Ummagumma

Cultural appropriation  is a hotly debated topic these days.  It seems the creep of victimhood knows no bounds.  Now cultures themselves deserve to be protected from the immensely perceived threat of being borrowed from or copied by other cultures.  The UN wants to outlaw it .   NPR calls it "indefensible."   But are cultures truly sacred cows? Should they be legally defended as such?  Is it illegal or unethical to borrow from, say, various religions on a given spiritual quest?  Is it improper for artists to borrow from various traditions to create art?  Making cultures sacred is not the first step not toward their preservation but toward their deification.   Nietzsche would uncover all this hubris  for exactly what it is, the  neoliberal absurdity  of hurt feelings. Quite simply, cultural appropriation is the  ressentiment  of the slave morality caused by the privilege of the  master morality  and, simultaneously, the attempt by slave morality  to attain privilege through c

Proof of Purchase Roger Waters successfully channels the classic Pink Floyd aesthetic with Is This The Life We Really Want? , his first album in 25 years.  I have listened to the record several times now.  It has grown on me, although it isn't as good, in my opinion, as his 1992 Amused to Death and he comes off as just an angry old man on a couple of tunes.  Nevertheless, at 73, Waters shows he still has plenty of passion and lyricism to justify the effort. Is This The Life We Really Want? has most of the trappings of the classic Pink Floyd sound.   The album begins with a sound  montage of a beating heart, clocks ticking, and looped background voices, mostly radio announcers.  So it starts out with that wonderful classic feeling.  “ When We Were Young ” and “ Déjà Vu ” are rather nostalgic. They are interesting, if uninspiring, pieces of music (well, the opening track is a “sound collage” rather than music).  “Déjà Vu” is the album's best attempt at Waters' cynic

Proof of purchase. Note:  This post is filled with spoilers about the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey After investing much of my free time on my Nietzsche blog in the first half of 2017, I decided it was time for a mental break, a change of pace, and I wanted to read something purely entertaining.  I was browsing through my collection of old paperbacks from my high school and college days when I spotted Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and wanted to give it a try.   The film 2001 is one of my all-time favorites (I plan to review it in the near future) and the novel was written simultaneously as Clarke worked with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay.  My paperback is one of the oldest books in my library.  I don't have a clear memory of it anymore but, I think my grandmother bought it for me circa 1970, around the time the movie was re-released and came to my small town theater.   I couldn't understand a lot of the novel when I first read it around age 10. I