Back in our tutorials, Truss demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise. No other student matched her mischievous ability to read out essays on any number of the main events in British political history which always managed to say something new; not always accurate, but definitely new.
These essays were creative and self-consciously unconventional. As we argued over the hour, she almost never backed down, even when I did what all Oxford tutors try to do and present fact after fact to try to change her mind. It was frustrating at times, but as a young tutor, I really liked how she insisted her judgment mattered just as much as anyone else’s. Older tutors were probably more frustrated by how she was happy to deviate sharply from the textbooks.
There's a lot going on between the lines in this assessment.
Oh, I now see properly what you wrote. So if you are right, that must have been commentary, by journalists or other academics, on what Stears had said.
Pro Bono: that would surprise me, regarding the words in bold. They were exactly what I remembered reading when she became PM. Was AI generating that stuff then?
By the time we get to Dave Lombardo and Slayer’s Reign in Blood, we are in a zone of Darwinian mutation, as Lombardo pulls off feats of speed and dexterity unimaginable—and probably terrifying—to his drumming forebears.
SLAYER!!!
(Sorry, it's kind of mandatory for me to do that.)
The thing about Liz Truss I can never forget is Marc Stears, one of her tutors from Oxford saying that
"once Truss had an idea in her head, she was "unshakeable" and seemed to thrive on going against the prevailing orthodoxy. Stears noted her ability to argue a position fiercely, even when presented with facts that showed she was wrong, only to later drop that belief entirely and adopt a new one with the same fervour."
That's copied from Google's AI, but I distinctly remembered it from when she was leader, and did a quick search to find it. It's (my) bolded part that I find particularly telling.
This podcast appears to be an attempt to monetize the extraordinary political appeal of her spectacularly short premiership. I wouldn't say she's less deserving than all of the people who've got rich out of right-wing politics.
I always think of noise rock, math rock, and post-rock when I think about influential Japanese musicians: MONO, Toe, Boris, Merzbow - all hugely influential far beyond Japan itself. (I'm tempted to throw Sigh into the mix as well, with their avant-garde black metal catching some of that noise and dada influence.)
It seems to me that Japanese rock splits itself into the groups that are coming at things from an Idol influenced direction - having a huge emphasis on visual presentation and fandom - and the more otaku side that is dedicated to exploration of some aspect of music with willful disregard for the Idol ethos.
I would say that I prefer the latter over the former, but I listen to a lot of BABYMETAL, so I am not immune to the charms of the idol aesthetic.
So, she failed to bring prosperity, which Brexit was (in some universe, I suppose) certain to bring. And now the economic mess that Brexit predictably did bring is an existential threat to the nation, and it's all the other guys' fault.
Somehow, to an American, it all sounds so terribly familiar. Except that she isn't bringing billions into her personal account while the country goes down the tubes. Rather irritating for her, one might suspect.
cleek, nous, that's really interesting, at my university and I believe at every other university, there is always a large contingent of students who are in a band, and I think the large majority of them leaning to heavy metal/hard rock. I'm wondering if it can be connected to the love of classical music, it is hard for me to see it as the same, though it could very well spring from the same source.
I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I've heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.
when my wife and i were in Japan many years ago we wandered into a club one afternoon, somewhere in Tokyo, and watched a local rock band of young guys playing songs for their not-quite-a-dozen friends - just like local bands everywhere.
last week, YouTube started recommending a bunch of Japanese post-rock / noise bands to me for some reason. i can't even read their titles or band names, so clicking on one is a pure crap shoot.
i like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7apuNjIRe0
GftNC, thanks for the Stewart Lee piece. He hits similar notes pre Trump here
https://youtu.be/D2DkYHbSxUE?si=GqYxfZTM9PqD4NT5
The transcript is in his book How I Escaped My Certain Fate
And, I was reading this great book of, of trial transcripts, of American soldiers accused of human-rights abuses in, in Abu Ghraib, which was of course closed today. And, um … I don’t know if you remember Charles Graner, he was a fat American soldier but he had a moustache, so you could identify him. And he was the guy that organised the photographing of a naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian being dragged out of a cell, er, on his hands and knees, er, on a dog’s lead. And, um, in his defence, er, his lawyer, Charles Graner’s lawyer said that the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian wasn’t being dragged out of the cell but was actually crawling of his own free will. And I just wondered how many other lines of defence they rejected before they settled on that one. And also what the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian might have been crawling of his own free will towards? And I like to think he was crawling towards the notion of Western democracy. But obviously he was having some difficulty knowing which way to crawl, er, because of the hood, er, and because of the fact that he was approaching a palpably abstract concept.
