Documenting Distress

From Dinoscopus:

...the key to the last 500 (or 700) years of the history of mankind has been its apostasy, its slow but steady turning away from God, in particular from his divine Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. This eliminating of the true Messiah has left in men's lives an enormous gap to be filled, a gap unknown before the Incarnation. Hence a variety of false messianisms in modern times.

Communism is an outstanding example. It is the messianism of materialism. For it may be just as materialistic as the bourgeois society it seeks to destroy, even more so; and it certainly has nothing better with which to replace the residual human values of that society. Yet Communists are driven by a quasi-messianic urge to create their horrible new world. It is as though they are saying, "Better no god than your false hypocritical 'God'!" And to the extent that the God of the bourgeoisie is a false god, the Communist messianism rejecting it is not false. In this respect Communists may at least be credited with a messianic dimension. Similarly in the scream of protest of Rock musicians there is something just, however negative their protest proves finally to be.

Now Art, Literature, History, Culture, Music, each of them with a capital letter, are all worshipped as substitute religions by modern devotees who, because they have no present religion, pump up these by-products of true religion in the past to take its place. Hence the Dadaists' refusal of "Art", and their "re-definition" of art. "What is your Art?" they ask. "It is our godless god", say the Art-worshippers. "Your godless god is a urinal!" snorts Dada.

-- Bishop Williamson

Ave verum corpus

Ave verum corpus natum de Maria Virgine Vere passum, immolatum in cruce pro homine Cuius latus perforatum unda fluxit sanguine Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine O Jesu dulcis, o Jesu pie, o Jesu fili Mariae

(Thanks to The Anchoress.)

The End of the Music Industry?

From Robert Thompson's Daynotes Journal:

It seems that others, including the music industry itself, are finally catching on to what I've been saying for at least ten years. The music industry is dead, gone beyond any hope of salvage. The glory days are gone for good, killed by the Internet eliminating the artificial scarcity upon which the industry depended. The era of "superstar" musicians and groups is giving way to a new era in which many more musicians and groups will find a wider audience, while the platinum-plated superstars of the past find themselves earning middle-class incomes. Even The Economist is now sounding the death knell of the music companies: "IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there." The music industry is now well into its death spiral. CD sales have been declining year-on-year for years, and are now falling month-on-month. Fewer CDs being sold means retailers allocate less shelf space to CDs, which in turn means still fewer CDs will be sold, and the shelf space will be further reduced in a spiral that ends only when CDs are allocated no shelf space at all. Electronic sales of single tracks can't make up for lost revenues from declining CD sales, and anyway electronic sales appear to have peaked and begun to decline in real terms. Most people simply aren't willing to pay much if anything for music any more, and that's never going to change. Musicians will still make a living, of course, just as they did before the music industry was born. They'll make their livings by touring, by selling branded gear, and by selling CDs and electronic tracks directly to the fans who want to support them financially. Good musicians will probably make no more than middle-class incomes, and in fact Internet distribution means that it's likely that more musicians will be able to make at least a modest living than have ever been able to do so in the past. But the days of the top 0.01% of musicians earning millions are rapidly drawing to a close, as are the days when the music "industry" was able to insinuate itself between the musicians and their fans, taking the lion's share of the income.

Pavarotti : 1935-2007

Requiescat in pace

Broken Questions (Matthew Hurford)

Live from his home studio:

The Whitewalls

My nephew Matthew's band performing at the University of Waterloo's 50th Anniversary...and I'm one proud uncle! :-) 1 - Wake Up Little Susie: 2 - Johnny B. Good:

A Musical Gem

Karl Kohlhase - He describes his music as "a little like John Michael Talbot meeting James Taylor ..." not at all what I usually listen to but ... I was really moved. And, best of all, all of his music is available for free download! How did I learn about him? He was the guest on tonight's "Journey Home" program on EWTN.