Released.

AC⚡DC released Highway to Hell on this day in 1979.

"If You Want Blood (You've Got It)" ...

Released.

John Cougar released John Cougar on this day in 1979.

Crown Lands, "Right Way Back"

Whatever happens, we have got the (whammy bar) and they have not. (3:34)

Hilaire Belloc-ish

Poetry

Calder, Vertical Foliage, 1941

To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.  When everything goes right, a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise!

Alexander Calder

Contribute.

Buckminster Fuller's sixty-six-year experiment to document his existence ...

On one of those walks, in the autumn of 1927, he stopped at the edge of Lake Michigan. He calculated how long it would take to for him to grow hypothermic and drown. His life insurance would pay out, and his wife and daughters would be provided for. 

Standing on that shore at age 32, feeling like an absolute failure, suicide felt like the only responsible decision.

But as he stood there, on the precipice of ending his life, he felt briefly suspended above the ground, and he heard a voice in his head that said:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

The conviction he felt from that thought marked the beginning of a life dedicated to replicating this sense of certainty by documenting the certainty of his existence. 

He went home and told Anne that he was done making decisions based on how he felt. He called it committing egocide. Not suicide, the death of the body. Egocide, the death of the part of him that ran on feeling.

He said that he had to think, and would not utter a word until he knew what he truly thought. For two full years (or so he claimed) Fuller was silent. He filled five thousand pages with notes, in pursuit of the secret to success for the entire human race. 

Fuller decided to make his life an experiment “to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” 

Learned.

When I was three my mother snuck me in and out of movies two or three times a week. My first film was Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I suffered permanent curvature of the spine and of my imagination that day a long time ago in 1923. From that hour on, I knew a kindred and wonderfully grotesque compatriot of the dark when I saw one. I ran off to see all the Chaney films again and again to be deliciously frightened. The Phantom of the Opera stood astride my life with his scarlet cape. And when it wasn't the Phantom it was the terrible hand that gestured from behind the bookcase in The Cat and the Canary, bidding me to come find more darkness hid in books. 

I was in love, then, with monsters and skeletons and circuses and carnivals and dinosaurs and, at last, the red planet, Mars. 

From these primitive bricks I have built a life and a career. By my staying in love with all of these amazing things, all of the good things in my existence have come about. 

In other words, I was not embarrassed at circuses. Some people are. Circuses are loud, vulgar, and smell in the sun. By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavor. Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves, into embarrassment. When the circus pulls in at five of a dark cold summer morn, and the calliope sounds, they do not rise and run, they turn in their sleep, and life passes by.

I did rise and run. I learned that I was right and everyone else wrong when I was nine. Buck Rogers arrived on scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn't worth living. The next thought was: Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.

Ray Bradbury, from "Drunk, and In Charge of a Bicycle"

Biebl, Ave Maria

VOCES8 ...

Off.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman

Infinite.

Steve points to Rabbi Sacks and his thoughts on Tolstoy ...

Faith, he said is a force of life.  "If a man lives, then he must believe in something." If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes.  The only thing worth believing in is the infinite.  And, "Without faith it is impossible to live."

Lineage.

The ordinary miracle of existing ...

As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible? Not the universe, which is without mind. And not the huge number of human beings who could have been but never were. I can hardly be responsible to people who do not exist. I believe it is a responsibility to myself—to not waste my precious life.

Eight or nine years old. Riding my bike home in the dark.  No street lights.  Pedaling, I looked up ... and immediately stopped.  Stars beyond stars.  I felt so small but a part of that vastness.  I was alive!  

Even then, I remember my thoughts flooded with the link in the chain that I was a part of.  Family.  Those who came before.  My Mum made them a part of our family prayer a the start of every meal.  Lineage.  A chain is only as strong ...

Executed.

I do not believe I ever would have the courage to fight a duel. If any man should wrong me to the extent of my being willing to kill him, I would not be willing to give him the choice of weapons with which it should be done, and of the time, place and distance separating us, when I executed him.

