Daily Archives: 25 May 06

News We Love to Hear

Posted on by
Cracks in Republican Unity: “Last week ought to have been a good one for Republicans in Congress: The House passed a budget, President Bush signed more tax cuts and immigration legislation advanced in the Senate with the blessing of the White House.

But within days of the budget passing, Republicans fell into an ugly spending fight, impugning one another’s honesty and patriotism on the House floor. Public resentment of oil-company profits, meanwhile, opened the door to a rout by environmentalists on the first 2007 appropriations bill. Even an elaborately staged tax-cut publicity event unraveled at the foot of the Capitol steps.” (Wall Street Journal)

R.I.P. Hamza El Din

Posted on by

Jon Pareles eulogizes the sublime Nubian oud player, dead at 76: “Mr. El Din’s austere, hypnotic music was based on his research into the traditions of Nubia, an ancient North African kingdom on the upper Nile, which was a cradle of civilization.

Accompanying his reedy voice with concise, incantatory phrases on the oud, Mr. El Din created a meditative music that sought a timeless purity. He performed dressed in white, with a white turban. But he was also a cosmopolitan musician who taught ethnomusicology and lived in Rome, Tokyo and California.” (New York Times )

 //graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/25/arts/25hamza_190.jpg' cannot be displayed]

Listening to Rock and Hearing Sounds of Conservatism

Posted on by

The National Review offers up the top fifty conservative rock’n’roll songs of all time (New York Times via abby). Rock critic Dave Marsh, asked about the list, found it a desperate attempt by the right to co-opt rock music. Seems to me a classic example of how much mileage you can get out of taking things out of context. To say, for example, that the Who are counterrevolutionaries for singing, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” (no. 1 on the list of fifty) ignores both the radical anti-authoritarianism of the overall theme of the song and the cultural iconoclasm of their cultural presence as a whole.

Michael Long, the list compiler, writes in National Review this week about the number two song, the Beatles’ “Taxman”, and announces that he will unveil the entire list of fifty on Friday, complete with iTunes links. But you can bet there will be no anti-capitalist links to free downloads of the tunes from Long!

Update: Here is the entire list courtesy of Left of the Dial.

Bike Trip Across America

Posted on by
My friend Jim and his daughter are nearly at the end of their 11-week bicycle trip across the country. As I mentioned here before they kicked off from San Diego, they’ve been recording their adventure, as it turns out with considerable eloquence, on their web log bikexc.blogspot.com.

They’re asking for help in their fund-raising effort to support the Jimmy Fund and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. They’ve made it easy – just click on the link at the top of the web site to their Pan-Mass Challenge profile.

… and then do them an even bigger favor, and send this request on to friends you may know who might be interested in their trip and in their cause … with a request that they do the same.