Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Culture

Music

BEYOND YACHT ROCK:

The Lost Prince of Yacht Rock: In 1978 he was music’s next big thing. Then his album bombed, he began a long slide into obscurity, and a bizarre fraud sent him to prison. Will Dane Donohue finally get his encore? (Keith Barry, March 25, 2021, Narratively)

Donohue’s only album fits squarely into a genre that’s now commonly called “yacht rock,” a neologism for a sound you’re probably familiar with even if you weren’t alive in the 1970s. Think Michael McDonald’s husky “I Keep Forgettin’” or the shuffle beat of Toto’s “Rosanna.” The genre has cycled through popularity, ridicule, nostalgia and respect, all the way back to popularity again: There’s a “yacht rock” station on SiriusXM that plays ’70s soft rock hits, and hipsters in captain’s hats sing Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” at karaoke. There’s even been a yacht rock–themed Peloton workout.

Since its release in 1978, Dane Donohue has gained a cult following among yacht rock fans. That’s because it’s a seminal work in the development of the genre, says “Hollywood” Steve Huey, a former AllMusic critic. Huey would know: Along with JD Ryznar, David B. Lyons and Hunter Stair, he co-created the mockumentary that gave yacht rock its name. They also hosted the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast, and they are writing a book about the genre too.

“You can hear this older kind of David Geffen, Asylum kind of sound — it sounds like the whole Laurel Canyon kind of scene, the early ’70s stuff,” Huey says, referring to the Los Angeles neighborhood where folk-rockers like the Mamas & the Papas and Joni Mitchell lived in the ’60s and early ’70s, and where the Eagles honed their sound. You could mistake the first few songs on Donohue’s album for Jackson Browne. But then you hit songs like “Woman” or “Can’t Be Seen,” and it’s a total paradigm shift. “You can also hear where the music is going, where the Southern California sound is about to go over the next few years.” More horns, more rhythm, more jazzy chord progressions.

Dane Donohue was lucky enough to be in the studio at an important moment in the L.A. music scene, when studio musicians started merging the tight ensemble work of funk and Motown, the screaming guitar solos of rock, the creativity of jazz, the rhythms of Rio, the blues-tinged R&B of Stax, and the introspective singer-songwriter melodies of the Laurel Canyon era, while superstar producers started using the latest technology to make slick, flawless recordings. And Donohue’s voice — which blended the airy twanginess of a Nashville tearjerker with the drama and clarity of a Broadway first act finale — was an ideal vessel to cross over between the old and new worlds of Southern California soft rock.

Yacht rock lyrics tend to deal with divorce, male loneliness and suburban ennui — a far cry from the vitality of war protests and civil rights anthems of a decade earlier. But more important, yacht rock is a sound, and that sound was defined by the tight-knit group of studio musicians who inadvertently created the genre. The guys behind yacht rock — and with the exception of a handful of backup singers, it was always guys — were among the most talented in the business. They made names for themselves as “first call” musicians, who artists and producers would specifically request for their albums. And the best of the best played on Dane Donohue.

Critics dismissed what came out of the Southern California studios as radio-friendly soft rock, but it permeated popular music for nearly a decade, its influence seeping into every genre from disco to hair metal. Some of the musicians on Donohue’s album were already famous, while others would go on to write, record on or produce some of the best-known songs of the 20th century. Put together, they would win more than 30 Grammy awards during their varied careers.

Anglospherics Books

POSTMODERNISM IS JUST A RETURN TO PREMODERNISM:

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien: a review of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: Three-Volume Box Set By J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond (Michael Lucchese, 4/20/25, University Bookman)

Postmodernism is more often associated with black-turtlenecked intellectuals smoking cigarettes in Parisian cafés than tweedy Oxford dons puffing on pipes. But Gerald Russello, the late editor of The University Bookman, drew a connection between conservatism and postmodernism, especially in the thought of Russell Kirk, this publication’s founder and another of the twentieth century’s great Christian writers. He argued that Kirk’s emphasis on imagination and sentiment constituted a rejection of modern rationalism. In his book The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, Russello wrote:

Sentiment assumes a larger importance in Kirk’s work because of his assertion that the coming (post)modern age will be an Age of Sentiments, superseding the old, modern, liberal Age of Discussion. The Age of Sentiments will be more concerned with the power of image on the heart, rather than that of logical discourse on the mind. Kirk thought that rhetoric—the creation of image through language—was a critical art for conservatism to perfect. And according to Kirk, rhetoric is only effective at creating those images if it pays careful heed to the sentiments of both the speaker and the audience.

