Monthly Archives: July 2025

Tom Lehrer as composer 3

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music on by

A couple of days ago I was saddened but not surprised to learn that Tom Lehrer had died. He was 97 years old, after all. He remarked many years ago that “It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year,” but he went on to surpass the lifespans of nearly every well-known writer of music. Irving Berlin and Elliott Carter broke the century mark, but that’s about it. His songwriting career was only a short interlude in a long academic career, but his fans know nearly all of his thirty or so songs.

The lyrics of those songs are widely quoted and discussed, but not as much is said about his music. He set his satirical lyrics to tunes that are inventive, catchy, and full of solid musicianship. I’d like to say a few things about that music, to restore a bit of balance.
(more…)

Don’t call it “Alligator Auschwitz” 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged history language liberty on by

The new ICE confinement facility in Florida, semi-officially called “Alligator Alcatraz,” is by all accounts brutal, unsanitary, and degrading. It’s a showpiece of the Trump administration, whose followers admire it for its sheer viciousness. Some people, including plenty on Bluesky, have taken to calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.” The term trivializes the Nazi extermination camp. Bad as the Florida facility is, it isn’t designed to kill people systematically. Equating the two implies that Jews in the Nazi camps merely had a very rough time of it.

Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp, a place where many civilians are involuntarily moved to and confined in without charges or due process. The Japanese-American internment camps of World War II were concentration camps in the same sense, and I’ve used the term repeatedly for them. But it isn’t a death camp. Trump is evil, but he hasn’t reached that level of evil yet.
(more…)

The General on YouTube

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged music silent movies on by

After figuring out (I hope) what was wrong with the music I provided for Buster Keaton’s 1926 film The General at the Plaistow Library, I did the music over and recorded a new version for YouTube. That means there are no audience sounds, but in this case that’s an advantage. Besides, the music was recorded directly to a computer, so it has better sound quality than the recording I made at the library.

I’ve already discussed the movie here and my approach to accompanying it here, so I’ll just say that I hope you enjoy it.
(more…)

A silent movie failure

This entry was posted in Movies Music Personal and tagged music silent movies on by

I failed terribly last night when showing The General. I don’t know what I did wrong.

As I’ve said before and told the audience before the showing, The General is a complex movie. It’s a comedy, but it’s also a war movie. A train collapses into a gorge. Soldiers die on screen. I expect people to laugh at the funny parts. I don’t expect them to laugh at the deaths. I tried to underscore the mood of each scene, as I always do. It didn’t work.
(more…)

Six rules for responding to bad ideas

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged SanityProject on by

SciManDan has put up a video which everyone trying to debunk bad ideas should watch. Nominally he’s talking about Flat Earthers. A lot of his videos are on that subject; a friend of mine likes to watch them, so I watch them too. Really, though, the six rules he offers don’t apply just to answering people who think the world is flat. They apply to any bad ideas you’re trying to knock down: socialism, Trumpism, “greedflation” theory, Moon landing hoax claims, whatever.

Watch the video, but I’ll quote his six rules here, substituting “[bad idea]” for “flat earth” to show the generality.
(more…)