Tag: analysis

TBT: Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”

The Portly Politico2 Comments

The new year school year is back into full swing, with this week being the first full week of classes.  Needless to say, yours portly is tired, but very much enjoying the academic year so far.

I’m teaching Pre-AP Music Appreciation again this year, so I’m excited to dive back into some of the works we discussed last year—and some new ones!  Of course, we’ve kicked the year off with a listening to “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” a favorite for introducing orchestral instruments.

My Pre-AP Music class this year is quite small—just five students—which makes for a more relaxed classroom environment.  We’re able to explore tangents as they arise (and, based on my frequent use of em dashes and parentheses, you can imagine I go off on them frequently), and generally take the time to enjoy the music, which the students seem to be doing.

I don’t have much more to add that I didn’t write a year ago.  Britten ingeniously weaves a whopping thirteen variations on a Henry Purcell theme, featuring nearly every instrument in the orchestra—including the percussion section!—in solo or soli.  Even the neglected double basses get some love with a melody of their own.

With that, here is 31 August 2020’s “Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’“:

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Rebuilding Civilization: The Hunter-Gatherer

The Portly Politico23 Comments

Thanks to Audre Myers of Nebraska Energy Observer I have a new commenter on the blog, 39 Pontiac Dream, a proper English gent of the old school (or so I gather).  He very kindly shared some links with me from The Conservative Woman (or TWC as it is styled on its website), a site both Audre and Neo have recommended to me many times.  One of those links was to an intriguing piece by Stuart Wavell, “The next civilisation.”

Our culture has an obsession with apocalyptic scenarios:  massive plagues (a bit too relevant at the moment); zombie uprisings (always a popular one); massive meteor impacts (a bit retro—a favorite of the 1990s).  Perhaps it’s a sign of a moribund and decadent culture that we fantasize about most of human life ending and starting the whole thing over from scratch.

When we indulge in these celluloid and literary fantasies, I suspect the inherent assumption is similar to those who want to restore absolute monarchies:  we assume that we will survive the collapse, just as the would-be monarchists assume they will be king (or at least some important member of the nobility).

Chances are, most of us (yours portly included) would die quite quickly, either from the cataclysm itself, or from the bands of marauding raiders that would inevitably rise up in the wake of such a collapse.  If those didn’t get us, it would be starvation, disease, or our own inability to assess danger that would do us in.

Wavell makes a similar point, with an interesting caveat:  while those of us softened and doughy by the abundance of civilization would find ourselves in the pickle brine, the isolated, self-sufficient hunter-gatherers of the world—and they are still out there!—would be just fine, as they have been for millennia.

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Supporting Friends Friday: photog

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After honoring Mogadishu Matt last Friday, I figured I should pay tribute to my staunchest blogging ally, the venerable photog, proprietor of Orion’s Cold Fire.

I discovered photog after he ran ads on The Drudge Report, back before Matt Drudge sold out to the Bidenistas (photog is now a WhatFinger News man).  I’m still blown away that he had the cash on hand to buy ads on Drudge, which I think he told me was the result of having money to burn on his hobby.  Hey, more power to you, photog.

photog gets his lower-cased, e. e. cummings-esque nom de plume from his love of photography.  If you’re a shutterbug, he writes a number of technical articles about various pieces of high-end camera equipment that he tests out.  If you’re like me and just want to see the pretty pictures, he has plenty of those, too.

In addition to photography, photog writes some hilarious and detailed reviews of everything from episodes of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek to classic movies, as well as science-fiction novels and country music.  He’s even written a review of a cheesy sci-fi flick for this blog.  My attempt at offering a little bit of something for every interest is inspired, in part, by his generalist approach to blogging.

But where photog really shines is his political commentary (I will hasten to add that his photography really is great; I hope he publishes a book of his nature photography soon).  He writes broadly on everything from the importance of family to Deep State perfidy to what conservatives should do in a world that wants us destroyed.  I often find myself agreeing with his conclusions.

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TBT: First Week of School in The Age of The Virus

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School is back, and while I’d like to think The Age of The Virus is in its twilight death throes, the powers-that-be seem intent on foisting fearmongering variants upon us, no doubt as a pretext to strip us of more of our civil liberties.

Regardless, we’re starting back normally this year—as normally as possible—with a whopping 408 (and counting) students.  Considering we had fewer than 100 students a decade ago, that’s a pretty huge change.

Hopefully we won’t have any major outbreaks this year, as we largely avoided last school year.  We managed to get through with only a few isolated cases among students and faculty, and finished up with life largely back to normal in the final two months of the year.

It’s interesting looking back to the beginning of last school year and seeing how the year progressed.  The fiasco of using Loom lasted about two weeks for yours portly; I quickly reverted to using the desktop version of Google Meet to record my lectures.

I’m also relieved that I won’t be livestreaming classes anymore.  I don’t have anything to hide; it’s just a huge hassle getting online kids logged in, much less engaged.  There’d frequently be times when I was ten minutes into class and a student would log in after being marked absent; sometimes I wouldn’t catch that the student had entered class, and the student would then complain about the absence.

More frequently, students would log in the moment I’d sent the attendance e-mail to the registrar, so I’d have to resend the e-mail.  Sometimes the registrar wouldn’t see that second e-mail, and I’d get a call in the middle of class asking if the “missing” student had logged into class.

Those were minor issues when compared to bigger problems with the online platform—students suddenly switching to distance learning on test days, for example—but still headaches.  It probably cost a good five-to-ten minutes of class time just to take attendance.

