Kate Bush: The Hounds of Love

Some years ago (probably closer to twenty than fifteen) a co-worker lent me his copy of a Kate Bush best-of collection called The Whole Story. I liked most of it quite well and have had in mind ever since to hear more of her music, but it wasn’t a high priority, and it was only recently, when I paid a dollar or two for a used cassette of The Hounds of Love, that I finally heard the album from which my favorite songs on The Whole Story were taken.

I haven’t been disappointed. This a brilliant album. Also a very eccentric one—I’m trying not to use the word “quirky,” which has become rather tiresome, but it fits. There are a few odd touches here that don’t work. For instance, a couple of songs are marred by an effect which I suppose seemed provocative at the time but now just sounds like a cd on fast-forward. But overall it’s adventurous without being tiresomely “experimental,” and the quirky touches are more often effective than not, like the melodic barking on the title song, which actually works. Really, it does.

I’ve had the impression of something a little spacey and dizzy about Kate Bush (which made the title of one song, “Hello Earth,” amusing at first glance). But the artist who wrote, sang, and produced this album while still in her mid-twenties is no dummy, and no fragile flower. I’m not sure how one would categorize it. AMG uses “art rock” and “progressive rock,” and those will do. It seems that few are able to discuss her music without using the words “lush” and “romantic,” so keep those in mind, too. Hounds is richly melodic, complex and lavish in production and arrangement, and very feminine in a way that’s both warm and strong, but not hard-edged in the way of too many self-consciously Strong Woman artists. The lyrics, always very important for me, are well-crafted and interesting, and although they’re frequently (well, mostly) somewhat cryptic one feels that they actually have quite specific meanings; it’s just that she doesn’t give us crucial background information. “Cloudbusting,” for instance, is obscure, bordering on nonsensical, unless and until you know it’s about the child of the crank sex-maniac psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, and then it makes perfect sense.

The final seven tracks (which comprised the second side of the LP release) are a sort of suite which seems to describe some kind of process of awakening, renewal, and engagement. It includes a few missteps: I could do without the mostly spoken and creepy “Waking The Witch,” which seems to involve the trial-by-water of a woman accused of witchcraft. And it includes the songs marred by the aforementioned fast-forward effect. Overall, though, it works, and ends beautifully with this:

Being born again
Into the sweet morning fog…
I’ll kiss the ground.
I’ll tell my mother,
I’ll tell my father,
I’ll tell my loved one,
I’ll tell my brothers
How much I love them.

I’m looking forward to hearing more of Kate Bush’s work, and I’m far from tired of this one.

B+

By the way, I’m going to change this rating system, or do away with it. I intend it to be very much tongue-in-cheek, but I’m not sure other people would get the joke. I keep having this nightmare in which I try to explain to somebody like Kate Bush or Patty Griffin why I gave her album a B+. If you’ll recall, I defined "A" as being a masterpiece, by definition a rarity. A work can be very, very good, like this one, without quite reaching that level.

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Ok, my wife is two for two in picking movies just because they sound interesting that turn out to be very good. The one I mentioned a few days ago as being something about a dwarf living in a train station turned out to be a wonderful little movie called The Station Agent (link is to imdb.com entry, which will give you a bit more info). I say "little" because it's low-key and modest in its ambitions, but one might say it's big on the inside. I'm not going to try to write a review--just see it. You won't be sorry. If nothing else, you'll see some stunningly beautiful photography of small-town New Jersey (apparently all of the state is not an urban-industrial wasteland, as those of us in other parts of the country tend to assume).

It's rated R, for no very good reason that I can see. I don't see why this is R and The Chorus is PG-13. It's not for children--it contains crude language and sexual references, and the characters smoke marijuana a couple of times. (Besides, it would bore children to tears.) But if you've seen some of the stuff that gets a PG-13 rating these days, you'll be as baffled as I am as to why this deserved an R, so don't let that stop you.

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I figure most people who read this blog probably also read Open Book, but for those who don't: Amy has a great post on these two saints today, including some typically rich words from the Pope.

A Fit Instrument?

Thus, in this age which boasts of its atomic power, it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice.

