Just thought I’d share this new ad Clint Eastwood did for the American Crossroads Super PAC.
He says, among other things:
Obama’s second term would be a rerun of the first, and our country just couldn’t survive that.
Really, Clint? Couldn’t survive it?
I think he has a greater sense of perspective and proportion in his movies. (Particularly “Gran Torino,” which is awesome.)
Anyway, if you want to see the PRO-Obama the Hollywood legend did not so long ago, I include that below…
Schoolteacher and former state superintendent candidate Kelly Payne shot the picture above last night, from the moment in scene 2 when I announce, “May I present our new neighbors at Netherfield: Mr. Charles Bingley (top), Miss Caroline Bingley, and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy…”
Though I’ve shot a lot of pictures of the production myself, is actually the first picture I’ve seen with me in it other than the dance one in which I am tiny and blurred. Seeing this, I’m thinking I might need to make the smile bigger. Sir William is an ebullient and convivial fellow.
If you’d like a better view of the whole thing, come on out. We’re performing in the amphitheater at Finlay Park at 7:30 tonight, Friday night and Saturday night, and then that’s it.
And it’s free.
Got to say I was seriously underwhelmed by Apple’s news yesterday:
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Steve Jobs once mocked tablets with small screens, saying they would need to come with sandpaper so people could sand down their fingertips to use them. But that didn’t stop his company from shrinking the iPad.
Apple’s iPad Mini, which it unveiled at a press event here on Tuesday, weighs about two-thirds of a pound and has a screen that measures 7.9 inches diagonally, making its surface area significantly smaller than that of the 9.7-inch iPad. Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s vice president for marketing, said the smaller, lighter tablet would be a good fit for people who want something more portable than the 1.44-pound iPad.
The company is selling the lowest price Mini for $330, about $130 more than similar-size tablets from competitors…
So what burst of innovation will they come out with next — an iPad that’s between the iPhone and the mini in size, or one between the mini and the full-size? Or maybe a 60 inch, for that home-theater effect while you’re sitting in the coffee shop?
And in the WSJ in the same news cycle, Walter Mossberg was highly praising the new Microsoft tablet set to come out at the end of the week. Ouch, Apple.
All of this Apple angst brings to mind this hilarious sendup of the iPhone 5 complaints, from SNL a couple of weeks back…
Except, get this — the dope doesn’t get laid off. He quits The Daily Planet, a newspaper still perfectly willing to keep giving him a paycheck to do what he does, to become a blogger on purpose.
Of course, I don’t suppose he’ll starve. The whole blog business model probably works a whole lot better when you can squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond whenever your ad revenues run low.
It’s all well and good to argue with your editor over news judgment. Everybody does it. And yeah, I like the touch where you invoke “truth, justice and the American way,” in the pontifical manner of scribes everywhere. But the thing is, you come back into work the next day, when you and the editor and everybody else has forgotten yesterday’s argument, and is ready to start on today’s.
Sorry, but I guess my problem is that I spent most of my newspaper career as an editor, supervising prima donna writers, so I tend to have a bit more sympathy for the multitudinous headaches of Perry White.
Oh, and another thing, Kent: Put on a damn’ tie! Great Caesar’s Ghost..
Gary Karr, ex-reporter, ex-press secretary to Gov. David Beasley, brought this to my attention Friday (Tweeting, “I bet my friends @bradwarthen and@cindiscoppe are envious.”), but I didn’t have a chance to read it until Saturday night, backstage at “Pride and Prejudice” in Finlay Park. And I was busy then.
So I’m just getting around to passing it on to y’all.
Everyone knows what I thought of John Edwards way before the sex scandal, and any of you who remain among his admirers will no doubt be saddened to learn that my opinion has not improved. But then, I’m a stick-in-the-mud, and lack the bold vision of The Onion‘s editorial board.
This seems to mark a departure for that revered organization. They used to be satisfied just to be funny. This goes to a whole new level. It’s positively Swiftian. And it makes anything I ever wrote about the guy seem almost complimentary.
