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Tuesday, August 24, 2004 |
'Freedom for Everyone'
GOOD FOR Vice President Cheney. At a campaign breakfast in Iowa yesterday, Mr. Cheney was asked about his position on gay marriage. Noting that "Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with," Mr. Cheney said, "My general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. . . . People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to." The question of whether that relationship should be given the status of marriage, Mr. Cheney, said, is "a matter for the states to decide." [washingtonpost.com - Opinion]
11:20:37 PM Permalink
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Here's A Side Of The Olympic I Hadn't Heard Before
"At the Albertville winter Olympics, condom machines in the athletes' village had to be refilled every two hours. And in Sydney the organisers' original order of 70,000 condoms went so fast that they had to order 20,000 more. Even with the replenishment, the supply was exhausted three days before the end of the competition schedule. (For the record, athletes who were in Sydney report that the Cuban delegation was the first to use up its allocation.) Salt Lake City in 2002 went even bigger: 250,000 condoms were handed out, despite the objections of the city's Mormon leadership." "There's a lot of sex going on. You get a lot of people who are in shape, and, you know, testosterone's up and everybody's attracted to everybody," says Breaux Greer, a shaggy-blond Californian who competed in the javelin at the Sydney Games."
[via Raymond Chen] [Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet]
6:32:42 PM Permalink
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Greil Marcus on Harry Smith
OK, in my first version of this post, I made a snide comment about Marcus that wasn't deserved. I've reread the piece, or at least parts of it, several times now. Marus is teaching a faculty seminar at Berkeley, and asks a bunch of professors to listen to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. It's really interesting how these listeners react to the music, and how it mostly falls flat to them:.
In most of the vast amount of commentary that greeted the reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1997, the music was taken as a canon, and the performers as exemplars of the folk. Neither of these notions had reached the room we were in. There people were arguing with Uncle Dave Macon, not with whatever tradition he might represent. It was Hattie Stoneman who had to be drowned, not white Virginia country women in general. There was no need to be respectful of a song if you didn’t like it.
I guess they haven't read enough Greil Marcus.
But what's fun is also the way these new listeners change the songs for Marcus:
The Anthology of American Folk Music had been turned upside down and inside out, that was for sure. I was still certain that Rabbit Brown’s ‘James Alley Blues’ was the greatest record ever made, but now another performance I’d never really noticed before, the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers’ 1928 ‘Rocky Road’, suddenly stood out. It wasn’t a record, it was a children’s crusade. On the Anthology, the spiritual ‘Present Days’, the same group’s recording from the same year, has a deep, mature bass, a reedy lead by a man you can see as the town pharmacist, then a farmer or a preacher taking the most expansive moments of the tune, their wives filling out the music. The piece goes on too long—you hear how well they know the number, how complete it is, how finished. It’s a professional piece of work. But in ‘Rocky Road’—‘Ohhhhhh—La la/La la/La la la’, ten or twenty or a hundred kids seem to be chanting while circle-dancing in a field on the edge of a cliff. As if it were something by Little Richard and I was eleven, I didn’t hear an English word, or want to. You didn’t need to know a language to hear this music; it taught you. Not that it had ever taught me a thing before. You have to be ready to accept God, songs like this say; you have to be ready to hear songs.
The professors don't react very well to one of Marcus' favorite conceits (one that I've always had a hard time grasping, too):
In the seminar I taught on Harry Smith’s anthologies of American folk music, I brought up the notion of the characters in all the performances—the characters named and shaped in the ballads about historical events as well as those only implicit and anonymous in the fiddle pieces and calls for deliverance, those representative fictional men and women in the tales told as if they really happened—as peopling a town, a community. If the songs did indeed make up such a town, what townspeople-like roles would those around the table assign the various performers on the anthologies? This did not go over very well. ‘Well,’ someone said finally, ‘I can see Uncle Dave as the town dentist.’ ‘If this is a community,’ another person said, ‘it’s not one I’d want to be part of.’ ‘Of course no one wants to be part of this community,’ a librarian said after class, frustrated and angry. ‘All of these people are poor!’
And good for Marcus to note that!
All that said, it's still hard to get through some of the standard Marcus verbiage to figure out the point of the article. For me, the point has been just to listen to the songs, as he mentions them in the article. Lately, I've been a CD ripping madman; I installed a 250GB drive in one of my machines, and I've been using iTunes to rip all my CDs to it. Since I'd never done this systematically before, it's pretty exciting. For example when Marcus mentioned "James Alley Blues," I was able to just type the title into the iTunes search box, and have it pop up, along with Dylan's version from the Minnesota Hotel tape, and David Johanssen's from one of the Oxford Music CDs from that late magazine. Instead of just listening to the Richard ‘Rabbit’ Brown version, I quickly listened to all three! What a hoot. Of course, I could do this because I'd done the ripping; it would be more fun if I could put links in this post so you could listen, too, even if you didn't have the CDs.
12:14:47 PM Permalink
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Cheez Whiz Facts of the Day
Three key points: - A half cup of Cheez Whiz goes great with 8 ounces of deli roast beef and some green peppers on a grilled panini.
- Neither major party presidential candidate likes Cheez Whiz on his cheesesteak.
- Only one major party presidential candidate feels the need to lie about it.
That is all. [matthew]
10:41:06 AM Permalink
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Bush's Moral Cowardice
Talking Points Memo
Josh hits it right on the head: George Bush's moral cowardice is the core principle of his life and his presidency. This is a must read. [Bolo Boffin]
9:57:11 AM Permalink
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BEHIND THE RESIGNATION OF BUSH'S CATHOLIC ADVISOR
Deal Hudson recently resigned as an advisor to the Republican National Committee. A key strategist for Bush’s Catholic policy, Hudson has offered such thoughts in the past as:
- "Catholics who consider themselves moderate are being duped by the rhetorical evasions, the liberal masquerade, of postmodern dissidents."
- "Multiculturalism as it is being practiced promises to be more exclusionary and more prejudicial than any form of education the West has ever known."
- "Golf remains the only major sport to resist the thug element infiltrating our public life."
On a more specific topic, Newsmax reported last spring of Hudson: “Sen. John Kerry's defiance of his Church's condemnation of abortion and approval of gay marriage is not only a problem for him and Catholic bishops, but for individual Catholics as well, according to a leading Catholic layman and editor. He says Catholic priests should refuse to give Holy Communion to Kerry even if their bishops have not specifically warned the senator that he is not to receive Communion.”
Less clear is how Catholic priests should respond to leading Catholic laymen and editors who behave in a manner described by Joe Feuerherd in an profile of Hudson in the National Catholic Reporter. Especially interesting was a certain Fat Tuesday, which - according to one woman present - disintegrated from bingo to French kissing, body shots and fellatio at Fordham.
This story has gotten short shrift during this already scandal-strewn season but deserves attention as a case study of the limits of purity even among the disciples of Karl Rove.
9:41:25 AM Permalink
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Dodging a Bullet
Whew! Looks like we dodged a bullet a couple months ago. New Scientist reports that an asteroid passed within 6500 miles of the earth -- that's less than earth's diameter -- on March 31.
The previously unknown object, spanning five to 10 metres across, has been named 2004 FU162. It streaked across the sky just 6500 kilometres - roughly the radius of the Earth - above the ground on 31 March, although details have only now emerged.
9:35:21 AM Permalink
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Adam and His Eves
Marriage, we're told by the president and a lot of other people, can only be between one man and one woman. Anything else would go against thousands of years of tradition and nature itself. If the president's DNA could... [The Loom]
9:10:58 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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A hilarious spoof of the Swift Boat controversy has surfaced, 