Well, here’s to the normal amount of craziness and bureaucratic overreach of the typical school year.  With that, here is 28 August 2020’s “First Week of School in The Age of The Virus“:

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Let’s Get Biblical: Elijah and the 7000

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It’s easy to get discouraged in the face of all the insanity and absurdity of the wokesters, who aren’t just unwashed Antifa thugs picking fights in the streets.  Woke-ism, Cultural Marxism, CRT, progressivism, etc.—whatever name we give it, the ideology dominates our institutions, our ruling class, and our popular culture.

In the face of such totality, it’s little wonder that conservatives and traditionalists grow pessimistic about the future.  Despair is seductive, and misery loves company.

As Christians, however, despair is profoundly sinful.  When we give into despair—into hopelessness—we are denying God’s Sovereignty, His Power and His Plan to guide us through the present storm.

During my pastor’s sermon this past Sunday, he mentioned in passing the passages from 1 Kings 19 in which Elijah curls up under a broom tree and prays for death.  Despite defeating the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel in the previous chapter, Elijah despairs, for he knows that Jezebel has put a price on his head—and he feels utterly alone.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018)

The Portly Politico7 Comments

This week’s Monday Morning Movie Review is by special request—sort of:  Audre Myers of Nebraska Energy Observer asked me if I’d seen The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018), and encouraged me to write a review of it.  She’s also asked me to write a review of 1999’s Bicentennial Man, but I haven’t seen the flick since… well, 1999.  I’ll get around to that one, too, eventually.

But The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot has the kind of exploitation title I love.  When I first heard about the film (on RedBox), I became obsessed with seeing it.  I remember making a special trip to a distant RedBox kiosk to rent the DVD.

I mean, clearly this flick had to be the greatest movie ever made, right?  What kind of crazy, evil genius cooked up the concept of a man assassinating Hitler and Bigfoot?

Well, it’s not quite the greatest movie ever made—far from it—and the film is way different than what the ridiculous title implies, but it’s still quite good.  Just temper your expectations.

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Allodial Rights

The Portly Politico11 Comments

I’ve made reference before to the concept of “allodial rights” or “allodial land rights,” the idea that a person’s land is his, completely and absolutely.  The land is not a grant subject to the authority of any king or magistrate, or subordinated into smaller plots under one governing authority; rather, the land belongs fully to the landowner.

When writing my piece Saturday about the Dukes and their struggle with the Town Council in Society Hill, South Carolina, I found a piece at The Center for Social Leadership on the topic of allodial rights.  The piece argues that allodial land rights—which are the norm in the United States—differ from those of the feudal system.  In a feudal system, the lord or king of a land controls all of the land, and leases or grants that land to subsidiaries with certain fees or obligations to the lord in exchange for the use of the land.

Under an allodial system, however, every landowner owns his land free and clear (or has the potential to do so), and is not subject to any higher authority in the use, maintenance, and disbursement of that land.  He is, essentially, the king of his parcel.

Of course, that’s never completely true.  The use of the land is subject to the restrictions of local ordinances.  Some towns enforce certain minimum standards of upkeep, and issue fines for particularly dilapidated and dangerous structures on private property.  Local governments assess property taxes; if those taxes go unpaid long enough, the government can and will strip you of your land.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Heathers (1989)

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Today marks the end of summertime fun and the beginning of work.  Classes for the school year won’t start for another nine days, but I’ll be filling out various bits of legalese paperwork and taking the same bloodborne pathogens quiz I’ve taken every August for the paste decade.

In the spirit of beginning another year of academic rigmarole and inspirational mind-molding, I decided to review the 1989 dark comedy Heathers, starring Wynona Rider and Christian Slater as two oddball teens who declare war against the titular popular clique that rules the school.

I first watched Heathers on Hulu back in 2019 with the girl I was dating at the time.  I remember it being far darker than I anticipated, and found the second half of the film unpleasant.  I usually enjoy unsettling movies, but tonally it seemed “off.”

I re-watched the film a couple of weekends ago on The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs, and must substantially revise my original assessment of the film.

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Lazy Sunday CXXV: More Movies VII: Movie Reviews, Part VII

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Well, tomorrow I head back to the real world—at least, as close to the real world as teaching gets—and the glorious freedom of summer ends.  I’ll likely spend today playing piano at church and watching crummy movies on Shudder.

That’s kind of a metaphor for the conundrum of summer vacation:  you get two months of completely unstructured time handed to you, then blow it all watching B-movies and taking naps.  I do think I had a more productive summer than usual, but many of my hoped-for projects—as usual—are incomplete, even un-started.

Oh, well.  It was still a good summer.  I loved living like a retiree for two months.

Anyway, on to the flicks!:

  • “Monday Morning Movie Review: Still (2018)” – This movie is about a magical water source deep in the Appalachian Mountains that grants eternal youth to two jaded outlaws.  A young woman stumbles upon it, and is drawn into their weird world.
  • “Monday Morning Movie Review: Suburban Gothic (2014)” – This flick is a fun, quirky comedy-horror.  The protagonist is a dude who looks and dresses like a gay man, but is just an eccentric weirdo.  When some Mexican contractors dig up a young girl’s grave and steal her necklace, some supernatural shenanigans start to go down.  Needless to say, this movie—which is only seven years old—could not be made today.
  • “Monday Morning Movie Review: The Housemaid (2016)” – I very much enjoyed this Vietnamese-language film, which takes place during France’s failed attempt to hold onto its southeast Asian colony in the 1950s.  A young woman takes a job at a notoriously haunted rubber plantation and begins an affair with the wounded French captain and plantation owner.  The flick is all about revenge and colonialism, but don’t let that second point spoil it for you—it’s quite good.

That’s it for this Lazy Sunday, my last Sunday as a free man until June 2022.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

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