This is exactly the kind of conservative postmodernism Tolkien mastered.

The Anglosphere avoided the tragedy of Modernism, following Hume’s rejection of Reason.

Anglospherics Music

THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

Dylan’s gospel songs make a fitting soundtrack to Holy Week (Kenneth Craycraft, April 15, 2025,, Our Sunday Visitor)


The title track of “Slow Train Coming” is a lyrical indictment of the moral and social pathology of American political life. It describes both various aspects of moral decadence and corruption, and the false gods and solutions invoked to address it. “Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted,” the narrator begins the song, setting the tone for a catalogue of various social and political maladies. The source of his disgust, however, is less the particular ills he describes than the assertion that we can save ourselves by our own effort. He asks of his companions, “Are they lost or are they found? / Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down / All their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon?”

Many people who hailed Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday fundamentally misunderstood the nature of his kingdom. Expecting a violent insurrection against imperial Roman rule, many welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem only as a political liberator. He was greeted not as the eternal savior, but rather as a political revolutionary. They reduced Jesus’ role to a this-worldly political hero who had come to replace one kind of coercive earthly politics with another. They sought a human solution to a divine problem.

Anglospherics Art

CAIN ALWAYS BEATS ABEL:

The Fighting Temeraire: Why JMW Turner’s greatest painting is so misunderstood (Matt Wilson, 4/17/25, BBC)

In Constable’s iconic 1821 painting The Hay Wain, an archaic cart rolls gently away from the viewer into a bucolic English landscape. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire gives us the exact opposite, putting the spectator on a collision course with the unstoppable force of industry.


This reflected contemporary reality. At the time The Fighting Temeraire was painted, the Royal Navy was increasingly using steamboats for towing bigger vessels. Moves were already afoot to replace its sail-powered fleet with new steam frigates. But the demise of the Temeraire didn’t reflect a routine upgrade in armaments. This was a one-of-a-kind revolution in seafaring. Sailors around the world had relied on wind-and-sail or oar-propulsion for thousands of years. Now, steam engines could allow seafarers to overcome the vagaries of gusts, shallows and tidal patterns – to supersede nature itself. The future was steam-powered, but how this was going to affect the future of transport, trade and naval combat was still anybody’s guess in the 1830s. What Turner did know was that as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, sailing functioned as a profound symbol of the life journey in art and literature. And so, by hitching the old and the new so unforgettably in his painting, he shows us a compelling metamorphosis – the beginning of a new, post-industrial lifecycle in human history.

Turner was awake to the responsibility of artists in times of irreversible historical change. For him, the age-old skill of depicting wooden sailing ships, their rigging, sails and ornately carved figureheads was becoming obsolete. The challenge for every artist (and every member of society) in the modern age, he realised, was to discover beauty and significance in newness, and in artefacts that had not previously been depicted in art, like iron funnels, pistons, valves, and paddle wheels. In The Fighting Temeraire, his rise to this challenge is captured in a very memorable and uncompromising symbol.

Books End of History

THE NOVELIST AT THE eND OF hISTORY (profanity alert):

The Great Neoliberal Novelist (Geoff Shullenberger, April 15, 2025, Compact)

In his early career, Vargas Llosa was a left-wing radical, and he wrote Conversation in a period when he was being regularly fêted in Fidel Castro’s Havana. Yet it is clear from the moral complexity and tragic sensibility of this and other novels that he never found such answers satisfying. To be sure, he never shied away from any of the dark facts of his country’s history. For instance, The Green House (1966), the novel he wrote before Conversation, depicts the kidnapping of indigenous children by Christian missionaries and the brutally exploitative rubber trade in the Amazon. But he refused to portray Peru and Peruvians as mere victims of foreign exploitation, or as anything but the agents of their own destiny.

