Quotulatiousness

June 13, 2023

Liberal woman frustrated she can’t find non-conservative but traditionally masculine men

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tom Knighton responds to a progressive woman’s lament:

Originally found on fark.com about 15 years ago, artist unknown.

    She is at a loss because she wants to be with a masculine man but doesn’t want to compromise her morals and values. She asks her followers if she is asking for too much when she requests a man she can be “equal” with while he still provides for her.

What she doesn’t seem to get is that it was women like her that basically destroyed manhood to the point that there’s little chance she’ll find a liberal guy with traditional values.

See, liberal men are basically obligated to take the subservient role. They’re required by their ideology to accept that the woman is just as capable — and obligated — to be at least an equal in providing for the family, if not the provider herself.

Failure to act according to this, at least in their minds, is to undermine the feminist values the left claims to hold so dear.

It didn’t have to be this way. It was always possible to empower women without trying to tear masculinity down, which is what has been happening.

Opening doors for women, for example, is one of those things guys used to do all the time. It wasn’t that women were somehow incapable of operating a doorknob. It was because it was just something a gentleman did.

Now, if a man opens the door for a woman, he’s taking a chance. Will she appreciate it or will she launch into a feminist diatribe about the patriarchy?

Leftist men already know which they expect, so they do no such thing. Guys with more of a traditional lean, however, can and will open that door because they’re not impressed with feminist screeching.

Why The Far Side is a masterclass in storytelling

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Gaze
Published 26 Dec 2019

The Far Side by Gary Larson is one of the best and most praised cartoons in history. But what makes The Far Side so good? What is the legacy of Gary Larson? And most importantly: what can we learn from The Far Side?

0:00 Pixar and Storytelling
1:22 How Gary Larson tells a story
2:42 The Far Side facts and figures
3:22 The level of detail in The Far Side
4:04 Telling a story with one image and a punchline
5:09 What is The Far Side about?
7:11 Gary Larson and naturalism
7:40 Controversy over The Far Side
8:10 The legacy of The Far Side
9:00 Conclusion
(more…)

May 31, 2023

The War Against The Patriarchy, updated

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Health, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent Joel Kotkin op-ed in the National Post discussing the “war of the sexes” and the long, long string of victories chalked up by the “weaker sex”:

    The war between the sexes has ended, and rather than a co-operative future that could benefit all, it has turned out to be more like a lopsided win for the female side.

So begins Joel Kotkin’s National Post op/ed “Women have won the ‘war between the sexes’, but at what cost?” It is a welcome but disappointing analysis that starts with a show of defiance and ends in quiet desperation. Of course, it’s good to find anyone in a major newspaper willing to cast a less-than-adulatory eye on “The Future [that] is Female” or to write sympathetically about men, and Kotkin, a prolific author on cities and technocracy, proves his good faith on the strength of that opening statement alone. Aside from the wishful thinking of believing feminism to be winding down (was #MeToo a prelude to ceasefire?) or ever having envisioned a co-operative future (he should take a look at Kate Millett’s incendiary “Theory of Sexual Politics“), Kotkin is to be commended for daring to name as a war the decades of post-1960s activism, in which all the decisive victories have been claimed by feminists against men.

Kotkin, however, isn’t able to continue in the take-no-prisoners style he chose for his opening salvo. He is prevented, either by his own prudence, his lack of deep knowledge, or the paper’s editorial insistence, from targeting feminist ideology and policies in the rest of the article. In fact, the article doesn’t name a single piece of debilitating feminist legislation or even make one reference to the many expressions of anti-male contempt that are now deeply embedded in our public culture. The result is a curiously disembodied discussion in which serious social problems linked to male decline are pointed to without any attempt made to say exactly how they came about or how they might be reversed.

“The crux of the problem,” Kotkin tells us to start off, “lies in the fact that as women rise, men seem to be falling.” Here we see him start to draw back from the attack, as if afraid to say what he really thinks. His phrasing makes male decline sound like a natural phenomenon, an illustration of the primordial principle of Yin and Yang. Or perhaps it is simply that men, with their allegedly fragile egos and hegemonic masculinity, haven’t been able to compete against all that female ability, once dammed up by the patriarchy, now finally being let loose on the world (though always with calls for more to be done to assist women).

[…]

Kotkin refers to men “left behind” in the economy, but he keeps mum about the decades of affirmative action in higher education and hiring (detailed by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in Legalizing Misandry, pp. 81-124) as well as draconian sexual harassment legislation that have made work life unrewarding and often punitive for men.

He stresses the loss of sexual amity and of willingness to marry, but avoids discussing the nightmare of family law that has made marriage or even cohabitation perilous for many men.

