Retreat.

Didier Francois, nyckelharpa, Rolf Lislevand, theorbo, and Andre Lislevand, viola da gamba, provide this morning's Kapsberger retreat ...

Again.

Do not tread on the dirgey darkness of my Oyster Month gloamings.

Prepare ye.

Grieg, Holberg Suite, Op.40

The New England Conservatory Chamber Orchestra performs ...

Happy Birthday, Sir Joshua

Reynolds, Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1769

In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, born on this day in 1723, from Discourses

Happy Birthday, Stewart Copeland

Stewart Copeland was born on this day in 1952.

"Reggatta de Blanc"...

Published.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them -- if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

J.D. Salinger, from The Catcher in the Rye, published on this day in 1951

More.

Put out more flags.

Released.

Killing Joke released Fire Dances on this day in 1983.

"Let's All Go (To the Fire Dances)"...

Released.

D-wight Lightnin' released Under the Covers on this day in 1997.

"Claudette"...

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

Already.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Frank Zappa, from an interview titled "Revolt Against Mediocrity" conducted by Batya Friedman and Steve Lyons in 1986

Boyce, Trio Sonata No. 1 in A-Minor

Beneath a Tree performs ...

Happy Birthday, Inigo Jones

Jones, The Walled Gardens at Milton Manor House, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, 1663

All these composed ornaments do not well in solid architecture and the façades of houses, but in gardens, loggias, stucco or ornaments of chimney pieces.  For as outwardly every wise man carrieth a gravity in public places, yet inwardly hath his imagination set free, so in architecture the outward ornaments ought to be solid, proportionable, according to the rules, masculine and unaffected.

Inigo Jones, born on this day in 1573, from Vaughan Hart's Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings

Simon Thurleyt's talk, Inigo Jones: The Architecture of Necessity

Happy Birthday, Andy Newmark

Andy Newmark was born on this day in 1950.

"My Only Love" with Roxy Music ...

Never.

Benjamin Warner’s Revolutionary-era linen knapsack and note to future generations remain two of Fort Ticonderoga’s most treasured artifacts ...

And whilst one shred of it shall remain, never surrender your liberties to a foreign invader or an aspiring demagogue.

Marvellous.

The Bodleian Map Room has the Oxfordshire Sheldon tapestry ...

Made from a mix of wool and silk the tapestries are both marvellous in their own right but are also important cartographic records, made at a time when England was beginning to be mapped properly for the first time. Each one would have originally measured approximately 15 by 20 feet and each has a "featured" county at its centre, bordered in red. Rivers and settlements feature prominently as do scenes of local interest such as the Rollright Stones, a prehistoric stone circle in north Oxfordshire, or a brief bit of text on the Worcestershire tapestry telling of a land slip. Important houses are shown though none as big as Sheldon’s, Weston House, which appears on all four tapestries, the very centre of the area the tapestries show. And what an area, when put together as a set of maps the range goes from as far north as the suburbs of Birmingham down past a beautiful, though comically inaccurate, White Horse at Uffington and from the Welsh border across to the Tower of London the whole of central England is depicted in glorious detail.

Beyond.

Ari Weinzweig on reading ...

Of course, as the news reports all too frequently of late, the drive to read is not the modern-day norm. Last summer, The New York Times cited a study from University College London and the University of Florida that found Americans’ rate of reading has declined roughly 3 percent a year for the last 20 years. 

The numbers are not encouraging, but there’s no time like the present to turn things around. In the larger context of the world, what’s at stake is not just reading for the benefit of the reader. Rather, it seems ever clearer to me that democratic constructs—whether in companies or countries—really depend on it. Regular reading builds the sort of empathy, curiosity, and culture of learning and creativity that we need to run the kind of caring, healthy organizations we’re out to create. As advocate Luis González Martin wrote last fall, 

Democracy depends on reading, but not in the abstract. It depends on the kind of reading that slows us down, unsettles us, and teaches us to think beyond ourselves. At a time when noise travels faster than nuance and democratic life feels increasingly fragile, the simple act of engaging deeply with a text becomes a form of resistance. Reading ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention, and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.

What goes wrong, then? Well, to a great extent, Peter Senge says, the problem lies with the pervasiveness of hierarchical thinking in Western society:

The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.

In his famous 1949 novel, 1984, George Orwell writes, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” One way that autocrats take charge is, indeed, by managing information—including the suppression or even outright banning of certain books and materials that offer alternative pasts, presents, and futures out of sync with the autocrats’ preferred story. As I learned in my time studying Russian history, this sort of thing has been going on in Russia for the greater part of the last 500 years. Officially sanctioned reading materials supported the tsars, and then their successors: the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, and beyond. Opposition writings were banned, and their authors often went to prison or were pushed into exile. Today, it’s Vladimir Putin and his people who manage the information, cutting off the internet where they can, kicking unruly writers out of the country, et cetera, but the theme remains pretty much the same. 

One way to take back the past, present, and future is to read. In the process, we lean into and learn about alternative angles on the world. When we read, we are increasingly able to pursue new perspectives, think things through more effectively, enhance empathy, and compound compassion. In the presence of autocratic leaders at any level, Timothy Snyder reminds us, “reading good books is important.” Their import is being seen right now in Ukraine. As Snyder posted on Instagram last month, “A lesson from Ukraine: In moments where life meets death, they don’t put books down. Reading is resistance.” 

Happy Birthday, Gustav Klimt

Klimt, The Sunflower, 1908

Gustav Klimt was born on this day in 1862.

Buxtehude, Benedicam Dominum, BuxWV 113

Raphaël Pichon conducts Ensemble Pygmalion ...

Traveling.

BREATHING SPACE, JULY

Listen

The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees

is also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,

swaying to and fro,

sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.

The one who’s standing down by the docks squints at the water.

The docks age faster than people.

They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.

The glaring light pounds all the way in.

The one who’s traveling all day in an open boat

over the glittering bays

will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp

while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.

Tomas Tranströmer

Happy Birthday, James McNeill Whistler

Whistler, Nocturne, The Falling Rocket, 1875

James McNeill Whistler was born on this day in 1834.

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 ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

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 ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

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

First

White Hawk, first of the cruisers to finish ...

Track the race HERE.

Watch the fleet finish from The Windemere.

White Hawk.

With about 30 nautical miles to go, White Hawk is leading the way ...

Track the race HERE.

Watch the fleet finish from The Windemere.

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

Both.

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

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

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

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 ...