Nothing like some top-notch acid-gospel-funk to set one up for the weekend, indeed a vital soundscape on reentry each morning. Joe Tangari of Pitchfork gets it, as do Thom Jurek of Allmusic, John Kirby of Wax Poetics, and Gabriel Baker of PopMatters. Listen here, here, and YouTube.
Peter Viereck’s difficult masterpiece with commentary by Michael Weinstein.
The question posed by Liel Leibovitz: “Why have so many Jewish leaders put their weight behind an activist whose separatist rhetoric is cloaked in the flaccid language of human rights?” On a closely related note, see Gary Weiss’ earlier “The Politics of Anti-anti-Semitism“. I also refer my Right Honorable friends to the phenomenon termed as Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome.
And hear, hear! Courtney
Self as Transcendent. In a post-religious age, the only transcendence open to the self is self-transcendence, that is, the transcending of the world by the self. The available modes of transcendence in such an age are science and art.
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Reentry problems become noticeable in less inspired scientists. The divorced wife of an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory accused her husband of “angelism-bestialism.” He was so absorbed in his work, the search for the quasar with the greatest red shift, that when he came home to his pleasant subdivision house, he seemed to take his pleasure like a god descending from Olympus into the world of mortals, ate heartily, had frequent intercourse with his wife, watched TV, read Mickey Spillane, and said not a word to wife or children.
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With the waning of transcendence, reentry problems increase. One manifestation, which always amazes laymen, is the jealousy and lack of scruple of scientists. Their anxiety to receive credit often seems more appropriate to used-car salesmen than to a transcending community.
Other examples of reentry failures: the general fatuity of scientists in political matters, their naïveté and credulity before tricksters. The magician Randi says that scientists are easier to fool—e.g., by Uri Geller—than are children.
More distressing consequences occur when the zeal and excitement of a scientific community runs counter to the interests of the world community, e.g., when scientists at Los Alamos did not oppose the bomb drop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The joys of science and the joys of life as a human are not necessarily convergent. As Freeman Dyson put it, the “sin” of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much.
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Their impoverishment is to be located in both an inflation of theory and a devaluation of the world theorized about. They out-Freud Freud without the scruples of Freud.
Review of Lawrence Powell’s masterful history of New Orleans in Cosmos + Taxis.
The palpable sense of cultural vibrancy and of place, so essential to New Orleans’ identity, makes absolute nonsense of the currently fashionable phrase “cultural appropriation”, a conceptually illiterate term of abuse, a newfangled fundamentalism, espoused by the authoritarian “regressive” left.
Ed Smith in the New Statesman.
People who frequently check Facebook (or as I’ve called it “Facecrack”) on their smartphone tend to have less gray matter in a reward-related area of the brain — Behavioural Brain Research.
It appeared, that in particular higher daily frequency of checking Facebook on the smartphone was robustly linked with smaller gray matter volumes of the nucleus accumbens.
Still on music, a pretty damn good price ($33) for 5 disks, a package with very good production values. Apparently it’s out of stock and will hopefully become available again soon and at a similarly good price. If you appreciate the work of Eno and Bowie, you’ll get Popul Voh, arguably the grandees of so-called “Krautrock”. For more on Popul Vuh see here (a four parter), here and here.
manwithoutqualities 
