Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 64th Edition. Things authentic and important.

Why there?

On Saturday, March 30, Pro Hamas protestors interrupted the Easter Vigil Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.

Why St. Patrick's?

For the same reason, most likely, that LGBTQ+ figures had a protesting funeral there recently. People are drawn to Catholic places, as they're real, and therefore attention is paid to them.

Why her?

Courtney Love, in an interview with Standard, stated; "Taylor is not important. She might be a safe space for girls, and she's probably the Madonna of now, but she's not interesting as an artist."

This followed Billie Eilish criticizing, sort of anonymously, "wasteful artists" who put out multiple vinyl editions, an apparent softball for sustainability.  She later said her comments weren't directed at Swift.

Hmmm. . . 

Why are these chanteuses dissing Taylor?  

I don't really know, but I will note that Love commenting on who is important and interesting in laughable.  Is Love "important" or "interesting"?  If she is, she might be interesting as she's the late wife of the tragic Curt Cobane, whom I don't find to have been particularly important, but certainly tragic.  And for Eilish, she's sort of a teenage train wreck who probably needs to get over her weird diet and flipping between hiding her form and flaunting it.

Taylor is interesting because she's a musical success.  I don't like her music, which I find to be juvenile, but I will note that appearance wise she's a throwback almost to the 1940s, and appears to have gained success while being basically normal in every fashion.  

Culturally, therefore, she might be sort of important in a way.

Love, and Eilish, on the other hand, might be fairly unimportant in every sense.  Musically, right now, it's hard to see what actually is important.  Whoever they are, they aren't in pop music.  

Indeed, much of society seems to be grasping for the authentic and important right now, without much out there in the culture offering it.

Appearances

Back in November, I posted this item:

What the Young Want.* The Visual Testimony of the Trad Girls. The Authenticity Crisis, Part One.

Since that time, this trend locally has noticeably increased.  It's really remarkable.

For whatever reason, I'm a student of people, so I take notice of what they wear.  I'm probably in a minority of sorts that way.  What people wear at Mass is a common topic in Cyber Catholic circles, but the recent turn towards the conservative amongst young, white, female Catholic parishioners is really remarkable.  It's a real rejection of the cultural norm of our era.

Indeed, very recently, even amongst those young women who were part of this group, there's suddenly a change.  One young woman who is routinely at Mass with her family on Sundays, and who typically showed a lot of shoulder (no, there's no problem with that) is now covering up hugely.  Something's changed.  It doesn't, however, carry over to Hispanic or Native American young women, both of whom continue to dress the way they have.  Hispanics have always dressed very conservatively at Mass, but not in a trad fashion. They're keeping on keeping on with that.

News, real news but in a rumor fashion, leaked out recently that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Byzantine Church is looking at putting in a mission in Casper, which would be a mission of a mission.  I don't know how many Ukrainian Catholics there may be in town, but I'll bet it's a tiny number.  I also bet that the mission church that's thinking of establishing a mission here, which is out of Cody, serves a mostly non-Eastern Rite community.  

Something is going on there too.  At a time at which some in the Latin Rite seem focused on a topic that's frankly jumped the shark, by and large, and which is really a matter of European culture, not biology, the young and rank and file in the pews seem to be moving on.  

Becoming a parody of yourself

One of the risks of taking the long reach for something is that you can end up actually becoming unauthentic in your quest for authenticity.

I'm reminded of Courtney Love again.

On her Wikipedia page, there's a picture of Love wearing a kokoshnik, a stiff hat associated with Russian women.  Russian women don't wear them anymore, and I'm sure they haven't for eons.  She's wearing it with a miniskirt.  It looked absurd, but was probably meant to make a statement.  Or here's another example:

The kind of dumb stuff you say when you actually really care about "your 'basic' fashion sense".

I don't know who Japanese Breakfast is (or for that matter what an actual Japanese breakfast is) but they've showed up on this Twitter headline:

Japanese Breakfast is too busy returning to Coachella and making 'music for bottoms' to care about your 'basic' fashion sense

Oh, bull.  That's the exact thing you say when you've tuned your fashion sense to look like you don't have a fashion sense, so you can appear to stay edgy for Coachella.

M'eh.

Exactly.  

