Category Archives: Art

Die Walküre, Act 2, Scene 4

The hinge of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle

Start here, the scene takes about 15 minutes (with English subtitles). Then watch the following 10 minutes to the end of the act, where there will be a dramatic battle. (I chose this particular version, from Bayreuth in 1979, because here the singers not only sound great, they also look the part.)

Here‘s the whole story.

The above linked scene is central to the whole story of the 4 mega operas. In this scene, Brünnhilde, Wotan’s daughter and favourite Valkyrie, “grows up” so to speak and does what she thinks is right (and knows that her father really wants) instead of what her father told her to do.

She initially tells Siegmund that he is about to die. But it’s all right, she says. You’re going to Valhalla (the Nordic equivalent of heaven). Siegmund asks some questions about Valhalla, which Brünnhilde answers: Will he be there alone with Wotan (no), will his father be there (yes, but Brünnhilde doesn’t say that Wotan is his father), will a woman greet him fondly there (yes, and not just one). But then he asks: Will his twin sister and love of his life, Sieglinde, join him there (no, and Brünnhilde initially doesn’t say why: Sieglinde is pregnant). Because of the last answer, Siegmund declines the offer and says, if he has to die, he’d rather not go to Valhalla.

What get’s me every time I watch this is the fact that Brünnhilde is the half-sister of Siegmund. She knows it, and loves him dearly. He doesn’t know it. For him, Brünnhilde is a beautiful apparition, but a stranger.

The scene I’ve linked above is well-directed with some great ideas that enhance the storytelling by the music and words. When Siegmund rejects Brünnhilde’s offer to go to Valhalla and says he thinks she is heartless and cold, the actress wonderfully plays the deeply hurt sister.

When she sees Siegmund’s determination not to go to Valhalla (because his great love Sieglinde will not be joining him there), Brünnhilde changes her mind and says that, contrary to what she said before, Siegmund will win the coming battle with his love rival.

When, during the battle, Wotan finds out that Brünnhilde is defying his instructions, he makes sure that Siegmund does die after all, even though it hurts him terribly. He then runs after Brünnhilde, who has fled the scene with Sieglinde.

At the beginning of the next act, we hear the famous “Ride of the Valkyries“.

By the way, JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” contains a somewhat similar scene. Similar in that it contains similar archetypes and archetypal relationships. I mean the one where King Théoden dies, with his niece Éowyn by his side to comfort him, who had just before heroically saved him from being devoured by the monster carrying one of the Ring Wraiths. Watch the two-minute scene here.

My two favourite Beethoven symphonies

I’m not listing the ninth. That’s just otherworldly and can be savoured in small dosages only. It’s in a league of its own.

However the ninth has a worthy “little sister”, and that is the 7th. Of those available on Youtube, I like this version best, with Iván Fischer conducting the Dutch Concertgebouworkest.

The other Beethoven symphony on my favourites list is the 3rd, or “Eroica”. This is the version I like best, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Wiener Philharmoniker.

Hate & Perversion in the Catcher in the Rye

It's "only three-quarters of a great novel"

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” when I was 18, and was disturbed by it. This review by Spencer J. Quinn of J.D. Salinger’s famous novel goes some way in enabling me to verbalise what exactly it was that disturbed me.

Excerpts:

Literature can shape the way we look at the world — even without our knowing it, or being beware of the specific literature in question. A Bible verse shared during a church service or a few lines of poetry offered in a classroom can have this effect. With novels, well-drawn characters can stick with us until we view life through their fictional eyes. I imagine Ernest Hemingway had this in mind when he claimed that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” There is a little of Huck Finn in all of us, in other words.

By the 1960s, however, Huck Finn had been largely replaced by Holden Caulfield in the American imagination. Despite what an original character Holden is and how deftly author J. D. Salinger developed him in the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, that’s hardly a good thing.

[…]

Holden Caulfield is indeed a wonderful, unforgettable character. But then why is The Catcher in the Rye only three-quarters of a great novel? Why is it bad that Holden has replaced Huck as the character through which so many Americans see their world?

[…]

None of this would be to the detriment of the novel had Salinger not molded Holden as the poster boy for revenge-minded alienated youth. Holden is treated so sympathetically by Salinger, especially at the end, that the reader is constantly tempted to view life through Holden’s jaundiced eyes — as if it’s the world that’s at fault, not Holden. This is dangerous. Given the connection between The Catcher in the Rye and John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, and others like him, yes, this is dangerous. Huck Finn may have viewed himself as an outlaw for helping Jim escape slavery, but he never saw himself as a predator constantly at odds with most of humanity the way Holden Caulfield seems to be at times.

