Excellent.

An excellent album for Spring's first Sunday evening ...

Reverse.

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

J.D. Salinger, from "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction"

Sprang.

Uncle Thomas was the first to draw my attention to the possibilities of the old bureau.  He was pottering about the house one afternoon, having ordered me to keep at his heels for company—he was a man who hated to be left one minute alone,—when his eye fell on it. "H'm! Sheraton!" he remarked. (He had a smattering of most things, this uncle, especially the vocabularies.) Then he let down the flap, and examined the empty pigeon-holes and dusty paneling. "Fine bit of inlay," he went on: "good work, all of it. I know the sort. There's a secret drawer in there somewhere." Then as I breathlessly drew near, he suddenly exclaimed: "By Jove, I do want to smoke!" And, wheeling round, he abruptly fled for the garden, leaving me with the cup dashed from my lips. What a strange thing, I mused, was this smoking, that takes a man suddenly, be he in the court, the camp, or the grove, grips him like an Afreet, and whirls him off to do its imperious behests! Would it be even so with myself, I wondered, in those unknown grown-up years to come?

But I had no time to waste in vain speculations. My whole being was still vibrating to those magic syllables 'secret drawer'; and that particular chord had been touched that never fails to thrill responsive to such words as cave, trap-door, sliding-panel, bullion, ingots, or Spanish dollars. For, besides its own special bliss, who ever heard of a secret drawer with nothing in it? And O I did want money so badly! I mentally ran over the list of demands which were pressing me the most imperiously.

First, there was the pipe I wanted to give George Jannaway. George, who was Martha's young man, was a shepherd, and a great ally of mine; and the last fair he was at, when he bought his sweetheart fairings, as a right-minded shepherd should, he had purchased a lovely snake expressly for me; one of the wooden sort, with joints, waggling deliciously in the hand; with yellow spots on a green ground, sticky and strong-smelling, as a fresh-painted snake ought to be; and with a red-flannel tongue pasted cunningly into its jaws. I loved it much, and took it to bed with me every night, till what time its spinal cord was loosed and it fell apart, and went the way of all mortal joys. I thought it very nice of George to think of me at the fair, and that's why I wanted to give him a pipe. When the young year was chill and lambing-time was on, George inhabited a little wooden house on wheels, far out on the wintry downs, and saw no faces but such as were sheepish and woolly and mute; and when he and Martha were married, she was going to carry his dinner out to him every day, two miles; and after it, perhaps he would smoke my pipe. It seemed an idyllic sort of existence, for both the parties concerned; but a pipe of quality, a pipe fitted to be part of a life such as this, could not be procured (so Martha informed me) for a smaller sum than eighteenpence. And meantime——!

Then there was the fourpence I owed Edward; not that he was bothering me for it, but I knew he was in need of it himself, to pay back Selina, who wanted it to make up a sum of two shillings, to buy Harold an ironclad for his approaching birthday,—H.M.S. Majestic, now lying uselessly careened in the toyshop window, just when her country had such sore need of her. And then there was that boy in the village who had caught a young squirrel, and I had never yet possessed one, and he wanted a shilling for it, but I knew that for ninepence in cash—but what was the good of these sorry threadbare reflections? I had wants enough to exhaust any possible find of bullion, even if it amounted to half a sovereign. My only hope now lay in the magic drawer, and here I was, standing and letting the precious minutes slip by! Whether 'findings' of this sort could, morally speaking, be considered 'keepings,' was a point that did not occur to me.

The room was very still as I approached the bureau; possessed, it seemed to be, by a sort of hush of expectation. The faint odour of orris-root that floated forth as I let down the flap, seemed to identify itself with the yellows and browns of the old wood, till hue and scent were of one quality and interchangeable. Even so, ere this, the pot-pourri had mixed itself with the tints of the old brocade, and brocade and pot-pourri had long been one. With expectant fingers I explored the empty pigeon-holes and sounded the depths of the softly-sliding drawers. No books that I knew of gave any general recipe for a quest like this; but the glory, should I succeed unaided, would be all the greater.

To him who is destined to arrive, the fates never fail to afford, on the way, their small encouragements. In less than two minutes, I had come across a rusty button-hook. This was truly magnificent. In the nursery there existed, indeed, a general button-hook, common to either sex; but none of us possessed a private and special button-hook, to lend or to refuse as suited the high humour of the moment. I pocketed the treasure carefully, and proceeded. At the back of another drawer, three old foreign stamps told me I was surely on the highroad to fortune.

