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Thursday, February 03, 2005
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UnPop Music. Michael Druzinsky, a composer, sends along a link to an interesting review by Martin Kettle in The Guardian that explores why classical music's history, which spans hundreds of years, suddenly ended fifty years ago. (Turnadot premiered in 1924; since then, no opera has lasted in the repertoire. Aaron Copland and Olivier Messiaen died in the 90's, Shostakovitch and Britten have been dead 30 years.)
"The audience that mattered to modernists (even the many who saw themselves as socialists) ceased to be the general public and increasingly became other composers and the intellectual, often university-based, establishment that claimed to validate the new music, not least through its influence over state patronage. Any failure of the music to become popular was ascribed not to the composer's lack of communication but the public's lack of understanding."
Anja Rau, on reading a critique of net art in Die Zeit, worries that too many of today's hyperfictiions "are children of their time: self-reflective, plotless, formal."
"But, much as I hate to say this, there's some truth here. Where's the hyperfiction that's really keeling me over? There's Donna Leishman's phd-project, Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw. There is Of Day, of Night, forthcoming from Eastgate Systems. But i haven't been thrilled or provoked into thought lately. And that's especially true for computer games."
[Mark Bernstein]
The article mentions briefly that classical music has survived after a fashion, but doesn't really expand on that idea. I would argue that classical music has indeed survived, albeit in altered form, by embracing the popularity that the modernists rejected.
Nobody but a bunch of self-absorbed academics cares about modern classical music (which hardly deserves to be called music), but virtually everyone on Earth knows the Star Wars theme. Classical music now exists as soundtracks instead of operas, but it does indeed still exist, and is still quite popular. The popularity of classical music lives on in the works of composers like John Williams, Youko Kanno, Jerry Goldsmith, and Tan Dun.
7:45:16 PM 
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Chertoff and Torture. Back on Friday, June 12, 2002, the Defense Department had a big problem: Its new policy on torture of captives in the "war on terror" was about to be exposed. John Walker Lindh, the young Californian captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and touted by John Ashcroft as an "American Taliban," was scheduled to take the stand the following Monday in an evidence suppression hearing regarding a confession he had signed. There he would tell, under oath, about how he signed the document only after being tortured for days by US soldiers. Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis had already said he was likely to allow Lindh, at trial, to put on the stand military officers and even Guantanamo detainees who were witnesses to or participants in his alleged abuse.
The Defense Department, which we now know had in late 2001 begun a secret, presidentially approved program of torture of Afghan and Al Qaeda captives at Bagram Air Base and other locations, had made it clear to the Justice Department that it wanted the suppression hearing blocked. American torture at that point was still just a troubling rumor, and the Bush Administration clearly wanted to keep it that way. Accordingly, Michael Chertoff, who as head of the Justice Department's criminal division was overseeing all the department's terrorism prosecutions, had his prosecution team offer a deal. All the serious charges against Lindh--terrorism, attempted murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, etc.--would be dropped and he could plead guilty just to the technical charges of "providing assistance" to an "enemy of the U.S." and of "carrying a weapon." Lindh, whose attorneys dreaded his facing trial in one of the most conservative court districts in the country on the first anniversary of 9/11, had to accept a stiff twenty-year sentence, but that was half what he faced if convicted on those two minor charges alone.
But Chertoff went further, according to one of Lindh's attorneys, George Harris. Chertoff (now an appeals court judge in New Jersey) demanded--reportedly at Defense Department insistence, according to what defense attorneys were told--that Lindh sign a statement swearing he had "not been intentionally mistreated" by his US captors and waiving any future right to claim mistreatment or torture. Further, Chertoff attached a "special administrative measure," essentially a gag order, barring Lindh from talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.
At the time, few paid attention to this peculiar silencing of Lindh. In retrospect, though, it seems clear that the man coasting toward confirmation as Secretary of Homeland Security effectively prevented early exposure of the Bush/Rumsfeld/Gonzales policy of torture, which we now know began in Afghanistan and later "migrated" to Guantanamo and eventually to Iraq. So anxious was Chertoff to avoid exposure in court of Lindh's torture--which included keeping the seriously wounded and untreated Lindh, who was malnourished and dehydrated, blindfolded and duct-taped to a stretcher for days in an unheated and unlit shipping container, and repeatedly threatening him with death--that defense lawyers say he made the deal a limited-time offer. "It was good only if we accepted it before the suppression hearing," says Harris. "They said if the hearing occurred, all deals were off." He adds, "Chertoff himself was clearly the person at Justice to whom the line prosecutors were reporting. He was directing the whole plea agreement process, and there was at least one phone call involving him." (link)
More reasons to oppose Chertoff. [Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs]
Sounds like it's also reason to overturn Lindh's conviction, and ask him to testify at the trials of those responsible for his mistreatment--including Chertoff. Of course, that would only happen in a nation which had the rule of law, which this is most definitely not.
7:22:34 PM
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#
Ward Churchill at The Rocky Mountain News -
Churchill's statement - Mr. Churchill has been wrongly
characterized as have said that the people who were killed in the
World Trade Center demolition deserved it. He clarifies what he meant
here, and, in greater detail, in his book,
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. [root]
The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way
to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to
compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of
Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To
the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans"
of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no
legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This,
of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than
anyone else.
[End the War on Freedom]
12:09:18 PM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/15/2006; 2:04:26 PM.
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