I note this as in the pews are a young couple, they're not married but perhaps engaged, whose family I somewhat know.  From a very conservative background, they're trying to affect the disaffected but conservative look to the max.  Unwashed hair and, for the young man, probably third or fourth hand overcoats from the 1970s with huge hounds tooth pattern. The young woman wears, of course, a chapel veil but also is affecting plain to the maximum extent possible, which is detracting a bit from her appearance.  I do love her very round, plain glasses, however.

Anyhow, when going for something crosses over into sort of a parody, you've gone too far.

Lost

Anyhow, I think this trend has been going on for a while.  It explains the entire Hipster look that's still with us, and was much in force several years ago.

Some days, when I leave the office, there's a young woman coming in.  She's either a Native American or a Hispanic from somewhere south of the border.  She's always dressed very conservatively, with dresses that remind me of what Latin American women traditionally wear.  She always has a big smile when you see and acknowledge her.

She's authentic.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 63d Edition. Strange Bedfellows.

Apostolic Christianity, Catholic, Donald Trump, Education, homosexuality, Israeli Hamas War, law, Mormon, Pope Francis, religion, Sex, theology, Zeitgeist

Wednesday, April 16, 1924. Flyer forced down.

Germany accepted the Dawes Plan.

Romania announced that it had settled its debts with Italy.

Senator Warren was reported as having voted against the Japanese Exclusion Act.

And an aircraft went down in the Around the World flight.

Henry (Enrico) Mancini was born.  He enlisted in the Army upon turning age 18 in 1943 and interestingly served in the 28th Air Force Band before being reassigned overseas to the 1306th Engineers Brigade in France.  He was the writer of many famous movie scores.

Last prior edition:

Tuesday, April 15, 1924. Opening day.

1920s, 1924, Army, baseball, Calvin Coolidge, cavalry, Equine Transportation, Sports

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 56th Edition. Timing

February 5, 2024

I have low interest in the Grammy's, but I was passing by the television when Long Suffering Spouse was watching it.  It was just as the Album of the Year was announced, which went to Taylor Swift.

Swift, as we all know, has been the subject of an insane far right conspiracy theory that GOP pundits right now try to nervously laugh off (if you haven't heard it, listen to last weekend's This Week in which the pundit calls it crazy and then realizes that he's pretty much called the entire GOP crazy, tries to laugh it off, and then goes into a tirade about how all football fans are voting for Trump.  Um, crazy much?

Anyhow, Swift, with perfect timing, lingers in her very brief acceptance speech to state she's going to give an announcement that she was going to wait until April to give.  Oh my, what could it be?  A wedding announcement or. . . the much feared Biden endorsement?

Nope, her new album is being released.

Nicely played.

Swift contrasts nicely with Myley Cyrus, who won her first award.

Not so nicely played are the machinations of one Mike Johnson, who it is now clear is nothing more than a puppet of Trump's.  He went on Meet the Press to defend himself, was slammed on that show, and on all the rest of them.

And JD Vance is now pretty much an outright fascist.  Perhaps more so than Trump is claimed to be, although he's paving the way for a violent rejection of the United States Supreme Court.  Vance is pretty desperately campaigning with Donald for the VP slot.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 55th Edition. Uncle Mike has the floor: Class Is In Session

In Memoriam. Melanie Safka, 1947-2024

Best remembered for Brand New Key, she was, in some ways, a slightly earlier, and somewhat less known, version of the same sort of singer than Linda Ronstadt would become, even preforming some of the same songs.

She performed at Woodstock, still so young that her mother went with her.

What Have They Done to My Song Ma is one I recall from my childhood for some reason, dimly recalling that my mother liked it.

Frankly, Billie Eilish probably could use a good hamburger and a beer, and maybe hang out at some community college for a while.

Monday, October 4, 1943. Monstrous

Himmler delivered the first of his Posen speeches to SS officers and German administrators, in which he stated, in part:

I also want to speak to you here, in complete frankness, of a really grave chapter. Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said quite openly, but all the same we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to do our duty as we were ordered, and to stand comrades who had erred against the wall and shoot them, and we never spoke about it and we never will speak about it. It was a matter of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, that we never talked about it amongst ourselves, that we never discussed it. Each of us shuddered and yet each of us knew clearly that the next time he would do it again if it were an order, and if it were necessary. I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is easily said: "The Jewish people are going to be exterminated," that's what every Party member says, "sure, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination - it'll be done." And then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a firstrate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this - and except for cases of human weakness - to have stayed decent, that has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history, for we know how difficult it would be for us if today - under bombing raids and the hardships and deprivations of war - if we were still to have the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators, and inciters. If the Jews were still lodged in the body of the German nation, we would probably by now have reached the stage of 1916-17. 