I think Japan does have that Chinese heritage of music education for young people, but the Cultural Revolution destroyed large ensembles of Western music, so you don't have the same ethos as Japan.
The institutions in China have been rebuilt in the intervening 50 years, and music is a required subject for primary and secondary school, but that discontinuity, plus the fact that academic subjects are more highly emphasized means that the situation is a little different from Japan.
You do have the same thing here with students who said that their mother (usually, the father most of the time doesn't deal with this) forced them to play piano, but a number of them say that they hated it at the time, but now appreciate it.
A couple of anecdotes, in Japan, every jhs and hs has a class chorus competition and it always surprised me that there was always at least 1 or 2 students within the class who played piano well enough to accompany. The whole thing is often run by the students, so you get this move away from a teacher centered thing to student led.
Another factoid that always amazed me, when a broadcaster records/televises a concert, they don't have to train the broadcast staff, they can simply give them annotated orchestra scores because they all can read music to a degree that the score acts as a shot list.
In Willie Ruff's autobiography, Call to Assembly, there is a chapter about the Mitchell-Ruff duo (Ruff plays french horn and bass) going to visit China and lecture at the Shanghai conservatory in 1981, which was 5 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The whole chapter is interesting, but this is particularly relevant
One [question] came from an older Chinese teacher. "When you created 'Shanghai Blues' just now," he asked, "did you have a form for it, or a logical plan?" I said, "I just started tapping my foot, then a theme suggested itself, which I played on the horn, and Mitchell heard it. And he answered And after that we heard and answered, heard and answered, heard and answered." "But can you play it again?" the professor asked. "We never can. He would not accept my answer. "But that is beyond our imagination. Our students here play a piece a hundred times, or two hundred times, to get it exactly right. You play something once-something that has great value-and then you throw it away." I said that if we played the same music twice in an improvisation, the second time would be no improvisation at all. "We call improvisation the lifeblood of jazz because the performer is challenged to do it better each time." The old teacher as much as threw up his hands. The mystery persisted.
This isn't to suggest that there are no Asian musicians who improvise, on the local level, there are some folks here whose concerts I go to and have great chops. (perhaps the topic of a future music thread), but I think all of them have had a period overseas where they immersed themselves and then have returned.
Band -- both marching band and wind orchestra -- was one of the really positive things for me in high school. Not just the music. Our band director was a retired US Army master sergeant, and by the time I was a senior I realized that if you paid attention, he was also giving you a master class in motivating young adults.
I wasn’t even born in the 50s but I’m already nostalgic for the days when, rather than re-bombing drowning Venezuelan sailors to make sure none survive an airstrike in a war Congress has not authorised, American operatives in sharp suits and sunglasses instead tried to implement regime change subtly, discreetly and even tastefully, to a soundtrack of Paul Desmond cool jazz classics. It’s called democracy, daddio, you dig?
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders believes the CIA promoted the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to discredit Soviet realist art. Donald Trump, meanwhile, just gave some kind of made-up award to the band Kiss, who pretended to be magic animals from space in the 1970s.
A world in which America could imagine abstract art as a cultural propaganda tool is a far cry from one where the president releases an AI video of himself carpet bombing protesters with clods of human excrement, although the 60s Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who canned his faeces and sold them, might recognise Trump as a kindred creative spirit. On balance though, those postwar CIA guys were a better class of bastard.
