Notes From the Underground

It's been awhile, I know. But it’s not like you can't live without this, my musings and ramblings. I mean, who cares? Most of the time even I don't. But, just in case anyone out there still checks in on this blog, here's a few of the random thoughts that having been running through my brain lately.

• I’m very much looking forward to HBO’s The Pacific, which starts this Sunday night.  I’ve long thought that Band of Brothers, HBO’s 10-part series about the 101st Airborne’s experience in the western theatre, was some of the finest television I’ve ever seen.  Maybe the finest.  My wife and I are re-watching it in preparation for The Pacific and it’s as good as I remember.  If The Pacific can match its predecessor, we are in for a treat.
• The Obama administration has apparently come to the conclusion that health-care must be passed if they are to have any future success at all.  Moving on to other things is not an option, they believe, because if health-care fails Obama’s presidency is as good as over.  He’ll suffer the same fate that brought Jimmy Carter down: the abandonment of an administration by the president’s own party.  People forget that it was the loss of faith in Carter by the Democrat-controlled Congress that finally made him a non-entity as president.  The Obama administration knows that the failure of health-care reform means they will suffer a similar fate.  The Democrats legislators who walked the plank for Obama on cap-and-trade and health-care only to watch him fail (over and over again) will never do it again.  They’ll know his political muscle has all but vanished and they’ll go back to looking out for their own skins.  So Obama and Reid and Pelosi are doing everything they can to get this monstrosity passed, damn protocol, damn Senate rules, damn the Constitution.  The “Slaughter Rule” of “deeming” a bill to have passed when it’s never been voted on, the use of reconciliation for purposes it was never intended, the contemplation of using a Biden override of the Senate parliamentarian’s rulings, are all outrages worthy of banana-republic style political thuggery.
• Of course, if health-care does pass, especially using the tactics under consideration, the mid-terms could be Armageddon for the Democrats.  Dick Morris is claiming up to 80 house seats could switch to the Republicans if that happens.  I don’t know about 80 but I think 60 is a good bet, and the Senate would be up for grabs.  I’ve long argued that it would be the best thing that could happen to Obama because, like Clinton after the 1994 debacle, he’d be forced to govern from the center.  Rich Lowry over at NRO is arguing the same thing this morning.  But the question remains: can Obama govern from the center?  Can such a committed ideologue sacrifice his life-long beliefs and certainties and actually compromise?  I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think he has it in him.  He said as much himself when he claimed he’d rather be a one-termer who got things done that a two-termer who didn’t affect much change.  His health-care gambit is his shot at history and he knows it.  If it passes, even if he doesn’t get re-elected, he believes he’ll go down in history.  I believe it will be more like infamy.           
• I’m happy to hear that Tiger Woods is planning on returning to golf soon.  The game needs him.  While I was disappointed to learn of his behavior I was not overly surprised.  A young man, the most well-known athlete in the world, has dozens of beautiful women throwing themselves at him everywhere he goes and he succumbs, happily, to the temptation. Why is that surprising?  Surely it was wrong given that he is married, but the media coverage was more than a little creepy.  Moreover, why Tiger felt the need to apologize to anyone but his wife, his family, and his sponsors is beyond me.  He certainly didn’t owe me an apology.  For those who feel like he let down parents who’d held him up to their children as a role-model, well, I’d argue that those parents were being naive, knowing what we know about the behavior of the average athlete.  The whole thing was ugly, as much for the media’s behavior as Tiger’s.  I’m just glad he’ll be back on the course soon.  Hoping that the media will concentrate on his golf game rather than his personal life is probably too much to ask for.
• American Idol has got a lot to answer for.  The wretchedness of the singers on the show have ingrained a certain style of singing into an entire generation of American youth.  You know what I mean, that cloying, over-emoting, hyper-melismatic style that most of these children employ.  They think it’s the way to show emotional expressiveness but of course it does just the opposite, revealing them to be the phonies that they are.  Add to that the song choices of many of them, the type that dominates in this musically-challenged age: dreary, lacking in melody and personality, lyrically without imagination, like reading pages from a diary.  Where have all the songwriters gone?  We watched one season of American Idol, the year when Carrie Underwood won, and then we swore off it. Until this season, which I am watching because my wife is forcing me to.  She is watching because her sister is forcing her to and she didn’t want to do it alone.  And you know what?  I’m glad I’m watching. Why?  For one reason only, and her name is Crystal Bowersox.  Have you seen her perform?  This girl is the real deal, a young lady just dripping with talent.  And, glory of glories, she knows how to sing. (There are many, many people with vocal talent who don’t know how to sing.)  This sweet young thing who grew up on a farm and had never watched American Idol before she appeared on it, is steeped in the style and aesthetics of mid-60s Atlantic Records soul and rhythm and blues. Her voice, her guitar playing, her very persona, are saturated in it. Toss in a little country rock and gospel, shake it up, and you’ve got Crystal Bowersox.  And she has taste – she knows a good song when she hears it, no doubt because she has grown up listening to good songs.  So far she has sung songs written by Carole King, John Fogerty, and Tracy Chapman.  And every song has had her own personal stamp on it.  I’m tempted to call her a natural but performances like those she has given so far are the product of much thought and practice.  To seem effortless takes hard work.  Whatever happens to her on the show from here on in doesn’t really matter – she’ll get a recording contract (I’ll be in line for her records) and she’ll go far, so long as America still has any musical taste whatsoever.  One of my favorite things about her is the way she looks at the judges when they are telling her what they though of her performance.  Rather than being giggly or intimidated by them, the look on her face is almost contemptuous, though it’s probably more accurately described as indifferent.  And she’s right to be indifferent.  There is nothing those judges can tell her that she doesn’t already know.  Single-handedly, Ms. Bowersox can help American Idol atone for many of its sins, simply by reminding Americans what good music sounds like.  She is the very opposite of everything American Idol has always stood for.
• My own personal music education continues. I am well on my way to reaching my goal of learning fifty new classical music pieces during the 2010 year.  I’d itemize them all for you but it’s too much work.  Suffice to say I’m immensely enjoying much of the new music I’ve learned.  A lot of it is chamber works, string quartets mostly, by Beethoven, Schubert, and Haydn.  Beethoven is and always will be the master in my book but Schubert’s later string quartets, his piano trios, and his string quintet are all marvelous – he was a man of the first rank and he wrote music of astounding depth and beauty.  I love, love, love it. 
• To end this thing, let me give you a little Beethoven, with whom I’m ending this post, and a little Band of Brothers, with which I began this post.  Episode 9 of BoB is the one where the 101st discovers the concentration camp.  Who else is the history of western music can evoke the sorrow and tragedy of such a thing but Beethoven?  The below is the beginning and the end of Episode 9.  The middle shows the horrors of the Holocaust and it’s what the music being played is referring to.  It’s music of utter beauty, sorrowful beauty, despairing beauty, set against the backdrop of human tragedy.