1. Is DeMint going to bring new ideas to Heritage?? He could hire Pete and allow him to clean house.
2. I’m agreeing with those who say that the Republicans now seem to have two principles: Don’t raise taxes on the wealthy and cut the entitlements (particularly Medicare) that everyone but the wealthy really need. I know this is a caricature, but we just noticed that the guy with the better caricatures wins the election. Obama narrowly won the election, but the post-election is a landslide for him so far.
3. I would love to add to Mr. Ceaser’s excellent intervention in support of our unrivaled and hugely postmodern coverage of trends in popular culture. But for some reason I’ve been cured of insomnia in recent years. “Cured of” is ironic; insomnia is a blessing for those who can live well with it. My opposition to “infomercials” is the same as mine to Vampires. They just don’t seem realistic. Now AM conservative talk radio in the SOUTH is full of commercials for cheap herbal Viagra and pills that remove blockages from your arteries and spare you expensive and risky surgery. Of course I only listen once in a while in the car and can never get to a pen quickly enough to jot down the number.
4. I’m still waiting for Pete’s post praising Romney. No candidate has been so thoroughly and somewhat ungratefully disowned by his party. Sure, his campaign stunk compared to Obama’s. I could go on and talk about his lack of real organization, his ridiculous pollsters, his clueless comments, his one-dimensional campaign, and his allowing those extremely rich guys to waste their money on overpriced and worthless commercials. As Pete pointed out, maybe Romney would have been better off with longer “infomercials” that actually said stuff. At least he could have gotten the insomniac vote. But anyone who’s looked at the studies can notice that his biggest problem was that Obama managed to get enough people to still blame Bush for how screwed up things are both at home and abroad for our country. It’s less clear that you might think how Romney could have prevented that.
5. I appreciate Carl exposing the genealogy of the Beatles’ greatness for us. But finally you gotta say that nobody has come up with so many memorable tunes with, yes, strangely original lyrics. I’ll take the Beatles’ “songbook” over Cole Porter or Gershwin eight days a week.
December 10th, 2012 | 12:24 am
Surely you are joking about the Beatles being superior songwriters to Gershwin and Porter. Which of their songs could possibly compare with “Our Love is Here to Stay” or “I’ve Got You Under My Skin?”
December 10th, 2012 | 7:36 am
Vampires bloody well exist…..
From your biggest fang.
December 10th, 2012 | 8:29 am
Stephen P, Of course I was trying to provoke outrage. But the two songs you mention by Porter I find very clever but annoyingly slight. Don’t hum them, have trouble remembering them. The Gershwins are of course superior to the Beatles in terms of musically sophistication and “literacy” and all that. But memorable tunes? What about SUMMERTIME, you might say? Of course, that might be the best American song ever. But for me the lyrics that are the key. They were written by DuBose Heyward (sp.?), the guy who wrote the novel PORGY AND BESS.
December 10th, 2012 | 2:19 pm
To answer Stephen’s challenge:
Eleanor Rigby.
December 10th, 2012 | 2:56 pm
I’m not that big a fan of Eleanor Rigby, but: It is more psychologically penetrating than the two songs Stephen mentioned. Even YESTERDAY is.
December 10th, 2012 | 4:18 pm
You can’t be “Here, There & Everywhere” for a sweet, simple, memorable, even elegant song.
December 10th, 2012 | 4:22 pm
P.S. Have you seen any of the PBS program on the recent history of musical theatre? (Maybe it’s old, but I just noticed it — pledge drive season, no doubt.) The cultural rupture of the late sixties is manifest: the gulf between West Side Story and Cabaret… and then all the corruption follows: Hair, lots of art as transgression, then followed by a kind of attempt to return to real human emotion, but what is left is largely grandiose sentimentality. Something like The King and I is incomprehensible without a norm of chastity. More generally, as a wise (if judeao-pagan) man once said: you can’t make sense of humanity without sacred restraints. Or of the beautiful.
December 10th, 2012 | 4:32 pm
Well, I did enjoy JERSEY BOYS.
December 10th, 2012 | 7:58 pm
[...] Peter Lawler asked, but the conclusions are [...]
December 11th, 2012 | 1:19 am
[...] Peter Lawler asked, but the conclusions are [...]
December 11th, 2012 | 9:25 am
Yeah, Peter, “Eleanor Rigby” proudly exhibits its giving you MORE psychological depth, but it turns out to be of the wrong (reductive) kind.
As I explained in Songbook #31: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2011/12/15/carls-rock-songbook-31-the-beatles-eleanor-rigby/
And in underlined in #32: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2011/12/16/carls-rock-songbook-32-the-zombies-a-rose-for-emily/
So maybe the formula-following RESTRAINT of the American Songbook songs actually demonstrates the greater psychological depth–i.e., “don’t pretend to take a song into the depths unless there’s a way of really doing it.” And with a 3-minute song, usually, there isn’t.
Out of the 30 or so actual songs I’ve analyzed in the Songbook, I think “Eleanor Rigby” was the one I showed the most outright hostility to. If you really listen to it, guys, I trust the revulsion will grow in your soul as well.
December 11th, 2012 | 9:58 am
And hey, does anyone know if Burke could dance well?
I’d be more surprised if the answer were “no,” than if it were “yes.” Portraits of him when younger show a handsome fellow, for one.
December 11th, 2012 | 10:00 am
Oops, the Burke thing should go with the other Beatle-related thread, the one where Jim calls me the house aesthete.
December 11th, 2012 | 2:07 pm
[...] Random Whines – Peter Lawler, PoMoCon [...]
December 11th, 2012 | 4:00 pm
Carl, agreed with your general assessment of the psychological point to Rigby, my recommendation of the song had more to do with its aesthetic effectiveness, in the sense that one might pose Triumph of the Will as aesthetically effective, however repulsive its objective. “Imagine” is an even more explicit example.
Stephen P’s original challenge was to identify any song of the Beatles that compares to Gershwin or Porter. Peter added the additional criteria of psychological depth later in the thread. Personally I find the phrase “pyschological depth” to be a contradiction in terms and so mute on matters of music altogether.
Just my two cents.
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