Carl Scott

Rock and disco, the typical middle-class alternatives to Afro-American popular music, are inferior forms of music; however, as Pete Townsend helped us to see in the last Songbook post , it may usually be too difficult, and is (arguably) inauthentic anyhow, for middle class persons to play . . . . Continue Reading »

Wow. The oral argument defense of Obamacare’s constitutionality so far has not just been bad, as has been reported, but has been stunningly bad.  And the incompetence displayed goes beyond that of Solicitor General Verrilli, but extends to several of the meaning-to-help-his-case comments . . . . Continue Reading »

Its lyrics are fairly interesting (in a nutshell, relativistic autonomy gets declared in a “manly” mod key) and music-wise it features the ground-breaking and still tasty-sounding feedback break. But my discussion will focus on the relation between The Who’s trademark . . . . Continue Reading »

My use of the DOL family farm regulations to take a pot-shot at the Porchers below, has led to my learning about the REINS bill , thanks to our astute commenters Brian and CJ Wolfe. Standing for Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny, the REINS act: “ . . . would require Congress . . . . Continue Reading »

. . . at least for the foreseeable future, and at least in most national races. Obama’s Department of Labor is in the process of banning farm children (including teens) from working on their families’ farms . They are set to implement a pages upon pages of family-farm regulations, . . . . Continue Reading »

For those of you who waded through all that muck, and have now got the likes of Morlocks in your head, here’s a musical palatte cleanser for you: Anne Sofie von Otter singing a brief Berlioz song . For a more thorough cleansing, here’s the first movement of my favorite Sibelius piece, . . . . Continue Reading »

The last Songbook post could have been titled What Martha Bayles Has to Learn from Retro Rock n’ Roll. This post could be titled What Retro Rock n’ Roll Has to Learn from Martha Bayles. The basic lesson: the primitivist aesthetic cultivated by many in the retro scenes, and particularly in . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the reasons my blogging has been light of late is I’ve been trying to catch up with Ralph Ellison. Here at Washington and Lee University, where I currently teach, professors Marc Conner and Lucas Morel put on a fabulous conference this weekend , commemorating the 60th anniversary of . . . . Continue Reading »

. . . would he have wound up a dismal black-power Marxisant radical? Or, might he, like Frederick Douglass, who only mid-way in life became a defender of the U.S. Constitution, have become to some degree a model for a conservatism that can speak to blacks? Two Claremont-influenced Frederick . . . . Continue Reading »

Did you know that William F. Buckley, Jr., considered The Lives of Others the best film he had seen in many years? Did you know that the central accomplishment of the film, is that while true tales of communist regimes slaughtering 2 million here(Cambodia), 30 million there(Mao’s 1958 . . . . Continue Reading »