Maddie Denton, "Hop High My Lulu Gal"

With Trey Hensley, Hayes Griffin, and my guy, Beppe Gambetta ...

Mind-Forg'd.

Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794

LONDON

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls, 

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls 

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear 

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse 

William Blake

Great.

"'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em.  It's not a pet, Sir.  Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." 

Barry Hines, from A Kestrel for a Knave

Sublime.

Mr. Lydon on respecting musical lineage and the danger of diluting the lessons of history ...

Sitting in a room, alone, listening to a CD is to be lonely. Sitting in a room alone with an LP crackling away, or sitting next to the turntable listening to a song at a time via 7-inch single is enjoying the sublime state of solitude.

Henry Rollins

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Bach, Magnificat, BWV 243

Here's the opening Magnificat anima mea Dominum conducted by Graham Ross with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Clare College Choir and soloists ...

Slowly.

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

MacDowell, Woodland Sketches, Op. 51

Takashi Yasunami performs No. 8, "A Deserted Farm" ...

Chance.

Steve points to the Mystic of Moyvane ...

What chance have we when that's where we think we live.

Colonic.

I keep getting asked by letter and on the street by Jane and John Does dressed in spandex, how they can prepare simple “gourmet” dinners in ten minutes so as to prolong, presumably, their cross-training and spritzer-drinking binges, massage and colonic appointments, drumming and marriage-counseling sessions, and tarot-card swap clubs. An easy answer here. Scoop ample quantities of Skippy on two paper plates. Handcuff each other and then slam your faces down into the plates with gusto. Good for the gluteus maximus.

Jim Harrison, from The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

Good morning.

Happy Birthday, Ronnie James Dio

Ronnie James Dio was born on this day in 1942.

"Slipping Away"...

The Traveling McCourys, "Walk Out in the Rain"

Jason Carter throwing high-octane fiddle fuel ...

I love it when a cover is better than the original.

Released.

Peter Frampton released Wind of Change on this day in 1972.

"All I Want to Be (Is By Your Side)" ...

See.

From James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, 1962 ...

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.  In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of identity.  Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame.  You would be frightened because it is our of the order of nature.  Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.  Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.  You, don’t be afraid.  I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man’s definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name.  You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality.   But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers.  And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.  For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.  It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved and unassailable and monumental dignity.  You come from a long line of poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer.  One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

Chopin, Ballade No. 4, Op. 52

It's Olga Scheps ...

Happy Birthday, Camille Pissaro

Pissarro, Garden and Henhouse at Octave Mirbeau, Les Damps, 1892

I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely.  At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it.  

Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you see nothing more to add.  Don't be afraid in nature: one must be bold, at the risk of having been deceived and making mistakes. God takes care of imbeciles, little children, and artists.

Camille Pissarro, born on this day in 1830

Mac.

The 117th Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac begins today ...

Track the race HERE.

Watch the fleet finish from The Windemere.

Sarah Vaughan, "Tenderly"

Gravity.

We need more Hercules Mulligan-types around ...

Washington’s own guard were willing to accept hard currency to betray their master.  They preferred to kidnap Washington, but the contingency plan was to poison the meal of buttered peas, lettuce and ham that Washington was fond of.   

Recognizing the gravity of the situation, Mulligan hastily shooed out Mathews and sought to inform Washington. He made about half the three-mile trip to Washington’s headquarters on horseback before running into Hamilton, who relayed the information to Washington which, combined with the prison intelligence mentioned above from the conventional story, stopped the conspiracy. Hickey was hanged, while the remaining conspirators including Mathews, were jailed in Connecticut.

More HERE. 

Gordon Lightfoot, "A Painter Passing Through"

Mackinac.

The 117th Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac starts tomorrow.

Help.