Because on Monday, quietly and without much fanfare from the mainstream media, the world we grew up in changed for ever and our Euro-doom was decreed. Donald J Trump’s National Security Strategy statement explained, quite explicitly, that he will be actively aiding European far-right nationalist parties to win elections in order to “restore western identity”, end mass migration into Europe, and enforce a contemporary American idea of freedom of speech, which appears to mean the right to say anything irrespective of its accuracy. Don’t like these facts? The algorhythmically amplified far-right avatars of American social media have others. And if those don’t convince you, the president has a cartoon of himself bombing people with shit.
Conservative commentators like to imagine Donald J Trump as a largely unserious presence whose provocative statements are meant to bait the libtards rather than to represent a genuine direction of political travel. Keir Starmer in turn chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast with Magic King Charles of Ye Olde England, and some string.
Trump in turn has already agreed to use the United Kingdom as an enormous energy-sapping battery, housing all the servers needed to generate the algorithmically skewed content that will eventually destroy liberal European democracy. Result! Sir Keir did a great deal with Donald, who then sent him down to the DIY shop to buy some striped paint.
But since Monday’s White House National Security Strategy statement, Starmer’s going to have to up the standard full English at Windsor Castle to at least the level of the late lamented Little Chef Olympic if he wants to avoid the country falling fast into fascism. Baked bean ramekins all round! Just how good can those Windsor Castle sausages be? And will the Royal footmen even be able to find any sausages now Prince Andrew, currently Andrew, is rumoured to have been playing a game involving hiding them?
I used to have a Samoan client who showed me videos of Samoan marching bands--a very big thing there. He said that every town had a marching band. There's a big festival when marching bands from all over come to one city and march in a huge parade. Each band has a clown that messes with the band while they march--laying down in the road, running in and out of the ranks etc. I have no idea why the concept of a marching band resonated with Samoans. Maybe because they have a tradition of drumming and group singing combined with movement?
Keir Starmer chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast
As an alleged teenage fan of Hitler alleged to have told small black British children to go home to Africa, although all in a spirit of harmless banter if he even said it at all, Nigel Farage would benefit from Trump’s foreign intervention in our politics. But being a man of honour and principle he will of course reject America’s direct assistance as it would be hypocritical to do otherwise. Because back in 2016, when Barack Obama said Brexit would harm British trade with America, Farage said: “Vladimir Putin behaved in a more statesmanlike manner than President Obama did in this referendum campaign. Obama came to Britain, and I think behaved disgracefully, telling us we would be at the back of the queue. Vladimir Putin maintained his silence throughout the whole campaign.” Farage and Putin sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
We must assume that, unlike Farage’s colleague Nathan Gill, the Reform leader wasn’t being paid at that point to promote Putin, the world leader he most admires, who, although nominally silent himself during Farage’s referendum, certainly had a lot of online bots making a lot of pro-Brexit noise on Farage’s behalf.
Don’t look for much pushback against Trump’s plan for European regime change from America’s on-off enemy-ally Russia or the rightwing British media. Both Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov and the Times columnist Melanie Phillips found some common ground to jointly endorse Trump’s plans, the former saying “The adjustments we’re seeing are largely consistent with our vision … we consider this a positive step”, and the latter commenting “Only Britain and Europe can save themselves. That’s what the Trump administration is saying.” Phillips appears to welcome the dismantling of our democracy as long as it returns us to “principles rooted in historic faith, traditions and institutions”, and the imposition of a puppet fascist government is a small price to pay to get Songs of Praise back on the BBC. And the Kremlin wants to make sure an Islamified UK doesn’t neglect all those beautiful old cathedrals so beloved of its architecturally infatuated international chemical weapons assassins, slaughtering civilians on our streets. Defence analysts discreetly admit we may already be at war with Russia, which is probing our communications cables, badgering European airports with drones and quietly flooding our social media with misinformation to make your Facebook-following uncle foam at the mouth and ruin your upcoming Christmas dinner by insisting Volodymyr Zelenskyy spends all the Ukraine aid money on yachts, cocaine and designer puffa jackets.
