Is it me, or is everything a bit uphill at present?

I feel you! I just thought it was me.

D.

Sometimes we all feel like a recording engineer named Sisyphus...

Or an entire world - tough times globally
::
Mads

Yep agree.

Strangely personally I am better than in a decade but I look around me and it is not nice.

Remember sometimes we have to hit the bottom before we can bounce back to the surface.

Peace and Love to all!

Yes, we have nothing to complain about when you look around.

This is an informative little graph, but it's not the whole story. The activities of classical performers and their requirements do not necessarily mirror directly those for pop music. Here all sales trends are combined.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/anima...-1973-to-2022/

If you subscribe to the Howe and Strauss generational theory, there is hope for a new dawn. According to this theory, we are in the final stages of the fourth and final “turning” of the Millenial Saeculum. Fourth Turnings are always a “chaos” phase. The last 4th turning ended in WWII. Before that, the US Civil War. Before that, the Age of Revolution (Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, American Revolution). It’s quite obvious that our saeculum will also end the same way as earlier ones.

Every 4th turning ends in war, and out of those ashes comes a new “high”. Our last high was in the 1950s.

I recall reading Gore Vidal on the cyclic nature of the ages. I think the order was Theocratic, Autocratic, Democratic, Chaos, repeat etc.

He did say that we were in Chaos in the late 20C.

Certainly feels like it. But, damn, the next age is Theocratic, thank goodness I will not be here for it.

I really hope so bwanajim!

It’s already a theocracy. It’s millenarian / ecumenical. Just look around. It’s the high phase of theocracy right now.

The next phase is autocratic.

They've already got theocracies in certain parts of the world David, and with air travel it is exportable!!

These are tough times for a lot of people. Wars, illnesses, climate change, unstable governments and a whole host of other problems. I try to live one day at a time and ALWAYS think that tomorrow will be better than today. FWIW

Hope is not a method

Hope (in and of itself) is not a method
for the attainment of ‘better times’…

Hope springs eternal.

FWIW and from the WWW...

The expression “hope springs eternal” means to hold onto the eternal sense of hope that God has placed within all human souls. Ecclesiastes 3:11 describes God doing so: “He has made everything beautiful in its time.

There may be some truth in Vidal’s prediction. Many of the cultural and political beliefs that emerged in academia during the early-mid 20th Century and that are now driving popular culture have taken on distinctly religious qualities, complete with prophets, dogma, formal canon, martyrs, evangelism, original sin, suspension of disbelief, heresies, and mob persecution of heretics. Notably lacking in the new postmodern belief systems, however, is any sort of transcendental spiritualism. Indeed, there's nothing transcendent or spiritual about it. The game is to gain power, influence and money by curating your position in an intersectional hierarchy of victimhood, while broadcasting your virtuous beliefs and pandering to the faithful.

Thanks for that clarification Tom, and indeed without hope perhaps all is indeed lost ? I simply meant it shouldn’t be used as an escape clause in the face of human inaction (in situations where such intelligent action is necessary, such as the multiple crises humanity and the planet now face)

That’s tactical. The grand strategy is a globalism with his/her majesty or the Royal we. All of this is a stepping stone.

Augustus (Octavius) consolidated it all: Emperator (“commander” of the legions), Princeps in the Senate, and then finally (what was mocked at the time, but we now understand as the grand strategy) the Pontifex Maximus. Once consolidated, it was checkmate. This checkmate on society lasted until the great bourgeois revolutions swept it all away beginning with Martin Luther around 1500. We can look at the last 60 years (1960-2020) as a great unraveling of all that was achieved the prior 500 years.

A great turning back the clock to that ancient system.

This feels quite appropriate at the moment!
April 2025

The solution is so simple: Just bring back the big bands!

There's certainly a few of them around these days.

We are all living in our own private Ephyra.

...a sludge digestion technology...???

Nope, it's where Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephyra known as Corinth which is a city in Greece today.

Oh! Yes, of course.............

That's nothin', I just did a recording of the full Dido and Aeneas by Purcell and if you think things are bad now, just recall all the mischief with gods scheming against each other, Cupid's half brother, sheesh, I tell you it was a mess...

Where this thread has ventured to from where it began, reminds me of the maxim,

"When you're up to your neck in alligators, it is difficult to remember that your first objective, was to drain the swamp!"