February 2007
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Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane: At Carnegie Hall My remedial education in jazz continues. Strictly speaking, this one can’t count as something I should already know, since it wasn’t released until late in 2005. (It’s from recently-discovered tapes of a 1957 concert.) But it represents my first serious acquaintance with Thelonious Monk. I have…
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Ok, I shouldn't be snide, but over the years I've come to expect from Anglican leaders a smoggy rhetoric that seems designed to obscure the fact that they don't really believe anything much resembling Christianity. Former Episcopal presiding bishop Frank Griswold was reportedly a master of it. Here (via the First Things blog) is a…
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Mozart: Piano Quartet in Eb (K.493) The piano has never been my favorite instrument; I would verbalize its basic sound as “clank.” But I’ve been drawn to it recently, partly because there is so much great literature for it, and am finding myself becoming more enthusiastic about it. I’ve also, since watching Bergman’s Magic Flute…
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For one brief shining moment, Myra Minkoff was running John Edwards's blog. (See John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces for more on Minkoff.) Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js
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Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful I’ve never considered myself an official movement conservative; “conservative for lack of a better word” is my favored description. (I’d like to have a catchy abbreviation for it, but can’t come up with any pronounceable variation of CFLOABW, the “W” being both essential and intractable.) Therefore I tend to…
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But what's wrong with believing in Richard Dawkins if it makes you happy? Thanks to Francesca for pointing this out. Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js
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Horace Silver: Song For My Father I knew this was considered a classic album but hadn’t heard it until recently, courtesy of a jazz trumpet student who believes, correctly, that there are some significant gaps in my education. Sure enough, it is a classic, if the word of a non-expert can be trusted. It immediately…
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There's an interesting discussion about evolution going on in the comments. This is a subject that I think about a lot and have written about several times. To wit: Great IDea What ID can and can't hope to accomplish. And why the evolutionary timeline strikes me as more of a problem for Christians than the…
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The Liberal Conservative (4) This is probably the last in the series, at least for a while. I wanted to add one more note to my list of reasons for wishing to preserve the institutions of liberalism—meaning, of course, the philosophical liberalism that goes back at least to the Enlightenment, not contemporary political liberalism. In…
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Here are brief comments on some interesting, not necessarily good, films that we've rented from Netflix over the past few months. My wife picked the majority of them. She has a pretty good record at this point. Children of Heaven: Iranian, by, I think, the same director who did The Color of Paradise, which is…
Light On Dark Water 