Music

Because I can play nicely with others.

athenais tagged me.

I'm not quite so pointless as papersky for this one, but.

Total musical files on my computer 6.68 GB. All loaded from MP3 CDs a friend had with him when we shipped out to Iraq. More than I thought, and that drive could use some cleaning up, because I never use them.

Last CD I obtained: A collection of Christmas music, odd bits of jazz and instrumentals from a late friends collection. Bought? I don't recall. It was a while back.

Listening to now: John Coltrane-Master Tapes 1985 MCA. (Song of the Underground Railroad).

Music is a funny thing for me. I love it. And I can live without it, sort of.

I don't go anywhere without a pennywhistle. I took two of them to Iraq. I bought a CD player and some CDs in Kuwait. A friend sent me odd folk, and Al Stewart (I was listening to Bedsitter Immages: The Ballad of Mary Foster when we crossed the berm. Headphones tucked under my helmet, earpieces on my mastoid [so I could listen for gunfire, without losing the music... I suspect I am one of the few {if not the only} soldiers to drive into a combat zone listening to Al Stewart]. Changing disks to KD Lang and Tony Bennet was easier in a HUMMVEE than it would have been in a regular car). I spent a lot of time listening to them. Homeward Bound, by Paul Simon, was touching (he and Stewart lived across the hall from each other for a while), but way painful.

I used to play the cello. I keep wanting to pick it back up. There was a time I sang in choir. I need lots of rehearsal to be decent, and my voice isn't meant for solos.

I go to places I can hear music. Bars, clubs (sometimes) concerts, friends houses, high school shows.

But I go for long stretches without listening to music (apart from in the car). Part of this is situational. The only CD players in the house use either a computer, or the television.

I also have ecclectic tastes, and I spend most of my time in the main living area (the house has a living room/dining area, a kitchen (separated by a deep counter, and overhanging cupboards, add a door and it would be like a restaurant pass-through), so making everyone listen to Scott Joplin piano rolls (going in next) because I want to hear them while I cook seems not so fair (anything which I can hear in the kitchen is audible everywhere.

Much of the music has migrated to the car, because we drive so often. Singing along counters highway hypnosis (though Oingo Boingo doens't work in this regard. Jimmy Buffett works fine, as does Meatloaf, and (though most wouldn't think so) Carl Orff.

Five Songs that mean a lot to me:

What day is it?

Mozart's 40 Symphony.

Haydn's Trumpet Concerto (esp. as performed with Wynton Marsalis) This is one of my favorite pieces of music, bar none. It was on the final of my music appreciation class (said final conducted spread out around the house of the instructor, because he wasn't going to let a bomb scare on campus [around the corner] stop the final) and it was played on the radio on That Tuesday. What a day that was. The planes, having to go milk cows at the L.A. County Fair (what did they care if New York was collapsing to rubble, and the Pentagon burnt to slag... they needed to be milked. Maia and I were pretty much the only ones to show up for work. Maia's mother lent us her cell phone, in case I was called in. I was. Then a pipe on the pastuerizer blew and clobbered Maia in the head. It was a day of contrasts. Mundanity, horror, stupidities, rage, fear, and in the middle of it all, hope: from the trumpet of Wynton Marsalis came the third movement, and that thrilling uplifting run of Haydn playing with the trumpet.

Battle Hymn of the Republic: As pnh said, this is song to inspire trembling and dread. Powerful in its own right, the imagery in it ought to make people weak in the knees when it's sung with passion and fervor, if one is the object of that singing, well, it's all the power of Puritan New England's determination, wrung out as a paen to righteous battle, ponder that, ye mighty, and despair. It was the closing number at the last performance in which I sang (Army Birthday Ball, June 1994).

