Monthly Archives: September 2023

Hannah Arendt, A Reflection

People who know me know that my favorite theorist is Hannah Arendt, much like one of my favorite professors in college, Dale Carrico. A German Jew, Arendt studied under Martin Heidegger, a popular philosopher, and known-Nazi, with whom she had an affair. Reading her works is like being lent a pair of fresh eyes with which to view the world, her thoughts are so simple yet immediately-palpable. Following her time in Germany, she was interned in a concentration camp, only to later escape to the United States, where she lectured at the New School in New York and wrote several books on love, community, Greek thought, Totalitarianism, European Jewry, literature, politics, the state of the world, and revolution.

She was known to often hold a cigarette in her hand while she incisively philosophized and never liked to consider herself part of any -ism because she thought it was that kind of conforming groupthink that led to Nazism in the first place. An independent thinker, she received much criticism for some of her works (especially Eichmann in Jerusalem), but she stood firm in the independence of her thought, admirably.

Ferris Bueller to Von Steuben…A German Imprint

In the famed “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, we see Ferris dancing on a float, singing to a Beatles tune at the top of his lungs in an unnamed parade. The namesake of the event is a long-dead German by the name of Von Steuben, a gay ex-captain of the Prussian Army (of Frederick the Great) who left a lasting and critical impression on American history.

At a bleak moment in the American Revolution, in the cold of winter at Valley Forge, Baron Von Steuben presented himself in full regalia, and with an entourage (including his dog and cook) to the undisciplined and beleaguered Continental Army. With him, he brought Prussian military expertise, some of the most advanced in the world at the time, along with Prussian military discipline and lore. One continental soldier calling him the very likeness of the Roman god of war, Mars, he spoke lewdly and swore at the soldiers in German and French to toughen them up but won great confidence among the American ranks as he trained them into a fighting force not to be meddled with.

He wrote the first standardized American military handbook called the Blue Book in which he detailed everything from tactics to marching to where the latrines should go. And pivotally, he commanded an army at the famed culminating battle of the American Revolution at Yorktown.

In at least this way, the Germans (Prussians) left a permanent and indelible imprint on the birth of our nation.

On Jazz Drumming

Call me an elder snob, but as a drummer, I strongly believe jazz drumming is just so underrated for its technical experimentation, its use of different time signatures, atypical beat structures and unpredictable, flowing fills.