A pandemic with no end in sight. Riots in the streets. Families and friendships torn apart by rank political partisanship. The dumbest presidential election in, like, forever (which is really saying something). Steven Spielberg remaking West Side Story, for God’s sake.

It’s enough to drive one to drink.

Until you realize that there is hope. Someone whose mere countenance is capable of calming inflamed passions; whose words alone can heal the sick (and, let’s be honest, probably cast out demons); whose humility and grace are a model to us all.

Someone who can gather the dispossessed and disconsolate around her, look 2020 in the eye, and tell it to f*** right off.

Praise be to Dolly. May she never leave us.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“Those who wring their hands about the decline of the language sometimes worry too much about the wrong things. They observe with horror that people confuse uninterested with disinterested, or don’t know when to say fewer and when to say less, or fumble in their use of the apostrophe or other punctuation marks. I share a due sense of irritation about points like those. But the more meaningful decline of the language doesn’t involve the presence of mistakes. It involves absences that are easier to overlook: the abandonment of half the orchestra, the erosion of rhetorical ability, the dwindling of attention spans, the scarcity of speech that inspires and rouses and strikes deep. A politician rises in a debate and speaks with utter vacuity and with the rhetorical sophistication of an adolescent. The modern guardian of English usage tends to look on without comment or alarm because the statesman was free from error. He was merely terrible.”

Ward Farnsworth, Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020)

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AMONG THE ROCKS
Robert Browning

Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,
This autumn morning! How he sets his bones
To bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true;
Such is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows.
If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In an otherwise interesting essay reflecting on nearly two decades of running a record label, Alec Hanley Bemis offers up some advice for those considering the same path. Hard to disagree with statements like “Dedicate yourself to learning as much about music that already exists as you do contributing new music to our cultural ecosystem,” “Be skeptical of overnight successes,” and “Creativity is inherently indifferent to money.”

Where Bemis and I part ways, however, is where he asserts that “art is a political act.”

For one thing, can we please, please designate one or two areas of our lives as politics-free zones? I mean, it can’t be a coincidence that our societal dysfunction has only increased as more and more people have insisted on politicizing every damn thing around us. Enough already!

For another, Bemis has committed what appears to be an error of logic. “By definition,” he writes, “art is a form of speech—so art is never apolitical.” That only works if we use the following construction:

premise 1: All speech is political.
premise 2: Art is speech.
conclusion: Therefore, art is political.

Forget about the spuriousness of premise 2 (a “problematic enterprise”); premise 1 is clearly untrue. No matter how you unpack it or deconstruct it or apply critical theory to it, “These pretzels are making me thirsty” just isn’t a political statement.

But I digress.

Art can—and should—be apolitical, if only so that we can get back to judging it on its merits rather than on whether the artist holds the correct political position du jour. Or to prevent it from becoming a cudgel with which to beat up the other side. Think I’m overstating things? Think again.

As usual, Nick Cave has the right perspective: “My music is not designed to reward people for good behaviour, nor do I make music to punish people for bad behaviour. My music is not conditional. It is for everybody, regardless of their actions, good or bad or otherwise.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I’m not exactly one of those guys with his finger on the pulse of, well…anything, really. So naturally I’m a little late to the wonders of Tedium. Here on “the dull side of the Internet” you’ll learn that the fake snow on the set of The Wizard of Oz was actually asbestos, read the surprising history of ranch dressing, and ponder the recent disappearance of hidden tracks.

In other words, you’ll waste time. A lot of it. But hey, if it distracts you from politics and keeps you away from social media, that’s a good thing.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I feel much the same about presidential debates as I do golf: It’s time that I’ll never, ever get back.

For one thing, they’re no longer debates. You know, with argument and discussion and context and logic and, um…facts. If I wanted to watch Kabuki theatre, I’d watch Kabuki theatre—not a couple of septuagenarians preening and posturing in front of a ridiculously self-serious audience while simultaneously dodging every question raised.

Do it Thunderdome-style, though, and I’m down to clown:

So obviously I’ll be skipping tonight’s performance. That doesn’t mean, however, that we won’t mark the occasion. After all, it was only sixty years ago that the very first televised debate was broadcast to the American people. (That’s the one in which, legend has it, those who listened on the radio proclaimed Vice President Richard Nixon the winner, while those who watched it on TV thought JFK had prevailed.)

More important though, it that it’s also the sixtieth birthday of Nixon’s half-eaten sandwich—one of our greatest, if largely unsung, national treasures:

But I digress. If, like me, you miss the days when candidates practiced the gentle art of persuasion—when it wasn’t so hard to tell the difference between a presidential debate and a WWE Smackdown—maybe tonight you should watch this instead:

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Big day today, everyone—big day: “A celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.”

How will you mark (Get it? Mark?) the occasion? Founder Jeff Rubin has a game plan. I for one wouldn’t mind tucking into the Official Meatloaf of National Punctuation Day.

But honestly, I’d be happy if more people took the opportunity of this glorious holiday to repent and forswear the comma splice—by far the most common punctuation crime committed in these parts. (I, um…may have ranted about this from time to time.)

Change can only begin with awareness, after all. And awareness, wrote zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, “is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.”

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