The core argument for the former U.S. Senator (and, we must not forget our shame, winner of the 2004 SC Democratic primary — y’all remember I told y’all to vote for Joe Lieberman, but did y’all listen?), begins as follows:
Mr. Edwards’ career has not been without its missteps. He has, like all of us at one time or another, made his share of mistakes. His opposition to a nationwide military draft, for instance. In addition, his support for the expansion of immigrants’ rights has angered this newspaper’s editorial board. And yet at each turn, Mr. Edwards has recovered in full, with two feet planted firmly on the ground and his dignity and political acumen intact. He is a man who has learned from adversity, knowing, as any former attorney does, that the strongest individuals are forged through trials by fire.
Furthermore, Mr. Edwards conducted a protracted extramarital affair with a younger woman while his wife was dying of cancer, and we like that he did this. Our reasons for liking that he did this are tenfold:
1. It was a brave thing to do, given the possible consequences
2. The woman in question was more attractive than Mr. Edwards’ wife
3. He did what he did without compromising his ideals, at least not to any illegal extent
4. He enjoyed himself, and good for him
5. The Onion believes sex is a natural and healthy biological function
6. Women have a weakness for men in powerful positions, and Mr. Edwards expertly exploited that weakness…
… and so forth. Be sure to read the whole thing. The logic is seamless, and who can say them nay? By these standards, there is no better choice on Nov. 6 than John Edwards.
Think about that as you watch tonight’s debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It should make both of them look better.
In case you haven’t had enough of “Gangnam Style,” here the special version for adolescent members of the British ruling class.
The Guardian, that great leveler, has kindly offered a translation:
Tardy book, beaks, chambers: like all the best rap songs, the Etonian version of Gangnam Style is almost entirely unintelligible. Fortunately,Eton College publishes a glossary to its arcane lingo on its website, and so with reference to this great resource, and with a bit of help from those in the know, we can at last reveal what on earth those poshos were on about…
Follow the link for the glossary.
I find myself envious of these lads. Not for their priceless prep school education, but because they effortlessly speak that way, while I have to consciously work at it every night.
Which is my setup for saying, come see “Pride and Prejudice” tonight at Finlay Park at 7:30. It will show at the same time tomorrow night, and also next Wednesday through Saturday. But allow me to point out that it appears the weather will be perfect tonight.
Below is a picture someone took (I grabbed it from Facebook) of me and the gang doing a dance called “Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot.” Really. That’s what it’s called. Here you can see them doing it in the BBC series, the time that Darcy (the Colin Firth Darcy) and Elizabeth first dance. They do it a lot more slowly than we do. Amazingly, they have a conversation during it. Bet they couldn’t do that if they were dancing as fast as we do.
That’s me on the far end of the second row of dancers. Admittedly, the picture’s sort of blurry. If you want to see it better, come see the show.
With the change of weather, my throat started feeling a bit scratchy yesterday, although with the help of an antihistamine, a decongestant and cough drops, I got through dress rehearsal last night.
Today, there’s a definite soreness creeping in, and it feels… I hesitate to type this… the way it does before my voice goes all croaky and barely inaudible. I share that periodic condition with Bill Clinton. Related to allergies.
And we open tonight.
So I started thinking about what I could do about it, and my mind naturally turned to thoughts of Tedral.
Tedral was an amazing, cheap little pill that used to be prescribed for asthma, but I discovered a neat side effect — it cleared my throat, and my voice, like nothing else in the world. Back in the 70s and early 80s, I used to take one before speaking, or appearing on stage, or singing in the folk choir at church, and it worked wonderfully. It was like magic.
Very off-label, of course.
So I was about to call around to some pharmacies (starting with my own) to see if anybody still had it, or knew who did. Because near as I can recall, the last time I got any, it was available over-the-counter.
But I thought I’d check the Web first. And as near as I can tell, Tedral was banned from the U.S. market in 1993. Although I haven’t really found what looks like an authoritative source on that.
