The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra played Carnegie Hall yesterday, for the first time in sixteen years, when Semyon Bychkov was the music director. The last few years have been good for the Philharmonic artistically (although finances are still touchy), and this was apparently a high point in the resurgence. The Buffalo News‘s music critic Mary Kunz reports.
See also this sidebar about Carnegie Hall itself.
Noon on Sedna.
I posted about Sedna a while back. Sedna is a large object discovered recently in the Oort Cloud, the most distant known planetoid in the Solar System. Here, artist Adolf Schaller — whose work will be familiar to anyone who has read the illustrated version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, or seen the TV series — envisions Sedna’s noontime sky, with the light of the Sun diffused by dust.
DPS points out a disturbing likeliness between John Kerry and a Star Wars character. Aieee!
Some years ago I purchased a boxed set of six CDs containing complete Presidential addresses, one from each President of the United States since recordings began — starting with William Howard Taft. The set includes such addresses as Harry Truman’s fiery acceptance speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention; Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address; Gerald Ford’s remarks upon being sworn in as President following Richard Nixon’s resignation; Jimmy Carter’s much-maligned “malaise” speech (in which he doesn’t use the word “malaise”), and others.
President Reagan is represented on this set by what The New York Times said might have been “Ronald Reagan’s finest oratorical hour”: his address to students and faculty at Moscow State University, delivered on May 31, 1988. It is a very fine address indeed, and I had hoped to record it as an MP3 and make it available for a short time here, but the file ended up being simply too massive even at the lowest standard of compression I could use and still keep the thing listenable. (Even at 64 kbps, the resulting file was more than 13 mb. I don’t have enough webspace for a file of that size.)
Failing that, the speech can be read here.
Honoring our 40th President on the occasion of his passing, here’s an article that suggests that Reagan wasn’t just concerned with the Soviet military threat. He was thinking of a more, shall we say, celestial threat.
OK then….
President Ronald Reagan: born 1911, served as President 1981-1989, died 2004.
I make no secret that I didn’t like Reagan as President, even though I do admire the way he shifted from being the hardline cold warrior to being a man honest enough to find something hopeful in a man named Gorbachev. I also admire his fierce patriotism and the grace with which he conducted both his Presidency and his twilight years, and I mourn his passing on that basis.
For what it’s worth — being one voice in Blogistan — I offer my condolences to his family, and I would also like to express my admiration for Nancy Reagan, whose unwavering position at his side is as fine an example of marital love as I can think of right now.
Ever since Nick Berg’s brutal murder in Iraq, a common refrain from the right has been, “Where’s the outrage!”.
Well, here’s some, penned by Berg’s own father. Somehow I don’t think this is what the “Where’s the outrage” folks had in mind, though.
(via LaGringa)
UPDATE: Hey, I wonder if Glenn Reynolds, Blogistan’s Secretary of Criticizing Everyone Who Dares React Differently Than He Does To Just About Anything, has linked Mr. Berg’s piece yet.
[search, search, search]
Not so far as I can see.
Matthew Yglesias thinks that many on the left are too pessimistic:
Ezra Klein once called me a “cynical optimist” and I think that’s just right — once you lose your illusions about the past, you’ll see that live in George Bush’s America is pretty darn good, compared to the historical alternatives.
Another way of putting this is that a lot of people confuse the pace and direction of change with the actual merits of the situation. The New Deal, clearly, was the high tide of progressive politics in the sense that lots of progressive steps were being taken, but America in 2004 is a far, far, far juster society than was America in 1938 or 1967 or other moments of greater progressive change.
This is something to keep in mind, but, well…maybe I just tend to be a pessimistic guy about political things, or maybe I’m just pessimistic about things when it’s not my guy in power, but I would amend Matthew’s words a bit.
First of all, I would by no stretch call what we have now “George Bush’s America”. Better, I think, to say that we have “America at the time of George Bush’s ascendence”. Clunky, yes, but what bothers me — and, I suspect, many liberals — is what America would look like if George Bush could wave a hand and in one instant actually create his version of America. At the very least, we’d be talking about a country in which discrimination against homosexuals would be actually codified in the law of the land. I don’t oppose Bush despite George Bush’s America; I oppose Bush because I don’t want to live in what I think George Bush’s America would be.
Secondly, America in 2004 may be “a far, far, far juster society” than the America of 1938 or 1967, but there is absolutely no guarantee that it will stay that way. To invoke a historical analogy, I doubt very much if a citizen of Romulus Augustulus‘s Rome would make any such comparison to, say, Constantine‘s Rome. Great gains, won over the course of many decades or even centuries, can be undone.
I want one of these. Not that I’d play it; I’d just give it a prominent position in the home so that visitors could do a double-take and say, “What on earth is that?!”
I hope I don’t read anything sadder than this Slate article any time soon.
Just shy of a month ago, I got a call from David Reimer’s father telling me that David had taken his own life. I was shocked, but I cannot say I was surprised. Anyone familiar with David’s life—as a baby, after a botched circumcision, he underwent an operation to change him from boy to girl—would have understood that the real mystery was how he managed to stay alive for 38 years, given the physical and mental torments he suffered in childhood and that haunted him the rest of his life. I’d argue that a less courageous person than David would have put an end to things long ago.
What a terrifying tale of how one thing, done in infancy, leads to a life of pretty much unremitting pain and anguish.