The sins of omission do not end there. Perhaps working on the assumption — not without basis — that any discussion of social problems will need to focus on women at least as much as on men, Kotkin proceeds to backtrack on his earlier claim about women’s victory in the sex war, outlining instead a downbeat portrait of women’s troubles. Citing research by Jonathan Haidt, he tells us that adolescent girls have been severely affected by depression and self-harm, that many young women, without reliable men to support them, have had to fend for themselves in a difficult economic climate, and that single mothers, left with few options, are unable to offer stability to their children. It looks as if the decline of men mentioned early in the article has mainly hurt women and their children.

What Kotkin neglects to mention — surely deliberately — is that adolescent boys commit suicide at 4 X the rate of girls, resolving their depression decisively enough that Haidt seems not to have felt the need to account for them; that women are the ones who choose divorce in approximately 70% of cases; and that divorced fathers are too often denied a real role in their children’s lives while being burdened past endurance by exorbitant support payments. In other words, for every sad woman held up for our concern, there is a plurality of equally sad men rendered invisible in the conventional reporting. The staggering statistics on male suicide provide a stark illustration of Kotkin’s initial contention about the casualties of the sex war — yet he leaves these aside, choosing instead to voice the now-obligatory concern about the trans threat to women’s sports.

Perhaps most importantly, Kotkin suggests through his word choice that the data he cites are simply “trends”, occurrences that came about through economic and demographic factors independent of the sex war initially evoked. But they aren’t. They flow directly from a feminist vision in which the family — explicitly understood by feminist leaders to be a source of abuse and oppression — must be transformed and women liberated from reliance on the fathers of their children. Under this vision, a more just and equitable world will be ushered in by women’s superior leadership once they are freed from their unpaid labor in the home and the many sexist barriers that hold them back. That freedom must be aided, according to conventional wisdom, through abundant contraception, unfettered abortion, collectivized child care, no-fault divorce, programs and propaganda to urge men to do more housework, and non-stop encouragement to women — in movies, sit-coms, advertising, articles, and government equity programs — to give up on their men.

May 28, 2023

Thanks to geography, Canada has “been able to neglect national security for decades”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the weekly Dispatch post from The Line‘s editors, an almost unremarkable comment comes into close focus:

Continuing with the Johnston report fallout, The Line has been pondering a tweet by Thomas Juneau, one of the country’s relatively few genuine experts in Canadian intelligence and national security. Let’s state this up front: The Line likes Thomas Juneau. He’s written for us before, we hope he’ll write for us again. Nothing that follows should be seen as disagreeing with or nitpicking the professor, because The Line broadly agrees with the point he was making, and found his entire thread on Twitter worth the read. But let’s zoom on this particular comment:

What specifically caught us was this part: “We have been able to neglect national security for decades”.

Again, no disagreement here. Both your Line editors would have made that literal exact argument countless times before in their careers, because it’s true, and likely with essentially identical language. But we read Juneau’s tweet when the Johnston report, and the POEC report before it, were much on our minds. And we’ve been unable to shake the feeling ever since that perhaps “neglect” isn’t the right word for how Canadians approach security. Maybe, we’re wondering, it’s something closer to “disdain”.

Canada has “neglected” a lot of things, after all. And we don’t even mean that in the sense of a lament or criticism. There’s a ton of policy areas or even simply fields of knowledge and expertise that Canada hasn’t paid any particular attention to or made a priority. As Line editor Gurney cracked on the podcast this week, we’ve also neglected botany as a national endeavour. But if some strange international development or social change required Canada to up its botany game, we suspect we’d just … do that. We’d recruit botanists from abroad, schools would open botany colleges, we’d create a Progressive Feminist Botanical Middle-Class Tax Credit (though you’d probably need to attest that you are pro-choice to apply for it). Pivoting to botany wouldn’t be a problem. We’d just emphasize botany, and let a thousand flowers bloom. As it were.

Whenever the issue is anything even remotely proximate to national defence and security, though, the mere suggestion that we should maybe do better, spend more money, allot greater resources, pay more attention, and build up current and future capabilities, is met with something that goes beyond neglect. Neglect implies a degree of apathy. The default Canadian response to any push for a greater emphasis on national defence and security is something closer to hostility.

“Like, why would we care about that weird stuff,” the default Canadian response goes. “That’s dumb. What, do you think Russia is going to invade us or something? What does Canada even need an army or spies for? Why would we even want to have experts on this stuff? This is Canada. We don’t need that stuff. Are you just some kind of weirdo or just some wannabe American?”

Your Line editors agree it’s a problem, but we aren’t sure exactly the root of it. Gerson thinks it might be more just an aversion to thinking about unpleasant things; we quipped on our podcast that talking about defence and security in Canada results in the kind of aghast stares a first-class passenger during the last dinner on the Titanic would have received from his dining companions if he’d casually mentioned he’d been counting the number of lifeboats and had noticed something interesting.

