December 9th, 2008 | How To Make Sausage

Absolute bliss....

December 7th, 2008 | Forqueray

November 16th, 2008 | Palin Originals

"My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars."

November 13th, 2008 | Reverend Gary Davis

Reverend Gary Davis

October 16th, 2008 | Busta

Busta Rhymes says, "Don't Touch Me" now...

October 4th, 2008 | Monteverdi's L'Orfeo

Music has caped crusaders, too....

rnrnThe opening of Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo, conducted by Jordi Savall.

September 27th, 2008 | Taming Trauma

From Adorno's essay "Commitment":

There is something embarrassing in[Arnold] Schoenberg's composition [A Survivor from Warsaw—not what arouses anger in Germany, the fact that it prevents people from repressing from memory what they at all costs want to repress—but the way in which, by turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of the world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite... [This effect] makes an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art which tried to evade them could confront the claims of justice. Even the sound of despair pays its tribute to a hideous affirmation. Works of less than the highest rank are also willingly absorbed as contributions to clearing up the past. When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the themes of committed literature, it becomes easier to continue to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder.

September 24th, 2008 | More Kraus

To the Bourgeois

That in gloom some are despairing
so that sun be yours alone;
that your burdens they are bearing
in addition to their own;
that their nights your days would earn you,
that their chains your freedom built—
that his never did concern you,
who can rid you of that guilt?

—Karl Kraus

September 24th, 2008 | A few aphorisms by Karl Kraus

"Love and art embrace not what is beautiful but what by that embrace becomes beautiful"

Why is it that so many people find fault with me? Because they praise me and I find fault with them nevertheless."

"I hear noises which others don't hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don't hear either."

"I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it will."

"The closer one looks at a word, the farther away it moves."

"The most dangerous writers are those whom a good memory relieves of all responsibility. They cannot help having things come flying to them. I would prefer an honest plagiarist."

September 21st, 2008 | Sublimation

From an editorial by Nick Kristof on Obama and his religion:

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

Raising doubts about a candidate based on the religion of his grandfather is toxic and profoundly un-American, cracking the melting pot we emerged from. Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.

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