And the moment we start sending Russia’s seized assets to Ukraine we can expect to see our entire online infrastructure shut down with the flick of an undersea switch, as British politicians’ eyes melt out of their faces while swathes of civilians evaporate behind them on the high street in invisible chemical warfare clouds, tapping at their suddenly unresponsive phones and asking an inert ChatGPT why their internal organs are wriggling about on the pavement. But the truth is we are now at war with Trump’s America as well, and the only reason we don’t recognise the situation for what it obviously is is because it seems so utterly inconceivable. And still Starmer prevaricates about re-entering the European customs union alongside Trump’s other intended European victim nations, because he worries it may jeopardise our American trade deal, a scarecrow walking into a furnace.
Interesting. I'm fairly familiar with how China does their music education because of the music writing class I've taught. There the emphasis is more on testing and certification than on ensemble playing. I'm sure that there must be a lot of young people who did the lessons and found something they loved, but most of the students who have written essays about their experience complain that it was too much about technical ability and challenge, and not nearly enough about play. They were pushed into it by their parents in order to have an objective certification of their diligence and discipline. Expression was secondary. Their stories are mostly about rediscovering music and learning to love it only after they had either refused any further lessons, or crashed and burned out of the competitive testing at a lower level of proficiency. They only learned to love playing after they came back to it with no outside pressure to excel.
Are there parallels in Japan, or is this one of those cultural differences over how each nation expresses their collectivity?
the combining of roman letters and kanji is pretty fascinating and shows how integrated the writing systems are becoming
I have seen kanji and kana, of course. And romanji. But a combination of kanji and romanji is a new one. Perhaps it has emerged in the years decades since I studied the language....
I am thinking that they are going to end up using chinese tech, and at some point, the Chinese will flip a kill switch and none of our stuff will work.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On ““We’re now poorer than Mississippi. It’s like Huckleberry Finn without the steamboats.””
Here's a bit of what Stears wrote in The Times:
There's a lot going on between the lines in this assessment.
"
Oh, I now see properly what you wrote. So if you are right, that must have been commentary, by journalists or other academics, on what Stears had said.
"
Pro Bono: that would surprise me, regarding the words in bold. They were exactly what I remembered reading when she became PM. Was AI generating that stuff then?
"
I think that's an AI summary of commentary on what Stears wrote, which was phrased more academically than that.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
SLAYER!!!
(Sorry, it's kind of mandatory for me to do that.)
On ““We’re now poorer than Mississippi. It’s like Huckleberry Finn without the steamboats.””
"often wrong, never in doubt", it's called.
"
The thing about Liz Truss I can never forget is Marc Stears, one of her tutors from Oxford saying that
"once Truss had an idea in her head, she was "unshakeable" and seemed to thrive on going against the prevailing orthodoxy. Stears noted her ability to argue a position fiercely, even when presented with facts that showed she was wrong, only to later drop that belief entirely and adopt a new one with the same fervour."
That's copied from Google's AI, but I distinctly remembered it from when she was leader, and did a quick search to find it. It's (my) bolded part that I find particularly telling.
"
Truss was against Brexit before she was for it.
This podcast appears to be an attempt to monetize the extraordinary political appeal of her spectacularly short premiership. I wouldn't say she's less deserving than all of the people who've got rich out of right-wing politics.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
I always think of noise rock, math rock, and post-rock when I think about influential Japanese musicians: MONO, Toe, Boris, Merzbow - all hugely influential far beyond Japan itself. (I'm tempted to throw Sigh into the mix as well, with their avant-garde black metal catching some of that noise and dada influence.)
It seems to me that Japanese rock splits itself into the groups that are coming at things from an Idol influenced direction - having a huge emphasis on visual presentation and fandom - and the more otaku side that is dedicated to exploration of some aspect of music with willful disregard for the Idol ethos.
I would say that I prefer the latter over the former, but I listen to a lot of BABYMETAL, so I am not immune to the charms of the idol aesthetic.
On ““We’re now poorer than Mississippi. It’s like Huckleberry Finn without the steamboats.””
So, she failed to bring prosperity, which Brexit was (in some universe, I suppose) certain to bring. And now the economic mess that Brexit predictably did bring is an existential threat to the nation, and it's all the other guys' fault.