Whoa, dude, we’re having a lovely dinner here. Why you gotta be bringing that up? You think the ship is gonna sink or something?

Gurney thinks there’s truth to that, and would add that if that’s the problem, it goes beyond what we would think of as defence and security, and go all the way into emergency preparedness. Canada and Canadians are chronic under-investors on emergency preparedness and underpreparers because Bad Things Don’t Happen Here, They Happen Somewhere Else, Thank You Very Much. Our typical emergency response plan is “Don’t worry, that won’t happen.” Gurney also thinks this all might be related to how Canadians continually define themselves in opposition to Americans: since the Americans do invest heavily in national defence and security, there’s probably some Canadians out there who have concluded, even subconsciously, that that is an American thing to do, and we don’t do American things.

The above is all a bit theoretical, we grant, but we can’t stop thinking about it all the same. What if the problem isn’t that we neglect security so much as actively dislike thinking and talking about it? If so, that’s a bad habit that may prove difficult, and ultimately expensive, to break free from.

May 26, 2023

QotD: After Africa’s “first dance of freedom”

Filed under: Africa, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have my own theory as to why Africa’s “first dance of freedom”, as Lord Byron called it and said he longed to see, was not exactly happy: I believe that the main harm of European colonialism in Africa, especially in its later phases, in the years before independence, was primarily psychological.

[…]

When I worked briefly as a junior doctor in Rhodesia, as it then still was, under a settler or colonial regime, I noticed something else whose significance it took me years to appreciate, being far less an observer and thinker than Leys.

Black doctors were paid the same as white doctors, unlike in neighboring South Africa; but while I lived like a king on my salary, the black doctors on the same salary lived in penury and near-squalor. Why was that?

The answer was really rather obvious, though it took me a long time to realize it. While I had only myself to consider, the black doctors, being at the very peak of the African pyramid as far as employment was concerned, had to share their salary with their extended family and others: It was a profound social obligation for them to do so and was, in fact, morally attractive.

This, of course, did not prevent them from wishing as individuals to live at the European standard; but this was impossible so long as the colonial regime lasted. Once this elite had its hand on power, however, it had both the means and opportunity to outdo that standard to assuage its sense of humiliation, but the social obligations to look after the extended family and others remained. There was no legitimate way to satisfy these voracious demands other than by gaining and keeping control of political power over the country, which is why the struggle for such control was often so ruthless and bloody. When, in addition, the model of power they had in their minds was that of the colonial ruler, who were in effect salaried philosopher-kings whose prestige was maintained by a lot of ceremonial flimflam (white helmets with egret feathers, splendid uniforms, and the like), it was hardly surprising that the first dance of freedom was actually like a bestiary of bizarre rulers.

The first dance is now nearly over, and if Africa has not settled down to be a realm of political maturity and freedom exactly, there are many fewer bizarre dictators on the continent than there once were. If it is rarely advisable to oppose the political incumbent too openly or fiercely, there is nothing like the quasi-totalitarianism tempered by incompetence that was once so prevalent.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rule Reversal”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-09-02.

May 25, 2023

QotD: How long does “celebrity” last?

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first warning sign was when they renamed Bob Hope Airport.

Back in the 1940s, Bob Hope was the most popular comedian in the world. He was a radio star. He was a movie star. He would later become a TV star at NBC.

When Hope died in 2003, it made perfect sense to name the Burbank airport after him. After all, his longtime employer NBC was the best known company in Burbank, and Bob Hope had spent a half-century on the network — usually at the top of the ratings.

So the local airport got renamed.

But the only thing that lasts forever in pop culture is the fact that nothing last forever. By 2017, Bob Hope was only a dim memory at NBC, and young passengers flying to SoCal had no idea who he was. So they changed the name to the Hollywood Burbank Airport.

By coincidence this happened almost exactly 80 years after Hope rose to fame — when Paramount signed him to star in the film The Big Broadcast of 1938. In that hit movie, he sang his charming theme song “Thanks for the Memories” — which he kept singing until the end of the 20th century. Not long ago, everybody knew that song.

But then the memories ran dry.

I’ve long believed that 80 years is a typical span of pop culture fame for superstars. I’m referring to the biggest names — the lesser stars burn out in 80 months or 80 weeks or 80 days. But the top draws retain their fame for the entire lifetime of their youngest fans — and given current life expectancies of the US audience, that can’t be much more than 80 years.

We already see the price of Elvis Presley memorabilia starting to drop. The recent Elvis biopic might slow the erosion, but will never bring back the King’s red hot fame of the 1950s. By my measure, Elvismania will be officially dead in the year 2034. That will be the 80th anniversary of his first hit single “That’s All Right”. Almost none of his original audience will still be around to celebrate the anniversary, and that can’t bode well, even for the nostalgia crowd.

