Bill Loges

Welcome to the personal page of Bill Loges. Soon you will be learning more about the fun and exciting life I lead as Jessie's father, a member of Mary's Garage Band, a victim of the Comb Bandit, and other adventures. For a brief bio, click here.

Hot Links

Student Information                 The Guardian

Mary's Garage Band               Ian Masters’ Background Briefing

Harry Shearer

Good Reading

Lately I've been reading:

Michelangelo by Howard Hibbard. This biography offers an excellent combination of art history and criticism, but is very awkward whenever the artist’s sexuality is the subject. If Hibbard would just accept that Michelangelo is gay, the rest of the story could be told much more gracefully. Hibbard offers wonderful reviews of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, not only on the familiar ceiling but especially on the altar (The Last Judgment). Hibbard also calls attention to the architecture that Michelangelo provided, especially the innovations in the Biblioteca Laurenziana. His description of the reading room and the stairs are excellent. The photographs that accompany Hibbard’s text in the Folio Society’s edition I read are also excellent. Uh, someday I hope to see the things Hibbard describes and Michelangelo created.

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Reading this classic I’m struck every other page by observations of Tocqueville’s that were taught to me as matters of fact in high school. This book has had a remarkable impact on American ideology, but it’s easy to see why. If a very perceptive, sympathetic and wise person spent a year observing you, then wrote a long book about you (covering in intimate detail your body, your origins, and your psychology) and concluded that you were the epitome of your species, you’d probably fall in love with the book too. Recently Bernard-Henri Lévy toured the United States with the intention of updating Tocqueville’s evaluation. I read Lévy’s work in four installments in The Atlantic Monthly and found them amusing, but nowhere near as illuminating as Tocqueville’s. Both Frenchmen write with the desire to teach France something about the U.S., but Lévy does not seem to believe that what he has to teach France should inspire imitation on any score. The pleasure of reading Tocqueville (for an American) is his measured tone.

Information Technologies and Social Orders by Carl Couch (1996). This posthumous book, edited by David R. Maines and Shing-Ling Chen, assembles Couch’s views about the connection between the most basic of information technologies and the political, cultural, and military orders they complement. Couch is very thorough, so any attempt to keep track of the tides and the stars gets his attention as an information technology. In this regard he is like James R. Beniger, who performed similar work regarding a shorter time span in The Control Revolution. The virtue of this book is that it reminds readers of the interrelations between political power, technology, and human desire. Too often media theory ignores one or more of these dimensions. I think that Couch (in this book) is weakest in his discussion of human desire, but any author makes sacrifices. This book is very well-written and provocative on every subject it touches. The editors could have been more diligent about catching typographical errors, which become more numerous in the later chapters.

Good Listening

For music reviews, click on titles below:

Toys in the Attic by Aerosmith (1975)

Homecoming by America (1972)

Abbey Road by The Beatles (1969)

Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band (1969)

Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1979)

Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)

Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan (1965)

What is Beat? by The English Beat (1983)

Fleetwood Mac (1975)

Frampton Comes Alive by Peter Frampton (1976)

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis (1974)

All Things Must Pass by George Harrison (1970)

Shaft by Isaac Hayes (1971)

Bless Its Pointed Little Head by Jefferson Airplane (1969/2004)

Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell (1974)

Groovin’ at Small’s Paradise by Jimmy Smith (1957/1999)

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (1975)

Stephen Stills by Stephen Stills (1970)

Daring Adventures by Richard Thompson (1986)

Close to the Edge by Yes (1972)

Harvest Moon by Neil Young (1992)

What Jessica is Up To

My daughter Jessica will begin her MA degree at the University of Chicago in the fall, around the time the Cubs are entering the World Series. While the Cubs are otherwise occupied, Jessie will be studying the humanities, and probably improving them.

Gosh, what fun we've had today! I wish we could meet this way more often. Feel free to send vicious criticism of me and everything I stand for, or just cheerful greetings, to my e-mail address below.

If you have comments or suggestions, email me at logesw@earthlink.net.