Will was hoping to organize an end of finals week get-together. Pizza and a viewing of Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ is what he had in mind, Friday evening. Here is one of my favorite scenes.
Post here if you are interested, and Will should post further details as he organizes it (room, time, etc).
Reminder: Philosophy major and pianist Dan Tate, along with his friend John Price, will be giving a free concert in the USU performance hall on Saturday, December 6 at 7pm.
Dan sent this along to me, and I thought it worth posting. He raises several interesting philosophical issues, and for those in the Republic course, Plato (particularly in Book X) has addressed a number of these aesthetic issues.
Dan wrote:
A friend and fellow musician recently showed me this vulgar debasement of one of Chopin’s masterpieces. Chopin wrote this piece (popularly called the revolutionary etude) to express his deep anguish over the extreme violence that had erupted in his native Poland due to conflicts with Russia. This video trivializes (to say the least) Chopin’s profound grief and turns it into mere spectacle. The saddest thing is that most people wouldn’t even see anything wrong with this (hence why the performer is famous). One might say I’m being too dramatic, but I think this is a dangerous symptom of a much deeper epidemic. This video illustrates several of the dilemmas society faces today:
1) The lack of differentiation between the Sacred and the profane (i.e. everything becomes profane)
2) The fact that even the most transcendent art has been reduced to image, spectacle, and the almighty dollar
3) The gross and narcissistic emphasis on ‘originality’ and the individual (check out the stupid faces the performer makes trying to look profound)
4) The fact that most art (like Plato observed) appeals to the basest part of the soul and even great art when misconstrued follows suit.
Here is the first video, the performance I am berating.
Here is a second video, it is one of today’s great artists playing the same piece as it ought to be played.
First read this article by Michael Shermer, about the human propensity to hear meaning in all sorts of meaningless noise. We are good at finding patterns; but not so good at detecting when we have superimposed a pattern on something meaningless. In Shermer’s words:
Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.
Then have a look at this YouTube featuring “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s played first forward, with lyrics, then BACKWARD, with lyrics. Does this prove the satanic genius of Led Zeppelin? Or simply our lack of a Baloney Detection Network?
We’ve had some discussion of originalism on this blog. My recollection of the discussion was that people on this blog (who represent various political stripes) found it attractive. Most found Scalia’s talk here at USU pretty compelling.
Well, I thought it worth pointing out how conservatives – who usually hail originalism – too often abandon it when it suits them. An article here discusses how the SC really manufactured a right for individuals to bear arms (with no reference to militias). The trouble is that originalism devolves into judicial policy activism when the original intent of the framers is unclear. It is my understanding, from Scalia, that SC judges should always, in such cases, defer to the legislature rather than enshrine in Con-law our current fancies. But Scalia, in this decision (he wrote the majority opinion), seems to have taken this question away from the people.
I like canon questions. I don’t really think the debate about what belongs in the canon can be settled, but that shouldn’t stop us from having the debate (a few months ago we tried to come up with a ‘mini-canon’ of philosophical texts on this blog).
Well this is much more light-hearted. With Thanksgiving coming up, many of us will watch Miracle on 34th Street on Thanksgiving Day. Discussing this with a friend recently, we got into an argument about which Christmas movies are canonical. Here is my list:
Obviously canonical xmas movies (live-action):
– It’s a Wonderful Life
– Miracle on 34th Street
– White Christmas
– A Christmas Carol (various versions, but I like the George C. Scott one).
And less obviously though I think it belongs:
– National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Before I get to a list of a ‘sub-canon’ of animated xmas classics, it is worth mentioning a few snubs that did not make my list:
– A Christmas Story. Many consider this story of the young boy and his yearning for a Red Ryder gun to be a ‘classic’, but I am not sure it belongs on the list above. For me, it is not a first ballot Hall of Famer, but it might get in over time since the voters will get sick of seeing it on the ballot year in and year out.
– I think Elf and Polar Express are too recent to be considered in canonical discussions.
Here are some animated xmas classics:
– Charlie Brown Christmas
– Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964 version)
– How the Grinch Stole Christmas (not the more recent Jim Carrey feature film, but the older animated one).
– Santa Claus is Coming to Town (Fred Astaire)
– Frosty the Snowman (1969)
– Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas (this late 1970s Muppet movie was huge for people my age, and it has some really great songs).
Additions? Subtractions? Or am I the only one looking for a break from the work at the end of the semester?
