When Randy Newman played the Kennedy Center in Washington last March, it was perfectly appropriate, on one level: No contemporary pop singer has serenaded America as far and as wide as Newman. He’s written songs about Birmingham, Louisiana, Baltimore, Dayton, Los Angeles, Gainesville, Kentucky, Miami, the Cuyahoga River, New Orleans. His appearance in a government-sanctioned...
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The Right Fork
“I ask myself again why anyone would find interest in the private dimensions of my own history,” muses Nobel laureate economist James M. Buchanan in his new collection of personal and intellectual autobiographical essays. The question, embedded in an essay entitled “Country Aesthetic,” which explores the manifold and profound meanings that the concept of country,...
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Rock Music Lives On
Camille Paglia, current official Court Enemy of America’s East Coast intellectual mafia, recently went on record in the New York Times encouraging federal support of the allegedly endangered American art form of rock music. She is correct in praising rock as one of American folk art’s grand contributions to world culture. Rock is definitively American,...