Carl Scott

One of the guys at the indispensable Powerline, following the lead of Big Hollywood, is saying that the new film Super 8 fits the anti-military pattern we’ve been seeing for years with liberal Hollywood. Well, I saw it at a drive-in, and it was an E-ticket all the way. Very fun, and a . . . . Continue Reading »

For the seventh Songbook entry, it’s time for sounds that remind us of, or at least make us long for, God’s goodness. Here are two pieces I can recommend unequivocally as fine music, one initially composed without words, from the jazz tradition but veering into the classical, and another . . . . Continue Reading »

TWO collections of Wilson Carey McWilliams essays!  Patrick Deneen introduces them  here .  One is more America-oriented, the other more general.  Wendell Berry is the muse, model, and poet of Porcherism, but McWilliams is its real political philosopher.  Or deserves . . . . Continue Reading »

I concluded the Songbook #6 essay by quoting Chantal Delsol in partial defense of, or rather, in sympathetic re-conceptualization of, the idealistic anti-war impulse. Delsol is a philosophic, essayistic, “anthropological,” Tocquevillian, and Catholic analyst of our present “late . . . . Continue Reading »

In the comments on Songbook #5, I was reminded that Bono said he wrote the central verse of U2’s “New Year’s Day” with Solidarity’s struggle in mind. My reply there lays out the erotic and political elements any full analysis of that song would address, and why the . . . . Continue Reading »

WIN the war in Iraq? Walter Russell Mead thinks so. . . . . Continue Reading »

One night in early 1983, my teenaged-Christian-60s-obsessed-socialist/pacifist-leaning self heard this song on the radio. I had not heard U2 before, and I was thrilled. Here was a band politically committed in a way that smacked of the idealism of the 60s I had been reading about in library books, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Poetic Wisdom Paradox, which I abbreviate as the PWP, works as follows. A wise poet, let us say Homer, wants to convey wisdom in his poetic creation. Unlike the bohemian model of the underground poet satisfied with a tiny audience, we assume he begins with the poet’s traditional desire to . . . . Continue Reading »

“Friends of Mine” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON-F0i69_8k is a song in which the narrator has an appreciative yet ultimately ambivalent attitude towards marriage, and towards “pairing off” more generally. Officially, that is, judged by the meaning of the lyrics alone, it is a . . . . Continue Reading »

The songs that make up Odyssey and Oracle could be analyzed in two ways. First, we could interpret them as distinct songs only superficially or incidentally linked in lyrical content—and then we’d say a lot more about which of the two Zombie songwriters, Rod Argent or Chris White, penned . . . . Continue Reading »