Archive for November, 2009
Results: When you saw that two legendary bands were going head to head you probably expected a slugfest. Hopefully you weren’t disappointed by what proved to be the tightest match we’ve seen. In the end, Pink Floyd nudged ahead for an extremely narrow win. The numbers: #2 Pink Floyd 52%; #1 Led Zeppelin 48%. Floyd is into the Final Four.
Up next, our search for the greatest band of all time takes you to the Budokan regional final. Do The Police have one more (really huge) upset left in them? We’ll soon find out.
Full story »
 What drives a man or a woman to spend millions of dollars — even tens of millions — of his or her own money to get a job that would place the words senator, representative, governor, or mayor in front of his or her name? For most of us unwashed heathens, the multiple millions of their own money these financial elites spend on their political campaigns represent seemingly staggering amounts.
But viewed in the rarified context of the very wealthy, the amounts are petty cash.
 For example, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman has put $19 million so far into her campaign for governor of California — but that’s barely 1.5 percent of her $1.3 billion fortune.
Whitman has “publicly floated the notion of a record-shattering $150-million campaign budget” — but even if she financed $100 million of that herself, that still would only be 7.7 percent of her billion-dollar-plus wallet. Full story »
 This would be Anonymous 4, not only the best, but perhaps the only American Medieval Babe group. I used to go hear them at the lunchtime concert series at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan in the 1980s, before they got famous and sold something like a gazillion albums of what is basically 14th century chant. Good for them. They called it a day back in 2004, but you know how these things go—they still tour occasionally—check out the website. Anyway, the problem here is which one?
They’ve done four Christmas albums (including the most recent one, discussed below)—the chant ones are On Yoolis Night, Legends of Saint Nicholas, and The Star in the East, which is a bunch of 14th century Hungarian chants. My slight preference is for the third one, because it has a little bit of an eastern edge, but they’re all wonderful. Anonymous 4 was a real person, by the way–musicologists actually know who some of the different “Anonymous” personages were–they just don’t know their names. There’s even some suggestion that Anonymous 4 was a woman. And there were certainly women composers back then, Hildegarde von Bingen for one. This was before the church decided women needed to be relegated somewhere out of sight, though. Full story »
 Part one in a series.
Is there a more radioactive word in American politics today than elitist?
Admit it – you saw the word and had an instinctive negative reaction, didn’t you? If not, then count yourself among the rarest minority in our culture, the fraction of a percent that has not yet had its consciousness colonized by the “evil elitist” meme. If not, you’re one of a handful of people not yet victimized by a cynical public relations frame that poses perhaps the greatest danger to the health of our republic in American history.
Pretty dire language there, huh? Perhaps we’ve ventured a little too deeply into the land of hyperbole? It might seem so at a glance, but in truth the success of any society is largely a function of the things it believes and how those beliefs shape its actions and policies. Full story »
The pocket-based art continues. Shot and edited completely on my iPhone.
 Ah, a bit of a problem here. There’s a whole bunch of them, but they’re all only ok if you’ve actually ever attended a Revels. None of them quite captures the real spirit of a real Revels show, which itself is a joyful, chaotic affair of boundless good cheer, occasional sloppy singing, and a fair measure of audience involvement. That’s what I miss the most about not being able to go to them regularly now–the magical moments from a Revels show usually come when the audience is belting away at one of the carols, particularly Lord of the Dance or the Sussex Mummers Carol, or when everyone belts out Wolcum Yole! at the end of the wonderful Susan Cooper Poem, The Shortest Day, or in that particularly lovely part of the show when everyone in the audience is quietly tapping one foot to accompany that haunting recorder solo. And the CDs, fine as they are, just don’t capture that. Full story »
Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of America’s foremost blues musicians. . . that you probably never heard of. He was born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas on November 30, 1909, but blues aficionados know him as Robert Nighthawk.
“In many ways,” writes an anonymous author at the site Sunday Blues,” Nighthawk was the archetype of the classic bluesman spending his entire adult life rambling all over the South [where he was popular] with frequent trips to the North playing a never ending string of one nighters punctuated by sporadic recording dates. … Nighthawk influenced a generation of artists including Elmore James, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and particularly Earl Hooker.” Full story »
According to a BBC report:
A controversial Scottish brewery has launched what it described as the world’s strongest beer — with a 32% alcohol content. Tactical Nuclear Penguin has been unveiled by BrewDog of Fraserburgh. Full story »
Yesterday, Nancy asked if I’d look at the car because it was making a funny noise when she accelerated.
“Sure, I’ll put The Finger on it,” I said.
“Enough with the stupid finger,” she replied. “I don’t want you to put your finger on anything, I want you to look at the car.”
“All right,” I answered. “But I can look at the car from here. It looks fine. Are you sure you don’t want me to go out there and put The Finger on it?”
She mumbled something and wandered away. I looked at the car. It needed a wash. Full story »
Our friend Lee Camp asks the hard questions.