–John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (1963)

At least as far back as Pacem in Terris, and as recently as certain remarks made by Pope Benedict, the argument has been made that the huge and undiscriminating destructive capacity of modern weaponry has made it impossible for any war at all to be licit. Some say this is a necessary development of just war teaching, some say it’s a departure from it, at least as the teaching has been stated at times in the past. I’m no theologian and can’t discuss the pros and cons of those views. But anyone can describe the lay of the land as we presently see it.

The argument for extending the just war teaching to forbid any war that might actually occur in our time is that it has become impossible to meet the proportionality requirement of that teaching, the requirement that the good to be achieved be proportionate to the harm to be done, and in particular that non-combatant casualties must be incidental and unintentional and not excessive. “Excessive” may be, obviously, difficult to determine, but no one can reasonably maintain that civilian casualties greater by a factor of five or ten than military ones is not excessive.

Ignoring the quibbling side roads into which these definitions can lead, is it not obvious to any Christian that the vast carnage involved in modern warfare is an abomination before God? And, indeed, setting aside the reference to God, any reasonable person would surely agree that it is an abomination. I’m not addressing the assertion that precision weaponry has made these objections obsolete, partly because it appears that they don’t necessarily make all that much difference—“collateral damage is somewhat reduced”.

The belief that it’s wrong to kill the innocent is hardly a specifically Christian one. Even those who claim justification for doing it generally feel obliged to defend their view on the grounds that the other side did it first, as when Osama bin Laden calculates the number of American non-combatants who can justly be killed as recompense for injuries done to Muslims.

An argument for pacifism-in-practice arises from the contemplation of such vast horror and injustice: if war cannot be conducted without producing it, war cannot be conducted at all. Even though there remains an abstract right of self-defense, it cannot be exercised if doing so would involve committing grave sin.

At least from the Catholic point of view, the logic of this is irrefutable. It’s an elementary principle of Catholic morality that one may not do evil in order that good may come. (Catholic moral theologians sometimes seem to stretch this rather far in analyzing hard cases which a common-sense view would simply describe as a choice between two evils, but the distinction between allowing and actively willing is an important one.)

But just as the logic is irrefutable, so is it morally certain that no state will pay much attention to a teaching that says it cannot defend itself. Not only would it require national suicide for the state, and quite possibly the surrender of its own non-combatants to murder and other brutalities, but it would implicitly cede governance of the world to the most ruthlessly violent.

Supposing there were such a thing as a state that regarded the moral guidance of the Catholic magisterium as authoritative: that state would accept the principle that war could not be waged for anything except the gravest reasons of self-defense, but it would insist on retaining that latter option. It would take very seriously the obligation to protect its own citizens, and as a means of obtaining moral permission to do so, it would probably take refuge in the part of the practical pacifist argument that regards disproportionate non-combatant casualties as intrinsic to war, perhaps saying something like “We don’t accept the assertion that we are unable to defend ourselves except by practicing indiscriminate slaughter. We think we can. And if we find it necessary to defend ourselves, we will do our very best to avoid civilian casualties, but defend ourselves we will.”

Now of course even that position, taken seriously, would render many or most wars illicit. But I wonder if it would really reduce their actual occurrence, because states do go to war most often in the belief that they are mortally threatened. In short, an opening does remain in the practical-pacifist logic—the assertion that such-and-such a course of action must always produce such-and-such a concrete result—and human nature assures that a great deal of traffic will probably move through it.

Moral reasoning and admonishment alone can only do so much. What, then, can the Church—what can Christians—do? Given that the carnage is unacceptable, what actions can we take that would limit it? I know there are a lot of people thinking about this, and they’ve proposed a lot of solutions. Some of them seem quixotic to me, as I’m somewhat fatalistically cynical about mankind, but maybe they will bear fruit.

Here’s a thought—a discomfiting, in fact dreadful thought—and only a thought, which I haven’t considered at length or at all thoroughly, so don’t expect me to be able to defend it. Perhaps in the end literal self-sacrifice might be required of some. To issue from a position of security a moral precept, however compelling and authoritative, that might require martyrdom of the recipient inevitably smacks of “binding heavy burdens and laying them on other men’s shoulders.” The example of Our Lord points the way: he never asked of his disciples any suffering which he himself was not willing to undergo.

