Nothing New

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Hi Readers,

It’s the busiest season of the school year for yours portly.  We finished up the big spring musical last night, and my school’s annual gala fundraiser is tomorrow.  Next Tuesday is my students’ Spring Concert.

Naturally, your chubby host is run ragged.  I’ve been running a low-grade fever this week on top of putting in twelve-to-fifteen-hour days.  Before you say, “kick your feet up, Port!  You need to learn to relax,” note that I have had to put in these many hours.  It’s not optional extra work.

See y’all soon,

TPP

TBT^2: Go to Church

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Church can be a beautiful thing.  Indeed, it should be—it’s the Body of Christ!  But many Christians are quitting church for various reasons.  The Age of The Virus gave everyone a taste of how the heathens live; unfortunately, too many Christians enjoyed it and dropped out of church almost entirely.

Perhaps the worst thing churches—and schools, and governments, and hospitals, and businesses, etc., etc., etc.—did during The Age of The Virus was to shutter their doors.  Churches should have been the last places to close down; during a pandemic, people needed access to their churches more than ever before, but the churches followed the world.  They’re suffering as a result now.

Granted, church attendance was on the decline In the Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus brought its authoritarian terrors.  The Plandemic was just the excuse to stop attending—“for safety!”—and it seems that many folks were not eager to return.  That’s a shame.  A church community provides so much, and while we can and should study Scripture on our own, we are part of a body.  An ear that hears but has no brain to process it or arms to react to the hearing is pretty useless.

So—go to church!

With that, here is 27 April 2023’s “TBT: Go to Church“:

Read More »

Myersvision: Bigfoot Buffet

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Our senior correspondent and resident cryptozoologist Audre Myers is back with a veritable buffet of Bigfoot footage—some plausible, most of it garbage, much like eating at a Golden Corral.  There are some surprisingly toothsome morsels surrounded by a great deal of flabby, fattening fluff.

Audre shares a video here with thirteen different alleged Bigfoot sightings.  She breaks each one down with her distinct brand of cryptozoological analysis.

With that, here’s Audre’s Bigfoot Buffet:

Read More »

Open Mic Adventures LXXVIII: “Robobop”

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

For this week’s edition of Open Mic Adventures I’d like to feature the opening track of Leftovers II, which you can find it at the following sites:

If you like 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and robots, you’re going to love “Robobop“:

Read More »

Monday Morning Movie Review: Late Night with the Devil (2023)

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I was born smack in the middle of the 1980s, so I missed the 1970s completely.  From what my parents have told me, it was a pretty cool time to be alive and coming of age (they were in their late teens and early twenties throughout the decade)—great music, crazy fashion, pool halls, etc.  Even though I missed the decade (and can barely claim to have “experienced” the 1980s, the greatest of all recent American decades), the 1970s were everywhere growing up.  South Carolina, like most rural States, lagged behind the pop cultural curve slightly, so the 1970s loomed large in fashion and architecture.  Plus, the 1990s saw a revival of the 1970s aesthetic, so the influence of the decade musically, culturally, and even sartorially was a big part of my early years.

Of course, the 1970s had loads of problems, too—crazy inflation; stagnant job growth; a wildly popular bamboozled out of office, followed by a clueless boob; a devastating, unpopular, unnecessary war.  It seems that I’ll never escape the Brutalist architecture of the time period, which still dominates the crumbling public buildings of offices of local, State, and national governments.  The Lamar Town Hall is a squat, ugly building, facing a squat, ugly U.S. Post Office.  While I like the earth tones of the 1970s—call me crazy, but there’s something about burnt orange, dark mustard, and drab olive-brown that I find aesthetically appealing—the decade’s aesthetic was an affront to Beauty, and probably to God Himself.  Perhaps wide lapels were the sartorial equivalent of the Tower of Babel—“our lapels will reach to touch the Face of God!”  No wonder we struggled under stagflation for so long.

For all its virtues and many, many vices, however, the 1970s possessed a distinct flair, especially when it came to the television talk show and variety show.  So when I heard there was a horror film that took place on the set of a fictional late-night talk show on Halloween of 1977, I had to watch it.  That film is Late Night with the Devil (2023).

Read More »

SubscribeStar Saturday: Heptadic Structure

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly took a brief break from composing to catch up on some other work, but I’m back to composing, albeit not with quite the same intensity as during the late winter months.  I released Leftovers II earlier this month, and Four Mages is coming very soon (2 May 2024).  I’ve also completed a funk album, Advanced Funkification, which is coming on 7 June 2024.

If you’d like to listen to Leftovers II, you can find it at the following sites:

I figured that was a pretty good slate of releases, and that I might take a rest.  But then I started jotting down a little melody in the incredibly rare (and, admittedly, self-indulgent) time signature of 7/16:

Heptadic Structure Prewriting

What resulted was the piece “Heptadic Structure.”  The piece itself is exactly twenty-one written measures (although it’s technically longer with repeats).

That gave me an idea:  if I wrote seven pieces in 7/X time consisting of twenty-one measures each, I’d have a total of 147 measures of music.  14 + 7 = 21.  There’s a beautiful mathematical symmetry there.

Why 21?  It’s the multiple of 3 and 7.  Three represents the Holy Trinity; seven is God’s Number, a heavenly number.  So 21 is a reference to the Trinity and Heaven.

I came upon the term “Heptadic Structure” when looking for a title for this piece.  Apparently, the concept of a heptadic structure is nothing new, and is a major concept in the rather esoteric field of Biblical numerology.  The argument is that various portions of the Bible breakdown in mathematically consistent and beautiful ways, always with the number 7.  It’s a fascinating concept, one about which I only possess a passing familiarity, but I love these mathematical structures.  Maybe it’s all a grand coincidence—or, more likely, it’s all part of God’s Grand Design.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Support Culture, Not Political Machines

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Last week regular contributor and senior correspondent Audre Myers wrote a piece for Nebraska Energy Observer entitled “Lets Chat” [sic].  In the piece, Audre ponders the question of whether or not to continue donating to the Republican Party (by which I take her to mean the Republican National Committee), and solicits readers for their opinions on the issue.

Audre is quite aware of the perfidious machinations of the RNC, but the source of her quandary is whether or not to help cash-strapped President Trump with his campaign.  If you’re going to give any money to any candidate, my personal, unsolicited advice is to give to only two sources:  Trump’s presidential campaign directly—not through the RNC or any PAC—and to local candidates (or, alternatively, your county GOP).  That’s where your money will have the most impact.

Overall, though, I advise strongly against giving any money to out-of-state political campaigns or to political parties generally.  Indeed, in my comment on Audre’s piece, I argued that our money is much better spent supporting small conservative creators.  I think I made a compelling case:

Read More »

TBT^4: The Joy of Spring

The Portly Politico2 Comments

We’re enjoying a glorious Spring here in South Carolina, much like the Spring of 2020, which inspired the original in this chain of posts.  Other than a few bitterly cold and brutally hot days on either end of Easter, it’s been very pleasant—cool in the mornings, warm in the afternoons, with low humidity.  The nice weather and Pokémon Go have gotten me out in God’s Creation more than usual, and I’m enjoying its beauty while it’s still tolerable to do so.

With that, here is 20 April 2023’s “TBT^2: The Joy of Spring“:

Read More »