I fancy meself a South Park Republican, no prig he, more likely to laugh at the ineptness of somebody trying to offend him than to be offended. A Piss Christ or a Virgin Mary made of elephant shit is so last century it’s hardly worth the bother of feigning outrage.
But I do confess that our friends and allies in Japan have come up with something I’m compelled/appalled enough to hide behind a link.
The only consolation is that there’s really nothing to be done for an encore.
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To me, these days, any artist whose work has a resemblance to its actual real-life subject is “conservative,” so too any artist whose sense of beauty corresponds to what is considered beautiful in real life regardless of context.
Above, Beth in White [2006]. Below, Corner of Ripka and Wilde Streets [2010].
Peter’s website is featuring his more recent work such as the latter, and the gentle observer notes a certain evolution in style, toward a less literal and more impressionistic and personal use of line and color.
I relate to PVD’s work not only on the visceral level, that I feel present at the scene, but it’s more than that. His newer work has added impact, and for that first glimpse of the scene, I’m an artist—I’m Peter, the artist—myself. He has lent me his discerning and loving eye, so that I may see what he sees, and feel it as he does.
What a gift, more a sharing really, between artist and audience.
As a matter of disclosure, Peter Van Dyck is related to me by marriage: my sister is married to his father. The names are coincidence, or kismet, depending on your view of these things.
I do hope that that provincial fact, or my tarnishing him with the “conservative” brush, does him or his work no fatal disservice. I was shown his earliest work over a decade ago, and even then it made my heart rise—life seemed just a little bit richer for having seen his work.
I’d say if there’s a conservative approach to artistry, it’s this—to show us what we strive to see but cannot, the beauty we know is there but lack the clarity of vision to perceive.
The kind artist, the lover of life and the lover of man, lends us the startlingly clear blink of his eye now and then, although it takes him hours upon hours [and a lifetime of preparation] to get it down onto his canvas.
I have stood on the corner of Ripka & Wilde and wanted to be nowhere else in creation at that very moment; I have had Beth take my breath away.
For that, to Peter Van Dyck, I am grateful, and shall be all my life.
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…Come hear Ed Whelan of NRO’s Bench Memos speak on the judicial nomination and confirmation process. Hosted by the Orange County Federalist Society.
Details here.
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Interesting emailia from me Dad:
1. Hale Business Systems, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Fuller Brush, and W. R. Grace Co…
Will merge and become: Hale, Mary, Fuller, Grace.
2. Polygram Records, Warner Bros., and Zesta Crackers join forces and become: Poly Warner Cracker.
3. 3M will merge with Goodyear and become: MMMGood.
4. Zippo Manufacturing, Audi Motors, Dofasco, and Dakota Mining will merge and become: ZipAudiDoDa.
5. FedEx is expected to join its competitor, UPS, and become: FedUP.
6. Fairchild Electronics and Honeywell Computers
will become: Fairwell Honeychild.
7. Grey Poupon and Docker Pants are expected
to become: Poupon Pants.
8. Knotts Berry Farm and the National Organization of Women will become: Knott NOW!
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A tasty bit of emailia that came my way:
Craigslist Ad:
We are a small & casual restaurant in downtown Vancouver and we are looking for solo musicians to play in our restaurant to promote their work and sell their CD. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More jazz, rock, & smooth type music, around the world and mixed cultural music. Are you interested to promote your work? Please reply back ASAP.
A Musician’s Reply:
Happy new year! I am a musician with a big house looking for a restauranteur to come to my house to promote his/her restaurant by making dinner for me and my friends. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get a positive response. More fine dining & exotic meals mixed with some ethnic fusion cuisine. Are you interested to promote your restaurant? Please reply back ASAP.
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Along with my lists from 2009 and 2010, I logged 101 books over the past three years. Here’s the list from 2011:
- Real Education, by Charles Murray. It’s become commonplace in the conversation about education to sigh about how there are no easy answers. This is probably as much because we are only prepared to accept answers that comport with certain preconditions utterly at odds with reality, insisting on the same results for every American kid, and thus guaranteeing failure.
- A Fierce Discontent, by Michael McGerr. An excellent book about the Progressive Era, which I reviewed earlier this year (part 1; part 2).
- The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen. A quick and interesting read. I discussed it a bit here.
- A Long Way From Home, by Tom Brokaw. Brokaw has a vivid and detailed memory, and is a fine biographer of the Boomer experience. While their parents rinsed and reused paper towels, Boomers proceeded to make themselves sick on the excesses of the 80s. Rebels indeed!
- What Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe. A very well done account of the forgottenest era of American history.
- Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, by William Voegeli. I reviewed this book here.
- The Liberal Mind, by Kenneth Minogue. I also made references to this book in my review of Never Enough.
- The Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman. I reviewed this book here.
- Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, by Greg Bahnsen.
