Geirr Tveitt

Tveitt's oeuvre—what's left of it—is multifarious, replete with hundreds of art songs and folk song arrangements as well as large, ambitious masterworks, such as the ballet Baldurs draumar (Balder's Dreams) and the magisterial Sonata Etere.

White America's Last Bender

Yesterday, I shook off the hangover from the open bar at the Election Night party and read about our historic victory.  The conservative movement has heroically stopped Obama’s diabolical scheme to make America socialist, with John Boehner as our weepy Leonidas. Conservatism is flush with victory and all throughout the land, ambitious College Republicans, my fellow think-tankers, and unemployed scribblers are dreaming of staff jobs, committee assignments, and midnight tangos with the supple interns of Capitol Hill. The “beautiful losers” made excited references to 1994, seemingly blind to the reality that the “Republican Revolution” did nothing to stop the growth of government or reverse cultural decline and President Clinton cruised to victory two years later.  Nonetheless, young conservatives are cute when they are happy, and I tried to hold my tongue as wild proclamations were made around the office about the imminent end of Big Government.  

The Monster We Need

The conflict between survival and virtuous sacrifice is at the heart of Dracula Untold, the surprisingly subversive reboot of the classic vampire franchise. Astonishingly, we are taken to Eastern Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, when Europeans knew what it was to be occupied, when Vienna itself was besieged by the armies of the Mohammedans, and when thousands of European children were brutally kidnapped and forced to serve as Janissary slave soldiers against their own blood. There is no pro forma condemnation of the Crusades, the Church, or the inherent hatefulness Europeans possess through their sheer existence–we get a straightforward tale of an occupied population groaning under a foreign tyrant from the East.

The Bulgarian Resistance

Nationalism is deliberately misunderstood and distorted by journalists and academics. The near universal rejection of the ethnic principle in post-modernity must have a source. That source is the global nature of capital. Therefore, in postmodernity, nationalist thought is the ethnic folk rejecting an economics that is global and therefore, completely out of control of peoples, states or any institution that is not a bank. Here, this view will be explored using the main political figure in Bulgaria today, Volen Siderov.