Rebooting the Calendar

Happy new year, world. 

I am not sorry to see 2025 go. 2025 sucked. From beginning to end - dominated by Donald Trump, doing all he can to fuck this country up six ways to Sunday, in the most embarrassing, shameful, idiotic way imaginable - what a nightmare. Is there any way this gets better? Well, there will be mid-terms this year, presumably, and if Trump doesn't send in the army, he is likely to lose all the congressional support he has. Though for that to matter, congress and Democrats have to do something - not just fend off the worst, but find a way to break the son of a bitch. I don't know. They should have done that in 2021 - he should have been frog-marched from the White House, probably on January 7, but January 21 would have worked. Letting him and his minions get away with trying to overthrow the government brought us to the disaster we are in today.

That's Trump. My pessimism about Democrats might be a function of being in Maine, and watching the ancient and infuriating Susan Collins running against the equally ancient, but usually pretty respectable Janet Mills, though Mills is likely to slot in with all the other ancient and respectable Democrats in congress. Who wants that? Unfortunately the most prominent alternative to those two is Graham Plattner, a guy who thought it was a good idea to get the Third SS Panzer badge emblazoned on his chest. Sure, it was a long time ago and he was drunk in Croatia, where I imagine this happens all the time - still, man, still! It took him until this year to do anything about it, and he ran his mouth more than once in those years and - I don't know. If he had ever served in any elected office in his life, we would at least have a track record to look at, but no. He's an "outsider"! He talks a good game - Bernie bro stuff - but that's talk, and a particularly cheap kind of talk at that. To me, he comes off as a shameless opportunist whose only real value is his own personal advancement. It is convenient for him to play the outsider, and to his credit he's playing the lefty outsider, but in the extremely unlikely event he ended up in Washington, I'd put my money on him turning into, at best, John Fetterman, at worst, Tulsi Gabbard. Though apparently he plans to wear a suit. 

What a hell hole this country has become.

Well, there is more to life than politics. There is, for example, Sport. As it happened, 2025 was a pretty entertaining year for sport. A very cool baseball season, with the local nine doing well, producing one of the most exciting young players in years, in Roman Anthony - promising to hang around. But all of baseball was fun this year - a fun season, a fantastic post season, lots of good young players coming up - it promises to stay fun, at least until they shut it down for a strike or lockout in a couple years. But there's a couple years before that happens. Beyond baseball, it has been a pretty good year locally - the C's are respectable, even with their best player out for most of the year, the B's are competent again, and the Patsies are back on top as if the post Brady years never happened. How thrilling!

2026 is also when the World Cup comes back to the US. Normally, that would be thrilling, but this year - yikes. No. The tournament itself is ridiculous, bloated and confusing, covering three countries and way too many teams. I haven't followed soccer close enough to know what to expect, and there isn't a lot making me do so. That and the fact that this is three straight world cups help in dictatorships. FIFA, of course, paid their proper bribe to the grifter in chief, but that is to be expected. Still - when push comes to shove I am more likely than not to get caught up in the fun. Maybe.

And? There is tech. My tech year has been a shit show. IPad dead; TV receiver dead; Mac mini dead; laptop screen dead - the cat bit it. Thanks, cat! That was fixed at least. And last week, my coffee grinder died! maybe the most horrible failure of them all! Alas - the wide world of technology does not seem to be doing any better. Everything is AI this and AI that, and it all sucks. This might even be made worse by the ways generative AI poisons the very idea of AI - which, I am told, can do many good things in other uses. I don't know enough to judge. I do know that that there are not a lot of technologies in 2025 that aero better than the same techs were in 2015 or 2005 even. Yeah, faster, lighter, sometimes cheaper - but I have seen people drop laptops and shatter the screens completely and the machines keep on working for years - mine died because the cat bit it!

All right; that's enough. It is time for 2026, which has almost infinite room to get better, though has not lack of ways to get worse. Let's hope for the best and get on with it. This year, let me try to be a better person. Try to post more often, once again; eat better, get more exercise, read more, write more, see more movies, pat the cat, be nice to people, backup my work (oh god) and go Red Sox! Good luck, 2026, you're going to need it.

Me I'm All Smiles... Welcome 2022

And here we are. Happy New Year! No one is going to miss 2021 - the only thing it had going for it was not being 2020. But it rivals 2020. People kept dying, they kept dying unnecessarily, as vaccines came out and big chunks of the country refused to get them, and prominent political and media figures urged people not to get them, and people kept dying because of it, the disease hangs around and everything remains shitty. 

Speaking of things hanging around making the world shitty, Donald Trump, having gotten stomped in the election, tried to overthrow the government. He failed, but he's still walking the world free, to our national shame. He still talks like he is going to try it again, the Republicans are doing all they can to stop enough people from voting to make it so he can win without a coup, though they are all pretty much fine with a coup at this point. The supreme court, a completely illegitimate institution at this point, works on undoing the twentieth century and the Reconstruction amendments. Republicans, in general, have basically adopted Trump's fascism wholesale, running on a constant attack on intellectual freedom and truth. All of which is mostly aimed at running on a platform of putting Black people back in their place. And women, foreigners, gays and anyone else they can find to hate and abuse. 

In other words, we suck. 

I suppose I can take solace from the economy recovering, though who knows how long that will last with COVID still going strong. I would take more solace if the Democrats were all Democrats. Joe Manchin has decided to singlehandedly betray more or less everything he is supposed to represent - Build Back Better is good for the country, will be good for West Viginia, and is good for the Democratic party - isn't that what a Democratic Senator is supposed to care about? immediate constituents, the country as a whole, and his party? In his case, there is also himself and his donors - he has decided to represent them. Now true - I single out Manchin when the entire Republican party is acting the same way - but they are openly seditious and fascist - they are openly working against the country and their voters. Though to their credit (for what it's worth) they do work for the good (short term anyway) of the Republican Party, which now, is all about power, looting the country, and oppressing Blacks, women, gays, foreigners and so on.

Alas. 

Well, I will not belabor politics anymore. How goes it with me? Not great. I suppose things are going along well enough in the general sense - gainful employment that doesn't drive me too crazy, I'm healthy, smart enough to be vaccinated (though not lucky enough to get a booster - I was scheduled for this very day, but the local pharmacy is down a person so closed up at the last minute. Bloody hell.) That all could be worse. 

But I have become unspeakably lazy in the last couple years. Just look at the output on this blog! And that reflects general lack of motivation for anything. I don't watch movies anymore, not much anyway. I don't write much, not much of anything. I did Nanowrimo, as usual, and produced almost 70,000 words - though with almost nothing I could imagine being part of an actual novel, in the end. Weird stuff. I used to hope to finally finish something - these days, I hope not to go backwards. And outside of that? I mentioned a couple years ago surfing on YouTube - that's still a thing, but these days, I spend most fo that time scrolling through YouTube looking for something to watch. Sad. 