Following on these bracing incentives, came a dull blank period of unrewarded search. In vain I removed all the drawers and felt over every inch of the smooth surfaces, from front to back. Never a knob, spring or projection met the thrilling finger-tips; unyielding the old bureau stood, stoutly guarding its secret, if secret it really had. I began to grow weary and disheartened. This was not the first time that Uncle Thomas had proved shallow, uninformed, a guide into blind alleys where the echoes mocked you. Was it any good persisting longer? Was anything any good whatever? In my mind I began to review past disappointments, and life seemed one long record of failure and of non-arrival. Disillusioned and depressed, I left my work and went to the window. The light was ebbing from the room, and seemed outside to be collecting itself on the horizon for its concentrated effort of sunset. Far down the garden, Uncle Thomas was holding Edward in the air reversed, and smacking him. Edward, gurgling hysterically, was striking blind fists in the direction where he judged his uncle's stomach should rightly be; the contents of his pockets—a motley show—were strewing the lawn. Somehow, though I had been put through a similar performance myself an hour or two ago, it all seemed very far away and cut off from me.

Westwards the clouds were massing themselves in a low violet bank; below them, to north and south, as far round as eye could reach, a narrow streak of gold ran out and stretched away, straight along the horizon. Somewhere very far off, a horn was blowing, clear and thin; it sounded like the golden streak grown audible, while the gold seemed the visible sound. It pricked my ebbing courage, this blended strain of music and colour. I turned for a last effort; and Fortune thereupon, as if half-ashamed of the unworthy game she had been playing with me, relented, opening her clenched fist. Hardly had I put my hand once more to the obdurate wood, when with a sort of small sigh, almost a sob—as it were—of relief, the secret drawer sprang open.

Kenneth Grahame, from The Golden Age

Motivation.

No trepidation

My motivation

Is a standing ovation from a waggin' tail ...

Resonance.

Titian, Fête Champêtre, 1510

The Resonance of Spring: A Bacchanalia of Lute Tunes

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;

In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Palestrina's Lute

Venere Lute Quartet

The Art of Resonance: Archlute & Theorbo Music Of The Italian Seicento

Luca Pianca

Del suono come perla: 17th-Century Italian Music for Theorbo

Laura La Vecchia

Scarlatti & Zamboni: Italian Lute Music

Toyohiko Satoh and Michiel Niessen

Nobilissimo Istromento: Virtuoso Lute Music of the Italian Renaissance

Luca Pianca

... in vece d'arco o di faretra, chi tien leuto, e chi viola o cetra: 16th Century Italian Lute Music

Roberto Gallina

Alla Venetiana: Early 16th Century Venetian Lute Music

Paul O'Dette

Vieux Gaultier: Pièces de Luth

Hopkinson Smith

Jacques de Gallot: Pièces de Luth 

Hopkinson Smith

François Dufaut: Pièces de Luth en Manuscrits

Hopkinson Smith

Robert de Visée: Theorbo Solos

Jakob Lindberg 

Nicolas Vallet: Le Secret des Muses

Nigel North

Alessandro Piccinini: Intavolatura di Liuto et di Chitarrone, Libro Primo, Bologna M.DC.XXIII

Nigel North 

Capricci: Castaldi & Pellegrini

Albane Imbs and Rolf Lislevand

Dolcissima et Amorosa: The Lute Music of "Il Divino," Francesco Canova da Milano, Vol. 1

Nigel North

A Decoration of Silence: The Lute Music of "Il Divino," Francesco Canova da Milano, Vol. 2

Nigel North

Exists.

In times of great vexation

When one must choose between what's right and wrong

Freedom, so they say,

Amounts to the choices you have made

Through all the arbitrary rationale concerning liberty

Freedom, I must say,

Exists within unconditioned minds

Reason has come of age

Castaldi, Capricci a due stromenti cioè tiorba e tiorbino

Albane Imbs performs Sonata 13a ...

Transcendent.

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what mythology does for you.

I mean a vocabulary in the form of not words but acts and adventures, which connotes something transcendent of the action here so that you always feel in accord with the universal being.

Joseph Campbell, from The Power of Myth

Work.

Steve points to timely wisdom ...

If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably progressing.  Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Choosing.

Ari Weinzweig on the benefits of choosing the unordinary ...

