Yankees Lacking Style and Bits About May.

I was all set to make one of those serious posts about growth, stagnation and depression, but I’m tired of the whole subject. May isn’t being a proper May this year, and Eckhart Tolle has just explained why that is and why I can’t do anything about it. Anybody familiar with the writings of dear Eckhart will find that statement confusing if not positively perverse. Good. Let’s leave it at that, then, and move onto something simpler.

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The following rendition of O Fortuna is easily the worst I’ve ever witnessed. If I weren’t so becalmed in the doldrums, I’d find it laughable. As it is, I feel moved to say this:

When are you damn Yankees going to realise that plastic hairstyles, exaggerated glitz, military precision, and performers standing to attention is neither moving nor stylish? It’s just cheap. You guys are so good at so many things, isn’t it about time you got that one right? And on top of that, the power surge at the end has been so weakened that the most dynamic element of the whole piece is rendered ineffectual. It sucks, to use your own phrase.

So come on, Yankees. If you can produce a Leonard Bernstein and an Aaron Copeland – not to mention all those wonderful poets and writers you spawned down the years – you can do better than this. John Boorman did when he used it in Excalibur.

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And now that I’m finally in the mood for writing something, I might also mention this:

Spare a thought for us Brits. It’s the middle of May. The bats are out of hibernation and desperate for food, the migratory birds have come up from Africa expecting a warm place to mate and breed, the cows have been turned out to graze, and the blossom is on the fruit trees. Tomorrow we have snow forecast.