The wealth they possessed we took from them. I gave a strict order, which has been carried out by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl, that this wealth will of course be turned over to the Reich in its entirety. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have erred will be punished in accordance with the order given by me at the start, threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single Mark of this money is a dead man. A number of SS men - they are not very - many committed this offense, and they shall die. There will be no mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, as a watch, by one Mark or a cigarette or anything else. We do not want, in the end, because we destroyed a bacillus, to be infected by this bacillus and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Wherever it may form we will together burn it away. All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character.... 

He also stated:

What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me, Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other races live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture. 

He went on to refer to these people as animals, noting how the Germans were, he claimed, the only people in the world to have a decent attitude towards animals.

These were words from a German leader, it might be noted, celebrating German murder.

The Germans took the Greek island of Kos, following which they killed 100 Italian officers, following orders from Hitler regarding Italian officers who had followed their government into action against the Germans.

Corsica was liberated from the Axis.

Australian commanders at Dampu.

The Australians prevailed in the Battle of Dampu.

Albanian resistance fighters prevailed in the Battle of Drashovica.

An RAF raid on Frankfurt hit a children's hospital's air raid shelder, resulting in 529 civilian deaths, of which 90 were children.

The U-279, U-389, U-422 and U-460 were all destroyed by aircraft in the Atlantic.

The U.S. Navy attacked German shipping at Bodø, Norway with aircraft from the USS Ranger in Operation Leader.  Five German ships were sunk, four damaged and two aircraft lost for a loss of four Navy aircraft.

Dauntless dive bomber in Opeation Leader.

The operation in far northern Norway was the U.S. Navy's only carrier assault on German targets during World War Two, outside of operations against submarines and in the Mediterranean.

Bing Crosby recorded I'll Be Home for Christmas.

Thursday, September 20, 1973. The Battle of the Sexes and the Death of Jim Croce.

"The Battle of the Sexes" took place in the Houston Astrodome between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King won three straight sets.

King and Riggs prior to the match.

This event was a big deal at the time, and I can recall my parents watching the television coverage of it.  It's always seemed odd to me as Riggs, who had been a tennis great in his youth, was well past his prime, while King was in hers.  Riggs, however, was quite the promoter and much of the attention can be attributed to that.

It was, up until that point, the most watched tennis match of all time.

Jim Croce, age 30, was killed along with five others when a chartered Beechcraft E18S hit a tree during takeoff from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Louisiana.  

Croce was a well known pop singer at the time.  When in grade school, one year we had to learn his Time In A Bottle song for a performance of some sort.  Perhaps it's for that reason, but I've never liked that song since then, and I didn't like it then.  Or maybe its just the song.  I have always liked his Leroy Brown song.

Only a Fool Would Say That

Only a Fool Would Say That was Steely Dan's song in reaction to John Lennon's Marxist anthem Imagine.

I'm glad some other musicians reacted.  Imagine is a horrible song, espousing an ideology that, while he claimed it would result in "nothing to kill or die for", killed more in the 20th Century than any other ideology going.

Lawrence Reed has an article on Lennon himself in The American Spectator.  It catalogs Lennon's real character, including his physical abuse of his first wife and his multiple extramarital affairs.  He's not a guy to be admired for any reason, but for some reason, perhaps his late physical appearance, and a decades long Libby Custer like effort to boost his image has created a false one for him.

I don't really get why people idolize performers anyway, except for their work.  I love the music of Jimi Hendrix, but he wasn't example a model of clean and effective living.

And interestingly, people will recite music and sing it without really pondering what the lyrics actually mean.  In our "Me Too" era, this is astounding.  Imagine is a Communist anthem.  Sweet Home Alabama excuses ongoing racial segregation in the South.  Brand New Key really does have sort of a creepy set of double meanings quality to it.  

And in spite of my self, I like those last two songs.

But at the same time, I guess, I don't idolize the Leonard Skynard or Melanie Safka

Wednesday, December 30, 1942. Sinatra breaks out, and Soviets starting to. And, Bobby Soxers.

