Stephen Roney's Blog, page 167
December 30, 2021
A Carnegie Hall Christmas
Jesus Comes to E Street
Springsteen Christmas
Lego for Adults
At first glance, this looks really cool. A partial solution for the high cost of housing?
Predictions for 2022
Surrender, Dorothy!A cautionary note: the prediction most likely to come true is a prediction that things will continue more or less as they are. Sudden change is the exception. Slow change is not generally perceptible year upon year. Any prediction other than this is most likely to be wrong.
But saying things will continue more or less as they are is hardly a prediction at all. You would stop reading at this point.
So what sudden changes seem most likely?
I’d like to predict that the COVID pandemic will be over by the end of the year. Without interventions, the Spanish flu burned out after 2-3 years. Surely with our vaccines and all, we can do as well. Signs are that omicron is milder than previous strains, and is driving them out. I really expect it to be all over but the shouting by February. People will stop being scared of catching omicron. But I have been consistently over-optimistic
If the pandemic ends, I expect the world economy to come thundering back. A pandemic does not affect fundamentals. It is hard to see any lasting economic damage from the Spanish flu pandemic. I expect a season or more of optimism and growth.
The US has mid-term elections coming this fall. Everyone expects the Democrats to get trounced, and they only have a small majority in Congress now. A spanner in these works might be the end of the pandemic. Just as Trump was unfairly blamed for the pandemic, and FDR might have been unfairly credited with the end of the Depression, the Democrats might benefit from the resulting mood of general optimism. The economy should also boom in recovery, and Dems will be able to cite those stats as though they were their doing.
On balance, I’d say the odds favour the Republicans re-taking both houses. The opposition party usually gains ground in midterms, and the Dems only had a thin majority. And inflation looks like a real problem, that probably will not go away soon. But I don’t expect a blowout.
Things look unsettled in China. There are signs of a leadership struggle. The economy is getting hit hard, and Xi Jinping seems to be making it worse—a crazy move if he is not acting in mortal fear for his position. China is facing a heating shortage, an energy shortage, and a food shortage this winter. Not to mention a new outbreak of COVID. Xi might start a war out of desperation, in a bid to rally support behind him. But I think this is unlikely. It seems obvious that Xi himself does not want a war and is not preparing for one. To fight a war and lose would be suicide, and Chinese diplomacy is doing all the wrong things if it intends to win a war—provoking multiple possible enemies at once.
I’d say there’s a better chance that someone other than Xi will be in command by the end of the year. I think the party turned to him and threw him his extra powers because they were already in a desperate situation, and were looking for a man on a white horse. If visible improvement does not come within a reasonable time, if things instead seem to be getting worse, such a leader can fall suddenly.
North Korea also looks unstable, although what is really going on there is opaque. There are renewed rumours that Kim Jong Un is near death. Regardless, his policy of blowing up subordinates is probably not wise in the long run. Will some group of officers or officials sooner or later decide to band together secretly and move quickly to take out Kim before he kills them all? One of these days, something like this could happen.
Some are talking about civil war in America, or separation. Left and right seem to live in two different realities, and do not agree on the most fundamental principles.
I think it is more likely that we are at a tipping point, and the general population and Overton window is about to lurch. I think of that old saw, “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you’ve won.” There might yet be a bigger fight, but the result is not in doubt. Insanity must over time collapse in the face of sanity.
The core issue is abortion. It looks as though the Supreme Court is about to roll back Roe v. Wade to the extent, at least, that individual states will be able to impose significant limits on abortion. I suspect that this will draw down much of the pressure, like lancing a boil. A compromise will have been reached, at least temporarily.
Sudden and successful popular uprisings never seem to come in the most obvious countries at the most obvious time. Who expected Tunisia to kick off the Arab Spring? Were the Thirteen Colonies really the most oppressed part of the world in 1775?
It is not the oppressive or cruel regimes that fall to popular uprisings, but regimes perceived to be incompetent.
There is a general mood everywhere that the “elites” have failed, wear no clothes, and are corrupt. So almost any state currently fills the bill. Who can say where this will reach the ultimate flash point?
We might be in store for another year like 1848. Militating against that, however, is the fact that the populations in most countries are rapidly aging. Revolutions and civil unrest generally come from the young, who feel their way upwards blocked. An older population sees less value in upending the boat for possible future rewards.
So, on the whole, nothing very unexpected is going to happen next year.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 29, 2021
A Warm and Sunny Christmas
A Million Dollar Christmas Chorus
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Musical Meditations
Feeling feverish and incoherent today. I suspect COVID, which complicates my reservation for a booster shot. I guess that’s not happening. Real life sucks.
Unable to sleep last night, I began playing my favourites list of YouTube music videos. Not necessarily my favourite songs: this is a category reserved for music I love that does not fit under some broader classification.