Imagine the heavenly counterpart of the hellish suicide bomber. Imagine a cadre of witnesses ready to accept martyrdom by entering war zones (or potential war zones), having no physical power to protect the innocent but standing alongside them and saying “If you kill them, you must kill me, too.” Harmless as doves, some of them would die, and the spiritual effect of such sacrifice would surely be great. But, wise as serpents, they would serve, in a world where vivid images and stories have an immeasurable impact on the way people think and behave, as a means of inducing revulsion for slaughter. In the recent (and not really concluded) war between Israel and Hezbollah, for instance, could such a witness have made a difference?

I think there have been attempts to do this kind of thing, but from what I’ve read they didn’t seem entirely serious—more like media events than a firm intention to interpose oneself. To be effective, such nonviolent tactics would have to be very serious indeed. And a plea, in the name of God and humanity, for the two parties to find some other way of settling a dispute must be addressed to both parties. The great weakness of Western peace movements is that they apply their efforts almost exclusively to their own side, which is generally the one where just war principles are already at least somewhat respected and which is very unlikely to punish them in any serious way. And so their gestures often seem just that: at worst just a self-affirmation of the protestor’s moral superiority, at best a rebuke to only one of two warring parties, and not likely to be very effective. A one-sided protest may even encourage an aggressor.

But a peace movement whose members were willing to put their own lives on the line, as ordinary soldiers do every day (which is probably one reason why most people have more respect for soldiers than for war protesters), could not fail to win the respect of all.

No, to answer the obvious question, I’m not ready to volunteer for such a war. Maybe later, when I have fewer responsibilities. Besides, I can think of a lot of reasons why it might not help very much—it might not be of much use in a Cold War sort of situation, for instance. Maybe it’s a foolish idea. But it does seem Christian.

Les Choristes in French (click to go to IMDB entry, but watch out for spoilers). Not being any sort of serious film buff, I don't know whether this is the work of a famous director, or anything about its reputation. But it's good. We recently joined NetFlix, mainly because I had decided the time has come for me to get better acquainted with Wagner's Ring operas, and the copies in the local library seem to be defective, and partly because I'm tired of looking at the huge lineup of Hollywood sludge in the local video stores. My wife picked this one out because "it sounded interesting." (I never know what's going to strike her as interesting--she also picked one which involves a dwarf living in a train station, which we haven't watched yet.)

Anyway, this is a very fine work, about an unsuccessful middle-aged musician taking a job as prefect (a step below actually teaching) at a school for troubled or delinquent boys shortly after World War II. I'm having trouble coming up with adjectives that wouldn't make it sound a little sappy. Let's just say it covers some of the same territory that a Hollywood inspirational weeper-heartwarmer might--the kind of thing Robin Williams often does--but with more grace and subtlety, and fewer cheap emotional effects. And it's very beautiful to look at.

Not suitable for children, as it deals pretty straightforwardly though not pruriently with some of the dark stuff that you would expect to go on in a home for adolescent boys.

UPDATE: I have corrected the lamentable error in which I gave to Robin Willams the name of an artist who means considerably more to me.

Yes: The Yes Album

Here’s the latest stop on my continuing tour of ‘70s progressive rock. As I’ve mentioned before, I treated this music with disdain when it was current: I thought of it as a place where grooves went to die, an often empty display of technical brilliance by people with much more talent than artistic judgment. But I began to reconsider it six or seven years ago when I bought a copy of Yes’s Fragile for one of my children, with the idea that it might be less harmful than the dour late grunge she and her friends were listening to—at least its vague mysticism was a more positive thing. She didn’t especially like Fragile, but I did, at least more than I had when “Roundabout” and “Long Distance Runaround” were inescapable.

This one is actually the fourth Yes album that I’ve gotten acquainted with over the past few years. I haven’t approached them in chronological order, and the others all came out after it: Fragile, Close to the Edge, and Tales of Topographic Oceans. So far it looks to me as if Close to the Edge is their masterpiece. The Yes Album is apparently the one where the group’s very distinctive sound came together fully, and it has some great moments. “Seen All Good People” (which includes the section which most people know from the radio edit, “Your Move”) is irresistible—in fact the radio edit was one of the few prog-rock songs that I genuinely liked during the genre’s heyday. This track, and the other two which made up side two of the original LP, seem to me equal to the group’s best work. However, I haven’t been able to get enthusiastic about the first two long tracks, “Yours is No Disgrace” and “Starship Trooper,” which, along with a skillful but undistinctive and very out-of-place folk guitar piece, made up side one. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I just don’t find them very affecting or memorable. In other words, there’s a really fine half-album here.