Somehow, to an American, it all sounds so terribly familiar. Except that she isn't bringing billions into her personal account while the country goes down the tubes. Rather irritating for her, one might suspect.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
cleek, nous, that's really interesting, at my university and I believe at every other university, there is always a large contingent of students who are in a band, and I think the large majority of them leaning to heavy metal/hard rock. I'm wondering if it can be connected to the love of classical music, it is hard for me to see it as the same, though it could very well spring from the same source.
"
cleek - that one is fun. For Japanese post-rock I think the grandmasters are probably MONO.
https://youtu.be/hlh6-M04pt0?si=IcY6ROkql4hsqP7P
"
I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I've heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rock-music-history-drummers/684955/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCfu6mZ7op8KFvj2oLcbyLWg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
"
when my wife and i were in Japan many years ago we wandered into a club one afternoon, somewhere in Tokyo, and watched a local rock band of young guys playing songs for their not-quite-a-dozen friends - just like local bands everywhere.
last week, YouTube started recommending a bunch of Japanese post-rock / noise bands to me for some reason. i can't even read their titles or band names, so clicking on one is a pure crap shoot.
i like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7apuNjIRe0
On “Open Thread”
We shouldn't forget or forgive what was done by our side at Abu Ghraib.
But now I'm triggered by "palpably abstract".
"
GftNC, thanks for the Stewart Lee piece. He hits similar notes pre Trump here
https://youtu.be/D2DkYHbSxUE?si=GqYxfZTM9PqD4NT5
The transcript is in his book How I Escaped My Certain Fate
And, I was reading this great book of, of trial transcripts, of American soldiers accused of human-rights abuses in, in Abu Ghraib, which was of course closed today. And, um … I don’t know if you remember Charles Graner, he was a fat American soldier but he had a moustache, so you could identify him. And he was the guy that organised the photographing of a naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian being dragged out of a cell, er, on his hands and knees, er, on a dog’s lead. And, um, in his defence, er, his lawyer, Charles Graner’s lawyer said that the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian wasn’t being dragged out of the cell but was actually crawling of his own free will. And I just wondered how many other lines of defence they rejected before they settled on that one. And also what the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian might have been crawling of his own free will towards? And I like to think he was crawling towards the notion of Western democracy. But obviously he was having some difficulty knowing which way to crawl, er, because of the hood, er, and because of the fact that he was approaching a palpably abstract concept.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
I think Japan does have that Chinese heritage of music education for young people, but the Cultural Revolution destroyed large ensembles of Western music, so you don't have the same ethos as Japan.
The institutions in China have been rebuilt in the intervening 50 years, and music is a required subject for primary and secondary school, but that discontinuity, plus the fact that academic subjects are more highly emphasized means that the situation is a little different from Japan.
You do have the same thing here with students who said that their mother (usually, the father most of the time doesn't deal with this) forced them to play piano, but a number of them say that they hated it at the time, but now appreciate it.
A couple of anecdotes, in Japan, every jhs and hs has a class chorus competition and it always surprised me that there was always at least 1 or 2 students within the class who played piano well enough to accompany. The whole thing is often run by the students, so you get this move away from a teacher centered thing to student led.
Another factoid that always amazed me, when a broadcaster records/televises a concert, they don't have to train the broadcast staff, they can simply give them annotated orchestra scores because they all can read music to a degree that the score acts as a shot list.
In Willie Ruff's autobiography, Call to Assembly, there is a chapter about the Mitchell-Ruff duo (Ruff plays french horn and bass) going to visit China and lecture at the Shanghai conservatory in 1981, which was 5 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The whole chapter is interesting, but this is particularly relevant
One [question] came from an older Chinese teacher. "When you created 'Shanghai Blues' just now," he asked, "did you have a form for it, or a logical plan?"
I said, "I just started tapping my foot, then a theme suggested itself, which I played on the horn, and Mitchell heard it. And he answered And after that we heard and answered, heard and answered, heard and answered."
"But can you play it again?" the professor asked.