Frank Sinatra appeared as a solo act for the first time, appearing before a screaming crowed of bobby soxers of 5,000 at the Paramount Theatre in New York City.

Sinatra on the radio with actress Alida Valli.*

Sinatra in some ways was the first example of a phenomenon that would attach to certain male performers of the mid 20th Century in which they were the subject of gigantic teenage female fascination.  We tend to think of personalities like Elvis in this category, but Sinatra had the same adulation prior to their experiencing it.

His appearance at this point in time raises certain interesting questions.

Sinatra was born into an Italian American family that endured rough circumstances, to some degree, but which also saw his father go from being a boxer to a fire captain, and which featured a dominant, highly driven mother.  The mother supported the son's endeavors.  Sinatra, who always performed under his own name, took an interest in music early and started singing professionally with bands at age 20.  He sang with Tommy Dorsey's band in the late 1930s, with his desire to break free from the band resulting in a legal battle and persistent rumors that Mafia boss Willie Moretti, who was Sinatra's Godfather, had held a gun to Dorsey's ear.  That rumor was incorporated by Mario Puzo in the novel, and later the movie, The Godfather to apply to a very much Sinatra like character.

Sinatra was a huge hit in the early 1940s, but being of conscript age, the logical question is why he wasn't drafted.  He was categorized by the Selective Service as 4-F, which provides the reason, due to a perforated ear drum, but Army files later indicated that he was regarded as psychologically unsuitable for military service due to emotional instability.  He did tour with the USA in the latter portion of the war.  A lack of wartime service did not hurt him, as it did not hurt John Wayne, which says something about the culture of the time.

He campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

Sinatra lived a long, and not uncontroversial, life, dying at age 82. As all that would really be too long to go into, will stop here, with the World War Two story told.

Bobby soxers should be noted.

Bobby soxers have come to be erroneously associated with the 1950s, but in fact were a 1940s phenomenon.  They were teenage girls and women in their very early 20s who were an early example of the emerging youth culture of the United States.  Indeed, they were in some ways its real pioneers.  They were called "bobby soxers" as, at the time, they wore short "bobbed" socks with saddle oxfords.

Saddle oxfords are a dress shoe now, but they've always had the reputation of being a semi casual dress shoe.  At some point they became heavily associated with students and young people.  They were introduced as a mass manufactured shoe in the early 1900s by the Spaulding Company, with the first example introduced in 1906. That's the same company, we'd note, famous for basketballs, etc., which says something, as at first, it was an athletic shoe, not a dress shoe.

Probably that origin as a sporting shoe caused its popularity.  It crossed over pretty quickly to dress wear, anticipating a later trend we have seen the past few decades of basketballs hoes in that use.  

The shoe came on the scene just as there was a real expansion of women in sports, so it was ideally timed  It became hugely popular with cheerleading teams.  By the 1930s it was approaching near universal adoption by schools as mandatory footwear for girls academic uniforms, although it remained popular with men.  They began to become school uniform shoes for boys in the period as well.

The same period saw a shortening of skirts. The combination of the shorter skirts, saddle shoes, and short socks lead to Bobby Soxers being the name for young women affecting the style.  The style endured until the 1950s, when it faded, but the shoes themselves retained widespread academic popularity until the decline of clothing standards started to set in during the late 1960s.

While it may seem odd now, the style was somewhat risqué.

President Roosevelt spent the morning visiting with Naval personnel, including Admirals King and Leahy, and the Secretary of the Navy.  He was in New York City at the time, and had a doctor's visit in the afternoon.

The Red Army was generally gaining ground everywhere to the south of Stalingrad.

Footnotes:

*Not really related to this entry but for this photograph, Alida Valli was an Italian actress coined by Mussolini as "the most beautiful woman in the world."  She truly was lovely.

Born to nobility, her real name and title was Freiin Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg.  She was born in a part of Italy that is now in Croatia, and which had once been part of Austria Hungary.  She was of mixed heritage, but considered herself Italian.

The photo must have been taken post 1943 as she was active in Italy at this time.  Married three times, her first husband was an Italian fighter pilot who was killed in action at Tobruk.

She was popular in Western films throughout her career, which again says something about the times.  Unlike hugely popular Italian actresses of a certain appearance, Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, Valli had a more normal figure and rose to popularity in the "dirty" Italy period when Italy was regarded as, and truly was, fairly backwards.