I did knock off a few books last year - most notably autobiographies of Richard Thompson and Will Sergeant - both very fine books by very fine guitar players. I have been worshipping Thompson for 30 odd years; I was reminded this year how much I liked Echo and the Bunnymen back in the 80s, and spent a lot of time this year listening to them. This happened with the Gang of Four a while back - I heard them, remembered how much I liked them for a while, and went back and dove in and have worshipped them since. The bunnymen have gotten the same treatment this year. Don't ask me why it took so long.

All of which does bring up one thing that went a bit better this year: I did listen to a lot more music than I have in a while. I tend to latch on to things - art forms - movies or music or books, or other things, like different sports or games or what have you - and ride them hard for a few years, then - stop. I stopped obsessing about music a while back, after obsessing about it hard for a long time. Strange. This year? I didn't pay m,uch attention to anything contemporary - but I paid attention to some old stuff. The last couple years, really. I will have to write about that some day. This year? Echo and the Bunnymen, the Kinks and Brian Jonestown Massacre got the weight of my attention. A lot of it from YouTube, though I bought records, and listened to them. Interesting. Maybe I will write about it again.

Anyway - there you have it. Something to mark the change of the calendar. I will even end with a resolution of sorts: I want to post once in a while on here. Something. Something besides obituaries and laments about the end of the republic, I hope. Maybe music.

2021 Is Here at Last!

And good riddance to 2020! 

Here we are, 2021, a new year, and one that is very welcome. 2020 has got a very strong claim to being the worst year in American history. 350,000 dead of Covid, over 3 million total deaths, a 15% increase from 2019, the largest increase in deaths since 1918. That is very bad. And around this, we can watch the government collapsing, one of our parties openly embracing treason - it's not a pretty picture. Now clearly, there have been bad times in the past - 1918, say! War, the flu and all; the Depression, WWII; the 60s had some horrible times as well. But this one - especially as so much of it feels like a self-inflicted wound. And the way there seems to be so little to take as compensation. Sure sure, 1968 was horrible - but you got the White Album! This year - this was so bad I somehow managed to miss the fact that Tommy Heinsohn died. A couple months ago. Somewhere between Sean Connery and Alex Trebek. That bad.

So here we are. The virus is still wreaking havoc (we keep hitting new daily highs in deaths, 3900 odd a couple days ago); there are vaccines, but they are slow to get implemented, so we are a long ways from normal life again. There's a new strain out there, more contagious than the last. Not good. Meanwhile, the economy is in a dangerous place. Maybe it's still functioning, but it feels like it could crash at any time. And though $600 checks will help a bit, you need more than that, especially if we were able to take the necessary step of closing things down again until the virus subsides and vaccines are common. There is hope, I suppose, if the Democrats win two senate seats in Georgia - otherwise, we remain at the mercy of Mitch McConnell, and that is not a good place to be.

There is no escaping the utter depravity of the modern Republican party. Donald Trump - he's less than three weeks from being out fo the white house, but is doing all he can to ruin the country while he is still there. He bears personal responsibility for a lot fo those COVID deaths - half of them? Probably about right. He had an easy job when this pandemic hit - nod along with the doctors, tell everyone to stay at home and wear their masks and wash their hands - but he did not do that. He did the opposite, He politicized the disease - he politicized the obvious measures one takes to battle infectious diseases. He did worse than that - he fostered conspiracy theories, he acted the fool, he inspired his followers to act the fool. If he had hit the bare minimum, doing what the doctors said, the Republicans likely would have gone along with it. You always have nuts - but Trump encouraged mainstream Republicans to defy obvious health measures. I don't think they would have done this without his lead. There is almost no one else he could have been in his place who would have acted the way Trump did on this. Mike Pence, bad as he is (and bad as he's been as Trump's VP) is very unlikely to have acted like Trump in the face of this disaster. And that little might have made it possible to keep the disease under some control. Not complete (unless you live in New Zealand) - but we are way worse than anyone else.

But Donald Trump is a pretty uniquely bad human being. He has managed to fulfill all the expectations for villainy and incompetence in the wake of the election. It's interesting to note that the election went more or less exactly as everyone expected it to go: Biden won the popular vote easily; a half dozen states were close enough to make the Electoral College outcome iffy, though there never seemed to be much chance of Trump repeating his 2016 luck. Because of absentee voting, and the politicizations of absentee voting, most observers thought that Trump would seem to be ahead on election day, but the lead would disappear as soon as the votes were counted. It's obvious that's what Trump expected to happen - thus his relentless campaign against absentee voting, his attempts to sabotage the post office, to stop counting votes after election day and so on. 

And that is how it happened. Trump was ahead at the end of November 3, and started clamoring to stop counting votes. People counted the votes. Trump's lead disappeared fast, and a day or so later, it was obvious Biden had won, and would win big. Here, a normal villain would back down, whine about whatever there was to whine about, and pout as the country prepared to change presidents. Not Trump! he kept doubling down on his fascism, challenging votes, trying to intimidate officials, raising up his followers for violence, and when everything else failed, speculating about a military coup. They are still at it! Weird notions still circulating about straight up rejecting the results when congress certifies them, with grandstanding morons in congress still carrying on. Astonishing. Well - not for Trump. More or less par for the course. For the other Republicans - somehow they seem to have missed that the rest of the party sort of made gains in this election - Trump is the only one who got smoked, regularly. 

And so. 2021 is here, Joe Biden will be president in a couple weeks, with luck, the Democrats will have the senate, and might pass some fo the lawws the house has been passing all year. Might make it possible to get through the next 3-6 months it will take to get vaccines to people - we might survive as a nation. For a while anyway.

I will not dwell on the bad, though. 2020 will represent the low point in the Republic, even if worse times come, as long as we do start to get back to something resembling respectability. It's hard to get too optimistic, though, even there - with several others countries slipping into fascism and stupidity at the same time. (Brexit anyone?) But - it feels good to get out of it. There could be light at the end of this tunnel; there hasn't been anything to be optimistic about in a while. So take what you can get.

2020 Hindsight

Happy New Year!

This blog has become a ghost site - I thought it was bad last year, or the year before, but - 4 posts? Why bother at all? Well - if I could get back to posting, I suppose that would be the answer in itself. I won't promise it. As it is - it's as good a place as any to toss some thoughts out into the world, to let them float in the ether on a sea of forced metaphors. It's as good a place as any to welcome the new decade, to bid the last one farewell and all.

It was a strange decade. For me, personally, it began on something of an all time low: my mother died, the day after Christmas, in 2009; 2010 began with her funeral. There has been a lot of that this decade - I am of an age when the generations before me are starting to die. My father, a couple close friends, many uncles and aunts have passed, some of them very hard to process. But - I am of an age when that is going to happen. I am getting perilously close to the age when having my contemporaries die will seem less like a shock and more of the natural way of things. Another decade and I will be there, I am afraid.