Given this deeply held sensibility, his break with the Latin American left was probably foreordained. Its precipitating event was what we would now call the “cancellation” of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who in 1971 was accused by the official national writers’ union of “exalting individualism in opposition to … collective demands” and promptly jailed by Castro. This led Vargas Llosa to organize an open letter protesting Padilla’s treatment. In the aftermath, he fell out with many of his fellow writers and intellectuals, most notably with his former close friend (and eventual fellow Nobel laureate) Gabriel García Márquez.

If Vargas Llosa’s early rebellion against the stifling mores of the Peruvian haute bourgeoisie had prompted him to embrace Marxism and the Cuban Revolution, his later rejection of the groupthink of Latin American intelligentsia led him to a new set of lodestars: Popper, Hayek, and Thatcher. While the political essays that resulted from this conversion often amounted to a rehashing of “classical-liberal” nostrums, the same can’t be said of the novels that marked his neoliberal turn: The War at the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984) number among his greatest achievements, and among the finest political fiction of the past century.

Both novels deal with failed revolutions: the first with the real historical events of the Canudos War in late 19th century Brazil, where a messianic sect of peasants revolted against the newly proclaimed republic; the second, a fictionalized version of an abortive communist revolution in 1950s Peru. Both stories expose the deep disjunction between elites and the masses in Latin America. In War at the End of the World, Brazil’s progressive reformers are shocked to find that many of the rural poor they hope to lift out of backwardness view their secular republic as a blasphemous abomination and prefer a restoration of monarchy; in Mayta, a hapless urban intellectual leads a doomed uprising of Andean peasants, in a tragicomic foreshadowing of the horrors of the Shining Path war that was tearing Peru apart as Vargas Llosa was writing the novel.

The author faced his own real-life version of the same disconnect when he ran for president of Peru in 1990. His highbrow neoliberal reformist platform, derived from his first-hand observations of Thatcher’s England and readings of Hayek and Friedman, failed to win out over the wily populist appeals of the outsider candidate Alberto Fujimori. Ironically, after his victory Fujimori went on to implement much of his rival’s proposed economic program of shock therapy and privatization, while also installing himself as dictator and engaging in staggering levels of corruption and violence. Nonetheless, decades later Fujimori retains enough of a mass following to this day that his daughter Keiko will be a leading contender in Peru’s next presidential election.

Books

PULSATIONS:

The Lion, the Wizard, and the Great Physician (Nina Maksimova, 4/15/25, Christianity Today)

I was five years old when my family immigrated from Russia to the United States, fleeing life-threatening antisemitism. From the safety of our new home, I pondered a question: Why, beneath the skin-flaying sorrow of the human story, could I sense in every capillary of my being the throbbing pulse of heartbreaking joy?

This was the question that kept me up reading, and the first fictional world where I began to glimpse answers was Narnia. Here was a story that persuasively imagined the necessity of friendship and courage in the face of hatred and terror––a story in which the heartbeat of joy beat louder. It emanated from Aslan the lion, who followed me home out of the wardrobe. He started accompanying me to kindergarten and playing tag with my friends at recess. He let me fall asleep nuzzling his mane, and the tenderness of his presence felt like déjà vu, like something I could almost recognize or a good dream I could almost remember.

One might argue I was simply recognizing C. S. Lewis’s allusions to the gospel story. But that was impossible. My family had inherited the Soviet Union’s atheism. When I met Aslan, I had never heard of “Jesus of Nazareth,” never opened a Bible, never knowingly encountered Christianity.

Aslan stayed with me for the next two years until the premiere of the Fellowship of the Ring movie. My family went to see it, and the heartbeat of joy that had reverberated in Lewis’s Narnia now surged from the depths of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

It crescendoed with nearly unbearable resonance into a longing that pulled me toward Gandalf the wizard. When I watched him die, I was so upset that I begged my mom to read me the next book in the series, The Two Towers. There, Gandalf came back from the dead, transfigured with white light, and took Aslan’s place as my imaginary companion. He remained with me for the next ten years—until they turned dark, then dangerous, and I told him to go away.

I did so because, as a teenager, I encountered more and more evil, not only outside myself but also inside. I did not need to read children’s stories anymore to know that adults could shape-shift into monsters, that we were capable of any horror. Louder than that heartbeat of joy, I began to hear a hissing in my thoughts that demanded to know why I should be kind to my enemies when I could be cruel; why I should seek good when I could seek power, pleasure.

