A bit belatedly, I’m reposting my piece on the Fin from last week, on background music, a topic we’ve discussed previously.

Also in the Fin Review section (paywalled) a couple of weeks ago was a piece by Andrew Ford which inlcuded an observation I’ve made myself, that contemporary music in the classical tradition often sounds like the soundtrack to a horror/thriller movie, and went on to point out that David Lynch has actually used ‘modern classical’ compositions in this role. He asks why people who are perfectly happy with the music as a soundtrack are totally unwilling to listen to it in concert. I think the potential audience falls into two groups, both small
(i) classical concert-goers who like horror/thriller movies
(ii) horror/thriller fans keen enough to go to a concert performance of the soundtrack

Anyway, here’s the article

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Kevin Berger at Salon reports on , one day of the year when we can hope to be free of the constant ambient buzz of someone else’s idea of appropriate music.

Another Remembrance (or Armistice) Day and we are still at war. I posted this in 2004, and have nothing to add or change

November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.

The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions[1].

And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles.We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.

War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.

fn1. It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.

That’s the question I asked on Facebook, and so far the vote has been unanimous for beard. Responses I’ve had in person have mostly favoured bare. So you can have your say here or (assuming there are no access problems) on Facebook.
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This interesting optical effect is presented as a test for Right Brain vs Left Brain thinking. My sample of one doesn’t support this – I saw the dancer going clockwise which is supposed to indicate Right Brain thinking, and I’m about as Left Brain as they come. But with a little effort you can get whichever one you want. Unlike with static illusions, it’s quite hard to figure out what cues you’re using to orient the motion.

I’ve been working a bit on the Political correctness article in Wikipedia and I ran across the best “PC beatup” story ever, starting with a claim from last year that nursery school students in Oxfordshire had been banned from singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. Among the ramifications were the foundation of a new political party (with a plug from Harry’s Place), and worldwide circulation leading to a claim in the Adelaide Advertiser that “black coffee” had fallen under a similar ban. Having visited Adelaide recently, I can assure anxious coffee-addicts that this is, like the rest of the story, a load of old bollocks. (I will admit that “doppio” has displaced “double-shot short black” in Australia over the last few years, a boon to addicts like me who are really in a hurry for their fix).

Going back even further, I once ran a contest to find a Mark Steyn column without either a gross error or a distorted or misattributed quotation. There weren’t any entries, though I gave an award to Tim Dunlop for coining the term “Steynwallingâ€? (failure to respond to repeated demonstrations of error). But now thanks to Tim Lambert and TBogg, we have a winner. It’s Steyn himself, who states “incidentally, I stopped writing for the (New York) Times a few years ago because their fanatical “fact-checking” copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge.” (John Holbo has a little bit more fun with Tim’s debunking here)

It’s midsemester break at UQ, and I’m just back from a few days holiday on beautiful North Stradbroke island, where beaches are white and Internet connections are patchy. I see that various comments threads have run out of control, with my post on US experience of war being derailed into a string of general rants about the merits or otherwise of US social organisation.

If you believe what you read in the papers, Stradbroke was similarly out of control, although a close textual analysis reveals that the “drunken teen packs” terrorising the island did so mainly by standing around looking bored and not picking up their rubbish. Admittedly Point Lookout is strung out over a couple of kilometers, and its “dimly lit streets” make it hard to be sure what’s going on, but the end of town we stayed at was sufficiently quiet that the ticking of the clock kept us awake. Having invested in a reporter and camera crew, I guess the Courier-Mail had to beat up a story of some kind.