Some reputations do flourish after 80 years, but only because the entertainers somehow found an audience outside of pop culture. Louis Armstrong was famous as an entertainer during his lifetime, but enjoys posthumous renown as an artistic and cultural figure. Back in the 1920s, Rudy Vallée sold more records than Armstrong, but never made the transition outside of pop culture.

Ted Gioia, “How Long Does Pop Culture Stardom Last?”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-23.

May 15, 2023

QotD: How military history shapes cultures and societies

Filed under: Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… war and conflict deeply shaped societies in the past and to the degree that we think that understanding those societies is important (a point on which, presumably, all historians may agree), it is also important to understand their conflicts. I am often puzzled by scholars who work on bodies of literature written almost entirely by combat veterans (which is a good chunk of the Greek and Latin source tradition), in societies where most free adult men probably had some experience of combat, who then studiously avoid ever studying or learning very much about that combat experience (that “war and society” lens there again). Famously, Aeschylus, the greatest Greek playwright of his generation, left no record of his achievements in writing in his epitaph. Instead he was commemorated this way:

    Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian lies beneath this marker
    having perished in wheat-bearing Gela
    Of his well-known prowess, the grove of Marathon can speak
    And long-haired Mede knows it well.

If a scholar wants to understand Aeschylus or his plays, don’t they also need to understand this side of his experience too? I know quite a number of scholars who ended up coming to military history this way, looking to answer questions that were not narrowly military, but which ended up touching on war and conflict. For that kind of research – for our potential scholar of Aeschylus – it is important that there be specialists working to understand war and conflict in the period. Of course this is particularly true in understanding historical politics and political narratives, given that most pre-modern states were primarily engines for the raising of revenues for the waging of war (with religious expenditures typically being the only ones comparable in scale).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.

May 13, 2023

QotD: The inherent absurdity of “Canadian content”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lately some have reminded us of the inherent difficulties in defining Canadian content, especially where a work is the product of several collaborators. Is a movie Canadian by virtue of its actors? Director? Crew? Location? Theme? Even as applied to individuals: Should citizenship be the criterion? Birthplace? Residency? Subject matter?

But the real folly of CanCon is not that it is impractical, or prone to abuse, or even unnecessary, though it is all of those things. It is rather that it is nonsensical at its root, in its very purpose – again, so far as anyone can define it. Is the point, after all, artistic or political? But it cannot be artistic: there is no theory of aesthetics that prefers that Canadian artists should make Canadian art that teaches Canadians how Canadian they are.

It is, rather, a political project: the inculcation of national feeling in the public, for the purpose of creating a political community, separate and distinct from the colossus to the south. Without the Maginot Line of CanCon quotas, it is suggested, we would be overwhelmed: first the artists, then the country.

But note the assumptions built into this emotive appeal: that a separate nationality cannot be maintained without cultural difference; that our cultural differences with the Americans are both sufficient in themselves to justify our statehood and yet so fragile as to be washed away in an instant; that, left to their own choices, Canadians would unhesitatingly choose the products of an incomprehensibly alien culture over their own; and that, by virtue of this diet of foreignism, we would no longer be Who We Are as Canadians. Therefore we must not be left to our own choices.

Which is nonsense, because we would still be Who We Are, even in that hypothetical dystopian future: it might not be Who We Were, but so what? The Who We Are we are now at such pains to preserve is itself vastly different from Who We Were before.

And who, in the end are we? As the comedian Martin Short once put it: “we’re the people who watch a lot of American TV”. The wholesale ingestion of a foreign culture – albeit much of it made by expat Canadians – is an integral part of our distinct national identity, an irony that must forever elude our cultural nationalists.

Andrew Coyne, “The concept of CanCon is pure folly. That’s the problem at the heart of Bill C-11”, The Globe and Mail, 2023-02-08.

May 10, 2023

When scapegoating stops working

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray documents what he calls the “kingdom of the non-sequitur” today:

Americans have lost faith in a broad range of institutions: academia, government at every level and in every branch, media of all kinds, and crony corporations. I just linked to poll results to support that claim, but I suspect you don’t need to be convinced, and the sense of declining trust shows up in your daily discussions with friends and family. The institutional cartel, embodied in the form of a ruling class or new elite who are defined by their uniformity of thought and ritual expression, arrive at the discussion with a top-down model of culture: Trust the experts! “Dr. Fauci says to get vaccinated.”

So they see the loss of trust, and they instinctively look for the driver who’s making the bus go down the low-trust road — the high-status bad actor who’s inculcating the loss of faith in the helpless minds of the ignorant poors. In the current model, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson tricked people into losing faith in institutions because they spread conspiracy theories and disinformation. So the problem is solved: Hit the off switch on Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson (and fascist billionaire Elon Musk’s mind control platform), and faith in institutions is necessarily reborn. If Donald Trump can’t be president again, people will trust the government again.