Pluto is officially not a planet. The neighborhood just won't be the same.

In related news, somebody at The Atlantic did recognize the headline potential in the matter (absence of which I was lamenting a week or so ago): their review of upcoming events in a recent issue noted Pluto Targeted for Elimination.

Pluto was only declared a planet in 1930, apparently with some opposition. So what's a conservative to do--deplore its expulsion as a needless upset of tradition, or applaud it as the restoration of a traditional order upset by reckless innovation? Deep matters....

(In case you're wondering, I had notions, when I was about sixteen, of being an astronomer or astrophysicist. Then I realized how mundane the actual work would be, and how much math would be required. But I look forward to renewing my interest Some Day When I Have Some Free Time.)

What is the real threat from Iran? This column by Thomas Sowell, who is not an idiot, says it is grave: if Iran gets nuclear weapons it's only a matter of time until it uses them against Israel and, via terrorist proxies, the U.S. Others write that off as hysteria, perhaps deliberately fostered by neocons who want war--are they just hiding their heads in the sand?

I wish I knew. I suspect both are wrong. Some on the right really are in a state of near-hysteria, expecting the mushroom clouds to appear any minute, and far too eager for war. Some on the left appear incapable of seeing any threat in the world that wasn't caused by American or Israeli misbehavior, and therefore disarmable by a change in that behavior.

President Ahmadinejad certainly knows how to appeal to the latter group. I saw on C-Span most of the uncut interview Mike Wallace did with him a couple of weeks ago and it was really astonishing to see how adept he is at appealing to the sensibilities of Western liberals. He has certainly learned how to handle the media. What touching solicitude he showed for the forty million Americans who lack health insurance! Google "world without Zionism" to add nuance to this picture of benevolence.

I don't have a lot of doubt that those who think Ahmadinejad and his comrades are harmless are engaged in wishful thinking. The question is just how bad and/or crazy they really are. Would he really court the destruction of his own country that would follow, sooner or later, if he used nuclear weapons? I tend to doubt it, but in a climate of opinion divided between "see no evil" and "see no good," it's very hard to tell. I pray to the God whom we both acknowledge that the Iranian rulers have, or will develop, a core of sense that will keep them back from the brink.

Provoking the Provocateurs

“The artist is a provocateur.” Surely this all-too-common claim has done a great deal of harm to the arts. It appeared in our local paper a week or so ago in connection with the lionization of a flamboyant artist at the opening of an exhibit of his work here. Not everyone was impressed, and the arts reporter apparently overheard some disparaging and ungracious remarks.

To give the man credit, he followed the “provocateur” remark immediately with the qualification that the artist is a purveyor of sometimes discomfiting truth. That’s much better. But provocation is only a potential side-effect of telling the truth, and ought not be treated as the point of the game. Truth may indeed be a challenge, but it may also be a comfort. The notion that to provoke is somehow intrinsic to the nature of art is easily disproven by appeal to all the works that are inarguably great art but which give delight and foster serenity: the painting of Fra Angelico, for instance, or Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur,” which would irritate only a touchy atheist. (Well, there’s also the occasional reader who doesn’t care for Hopkins’ highly compressed and mannered style, but that’s a different matter.)

More importantly, the emphasis on provocation invites and encourages the sort of meretricious sensationalism that’s easily found in the art world, especially in the visual arts, and which is far more likely to communicate a combination of hostility and self-righteousness than any meaningful challenge.

The classical formulation that art is to “delight and instruct,” which strikes the modern ear as hopelessly antiquated, is much more useful. “To instruct” may seem condescending and potentially moralistic, but in fact the “provocation” to which contemporary artists lay claim is just a variation on that theme: what is the point of it if not to somehow change and correct a bad idea or attitude attributed to the viewer by the artist? I should say, rather, the ostensible point—it’s pretty obvious that the real point in many cases is precisely not to challenge those expected to encounter the work, but rather to invite them to join the artist in his hostility to some third party.