The Wild Mushroom

Well the sunset rays are shining

Me and Kaihave got our tools

A basket and a trowel

And a book with all the rules

Don't ever eat Boletus

If the tube mouths they are red

Stay away from the Amanitas

Or brother you are dead

Sometimes they're already rotten

Or the stalks are broken off

Where the deer have knocked them over

While turing up the duff

We set out in the forest

To seek the wild mushroom

In shapes diverse and colorful

Shining through the woodland gloom

If you look under oak trees

Or around an old pine stump

You'll know a mushroom's coming

By the way the leaves are humped

They send out multiple fibers

Through the roots and sod

Some make you mighty sick they say

Or bring you close to God

So here's to the mushroom family

A far-flung friendly clan

For food, for fun, for poison

They are a help to man.

Gary Snyder

It's time for Hen of the Woods.

Unavoidable.

Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is unavoidable.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Aloud.

McRae, Pulling Down the Statue of George III, 1853

On this day in 1776, The Declaration of Independence was read aloud to General George Washington's troops in New York ...

As tensions ran high, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, and word reached New York on July 9th. Washington ordered the declaration to be read aloud to troops that day. Following the public reading, soldiers and civilians marched down Broadway and on to Bowling Green. Erected on the green was an equestrian statue of George III. The rowdy crowd toppled the statue and paraded the King’s lead head on a spike, a symbolic regicide. The body of the statue, about four-thousand pounds of lead, was sent to Connecticut and melted into musket balls to use against the King’s troops. 

Happy Birthday, Ottorino Respighi

Ottorino Respighi was born on this day in 1879.

Oksana Lyniv conducts the Youth Symphony of Ukraine in a performance of The Birds ...

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

Ownership.

The Economist: Are the e-bikes a paragon of liberalism or an abomination?

The dominance of convenience also means the decline of ownership. And so much of the anti-social nature of electric bikes is a result of that. “Why did you park your Lime bike there?” one might ask. “It’s not my bike.”

Weber, Andante e Rondo Ungarese, Op. 35

Catherine Van Handel, bassoon, with Rachael Kerr, piano ...

Bound.

Stuart, Major General Henry Knox, 1806

Every friend to the liberty of his country is bound to reflect, and step forward to prevent the dreadful consequences which shall result from a government of events.

Henry Knox, from his letter to George Washington, October 23, 1786

Willie Nelson, "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground"

Willie Nelson is the most underrated and under appreciated guitarist in the history of man ...

What has happened to "music"?

Babe.

What room is the Babe in?

Humility.

SPIRIT

Rumi advised me to keep my spirit

up in the branches of a tree and not peek

out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall

willows along the irrigation ditch out back,

a safe place to remain unspoiled by the filthy

culture of greed and murder of the spirit.

People forget their spirits easily suffocate

so they must keep them far up in tree

branches where they can be summoned any moment.

It's better if you're outside as it's hard for spirits

to get into houses or buildings or airplanes.

In New York City I used to reach my spirit in front

of the gorilla cage in the children's zoo in Central Park.

It wouldn't come in the Carlyle Hotel, which

was too expensive for its taste.  In Chicago

it won't come in the Drake though I can see it

out the window hovering over the surface

of Lake Michigan. The spirit above anything

else is attracted to humility. If I slept

in the streets it would be under the cardboard with me.

Jim Harrison

ZZ Top, "Just Got Paid"

Read.

A young writer once asked Hemingway, “Are there ten books one should read to become a writer?”

Hemingway replied, “Yes, there are such books.”

The young man took out his notebook to jot down the titles.

Hemingway said, “Well, for you to find out which books are for you, you will have to read ten thousand books.”

Whiskey Myers, "Gasoline"

Spiritual things ...

Simple.

I am myself ensconced almost at the back wall, but even across the distance of this room, I can see clearly out into the sunlit street, and am able to make out on the pavement opposite a signpost pointing out several nearby destinations. One of these destinations is the village of Mursden. Perhaps 'Mursden' will ring a bell for you, as it did for me upon my first spotting it on the road atlas yesterday. In fact, I must say I was even tempted to make a slight detour from my planned route just to see the village. Mursden, Somerset, was where the firm of Giffen and Co. was once situated, and it was to Mursden one was required to dispatch one's order for a supply of Giffen's dark candles of polish, "to be flaked, mixed into wax and applied by hand." For some time, Giffen's was undoubtedly the finest silver polish available, and it was only the appearance of new chemical substances on the market shortly before the war that caused demand for this impressive product to decline.