The more I played with the idea of unordinary, the more it resonated. I began to see that, while the quality of our food may indeed be particularly special—extraordinary when we do it really well—most of what we do in our business practices, seen through my new lens of understanding, is definitely unordinary. They aren’t, I’m realizing, especially extraordinary at all. Anyone who wants to could do them. It takes neither a particularly special skill nor years of intensive formal training to learn to be kind. Kindness. Compassion. Dignity. Diversity. Humility. Empathy. Inclusion. Any eight-year-old could have their hand at them. Vision-writing. Extra-miling. Open-book management. Open meetings. Consensus. Also wonderful, but still, not really “extraordinary.” We have no special ingredient that makes us more able to do what we do than any other American organization.

All of those processes are really important to us, and I recommend them wholeheartedly to you too, but the truth is that anyone who decides to could do them. In that sense, I would now describe them as “unordinary.” Yes, uncommon, but not because of a rare ability that’s uniquely abundant in and around Ann Arbor. They’re hard to find because they’re not the norm—most people color within the same behavioral lines their colleagues do. They’re not the norm because, in current conditions, it may take a bit more attentiveness to take positive, dignity-based action. And, at the same time, they are absolutely unordinary.

Happy Birthday, David Lindley

David Lindley was born on this day in 1944.

"Her Mind is Gone," with Bill Frisell ...

Happy Birthday, Spaceman

Roger Hodgson was born on this day in 1950.

"Take the Long Way Home"...

Everything.

Firchau, Uncle Fred, Pop, and Sarge, Higgins Lake, 1971

Sandy two-tracks

Blue jay cries

Up early

Colossal white pine

Sand dust between toes

"Jump The Dump"

Imperceptibly wobbling at dinner from being on the water all day

Pipe smoke

Minnow bucket

Centerboard vibrating on the Sunfish

The easy-listening sounds of WGER in the background ... beautiful music with personality

Wet swim trunks

"Don't run on the dock!"

Black squirrels

The smell of two-cycle exhaust

The halyard on the flag pole ... WIND!

Vernor's and Faygo red pop in the bottomless cooler

Oxidized-copper-green decking on the dock

Paper birch

Salami on rye

Wave-rippled sand underwater in the morning

The cedar smell of the bedrooms upstairs

Wood smoke

Hearing the pull tab rattle at the bottom of a can while having a sip of beer

Perch-scented hands

Yeasty, powder-sugar donuts from the carryout

Two-cycle outboard exhaust

Coppertone

Planters peanuts

"Trunk slammers"

Chicken on the grill ... skin

Sitting and listening to everything that Dad and Uncle Fred were talking about

Above, a familiar scene: frying bluegill in cast-iron on the Weber.  As they say, "Technique is the proof of your seriousness."

Shafts.

For Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking—a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree—is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe—certainly creative and super-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as it were talking to you, while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old Earth that is pushing forth life of every sort under your very feet or spellbound in deathlike winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that—across the dinner table, in smoking-room armchairs; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow. Not a fiftieth part of all your happy imaginings will you ever, later, recapture, note down, reduce to dull inadequate words; but meantime the mind has stretched itself and had its holiday. But this emancipation is only attained in solitude, the solitude which the unseen companions demand before they will come out and talk to you; for, be he who he may, if there is another fellow present, your mind has to trot between shafts.

A certain amount of "shafts," indeed, is helpful, as setting the mind more free; and so the high road, while it should always give way to the field path when choice offers, still has this particular virtue, that it takes charge of you—your body, that is to say. Its hedges hold you in friendly steering-reins, its milestones and fingerposts are always on hand, with information succinct and free from frills; and it always gets somewhere, sooner or later. So you are nursed along your way, and the mind may soar in cloudland and never need to be pulled earthwards by any string. But this is as much company as you ought to require, the comradeship of the road you walk on, the road which will look after you and attend to such facts as must not be overlooked. Of course the best sort of walk is the one on which it doesn’t matter twopence whether you get anywhere at all at any time or not; and the second best is the one on which the hard facts of routes, times, or trains, give you nothing to worry about. And this is perhaps the only excuse for the presence of that much-deprecated Other Fellow—that you can put all that sort of thing on to him.

Kenneth Graham, from "The Fellow That Goes Alone"

Love.

Teach me to love? Go teach thyself more wit:

I chief professor am of it.

The god of love, if such a thing there be,

May learn to love from me.

Abraham Cowley, from "The Prophet"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Refuses.

Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Thanks to Kurt for introducing me to Chesterton and that book all those years ago.

Ready.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Gaston Bachelard

You.

