Category Archives: Art

Breaking the Chain

Posted on by

Once upon a time, before blogs ruled the earth, somebody invented the Liebster Award. It was probably a German, because “liebster” is German for “beloved” or “favorite”.

The idea is that you nominate a blog for the award if you think it deserves more readers. In this latest round of nominations, the cutoff for getting the award is having fewer than 200 followers. This humble blog currently has 181 followers, so it qualifies with respect to the numbers. Whether WOCS deserves to have more readers is a more difficult question (it’s possible it should have fewer).

Anyway, a fellow blogger nominated WOCS for the Liebster today, after being nominated himself. So, to accept the award, I’m supposed to answer 10 questions sent to me by the other blogger, and also nominate other supposedly underappreciated blogs.

However, although I’m pleased to have been nominated – as anyone would be – I’ve decided not to “accept” the award by fulfilling the requirements above. Instead, I’m merely going to mention some blogs I follow and which you might enjoy too (one of which has many more than 200 followers).

Fortunately, the nomination doesn’t come with a threat, unlike a standard chain letter. If I’d been told that failure to continue this process would result in some catastrophe or other (locusts? none of my favorite cereal at A&P?), I definitely would have complied. You can’t be too careful about these things (well, actually, you can).

Now for those blogs I recommend:

First, there is SelfAwarePatterns. The author of this very interesting blog writes about science and philosophy, among other things, and gets a lot of intelligent comments. Also, I agree with him more often than not (he’s obviously a very bright guy).

Another philosophical blog I recommend is ausomeawestin. The author argues vigorously for moral realism, the idea that judgments like “Susan is a good person” or “Sam did the right thing” are true or false just as much as statements like “Copper conducts electricity”. In other words, we can have knowledge about ethics. I tend to disagree, but I’m not sure why, and I’ve greatly enjoyed discussing the issue with ausomeawestin’s proprietor.

Lastly, on a very different note, there is Beguiling Hollywood, operated by Vickie Lester (presumably a pseudonym, since “Vicki Lester” is the character played by Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland in their respective versions of A Star Is Born). Ms. Lester mostly writes about old Hollywood and also has a wonderful supply of related photographs, which she shares on a daily basis, like this one of Frederic March and Janet Gaynor from that famous old movie:

fredric-march-janet-gaynor-a-star-is-born

Ok, my part of the chain is now broken, but do consider taking a look at these deserving blogs. They’re fun and educational too!

A Pessimist’s Pessimist

Posted on by

Giacomo Leopardi, born in 1798, was the son of a minor Italian aristocrat. He spent most of his youth in his father’s extensive library. By the time he was ten, he had taught himself Latin, Greek, German and French. Leopardi suffered from poor health throughout his life and died at the age of 38. He is now considered one of Italy’s greatest poets.

He is also revered as the author of a massive intellectual diary, first published in 1898 in seven volumes. Originally titled Pensieri di varia filosofia e bella letteratura (“Various thoughts on philosophy and literature”), it’s now known as Zibaldone (“Hodge-podge”). Last year, a complete English translation was published for the first time. (The translated text is 2,000 pages long, so if you’re interested, an electronic edition might be a good idea.)

In addition to being a great poet, Leopardi was one of Western culture’s great pessimists. Arthur Schopenhauer, probably philosophy’s most famous pessimist, had this to say about him: 

But no one has treated [the misery of our existence] so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi…. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence. He presents it on every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect [The World as Will and Idea].

More recently, Tim Parks summarizes Leopardi in The New York Review of Books (behind a paywall):

Obliged by frequent illness to pass his firstborn’s right to inherit to his younger brother, troubled by constant problems with his eyes, frail and almost grotesque, Giacomo saw before him a life without physical love or financial independence. Studying was the one thing he knew how to do, but the knowledge so gained only revealed to him that knowledge does not help us to live; on the contrary it corrodes those happy errors, or illusions as he came to call them, that give life meaning, shifting energy to the mental and rational and away from the physical and instinctive, where, in complicity with illusion, happiness lies.

In a later biography of his son, [Leopardi’s father] would write of Giacomo in this period that “setting himself to thinking about how one breathes” he found he could no longer breathe… “Thought,” Giacomo wrote in a letter in his early twenties, “can crucify and torment a person.”

Maybe more careful thought, perhaps a life devoted to philosophy, might help? That’s what Plato and Spinoza recommended. Leopardi is skeptical:

Those innumerable and immense questions about time and space, argued over from the beginnings of metaphysics onward,…are none other than wars of words, caused by misunderstandings, and imprecision of thought, and limited ability to understand our mind, which is the only place where time and space, like many other abstract things, exist independently and for themselves…”

In his review, Tim Parks suggests that if Leopardi were writing Zibaldone today, it would be a blog. I wonder if he’d throw in a few lighthearted posts to generate traffic.

Friedrich Nietzsche on Doing It Again

Posted on by

Friedrich Nietzsche had a recurring thought about recurrence.

