Dick Staub writes in STAUBLOG:
“Happy Birthday to Mozart, who would have been 250 years old today. The DVD’s* of Amadeus will fly off the Blockbuster shelves today in celebration of a boy genius, and irascible bad boy…”
Uh…they will?
I appreciate how hard it can be to find a good lead. I look on with sympathetic fascination when writers are clearly stretching way too far, and probably know it but hope that the reader won’t notice.
Here Dick attempts to:
- Use the occasion of Mozart’s birthday to contrast the composer’s life and work with the patronage Oprah Winfrey gives to certain crappy authors, and
- Tie these unrelated artifacts of Western culture to the central concern of his blog (the arts have become meaningless and glib, and we Christians are part of the problem.)
It doesn’t quite work, but it was an admirable try. I love this bit, though:
“We live in a day of words and images and Oprah is the master of ‘shadow play,’ the Indonesian art of silhouetted puppetry.”
How great would it be if Indonesian shadow puppetry was really Oprah Winfrey’s chosen medium? Imagine self-help authors being interviewed by Oprah as she speaks through a life-sized silhouette of the Hindu god Rama. I’d watch every single day.
*Aagh! For the love of God, Dick, it’s “DVDs”, not “DVD’s”. It’s right there in the Nicene Creed: “We believe that only lowercase letters and abbreviations with two or more interior periods or with both capital and lowercase letters form the plural with an apostrophe and an s. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
Tags: christianity, culture, Mozart, Oprah, blogs, blogging, Indonesian shadow puppetry
Wade Rockett 
Thanks for that link! I loved it. A classic example, to my mind, of someone who spouts incomprehensible gibberish designed to fool people into thinking it actually MEANS something.
Or to put it in his terms: A veritable impressionist palimpsest of terminology designed to create a new paradigm of sense that decontructs traditional notions of logic.