To instruct is more humble than to provoke, because it implies that truth exists independent of either party. The instructor must be as humble before it as the instructed. But the impulse to provoke is responsible only to its own instincts and whims. Instruction may very well tell us something we need to know but do not wish to hear. In that case it is indeed provocative, as in the work of Flannery O’Connor. Her Christian provocation is the real thing, not a sly appeal to self-satisfaction; it’s as discomfiting to the believer as to the skeptic.

You’d think the shock-the-bourgeoisie stuff would have run its course after these hundred or so years. I think the bourgeoisie are now in fact more capable of shocking the artsy crowd than vice-versa. And as a member of the bourgeoisie myself I must say that it’s kind of fun, and I can see why they don’t want to give it up. It may well be that the person who disparaged our local artist at the opening was actually a sort of performance artist.

A lengthy and unpleasant exchange on the Caelum et Terra blog on these topics left me feeling that they had been rather more obscured than revealed. No sane Catholic can argue that warfare is anything but a terrible calamity and at very best a very difficult thing to justify, but a position of practical pacifism on the part of one side would hardly resolve the dilemma of violence and violent oppression.

This post at Against the Grain (hat tip to Amy Welborn) seems a useful step toward clarity. In particular, it quotes someone named Tom Haessler, of whom I know nothing except that he has been all over the comments on a number of Catholic blogs lately with remarkably reasonable, charitable, knowledgeable, and insightful remarks. Mr. Haessler says: "The parsing of various aspects of just war theory is quite foreign to [Pope Benedict's] approach. He's trying to call all to their senses, to awaken new communities of conscience, to help us discover new zones of sensitivity and awareness not previously attended to; he's NOT playing Jesuit anagrams with just war theory."

Somehow I knew that this pope, whom I've admired for so long precisely for the depth and scope of his thought, was not going to take a superficial view on so grave a question. I have some more ideas on this which I think I'll hold until I've thought them through a little more.

(yes, I’m skipping a week, having gotten too far behind)

Love: Forever Changes

In Memoriam: Arthur Lee (1945-2006) & Bryan MacLean (1946-1998)

I had a friend in college who was very taken with the first two albums by this mid-‘60s Los Angeles band. When Forever Changes came out, he came over to my apartment with it and put it on without expressing any opinion. When the trumpets kicked in at the instrumental break of “Alone Again Or” he made a face. “Sounds like the Tijuana Brass,” he said with disgust. Since the rest of the album was in much the same vein, he hated it altogether. And I, although not sharing his disappointment because I didn’t share his expectations, did think it sounded pretty slick and sappy: not only brass, but strings, and not just as an accent here and there but as a key element of the sound. And the lead singer sounded a bit familiar, a bit like…Johnny Mathis? Could this be the same voice that sang “Little Red Book”? This wasn’t cool. It wasn’t rock-and-roll. Away with it.

In truth, though, I didn’t really think it was so bad. Yes, it was kind of—I’m not sure what word I would have used then, maybe “commercial”—but it was also kind of interesting, and undeniably melodic. If I remember correctly my disgusted friend left his copy with me. At any rate I acquired it, and listened to it now and then. It was a bit of a guilty pleasure but I had to admit to myself at least that I liked it, and then that I really liked it a good deal. I think I finally recognized how much I liked it one sunny but melancholy afternoon, listening to it alone in my apartment, and finding myself really moved by the last song, “You Set the Scene”:

This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that’s all that lives is gonna die
And there’ll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello there will be good-bye

As the business of life took most of my time and attention, I didn’t hear it for many years. Sometime in the late ‘80s I listened to it for the first time since perhaps 1970 or so. Yep, it was still good. And sometime after that I became aware that it was considered a classic, turning up frequently on lists of the all-time-best pop albums.

When Arthur Lee, the band’s driving force, died of leukemia a few weeks ago, and eulogies and retrospectives popped up everywhere, I got out my old vinyl copy and listened to it again, just to see if it was really that good (having, once again, gone many years without hearing it). Yes, it is that good. I can’t think of anything else comparable in style from the last few years of the ‘60s that’s as good, and not much that even comes close. Nothing the Beatles did after their last few brilliant singles, the ones collected on Magical Mystery Tour, can touch it. The Byrds? No. Simon and Garfunkle? No. Procol Harum’s A Salty Dog is in the same class but not as consistent and unified. This is one of the few pop albums that really seems to have a coherent and organic flow from beginning to end.