As I remember, Giffen's appeared at the beginning of the twenties, and I am sure I am not alone in closely associating its emergence with that change of mood within our profession - that change which came to push the polishing of silver to the position of central importance it still by and large maintains today. This shift was, I believe, like so many other major shifts around this period, a generational matter; it was during these years that our generation of butlers 'came of age', and figures like Mr. Marshall, in particular, played a crucial part in making silver-polishing so central. This is not to suggest, of course, that the polishing of silver - particularly those items that would appear at table - was not always regarded a serious duty.

But it would not be unfair to suggest that many butlers of, say, my father's generation did not consider the matter such a key one, and this is evidenced by the fact that in those days, the butler of a household rarely supervised the polishing of silver directly, being content to leave it to, say, the under-butler's whims, carrying out inspections only intermittently."  It was Mr Marshall, it is generally agreed, who was the first to recognize the Nil significance of silver - namely, that no other objects in the house were likely to come under such intimate scrutiny from outsiders as was silver during a meal, and as such, it served as a public index of a house's standards. And Mr Marshall it was who first caused stupefaction amongst ladies and gentlemen visiting Charleville House with displays of silver polished to previously unimagined standards. Very soon, naturally, butlers up and down the country, under pressure from their employers, were focusing their minds on the question of silver-polishing. There quickly sprang up, I recall, various butlers, each claiming to have discovered methods by which they could surpass Mr Marshall - methods they made a great show of keeping secret, as though they were French chefs guarding their recipes. But I am confident - as I was then - that the sorts of elaborate and mysterious processes performed by someone like Mr. Jack Neighbours had little or no discernible effect on the end result. As far as I was concerned, it was a simple enough matter: one used good polish, and one supervised closely. Giffen's was the polish ordered by all discerning butlers of the time, and if this product was used correctly, one had no fear of one's silver being second best to anybody's.

Kazuo Ishiguro, from The Remains of the Day

Monteverdi, Selva morale et spirituale, SV 268

Lionel Meunier conducts Vox Luminis in a performance of the the Beatus Vir Primo ...

Refuge.

Unknown, Kant, 1790

Fifth Thesis

The greatest problem for the human species, whose solution nature compels it to seek, is to achieve a universal civil society administered in accord with the right. Since it is only in society—and, indeed, only in one that combines the greatest freedom, and thus a thoroughgoing antagonism among its members, with a precise determination and protection of the boundaries of this freedom, so that it can coexist with the freedom of others—since it is only in such a society that nature’s highest objective, namely, the highest attainable development of mankind’s capacities, can be achieved, nature also wills that mankind should itself accomplish this, as well as all the other goals that constitute mankind’s vocation. Thus must there be a society in which one will find the highest possible degree of freedom under external laws combined with irresistible power, i.e., a perfectly rightful civil consitution, whose attainment is the supreme task nature has set for the human species; for only by solving and completing it can nature fulfill her other objectives with our species. Necessity compels men, who are otherwise so deeply enamoured with unrestricted freedom, to enter into this state of coercion; and indeed, they are forced to do so by the greatest need of all, namely, the one that men themselves bring about, for their propensities do not allow them to coexist for very long in wild freedom. But once in a refuge such as civil society furnishes, these same propensities have the most salutary effect. It is just as with trees in a forest, which need each other, for in seeking to take the air and sunlight from the others, each obtains a beautiful, straight shape, while those that grow in freedom and separate from one another branch out randomly, and are stunted, bent, and twisted. All the culture and art that adorn mankind, as well as the most beautiful social order, are fruits of unsociableness that is forced to discipline itself and thus through an imposed art to develop nature’s seed completely.

Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Pure Reason

Best.

Brian Lamb dicsusses the book 1776 with its author, David McCullough ...