 Full story »
 There are lots of versions of this, but my favorite remains the one I bought in 1964 (which I still have, amazingly enough) by the Robert Shaw Chorale–in this case, just the women’s chorale. One of the first classical recordings I ever bought, in fact. It’s the loveliest version of one of the loveliest pieces of 20th century music that I know of. The only problem (if one can call it that) is that the other pieces on the album, also by Britten, aren’t Christmas music at all. One is the Te Deum, Britten loud and brassy, and the other is Rejoice in the Lamb, which is Britten’s setting to music a bunch of the poetry of Christopher Smart, who spent the last 20 years or so of his 18th century life in the madhouse, writing wonderful poetry. These days we’d just give him some lithium and he’d work for an ad agency. It’s a shame that this edition is only obtainable on vinyl—hey, RCA, let’s get this version back out in circulation! The newer Robert Shaw edition, to be found on Angels on High, also includes a female choir, and it’s lovely too—but the earlier one has a certain austerity that I think captures Britten’s intent wonderfully. Full story »
The results: Nobody saw it coming when the tournament began, but everybody saw it coming entering the Great 8, I’ll bet. So now we know – one of the four greatest artists of all time is Neil Young. The numbers: #5 Neil Young 62%; #2 The Clash 38%. NY is into the Final Four.
Up next, our search for the greatest Baby Boomer band of all time takes you to the Fillmore region. Hold still – this is going to sting a little.
Full story »
 (Note—this is an updated version of a group of posts I last updated about four years ago—so those of you who remember the earlier posts may find some of this familiar.)
Now that Thanksgiving is over, and the Christmas shopping season has kicked in, we need to note that Christmas is coming. Christmas is a very big deal in the Wufnik household. For most people who celebrate Christmas it means the usual things–family, a time to reflect, presents, feeling really full, that sort of thing. But for some of us, it has a deeper, more personal meaning. Specifically, it means “OK, now I get to go out and buy more Christmas music.” I’ve been doing this for an embarrassingly long time, several decades. You know, you buy two or three or four or more of these every year for forty some-odd years and they start piling up. But I can’t help it. I’ve already bought a bunch this year, and I may not be done yet. Full story »
More from iPhone-only land.
Happy Thanksgiving from your friends at Scholars & Rogues. Let’s go around the table and everybody say what they’re thankful for. I’ll go first.
I, Dr. Slammy, am thankful that the local news shows here in Denver aren’t any dumber than they are. Because if they were, the anchors would be on the set communicating in grunts and taking turns picking lice off each other’s backs.
Your turn.
Welcome to my home Full story »
Results: And Carlos Santana’s magical Cinderella run to the Great 8 … well, as they say, it’s not the fall that hurts, it’s when you hit the ground. The numbers: #2 Pink Floyd 81%; Santana/Carlos Santana 19%. Pink Floyd advances.
We have reached the Great 8 in our contest to name the greatest band of all time. Let’s begin with the Red Rocks regional final, where our readers’ apparent choice for best punk band ever takes on the lowest remaining seed.
Full story »
As a follow-on to Dr. Denny’s post on Rupert Murdoch way back on 29 August, there have been further developments worth noting in this space. There has been a flurry of headlines the past few weeks over recent comments by Murdoch, who now is making noises about removing News Corp news stories from Google. He’s not alone, apparently—Belo is considering removing some of its stories as well, as is the owner of the Denver Post. These are all entities that have been seeing their print output hit hard by the drop in advertising over the past year or two, coupled with an outright (and possibly accelerating) decline in newspaper sales. And Murdoch’s comments (and those of other publishers) represent some frustration over the fact that Google News aggregates headlines from all news sources without any fee to the source provider. (Yahoo does something similar, I think, but I’m not sure; but no one seems to care about poor Yahoo these days). See this Bloomberg story or this New York Times story for more details. Murdoch’s plan is to block Google from access to News Corp content, and rather make it available only on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. This is an interesting strategy—how likely is it to succeed? Full story »
Word on the street is that Obama will send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He really stared McChrystal down, eh? It’s expected that he’ll make a public announcement on Tuesday; i’m sure it will be a fine speech. He’ll talk about freedom and how important it is to defend it. He’ll have tough words for Hamid Karzai and corruption in Afghanistan. He’ll tell us that this is all necessary so that the terrorist bogeymen don’t come back and kill us all at the mall. And most importantly, he’ll tell us that this “surge” is temporary; it will facilitate the development of the Afghan National Army and provide security until that body can take on the job of defeating the Taliban.
That is, Mr. Obama will produce grand words that will, hopefully, mask the taste of bullshit. There’s a video going around the internet that you should watch so that you have the right visual for the moment our President tells you about developing the Afghan Army.
Full story »
South African track runner Oscar Pistorius, though not a double amputee — he was born without lower legs — has enjoyed great success competing in that class wearing state-of-the-art carbon-fiber prosthetics. After setting world records in the 100, 200, and 400 meters, he sought to move up in weight class, if you will.
Initially, he was prohibited from competing against able-bodied runners on the grounds that, because they were a little too state-of-the-art, his prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage. (Of course, he was still allowed to crush other double-amputees.) Ultimately, though, he was cleared to compete against all runners. But the unfair-advantage issue is not a closed book. Full story »
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