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Showing posts from July, 2019

Going Deep with Kung-Fu Kenny on DAMN.

Note: This post contains explicit material. I’m very late to the party but perhaps the fact that I’m a 60-year-old white southern male might allow you to cut me some slack.  I recently purchased the digital download of DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar and, as I do with most new music, I have obsessed over it the past few days.  My interest in Rap/Hip-Hop emerged last year.  I mentioned it in my “ Loose Ends ” post in December.  At the time, I was only familiar with a few of Kendrick’s songs, HUMBLE. being one of them, of course.  It was such a phenomenon when it was released in 2017 that I became aware of it through my normal music news feeds. Anyway, I’ve now listened to DAMN. multiple times and glanced around YouTube and other spaces for reviews and analysis of the album.  In this review I'll mention the music some but my main focus will be to take a closer look at Kendrick’s lyrics, their ideas and structural aspects.   DAMN. is a concept album.  The tracks stitch together to fo

Gaming Barbarossa: August 1941

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The 1st Panzer Army is able to encircle a large number of Soviet units near Kiev. The Germans only receive one weak infantry division as reinforcements.  They get 4 infantry steps as replacements which go to weakened corps in the north and south.  The Soviets, on the other hand, receive their first substantial reinforcement in the form of 14 infantry armies plus some regional corps.  More importantly, the Soviet get two headquarter units with which they can make better orchestrated attacks.   The first Soviet HQ represents their supreme marshal Zhukov.  He works with a range of 3 hexes, just like the German Panzer HQs.  The second represents STAVKA, the Soviet Supreme Command Reserve.  This important HQ has a range of 6 hexes.  Unlike most other chits in the game, the Soviet player may choose to play the STAVKA chit whenever he wishes , except that it cannot be played before the Axis selects a chit on turns when the Axis has initiative.   The Soviets may place any number of reinf

Reading Proust: The Fugitive – The Beginnings of Lost Time

The actual “forgetting” part of Albertine does not happen in Chapter One (in fact, she is never completely forgotten).  At the beginning of the next chapter, Marcel understands that “before returning to the state of indifference from which one started, one cannot avoid covering in the reverse direction the distances one had traversed in order to arrive at love, the itinerary one follows, the line one takes, are not necessarily the same.” (page 754) While taking a walk in Paris, Marcel notices three “well-born girls” of which “the fair one” catches his eye.  She gazes back at him from a distance before entering a carriage at the entrance of a hotel and going away.  His heart beats wildly.  Marcel becomes “madly in love with her” and inquires as to who she is.  The concierge gives him the name of a girl that Robert has mentioned having sex with earlier in the novel.  Marcel lives mostly in a fantasy world with women at this time, after having felt the void that having sex with various g

Reading Proust: The Fugitive – Grieving and Forgetting

At about 370 pages, The Fugitive is the shortest volume in the novel.  This is entirely due to the fact the Proust died as he was writing it.  Nevertheless, as I mentioned in my post on The Captive , there is a complete narrative structure with associated subplots and musings, so The Fugitive can be fully comprehended from start to finish.  But, unlike the previous volume, Proust, working in a semi-comatose state at times, did something significant to The Fugitive just before he died.  He obsessively marked through about two-thirds of the piece, as if he wanted to cut most of it out. In his biography of the author, Jean-Yves Tadie explains that Proust worked from a typed manuscript that was duplicated by carbon copy.  The author did not touch the carbon copy and worked with only the “top copy” when it came to expanding and rewriting his text.  Tadie makes the sensible claim that Proust “always made additions and never deleted material.”  So, in his opinion, it was not Proust’s int

Taking in a Braves Game

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Ronald Acuna, Jr. draws a walk to load the bases.  The Braves didn't score this time.  The crowd gravitated toward the parts of the stadium that were in the shade.  It was a really hot, humid afternoon. My daughter and I took in a Braves game yesterday.  She had asked about going to one several weeks ago.  We have always connected on baseball and softball , among other things.  It was a fun time for both of us and the game was definitely a good one to watch. The Braves beat the Miami Marlins 4-3 in what ended up being a tense game.  We lucked up and got to see the recently signed free agent Dallas Keuchel pitch a decent game.  It was 4-0 when he left after throwing 7.1 innings.  He scattered five hits while striking out 4 against only one walk.  That walk is what took him out of the game, bringing in the wobbly Braves bullpen to make the game closer than it ever should have been. What impresses me most about Keuchel is he throws strikes.  He rarely pitches behind in the