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One of Lee’s dispatches from Singapore included the news about the book contract as well as this nugget: “I was worried that they might not get some of the references — I had a great image of the original Star Trek with Kirk and Spock disguised as Nazis — but I asked one of the museum curators beforehand and he promised me that everybody in Singapore knows Star Trek. And it was true, when that image came up there was an immediate wave of recognition and laughter.”
Whet adds: Since it’s Friday, you should not work and instead spend awhile today reading Lee Sandlin pieces. Here are a few to get you started (besides “Losing the War,” which is linked to above, and which is one of my favorite essays of all time; you can hear an abbreviated version on an old This American Life here ). As of right now leesandlin.com seems to be down, so here are some archival links. My bad: leesandlin.com. Links below have been updated.
“I’m not denying that Ives was a patriot. His saturation in American pop culture, American music, American values and ideology and philosophy was so profound it amounted to a kind of religious ecstasy. The falseness lies in presenting him as a nice guy. He was just as American in his hair-trigger anger and furious xenophobia, and the radical originality with which he treated the forms of classical music sometimes seems prompted by a hatred of everything civil, decorous, traditional, and European. The turmoil of his music–the vast storm fronts of marches, hymns, jigs, ballads, hornpipes, and anthems–is really a kind of patriotic road rage, an urge to sweep away all traces of the foreign with blasts of pure homegrown energy. This can make him come off as nothing more than a foul-tempered crank, though it also resulted in the soaring grandeur of his Fourth Symphony, the Moby-Dick of American music.”