What is the style? I hesitate to describe it, for fear of making it sound bland and soft, but: richly melodic, with a sort of folk-rock base to which are added brilliant string and brass arrangements. Well, let’s not say “added,” because the arrangements are intrinsic and essential, and arranger David Angel ought, as with other great arranger/producers of the time like George Martin and Joe Boyd, to be credited as a group member.

The lyrics are a major strength. You can’t say they’re brilliant, exactly, and they’re often obscure, but somehow they capture the odd mixture of hope and alienation that characterized the late ‘60s.

Maybe it’s not so much that the album speaks to and of its time as to and of youth. I wondered, as I listened to it the other day, if it’s an artifact of its time, and if my liking for it is a result of having been young in that time. But I’ve asked around, and have found among its strongest admirers people who were born long after it was released. That constitutes a classic, at least in the shortened time frame of popular music.

A+

At AMG you can read the sad story of the band, of Arthur Lee, and the not-so-sad story of second guitarist-songwriter Bryan MacLean, who I suspect had a larger-than-recognized role in Forever Changes.

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Patty Griffin: 1000 Kisses

Although I can’t claim to have heard all the competition, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that Patty Griffin has one of the very best voices in pop music. She has prodigous strength and range and tone and control, with a lower register bound to produce odd spinal sensations in any human male who can hear, but unlike some singers with comparable natural gifts, she has taste and intelligence and sensitivity to the song. Moreover, she’s a terrific songwriter herself. All of this is rather unfair to those of us who aren’t so gifted, particularly to songwriters who don’t sing very well and singers who don’t write very well. Our compensation is that we get to listen to her.

Her first album, Living With Ghosts, is only voice and guitar and while it’s an impressive feat it feels stripped down. Her second, Flaming Red, is excellent but goes too far in the other direction: it’s over-produced, with that over-crowded and glossy sound that major studios seem to produce often and which sometimes seems—to me, anyway—to render the music somehow remote and untouchable, like something encased in plexiglass. This one, 1000 Kisses, is just right, production-wise. She’s backed by a small acoustic ensemble that plays subtly and sparsely, giving her voice plenty of room. The sound is big, open, and clear. The material runs the gamut from good to very very good. My particular favorite is a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song, “Stolen Car,” and it’s a testimony to her skill that she’s utterly convincing in it even though the lyric is from a first-person male point of view; in fact I don’t recall, on first listen, even thinking about the disparity until the song was over. I suspect she’d be capable of taking ownership of most any song in that way, if she liked it enough to go the trouble.

The album as a whole doesn’t quite come together in the way that makes a real classic. To my taste the material falls off a bit toward the end, and “Mil Besos,” sung in Spanish and more elaborately arranged than the other songs, seems out of place. But the first two-thirds or so is about as good as this kind of music can ever be.

A-

1000 Kisses is available on eMusic.

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Poetry and Politics: Guernica with Graffiti

Patti Smith (famous in the late ‘70s as a sort of beat-punk poet singing rock-and-roll) has made available a song, “Qana,” about the civilians killed by Israeli air strikes in the Lebanese city of Qana. (You can download the song here.) It’s a powerful piece, a Guernica in words and music, with a striking and vividly apropos Catholic touch at the end—Qana is held by some to be the biblical Cana. But the emotional effect is undermined for me by Smith’s odd singling-out of a villain: Condoleeza Rice. Even if you hold the U.S. partly responsible for those deaths, to skip over the parties actually waging the war and lash out at an American statesman comes across as a leap from poetry into ideology. Suddenly you can’t simply participate in lamentation for the dead and anger for the sheer evil embodied in the violence—either you agree with Smith’s views about the global political picture, or you’re out of the song and into an argument. It becomes Guernica with a couple of Republican (Spanish) slogans added like graffiti.