But that said: the first half of the 2010s weren't a bad time for me. I moved to a place I liked, a good apartment, where I stayed for 7 years. I took classes, I wrote, I posted regularly, here, and sometimes on other blogs. I got out of the country a couple times, still played softball, sometimes well, I ate well, lived well. My job even seemed to reach a detente with me - though that got me accused of "complacency." That, of course, should have been a sign - was a sign - but - that's the second half of the decade. In all - I lived pretty well in the first half of the 10s. Even just using this blog as indication - I posted regularly; I started up a couple series that carried on a while, and gave me a chance to write some things I liked. History posts - following along with the Civil War, then WWI for a while; music posts, those band of the month posts; movies - screen shots and directors and things like that. It was good. I was, I think I would have to say, satisfied with my lot in life.

The second half fo the decade has been a bit different. Maybe not objectively - nothing really bad has happened to me, except of my own making (sort of) - but a lot of the things I was satisfied with had to go. And the world outside has gone straight to hell. For me - the job is what got me. Things changed. A generation of managers where I worked left, and a new generation came in - people who use words like "disruption" as a positive term; people who openly admitted to forming their management ideas by watching TED talks and reading online management consultants. The results were predictable. And I was not willing to take it, because I did not have to. I had resources to move, and did, though it meant I gave up living in the city - but I could live closer to my family, could support myself on a lot less money, and could engage in other past times - bowling and D&D in place of softball and education! So - not a bad tradeoff, over all. Though it changed me in strange ways. I went from being a fairly obsessive habitual movie goer to almost never going to movies, and barely even watching movies. I went from the blogging you see before 2017 to almost nothing since 2017. Some of this is me - some of this might be the world, the way the technology has evolved (as fewer and fewer blogs seem all that important - Twitter is where all the conversations seem to be happening. That is not a good thing.) BUt there is it.

And the world, of course, has gone to hell. It held on in the first half of the decade - but you could see the disaster coming. The mid-term elections in 2010 doomed us, giving the Republicans completely undeserved and unrepresentative control of the machinery of government that they have exploited to hold power as they sink into smaller and smaller minority status. The GOP, long having embraced white supremacy as a vital part of their politics, doubled down on it. They reacted shamefully to Obama's election, the worst of them used it to build the racist elements in the party. All this brought us to Trump, who has made all the racism, sexism, xenophobia and everything else the whole point of his existence. Was Trump a break from what the GOP had been? Maybe - there is a sense that earlier Republicans used racism as a way to get votes for their tax cuts. Trump and his closest supporters seem to be using tax cuts to keep support for their racism. The white supremacy seems to be their defining point. It sometimes seems like this is so.

And no? Trump himself is a plain fascist - he has all the makings: the racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, use of violence for politics, corporatism, aestheticization of politics, turning it explicitly into spectacle, and working very hard to make only the spectacle seem to matter. (Though I think the most important element in the aesthetics of fascism is the idea of the dominance of Myth. It's the idea of a mythological justification - Make America Great Again. The red hats are part of it - but the idea of a lost golden age, an imaginary version fo the country that conforms to their political goals, etc, is what really defines fascism. This is an essay I am not going to write just now, though.) The country, of course, is something else - even now, he is only the president, one branch of government, he is a Republican, one party - if the other branches act, if the other parties resist, if his own party decides to try to not be fascists - he is not going to succeed in turning the country into something worse than it is. He has been impeached; there are elections coming; we will see how this goes.

But I don't want to write about the future. This is one last look back at the decade gone. So: the second half fo this decade - 2016 on at least - have gone from worse to worse. All the celebrity deaths in 2026 hit hard. My job went to hell in 2026. And Trump - getting elected came on top of a primary and election campaign that defied my ability to imagine the depths of stupidity possible int he American political system. Trump? The idiotic attacks on Hilary Clinton? Though the defenses of her were sometimes just as hard to take - I mean - how could any Democrat worth a damn vote for anyone who voted for the war in Iraq? why was that forgiven? I don't know. Now - 2020 - big chunks of the country, the Democrats in particular, seem determined to relive 2016. I don't get this. Why does so much of the discussion in the Democratic party revolve around Bernie Sanders (and by extension, Hilary Clinton?) That might be because I read Twitter and Facebook too much - that is a topic unto itself. The point is, 2016 was awful even before Trump got elected; his election just made sure the next 4 years would be even worse.

All right. That is enough. One more thing - just a hint. Technology - here is something I have been thinking about lately. There are major technological shifts going on - streaming, Disney's domination of the entertainment industry, the effects on discourse of Twitter and FAcebook, etc. But have there been any real technological changes in the last 10 years? Twitter and Fecebook existed in 2010; youtube did; streaming services existed. Digital film distribution. Almost everyhting that defines the technological world now existed, was even fairly significant, in 2010. Compare 2010 to 200 - that is not true. The 00s brought us youtube, Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and all the other dumber forms of online communication. It brought ius smart phones, tablets, iPods, it started streaming services. Or the 90s - from 1990 to 2000 we gaines DVDs, the world wide net and the popularization of the internet; computers changed fairly significantly; digital photography and video started to appear (though they became ubiquitous in the 00s). What has appeared int he 2010s that has changed things the way - any of a dozen things changed the world in the previous decades? This has been more about cultural shifts to accommodate technology - which have mostly felt bad: corporate control over all of it; the colonization of places like Facebook and Twitter by propagandists, who have made all of us amateur propagandists and ad writers. Another reason to worry, I guess.

But I won't end with pessimism. I like a lot of what the world offers. I can lose days browsing through YouTube - I don't know why videos have replaced blogs as the preferred method of amateur communication, but it seems they have. 10 years ago, I counted mostly blogs as the most interesting sources of information and discussion online. Now? it tends to be youtubers - Seth Skorkowsky! The History Guy! Scholagladatoria! (All reflecting my recent interest in games and history, no doubt.) Is this better than reading blogs? I won't say yes - but it's still a nice feature of the internet, the ease with which people with interesting things to say can communicate with the world, without a lot of extraneous resources.

And so - happy new year! Happy new decade! And here's hoping I manage to post something here before 2030...

Nothing Changes on New Year's Day

Happy new year, world!

I can't say I will miss this last one. Personally, it was not as bad as the year before - 2016 felt like hell on earth. But objectively - 2017 was a shit show. Trump as president was as bad as anyone could ask, and though his incompetence tended to suppress the enactment of his bad ideas, the year ended with one of the worst ideas - that tax cut - going through. I don't know how long it will take for that thing to wreck the economy - but if it isn't quickly undone, it will. But on the bright side, we haven't had a nuclear war - yay!

