Mozart's Primitivism

What does Wolfgang A. Mozart have in common with Sid Vicious?

"It is true that one doesn’t normally speakof Mozart and Sid Vicious in the same breath, but they do have this in common: primitivism. Rock’n’roll began as a primitivist movement, and it renews itself with mini-primitivisms, of which punk is just one example. To see Mozart as a primitivist is a little harder, since his style is so identified with the civilized and the rational, things we think of as anti-primitive, and yet the Classical movement in music, like its companion neoclassicism in art, owed everything to the primitivist desire to begin anew by stripping away the false and inessential. Écrasez l’infâme. To the Baroque’s heavy sauces, multiple courses, and thickly layered combinations of tastes and textures, the Classical would propose a nouvelle cuisine." (read whole article)

Why Cultural Elites Attack Religion

This Spiked-online article examines the vitriolic attacks often directed at religion.

The Father of Ireland

This article from the Independent has an interesting story about the use of Y-chromosome research to identify a famous common Irish ancestor.

We are...amused

Is heart health a laughing matter? Apparently so.

Critiquing Richard Dawkins

This article from the Guardian calls “Richard Dawkins’ latest attack on religion” an “intellectually lazy polemic not worthy of a great scientist.”

(via DangerousIdea)

Brits Give

This TimesOnline story tells how British evangelicals outgive practically everyone else.

(via CTMag Weblog)

Book a film

Is the book always better than the movie as many seem to assert? That all depends.

(via Arts and Letters Daily)