Lynn Sislo posts about sad classical music. (Apparently she gets search engine hits on that phrase, so I’m going to repeat it: sad classical music. Music that is classical, and sad. Sad music that is also classical. Classical things that are sad and that are music. Yep, that oughta do it!)

Anyway, I’ve never found any sad classical music, in the sense of “music that makes me feel sad”. Classical music can meditate on sadness, but somehow there’s something I always find uplifting in such music, exalting if you will, that works against the actual creation of sadness. There’s music that is wistful (Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, music that is melancholy (any number of Chopin piano pieces), music that is meditative (Rachmaninov’s Vespers), music that is heartbreakingly beautiful (Rachmaninov’s entire Second Symphony), but actually sad? I just can’t think of any.

Well, that’s not quite true. Berg’s Violin Concerto is probably sad. Portions of Mozart’s Requiem are sad, but other parts are fiery, some angry, some just plain fiery. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is sad, I think. But the list of genuinely sad classical works is, to me, very short. What many might consider “sad music” often ends up to me being something of a meditation on sadness, which isn’t quite the same as being sad.

(I haven’t said anything about lieder and the vast amount of art songs, because that’s the part of classical music that I know the least about, to a spectacular degree. When you factor in words, music can become very sad indeed. From the rock and country music worlds, I can probably fill this blog with sad songs, by virtue of the lyrics. I’m sure that Hugo Wolf and Franz Schubert wrote some genuinely sad songs.)

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Shouldn’t this Tom Burka joke include something about IKEA?

And did anyone else notice that both David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel last night featured a video of Jay Leno, attending Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory speech, clapping lackadaisically and checking his watch?

And did anyone catch George Carlin on Leno? I love Carlin, but he always seems “neutered” when he appears on a network show. It’s so obvious that he’s had to comb through his material for jokes that don’t involve any of the “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV”.

And at my next birthday party, I want Letterman’s “Spark Lady”. Just watch; you’ll learn what I’m talking about, if you don’t know already.

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OK, I’ve just watched Law and Order, and for the life of me, no matter how many times I watch this show I cannot understand the following it inspires. But hey, at least next week’s episode is apparently going to be “ripped from the headlines”.

As for the other Wednesday night shows:

Ed seems to be doing a good job at moving past the oft-cited Moonlighting factor — i.e., the way a show deflates when the two romantic leads finally “do the dirty”, as Ed Stevens and Carol Vessey did. (Full disclosure: I hated Moonlighting both before and after they “did the dirty”.) The keys here are a strong supporting cast around whom interesting stories can be told, and the fact that Ed was always best when Ed-and-Carol was a subplot, and that’s what they are now.

And then there’s The West Wing. Three episodes are probably not enough to judge, but I’m gonna anyway, because it’s my blog. Anyhow: with the exception of Abby Bartlet’s fury at her husband (obviously they’re setting up some manner of blow-up later on), I think the show is doing just fine without Aaron Sorkin. Part of that is the fact that the cast and crew well knows what they are doing at this point, and part of it is good writing. Some of the political nuts-and-bolts stuff that marked the show’s first two seasons is back, and the dialogue is, dare I say it, sharp. No, it doesn’t sound like Sorkin’s dialogue, but the characters still sound like themselves. To draw an overwrought analogy, Hemingway’s not a lesser writer just because he doesn’t sound like Dickens.

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Andrew Cory has a list of things we need to get done before we should consider leaving Iraq.

The idea that we should be mostly out of there within a year is absurd (presumably this is so there aren’t any pesky headlines like “Two More US Soldiers Killed” within, oh, two months of the election). It takes a lot of time to build a nation – – hell, I could make a case that the bit of nation building that started in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 still isn’t done.

Anyhow, I like Andrew’s list. It covers the basics of what the Iraqis will need to get their economy and their democracy and economy going again. I assume that when Andrew says that, say, 85% of the country needs to have potable water, he’s talking about 85% of the people, not the geography. It is, of course, far from clear that all this can work in a country of Iraq’s complexity – – what of the Kurds, to name just one concern – – but it would be nice to have a clear idea of just where we’re going with all this, a clear idea which doesn’t seem forthcoming when the Administration apparently can’t figure out just who’s going to be in charge of all this nation-building in the first place.

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Just a shout-out to two bloggers, Sean and Jason, who seem to be lacking for either inspiration or opportunity to blog.