But along side Trump, we've had mass shootings; we've had terrorism mostly from the right, but a few from foreign agents. (The left mostly behaves itself, though - as usual.) The right - the hard right, the racist right - has been out in force all year,and show no signs of going anywhere. Why should they? Trump is a fascist, and has spent most of the year testing how far he can push his authoritarianism, racism, and so on - his followers gleefully competing with him in their own fascist ravings. As policy, it is mostly aimed at immigrants - though the continual attacks on the media, education, political protests and other activism, voting, could always bear fruit.

It is easy to be depressed. But there are reasons for hope. The one tool we have to make things better is the vote (well - there are lots of tools, but that is the one that had direct and immediate consequences.) And this year, the Democrats have tended to smoke the Republicans at the ballot box. The most extreme instance being the election of Doug Jones overRoy Moore in Alabama - yes, the GOP had to run a child molesting fascist nutcase to lose, but they did lose. And though Republicans have won a lot of special elections this year too, they have done so in hard-right districts, and the Democrats have run them very close. In Montana, in Georgia - if this continues, it bodes well. The Democrats have to overcome a massive structural disadvantage to win the house - a strange thing, but gerrymandering and other oddball vote distributions makes that body remarkably undemocratic - but they might be able to do it. Might have to win 5 million or so more votes to break even in the house - but that has happened before and might again.

Politics: I have written more about politics than anything else here,this year,and more than I have in a long time - politics is maddening these days,but it's also vital. It feels like life or death for the republic, sometimes. And it is hard to be optimistic - the last two years haven't just shown that white resentment is hanging on in the country, and can still hold a great deal of power; it's also shown that the system itself doesn't work. The constitution itself at its worst is explicitly racist (most of that is gone, thankfully, but the Electoral college remains), and often practically racist (the senate, by helping exaggerate rural votes is practoically racist, at this point in history at least) - but the bigger problem is that the system, with its checks and balances and diffusion of power gives overwhelming power to minority groups, if they are willing to use it. The American system depends on the good faith of all participants: and the Republicans are not operating in good faith. There is nothing to force them to operate in good faith - they took control of the courts,in an act of shocking bad faith - so there is no counter to any ofthis except the vote,and the system currently requires a massive landslide toward the Democrats to overcome the system.Depressing.

But not hopeless. Or - put plainly - in politics, you can't afford to take things for granted,good or bad, because, in the end, what you do determines what politics is. So I guess, keep at it. Vote, argue, work - what else is there to do?

I have to write something about something else. Alright. This was a momentous year - I moved, which has changed my movie watching options for the worst - I compensated with a fair amount of TV, or at least, with some TV - whole first run TV shows, watched first to last! Ken Burns' on Vietnam; and of course Twin Peaks - the latter of which was more or less awe inspiring and brilliant - obviously better than anything else I saw this year, since I barely saw anything else - but as good as anything I've seen on a screen in years. I also watched a good deal of old TV this year,for the TV Countdown at Wonders in the Dark (including the coming Part 2) - but not enough movies.

And so? I suppose the new year is a time for resolutions - and - well: I wish I had some. Or rather, I wish I had some I felt sure of following through on. But I guess the new year is the time for promises, listing the things you hope you do or will regret not doing - I can play that game. So:

1) I hope to post here again, more than once a week (though I suppose that should really be, at least once a week, as I have fallen well short of that unimpressive standard). I know, I know, blogs are old hat - but I am old hat, so, I would rather write for this than for twitter or something like that. Now - I fear if I deliver on this resolution, it will bring a lot of politics - but that is the world we live in, so...

2) I hope I can get back to a more regular film watching regime. Might not be possible to do my habitual 2 new films a week, plus 2-3 older films somewhere - but I need to get in the habit again of watching films. Probably will - I don't lose that habit for long, usually.

3) I hope I write about films, and other subjects - books, TV, music - here - once in a while. It has been a while since I have made a habit of writing longish posts about arts here, and I don't know if that habit will come back (without external stimulus - I get work done for other people, when I can...)

4) I will try to acknowledge the fact that this is 2018. the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, and all the stuff that went on around it - so some Great War blogging might be in order. I hope. Reconstruction blogging, too,if I can - 150 years since 1868 - a vital part of the country's history....

5) Finally, a lot of this depends on my ability to write, in general. f that goes well, then, some of it should end up here.

And so - that's enough for now. Happy New Year!

(And here's a holy shit I'm old moment for you: U2, 35 years ago:)

Bastille Day

Happy Bastille day, France, and Francophiles everywhere. Try not to dwell too much on the appeal of the tumbrel in these troubled times, as our (sort of) elected leaders demonstrate how Louis XVI ad co weren't the worst you could do....

I know this is another placeholder type of post - I don't know when that will change. As always, for the next few months, don't miss the TV countdown at Wonders in the Dark; don't miss the new Twin Peaks. Baseball starts back up after its all star break. And the Tour de France rolls along, with a twist - Chris Froome and the invincible Sky Team have lost the lead! Though no one seems to npticethe obvious: the current leader, Fabio Aru, got it yesterday by winning a sprint up the side of a wall after rding the entire race on Chris Froome's wheel. If Sky is so invincible, don't beat em - join em! Make them pull you through the mountains!

Good enough. Music? Kraftwerk can bring you the sport:



And as usual - a bit of French pop is in order - here's Johnny Hallyday:



et encore - live, 1960!

Bloomsday and Politics and GWAR

Happy Bloomsday! if you fry up some kidney, be sure to share with the cat....

I get hungry just reading it:

On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded and rinsed out the teapot and put in four ful spoons of tea, tilting the kettle to let the water flow in. Having set it to draw he took offthe kettle, crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won't mouse. Say they won't eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to her and dropped the kidney amid the zsizling butter sauce. Pepper. He sprinkled it through his fingers ringwise from the chipped eggcup.

Meanwhile, in the world - my god who wants to live in this world? Gunmen preying on congressmen, gunmen preying on citizens; terrible fires in London. Nonsense in the hals of government - Trump lying and looking for new ways to defy the constitution and law and order; congress itself trying to sneak a new health care law through the senate, a law that will cause massive suffering and undoubtedly cost citizens a lot of money, all in the name of an upper class tax cut. They are sneaking it through because they know that not even habitual Republican voters are going to support it - they don't want to talk about it, they don't want anyone talking about it - so I suppose I must talk about it.

Ugh. I suppose I will have plenty of time to give in to despair in the coming years, so I will leave it off now.

Leave you with GWAR, doing terrible things to a Billy Ocean song:

St. Patrick's Day With Thin Lizzy

Haven't posted in ages - here's a reminder that I am still alive... A bit of something from the old country in honor of Evacuation Day...

Long weekend Friday Ten

Memorial Day weekend is here, with actual seasonal weather! Hooray! fire up that grill! My weekend is getting an early start, so I don't have much to add here - enjoy it... Don't forget to remember those who've gone, and especially those who've gone serving their country, and maybe especially those who went saving our country from division and freeing the slaves - don't forget Decoration Day.

