The Police, "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da"

For William Blake, who is hard for me to understand, but I love it ...

And when their eloquence escapes you ...

Books.

Mozart, Piano Concerto No.19 in F major, KV 459

Hélène Grimaud performs with the Chamber Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio Symphony ...

What.

Musich, Verano, 2011

Pine tree tops

In the blue night

frost haze, the sky glows

with the moon

pine tree tops

bend snow-blue, fade

into sky, frost, starlight.

The creak of boots.

Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,

what do we know.

- Gary Snyder

In.

Homer, The Boatman, 1891

Fisherman

A man spends his whole life fishing in himself 
for something grand. It's like some lost lunker, big enough 
to break all records. But he's only heard rumors, myths, 
vague promises of wonder. He's only felt the shadow 
of something enormous darken his life. Or has he? 
Maybe it's the shadow of other fish, greater than his, 
the shadow of other men's souls passing over him. 
Each day he grabs his gear and makes his way 
to the ocean. At least he's sure of that: or is he? Is it the ocean 
or the little puddle of his tears? Is this his dinghy 
or the frayed boards of his ego, scoured by storm? 
He shoves off, feeling the land fall away under his boots. 
Soon he's drifting under clouds, wind whispering blandishments 
in his ears. It could be today: the water heaves 
and settles like a chest. . . He's not far out. 
It's all so pleasant, so comforting--the sunlight, 
the waves. He'll go back soon, thinking: "Maybe tonight." 
Night with its concealments, its shadow masking all other shadows. 
Night with its privacies, its alluringly distant stars. 

- Kurt Brown

Effort.

Keith.

"Wanna Hold You"



"You Don't Have To Mean It"



"How I Wish"

Look.

O'Keeffe, My Shanty, 1922

I would rather walk through the woods and the grass and the briars and pick daisies and ferns and wild strawberries - or just look at the sky.... The green all about - the woods and pastures all growing wild so fast - no cows in it for three or four years - all sorts of unexpected things growing - and growing so fast - fern - little trees and big trees - flowers and all sorts of little creeping ground plants - masses of ferns that are wonderful. I love all those things so much it almost makes me feel I must stay here.

- Georgia O'Keeffe

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Happy birthday, Pannini.

Pannini, Interior of St. Peter's, Rome, 1731

Giovanni Paolo Pannini was born on this date in 1691.

Completely.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

- Ernest Hemingway

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Pergolesi, Stabat Mater

Angharad Gruffydd Jones sublimely performs the Cujus animam gementem with the Cambridge Ensemble ...



Thank you, Jess.

Imperative.

Overwhelming gaiety,

...insupportable grandeur,

... sombre desolation are flung at you.

Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. 

The only imperative that nature utters is, ...

"Look. Listen. Attend."

- C.S. Lewis

Become.

But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Infinite.

Blake, Teach These Souls to Fly, 1796

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

- William Blake

Liberated.

As sleep is to dreaming -- a portal to dreamworlds -- so is the potential in everyday experiences.  If we recognize them as points of shimmer we might find ourselves liberated from the common, transported by them into the waiting other worlds.  

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Building.

As a kid, I remember this poem tacked to my Dad's workbench ...

The Little Chap Who Follows Me

A careful man I want to be;
A little fellow follows me.
I do not dare to go astray
For fear he'll go the self same way.

I cannot once escape his eyes,
Whate'er he sees me do, he tries.
Like me he says he's going to be;
The little chap who follows me.

He thinks that I'm so very fine,
Believes in every word of mine.
The base in me he must not see;
The little chap who follows me.

I must remember as I go
Through summer's sun and winter's snow,
I'm building for the years to be;
The little chap who follows me.

Thank you, Dad. Happy Father's Day!  I love you.

Holds.

Collier, Priestess of Delphi, 1891

The secret of poetry is never explained, is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and one knows what it is.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

David Gray, "Morning of My Life"

Depeche Mode, "Enjoy the Silence"

Silence.

There are two great forces in the universe, silence and speech. Silence prepares, speech creates. The strength of noise and activity is great. But infinite is the strength of stillness and silence, in which great forces prepare for action. To be capable of silence, stillness and illuminated passivity is to be fit for immortality.

Silence is more than quietude; it can be gained by banishing thought altogether from the inner mind keeping it voiceless or quiet outside; but more easily it is established by a descent from above – one feels it coming down entering and occupying or surrounding the personal consciousness which then tends to merge itself in the vast impersonal silence.

- Sri Aurobindo

Monteverdi, L'incoronazione di Poppea (SV 308)

Sonya Yoncheva performs "Pur ti miro" ...

Out.

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map … nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin’s terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.

- Rebecca Solnit

Reunion.

On July 4th, 1991, the Replacements capped off their set at Chicago's Grant Park with a winking, typically iconoclastic stunt: The members exited the stage one by one, leaving their roadies to pick up their instruments and finish the gig. "I remember feeling kinda sad," Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson tells Rolling Stone in an exclusive interview. "But at the same time it felt like an 800-pound gorilla had been lifted off my back."

For the great American garage band of the 1980s, it was the end of a 12-year-run full of brilliant albums (most notably 1984's ragged masterpiece, Let It Be), dashed expectations and heroically messed-up shows. 

