Category: Religion

Unction this: Froward cozenage

I attended Catholic schools for the first 12 years of my life. The first eight years were taught by Dominican nuns, with one lay teacher covering second grade. Our school was one block away from the church, so that you can imagine frequent trips there for various ceremonies, like confession, stations of the cross, or just weekday mass. Weekends consisted of Saturday, a free day, and Sunday, at least part of which had to be used to attend church under penalty of mortal sin and eternal damnation if we failed. Unless we had a good excuse. However, going fishing, playing baseball with the neighborhood kids, or even reading a book were not considered good excuses. There were no good excuses, really, save deathly illness, or perhaps death.

One memory to emphasize that we were not wealthy kids attending this school … girls, on entering the church, had to have head covers. None of them had any such thing, no lace or doilies, so on entering they would pin a Kleenex on top their heads. It got the job done.

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The Curious Case of Xmas Albums

When I was a kid, my parents rented half our duplex to a lesbian schoolteacher. That arrangement went smoothly until her girlfriend’s “overnight tutoring sessions” became a bit too frequent, and she got the boot. I bring this up because this teacher once threatened to wring my neck if I didn’t stop playing the Chipmunks’ Christmas classic “Christmas Don’t Be Late” on an endless loop. Yep, I was obsessed with that song. In hindsight, I get it. Listening to Alvin and the gang whine about hula hoops 50 times in a row could push anyone to the brink.

Fortunately, I grew out of it—no more Chipmunks. In fact, I can’t remember ever buying a Christmas album, for myself or anyone else.

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Investigating Social Engineering in Music: Alice Cooper

After the dissolution of The Doors in 1971, another band emerged to fill the void of dark, theatrical rock: the Alice Cooper Band. That year, they released two albums, Love It to Death and Killer, both of which showcased impressive musicality. However, their true standout feature was their bold embrace of taboo themes, including manic insanity, necrophilia, and the infamous “Dead Babies.” Such provocative subject matter inevitably drew criticism and sparked debates about artistic intent, with defenders dismissing objections as either prudish overreaction or a failure to appreciate the dark humor and performance art inherent in the work.

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In all seriousness

The only two other persons I have told about this are my Delaware cousins, and I immediately said after “It feels so pretentious!” I am reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and mostly because I don’t have anything else at hand (except Plato’s Republic, and which, like BG&E, is tedious). Nietzsche wrote in a different time, and of course, I only have benefit of him via a translator, as he wrote in German. He often writes in long paragraphs, and uses semicolons too often for my taste – how about shorter sentences? He makes points I (most) often don’t get, or even think a little too subtle for anyone’s taste, even mine.

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