And with that - some random songs to consider...

1. Wire - Smash
2. Jacques Brel - Vesoul
3. Slits - Enemy Numero Uno
4. Kinks - Superman
5. Mono - Gone
6. 13th Floor Elevators - Kingdom of Heaven
7. Nina Simone - My Baby Just Cares for Me
8. Battles - Futura
9. Boris - Window Shopping
10. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - God is in the House

Video? first - in case I don't get back in here before the holiday - here is Odetta singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic:



And some some singer-songwiriter goodness, starting with Jacques Brel:



And - here's Nina Simone:



And Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, on Jules Holland:

On Bernie Sanders' Success

Happy May Day! In past, I have used this as a chance to post musical videos and jokes about witches, communists and morris dancers, but this year, with Bernie Sanders, Socialist, running for president, and doing very well, thank you very much, I might try something more.

It seems, in the last couple weeks, that Sanders' campaign is starting to run down. He was never really going to win, I suppose - but he made a nice run of it, and has been relevant all along. The race has gotten uglier as it has gone along, but it's only May now, and there is plenty of time for the Democrats to get their act together and get on with the business of winning elections. The presidency, of course - though maybe just as important, maybe more, Senate and House races. The senate is in range - the house, probably not - but getting the Senate takes a lot of pressure off, allows a Democratic president to fill up the Supreme Court, move the country left (or at least, sane) there, generally force more stuff through. There is a lot of whining on the "left" about the horror or Hillary Clinton, neoliberal as the candidate, but I still hope that's just a fringe, dimwits looking for clicks, you know...

Because too much lamenting over Sanders' failure is not justified in the least. First - because he hardly failed. He didn't win the nomination, but it's hard to see how that was ever in the cards. But assuming he's smart enough to know that - he has succeeded brilliantly in getting his policies into the public eye. He has made Socialism respectable - made it possible to talk about socialism, socialist policies, and to call them socialist. (Even if most of them are just good liberal positions - tax the rich, help the poor, use government money to put people to work and keep the roads and trains and bridges functioning, don’t invade every country we disagree with, and pay for medical care and education for everyone.) He has gotten votes for those things - he has injected leftist ideas into the conversation - not the moronic kind of "conversation" dimwits like Walker Bragman (maybe the dumbest thing on the internet this week - which tells you how stupid some of the internet has become, if that's in question) babble about, but the actual things actual politicians actually talk about. We shall see how much of it makes it into the Democratic platform, and see how well Clinton (if she wins, which she should) sticks to them, either with some legislative support or without it, but it is there.

And this is the thing: Sanders likes to talk about revolutions, but that's just rhetoric, for all the Salon writers pretending to be confused. When he decided to run, as a Democrat, he made it clear that he is, in fact, smarter than that - revolution is for the choir; but better platforms, better down ticket candidates, more public pressure for liberal policies, that is where the action is. And for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the (alleged) Bernie true believers, all the Democrats in disarray nonsense being published - it's working. It's not just Bernie - in the past few years, we've seen the Occupy Wall Street movement, the election of people like Elizabeth Warren, Sharrod Brown and such, the emergence of Sanders himself as a national figure, the movement for a $15 minimum wage, along with a significant number of liberal social victories. Not much of this has made inroads as Federal law (since the Democrats lost the house in 2010 - before that, real progress was made), but it has made significant progress in states and cities. Minimum wages have gone up; tipped minimum wages have been eliminated; social policies have changed for the better in many cities, as well as Federally, thanks to the Supreme Court recognizing obvious truth. And it's important to remember that egregiously regressive laws, like North Carolina or Mississippi and so on, are, more often than not, defensive laws passed to try to hold back pressure from above and below. The Supreme court has joined the 21st century in some areas; and many cities, even in the Old Confederacy, are passing laws to raise minimum wages, to protect gay, lesbian, transgender rights - thus causing the states to try to reverse history again.

All of this makes it easy to get discouraged, I won't deny it. You look at Trump, running more or less explicitly as a fascist, certainly making white supremacy the one true issue of his campaign, and it is discouraging. Look at North Carolina (and a parade of other states) trying to stop their own cities from treating people decently, and it is easy to forget that these things come because their own cities are turning on them. But in the end, if change comes, it comes the way it always comes - by people voting for it. It's fun to talk about electing Bernie Sanders - but it's far more important to elect more liberal liberals to more offices. To take over city governments, state governments (though as always, the states are the most regressive forces in the country; you want a revolution? abolish states), get people into the house and the senate, and then you can change. And personally I think Bernie Sanders, running as he did, and succeeding as he did, has made it easier to do that - has legitimized the liberal side of Democratic politics, created an audience and a constituency for leftier politicians, policies and all the rest. Whining about how the establishment won again underestimates how much he has done to change the establishment - and underestimates by far the importance of simply voting to move the establishment.

Because when you get to the nitty gritty of it - if Democrats and liberals and progressives and socialists want to move the country (and the party) left, they do it by voting. Get 74% participations, and the Democrats will dominate government for the foreseeable future. Get that participation in every election, and it will move the Democratic party left as well. And moving the party is more important than electing one man. So - vote, people! Vote for Democrats! vote for the most liberal Democrat in the primary (if that's your thing), but for the love of god and the democracy, vote for the Democrat in the general. And if that means Hillary Clinton, well - that works for me. And anyway, the tea baggers all thing she's a communist anyway, so - who am I to doubt them?

All right. That said - may day is a day for jokes and music about commies, witches and morris dancers -and celebration of all things red. Not a good day on the soccer front, with Liverpool getting smoked - what can you do?

David Bowie singing Brecht?



Maybe Prince doing Red House with Maceo Parker (enjoy it while you can - Prince songs go fast off YouTube):



And don't forget Black Phillip, this may day!

Year End

I should post something to say good bye to 2015. (This New Year's post is starting to be a tradition.) I should post something - I have had a terrible year on this blog - the lowest post total ever, including the year I started in June... Sad. It is a chore.

2016, I am sure, will give me plenty of things I could write about if I were masochistic - it is an election year! 2015 has been a campaigning year, and a horrific one at that. The sensible party marches along, with an appealing old geezer running against a depressing old politician, either of whom I can vote for with no regrets (though I will not be voting for any Clintons before I have to). The Republicans, meanwhile, run out dozens of nobodies with no chance of winning a national election (assuming people show up), and little chance of winning their own lunatic election... More than one of them embrace something that comes closer and closer to open fascism (with its xenophobia and racism and willed, learned stupidity, its authoritarianism, its corporatist economics, and its deliberate dishonest fantasy), with the most fascist being the front runner most of the time. Fuck - it's depressing to watch. You want the party you disagree with to be someone with policies you don't prefer - not a bunch of con men and apparatchiks competing for place in the tabloids with the Kardashians, and promising to reproduce the glory days of 1865 Virginia. The whole lot of them pissing their pants in terror of the possibility that there's a Moslem somewhere in the world who isn't donating to their campaign.