It probably had something to do with the ingredients, which according to the Web were:
I had known about the theophylline (a bronchodilator) and phenobarbital (a narcotic that I suppose was meant to take the edge off the bronchodilator). But I hadn’t remembered the ephedrine.
Looks like I’m out of luck. And I’m glad I didn’t start calling multiple pharmacies looking for it. They might have thought I was a Walter White copycat.
So... you wouldn't happen to have any, um, Tedral in stock, would you?
The top of my main Pinterest page.
Some years ago — it could have been 20 — I read an article by Umberto Eco that seems appropriate to this topic. I don’t remember all the particulars of the piece, or even in which magazine it appeared. But I seem to recall that the semiotician and novelist set forth the notion that we might be moving, beyond a post-literate society, to becoming post-verbal, returning to means of communication common in medieval days when, say, a pub called the Rose and Crown would be identified by a hanging sign showing pictures of those things, rather than words.
The premise would seem excessively alarmist, or at least premature, since the decades since I read that have seen an explosion of the written word on the Web. More people are writing, and reading, a greater profusion of words than at any time in the history of this planet.
But sometimes, we are faced with images alone, and words fail us. On friends’ Facebook pages, I’m occasionally confronted with images that just beg for accompanying text to explain them, but nary a word is offered.
And recently, I found myself in a world that brought the Eco piece back powerfully.
I was going to (and eventually did) write a light item for the ADCO blog about the addictiveness of Pinterest, which has hooked a couple of my co-workers. The spark was a study indicating that 20 percent of women who are online were into the site.
At first, I supposed that only women could possibly get into it, for as I perused the boards created by my female co-workers, I was overwhelmed by all the images of food and housewares and decorating ideas. As I said in that ADCO blog post, those screens looked like “the result of Edward Scissorhands going to town on a 10-foot-high stack of old copies of Better Homes and Gardens and Southern Living.”
But as I went through the little signup ritual for creating my own account, I saw how quickly the screen would morph into something that more interested me.
Here’s what happens: You sign in to the site. You are offered a screen full of slightly-bigger-than-thumbnail images. You are asked to “like” the ones that appeal to you. What you “like” affects what you see as you continue to scroll down. It’s rather fascinating to watch as the algorithm does its work. For a time, for a long time, the wave of images coming at you seems never-ending. The scroll bar on the right will seem to be approaching the bottom, then suddenly it will glide back up toward the middle as a new load of images arrives.
I saw a lot of images that interested me a great deal, but I couldn’t decide whether to “like” them or not. I mean, what does it say if you click “like” on a picture of a B-26 going down in flames? I don’t like that it’s going down, with American airmen dying in it. But I do want the program to know that I find images of WWII warplanes interesting.
Or what about a picture of Michael Caine as spy Harry Palmer? Will it think I like the raincoat, or “The Ipcress File?” This is a place where words would help.
And what does it mean when I “like” a picture of Marilyn Monroe? I mean, have you ever seen a picture of her you didn’t like, on some level or other? I haven’t. And yet, after I liked one or two of them, they kept coming in a profusion that suggested that Pinterest thought I had some kind of Elton-John-like celebrity fetish centered on her. I continued to “like” them, because that was my honest and uncomplicated answer. But I didn’t want it to offer me nothing but movie-star pictures going forward.
Just because I like Sean Connery doesn’t mean I want to see pictures of Rock Hudson (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And my liking a picture of Natalie Wood doesn’t mean I want to see Robert Wagner. And what’s with these Jody Foster pictures you keep throwing at me? I haven’t liked a single one, and they keep coming. Who do you think I am, John Hinckley? And just because I click on an interesting diagram of old military headgear doesn’t mean I want to look at one Confederate kepi after another!
So here’s where you end up, or where I ended up anyway: Pinterest now “knows” me well enough that one out of 10 or 12 things it throws at me will be mildly interesting. Which I guess is an achievement for a computer program.