This confidence that the loss of faith is caused by top-down manipulation is so stupid it’s making me squirm in my seat as I think about it: Your true self actually likes Gavin Newsom, Congress, woke universities, homeless encampments, and drag queen story hour for children, but Fox News TRICKED YOUR BRAIN, peasant. You can’t possibly be losing faith in institutions yourself, on your own motive force. Have a Bud Light and an mRNA injection, and we’ll talk in the morning when you feel better.

And so the need to purge the folk devils, the manipulative purveyors of discontent, manifests itself over and over again in a ritual behavior as old as humanity itself, the performance of “the crops are failing because this woman is a witch.” Burn the witch, and we restore the corn and the hogs before winter arrives.

If [Person A] is a folk devil and a scapegoat, then everything [Person A] does is dark and cruel. OH MY GOD LOOK AT HIM PETTING THAT KITTEN NOW DO YOU SEE HOW DANGEROUS HE IS!?!?!? Cultural performers show up on the page with a kind of tacit assignment, an agreement they’ve made at the level of choosing an identity and seeking a social status. Folk devils are devils, because people who don’t hate folk devils are of a low-status outgroup. Yes, all of life is just like high school.

May 8, 2023

Grrrrrrl Power is the only acceptable mode for new female characters, it seems

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo on the strictly monotone representation of female characters in recent years:

The trend to make female movie characters tough and abrasive has been proceeding for some time. We can all predict that the new partner in the police procedural, let’s say a petite black woman whose entrance surprises (and thus reveals the bigotry of) the white man she’ll be working with, will turn out to be the biggest badass on the force. She’ll almost certainly save her partner’s life — and unearth a crime-solving detail he’d overlooked — before the first episode is over. At the same time, viewers will be treated to her sneering refusal of the partner’s banter, her steely gaze, and her fearless embrace of outrider status. She’s a woman with wise-cracking disdain for men as a group who takes quick revenge for even the smallest hint of sexism, benevolent or otherwise, from her fellow officers. And she quickly earns not only their respect but also their unwilling awe.

Whether police officers, first responders, detectives, firefighters, FBI — or, for that matter, nurses, ER doctors, politicians, or lawyers — the message is clear: these women are at least as capable and fearsome as any man: tough-minded, smart as a whip, and street-wise. Even in this era of agitation about the trans peril to women’s sports, the fictional females are as physically strong and combat-ready as any male, their fists and kicks aimed with staggering accuracy. Even tiny Lucy Tara on NCIS Hawai’i comes to the rescue of her far-larger male colleagues in impressive physical struggles with suspects.

But physical characteristics, the notable fearlessness and strength, are to some extent less striking than the women’s personalities and demeanor. An entire character transformation has been taking place, as traditionally feminine characteristics have been decisively minimized and masculine bravura brought to the fore. These women are, seemingly without effort, brusque, foul-mouthed, and contemptuous, particularly of male authority — and we’re to love them for it. They’re often beautiful, but they never try to be. With hair pulled back and aggressive booted stride, they are independent, uninterested in male approval, and largely indifferent to men as romantic partners, unless they are shown pursuing their occasionally voracious sexual needs, at which times their approach is direct and unsentimental. After an evening of bronco-riding athleticism, they wake up in a tousled bed with a slight grimace and duck out of the lover’s offer of breakfast. They’re not interested in commitment or any continued intimacy. A call comes in on their cell phone, they pull on their clothes nonchalantly, and walk out of the man’s life. They’ve already forgotten him as they prepare to conquer evil once again.

A popular new Netflix series, The Diplomat, takes these now-standard elements to the next level, profiling an ambitious, sexy, oft-frowning, brilliant, and explosively hot-tempered woman, Kate Wyler, who engages in uncontrolled physical and verbal abuse of her husband without remorse or narrative comeuppance. Though one might expect that a portrait of reckless physical violence by one spouse against another would be evidence at least of a serious character flaw — if not criminality (as it certainly would be if the male spouse were delivering the blows) — it is not at all clear in this case that the character’s actions deserve any condemnation. Her violence is simply the most extreme manifestation of her (rather admirable and plucky) unconventionality in breaking the rules of propriety in order to save the liberal world order.

May 5, 2023

Canada’s new internet rules have become law. What now?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 4 May 2023

Bill C-11 has passed. But there’s still time.
(more…)

May 4, 2023

QotD: Gesamtkunstwerk

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it occurs to me that movies aren’t the best example of the Current Year’s creative bankruptcy — music is. Somewhere below, I joked that Pink Floyd’s album The Wall was a modern attempt at a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total art work”. Wagner thought opera should be a complete aesthetic experience, that a great opera would have not just great music, but a great story in the libretto, great poetry in the lyrics, great painting in the set design, and so on, all of which would combine to something much greater than the sum of its already-excellent parts.