Right. More happened in 2015 than politics, I suppose. Right? I have found it hard this year to write about anything except politics and music, something I have to change. I will not be so foolish as to post resolutions here - but if I did, "blog more" would have to be one of them. About the only things I have managed to do this year were my essays for the Wonders in the Dark Childhood Countdown - I am happy with those, and always honored to be part of their projects... But I have to do more than that. I can promise a couple things for the coming year - 1916 is 100 years ago, and that means, Verdun and the Somme - yes indeed - Great War blogging! Things are about to get really bad... Maybe some Lawrence of Arabia blogging too, while we're at it - since that part of WWI seems to still be going on, having barely stopped in the 100 years meantime. This year's bogeyman is ISIS - but how much of the last 100 years have not had something bad happening in the middle east? Most of it caused by misguided attempts to fix last years' problems...

Politics again. I should leave off the politics... or accept my fate and write about politics... or the weather - I see the Heat Miser got his way - springtime at the North Pole! We are all doomed. It was 60 here last week, 50 last weekend in Vermont, then we got snow, and it's back int he 40s again - who knows. It was mild last winter, up throuigh the end of January, when All Hell Broke Loose.



I can live without that again. All right - it's still early - not going to try to post this at 11:59 this year - do it now and then spend the evening watching Thin Man movies? might be, might be. Happy new year!

And happy new year, from this naughty fat cat, about to knock my Columbo and Monty Python DVDs on the floor. Awful beast!

Happy Bastille Day!

The Tour de France is starting back up today, moving into the mountains - always fun. This year's race looks likely to come down to an Englishman (from Kenya) vs. a Columbian, with an American, Spaniard and Italian in serious contention - well - it's an international sport. So here, to celebrate it, is a group of Germans:



And to wish our French friends a happy Bastille Day, here are some nice Canadian boys:



And finally, a very French performance of the Marsiellaise:

Decoration Day

Happy Memorial Day!

As I am wont to do, I am inclined to think about the origins of holidays on holidays. This one began in the wake of the Civil War - officialy in the north in 1868; less officially, and at various times and places in the south in 1866 or so. And one of the first instances came in Charleston, South Carolina, where a large number of freed slaves (mainly) gathered to pay tribute to the Union soldiers who had died at the Hampton Park Race Course, which had been used as a prison camp during the war. The dead had been buried there - the freedmen cleaned and landscaped the grounds and gathered for a ceremony on May 1, 1865, to honor the Martyrs of the Race Course. There may or may not have been any direct connection between that and the commemorations to come, but it set the patterns - parades, memorialization of the war dead - and I suppose an attempt to claim the holiday for a political purpose. In this case a good purpose - the end of slavery and preservation of the union. But in coming years, the south would try to claim it as a celebration of the "lost cause".

Over the years, the original significance of the day has been replaced by a more general day of remembrance for the war dead - we do have more wars to remember now. That is a good thing to remember - but it is good, too, to go back to the origins. I admit too that I feel this more strongly on Decoration Day (and Armistice Day) than most holidays - the Civil War is, really, the foundational moment of the United States. We existed for 87 odd years before that, but the Civil War is what defined us (or at least, defined us as something worth being.) We live with its effects more than we live with the effects of any other event in our history, even now. Which links it to Armistice Day - since WWI had this impact on the rest of the world. everything since - bigger or smaller - flows from the Great War, as it flows from the Civil War in this country. And so - keep in mind where this came from, and maybe, the cause behind it.



Here, then, is Orson Welles, explaining and reciting The Battle Hymn of the Republic:

Goodbye to 2014

I can see this year is ending like last year - the idiot cat is stretched out on the desk, making it very difficult to type. But I am not really here to write a whole lot - just a bit of a roundup, a farewell to 2014.

I can't say I'll miss it. Nothing particularly bad happened to me or anyone close to me - I can't complain about that. But it's just been an odd disappointment, across the board. This blog has suffered, especially in the second half of the year - Gran't Overland campaign and the World Cup provided some mid-year fodder, but otherwise, man, have I been lazy about posting. I can't offer much for excuses - work has been a bear; I took a rather demanding class in the fall - but mostly, I have just been lazy. I might as well take the opportunity to pretend to make a resolution about that - back up over 100 a year! I will do it! I can! I should also try to write some movie posts - though I've been shockingly lazy about seeing movies this year too. Never mind writing about them. I need to get that up over 200 again - a reasonable, makable goal, that I can't seem to manage these days...

That's me. Out in the world - it's been a strange year. The country is not in the worse shape ever - the economy is better than it has been; we are managing to creep our way out of out bad wars. The government continues to spy on us; the revelations about the horrors perpetrated by our government during the 00s - torture, war crimes - seem to make no difference. No one is locking Dick Cheney away - or even pardoning him, which at least would let us put on record, maybe, that he needs to be pardoned, because he is a war criminal. Not just Cheney, but start with him. It's a strange world. It is very strange - the old adage, "it's the economy, stupid" didn't quite work this year - the Republicans won big in the elections, even with gas prices low, the economy keeping up, even a greater sense that the country ought to move left to fix its problems - raise minimum wages, reduce debt... It's really a simple lesson of course - people need to vote. There were protesters out today, again, protesting the Eric Garner and Michael Brown non-indictments - I heard some young fools complaining about them, and about the Occupy movement, saying they were just a bunch of pot-heads who got nothing done. Which - might not be totally fair: pot is legal in four states now, all in the last year or two. Minimum wages have been raised in a number of states and cities in the last couple years - not enough, and not nationally - but there has been movement. Occupy didn't do anything directly, but it's hard to dismiss the fact that it made economic reform a subject for discussion.

Though that is probably my point here: that political change has to happen at the ballot box. Protests are fine, but they are not going to change anything themselves - they have to be transformed into votes, votes into laws - or regulations - though laws are better. Unfortunately, this is a point that the Republicans seem to grasp more than the Democrats - the right more than the left. The fact is - the right comes out to vote, all the time, every time - so you get 40% turnout and you get Republican controlled congresses. When we get 60% turnout, we get Democrats. If we got 70% turnouts, we might get Democratic supermajorities. The Republican party gets it, I have to say - they vote; they know that they have to keep other people from voting - so they pursue policies to limit voting, pretty consistently... They work to make people think voting is irrelevant - though not their own people, who seem to show up anyway. I could go on about that a while.