After that... they become a tangled mess. Showtunes and perfomance piece from high school (and all the attendant memories which come of rehearsals, and performance, and the travel and the setting up and tearing down), moments from the past which a song will evoke (the girl I was dancing with, the people who went to the show with me (Boiled in Lead will always make me think of Gary Louie and an evening at Trancas in Malibu), Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown makes me think of the third floor flat we had on the South Side of Chicago when it came out (I knew right where, "down there" was in the lyrics... I can't have been more than four).

Music is part and parcel of life, and the songs are part and parcel of me.





I'm not tagging anyone.

Orson Scott Card, and hypocrisy

Orson Scott Card is a swell writer of fiction.

Well, maybe. I've read, I think, only a couple of his pieces of fiction (the short story of Ender's Game and some end of civilization story, which even in high school I found irritating for the subtext of only Mormons will be willing to help other people out when it all goes south).

He has, however, of late been making rather a name in the pundit class with various writings for places like Beliefnet, and World Watch. Most of which writings are, IMO blather. Some of it humorous blather, sort of. His defense of the Sith (I've not seen the movie) is more an attack on the Jedi, saying the portrayal of them doesn't show them in a very good light. It's amusing, to this Catholic, for the paragraph which reads, It's one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it's something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being," given the things I've read about Joeseph Smith (though I might be willing to entertain his speaking of Jesus. On the otherhand I've read a fair chunk of the Book of Mormon, and tnh's writing on the topic [which includes her account of her excommunication from the Church of Latter Day Saints] as well as a few lectures from Mrs. Pagniatta; who taught the 7th and 8th grades at St. Gertrude's, where I went, for a time, and was also a former Mormon. I also have a lot of Mormon friend. For some reason my part of the Army is over represented with them. All of that is to say, I'm familiar with the religion, and [even taking the leaps of faith one must make for any religion] it seems a load of bunk to me. Where are the remains of the great cities which are supposed to be here? Where is the barley, and the wheat? Joeseph Smith was supposed to have perfect translation, so when he says barley, or wheat, he must have meant barley and wheat, but I digress).

It may also have some merit, if it weren't that he misses the whole point. If the Sith and the Jedi are, as he claims, only different because of intent, well intent matters. I haven't seen R.O.T.S., so I can't say if his complaints about the Jedi (eltitist, non-democratic, authoritarian) are valid, but I can say that the Sith seem to be a horse of a different color. The Empire they built was evil. Wiping out entire planets pour encourager les autres doesn't strike me as being a difference of no merit.

It's just those differences of merit for which I am taking Card to task, on on matters more earthly.

He, you see, has an opinion about Newsweek In short he says they, pour encourager les autres need to be punished for what they wrote. If you read him closely it doesn't seem he cares if they are right. In fact looking at his arguments a case might be made he would want them punished espcially if the story is true (which we now know it is. If the FBI isn't credible to the White House, then no one is). Because he thinks Newsweek needs to be held accountable for the damage it has done to the image of the United States, and the blow it has dealt to "The War."

He says the nation is at war. Not the war in Iraq, no the larger, war on, "terror,". He says, quite rightly, that the US will lose the war if it seen as a war on Islam, instead of on a few bad actors. He then implies that media is to blame for that perception in the Muslim world.

Right. Bush calling it a Crusade, Boykin saying we'll win because our God is bigger than their God (and a Real God to boot, not some made up story), the lack of our caring if we harm innoncents (Abu Ghraib was/is populated with people whom we admit aren't terrorists, most of whom aren't even insurgents, but we keep them for months) and the perception that we just don't care whom we kill, those haven't made people think it's against the Islamic world, but Newsweek (and the rest of the media) they managed, with one little paragraph, to undo all the good we've done in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Right.

He goes on.

2. Too many people in the "American" media have lost any concept of loyalty to their country -- if they even consider it their country, rather than just their residence.

Yeah, that's right, I'm playing the "patriotism" card. But not the way you think.

Our country is at war. And it's a war in which victory absolutely depends on the Muslim world perceiving it as a war between the U.S and its allies on one side, and fanatical murderous terrorists on the other....

