Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

April 5, 2010

Rachmaninov, Russian Easter, etc

This morning I am listening to a splendid new CD on the Avie label of Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances (totalling 35:47), The Isle of the Dead (20:58), and The Rock (13:01), by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. Wonderful playing and very good sound! As Max Harrison's biography of the composer points out, he did not compose much after he was driven from Russia by the Communists, because he had to make a living as a concert pianist; we are lucky to have the sparkling Symphonic Dances from 1940. My only gripe about this CD is that the three compositions should have been programmed the other way around, with the earliest first. Why are record companies always foolish that way?
      Avie spells it 'Rachmaninov'; Harrison spells it 'Rachmaninoff'. I would be willing to bet that Harrison's is a more accurate transliteration.
      Yesterday morning on the radio I heard a marvelous performance of Rimsky-Korsakoff's Russian Easter Festival Overture, and had to listen to the end to find out whose it was. It was Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra, one of the long series of legendary 'Living Presence' recordings made by C. Robert Fine and his wife Wilma Cozart Fine, who just died last year at age 82. My favorite recording of the Russian Easter Overture is the old mono Hermann Scherchen, a Nixa recording made in London and on Westminster in the USA, but the Dorati was thrilling. I must look it out.  

 

April 5, 2010

The New Ford Mustang

Last week somebody wrote an admiring article in the Wall Street Journal about the new Ford Mustang, which apparently can go from zero to 60 in nothing flat, yet also gets over 30 mpg on the highway. The author said of the government's requirement that car companies improve the mileage of their vehicles that it works. Did he know that he was contradicting Holman W. Jenkins Jr, the paper's arch-capitalist? Perhaps he should be warned.

 

April 5, 2010

Banning the Veil

In today's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz writes about the French government's plan to ban the full Muslim veil, which amounts to a woman wearing a tent over her head, a requirement which if I am not mistaken is not even mentioned in the Koran. Berkowitz says that a ban would be justified to the extent that Muslim communities "use the veil to deprive girls of basic educational opportunities and to prevent women from fulfilling their obligations as citizens, or that terrorists create a security threat by disguising themselves in the veil." He then goes on to say that the ban may be justified in France -- "Circumstances, not just principles, are decisive" -- but that in the USA it would be "unthinkable."
      Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, where a great many of our American so-called "conservatives" hang out.

 

April 5, 2010

Sarah Palin

We tuned in the other night to see what Sarah Palin's new TV show would be like. Her tongue did not get in front of her eyeteeth because every word she was speaking was scripted for her. This is a candidate for public office? We should have known better than to look at the Fox news channel.

 

April 5, 2010

True Conservatism

Speaking of crackpots and Sarah Palin, Matt O'Brien of Austin, Texas (who is neither) writes in the letters page of the Wall Street Journal today that the reason for the general disdain of Palin is that the Republicans cannot "produce an electable presidential candidate who is a conservative intellectual and who is capable of articulating a political philosophy". He compares "Woodrow Wilson, a former professor of jurisprudence and president of Princeton; FDR and his 'brain trust' from Columbia and Harvard; and now Barack Obama and his friends from the University of Chicago and the Ivy League."
      This is good as far as it goes, but does not address the American problem. The word "intellectual" implies somebody with some historical knowledge and some attention span, who, when contemplating this or that political problem and asking "What would the Founders do?", would immediately realize that the correct question must be, "What would the Founders have done if they had led the most powerful nation that ever existed, with previously undreamed of medical and military technology, more economic clout than any other country, and instant communication with all the other world leaders?" Wishing to turn the clock back to some imagined golden age has nothing to do with true conservatism.