November 2007
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It appears all too frequently: an account of a child horribly abused, tortured or raped or murdered or all three. There’s one in the news right now. I’m not going to link to it—if you’re in the US, you’ve probably seen it; if not, well, just take my word for it that it’s horrible, and…
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My Head Hurts I really don’t feel like thinking very hard about anything tonight, so I thought I’d tell you about my headache. It’s a sort of quasi- or semi-migraine that I get sometimes. It was present when I woke up this morning and nothing I could have done would have made it go away…
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Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle When it was released in 1968, I read some reviews that praised Song Cycle as a revolutionary masterpiece and Van Dyke Parks as a genius— this Rolling Stone review appears to have been contemporary, and gives you a good idea of the reception I remember. But it didn’t sell very…
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My old friend Daniel has an excellent post on Judee Sill over at the Caelum et Terra blog. If you can play YouTube videos, be sure to use the link at the end to see the video he's talking about and hear the song, which is one of Sill's best, and that's saying a lot.…
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I've been away for Thanksgiving Day—will take up some of the topics in the comments sometime on Friday. Hope all of you in the USA, which I think is the vast majority of people who read this blog, had a good holiday. I find that being congenitally pessimistic actually makes me more thankful—I can so…
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I thought this merited emphasis and a separate discussion. Francesca Murphy brought up this New Criterion article by Mark Steyn in which he describes the omnipresence of pop music in public places as turning our lives into "a movie with a bad sound track." Steyn is writing in the context of a New Criterion retrospective…
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I was going to post something by and about Judee Sill as a follow-up to the surprisingly active discussion about female musicians. Sill is one of the major figures in this category, even though she only released two full albums. But Daniel tells me he's going to post something about her on the Caelum et…
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Women, Music, and Modernity “You’re into girls.” That was the startling but not inaccurate remark my wife made last Saturday when she walked by as I was browsing YouTube for Patty Griffin songs. Since 90% of my music listening is done when I’m alone in my car going to and from work, and she is…
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Bob Marley & The Wailers: The Complete Upsetter Singles 1970-1972 I’m actually talking about the first volume of this two-disk set here; the second disk seems to be dub versions—mostly-instrumental “remixes,” as they would be called today—of some of the songs on the first disk. (Since eMusic charges per song, I’ve downloaded only the first…
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…about the origin of the universe: in a comment a day or two ago, Jack quoted this from Benedict XVI's Introduction to Christianity. I think it deserves emphasis: Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all…
Light On Dark Water 