- The American Political Tradition, by Richard Hofstadter. A preeminent work by a preeminent U.S. historian. Highly recommended.
- By This Standard: The Authority of God’s Law Today, by Greg Bahnsen.
- The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Thoughts on this important work on liberal economics here.
- War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life, by Wendell Cox. Founder of Demographia, Cox is a leading scholar demonstrating how New Urbanists’ policies actually work against them as well as everyone else.
- After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, by Mark Steyn. Some thoughts here.
- Manliness, by Harvey Mansfield. A discourse on an increasingly outdated topic.
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. TANSTAAFL!
- The Gated City, by Ryan Avent. The unintended consequences of urban planning and hyperactive land use regulations.
- The Truth About Obamacare, by Sally C. Pipes. A survey of what Obamacare does, and some of its expected consequences. Not a lot here you didn’t hear about in op-eds leading up to its passage, but it’s a decent digest.
- Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, by Claude S. Fischer. Despite off-handed accounts to the contrary, the American debt-culture is not a new phenomenon. As production increased and transportation costs decreased from the 18th century onward, the notion that everyday Americans “deserved” certain commodities—whether tea, umbrellas, or high-speed internet—took hold. (One wonders whether such high sentiment is driven by financiers and industrialists, who enjoy the profits of the new credit accounts and increased sales it generates.) What is new under the sun are the incredible advances in health care and the unique pressures the growing elderly population are bringing to bear. Economically comfortable and politically powerful, these Americans tend toward a post-materialism in which, “[s]ecure in body, they now focus on the soul—on higher personal goals, such as self-improvement, and higher social goals, such as saving the environment.” While Boomers hold onto their property and power and write laws that eliminate the economic opportunities they enjoyed, successor generations are left to pay the tab for their forebears’ entitlements and high-minded social goals. This, not consumer debt or wealth inequality or crony capitalism or international turmoil, is the truly unprecedented challenge 21st century America faces.
- Baby Boomer Bust, by Roger Chiocchi. Mostly anecdotes from poll data taken by the author.
- One Nation Under AARP, by Frederick Lynch. Some interesting data here, which I will discuss in a longer piece hopefully later this month.
- The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, by James C. Humes.
- Popper’s Tort Reform, by Andrew F. Popper. Persuasively makes the case that tort reform is too complicated an issue to fire-off as a campaign one-liner.
- Republic, Lost, by Lawrence Lessig. Highly recommended; reviewed and analyzed here.
- The Conscience of a Conservative, by Barry Goldwater.
- A Disquisition on Government, by John C. Calhoun. A flawed but important contributor to 19th century American politics.
- Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution, by Elihu Root. Published in 1913 between the second industrial revolution and the New Deal’s reinvention of American government, Root captures the modern role of government. No longer insulated in small, organic economic communities, Americans were both enriched by and involuntarily swept into a national economy fueled by instant communication and efficient transportation. Government, then, must “do something more than merely keep the peace—to regulate the machinery of production and distribution and safeguard it from interference so that it shall continue to work.” And yet “The utmost that government can do is measurably to protect men, not against the wrong they do themselves but against wrong done by others and to promote the long, slow process of educating mind and character to a better knowledge and nobler standards of life and conduct. We know all this, but when we see how much misery there is in the world and instinctively cry out against it, and when we see some things that government may do to mitigate it, we are apt to forget how little after all it is possible for any government to do, and to hold the particular government of the time and place to a standard of responsibility which no government can possibly meet.”
- Utopia, by Sir Saint Thomas More.
- The Housing Boom and Bust, by Thomas Sowell. Sowell provides data and analysis further explaining the particular hell the Boomers have wrought on their successors with respect to the housing market and, as a result, the credit market. More to come in a longer post later this month.
- Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, by Luigi Zingales and Raghuram Rajan. As much blame as we heap on the finance sector, we ought to consider the powerful role credit markets have played in reducing poverty and creating opportunities for the have-nots. In countries with greater government intervention, crony capitalism is a feature, not a bug. It yields stability—a premium for fledgling or rebuilding nations—at the expense of full and fair opportunity to all.
- A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens.
- Throw Them All Out, by Peter Schweizer. Also discussed in a recent post.
- Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, by Louis Brandeis. Justice Brandeis displayed a more intimate familiarity with how bankers and corporatists worked than perhaps any other Supreme Court justice.
- Inside American Education, by Thomas Sowell. Spending more money on education and inflating our kids’ grades and test scores, predictably, have not improved American education. Even class size appears to be a red herring, as America is outperformed by Japan and its high student-teacher ratio. And higher education is a racket—see Claude Fischer’s quote regarding the premium on “higher social goals,” which have spurred policymakers to push Americans to take on more and more debt, purportedly with the goal of sending very kid to college. This greater demand put pressure on the supply of higher education, driving up its cost, the consequence of this “higher social goal.” Unintended though this consequence may have been, it could have been unexpected by someone wholly illiterate in basic economics.
- NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, by Samuel Blumenfeld. A conspiracy theory, for sure, but somewhat entertaining with some useful history of the national education unions. I hesitate to call them “teachers’ unions,” since the NEA was started by administrators and textbook publishers.
- Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky. At a general level, much about Alinsky’s teachings about community organizing apply to Obama’s great success as a campaigner and failure as a president. Alinsky treated people as foot soldiers to accomplish his own agenda, and told them what they needed to hear to mobilize them. Because political issues have a shelf life, it’s necessary to keep finding new outrages to keep people engaged. Community organizing is a Ponzi scheme that way: as people tire of political protest, they need ever more and greater reasons to keep them from just going home and getting back to their lives. People might give an Alynskyite one election; they’ll be too worn out to give him a second.
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Remembering the important things, as these men did, seems longer ago and even farther away with each passing year, and to some, even more silly. But Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all those here gathered anyway, and may we smile today, give thanks, and be inspired in the coming year to perpetuate their silliness…
It was on Christmas Eve 1968 that the astronauts of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, became the first of mankind to see an earthrise from the orbit of the moon, and looking back on us, they spoke these words:
Anders: “We are now approaching lunar sunrise. And, for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 have a message that we would like to send to you…
“In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.”
Lovell: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
Borman: “And God said, Let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.”
It is good. God bless us, every one.
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Age 62, wrestled with cancer since spring 2010, knowing he could not win or even get a draw. But he gave death hell.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011
I adored Hitch since the first time I read him. Don’t remember when, I subscribed to both Vanity Fair and Atlantic in the 1990s. He might even have still been a Trotskyist and mebbe died as one, but it was before he endorsed Dubya’s whack of Saddam [on behalf of the Kurds], before he challenged my Roman Catholic self with his evisceration of Mother Teresa.
Hitch was Hitch—he called ‘em like he saw ‘em, an honest man. He never fronted for anybody.
Christopher Hitchens was of course a New Atheist as well. And, just a day after his death, he described Ronald Reagan—revered on this sub-blog, see our title—as a “cruel and stupid lizard.”
But I think Hitch would be OK with me—and Tim Kowal, I think, mebbe even Ronald Reagan—wishing him Rest in Peace, Godspeed, and even hoping to meet him again in some Next World, for the first time. Of such things heavens are made.
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Thx in advance for your sympathies, all.
Of course, we weren’t lucky enough she died in her sleep. That was wishful thinking, that the decision would be taken out of our hands.
Middie the Wonder Dog was 15 afterall, and that’s stretching it even in dog years. To explain, she’d suddenly stopped eating her usual food a month ago, and even though we came up with a new formulation that kept her eating, eating had become her last and only pleasure.
She was going away from us.
Yesterday, she had her second attack of vestibular syndrome, which makes ‘em dizzy as hell. Recovering from a second bout at age 15 is clinically contraindicated. It was time.
She couldn’t sleep last night; she was sitting up because laying down made her dizzy. We got up together around dawn although I never get up at dawn, and we went outside together. I held her up so she could pee at my feet.
Good dog, as she’s always been. She held it until the proper time.
Woke Mrs. TVD after making an appointment at the vet, said she should come this time. She knew what I meant.
They spent time together in the back seat of the car while the vet got ready. And we were ready, me, the missus, and Middie. Help me, said Middie. So we did help Middie, over what pet lovers call the Rainbow Bridge.
C.S. Lewis said that heaven is perfect, and if that means we need Middie there for it to be perfect, then yes, dogs go to heaven and she will be waiting for us there.
I think there’s a reason dogs only live 15 years or so. Their love for us is perfect, and so is our love for them.
And when they are gone, we humans have to look to each other, and none of us is perfect. It’s so much harder for us to love each other than it is to love what is perfect.
That’s my lesson for today anyway, why Middie the Wonder Dog was given to us, and why she had to be taken away. If she could have lived forever, everything would have been perfect. But that’s not what this life is for.
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Tim Kowal is an attorney practicing in Orange County, California, Vice President of the Orange County Federalist Society, and contributor to UnionWatch. The views expressed on this blog are his own. You can follow this blog via RSS, Facebook, or Twitter. Email is welcome at timkowal at gmail.com. Previous posts are still available at the old blog.
Tom Van Dyke, businessman, musician, bon vivant and game-show champ (The Joker's Wild, and Win Ben Stein's Money), knows lots of stuff, although not quite everything yet.
A past contributor to The American Spectator Online, the late great Reform Club blog, and currently on religion and the American Founding at American Creation, TVD continues to write on matters of both great and small importance from his ranch type style tract house high on a hill above Los Angeles.