As I said, that’s awfully heavy for an album whose most famous song asks how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat, but it’s nonetheless an accurate description of what Roger Waters was trying to do with the integrated concept album / movie / stage show. Whether or not he knew he was attempting a Gesamtkunstwerk in the full Wagnerian sense is immaterial, as is the question of whether or not he succeeded. Nor does it matter if The Wall is any good, musically or cinematically or lyrically.* The point is, he gave it one hell of a go … and nobody else has, even though these days it’d be far, far easier.

Consider what a band like Rush in their prime would’ve done with modern technology. I’m not a musician, but I’ve been told by people who are that you can make studio-quality stuff with free apps like Garage Band. Seriously, it’s fucking free. So is YouTube, and even high-quality digital cameras cost next to nothing these days, and even laptops have enough processor power to crank out big league video effects, with off-the-shelf software. I’m guessing (again, I’m no musician, let alone a filmmaker), but I’d wager some pretty good money you could make an actual, no-shit Gesamtkunstwerk — music, movie, the whole schmear — for under $100,000, easy. You think 2112-era Rush wouldn’t have killed it on YouTube?

I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for prog rock, but I have a hard time believing Neal Peart and the Dream Theater guys were the apex of rock’n’roll pretension. I realize I’ve just given the surviving members of Styx an idea, and we should all be thankful Kilroy Was Here was recorded in 1983, not 2013, because that yawning vortex of suck would’ve destroyed all life in the solar system, but I’m sure you see my point.** Why has nobody else tried this? Just to stick with a long-running Rotten Chestnuts theme, “Taylor Swift”, the grrl-power cultural phenomenon, is just begging for the Gesamtkunstwerk treatment. Apparently she’s trying real hard to be the June Carter Cash of the New Millennium™ these days, and hell, even I’d watch it.***

The fact that it hasn’t been attempted, I assert, is the proof that it can’t be done. The culture isn’t there, despite the tools being dirt cheap and pretty much idiot proof. Which says a LOT about the Current Year, none of it good.

    * The obvious comment is that Roger Waters is no Richard Wagner, but that’s fatuous — even if you don’t like Wagner (I don’t, particularly), you have to acknowledge he’s about the closest thing to a universal artistic genius the human race has produced. It’s meaningless to say that Roger Waters isn’t in Wagner’s league, because pretty much nobody is in Wagner’s league. And philistine though I undoubtedly am, I’d much rather listen to The Wall than pretty much any opera — I enjoy the symphonic bits, but opera singing has always sounded like a pack of cats yodeling to me. I’m with the Emperor from Amadeus: “Too many notes.”

    ** If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then please, I’m begging you, do NOT go listen to “Mr. Roboto.” Whatever you do, don’t click that link …

    … you clicked it, didn’t you? And now you’ll be randomly yelling “domo arigato, Mister Roboto!!” for days. You’ll probably get punched more than once for that. Buddy, I tried to warn you.

    *** Anthropological interest only. I know I’m in the distinct minority on this one, but she never turned my crank, even in her “fresh-scrubbed Christian country girl” stage. Too sharp featured, and too obviously mercenary, even back then.

Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.

May 2, 2023

QotD: The musical importance of the city of Córdoba

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Which city is our best role model in creating a healthy and creative musical culture?

Is it New York or London? Paris or Tokyo? Los Angeles or Shanghai? Nashville or Vienna? Berlin or Rio de Janeiro?

That depends on what you’re looking for. Do you value innovation or tradition? Do you want insider acclaim or crossover success? Is your aim to maximize creativity or promote diversity? Are you seeking timeless artistry or quick money attracting a large audience?

Ah, I want all of these things. So I only have one choice — but I’m sure my city isn’t even on your list.

My ideal music city is Córdoba, Spain.

But I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to Córdoba around the year 1000 AD.

I will make a case that medieval Córdoba had more influence on global music than any other city in history. That’s probably not something you expected. But even if you disagree — and I already can hear some New Yorkers grumbling in the background — I think you will discover that the “Córdoba miracle,” as I call it, is an amazing role model for us.

It’s a case study in how communities foster the arts — and in a way that benefits everybody, not just the artists.

[…] a thousand years before New Orleans spurred the rise of jazz, and instigated the Africanization of American music, a similar thing happened in Córdoba, Spain. You could even call that city the prototype for all the decisive musical trends of our modern times.

“This was the chapter in Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side,” asserts Yale professor María Rosa Menocal, “and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.”

There’s even a word for this kind of cultural blossoming: Convivencia. It translates literally as “live together.” You don’t hear this term very often, but you should — because we need a dose of it now more than ever. And when scholars discuss and debate this notion of Convivencia, they focus their attention primarily on one city: Córdoba.