Unknown, Carl Robert Firchau, 1st Upper Silesian Field Artillery Regiment "von Clausewitz" No. 21, 1907

Firchau, Self-Portrait, 1971

Firchau, Self-Portraits, 2008

PRINTS

Seeing photos

of ancestors

a century past

is like looking

at your own

fingerprints—

circles 

and lines

you can't 

recognize

until someone else

with a stranger's eye

looks close and says

that's you.

Joseph Bruchac

Labeled.

As my best man, Kurt told a story at my wedding about my Pop that encapsulated his methods perfectly.  

Pop was an engineer: organized, analytical, and processual.  On and in his work benches you would see bins, labeled, organized, some dated, if appropriate.  

Tools, always cleaned and returned (I can hear him now, "You can use anything you need, just take care of it and put it back when you're done.")  The tools were engraved with dates.  I have a screwdriver with "1957" engraved on its well-worn, beautifully-patina-ed wooden handle.  

Lift the hood on any of our family cars and you'd find a strip of duct tape on the frame above the radiator with dates written in Sharpie, very neatly in his all-caps print, the dates of the latest maintenance done on belts, fluids, or filters.

Kurt's story told of the day of my birth, when Pop flipped me over, slapped a strip of duct tape on my butt and wrote, "October 17, 1964."

Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach

Hausmann, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1746

All music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the soul's refreshment; where this is not remembered there is no real music but only a devilish hubbub.

Johann Sebastian Bach, born on this day in 1685

Viktoria Mullova performs the Chaconne from the Partita in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004 ...

Happy Birthday, Pop

Many years ago, my Dad sent me an e-mail after we had a discussion about "the world today" ...

Dwelling on and blaming every day can take a physical and mental toll and eat up one's time. There is too much of this stuff along with other things in this world that are negative. This again is part of the problem(s) in this day and age. If it's on the internet in anyway, shape or form, it has to be true ... that's false ... but that is what "some are into" today.  Common sense says that some of this topic may be correct, but more data has to be generated and discussed on topics "in open discussion," not, "If you don't believe me, you are against me," etc.!!!

At this point, hate and blaming DOES destroy good days and DOES give many people headaches and loss of sleep and this is TRUE, this we know, we must try to overcome or be above it, which is VERY, VERY hard to do! 

These are some of my thoughts ... Dad.

Thanks and happy birthday, Pop!  I hope the Amish lady came today.

Harvested.

Of course the best domestic spaghetti is harvested on the coasts ...

True.

It'd be hilarious if it wasn't absolutely, word-for-word, heartbreakingly true ...

People would like that.

Telemann, Violin Concerto in A, TWV 51:A4, “The Frogs”

Orchestre à Cordes de l'Uliège performs under the guidance of Loïc Duchêne with Émilie Herwats, violon ...

Now.

Shepard, Ratty's Picnic, 1908

Spring is upon us right about ... now.

EARLY SPRING

The Spring is come, and Spring flowers coming too,

    The crocus, patty kay, the rich hearts' ease;

The polyanthus peeps with blebs of dew,

    And daisy flowers; the buds swell on the trees;

    While oer the odd flowers swim grandfather bees

In the old homestead rests the cottage cow;

    The dogs sit on their haunches near the pail,

The least one to the stranger growls "bow wow,"

    Then hurries to the door and cocks his tail,

To knaw the unfinished bone; the placid cow

    Looks o’er the gate; the thresher's lumping flail

Is all the noise the spring encounters now.

John Clare

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Released.

Depeche Mode released Violator on this day in 1990.

"Enjoy the Silence"...

Herreshoff.

Herreschoff, Westward, 1910

Public Image Limited, "Rules And Regulations"

Have no fear of laughter

Wait for what comes after

Excusing no excuses

The hangmen and his nooses

Busy executing

The bloody and blaspheming

Rules and regulations ...

Introduced.

The world was introduced to the theme and variations of Asia on this day in 1982.

A song about julienne, “Cutting It Fine"...

Big.

Jones, Big Sticks Weetamoe and Vanitie, 1933

Released.

The Who released Face Dances on this day in 1981.

"Another Tricky Day"...

Please note that the editor of this blog believes The Who was a necessary evil in the musical soundscape of the headiest of heady days and does not condone your attention beyond this post.  

We should've known when Mike's mom told us to turn it down.

Order an extra side of ranch.

Everywhere.

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.

Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

Happy Birthday, Jerry Jeff Walker

Jerry Jeff Walker was born on this day in 1942.

"Pickup Truck Song," featuring the artistry of "Praise the" Lloyd Maines on steel...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...