13 July 2026
Magnificence.
On the afternoon of this day in 1985, I steeped into a bar on Mackinac Island, ordered a Mount Gay and tonic, and looked up to see this magnificence unfolding on the TV ...
Schubert, Der Schmetterling (The Butterfly), D 633
The BUTTERFLY
Why should I not dance?
It costs me no effort,
and enchanting colours
shimmer here amid the verdure.
Ever lovelier
my brightly-coloured wings glisten;
ever sweeter is the scent
from each tiny blossom.
I sip from the blossoms;
you cannot protect them.
How great my joy,
be it early or late,
to flit so blithely
over hill and dale.
When the evening murmurs
you see the clouds glow;
when the air is golden
the meadows are more radiantly green.
I sip from the blossoms;
you cannot protect them.
Franz Schubert
According to medieval superstitions, witches turned into butterflies at night to spoil or steal cream or milk. Schmetten, Schmette (Slav. Smetana) is the old east/central German word of Slavic origin for sour cream or butter.
Window.
The HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.
And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.
The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
Tomas Tranströmer
Continually.
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
Charles Baudelaire
Mozart, "The Great" Mass in C-Minor, K. 427
Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Monteverdi Choir and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of the Credo ...
12 July 2026
Excellent.
An excellent album ...
... to prioritize victory over, rather than coexistence with, the communist threat.
Happy Birthday, Henry David Thoreau
Green, Henry David Thoreau, 1856
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau, born on this day in 1817, from a letter to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, on April 10, 1853
Happy Birthday, Amedeo Modigliani
Modigliani, Portrait of a Polish Woman, 1919
I want to be a tune-swept fiddle string that feels the master melody, and snaps.
Amedeo Modigliani, born on this day in 1884
11 July 2026
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
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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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.
10 July 2026
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.
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
09 July 2026
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.
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
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Aloud.
McRae, Pulling Down the Statue of George III, 1853
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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 ...
08 July 2026
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.”
07 July 2026
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"?
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
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.”
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