But the language of social media — “like” and “friend” and other terms that so often don’t exactly describe the relationship in a given case — still needs work. Let’s not give up on words just yet.
Below are some of the pictures I “liked” as they were thrown at me. But really: What does it mean to “like” a picture of Bonnie and Clyde?
Monday was our first night with lights. In this scene (still sans costume), the Bennets get to know Mr. Collins better than they'd like to.
Just to remind y’all that one reason I’m not blogging as much as usual these days is because of rehearsals for “Pride and Prejudice,” seven days a week.
Over the weekend, we further prepared our state of mind with Karen Eterovich’s (mostly) one-woman Jane Austen show at Drayton Hall. Just days before those performances, I was asked to play a small supporting role in that. Master Thespian that I am, I quickly mastered my three lines, which were as follows:
Moving on from that triumph… Sunday night, we moved to Saluda Shoals park, where we open Friday night, which I believe is starting to freak everybody out just a bit.
Sunday night, we experienced rain. We moved inside to a very small room, and did a hurried run-through, which directors Linda Khoury and Paula Peterson said were our best performance yet. It was certainly… intimate. In a dance scene, one of the actresses and I ran into each other via our posteriors. It occurred to me that this was unexplored cultural ground: I had just done “the Bump” with Miss Jane Bennet. Lydia I could see, but Jane?
Then last night, there was a challenge of outdoor theater I had never anticipated, as we stood at the edge of woods damp from the rain, waiting to go on: Mosquitoes. As I waved and slapped at them, I took solace from Marty Feldman’s immortal words: “Could be worse. Could be raining…”
Three more nights…
At the edge of the woods, waiting to go on: Mr. Darcy (Gene Aimone) and my daughter, who plays Lady Lucas.
At some point I’ll post something serious today, but I just had to share this, too:
The video shows Ron Bronstein, an enlistee in the Israel Air Force, “shuffling” through the basic training process to the tune of LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem.
In the video, Bronstein dances in the midst of many mundane basic training backdrops that are all too familiar to Israelis who have done military service.
And in case you just can’t wait for something serious: Bibi decided to take the ‘subtle’ approach at the U.N. yesterday, just days after Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad’s Yom Kippur address to the body…
As you know, I’m working on some mutton chops for “Pride and Prejudice.” I really didn’t start early enough to get them nice and bushy, a la Regency Period.
From my sideburn days, in college. They show up better when they're not white.
I know from experience that sideburns take time. To grow them really big would take close to a year. And even more maddeningly, the part of my beard I don’t want — the mustache and chin area — grows much more quickly and thickly.
All I can say is that by the time I shave the middle part, just before opening night (which is just over two weeks away!), they will be passable, although not nearly as good as Mr. Bennet’s in the 1995 TV series. Good thing I’m playing Sir William, eh?
This would be easier to accept if I hadn’t watched a movie with my wife the other night about Beatrix Potter, whose father was played by John Woodvine, below. That’s just totally unfair. I console myself by saying that they have to be fake. They do, right? No actor could take that much time out of his life to look like this for one role…
When I saw that Randy Newman had written a song titled “I’m Dreaming (of a White President),” I thought, this is going to be good.
When I read on Twitter that it was “Not a radio hit,” I expected the kind of dead-on, slashing, too-sharp-for-prime-time brilliance that he displayed in “Rednecks,” which we’ll never hear on the radio if we live a thousand years (OK, it’s theoretically possible that we’d hear it — after an hour’s worth of explanation, apology and disclaimer). Oh, and a warning, in case you don’t know that song and innocently follow the link — it uses “N” word eight times. Among other things.
But no. This effort also tries to mine America’s race complexes for profundity, but fails utterly. The lyrics are entirely predictable and trite, the music utterly unappealing.
Either Randy Newman’s lost it — which would mean the loss of a national treasure — or he was just trying too hard on this one.
But since I spent the time listening to it, I pass it on.