[Henry Knox] is such an extraordinary story of an American who seemed to be miscast, seemed to be a fellow not prepared for the role that history had for him to play and who not only lived up to the role but went over the top, as it were.  An example of a man who came from very humble origins with very little advantage in the way of education or connections.  He rose to be one of the most important Americans of his day, the man that George Washington discovered and the man that George Washington counted on through nearly eight and a half years of the Revolutionary War and who then counted on him as his secretary of war during the time that Washington was president.

He started out as a Boston bookseller. Big, stout, gregarious, robust, friendly, popular fellow who had about the equivalent of a fifth grade education and who loved books and never stopped reading. And he became one of the best officers in the whole war. 

Washington singled out two young men almost within a week or two weeks after he took command at Cambridge, Massachusetts as people he could count on. One was Nathaniel Green, who was a 33-year-old Quaker who'd been made a major general at the age of 33, having had no military experience at all. And the second was Henry Knox, who was all of 25, and he had had no military experience at all.  But both of them had been reading books. What they knew about the military was entirely from books. That was an age, an era that believed that one of the best ways to learn things was to read books, the age of The Enlightenment. They are in their way, I think, wonderful examples, personifications of the Enlightenment faith that if you want to learn something, pick up a book and get reading.

Henry Knox, a long-standing member of The Hammock Papers' Great Hall.

The "Knox Moving Co." scene from John Adams ...

An excellent book ...

Happy Birthday, Gustav Mahler

It is peculiar, but as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.

Gustav Mahler, born on this day in 1860

Bernard Haitink conducts the Berlin Philarmoniker in the 3rd Symphony's horn introduction, f,the first time in my dog-walking mix, featuring the heroic horns of Norbert Hauptmann, Fergus McWilliam, Klaus Wallendorf, Stefan Dohr, Stefan de Leval Jezierski, and Manfred Klier ...

Thin Lizzy, "Cowboy Song"

I am just a cowboy, lonesome on the trail

A starry night, a campfire light

The coyote call and the howlin' winds wail

So I'll ride out to the old sundown ...

The lamp is lit.

Aaron Lewis, "Northern Redneck"

Recorded at The Bluestone, in Columbus, Round-On-The-Ends-and-High-in-the-Middle ...

Until.

Raphael, The School of Athens (detail), 1509

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy cities will never have rest from their evils.

Plato, from The Republic, Book V

Unobstructed.

Otis, Thomas Jefferson, 1817

I abandon politics, and accomodate myself chearfully to things as they go; confident in the wisdom of those who direct them, and that they will be better and better directed in the progressive course of knolege and experience. our successors start on our shoulders. they know all that we know, and will add to that stock the discoveries of the next 50. years; and what will be their amount we may estimate from what the last 50. years have added to the science of human concerns. the thoughts of others, as I find them on paper, are my amusement and delight; but the labors of the mind in abstruse investigations are irksome, and writing itself is become a slow and painful operation, occasioned by a stiffened wrist, the consequence of a former dislocation. I will however essay the two definitions which you say are more particularly interesting at present: I mean those of the terms Liberty & Republic, aware however that they have been so multifariously applied as to convey no precise idea to the mind. of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of it’s extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law"; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Thomas Jefferson, from his letter to Isaac H. Tiffany, April 4, 1819

Learn.

If you learn one thing today, take a load off ...

Thanks, Kurt.

Happy Birthday, Frida Kahlo

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness."  Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.  I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality."

Frida Kahlo, born on this day in 1907

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

... to prioritize victory over, rather than coexistence with, the communist threat.

Arts.

Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.

M.F.K. Fisher, from Serve It Forth

Proof.

Kurt's focus on The Philosopher of Phoenix' framing of freedom ...

America still has what we've lost: the reflex to build rather than administer. The founder is a hero there, not a suspect. Success is proof there, not a sin to atone for. That's your treasure. And a treasure is lost without anyone noticing—a form, an agency, a "good cause" at a time.

So don't look for hidden enemies. It's useless and unworthy of you. Look at the figure instead.

Kurt said it decades ago: "Aside from mayonnaise, the French are good for very little."

Maybe they get a pass on sculpture, as well.