But it creates a situation that is kind of depressing and hopeful at the same time. The GOP won this year - but they won a lot of very close races - despite being very successful at voter suppression, despite during horrifying amounts of money into the election... They did win in the face of economic recovery - though it's hard to get too excited about the recovery. People still don't have enough money - the whole thing seems very fragile, and very vulnerable, as long as wages stay low, corporate taxes and the higher tax brackets stay low, debt keeps rising (especially student debt.) Those things require the federal government and the federal government isn't going to do anything controlled by Republicans... But still: the numbers are against them. there are more Democratic voters than Republicans - the GOP is more and more converting itself explicitly into the party of racist white people - which is to say, older white people - so - they might just fade away.

All right. Politics. I should stop - though - there is more. The Garner and Brown stories (and other similar stories) have galvanized the country - made people pay attention to the continuing racism in American society. It's pulled the cover off things - the NY Police Department has managed to squander more good will in the last two weeks than you would imagine they could have. I don't know where that will go - they are very powerful, capable of making great trouble - but they are also demonstrating rather clearly the need to get police under control. Police need to be controlled by the civil authority. we have been lucky in this country - or,put another way, blessed, in having a military that has, for the most part, taken seriously the fact that they are under civilian control. They answer to the government - and while they might whine now and then, they generally do their duty. That has not always been the case for police - it hasn't been in the last couple weeks in New York. That has to stop. I don't know where this is going, to be honest - maybe we have started to wear off the deference to armed law that we have held since 9/11 - one has to hope. But it is going to take some votes to do it...

Votes. Comes down to votes.

All right: look at this - just like last year, this year end roundup degenerated into a political rant. Sad. I will leave you then with a film still - Walter and Hildy in His Girl Friday, getting ready to bring down the ward-heelers. My New Year's Eve movie marathon this year was The Front Page x2 - Milestone and Hawks. The 1931 film is an interesting one - more of the newspaper stuff, less of Walter/Hildy - and showing its age in odd ways. The sound (at least on the cheap DVD I have) is pretty bad; the camera work is quite remarkable. Milestone liked to move the camera around, and it spins and swoops around the room throughout the play - sometimes rather dizzyingly. It's also interesting for coming pretty close to the same rapid fire overlapping patter the Hawks films features - not quite so fast, but getting there. It's a neat film in itself. Though the Hawks is one of the great ones. The comedy of remarriage stuff picks the plot up another notch; the performers are as good as they come; and the improved production values make the whole thing crisp looking and sounding, which it needs. Great fun - a great way to ring out the old year.



And finally - the cat, claiming another kitchen appliance before I could even get it home. Horrible beast!

Christmas Songs Ranked

The year is getting gone in a hurry - less than a week to Christmas, 2 weeks to the new year - things are getting away from me. well - last week should have been a Band of the Month week - but no Band of the Month was forthcoming! and now I am sorry to say, nothing is coming this week, either. Instead - let us celebrate the season! or something like that. A simple enough pair of lists: first - my favorite Christmas carols, because - why not? who doesn't love Christmas carols? And second - my favorite performances of Christmas songs - because - again - why not? They have to be different though because these are different sets of things. Christmas carols are there to be sung - best in a group - in the cold maybe, but anywhere - in the living room, in church, on the sidewalk, in a bar, in your car - who cares? Christmas carols, I admit, are the one thing that make me like going to church - to hear them, better to sing them - they are something I enjoy without reserve. And so - let's do this:

Christmas Carols, judged as much by the fun of singing them as by the song:

1. Silent Night - simple, clean and precise, sentimental, but honest, if you are going to sing about christmas, you can't do better
2. O Come All Ye Faithful - rousing lovely old fashioned Christmas song, a joy to hear and sing.
3. Come Thou Long Expected Jesus - with the Rowland Pritchard tune, it is a very beautiful and enjoyable song
4. Joy to the World - the finale to every christmas pageant ever, and so it should be: a rousing exuberant triumph. Handel! And such fun to bellow out before you get your presents and candy!
5. What Child is This (Greensleeves) - this song tends to baffle the amateur singers, probably because the words put to it are something of a tangle - but it is such a beautiful and classic melody, that I can't resist it.
6. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - lots of these songs are in moonier keys, at least part of the way through - why is that? This one is fun to sing, and when I was a wean, it was fun to play on the trumpet, the only instrument I ever managed to fight to a draw. I have great nostalgia for that, and sometimes even now have been known to give it a shot again...
7. Hark the Herald Angels Sing - another very happy one, fun to bellow out in groups, in the cold; and of course there is Linus...
8. Angels We Have Heard on High - lovely French Carol, with those great glorias, though they are not quite singable by those of us who are not exactly singers. But they are fun to try, and this is such a pretty song...
9. We Three Kings - cool melody; see below.
10. Away in a Manger - you have to sing it every Christmas; it is schmaltzy where Silent Night is sentimental - never quite convincing, but it's still something you have to do around Christmas; and it is a fine song for singing. Hard to make it sound bad.

And now, five christmas songs, performed. You will note that these are not carols - they are mostly secular. There are reasons - mostly that this depends on recordings, and recordings are new... But also because Carols are experienced mainly by being sung - these are more about listening.

1. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Judy Garland: another melancholy christmas song - one of the most melancholy of them all. A beautiful song, from a beautiful movie - one of those movies where the date of release probably tells you more about it than the story or the setting. Gets 1944 better than a lot of songs explicitly about the war... we'll have to muddle through somehow...



2. We Free Kings - Rahsaan Roland Kirk - this is just thrilling.



3. Silver Bells - Der Bingle (with Carol Richards) - I grew up on this LP, Bing's Merry Christmas LP - like every other household in America (or 14,999,999 other households, anyway.) There are many good songs on that record, which we listen to every Christmas, and I listened to every Christmas on my own when I appropriated the thing from my mother (since I still had a record player in my living room, and they did not.) And still do on old iTunes, and would on LP if I had the energy to hook up the turntable again. Yes. well. All those great songs - and Der Bingle's voice - but this, I think, might be the prettiest, the nicest arrangement.



4. The Little Drummer Boy - Bing Crosby and David Bowie - might have started as one of those attempts at bridging the old and new, making some old timer hip, some youngster serious - but the results... It is a lovely song, Bowie's part countering the Little Drummer Boy - but part of the joy of it is the surprise in seeing one of the things come so right.



5. The Christmas Song - Jack Teagarden - I had this on some compilation - still do, actually - but of all the versions of this song (a hell of a song, too), this is my favorite. Jack's cool, drawling delivery just kills it.



That will do. Happy Holidays, people.

Boo!

Imhotep bids you a happy Halloween.



