The funniest thing about presidential inaugural ceremonies is that anyone takes them seriously at all. This latest edition reached new heights—and depths—of comic excellence. To his credit, Barack Obama had a hard time keeping it…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Irony is the not-so-new normal. Somewhere back in the swirling dry-ice mists of history, round about the time of the one-and-only Clinton Administration, this venerable figure-of-speech stretched its wings and its brand and became a…
For many it remains an open question whether the tricentenary of one of J. S. Bach’s most famous tunes—or, to be more precise, the work that eventually spawned that tune—should be a moment of celebration…
London — ‘Tis the season to think about the next season. Before letting the wave of Christmas gifts crash of over their heads and/or into the digital stockings, and before undertaking their own yuletide retail…
At any political funeral, especially one as sorrowful and grandiose as Hillary’s ongoing obsequies, there will inevitably be abundant tears and cathartic sighs, long faces and stiff upper lips, doleful homilies and respectful postmortems. As…
Another Memorial Day has come and gone in Ithaca’s ramshackle nineteenth-century civic graveyard that sprawls over some twenty hillside acres between the flats of downtown and the campus of Cornell University on the bluffs above. Once a grand landscape park that housed the dead beneath neo-classical crypts and mighty obelisks, the cemetery is now a neglected oasis for mischief-makers and dog-walkers: many monuments have toppled over; the facades of the city fathers’ imposing vaults are ruined.
I’m in San Francisco for an organ concert tomorrow night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church on the edge of the city’s Tenderloin District, and a stone’s throw from St. Mary’s catholic cathedral, that giant cross-shaped…
Even amidst the bluster, lies, and anger unleashed by the presidential election—the last of these captured this morning in a vivid photo essay in Germany’s leading daily, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, I often hear the calming…
The Age of Trump is an Age of Conspiracies. In lock step with the zeitgeist, elements human, natural, and perhaps even ethereal conspired against last night’s screening at the Syracuse International Film Festival of Alfred…