If you do agree, of course, the specific political statements combined with the horrific and piteous imagery will get your outrage going and perhaps motivate you to some sort of action. And maybe Smith is more interested in accomplishing that than in making a work of art. If so, she moves thereby pretty far beyond the vague and ever-shifting boundary between art and propaganda, and really has no grounds for complaint if those who disagree with her politics dismiss the song. Whether in the long run the song would, if shorn of its specific political statement, do more or less for the cause of piece is anybody’s guess, but I feel certain that it would be more effective and live longer as a work of art.

I say all this as someone who rather admires Patti Smith and has no desire to belittle her or her work. Although I’ve never heard the albums from the ‘70s that made her famous (a gap which I’ll fill someday), I ran across her late ‘80s album, Dream of Life, more or less by accident some years ago, and heard in it a voice I liked and respected; likewise for her 1996 Gone Again.

Punk rock, with which Smith’s best-known work is associated, never meant much to me. At the time it appeared I was already a parent and trying hard to be an adult, and punk seemed by and for adolescents. But Dream of Life is the work of a woman who’s more interested in raising her children than making rebellious gestures: a grown-up living in, well, if not my world exactly, at least one that has a lot in common with mine. It’s not her political views but the common and universal cares of human life that I share with her.

Why, in general, should anyone give any particular weight to the political views of an artist, especially to his views on specific topics of the day? We find Johnson’s Tory principles of interest mainly insofar as they touch on questions that still occupy us, his views on American independence of interest mainly as they reflect his personality and principles, and his views on inheritance laws hardly at all. But there’s an impulse, at least on the part of those to whom the arts are very important, to attribute some sort of authority on political and social questions to artists. This I think is a leap from the sense, only partially justified at best, that the artist possesses deeper insight than the average person. The more I know of people in general and of artists in particular the less truth I see in this.

It is not intelligence or depth of feeling or accuracy of intuition that distinguishes the artist from others, it is a specific skill—a verbal, musical, or physical skill which is above all a matter of aptitude and development, not of sensibility or intelligence. Where politics is concerned, the artist may actually be less worth attending to than the average person, because he’s likely to see life too much in dramatic and aesthetic terms and to be a pushover for whichever political party most successfully appeals to his emotions and his taste.

There has been since sometime in the 19^th century a toxic cloud of cant surrounding art which can be dispelled by recourse to the ancient and simple definition: art is skill in making. A poet is not, as poet, a prophet or a statesman, and neither is a songwriter, much less a painter or a singer or a guitar player. And it’s no service to either the artist, his art, or his audience to treat him as such.

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Why didn't somebody use "Pluto Under Attack" for the headline of this article? That would've been one to remember. Pre-TypePad

The Atlantic has this year-old appraisal of Israel's long-term prospects by Benjamin Schwartz. Summary: not good. I don't have any particular insight into whether the just-signed cease-fire is a good or bad deal, but unless it has some really strong and enforceable measures that will prevent Hezbollah from simply rebuilding and reloading, we will be reading a few years from now about a repeat of this month's war. I see misery in the Middle East for the foreseeable future, barring a miracle. Whatever else we may do or think about this, Christians should be begging for that miracle. Pre-TypePad

(I’m really behind on posting these—hope to catch up over the next four or five days.)

Ishq: Orchid

Ambient music is a guilty pleasure for me. I really can’t approve of the idea of music that isn’t meant to be listened to attentively, music that is, in Brian Eno’s words, “as ignorable as it is interesting” (see here for his original definition and statement of purpose). But I do like the pleasant, relaxed, reflective atmosphere it produces, alleviating boredom without being too distracting. And I like its emphasis on the sheer pleasure of sound. It’s particularly enjoyable and appropriate while driving, at which I spend an hour and a half every day.

Orchid is the best ambient album I’ve ever heard—yes, better than Eno’s work. To give it that distinction almost disqualifies it, because it’s so good that it commands too much attention to be considered ambient. It might be better to say that it creates a particular sort of dreamy atmosphere better than anything else of its type. It starts off (a little misleadingly, in view of where it’s going) with a trip-hop-ish sort of beat, then settles into a series of gentle connected pieces that are sometimes melodic, sometimes droning, and have a sort of low-key wistful emotionality that is not normally found in ambient music. There are synthesized sounds (of course) but also warm female voices, natural instruments and real-world sounds: water, birds, an airliner passing overhead, children playing in a pool or stream. That sort of thing is often used in ambient music, but never so effectively.