Lately, I’ve been marveling at some of the silent films TCM has been showing from before 1910. But none of them impressed me as much as this:
The world’s first colour moving pictures dating from 1902 have been found by the National Media Museum in Bradford after lying forgotten in an old tin for 110 years.
The discovery is a breakthrough in cinema history.
Michael Harvey from the National Media Museum and Bryony Dixon from the British Film Institute talk about the importance of the discovery.
The previous earliest colour film, using the Kinemacolour process, was thought to date from 1909 and was actually an inferior method.
The newly-discovered films were made by pioneer Edward Raymond Turner from London who patented his colour process on 22 March 1899.
The story of Edwardian colour cinema then moved to Brighton. Turner shot the test films in 1902 but his pioneering work ended abruptly when he died suddenly of a heart attack.
Watch the video. It’s pretty cool. Some guy just invented it on his own, and shot home movies of his kids — but he couldn’t figure how to make it work with a projector. So they were never seen, until now (with computer help).
This Turner, I assume, is not to be confused with colorization pioneer Ted…
I’ve been enjoying the new 92.1 on FM, partly because it plays things I like, but have forgotten.
Today, I was driving up Lady Street when the Spin Doctors came on. Which made me think, What happened to those guys?
They came out of nowhere in the early 90s with an album just jammed with single-worthy tracks. They had a distinctive sound. “Pocketful of Kryptonite” was the last album by a new band I can remember buying based on hearing them for the first time on MTV and/or radio. Which I guess isn’t that remarkable given that rock, to the extent that it still exists, isn’t so album oriented any more. Still, at that point in my life, I had to be impressed to buy new music.
I think maybe my favorite song was “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues,” on account of it being about the Daily Planet’s newsroom personnel. How often pop song speak of having it bad for a journalist? Yah, Lois Lane, you don’t need no Superman… Although “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” was quite catchy as well.
And then… I haven’t heard from them since. According to Wikipedia, they’re still out there. But you couldn’t tell by me.
So I appreciate hearing them on the radio this morning.
The next track played after that was Neil Young’s “Ohio.” Gotta get down to it…
Not only is Barack Obama enjoying a post-convention bounce, not only has he outstripped Mitt Romney in fund-raising for the first time in four months, he actually got a physical lift while visiting a pizza parlor in Florida.
No word on where the Secret Service was during this, but I suspect the president’s detail spent the next hour breathing through paper bags, trying to calm down…
It appears that the Democrats got a modest bounce from last week’s convention, but the opposition refuses to be impressed, according to the WashPost:
BOSTON — Acknowledging Monday that President Obama has seen a surge in voter support since last week’s Democratic National Convention, the Romney campaign’s pollster likened the bounce to a “sugar high” and argued that the Republican challenger has a long-term advantage over the president.
Neil Newhouse, Mitt Romney’s pollster and senior strategist, wrote a memorandum released to reporters to rebut the conventional wisdom that Romney has fallen behind in the presidential race and to calm any panic among supporters. In the memo, Newhouse wrote that Obama “has seen a bounce from his convention” but contended that the president’s approval ratings are likely to recede in the weeks ahead.
“Don’t get too worked up about the latest polling,” Newhouse wrote. “While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly. The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama Presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race.”
According to several new national polls, after months of deadlock, Obama opened a lead over Romney after last week’s Democratic convention in Charlotte. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday, 47 percent of likely voters supported Obama and 43 percent Romney. In a Gallup tracking poll, Obama leads Romney 49 percent to 44 percent, while an automated Rasmussen poll released Monday put Obama at 50 percent and Romney at 45 percent….
“Ultimate downfall?” Really. It looks like maybe Jim DeMint is acting as scriptwriter for Mr. Newhouse. Here I thought we were just facing an election. The Romney team seems to be planning something more on the order of Götterdämmerung. I can see Mitt in his helicopter now, cranking up the Wagner and explaining, “It scares the hell out of the libs… but our boys love it!“
GEORGE: Oh! You mean that posh bird who gets everything wrong?SIMON: Excuse me?GEORGE: Oh, yeah. The lads frequently sit around the telly and watch her for a giggle. One time, we actually sat down and wrote these letters saying how gear she was and all that rubbish.SIMON: She’s a trendsetter. It’s her profession.GEORGE: She’s a drag. A well known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things.
