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Les Choristes in French (click to go to IMDB entry, but watch out for spoilers). Not being any sort of serious film buff, I don’t know whether this is the work of a famous director, or anything about its reputation. But it’s good. We recently joined NetFlix, mainly because I had decided the time has…
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Yes: The Yes Album Here’s the latest stop on my continuing tour of ‘70s progressive rock. As I’ve mentioned before, I treated this music with disdain when it was current: I thought of it as a place where grooves went to die, an often empty display of technical brilliance by people with much more talent…
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Pluto is officially not a planet. The neighborhood just won’t be the same. In related news, somebody at The Atlantic did recognize the headline potential in the matter (absence of which I was lamenting a week or so ago): their review of upcoming events in a recent issue noted Pluto Targeted for Elimination.
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Pluto was only declared a planet in 1930, apparently with some opposition. So what’s a conservative to do–deplore its expulsion as a needless upset of tradition, or applaud it as the restoration of a traditional order upset by reckless innovation? Deep matters…. (In case you’re wondering, I had notions, when I was about sixteen, of…
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What is the real threat from Iran? This column by Thomas Sowell, who is not an idiot, says it is grave: if Iran gets nuclear weapons it’s only a matter of time until it uses them against Israel and, via terrorist proxies, the U.S. Others write that off as hysteria, perhaps deliberately fostered by neocons…
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Provoking the Provocateurs “The artist is a provocateur.” Surely this all-too-common claim has done a great deal of harm to the arts. It appeared in our local paper a week or so ago in connection with the lionization of a flamboyant artist at the opening of an exhibit of his work here. Not everyone was…
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A lengthy and unpleasant exchange on the Caelum et Terra blog on these topics left me feeling that they had been rather more obscured than revealed. No sane Catholic can argue that warfare is anything but a terrible calamity and at very best a very difficult thing to justify, but a position of practical pacifism…
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(yes, I’m skipping a week, having gotten too far behind) Love: Forever Changes In Memoriam: Arthur Lee (1945-2006) & Bryan MacLean (1946-1998) I had a friend in college who was very taken with the first two albums by this mid-‘60s Los Angeles band. When Forever Changes came out, he came over to my apartment with…
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Patty Griffin: 1000 Kisses Although I can’t claim to have heard all the competition, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that Patty Griffin has one of the very best voices in pop music. She has prodigous strength and range and tone and control, with a lower register bound to…
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Poetry and Politics: Guernica with Graffiti Patti Smith (famous in the late ‘70s as a sort of beat-punk poet singing rock-and-roll) has made available a song, “Qana,” about the civilians killed by Israeli air strikes in the Lebanese city of Qana. (You can download the song here.) It’s a powerful piece, a Guernica in words…
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