First up. Elvis Presley, “His Latest Flame,” with a selection of shuffle-dancing babes. I love rhythm. Early rock and roll is great for rhythm; later rock lost it, and lost my interest. I also cannot get enough of watching beautiful girls shuffle dance. “His Latest Flame” is based around a simple endless two-note riff. I could listen to it forever. My brother Gerry used to scorn rock and roll as too simple. That’s just what I like about it.
Next up, Madonna singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” Rather the opposite. The Webber melody is no doubt complex enough to satisfy my brother. The lyrics, too, are dense, and there’s not much rhythm. Tim Rice is clearly influenced by W.S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan. But he uses erudition not for comic effect but, here, to express a philosophical world-view in verse. This strikes me as a fantastically hard thing to do, and deserves some kind of award. He also deserves an award for making Madonna relatable. I’m impressed at a rhyme of “existence” with “distance,” “illusions” with “solutions,” or the line. “All dressed to the nines/ At sixes and sevens with you.’
“The Sidewalks of New York” – three versions; none of them quite hits the mark. My grandmother used to sing this to me, and it can sometimes evoke tears. The lost world of childhood—hers more than mine.
W.C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues.” This is a purely instrumental version performed by the composer himself. I love the tone of world-weariness. Sad music is cathartic. The blues is eternal.
Playing for Change, “Guantanamera.” I’m crazy for rhythm. I love Latin rhythms. I love the format of Playing for Change, picking up participants across the world. The words do not make much sense, and are in Spanish, but there is great strength in that simple refrain,
“Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera
Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera.”
Guantanamo girl. Guantanamo country girl.
I know what he means.
A simple cry of aching appreciation for random beauty. This is not a love song; he does not know her name. The verses make sense as a spontaneous meditation on what he could possibly say to this girl, knowing nothing of her.
“I am an honest man from the land of palms…”
“My thoughts are light green, yet burning incarnadine.”
She is his muse. Perhaps she is everyone’s muse; beauty itself.
Norah Jones, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” I do not like modern jazz. I find it pretentious, emotionally superficial, and self-indulgent. Yet I love the vocal stylings of Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, or Diana Krall. When their jazz cool is used on a song with deep emotional tones, the counterpoint is painfully beautiful.
Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott, “Over the Rainbow.” I’m not big on show tunes as a rule, because they usually seem canned and artificial. But this one speaks of a deep universal yearning. It is in the end the yearning for heaven that each of us is born with. This version is instrumental, and seems even better for it, given that the words are in my head. The imagined song is more perfect tha the song heard with the ear.
Emmylou Harris, “Spanish is a Loving Tongue.” The lyrics are the main attraction here. They started out as a stand-alone cowboy poem, and it is a fine example of the genre. Harris, being a woman, must sing it in the third person. But that seems worth it for the sake of her beautiful country voice.
The Highwaymen, “City of New Orleans.” Willie Nelson is singing on this one, and the others strumming. The lyrics are finely crafted. But this is another rhythm song. It is the rhythm of the rails; you can almost feel them rumbling ‘neath the floor.
I have no connection with this part of the world—the American Midwest, and down the Mississippi. I don’t have wide experience with trains, other than watching them pass by for hours without me on them. But I can almost feel I am there. A perfect slice of Americana.
Willie Nelson with Paula Nelson, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” A beautiful black-and-white atmospheric video. I love the song in its apocalyptic simplicity. I think it was the plainness of Creedence Clearwater in particular over which my jazz-loving sibling and I differed. Willie’s cool voice feels like the cool rain falling.
Jordan Bickhart, “Brownsville Girl.” Dylan’s songs are usually better performed by someone else. It is not that he has a bad voice, so much as that he abuses it and goofs around. I think it is because he finds the songs too emotionally meaningful, too revealing.
“Brownsville Girl” has almost no melody; it is a tone poem. Not a rhyming poem either; blank verse. There is a narrative, but disjointed. A lot of it is just Western atmospherics. There ought to be little to hang your hat on here, but not so—Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize for Literature. He knows the trick of associating images, the same trick that made Yeats’s later poems so great.
The Brownsville girl makes the narrator think of Western movies, which fade in and out of his own remembered life. This is what she was to him: some promise of heroic perfection, somewhere over the rainbow, or across the Mexican line.
Like “Guantanamera,” it is mostly a coyote howl at the moon of beauty, always visible but just out of reach:
“Brownsville girl
with your Brownsville curls,
teeth like pearls
shining like the moon above
Brownsville girl
Show me all around the world,
Brownsville girl,
you're my honey love.”
Deliberately not polished poetry. Just one man trying to express the universal feeling in his heart. The incoherence is part of the point. We are here, and do not understand. Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.
That’s the way I feel today.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 28, 2021
A Dunning-Kruger Christmas
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