"We never can.
He would not accept my answer. "But that is beyond our imagination. Our students here play a piece a hundred times, or two hundred times, to get it exactly right. You play something once-something that has great value-and then you throw it away."
I said that if we played the same music twice in an improvisation, the second time would be no improvisation at all. "We call improvisation the lifeblood of jazz because the performer is challenged to do it better each time."
The old teacher as much as threw up his hands. The mystery persisted.
This isn't to suggest that there are no Asian musicians who improvise, on the local level, there are some folks here whose concerts I go to and have great chops. (perhaps the topic of a future music thread), but I think all of them have had a period overseas where they immersed themselves and then have returned.
"
Band -- both marching band and wind orchestra -- was one of the really positive things for me in high school. Not just the music. Our band director was a retired US Army master sergeant, and by the time I was a senior I realized that if you paid attention, he was also giving you a master class in motivating young adults.
On “Open Thread”
Just trying again, in case I found out how to delete one link
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Remember when America used to destroy democracy in style? Those were the days
The CIA once promoted abstract expressionism as a tool of regime change. Now we have AI videos of Trump bombing people with faeces
Stewart Lee
Dec 12, 2025
I wasn’t even born in the 50s but I’m already nostalgic for the days when, rather than re-bombing drowning Venezuelan sailors to make sure none survive an airstrike in a war Congress has not authorised, American operatives in sharp suits and sunglasses instead tried to implement regime change subtly, discreetly and even tastefully, to a soundtrack of Paul Desmond cool jazz classics. It’s called democracy, daddio, you dig?
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders believes the CIA promoted the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to discredit Soviet realist art. Donald Trump, meanwhile, just gave some kind of made-up award to the band Kiss, who pretended to be magic animals from space in the 1970s.
A world in which America could imagine abstract art as a cultural propaganda tool is a far cry from one where the president releases an AI video of himself carpet bombing protesters with clods of human excrement, although the 60s Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who canned his faeces and sold them, might recognise Trump as a kindred creative spirit. On balance though, those postwar CIA guys were a better class of bastard.
Because on Monday, quietly and without much fanfare from the mainstream media, the world we grew up in changed for ever and our Euro-doom was decreed. Donald J Trump’s National Security Strategy statement explained, quite explicitly, that he will be actively aiding European far-right nationalist parties to win elections in order to “restore western identity”, end mass migration into Europe, and enforce a contemporary American idea of freedom of speech, which appears to mean the right to say anything irrespective of its accuracy. Don’t like these facts? The algorhythmically amplified far-right avatars of American social media have others. And if those don’t convince you, the president has a cartoon of himself bombing people with shit.
Conservative commentators like to imagine Donald J Trump as a largely unserious presence whose provocative statements are meant to bait the libtards rather than to represent a genuine direction of political travel. Keir Starmer in turn chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast with Magic King Charles of Ye Olde England, and some string.
Trump in turn has already agreed to use the United Kingdom as an enormous energy-sapping battery, housing all the servers needed to generate the algorithmically skewed content that will eventually destroy liberal European democracy. Result! Sir Keir did a great deal with Donald, who then sent him down to the DIY shop to buy some striped paint.
But since Monday’s White House National Security Strategy statement, Starmer’s going to have to up the standard full English at Windsor Castle to at least the level of the late lamented Little Chef Olympic if he wants to avoid the country falling fast into fascism. Baked bean ramekins all round! Just how good can those Windsor Castle sausages be? And will the Royal footmen even be able to find any sausages now Prince Andrew, currently Andrew, is rumoured to have been playing a game involving hiding them?
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
I used to have a Samoan client who showed me videos of Samoan marching bands--a very big thing there. He said that every town had a marching band. There's a big festival when marching bands from all over come to one city and march in a huge parade. Each band has a clown that messes with the band while they march--laying down in the road, running in and out of the ranks etc. I have no idea why the concept of a marching band resonated with Samoans. Maybe because they have a tradition of drumming and group singing combined with movement?
On “Open Thread”
Part 1 obviously had more links than I realised, so is still "waiting for approval".