What further enables the psychopath-as-hero reading of The Catcher in the Rye is the fact that so little is nice in Holden’s world. So much of it is dingy, seedy, or vomity, and, boy, does Holden Caulfield love dwelling on that. Other than during his dreamy walk through the museum, Holden fixates on the ugly and the revolting in New York City, as if that’s all there is. And his penchant for exaggeration doesn’t help. A hotel lobby smells like “50 million dead cigars.” Walking down steps to the sidewalk, he nearly breaks his neck over “10 million garbage pails.”

Even worse, Salinger normalizes sexual perversion. In a hotel Holden finds “a few pimpy-looking guys, and a few whory-looking blondes.” Through the open windows of his hotel, he sees a man trying on women’s clothing and a drunken couple squirting alcohol at each other from their mouths. “The hotel was lousy with perverts,” he states.

[…]

Most tragically, when a man Holden admires touches him inappropriately and forces him to flee into the night, Holden wasn’t even terribly surprised. He admits that “perverty” things like that have happened to him “about twenty times” before. Rounding that down to the more accurate-sounding once or twice, we still have the normalcy of perversion. It’s as if most American boys in Salinger’s world are forced to deal with unwelcome come-ons from grown men.

Who wouldn’t want to shoot up a world like that?

With such a splendid character as Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye could have been a much greater contribution to Western literature. Salinger only needed to tone down the murder in Holden’s heart and the perversion in Holden’s world. Instead, however, he was happy to paint the world to be a darker place than it really is, and make it cool to hate your fellow man.

The East is Preserving Western Civilisation

"Voices of Spring"

The Jakarta Concert Orchestra with Avip Priatna conducting and Isyana Sarasvati, soprano, performing Johann Strauß II, “Frühlingsstimmen” (“Voices of Spring”).

Here are the lyrics (in German and English).

Writes Rick Rozoff:

Exquisite ear, eye and artistic candy. Enchanting, for-real performance art. While the West accelerates the murder of its civilization, the East is preserving it.

The constitutional condition of England

A traditionalist laments

In his recent article, “Shakespeare and the Redundancy of Conservatism“, Alan Bickley laments the downfall of a country that once could rightly be proud of itself.

Excerpts:

I spent the 1980s and 1990s predicting and lamenting the death of our Ancient Constitution. This was not the provisional work of more or less stupid intellectuals. The English Constitution was part of the organic unity of our nation. It was one with our language and our history and our general beliefs about ourselves. It needed no justifications, no hierarchy of laws, no entrenchment, no supervisory panel of judges. We had trial by jury not because some piece of paper required it, but because we had agreed, since before the Norman Conquest, that a man should suffer punishment only after the lawful judgement of his peers. We had a privilege against double jeopardy because we agreed it was fair that a man should be troubled only once by the authorities with an accusation of some specific wrongdoing. We had freedom of speech because it was our birthright. We knew who we were. We looked down on foreigners, and we took it for granted that they should look up to us.

The last two sentences may be indicative of what went wrong: Pride cometh before the fall. (In fact, Proverbs 16:18 (KJV) says: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”) That is not to say that England didn’t have something others could rightly look up to. But it did invite the wrong kind of pride.

I have given up on lamentations during the present century. I have given up on them because my predictions turned out to be broadly correct. The English Constitution is something nowadays to be discussed in various past tenses. In 1997, I looked forward with particular horror at what was now certain to come. I was like a man in fine clothes who found himself compelled to cross a sea of pig filth. I fussed and tutted over every speck on the national shoes. A quarter of a century later, we are spattered up to our waists, and it hardly seems much if we trip and land on our faces. The forms of our Constitution have been changed in random though generally malevolent ways. Even those forms that remain have been drained of their ancient substance and filled with something new and wholly malevolent.

Bickley is a traditionalist, but despairs of the current Monarchy:

The Conservative Party has not only failed us. It has betrayed us. It has conserved nothing. It has joined in the work of destruction. We now face the prospect of another Labour Government. This will almost certainly complete the draining of substance and the changing of forms. But I no longer greatly care. The Monarchy is much in the news at present. A few months ago, the Queen died. We have a coronation approaching. More importantly in the past few weeks, the younger son of the King’s first wife has published an extended ghost-written whine of self-pity. The response of the fake conservatives who are allowed into the media is to complain that he is bringing the monarchy into disrepute, and even endangering its existence. So far as they believe what they are saying, they deserve the comment that Tom Paine made on Edmund Burke – that he “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” What has the Monarchy done in living memory to uphold the Ancient Constitution? The answer is less than nothing. The late Queen was a woman of notable uselessness. Of all the documents put before her to sign, she seems to have queried only personal cheques. The new King is stupid or evil, or possibly both. What I have read of his coronation plans involves a repeat of the woke pantomime that opened the London Olympics. His son appears to be no better.