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As long as I’m responding to The Fiendish One, I also take note of this post in which he recommends a couple of books by Karen Armstrong, one on the history of monotheistic religion (which I own, but have not yet read) and one on the rise of fundamentalism (which I neither own nor have read). Matt suggests that Jessica Stern (the author of the book on terrorism I’m reading, see below) needs to read Armstong’s book The Battle for God (the one on fundamentalism); I’ve just found that very volume cited in her endnotes, so I can only assume she has in fact read it.

Of course, I don’t think Matt meant that in a “snarky” way, so I should note that understanding why fundamentalism comes to exists does not quite explain why terrorism comes to exist. There are a lot more fundamentalists in this world than there are terrorists, and while some religious aspect inspires many terrorists, I don’t think that the religious element is sufficient to do so. What Stern seems to be investigating is what leads the strongly religious to become militantly religious. (I say “seems to be” because, as noted below, I’m only a short way into the book.)

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My unindicted co-conspirator wants to know why Major League Baseball has scheduled both of today’s Championship Series playoff games at the same time.

The answer, as is becoming depressingly common, is that the television people want it this way. FOX Sports, which owns all broadcast rights to the MLB playoffs, thinks it can make more money by ensuring that every game is in prime time, except for Saturday (when nothing else is really going on, sportswise, except for college football. What surprises me is that whatever game is broadcast on the cable-only channel FX will apparently have better ratings in prime time than a regular FOX broadcast during the afternoon hours. FOX is also hedging its bets, because the playoff schedule shows that they’re willing to have an afternoon, weekday playoff game if they have to, next week. But today’s games are guaranteed to happen (barring rain), whereas Game Six of the ALCS and Game Seven of the NLCS, both scheduled for next Wednesday, are “if necessary” affairs. Presumably, if the ALCS goes to Game Six but the NLCS is already over by next Wednesday, then that game — currently scheduled for 4:18 pm ET — would be moved to prime time.

The way TV dominates sports is nothing new, but it can still be an annoying factor. Case in point: I was listening to a Buffalo sports-talk radio show this afternoon, and I learned that the Bills’ game against the Washington Redskins, to be played on the 19th (a week from this Sunday) has been moved from 1:00 to 4:15, probably because FOX Sports — which carries NFL games in which an NFC team visits an AFC team — thinks it’s a better looking matchup now, based on both teams’ early success this season. Not that big a deal, really, except that the Bills draw on a very wide area for their ticket holders, and for people coming from more than 100 miles away to attend the game, a sudden shift of game time less than two weeks prior to the event is no small thing.

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Lord, make it stop! A blogger writes this:

I have looked evil in the face. I’ve been in the same room with it. I don’t know how else to describe my feelings now except to say that I feel unclean, and I’m having to fight being afraid.

Wow. He must have been in the same room as Osama Bin Laden, or maybe he had a secret meeting with Saddam Hussein. Or perhaps he was entertained by that Phelps guy I mention below.

Or maybe he attended a book signing by…economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

My God, this Luskin fellow is deranged.

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Lord, it’s almost a theme for today: Stuff That Creeps Me Out.

I’m reading a book right now called Terror In the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, by Jessica Stern (who is apparently a noted terrorism expert — I’d not heard of her before I checked the book out of the library). Stern’s goal in the book is to interview the actual terrorists: not experts, not law enforcement and government officials, but the terrorists themselves. I’m barely one-fifth into the book, so I can’t report yet on if it’s a good book or if I agree with Stern’s conclusions, because I haven’t reached any. But I’ve just reached a place where Stern interviews one of the leaders of Hamas.

While I’ve long understood that terrorists view their activities as exercises of war and not murder, I suppose that I also believed that, on some level, the terrorists still knew that the innocents they attack are actually innocents, the act of attacking whom is part of some strategy, if a monstrously evil one. It turns out that I was wrong in that belief, because this is what the Hamas leader says:

“There are no civilians in Israel, because every citizen is required to serve in the Army. We are war with Israel.”

They don’t attack innocents because they think that doing so will help them achieve their military goal. Attacking civilians IS their military goal.

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I mentioned in a post below my occasional belief that the human species is circling the drain. Then, an hour or so later, I learn that some guy named Fred Phelps wants to build this in a park in Casper, Wyoming.

I can’t even begin to fathom the brain that entertains thoughts like these.

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