"
Part 2
Keir Starmer chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast
As an alleged teenage fan of Hitler alleged to have told small black British children to go home to Africa, although all in a spirit of harmless banter if he even said it at all, Nigel Farage would benefit from Trump’s foreign intervention in our politics. But being a man of honour and principle he will of course reject America’s direct assistance as it would be hypocritical to do otherwise. Because back in 2016, when Barack Obama said Brexit would harm British trade with America, Farage said: “Vladimir Putin behaved in a more statesmanlike manner than President Obama did in this referendum campaign. Obama came to Britain, and I think behaved disgracefully, telling us we would be at the back of the queue. Vladimir Putin maintained his silence throughout the whole campaign.” Farage and Putin sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
We must assume that, unlike Farage’s colleague Nathan Gill, the Reform leader wasn’t being paid at that point to promote Putin, the world leader he most admires, who, although nominally silent himself during Farage’s referendum, certainly had a lot of online bots making a lot of pro-Brexit noise on Farage’s behalf.
Don’t look for much pushback against Trump’s plan for European regime change from America’s on-off enemy-ally Russia or the rightwing British media. Both Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov and the Times columnist Melanie Phillips found some common ground to jointly endorse Trump’s plans, the former saying “The adjustments we’re seeing are largely consistent with our vision … we consider this a positive step”, and the latter commenting “Only Britain and Europe can save themselves. That’s what the Trump administration is saying.”
Phillips appears to welcome the dismantling of our democracy as long as it returns us to “principles rooted in historic faith, traditions and institutions”, and the imposition of a puppet fascist government is a small price to pay to get Songs of Praise back on the BBC. And the Kremlin wants to make sure an Islamified UK doesn’t neglect all those beautiful old cathedrals so beloved of its architecturally infatuated international chemical weapons assassins, slaughtering civilians on our streets.
Defence analysts discreetly admit we may already be at war with Russia, which is probing our communications cables, badgering European airports with drones and quietly flooding our social media with misinformation to make your Facebook-following uncle foam at the mouth and ruin your upcoming Christmas dinner by insisting Volodymyr Zelenskyy spends all the Ukraine aid money on yachts, cocaine and designer puffa jackets.
And the moment we start sending Russia’s seized assets to Ukraine we can expect to see our entire online infrastructure shut down with the flick of an undersea switch, as British politicians’ eyes melt out of their faces while swathes of civilians evaporate behind them on the high street in invisible chemical warfare clouds, tapping at their suddenly unresponsive phones and asking an inert ChatGPT why their internal organs are wriggling about on the pavement.
But the truth is we are now at war with Trump’s America as well, and the only reason we don’t recognise the situation for what it obviously is is because it seems so utterly inconceivable. And still Starmer prevaricates about re-entering the European customs union alongside Trump’s other intended European victim nations, because he worries it may jeopardise our American trade deal, a scarecrow walking into a furnace.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
Interesting. I'm fairly familiar with how China does their music education because of the music writing class I've taught. There the emphasis is more on testing and certification than on ensemble playing. I'm sure that there must be a lot of young people who did the lessons and found something they loved, but most of the students who have written essays about their experience complain that it was too much about technical ability and challenge, and not nearly enough about play. They were pushed into it by their parents in order to have an objective certification of their diligence and discipline. Expression was secondary. Their stories are mostly about rediscovering music and learning to love it only after they had either refused any further lessons, or crashed and burned out of the competitive testing at a lower level of proficiency. They only learned to love playing after they came back to it with no outside pressure to excel.
Are there parallels in Japan, or is this one of those cultural differences over how each nation expresses their collectivity?
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the combining of roman letters and kanji is pretty fascinating and shows how integrated the writing systems are becoming
I have seen kanji and kana, of course. And romanji. But a combination of kanji and romanji is a new one. Perhaps it has emerged in the
yearsdecades since I studied the language....On “Cory Doctorow and enshittification”
I am thinking that they are going to end up using chinese tech, and at some point, the Chinese will flip a kill switch and none of our stuff will work.
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