Many of the speakers at the two political conventions brought out the George Harrison in me. When they came on, I’d only be able to listen for a moment. Then I’d turn the sound down on them and say rude things.
Peggy Noonan apparently kept listening, and then when it was done, wrote down the rude things she was thinking. For my part, sometimes I only went so far as to turn the sound down. That was the case, near as I can recall, with Sandra Fluke. She came on, I listened a bit, then turned the sound down and went back to reading Wolf Hall. So next time I see her, I might confuse her with Anne or Mary Boleyn.
I learned later about what she had to say from reading Ms. Noonan, who characterized it thusly in her column this weekend:
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I’ve never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
“Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception,” Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim?
What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Unusually harsh language, coming from Peggy “Thousand Points of Light” Noonan.
I didn’t watch Ms. Fluke long enough to form the same impression Ms. Noonan did. But her description of why she found the young woman so off-putting is very familiar to me — it’s very like what I thought listening to non-headliner speakers at both conventions (sorry I’m not remembering any names; I wouldn’t have remembered this one had Ms. Noonan not made such a thing of her). So much of what they talked about just seemed… off-topic. Something they were going on about just to divide their partisans from the other partisans.
What’s interesting about this is that the parties apparently know this. They know the difference between these wedge issues and the central ones that should decide elections. The central issues, the ones that are not non sequiturs, are the ones the nominees themselves, and to some extent their running mates and other top surrogates talk about. There seemed to be a fairly strict line between the pre-10 p.m. speakers and topics, and the ones we heard from and about post-10 — the hour at which the parties got serious about trying to reach beyond their bases to try to win an election.
My favorite moment in either convention came late last night, when one of the commentators on PBS used the word “exegesis” in describing what he’d just heard.
He was referring to Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s benediction right after President Obama’s speech. I had not heard it, whether because PBS didn’t show it or I was out of the room, I can’t recall. But C-SPAN had it, as you see above.
The commenter — I think it was Ray Suarez — was saying that the Cardinal had delivered “a riff” on something. Then he corrected himself, saying perhaps the word “exegesis” was more appropriate. His colleagues were impressed.
I very much appreciate that the Democrats gave the cardinal this forum, only about an hour after ostensible Catholic Joe Biden had roared out his approval of the party’s embrace of abortion. The cardinal said, among other things:
Thus do we praise you for the gift of life. Grant us to defend it. Life, without which no other rights are secure. We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected…
At the end of his prayer, the assembled Democrats responded with a strong “amen,” which was a settler for all those Republicans who think they’re just a bunch of heathens. To what extent all had been listening carefully, I don’t know. But the fact is that as with most public prayers, most of the words were ones they would most likely have agreed with.
The coverage came later, after the assembled media caught their breath.
The cardinal was the one person who spoke at both conventions, by the way.
Oh, what did I mean by my headline above? Well, this morning I saw a Tweet from the Charleston paper that said, “Bishop England beats Porter-Gaud. Story:http://bit.ly/NYyg6j .” So I couldn’t resist responding, “… And Cardinal Dolan thrashes the Democrats. Big night for the Catholics…”
Mackerel-snappers had a big one the night before, too. Among the non-headliners, I thought the speech by Sister Simone of “Nuns on the Bus” probably the most uplifting, least off-putting of the two weeks. Her delivery was beatific, but pulled no punches: After taking apart the budget of another dubious Catholic, Paul Ryan, she said to fervent cheers, “This is part of my pro-life stance, and the right thing to do.”
Both of them expressed what I believe. Which is a big reason why I’m so uncomfortable with both parties.
The video is often secondary (here, a still photo displays throughout the song). YouTube's just the easiest place to hear what you want for free.