It represents the historical and cultural epicenter of living together as a norm and ideal.

Even today, we can see the mixture of cultures in Spain’s distinctive architecture, food, and music. These are both part of Europe, but also separate from it. It is our single best example of how the West can enter into fruitful cultural dialogue with the outsider — to the benefit of both.

Ted Gioia, “The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn’t What You Think It Is”, The Honest Broker, 2023-01-26.

April 26, 2023

QotD: The vanishing “entertainer” of yore

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As I wrote somewhere in the comments below, we’ve done ourselves a real disservice, culturally, by all but abandoning the profession of “entertainer”. Lennon and McCartney could’ve been the mid 20th century equivalent of Gilbert and Sullivan, writing catchy tunes and performing fun shows, but they got artistic pretensions and we, the public, indulged them, so now everyone who gets in front of a camera — which, in the Social Media age, is pretty much everyone — thinks he has both the right and the duty to educate The Masses.

It was still possible — barely — to be an entertainer as late as the early 2000s. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was one. Schwarzenegger’s dharma heir, he, along with guys like Jason Statham, made goofy shoot-em-up movies in which improbably muscled men killed a bunch of generic baddies in inventive ways. It’s a lot harder than it looks, since it calls for the lead actor to be fully committed to the role while being fully aware of how silly it all is. The fact that these guys aren’t “actors” in any real sense is no accident.

See also: the only real actor to take on such a role successfully: Liam Neeson, that poor bastard, who uses acting as therapy. (I don’t think it’s an accident that Neeson, too, was an athlete before he was an actor — Wiki just says he “discontinued” boxing at 17, but I read somewhere he was a real contender). Note also that Neeson’s Taken movies have a “real life” hook to them, human trafficking. They’re Schwarzenegger movies, and Neeson acquits himself well in them, but Neeson would fall flat on his face in all-out Arnold-style fantasies — a Conan or a Total Recall. Actors can’t make those movies; only entertainers can [cf. The A-Team, a role Arnold would’ve crushed].

In other words: you can make an “Arnold movie” without Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man, in the lead role, but you absolutely must have an entertainer as a leading man. Nothing could’ve saved the Total Recall “remake”, since it was clearly some other film with a tacked-on subplot to justify using the title, but Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson could’ve saved the Conan remake. It still wouldn’t have been very good — too self-consciously meta and gritty — but as a young guy trying to establish himself, poor ol’ Aquaman wasn’t up to it. He wanted to be a good actor; Arnold, in all his roles, just wanted to make a good movie. Arnold didn’t have to worry about his “performance”, because he was always just being Arnold (this seems to be the secret of Tom Cruise’s success, too). Aquaman had to worry about being taken seriously as an actor.

Severian, “The Entertainer”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-08.

April 25, 2023

QotD: What is military history?

Filed under: Books, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The popular conception of military history – indeed, the conception sometimes shared even by other historians – is that it is fundamentally a field about charting the course of armies, describing “great battles” and praising the “strategic genius” of this or that “great general”. One of the more obvious examples of this assumption – and the contempt it brings – comes out of the popular CrashCourse Youtube series. When asked by their audience to cover military history related to their coverage of the American Civil War, the response was this video listing battles and reflecting on the pointless of the exercise, as if a list of battles was all that military history was (the same series would later say that military historians don’t talk about about food, a truly baffling statement given the important of logistics studies to the field; certainly in my own subfield, military historians tend to talk about food more than any other kind of historian except for dedicated food historians).

The term for works of history in this narrow mold – all battles, campaigns and generals – is “drums and trumpets” history, a term generally used derisively. The study of battles and campaigns emerged initially as a form of training for literate aristocrats preparing to be officers and generals; it is little surprise that they focused on aristocratic leadership as the primary cause for success or failure. Consequently, the old “drums and trumpets” histories also had a tendency to glory in war and to glorify commanders for their “genius” although this was by no means universal and works of history on conflict as far back as Thucydides and Herodotus (which is to say, as far back as there have been any) have reflected on the destructiveness and tragedy of war. But military history, like any field, matured over time; I should note that it is hardly the only field of history to have less respectable roots in its quite recent past. Nevertheless, as the field matured and moved beyond military aristocrats working to emulate older, more successful military aristocrats into a field of scholarly inquiry (still often motivated by the very real concern that officers and political leaders be prepared to lead in the event of conflict) the field has become far more sophisticated and its gaze has broadened to include not merely non-aristocratic soldiers, but non-soldiers more generally.

