Kursk

Right on the edge of Europe, in Belarus, the Ukraine and Western Russia, took place the largest battles in the history of all the world. For most of the Second World War, the entire Eastern Front was a vast mass of men and machines in a state of continuous conflict, punctuated by a series of huge military operations. The greatest of these clashes was a fierce and intensely destructive encounter, spread across hundreds of kilometres, centred around a town called Kursk.

If you visited this battlefield today, with some careful searching, a bit of light digging and perhaps the aid of a metal detector, you would be sure to find artefacts — bullet casings, ammunition, discarded equipment, weapons and parts of the thousands of destroyed tanks, artillery pieces and fighting vehicles. It would pay to be careful, though, as after a mere 62 years, any live ammunition you found would certainly still be dangerous. If you looked hard enough, sadly you might even find human remains.

Nothing else brings history to life like an artefact. (more…)

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
The Gospel of St Matthew 5:5

But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.
2 Peter 2:1

Also sprach Zarathustra

The bombastic and overblown but musically brilliant tone poem ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ (’So said Zoroaster’) by Richard Strauss, inspired by Nietzsche’s book of the same name, was famously used by Stanley Kubrick as theme music his classic movie ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’. For the most part this movie is an intelligent and entertaining sci-fi thriller. It begins and ends, however, with some memorable but rather odd scenes.

The movie opens with a man in an ape suit symbolically evolving to humanity through an act of violence, cracking the skull of his ape-man neighbour — man in a Godless world creating himself by an act of pure Will — boom-boom boom-boom goes the kettle drum, taaa daa ta-daa go the trumpets. It ends with an individual alone in the void, pursuing his destiny, transformed, in a long tedious series of scenes of incoherent cartoon mysticism, into an infant super-being.

Boom-boom boom-boom goes the kettle drum, taaa daa ta-daa go the trumpets.

Friedrich Nietzsche would probably have loved it.

(more…)

My image of Jean Paul Sartre is of a dapper little Frenchman in a black sweater and a beret, an avid Marxist who smokes stinky cigarettes. He was the favoured philosopher of Avant Garde artists of the 1960s, and of art students ever since.

The several books of his I read in my misspent youth all seemed to consisted of a completely self-absorbed and egotistical male character wandering meaningfully amongst a crowd of shallow inferior beings fate has obliged him to endure, that cause him great torment of the soul, on account of the fact that he is so profound and enquiring, and they so ordinary and unappreciative.

(more…)

Image source

When I was younger I went through an extended period of listening to Free Form Jazz. I can still enjoy some of it very occasionally, in small doses. It’s generally a harsh and unsatisfying musical style. Emotional resonances are rare — intentionally so, of course, being what I interpreted as a deliberate artistic statement about rare points of beauty in an ugly meaningless universe. (Concepts like that seemed very meaningful to me as a young atheist, just as they seem laughably shallow to me now.) Nevertheless, some of these musicians are actually quite good. Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, all talented musicians trying sincerely to create a novel and worthwhile musical form.

(more…)