Ulysses S. Grant, from Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant

Happy Birthday, Hilaire Belloc

Now there is discoverable in man, freewill. His actions are of moral value to him if they are undertaken upon his own initiative; not if they are undertaken under compulsion. Therefore the use of choice is necessary to human dignity. A man deprived of choice is by that the less a man, and this we all show through the repugnance excited in us by unauthorized restraint and subjection, through coercion rather than authority, to another’s will. We cannot do good, or even evil, unless we do it freely; and if we admit the idea of good at all in human society, freedom must be its accompaniment.

Hilaire Belloc, born on this day in 1870, from "An Essay on the Restoration of Property"

More.

More leisure time for artists everywhere ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

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

Happy Birthday, Roger Taylor

  

Roger Taylor was born on this day in 1949.

"Now I'm Here ...

An excellent album ...

Alan Parsons Project, "The Turn of a Friendly Card"

Thanks to my buddy, Kurt, for introducing me all the way back in those heady days,long ago and for the gift of experiencing this band live last night ...

Part One

Part Two

Ask.

The VAGABOND

Give to me the life I love

Let the lave go by me.

Give the jolly heaven above

And the byway nigh me.

Bed in the bush with stars to see

Bread I dip in the river -

There's the life for a man like me,

There's the life for ever.

Let the blow fall soon or late

Let what will be o'er me.

Give the face of earth around,

And the road before me.

Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,

Not a friend to know me.

All I seek, the heaven above

And the road below me.

O let autumn fall on me

When afield I linger

Silencing the bird on tree

Biting the blue finger.

White as meal as frosty field -

Warm the fireside haven -

Not to autumn will I yield,

Not to winter even!

Let the blow fall soon or late

Let what will be o'er me

Give the face of earth around

And the road below me.

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,

Nor a friend to know me.

All I ask, the heaven above

And the road below me.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Telemann, Suite in A-Minor for Recorder and Strings, TWV 55:a2

Bolette Roed performs the Menuet with Arte dei Suonatori ...

Sing.

SABBATH I 

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,

mute in my consternations,

I hear my song at last,

and I sing it. As we sing,

the day turns, the trees move.

Wendell Berry

Verdi, La Traviata

Sir Georg Solti conducts the Orchestra of The Royal Opera House in a performance of the Prelude to Act One ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

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

Luncheon.

Phantasmagoric.

The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action, for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.

Robert Louis Stevenson from “The Lantern-Bearers”

Alive.

How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?

Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What's the cure?

I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what.

I did. And was made well.

But still. At that age? When we are accustomed to responding to peer pressure?

Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone?

I don't want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. 

Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers, I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed. It is almost that simple. It was like having your best allround greatest-loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shotgun killed. Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and, lo !, he sat up and talked and said, what?

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.  

Except I never used the S.O.B. words. They were not allowed.  Heck! was about the size and strength of my outcry. 

Stay alive!

Ray Bradbury, from the preface to Zen in the Art of Writing, "How to Climb the Tree of Life, Throw Rocks at Yourself, and Get Down Again Without Breaking Your Bones or Your Spirit, A Preface with a Title Not Much Longer than the Book

Wait.

A TRACE

You that give new life to this planet,

you that transcend logic, come.

I am only an arrow.

Fill your bow with me and let fly.

Because of this love for you

my bowl has fallen from the roof.

Put down the ladder and collect the pieces, please.

People ask, but which roof is your roof?

I answer, Wherever the soul came from,

and wherever it goes at night, my roof is in that direction.

From wherever spring arrives to heal the ground,

from wherever searching rises in a human being.

The looking itself is a trace of what we are looking for,

but we have been more like the man who sat on his donkey

and asked the donkey where to go.

Be quiet now and wait.

It may be that the ocean one,

that we desire so to move into and become,

desires us out here on land a little longer

going our sundry roads to the shore.

Rumi

Spirit.

