twc
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Dog Lovers Beware — This video may seriously melt your heart
Australia has an unenviable record of extinctions.
Homo sapiens arrived 60,000 years ago and pushed Australia’s megafauna to extinction: its giant kangaroos, wombats, razor-teethed “lions”,..
But the determined human slaughter of the thylacene, or Tasmanian Tiger, removed an essential Apex predator from its eco-system, while simultaneously destroying the most celebrated paradigm of convergent evolution.
You’ve more-or-less got to check for marsupial nether-parts and a female pouch to distinguish a thylacene from your friendly canis familiaris.
Yet a thylacene’s evolutionary line branched from a dog’s back in Jurassic times — about 160 million years ago, and 50 million years before the appearance of those prehistoric critters in “Jurassic Park” (which, in any case, mainly come from the Cretaceous).
What didn’t help the thylacine’s survival was the superior European stigmatising of marsupials as inferior, or “failed”, placental mammals!
Yet, anyone who has ever watched in awe that prejudicially assumed “even more inferior failed” mammal, the platypus, soon receives a salutary jolt that, in nature’s harsh wilderness, there are no “failed” animals — only beautifully adapted ones.
Bring Back the Thylacene?
Weimar Republic Songs by Hanns Eisler
Apologies for darkening the mood, but Hanns Eisler could write savage music.
(1) Song of the Commodity Brecht and Eisler (1930)
Capitalism thrives on supply and demand.
“By the way, what is a man?
Don’t ask me what a man is,
Don’t ask me my advice,
I’ve no idea what a man is.
All I have learnt is his price!”(2) The Secret Deployment words Erich Weinert; music Hanns Eisler (1929-30)
Most radical Weimar musicians assumed the USSR was socialist.
Postcript to music of the Weimar Republic
Alban Berg’s bleak opera Wozzeck (1925), to a text by Georg Büchner, (brother of the materialist author of “Force and Matter”, Ludwig Büchner, who was Marx’s bête noir) is perhaps the most enduring of Weimar’s [post-]classical music. It became popular despite its atonality.
March to the Scaffold Hector Berlioz (1830)
Part IV of the Symphonie fantastique — Episode in the Life of an ArtistIn a narcotic hallucination, the now suicidal Artist of the symphony’s title, is drummed through the streets of Paris to the Place de la Révolution for murdering his unattainable girlfriend. With his neck on the block he hears her theme (idée fixe) as his head is cut off.
The Symphonie fantastique is a pinnacle of 19th century romanticism. It was composed in Revolutionary 1830 when Delacroix was painting his Liberty Leading the People.
The images accompanying the music are incidental, but they convey the grotesquerie of Berlioz’s conception.
A Man’s a Man for a’ That Rabbie Burns (1795)
“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.”Burn’s poem was translated into German by Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was the revolutionary poet of Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie (NRZ) during the 1848 Revolution.
When the censors closed the NRZ down Marx ran the last issue through the press in red ink: “red, red, red was its war-cry — today it is soaked in red”.
Freiligrath’s defiant “Farewell to the NRZ” was spread across the front page banner …
“Farewell, brothers, but not farewell,
My spirit they can’t slay!
I’ll rise again with rattling Mail,
Better armed to join the fray!”(Apologies for all the edits — twc)
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
.
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
Noël Coward
Perhaps a mistake to include this conservative, but socialists may enjoy his sardonic humour …
(1) The Stately Homes of England (1932)
(2) There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner (1952?)
Ruler of the Queen’s Navee Gilbert & Sullivan (H.M.S. Pinafore)
You can “hardly ever” ignore G&S when it comes to 1870-80s political satire.
With the Paris Commune and the notorious International still in living memory, “socialism” was in the air and, in egalitarian form, it pervades G&S.
The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty proudly reveals the loathsome secret to his brilliant political career.
He and the Major General (Pirates of Penzance) are bumbling careerists of the type who oversaw the slaughter of a generation in the coming Great War. But Gilbert playfully pillories them as figures of political mockery.
Political Prisoners’ Chorus Ludwig van Beethoven (1805)
Beethoven’s opera Fidelio is based on a French play of the Reign of Terror, that took place just a decade earlier, and it contains a scene in which the broken political prisoners are temporarily let out into the yard.
Staged opera operates without the visual resources of cinema, and modern productions give the director free reign to improvise with the setting, but however he represents or misrepresents it on stage this harrowing basis of the Shawshank scene remains indescribably moving.
It was on the eve of the 1849 Dresden uprising, after a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that Mikhail Bakunin approached the conductor Richard Wagner and passionately declared “if everything else goes down in the revolution, we must see to it that Beethoven’s 9th survives”.
Russia and the Rebel
Russian music about rebels is remembered most for its ecstatic love themes …
The Ballad of Stenka Razin. Poem by Dmitry Sadovnikiv (1883), music [trad?]
Stenka Razin (1630-71, leader of the Cossack revolt against the Boyars [feudal lords], sacrifices his young bride in the Volga River to placate his grumbling crew, and arouses them to carouse “where beauty lies”.
“Volga, Volga, Mother Volga, Make this lovely girl a grave!”
Stenka Razin — Russian Red Army Choir
(2) Spartacus. Ballet, Aram Khachaturian (1954)
Gladiator slave Spartacus (103-71 BCE) leads a slave revolt against Rome and frees slave girl Phrygia. They celebrate their short-lived liberty in the famous Adagio before Spartacus is captured and summarily executed by the Romans.
The Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia — Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, cond. Azim Karimov.
The great climax starts around 5:30.
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