Remember when I wondered where kids were hearing current music enough to get to like it? Actually, to explain: I initially wrote a post that rated recent music at the low end of a zero-to-five scale, but after listening to the same music over and over for awhile, came back and upgraded some of the tracks. Then I realized that I loved the older music because I heard it everywhere I went back in the day. And I was wondering where kids were hearing music so much today that it was becoming an acquired taste, because it was generally out of my hearing.
Yes, I know, they’re listening on earbuds, but from what sources? MP3 players? Stuff passed to them by friends via social media? Where?
Part of an answer comes from this piece the other day in the WSJ:
Among the issues dividing teenagers and their parents, add whether to listen to music on YouTube or on CD.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. teenagers under the age of 18 say they use Google Inc.’sGOOG +0.65% video-sharing site to listen to music, more than any other medium, according to a new consumer survey from Nielsen Co., one of many challenges facing record companies as they transition into the digital world.
In addition to treating YouTube as a de facto free music service, young people said they are less inclined than those 18 years old and up to listen to CDs or the radio.
Neither age group reported making much use of Spotify AB, Rhapsody International Inc. or other on-demand streaming music services, though Pandora Media Inc.’s P -3.60%custom online radio service was among the five most-popular methods for both groups.
My first reaction was, who’s listening to CDs at all — aside from those burned to listen to in the car? And I see it’s clueless old people. In fact, older generations — from whom I’m disassociating myself as much as possible in my wording here — are more out of it than that:
In fact, among adults, cassette tapes remain more popular than many online music services, or even vinyl records, despite the latter medium’s purported comeback in recent years.
Just to make an excuse for adults here: I think that might be because so many of us these days are driving older cars. For instance, my wife drives a Volvo that she inherited from her father, and it has a cassette player but no CD player or MP3 jack. If our cars had turntables for vinyl, I suppose we’d sound cooler, but it would be rough on our record collections.
But back to the kids: Turns out they’re pretty smart. I discovered sometime back that YouTube is the quickest, easiest way to listen to almost any song, from any genre, for free. It’s not as easy as turning on one of your Pandora stations and letting it run, but at least you get to listen to exactly what you want to hear.
... but the video can add something.
Good thinking, kids.
Well, nothing, strictly speaking. There’s no direct connection, anyway. But bear with me…
Some time ago, as you’ll recall, I expressed my pleasure when Rep. Ryan used the word “subsidiarity,” a favorite concept of mine arising from Catholic social teaching, coupled with my dismay at the odd way he used it. The word (to me) refers to the principle that in any system — governmental, economic, what have you — functions should be left to the smallest, most local unit that can competently perform them, with larger entities only performing the functions that can’t be carried out by the smaller units. Applied to government, that means the federal government should only perform those functions that can’t be effectively carried out at the state or local level, and so forth. It’s sort of related to what was for a time popularly called “devolution,” but with differences.
But fellow Catholic Ryan startled me by interpreting the principle as meaning functions should be performed by private entities other than public ones — which is convenient for him politically, but not the way I’ve understood it.
I’m not the only one who sees Ryan’s use of the term as misleading, if not outright wrong. I ran across this a couple of days back. Carrying it further, here’s a piece further explaining the problems with “small-government” libertarians trying to claim subsidiarity as their own. For one thing, it points out, “Subsidiarity is a communitarian philosophy.” Well, yeah.
Furthermore, Ryan has been taken to task for his misapplication of Catholic teaching to the federal budget by 90 faculty members from Georgetown University (a Jesuit institution), and more to the point, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops criticized his 2012 budget plan for failing to protect the poor and vulnerable.
But there there are those, including some Catholic clergy, who would defend the Ryan interpretation of subsidiarity. I was led to this knowledge by Paulie Walnuts.
I’m a big fan of the Internet Movie Database. I have the app on my iPhone, and can’t watch a movie on television without constantly turning to it to answer such questions as “Who’s that actress?” or “What else has she been in?” or “Was this directed by…?” Sometimes I go from there to Wikipedia for elaboration.