Reflect that nothing merits admiration except the spirit, the impressiveness of which prevents it from being impressed by anything.

Seneca, from Letters from a Stoic

Released.

 AC⚡DC released Back in Black on this day in 1980.

"Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" 

Rock and roll ain't no riddle, man ...

 Good morning.

Happy Birthday, Henry Knox

Stuart, Henry Knox, 1806

On the very first impression of Faction and licentiousness the fine theoretic government of Massachusetts has given away and its laws arrested and trampled under foot. Men at a distance, who have admired our systems of government, unfounded in nature, are apt to accuse the rulers, and say that taxes have been assessed coo high and collected coo rigidly. This is a deception equal to any that has been hitherto entertained. It is indeed a face, that high taxes are the ostensible cause of the commotions, but that they are the real cause is as far remote from truth as light from darkness. The people who are the insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes—But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their creed is "That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice, and ought to be swept off the face of the earth." In a word they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private and have agrarian Laws which are easily effected by the means of unfunded paper money which shall be a tender in all cases whatever. 

The numbers of these people may amount in [M]assachusetts to about one fifth part of several populous counties, and to them may be collected, people of similar sentiments, from the States of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire so as to constitute a body of 12 or 15,000 desperate and unprincipled men—They are chiefly of the Young and active part of the community, more easily collected than perhaps Kept together afterwards—But they will probably commit overt acts of treason which will compel them to embody for their own safety—once embodied they will be constrained to submit to discipline for the same reason. Having proceeded to this length for which they are now ripe, we shall have a formidable rebellion against reason, the principles of all government, and against the very name of liberty. This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England—They start as from a dream, and ask what has been the Cause of our delusion? What is to afford us security against the violence of lawless men? Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property. We imagined that the mildness of our government and the virtue of the people were so correspondent, that we were not as other nations requiring brutal force to support the laws—But we find that we are men, actual men, possessing all the turbulent passions belonging to that animal and that we must have a government proper and adequate for him—The people of Massachusetts for instance, are far advanced in this doctrine, and the men of reflection, and principle, are determined to endeavor to establish a government which shall have the power to protect them in their lawful pursuits, and which will be efficient in all cases of internal commotions or foreign invasions—They mean that liberty shall form the basis, a liberty resulting from the equal and firm administration of the laws. They wish for a general government of unity as they see that the local legislatures, must naturally and necessarily tend to retard general government. 

We have arrived at that point of time in which we are forced to see our national humiliation, and that a progression in this line, cannot be productive of happiness either private or public—something is wanting and something must be done or we shall be involved in all the horror of faction and civil war without a prospect of its termination—Every tried friend to the liberties of his country is bound to reflect, and step forward to prevent the dreadful consequences which will result from a government of events—Unless this is done we shall be liable to be ruled by an Arbitrary and Capricious armed tyranny, whose word and will must be Law. 

 Henry Knox, born on this date in 1750, from his letter to George Washington, October 23, 1786

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

An excellent book ...

The Jam, "Absolute Beginners"

Jones, Air in B-Flat Major

The Beggar's Ensemble performs the Allegro ...

Grow.

A SECOND CHILDHOOD

When all my days are ending

And I have no song to sing,

I think that I shall not be too old

To stare at everything;

As I stared once at a nursery door

Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs

On all my sins and me,

Because He does not take away

The terror from the tree

And stones still shine along the road

That are and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,

Men grow too old for wine,

But I shall not grow too old to see

Unearthly daylight shine,

Changing my chamber’s dust to snow

Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,

The first surprises stay;

And in my dross is dropped a gift

For which I dare not pray:

That a man grow used to grief and joy

But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,

Men grow too old for lies;

But I shall not grow too old to see

Enormous night arise,

A cloud that is larger than the world

And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose

The latchet of my shoe;

Or shake the dust from off my feet

Or the staff that bears me through

On ground that is too good to last,

Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,

Men grow too old to wed;

But I shall not grow too old to see

Hung crazily overhead

Incredible rafters when I wake

And I find that I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:

Though blackening clouds be plain,

Still I am stung and startled

By the first drop of the rain:

Romance and pride and passion pass

And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,

Wide windows of the sky;

So in this perilous grace of God

With all my sins go I:

And things grow new though I grow old,

Though I grow old and die.