In one sentence: it’s a 78-minute vacation in some lush, tranquil place by the water. Or perhaps it might be a little more accurate to say that it makes you nostalgic for the perfect vacation you never had and never will have: an aural visit to the earthly paradise.

Although the genre is inferior to others, the fact that Orchid is the best of it seems to mean it deserves an A.

Orchid is available at eMusic.

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I think Amy Welborn is spot on about the widespread sense among faithful Catholics that recent Vatican (including papal) statements on the situation in Lebanon (and other hot spots involving Islam) seem, well, not all that useful.

It is decidely painful for me to say such a thing about this pope, for whom I have vast respect, admiration, and love. But Amy sums up what's missing:

I think it is that in these statements, there seems to be a sort of distance from the reality raging around us. There is no direct engagement with the fundamental issues: the commitment to cripple the West and impose the radical, fundamentalist Islamist ideal in its stead. A total contempt for freedom and the intrinsic value of human life. And the determination and will to do this, by any means necessary.

In which "peace" means something different to those instigating the war than those defending themselves, in which there is no desire for co-existence or dialogue.

Read the whole thing, and intense discussion following.

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Today is her memorial. I've always been very drawn to her and her writings, although I haven't progressed very far in the latter. I devoted this past Lent to reading her and commented on what I had read every Sunday, throughout March and part of April. If anyone is interested, here are links to the monthly archive: March and April.

And let's ask her to pray for peace in the Middle East.

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Masters of War

The week was saturated with news of the war in Lebanon, featuring the civilian body count and terrible photographs, and with furious argumentation, on the Internet and elsewhere, as to which side is more right or more wrong. The division emerges clearly once again between those who see Israel and the United States as the root of the trouble in the Middle East, and those who see Islamic fanaticism and oppressive Muslim and/or Arab governments as the problem.

My natural sympathies lie with Israel. It seems to me that open war aimed at the destruction of Israel was Hezbollah’s intention, and that Israel concluded that sooner would be less terrible than later. But it’s at best an open question whether the level of civilian death and hardship involved in the effort to destroy Hezbollah’s war-making ability can be justified morally.

The questions are agonizing, the debate full of anger and incomprehension. Several weeks of reading everything I could find and make time for on the subject have left me certain only that war is a terrible thing. It has always been terrible, but the enormous and indiscriminate power of high explosives have made it far more so. The ruler of a nation under attack will probably have to choose between allowing these weapons to be used on his people or using them on someone else’s, even if his is one of the nations that at least makes an effort to avoid civilian deaths.

On the way home from work Friday afternoon I was listening to Patty Griffin’s “Long Ride Home,” in which a man on the way home from his wife’s funeral looks back on their life together, regretting small failures of love. Still turning over in my mind the arguments for and against each side in this war, and more abstract arguments about the legitimacy of the use of force, and seeing all this in light of the simple human story in the song, I found myself unexpectedly overtaken by rage at the folly and evil that produce war. Isn’t it enough that we have to face natural death, and that we struggle day by day to lead decent lives? Must we also and always be vulnerable to the violence that not only devours good young men by the thousands but leaves women and children crushed, torn, and burned in the ruins of their homes?

Upon the release of his song “Masters of War,” Bob Dylan expressed misgivings about having wished death upon the masters of war. The song gives a naïve and superficial view of the causes of war (arms merchants), but although its outrage may not be very well-aimed, it’s appropriate.

We choose whom to believe about the facts of this war, and we remain, if we’re sensible, mindful that no nation’s hands are ever perfectly clean. And in the end, none of us who can only learn about it from a great distance can really know the moral status of the participants. But God knows. And I tremble for anyone who would set such violence in motion for reasons that will not bear his scrutiny.

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My wife and children often voice the suspicion that I am secretly the author of Arlo & Janis. I deny it, but the evidence continues to accumulate. Pre-TypePad

The big news about Mel Gibson's drunken anti-Semitic rant has brought out, again, those who thought The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic, giving them much pleasure. Well, I still deny that the film itself is anti-Semitic in any meaningful way, no matter what resentments are knocking around in Gibson's psyche. I went back and read what I wrote about it at the time. I stand by it. You can read it here. Pre-TypePad