So during such a difficult time, even people who think the Iraq War or even the whole war on terror is a horrible mistake still have an obligation of loyalty to the nation that offers them protection, prosperity, and freedom....

Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime? It's not that the Media themselves regard the Quran as sacred. It's just paper to them. And surely they would have to agree that if such actions might somehow gain the cooperation of a potential source of useful information (though that seems extremely unlikely to me), it would be infinitely preferable to physical torture.

I'd argue with him about the usefulness of abusing a holy book as a means of breaking someone (because it only works if the book is as sacred, in fact, as he seems to think it isn't. Given the large numbers of the Book of Mormon which are given away by the LDS, one can only assume it has not the same level of sanctity to them which the Qu'ran has to Muslims. They have to know those whom they don't convert aren't likely to care much, one way or the other, what happens to it when the missionaries leave it behind. This may be coloring his perception), but the rest of it... appalling.

He is asking us to muzzle the press. To force them to kowtow to the Administration, to not publish anything which might cast aspects of the War on Terror in a bad light, because to do so is to let the bad guys know how we really are.

As if that is going to work. The French, under Napoleon, had a phrase to explain falsity, "to lie like a Gazzette." That's because the press was a slave to the State, and didn't exactly report the facts as they happened. In more recent times we had Pravda, which the West laughted at because the word means Truth, and the paper was known, in Russia and out, to be a bit fast and loose with that commodity.

How did the French get the real news, which showed the Gazzettes to be false? From other countries. Napoleon himself didn't believe the Gazzettes (he, after all knew the rules under which they worked). He only believed his Marhsals when they won, and not always then. No, to find out what was going on in theaters he wasn't in, he read the London Times.

Mind you Card hasn't said the press needs to lie, not really. A little omission never hurt anyone, right?

By his logic, we shouldn't report on the abuses in Afghanistan. Nor the ones in Abu Ghraib, or Gitmo. We really oughtn't let people know the Army hounded poor Chaplain Yee for being too kind to the prisoners. No, all of that makes it look like we aren't knights in shining armor.

He goes on to rail against the people in Smartland (I'm not kidding that's the word he uses). Smartland, you see, is made up of all those liberal press types (and I suppose Hollywood types, who don't understand they aren't supposed to use their fame to promote the causes they believe in, that's for SF writers) who secretly hate America. They want to kill the goose laying their golden eggs. Now that they can't turn the nation over to the Communists I don't know whom they bear loyalty, but Card can see it isn't the good ol' US of A.

But I still haven't gotten to the Hypocrisy (not even to the part which justifies my bringing up the Sith/Jedi comments, apart from it letting me be snarky).

That's higher up.

So Newsweek kills people with a false story that is actually a lie (unlike anything President Bush ever said about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction), and nothing happens to the perpetrators.

You read that right. One can't even give him the benefit of the doubt. Newsweek didn't lie. Newsweek's source didn't lie. So even writing this back on the 15th he doesn't have that cover.

Bush, however, seems to have lied. The Minutes of the meeting at Downing Street, where Blair said the US knew Iraq had damn all for WMD, but was going to fix the Intel around the policy pretty much seal that deal.

So where is his outrage at the people who helped in that not being not punished (and we are expected to let the DoD do an internal investigation, after which I'm sure all those guilty of twisting facts, pushing people to bend them, or just cherry-picking the snippets that would sound best when leaked to the press... those people who Hate America So, I'm sure the same rules he proposes above, "So all that's left would be a clean personnel sweep of everyone involved in publishing a false story that leads to needless deaths." are what he would be demanding for those who cooked the books on the war. Then again, maybe he knows better, " But it'll never happen. Maybe some token person, after a lengthy "internal investigation" (i.e., coverup; after all, we know just how thorough Newsweek's investigations are), will be ... fired? Naw. Reassigned."

We actually know what's happened to some of them. The guys who made the call the aluminum tubes were for separating uranium... they got bonuses.