G.K. Chesterton

Infinite.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

Madeleine L'Engle, from A Circle of Quiet

Entirely.

Sir Philip Pullman at the Oxford Union ...

I’m too lazy to go to places and look around and see what real places are like, so I prefer to sit at home at my desk and make them up. I didn’t go to the Arctic to write Northern Lights, I went to the Bodleian Library instead. Which proved entirely satisfactory.

Fauré, Trio in D-Minor, Op. 120

The ATOS Trio performs ...

Overlap.

I wandered down a "intellectual craftsmanship" rabbit hole found in this week's essay from Ari Weinzweig ...

Perhaps you may object that the ordinary words of common usage are often loaded with feelings and values, and that accordingly it might be well to avoid them in favour of new words or technical terms. Here is my answer: it is true that ordinary words are often so loaded. But many technical terms in common use in social science are also loaded. To write clearly is to control these loads, to say exactly what you mean in such a way that this meaning and only this will be understood by others. Assume that your intended meaning is circumscribed by a six-foot circle, in which you are standing; assume that the meaning understood by your reader is another such circle, in which he is standing. The circles, let us hope, do overlap. The extent of that overlap is the extent of your communication. In the reader’s circle the part that does not overlap - that is one area of uncontrolled meaning: he has made it up. In your circle the part that does not overlap - that is another token of your failure: you have not got it across. The skill of writing is to get the reader’s circle of meaning to coincide exactly with yours, to write in such a way that both of you stand in the same circle of controlled meaning.

Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Happy Birthday, Marcello Benedetto

Zuliani, Benedetto Marcello, 1803

Benedetto Marcello was born on this day in 1686.

Here's the Sonata for Cello, Op. 2, No. 6, performed by Josephine van Lier ...

Thin Lizzy, "Do Anything You Want To"

'Tis Summer and the weekend begins now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."     

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to this: Thin Lizzy, "Do Anything You Want To"...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Haydn, Symphony No. 98 in B-Flat Major, Hob.I:98

Adam Fischer conducts the Danish Chamber Orchestra ...

Excellent morning music.

Perception.

You won't understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.

Sir Philip Pullman, from The Secret Commonwealth

Schubert, Piano Trio in B-Flat Major, D. 898

The Merz Trio performs ...

Make.

Michael Tilson Thomas on instruction ...

It doesn't interest me in any way what you do or you do not do. I only point out to you that in the music there are designs and structures.  And concerning these things, you must make decisions and there are consequences for your decisions.

Satisfactory.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.

He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.

Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning forward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and then turned off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into the country. He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.

Ernest Hemingway, from "Big Two-Hearted River, Part One"

Rebel, Les Caractères de la Danse

Augusta McKay Lodge, violin; Jeffrey Girton, violin; Kieran Campbell, cello; Peter Ferretti, bass; Adam Cockerham, theorbo; Robert Warner, clanger.

So, let's dance ...

Quiet.

Socrates could enjoy a banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe, taking a constitutional in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting with a few friends by the way. Kant is said never to have been more than ten miles from Konigsberg in all his life. Darwin, after going round the world, spent the whole rest of his life in his own house. Marx, after stirring up a few revolutions, decided to spend the remainder of his days in the British Museum. Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye. No great achievement is possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement, except such as serve to recuperate physical energy during holidays, of which alpine climbing may serve as the best example.

Bertrand Russell, from Chapter Four, "Boredom and Excitement," from The Conquest of Happiness

Exultantly.

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.

Jack London, from The Call of the Wild

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

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

Even.

Wonder.

Miles.

I finished miles ahead of you fellows!