Instead of the “great generals” orientation of “drums and trumpets”, the field has moved in the direction of three major analytical lenses, laid out quite ably by Jeremy Black in “Military Organisations and Military Charge in Historical Perspective” (JMH, 1998). He sets out the three basic lenses as technological, social and organizational, which speak to both the questions being asked of the historical evidence but also the answers that are likely to be provided. I should note that these lenses are mostly (though not entirely) about academic military history; much of the amateur work that is done is still very much “drums and trumpets” (as is the occasional deeply frustrating book from some older historians we need not discuss here), although that is of course not to say that there isn’t good military history being written by amateurs or that all good military history narrowly follows these schools. This is a classification system, not a straight-jacket and I am giving it here because it is a useful way to present the complexity and sophistication of the field as it is, rather than how it is imagined by those who do not engage with it.

[…]

The technological approach is perhaps the least in fashion these days, but Geoffery Parker’s The Military Revolution (2nd ed., 1996) provides an almost pure example of the lens. This approach tends to see changing technology – not merely military technologies, but often also civilian technologies – as the main motivator of military change (and also success or failure for states caught in conflict against a technological gradient). Consequently, historians with this focus are often asking questions about how technologies developed, why they developed in certain places, and what their impacts were. Another good example of the field, for instance, is the debate about the impact of rifled muskets in the American Civil War. While there has been a real drift away from seeing technologies themselves as decisive on their own (and thus a drift away from mostly “pure” technological military history) in recent decades, this sort of history is very often paired with the others, looking at the ways that social structures, organizational structures and technologies interact.

Perhaps the most popular lens for military historians these days is the social one, which used to go by the “new military history” (decades ago – it was the standard form even back in the 1990s) but by this point comprises probably the bulk of academic work on military history. In its narrow sense, the social perspective of military history seeks to understand the army (or navy or other service branch) as an extension of the society that created it. We have, you may note, done a bit of that here. Rather than understanding the army as a pure instrument of a general’s “genius” it imagines it as a socially embedded institution – which is fancy historian speech for an institution that, because it crops up out of a society, cannot help but share that society’s structures, values and assumptions.

The broader version of this lens often now goes under the moniker “war and society”. While the narrow version of social military history might be very focused on how the structure of a society influences the performance of the militaries that created it, the “war and society” lens turns that focus into a two-way street, looking at both how societies shape armies, but also how armies shape societies. This is both the lens where you will find inspection of the impacts of conflict on the civilian population (for instance, the study of trauma among survivors of conflict or genocide, something we got just a bit with our brief touch on child soldiers) and also the way that military institutions shape civilian life at peace. This is the super-category for discussing, for instance, how conflict plays a role in state formation, or how highly militarized societies (like Rome, for instance) are reshaped by the fact of processing entire generations through their military. The “war and society” lens is almost infinitely broad (something occasionally complained about), but that broadness can be very useful to chart the ways that conflict’s impacts ripple out through a society.

Finally, the youngest of Black’s categories is organizational military history. If social military history (especially of the war and society kind) understands a military as deeply embedded in a broader society, organizational military history generally seeks to interrogate that military as a society to itself, with its own hierarchy, organizational structures and values. Often this is framed in terms of discussions of “organizational culture” (sometimes in the military context rendered as “strategic culture”) or “doctrine” as ways of getting at the patterns of thought and human interaction which typify and shape a given military. Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2006) is a good example of this kind of military history.

Of course these three lenses are by no means mutually exclusive. These days they are very often used in conjunction with each other (last week’s recommendation, Parshall and Tully’s Shattered Sword (2007) is actually an excellent example of these three approaches being wielded together, as the argument finds technological explanations – at certain points, the options available to commanders in the battle were simply constrained by their available technology and equipment – and social explanations – certain cultural patterns particular to 1940s Japan made, for instance, communication of important information difficult – and organizational explanations – most notably flawed doctrine – to explain the battle).

Inside of these lenses, you will see historians using all of the tools and methodological frameworks common in history: you’ll see microhistories (for instance, someone tracing the experience of a single small unit through a larger conflict) or macrohistories (e.g. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2008)), gender history (especially since what a society views as a “good soldier” is often deeply wrapped up in how it views gender), intellectual history, environmental history (Chase Firearms (2010) does a fair bit of this from the environment’s-effect-on-warfare direction), economic history (uh … almost everything I do?) and so on.

In short, these days the field of military history, as practiced by academic military historians, contains just as much sophistication in approach as history more broadly. And it benefits by also being adjacent to or in conversation with entire other fields: military historians will tend (depending on the period they work in) to interact a lot with anthropologists, archaeologists, and political scientists. We also tend to interact a lot with what we might term the “military science” literature of strategic thinking, leadership and policy-making, often in the form of critical observers (there is often, for instance, a bit of predictable tension between political scientists and historians, especially military historians, as the former want to make large data-driven claims that can serve as the basis of policy and the later raise objections to those claims; this is, I think, on the whole a beneficial interaction for everyone involved, even if I have obviously picked my side of it).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.

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