Anyway… and I forget what led me to this… I found myself recently reading the Wikipedia entry about Tony Sirico, the actor who played Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri on “The Sopranos.” Mr. Sirico, I learned, has also played gangsters in “Goodfellas, Mob Queen,Gangsters, Love and Money, Fingers, The One Man Jury, Defiance, The Last Fight, Innocent Blood, Bullets Over Broadway, The Pick-up Artist, Gotti, Cop Land, Turn of Faith, and Mickey Blue Eyes.”
I read on, and was told that there’s a very interesting reason why he is so convincing as this sort of character:
Before turning to acting, Sirico was reportedly a fast-rising mob associate of the Colombo crime family, serving under Carmine “Junior” Persico, and had been arrested 28 times. There is a Sopranos reference to this fact when Paulie says, “I lived through the seventies by the skin of my nuts when the Colombos were goin’ at it.”[3] In 1967, he was sent to prison for robbing a Brooklyn after-hours club, but was released after serving thirteen months. In 1971, he pled guilty to felony weapons possession and was sentenced to an “indeterminate” prison term of up to four years, of which Sirico ended up serving 20 months. In an interview in Cigar Aficionado magazine, Sirico said that during his imprisonment, he was visited by an acting troupe composed of ex-cons, which inspired him to give acting a try.[4] According to a court transcript, at the time of his sentencing, he also had pending charges for drug possession.[5] Sirico appeared in a 1989 documentary about life, The Big Bang by James Toback, in which he discussed his earlier life.
Father Sirico
Interesting, but what does it have to do with the definition of “subsidiarity?” Well, continuing to read the “Background and Career” section, we see that “His brother, Robert Sirico, is a Catholic priest and co-founder of the free-market Acton Institute.”
Really? This was, to me, at least as interesting is Mr. Sirico’s alleged past as a wiseguy. So I checked out the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, where I found commentary with such headlines as “The Rich Don’t Make Us Poor,” “Challenging Liberals on Economic Immobility,” “Moral Formation and the School Choice Movement,” “It Takes a Village to Raise a Business” (that’s my personal favorite) and “Black Scholars Give Obama an ‘F’.”
This is from The Acton Institute Core Principles:
Rule of Law and the Subsidiary Role of Government – The government’s primary responsibility is to promote the common good, that is, to maintain the rule of law, and to preserve basic duties and rights. The government’s role is not to usurp free actions, but to minimize those conflicts that may arise when the free actions of persons and social institutions result in competing interests. The state should exercise this responsibility according to the principle of subsidiarity. This principle has two components. First, jurisdictionally broader institutions must refrain from usurping the proper functions that should be performed by the person and institutions more immediate to him. Second, jurisdictionally broader institutions should assist individual persons and institutions more immediate to the person only when the latter cannot fulfill their proper functions.
On their face, I wouldn’t argue with those assertions, although it’s odd that subsidiarity is being described in terms of an individual’s relationship to the state, rather than between larger and smaller governmental entities. Quite Ryanesque. Here’s how subsidiarity is further interpreted by a writer on that site:
One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.
This is why Pope John Paul II took the “social assistance state” to task in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. The Pontiff wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”
In spite of this clear warning, the United States Catholic Bishops remain staunch defenders of a statist approach to social problems. They have publicly criticized recent congressional efforts to reform the welfare system by decentralizing it and removing its perverse incentives. Their opposition to the Clinton Administration’s health care plan was based solely upon its inclusion of abortion funding. They had no fundamental objection to a takeover of the health care industry by the federal government…
So I read that, and I thought, “Where have I seen subsidiarity used that way?” Which brought me to the man of the hour. Paul Ryan would no doubt feel very comfortable with the ideas espoused by “Paulie’s” brother, or at least by the organization he heads. But that’s the only thing they have in common, that I know of. If you were hoping for something more, I’m sorry.