In one of his early works, he imagines people being asked “whether they would wish to live through the past ten or twenty years once more”.

In a later work, he appears to raise the stakes:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”.

Assuming the demon and I didn’t get hung up on questions like “Who are you anyway?” and “Are you sure about that?”, I’d want some clarification. (I can’t imagine gnashing my teeth, since I don’t know what that is.)

Tell me, demon. Would I know that I was living my life again? There wouldn’t seem to be much point in doing it again from scratch.

The demon would probably have a ready answer: if you knew you were living it again, it wouldn’t be the same as living it the first time. You’d have more knowledge the second (or third, or fourth) time around, and presumably be in a position to make different choices.

Right, the Debbie Anderson thing again.

But if I didn’t know anything more this time or remember how things turned out before, what difference would it make? Even if things turned out differently, I wouldn’t know they were turning out differently. I’d simply be living my life as if it were the first time. In fact, for all I know, I’m living my life right now for the umpteenth time, even though it sure feels like the very first (and only) time.

The demon might be nonplussed at this point. Hey, he might say, I never thought of it that way. If you remember you’re doing it again, you’re not really doing it again. But if you don’t know you’re doing it again, you might as well be doing it for the first time. Oh well, I guess it was a stupid question to begin with.

Nietzsche clearly didn’t think it was a stupid question. He thought that a superior person would willingly live the very same life over and over again. To do so would be the highest affirmation. Life is tragic and full of pain, but the best among us will embrace it anyway.

He’s probably right about that, even though the idea of “eternal recurrence” is a dead end.

What some of us really want, of course, is to go back and do things differently. If I could only go back to that one moment ten years ago, or forty years ago, I’d do it better this time.

Since we’re merely human, fantasizing about the past is much easier than getting the future right.

The Everly Brothers – “Oh, So Many Years”

Posted on by

The Everly Brothers’ first album, released in 1958, featured songs like “Bye Bye Love”,  “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Rip It Up”. Later that year, they released their second album: Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. It was a surprising choice as a follow-up, since it included no rock and roll at all. 

Don Everly, 76, released a statement tonight: “I loved my brother very much. I always thought I’d be the one to go first.”

“Oh, So Many Years” was originally recorded by the Bailes Brothers in the 1940s. The Everly Brothers sang it like nobody else on Songs Our Daddy Taught Us:

Friday Night “Soul Music” Potpourri

Posted on by

There is an ongoing discussion at Brian Wilson’s website called “The Battle of the Bands”. Every week someone selects four songs from YouTube that have something in common (say, songs about food or songs with great bass lines). At least one of the songs has to be related to Brian Wilson or the Beach Boys. Then the 20 or so regular participants rank the four songs (gold, silver, bronze and tin).

Opinions are offered, other videos are posted, stories are told and at the end of the week, the votes are tabulated. It’s an enjoyable pastime, since the participants are into music and extremely well-mannered (although they tend to be a little long in the tooth, like a certain blogger).

This week’s theme is Soul Music. The artists represented are Etta James, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke (singing the Beach Boys song “Sail On, Sailor”),  and Barbara Mason (doing her big hit “Yes, I’m Ready”).

I voted a couple days ago, giving gold to Otis Redding. This afternoon, one thing led to another (I believe that’s the definition of “the Internet”) and I ended up listening to and sharing several YouTube videos more or less associated with “soul music”. You might find some of them of interest. 

First, some related philosophical observations:

“There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.” – L. Armstrong 

“You blows who you is.” – L. Armstrong

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” – F. Nietzsche

Whether it’s gospel-influenced, doo wop, R&B, soul or whatever, this one is pretty damn amazing. The Chantels, featuring lead singer Arlene Smith, from 1957/58:

James Brown sings it’s “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World” in Paris. He launches into a bit of a medley around 6:40 or so:

Which doesn’t really lead to Bill Medley talking about Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Carole King or Eric Burdon, or “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” or some famous songs he had the chance to record but didn’t:

The #1 “blue-eyed soul” record that he and Bobby Hatfield did right after they split from Phil Spector:

Which leads in a way (“she’s been my inspiration”) to an extended version of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made To Love Her”, including instrumental intro and outro:

I really disliked that song when it was on the radio in 1967, and was very surprised when the Beach Boys put it on their terrific “Wild Honey” album later that year. But sometimes we progress. This is the late Carl Wilson doing the lead vocal:

The Beach Boys covered Stevie Wonder, and in 1980 the Los Angeles punk rock band X covered the Doors (whose “Soul Kitchen” referred to a soul food restaurant in Venice, California):

Which doesn’t lead at all to Jimmy Cliff, but this is real good and clearly soulful (although rhyming “over” and “White Cliffs of Dover” is geographically suspicious in a song called “Many Rivers to Cross”. Those cliffs aren’t known for their waterfalls.):

Too bad there’s no money in propagating this Internet stuff.