And so do I, in the form of music - enjoy!:

1. Half Japanese - Frankenstein Must Die
2. Neutral Milk Hotel - Ghost
3. Slint - Nosferatu Man
4. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
5. Blue Oyster Cult - Joan Crawford
6. Donovan - Season of the Witch
7. Pink Floyd - Lucifer Sam
8. Warren Zevon - Werewolves of London
9. Chickasaw Mudd Puppies - Lon Chaney
10. Butthole Surfers - Creep in the Cellar

What my iTunes can't provide, YouTube offers - Edgar Winters Group and Frankenstein:



And the Surfers, worrying about what might be living under the floorboards:



And the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies serenading the man with a thousand faces:



And Junior:



And finish up with Slint, live:

Happy Bastille Day!

Is there anything more French that women, bread and art?





Maybe the roofs of Paris?



Happy Bastille Day!

Fourth of July Friday Music

Happy Birthday, America, and good luck with the hurricanes.

Making this quick, since I am on vacation... how about 10 Songs for America?

Green Day - American Idiot
The Guess Who - American Woman
Sonic Youth - Early America
U2 - Elvis in America
REM - Little America
You La Tengo - We're an American Band
Stevie Wonder - Jesus Children of America
Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth
Wilco - Ashes of American Flags
The Germs - American Leather

And let's add - 4 songs for the fourth of July: Bruce...



And again:



X



And Dean Wareham:



Happy 4th!

May Day 2014

Then to the maypole haste away for 'tis now a holiday - featuring Maddy Prior:



For those of you of a more diabolical turn of mind, here's a recording of Black Sabbath, when War Pigs was Walpurgis:



And finally, on the political front, Paul Robeson, singing Joe Hill:

Out with the Old, In With theNew - 2013, 2014

My idiot cat is very happy, currently stretched out between the keyboard and the screen, purring away and occasionally batting my fingers. She is a lot of help. Here is a picture of her helping me put away some pots and pans I got this year - she is often very helpful that way:



The year is waning fast. I figure I should put up one more post though. It has been a very eventful year - blizzards, the Red Sox, wickedness, personal loss - in a year in which I passed one of those milestone birthdays people get worked up about (not that I am about to admit which one, though anyone following my band series might be able to hazard a guess, from the dates referred to here and there...) It was a momentous year, with anniversaries and birthdays, deaths, retirements of friends at work, things that brought out reminiscences and considerations of events - and things like the trip my brothers and I made to Ellsworth ME, to find our great- (and great-great-) grandparents' graves.

All of which makes me more inclined than usual to post something like this, looking back, maybe looking ahead. It was an eventful year - a reasonably satisfying one, in a way. I don't usually post things like resolutions or goals for the next year - but if I had last year, I would have ended up reasonably happy with the results. Just thinking about the blog - I have stopped writing film reviews for some reason, and stopped writing about politics (though I think about politics more than is healthy) - but I am rather pleased (and a bit relieved) that I have kept up with my Civil War posts, with those band of the month posts, with the director of the month posts (though I've missed the last couple - holiday congestion, call it; I should be back at it in the new year. Not sure what kind of theme I will pursue - though I suspect I know where I will start...) I hope this continues in 2014 - I see no reason not to keep it up. I have music and civil war posts already in the pipeline, so things should proceed. And I imagine I will pick up another anniversary series this year - I have been diligent in making Armistice Day posts every year - 2014 is the 100th anniversary of The Great War, an event that, I think, was as definitive for Europe as the Civil War was for the United States. Everything since revolves around it, to this day, we are still working out its aftermath. (Just as the US is for the Civil War.) I don't actually know as much about WWI going in as I did about the Civil War - that sounds like an invitation to find out all I can, and I hope I can share it as I go.

This might turn into a history blog, after having spells as a political blog, mostly a film blog, though always a bit of a music blog. Why not? I have been reading history the last couple years - Civil War mostly, though lately I've been reading Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe - a fascinating subject itself. But - I do hope this year to get back to more film reviews - and for that matter, more politics.

I can't get away from politics. I have been inclined to try to avoid it lately - it's been very depressing these past few years. But - you can't get away from politics; I certainly think about it enough. I could have plenty opt opportunities to argue about it, particularly on Facebook - though that is a soul destroying forum for any kind of serious conversation. Just this week I had a bit of a conversation - someone posted a meme about how the Republicans passed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments with almost no Democratic support - and now, the Democrats passed Obamacare with no Republican support. It would have been hard to figure out the intended point, if the thing hadn't included an anti-Hillary Clinton bit: seems to have been a Republican source trying to resurrect their past as the sensible party. It's not very effective - though one certainly can feel the irony of the party of Lincoln becoming the party of Jeff Davis. Parties change - it is fascinating to see how the Republicans and Democrats have reversed themselves so completely, and almost perfectly. Still - the conversation that ensued ended with someone making one of those weaselly both-sides-do-it, what-is-the-difference complaints - a complaint given the lie by the graphic itself. Obamacare passed with 0 Republican votes - whether you think the ACA is a good thing or bad thing, it's pretty clear that it is part of a very different set of policies between the party.

And that is true - party discipline is about as strong right now as it has ever been in the US (especially among the Republicans; the Democrats are a bigger, broader party - their positions and orthodoxies are a lot less rigid.) And I was thinking about it - I can list off a dozen or so policies I would like to see: and most are official Democratic positions, and the others have supporters among Democrats; none (almost) have any support from the Republicans at all. I wonder how often, in American history, that would have been true? that policies I like would be almost exclusively associated with one party?

I mean it - here are some examples, things I would like to see:

Higher minimum wage
Higher top marginal and corporate tax rates
Expended social security and medicare and Medicaid
Expanded benefits for food stamps and other programs
More spending on education
More spending on infrastructure
Better health insurance systems
Climate change projects
Gay marriage
Stronger unions
Stronger regulation of banks and financials and corporations
Prosecution of bankers etc. for the more egregious offenses
Reining in the security state

Of those - everything down to stronger unions are basically positions held and advanced by Democrats, and opposed by Republicans. The strength of the party positions varies, the parties may have different priorities - but those positions are all clearly aligned with one party or the other.

The bits about bankers and corporations goes quite a ways beyond the official Democratic party - but plenty of actual Democrats (my senior Senator, prominently!) push for those kinds of policies.

The security state - NSA spying, drones, all that crap - is about the only item on the list where I radically part company with the Democrats. It's an issue that you will hear Republicans weigh in - though to be honest, I don't believe a word of that. Rand Paul can say what he wants to now, but if he were to get elected president in 2016, I hope no one will be shocked to find that he's as enthusiastic a war monger and authoritarian as any other Republican. (Or way too many Democrats.)

BUt the point of this is - well: two things. First - that parties matter, whether you like it or not. And second - imagine me trying to make this case on Facebook, a sentence at a time. It's hopeless! I can't do anything in a sentence at a time. I need 1000 words!

So consider yourself warned.

And so - I have managed to time this almost perfectly to finish on the stroke of midnight - or 11:59 I hope, so this hits 2013 not 2014. I will leave you with another cat - a carving of a lion in Copley Square. Happy new year, everyone!