A minor and disturbing example of how quickly war changes things. The singing of Sofia Shkidchenko.

She was a contestant on Ukraine's "Ukraine's Got Talent", kids edition, in 2017.

Seems like every nation in the world has some variant of this.

Jimmy Akin posted this on his Facebook Feed, noting how cheerful this prewar performance was, which it is.  I think she was 11 at the time she sang this, and she's awesome.

I will  note that yodeling isn't really a Ukrainian thing, as so far as I know, but she's super at it.  Some of the lyrics here are in English, which shows how dominant English has become globally as well, and contrary to what people will claim about there being no accents in sung English, her Ukrainian accent is thick.

Well, with pipes like that, she's tried to keep a singing career up, and she ought to.  She has a really good voice, and a command of it.

As recently as 2020, the yodeling thing was still going on.  Here's an example from that year, at which time she was apparently 14.  Here she sings in German.  I can grasp some German, but not enough to be able to tell if her Ukrainian accent is equally thick in German.

You probably can't make a career of being a Ukrainian yodeler, I'm guessing, and her YouTube page shows some odd attempts at covers, such as John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads.  Anyhow, here's one from last year that's clearly an attempt to cross over into being a Ukrainian pop star (heck, maybe she is a Ukrainian pop star).

As a non-Ukrainian, I have to say that this piece is both very pop, and very, even oddly, Ukrainian.

Here's a more "pop" one.

What about now?

And check out the evolution of the music, particularly the lyrics.

And this one could be right out of the Second World War.

So there you go.  How to go from a kid singing "What Does The Fox Say" to ballads about killing the Russians.

Really good job there, Putin.  Getting your country into a war you can't win, over dreams of imperial glory, and making a people that didn't like yours in the first place, probably hate you for another generation.

January 2, 1941. The work of 1941 commences.

Americans went to work on the first day of work for the New Year.  Always a joyous occasion.  The Bookkeeping department of Manufacturer's Trust in New York on this day in 1941.

Dublin in neutral Ireland was bombed by the Luftwaffe.  It'd be bombed again the next night.

Cardiff in Wales was also bombed, this being the second and worse day of the Cardiff Blitz.  Both events are not unrelated in that, in the context of 1941, air forces had a difficult time bombing accurately by night, and largely did not.  In that context, it was possible for the Luftwaffe bombing crews to miss their marks by a large distance and, as this demonstrates, end up bombing a neutral city.

Today in World War II History—January 2, 1941

The Andrew Sisters released Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, one of their signature songs.

This song is strongly associated, of course, with World War Two, but at the time of its release, the United States was not at war.  Rather, large numbers of men were in the service in training, having been drafted in anticipation of the war, or being in called up National Guard units.

The US announced its plan to build Liberty Ships as part of our war effort while we were not yet at war.

An enormous number of them would come to be made, and manufacturing time was reduced to such an extent that they were manufactured in twenty-four days or less.  Part of their innovation was to use welds, rather than rivets, in their construction.

Only four remain.

Elsewhere on this day during World War Two:

Day 490 January 2, 1941

Am I the only one who finds Korean boy bands to be super creepy?

As in really creepy?

Frankly, I find Korean girl bands to be pretty creepy also.  

The other day an issue of People was laying around and I thumbed through it and found an article on a Korean K Pop girl band.  Really creepy. They're obviously the Bubble Gum of their day in a decade people will look back on them laughingly, with their assembled personalities and westernized pink hair, etc.  Indeed, people will probably find them uncomfortable.

But the boy bands?  Really creepy.

In Memoriam, Mac Davis and Helen Reddy

I can't say that I was a fan of either, but they were part of the background music of my early late childhood and early teen years. AM radio on local stations featured both, indeed the same channel here played both, in the early 1970s when they were in their prime.

Both died yesterday at age 78.

Davis I remember as a popular singer who had a popular television variety show when there were such things.  My parents liked the show.  I also recall him from North Dallas Forty, the rather unvarnished and critical movie about professional football with Nick Nolte as a broken up football player reaching the end of his career, although I thought Davis looked like an unlikely football player.

He died from complications of heart surgery.

Helen Reddy was part of the era in particular for her anthem, I Am Woman, which was played absolutely everywhere for awhile and which was the standard of the "Women's Liberation" movement.  I didn't realize that she was Australian born until today.  Her health had suffered enormously in recent years.