Twelve Girls Band

Scour the classical music conservatories of China for twelve utterly beautiful women in their mid-20's who also happen to be exceptionally proficient at their instruments, mix and match them with a producer who understand what's really popular with the consumer classes of various wealthy nations, assign them to a team of arrangers who can craft that music so that it sounds somewhere between correct and native on instruments like the yang qin (a sort of hammared dulcimer) and the eru (a two-string cello-like instrument), and add a couple of studio engineers who can bring in a funky sound effect or two as needed, and you've got Twelve Girls Band.

I ought to like them. I like Chinese classical music, and I'm reasonably hip to Jack-format stuff, but after listening to their (Japanese release only) album Mei Ii Yin Yue Hui, I can only conclude that I don't. And the problem can be isolated down to one word: slick.

You know how there are CGI models whose skin looks waxy and fake, but otherwise they're so convincing that it's that very flawlessness and artificiality that twigs you and you start having uncanny valley effect? That's how I feel about Twelve Girls Band. This is music so polished and precise that the humanity of the women who produced it is obscured behind the many layers of digital cleanliness. This is not helped but a complete and utter lack of courage on the part of the arrangers and producer. Not a single piece on this album moves me one way or the other. No one strikes out on her own, solos, or otherwise shows any interest in anything more than getting the track down and collecting a paycheck. This is music you can toss into the CD player at a party and receive kudos for your "wide ranging tastes" without actually risking offense, a music fit mostly for the elevators of some Chinese THX-1138 apartment complex.

Maybe it's because I actually like Chinese classical music and have listened to albums such as Zeng Zhao-Bin's Fishing in Spring Tides or traditionals like Dance Song of the Yao Tribe, that ruins it for me. Most of the reviews I've read absolutely adore this "new" and "refreshing" music, but to me it's neither: it's well-packaged, mass-produced new age pop music without a shred of individuality. They have two American releases, Romantic Energy and Twelve Girls of Christmas, but unless something has changed since the release I'm listening to, I can't recommend the band to anyone.

Wine: Menage a' Trois

So, the wine of the week is Menage a Trois Red, a little wine produced by the Folie a Deux Winery (har har) in, where else, California. It was hardly a challenging or interesting wine. I found it in the Syrah section although it says it's a blend of Syrah, Gwurtzmuller, Reisling, and a few other flavors, but I guess Syrah was the best place to find it. It's a very sweet wine with very little nose, even with a lot of swirling. It has a lot of berry and for some reason, although I have no right to use such a pretentious word I thought of it as "cartoony." It is a party wine, not something to eat over dinner although it doesn't suffer for it, and the best description for it went to fallenpegasus: "It's the perfect wine to drink before doing what the name suggests." I must concur.

(This review is a couple of weeks old. For some reason, I've been writing up but not posting a lot of stuff. There are a number of wine reviews in the "pending" box. Weird, but I've chosen not to back-date it; this isn't exactly time-critical info.)

Offensensitivity

One of the common themes out of the Dhimmi Watch crowd is the hostility that Islam has toward criticism. In the West, they argue (and with strong evidence), the Pentateuch, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament are "the word inspired by God," meaning that human beings wrote the words down and human beings can get things confusing or wrong, even when inspired by God; whereas The Quran is the word of God, written by Him, by His Hand, and to criticize it is to commit heresy, to insult God. Dhimmi watch keeps a long list of atrocities committed by Muslims whenever their religion is "insulted". The list is long and heartbreaking, and it's not worth the effort for me to repeat much of it.

But one example is illustrative. It is possible in the West to lampoon and cartoon Jesus and Jehovah; we do it all the time. Nobody has threatened Reuben Boll's life for his recurring character "God Man," and no comic book stores have been bombed for carrying bobblehead "Your Buddy Christ" dolls. In Denmark, however, Theo Van Gogh was murdered after he made a short film about women's oppression under traditional Islam. In the same country more recently, the artists who penned an editorial cartoon which depicted Mohammed in an unflattering light have had to go into hiding; a reward for their deaths has been issued by a group in Pakistan.

So, let me ask: when faced with this cartoon, does the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights defend the right of all people to speak their mind, to be critical of what they believe criticism-worthy in others, and to state unequivocally that neither vigilantism nor state-sanctioned force are acceptable responses to mere expression? Here's her response when asked about it by a representative from the Organization of Islamic Conferences:

I understand your attitude to the images that appeared in the newspaper. I find alarming any behaviors that disregard the beliefs of others. This kind of thing is unacceptable.

The scary thing is that our tax dollars actually pay part of her salary.

Lest you think I'm only coming down on Islam in this post, think again. Because I actually want to bring this around and point out that it's not just Islam that is so defensive of its tribal rights that it seeks to squash dissent. Paul Mirecki, a professer of religious studies at Kansas University, recently tried to put on a class called "Intelligent Design, Creationism, and other Mythologies." He might have gotten away with it too if he hadn't had the bad political savvy to also write in a Yahoo group that he really hoped to "rub the fundies nose in their nonsense." The post got repeated up the chain of command and the Kansas State Legislature got into the act. The class has been canceled, Mirecki was roughed up by two goons (although there's some question about that) and was unquietly made to resign his seat as a chairman of the religious studies college.

What inspired me to write this post, however, were comments by members of the Kansas state legislature. Senator Kay O'Connor threatened to withhold state money from the school unless Mirecki stepped down. She also for a hearing so that the senators could grill the Kansas University Academics Committee about what they would do to make sure that the school had "a balance of ideological viewpoints" and answer the question, "What benefit did the school expect to derive from teaching Intelligent Design as a 'mythology'?"

But she also said, during her speech, the following: "Mirecki's intent to make a mockery of Christian beliefs is inappropriate. We have to set a standard that it's not culturally acceptable to mock Christianity in America."