uncle is the bench-press bar, and you are the lifter. He is the open journal, and you are the pen. You are a master of your fate, of the dictates of racial and gender politeness, only because your other family members can see the reductio ad absurdum of their bigotry in your combed-over foil across the table, sitting there stuffed in a disintegrating Bill Blass dress shirt that Wife No. 2 bought him in the now-defunct Wanamaker’s for $8.95.
You sit, a paragon of yoga-loving, organic-banana-mashing-for-the-baby virtue, proving once and for all that, no, Obama is NOT a FUCKING Kenyan, all because he allows you to profess it as he strokes his mustache, the one he calls his “pussy tickler.”
Mike Franc, at Human Events in 2005, identified the real reason for celebration at the first Thanksgiving.
Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others “became servants to the Indians,†cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for “a capful of corn.†The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, “was so weak … he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.â€
The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called “communism.†Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (“taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealthâ€) bred “confusion and discontent†and “retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers’] benefit and comfort.â€
Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.
On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.
As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. “This had very good success,†Bradford reported, “for it made all hands very industrious.†In fact, “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been†and productivity increased. “Women,†for example, “went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.â€
The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.
A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims’ economic recovery. Their success, he observed, “may well evince the vanity of that conceit…that the taking away of property… would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.†Bradford surmised, “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.â€
The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America.
Victor Davis Hanson is tired of all our national policy decisions being made by a coastal elite resident in urban bubbles of like-mindedness, far removed from the lives of ordinary Americans.
The problem is not just that the coasts determine how everyone else is to lead their lives, but that those living in our elite corridors have no idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior — much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic ideology on the distant, less influential majority.
In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Missouri. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.
I would transfer the United Nations to Salt Lake City, where foreign diplomats would live in a different sort of cocoon.
I would ask billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the Koch Brothers to endow with their riches a few Midwestern or Southern universities. Perhaps we could create a new Ivy League in the nation’s center.
I would suggest to Facebook and Apple that they relocate operations to North Dakota to expose their geeky entrepreneurs to those who drive trucks and plow snow. Who knows — they might be able to afford a house, get married before 35, and have three rather than zero kids.
America is said to be divided by red and blue states, rich and poor, white and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, old and new.
I think the real divide is between those who make our decisions on the coasts and the anonymous others who live with the consequences somewhere else.
Senator Hudak contemptuously rejects a rape victim’s observation that she might have been able to defend herself if she had been carrying her weapon.
Rather than face a recall election, Colorado Senator Evie Hudak has decided to resign. (Town Hall)
After seeing two of her Colorado colleagues recalled over anti-gun votes, Democratic State Senator Evie Hudak, will submit her resignation.
Hudak will hold a news conference Wednesday morning at the Arvada Library.
“By resigning I am protecting these important new laws for the good of Colorado and ensuring that we can continue looking forward,” Hudak wrote in her resignation letter in regard to her gun votes, which led to the recall effort.
Proponents of the recall have until early next week to submit about 18,900 valid signatures to the secretary of state’s office. If enough signatures are valid, Hudak would be the third Colorado lawmaker to face a recall election this year because of her support for tougher gun laws.
Earlier this year, Colorado State Senator Angela Giron and Senate President John Morse, both from blue districts, were recalled and replaced with Republicans.
Simon Winchester remembers, hilariously, his first major professional mistake.
The victim of the first big mistake I ever made was a gentleman to whom I had never been properly introduced (and whose name I still do not know) but who was possessed of three singular qualities: he was alone in a room with me, he was without his trousers, and he was very, very dead.
Some context might be useful. It was the winter of 1962. I was eighteen years old and had taken a year off before going up to Oxford University. I also had a girlfriend far away in Montreal, and in the superheated enthusiasm of my puppy love, I had promised to visit her. The fact that I then lived in London and she three thousand miles away meant that fare money had to be amassed: I had to get a job, and one that paid well enough to allow me to get away to Canada as quickly as possible.