Bickley is particularly scathing about the Church of England:

I could continue. I could say the Church has been colonised by probable atheists, there for salaries that, if not generous in themselves, are higher than their personal market worth, or for easy access to under-age boys. The Bench is a committee of authoritarian leftists. The chartered institutions are the same. The whole administration is a mass of incompetence and petty corruption. The Ministers no longer try to hide that they are taking bribes. Corruption beams from their horrid faces. The classics are rewritten to be goodthinkful, and hardly anyone complains. We have indeed dropped into the filth, and those dragging us through it make a point of kicking anyone who declines to wallow in it with the approved show of enthusiasm.

But I will not continue. I have said enough. We have fallen, and, looking at those countries with a less fortunate history than our own, there are lower depths yet awaiting us. Should I care? Should I not give up altogether on writing and focus what time I have left on securing the least uncomfortable life possible for me and mine? Though always desirable, national improvement is possible only when there is a nation still fit to be improved. I am no longer as sure as I was about England. Before the spring of 2020, I could tell myself that the people had always voted for improvement when given the chance. The English had voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union. They had pinched their noses and voted in a team of corrupt mediocrities when these turned out to be the only group in politics who seemed willing to go through with the Referendum result. Surely, though oppressed, the nation was still sound?

I am no longer so sure. I live in a middle class area. Every Thursday during the Lockdown, I was troubled by the sound, from every front door in my street, of people banging their pots and pans in required solidarity against a virus that plainly showed itself from the start to be no worse than a mild seasonal flu. I then saw the hundred-yard queues of people waiting patiently to be injected with an untested vaccine they had already been warned was at least dangerous. More recently, doubts regarding the wisdom of our war with Russia have been routinely treated in private conversation as equal in their morality to defences of pederasty. Everyone in England but the rich is cold. Everyone but the rich may soon be hungry. There are no demonstrations in Trafalgar Square. When the Ministers tell us we are all in the same boat, there is no replying shout that they are in first class and we in steerage. If every nation gets the government it deserves – government, that is, in the wider sense – the English have no right to complain; and they do not complain. Richard Lynn once assured me that IQ in England had been falling by one point every decade since 1901. 1901 was many decades ago. Whether IQ means as much as people tell me I will leave aside. There seems little doubt that the English who once defended their ways and liberty with fists and more deadly weapons, who began the scientific and industrial revolutions, and who planted their flag in every corner of the world, are as extinct a people as the Athenians of the age of Pericles were when Hadrian visited the city.

So, what is to be done?

There is, however, no doubt that the days of lamenting the death of the Ancient Constitution are past. It has gone beyond recall. Any restoration now must be much more of a new beginning. There is a case for reconnecting the most vital threads from our past to a future settlement. But I do not believe these threads involve a privileged role for the family of Alfred the Great, or any of the outward forms of the Ancient Constitution. We have been notorious, since the eighteenth century, for our indifference to questions of political legitimacy and national identity that consumed other peoples. Now that the mostly unspoken consensus has passed that allowed us the luxury of smiling at the antics of foreigners, we must begin to think about first principles. This will often be painful. It may lead us in directions that we once thought undesirable. Even so, we are left with no alternative if we are not to continue our slide towards, and perhaps below, the level of other nations. And, if I cannot be bothered to explain myself more clearly than I have, a period of Labour government may not be quite so regrettable as I regarded the advent of Tony Blair in 1997.

Celine Dion was disabled from a known side effect of the COVID vaccine

US government data shows it is 99.6% likely that Celine Dion got her Stiff Person Syndrome from the COVID vaccine. She can't sue because of the liability protection.

Article by Steve Kirsch.

Excerpts:

Pfizer knew about this potential side effect likely before Celine Dion was vaccinated, but they have no duty to disclose that because hey, it’s a safe and effective vaccine with only mild side effects. The FDA simply looks the other way for safety issues. That’s the way science is done.

Pfizer knew about SPS in February 2021 and the FDA knew about it on Aprile 2021. But the FDA isn’t going to warn anyone about all these side effects because that would create vaccine hesitancy.

[…]

The COVID vaccines CAUSE SPS as well as hundreds of other severe adverse events which I documented LONG ago. There is simply no other way to explain the numbers in VAERS. Nobody will debate me on this.

Celine Dion developed SPS after COVID vaccination.

The chances she got it from the vaccine is 99.6%.

Will she go to a doctor who specializes in treating the vaccine injured? Nope. It’s highly likely she was told it wasn’t the vaccine by her doctor. Which means unfortunately, she will likely never recover since in general, the sooner you are treated properly, the greater the chance of making a recovery. To get proper treatment, you need to see a doctor who understands the cause.

Will Celine’s doctors ever tell her about this article? Nope. What a shame.

Celine Dion could be a powerful voice to warn people not to take the vaccine if she has the courage to speak the truth.