But on Wednesday evening, the Replacements made good on one of rock's most prayed-for reunions, announcing they'll play three dates of the Riot Fest, starting August 25th in Toronto. "The universe seems to be trying to put us together to do our thing," Stinson says. "It was just the timing and the aligning of the planets."

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"Color Me Impressed"

Wolverine.

In November of 2012, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder proposed a 924 mile trail that starts at Belle Isle in downtown Detroit and traverses the entire state, across the Upper Peninsula to the Wisconsin border. Chris Hillier, also known by his trail name, Wolverine, intends to be the first to thru-hike this trail.

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Quietly.

Collins, Untitled, Undated

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Stones, "You Got The Silver"

Eunoia.

Conceptual artist Lisa Park has been experimenting with a specialized device called aNeuroSky EEG headset that helps transform brain activity into streams of data that can be manipulated for the purposes of research, or in this case, a Fluxus-inspired performance art piece titled Euonia (Greek for “beautiful thought”). Park used the EEG headset to monitor the delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves of her brain as well as eye movements and transformed the resulting data with specialized software into sound waves. Five speakers are placed under shallow dishes of water which then vibrate in various patterns in accordance with her brain activity.

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Mozart.

The violin and viola that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played himself are in the United States for the first time ever.

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Glory.

Because we count the search for and consumption of fantastic cheese among life's greatest pleasures--and because we're pretty sure many of you do, too--we asked five top cheesemongers and cheese pros from different pockets of the country to each recommend two American artisanal cheeses they are particularly excited about right now. Here are their picks, in all their grassy, milky, stinky, moussy, nutty, mushroomy glory...

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Inner.

Matisse, Polinesia, The Sky, 1947

Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Rivers.

Just how many rivers are there in the United States? 

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Ratdog, "Lost Sailor"

Cause it's a place you've never been
Maybe a place you've never seen
You can hear her callin' on the wind
Driftin' and dreamin'

Drifting.

Homer, Boys in a Dory, 1873

Like a boat drifting,


sleep flows forward
    

on the deep water of dreams.


Drifts and drifts...


until, finally


the bottom falls out of knowledge.



In the fragrant mist of dawn


the rower wakes,
    

picks up the oars, sets them,
    

and begins to row.


All night


he labored in his dream
    

to be born


like a song in the mouth of God.



- Robert Sund

Flag.

"That the Flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” Washington explained it this way: “We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing liberty."

- George Washington

Medicine Crow.

Joe Medicine Crow was the first member of his tribe to go to college, and was in graduate school in California when America entered the war. He joined the Army, became a scout in the 103rd Infantry Division, and fought in Europe. Whenever he went into battle, he would paint red stripes on his arms beneath his uniform, and he carried in his helmet a sacred, yellow-painted eagle feather provided by a Sun Dance medicine man to shield him from harm. 

While he was in combat in Europe, and without quite meaning to, Joe Medicine Crow performed the four necessary war deeds to become a war chief like his grandfather. First, he led a seven-man squad carrying explosives through a wall of artillery fire to blast German positions along the Siegfried Line. Then, while helping to take over a German-held village, he literally ran into a German soldier, knocking him down. He quickly disarmed the soldier, taking away his rifle Finally, in the last weeks of the war, he stole dozens of horses from a battalion of German officers. He is the last Crow Indian to become a war chief.



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Repeated.

Homer, The Artist's Studio in Afternoon Fog, 1894

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

- Rachel Carson

Samuel Yirga, "Ambassel in Box (Revisited)"

Interesting.

Wandering.

I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with.

- Plato

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No.17, Op.31, "Tempest"

Glenn Gould performs ...

Dreefees.

Most kids have a special stuffed animal, ratty blanket or dog-eared book they take to sleep with them – and a lot of kids, lacking this talisman, go berserk and scream themselves to sleep. Bill Bob had no one special talisman: Bill Bob had dreefees. None of us ever quite figured out the etymology of that word, but when I asked him years later Bill Bob thought it might be an amalgamation of ‘dream’ and ‘feed’ -– food for dreams, you might say.

- David James Duncan, from The River Why  

Tallest.

In the realm of the world's tallest living things, Redwood Giants ...



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Tea.

The great Zen master Zhaozhou (Joshu)’s advice to seekers of the Way was “Go drink tea.” Zhaozhou’s contemporary, Zen Master Jiashan Shanhui, famously uttered, “Tea, Zen: one taste,” a phrase that adorns countless tea houses in China. What’s the story behind Chinese Zen and tea culture’s intimate relationship?

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Fountainhead.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

- Rollo May

Butch Hancock, "Wind's Dominion"

Return.

Wyeth, Berry Bucket, 1968

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,—the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate,"—and with a sudden gush, return to my senses.

- Henry David Thoreau

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Joe Ely, "If You Were A Bluebird"

Union.

The idea is distributed in space. It isn't only in one part; one part can't express the idea any longer, only the union of parts can completely express the idea. The idea found it necessary to be presented by several parts. After that, there was a rapid flowering of polyphony.

- Anton Webern

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Jimmie Dale Gilmore, "Another Colorado"

Happy birthday, Schiele.

Schiele, Mountain Torrent, 1918

Egon Schiele was born on this date in 1890.

I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds.

- Egon Schiele