I had no answers, only the emotions Narnia and Middle Earth had inspired. So I stopped using my imagination to indulge in “childish” stories and started digging for answers in the nonfictional abysses of 20th-century Europe. I stopped talking to Gandalf and matriculated at Dartmouth College. My first professor was a Christian.

His lectures on 20th-century Europe dissected me. I imagined myself a citizen of the Third Reich and understood I could not stop its gears from grinding up blood and marrow. I could perhaps shelter my Jewish neighbors, but that would not halt the cattle trains headed to Auschwitz. If anything, I would be arrested and gassed myself, so all my logic ordered me to opt for self-preservation.

But I could still hear that joy from my childhood, pounding like the heartbeat of a dying bird.

Baseball Identitarianism Immigration

WE DON’T EVEN DESERVE OUR IMMIGRANTS:

The Moving Story of Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar, Where Thousands of Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During World War II: In honor of his mother and others imprisoned at the internment camp, baseball player Dan Kwong has restored a diamond in the California desert (Rachel Ng, 3/27/25, Smithsonian)

“Play ball,” the umpire hollered. The modest crowd roared. Little Tokyo Giants lead-off batter Dan Kwong stepped up to the plate. A gust of dry desert wind whipped up the loose sand across the infield. Kwong looked out to the clear-blue skies and craggy Sierra Nevada in the distance, taking in the moment.

“People were cheering,” Kwong reflected. “It was rather surreal that after all these months of work I was actually playing in a real game.”


Baseball game, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif. / photograph by Ansel Adams Library of Congress
It was a scene plucked out of Ansel Adams’ iconic 1943 photo of a baseball game at California’s Manzanar Relocation Center. Only this time, the date was October 26, 2024, and Kwong and his teammates from the Little Tokyo Giants faced off against the Lodi JACL Templars in the inaugural game at Manzanar National Historic Site—the first since the incarceration camp closed in November 1945. Both well-established Japanese American amateur teams, the Giants beat the Templars handily in an eight-inning game, which was followed by an all-star game where players donned 1940s-style uniforms and played with vintage gloves and bats. The momentous doubleheader marked the soft launch of the newly restored field at Manzanar, a camp where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

Film/TV Identitarianism

MAGA ROOTS FOR THE RED SKULL:

Superman vs. the KKK: Hear the 1946 Superman Radio Show That Weakened the Klan (Open Culture, March 28th, 2025)

The year is 1946. World War II has come to an end. And now membership in the Ku Klux Klan starts to rise again. Enter Stetson Kennedy, a human rights activist, who manages to infiltrate the KKK and then figures out an ingenious way to take them down. He contacts the producers of the popular Adventures of Superman radio show, and pitches them on a new storyline: Superman meets and defeats the KKK. Needing a new enemy to vanquish, the producers greenlight the idea.

The 16-episode series, “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” aired in June 1946 and effectively chipped away at the Klan’s mystique, gradually revealing their secret codewords and rituals. Listen to the episodes above.

Academia

COLLEGES ARE HOTBEDS OF CONSERVATISM (profanity alert):

The Corporate Raid on Campus: Finance industry recruiters are starving critical fields of talent and steering an entire generation into soulless jobs. (Zach Marcus, March 23, 2025, Washington Monthly)


Like many incoming freshmen, Audrey arrived at Middlebury College without a clear plan for her future. “I knew pretty much nothing about finance,” she admitted. “I watched Succession.” But she was certain about one thing: securing a successful, well-paying career during college was nonnegotiable. After attending a high school with an “extreme amount of wealth” and now navigating a similarly privileged environment at Middlebury as a student on financial aid, she felt constantly reminded, “S[***], I need to make money.”

Although she had previously explored opportunities in public law—volunteering at a free legal center where she simplified legal documents to make them accessible for young people and interning at a court—at college it was hard to resist the pull of the finance recruiting machine. Jokingly dubbed the “Middlebury Mafia,” the school’s finance network is vast and the on-campus recruiting is intensive: newsletters, information sessions, networking breakfasts, and even curated trips to New York City, where students meet Middlebury finance alumni and get a taste of their world (parties included). “I signed up for all the career center materials, but finance was the only thing I saw,” Audrey told me.

One side effect of the high cost of elite schools is that the kids come from elite families so they’re focussed on a high paying career, not activism.

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