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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Dirges for the Living Dead

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…

Ceremonial Bugles: The Latest Insult To Veterans

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.

Organistic In Frisco

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…

Bach On The Election

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…

Trump & Hitchcock in the Age of Conspiracies

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…

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

Was that great global spluttering sound we heard this week the five members of the Nobel literature committee gagging on the lutefisk that is their prize? Or was it the rest of the world guffawing…

If Wagner Scored The Debates

I have felt more refreshed sitting through five hours of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung than I did after the excruciatingly slow ninety minutes of Monday’s long-dreaded presidential debate. Hey, that’s it—Wagner to the rescue! The main problem…

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