The Police, "The Bed's Too Big Without You"
31 October 2012
30 October 2012
ROCKTOBER
J. Geils Band, "Jus' Can't Stop Me"
Remembering the show at The Fairgrounds, Sunday, December 13,1981 ...
Remembering the show at The Fairgrounds, Sunday, December 13,1981 ...
True.
All are different,
But when they fall
They become the same water
As the valley stream.
The ways of proclaiming
The Mind vary,
But the same heavenly truth
Can be seen
In each and every one.
Cover your path
With the fallen pine needles
So no one will be able
To locate your
True dwelling place.
- Ikkyu
Fun.
Read the rest at The Indepedent.
Eddie Vedder, "Far Behind"
Subtle voices in the wind,
Hear the truth they're telling
A world begins where the road ends
Watch me leave it all behind
For my friends, the wind and the full moon ...
Hear the truth they're telling
A world begins where the road ends
Watch me leave it all behind
For my friends, the wind and the full moon ...
29 October 2012
28 October 2012
27 October 2012
26 October 2012
25 October 2012
Il Giardino Armonico.
Giovanni Antonini runs Il Giardino Armonico through the Concerto for Flute and La Tempesta di Mare by Antonio Vivaldi, Symphony for Strings in F Major by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and the Concerto Grosso No. 7 of Georg Friedrich Handel.
This brought today's Language Arts class to life.
This brought today's Language Arts class to life.
24 October 2012
23 October 2012
22 October 2012
Company.
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises was published on this date in 1926.
I drank a bottle for wine for company. It was a Château Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.
21 October 2012
Liberation.
Poortvliet, Sentry, 1979
Even as fire finds peace
in its resting place without fuel,
when thoughts become silence
the soul finds peace in its own source.
When the mind is silent,
then it can enter into a world
which is far beyond the mind:
the highest End.
The mind should be kept in the heart
as long as it has not reached the highest End.
This is wisdom, and this is liberation.
~ Upanishads
in its resting place without fuel,
when thoughts become silence
the soul finds peace in its own source.
When the mind is silent,
then it can enter into a world
which is far beyond the mind:
the highest End.
The mind should be kept in the heart
as long as it has not reached the highest End.
This is wisdom, and this is liberation.
~ Upanishads
Mozart, Mass in C Minor, "Et incarnatus est"
Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts The Monteverdi Choir, with soloist Barbara Bonney ...
Sublime.
Sublime.
Happy birthday, Mullins.
As a disclaimer to everything I’ve ever said or everything I ever will say, when it’s all said and done, we’ll only have two things left to say. One is ‘Forgive me’ and the other is ‘Thank you.'
More here.
20 October 2012
HAIL!
I’m from Ohio, that’s why beating Michigan is such a kick for me. We will continue to do that. … I promise you that!
- Mark Dantonio
Mozart, String Quartet No. 21 in D major, K. 575, "Prussian No. 1"
The Gewandhaus Quartet performs ...
I. Allegretto
II. Andante
III. Minuetto (Allegretto)
IV. Allegretto
I love the sound in that room.
I. Allegretto
II. Andante
III. Minuetto (Allegretto)
IV. Allegretto
I love the sound in that room.
If.
Schiele, Autumn Sun, 1914
In heaven it is always autumn;
His mercies are ever in their maturity:
We ask our daily bread,
And God never says:
You should have come yesterday,
He never says,
You must ask again tomorrow:
But today, if you will hear His voice,
Today he he will hear you.
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light:
He can bring thy summer out of winter,
Tho' though have no spring.
Though in the ways of fortune or understanding or conscience
Thou have been benighted til now,
Wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed
Damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied til now:
Now God comes to thee,
Not as in the dawning of the day,
Not as in the bud of the spring
But as the sun at noon,
As the sheaves in harvest.
- John Donne
In heaven it is always autumn;
His mercies are ever in their maturity:
We ask our daily bread,
And God never says:
You should have come yesterday,
He never says,
You must ask again tomorrow:
But today, if you will hear His voice,
Today he he will hear you.
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light:
He can bring thy summer out of winter,
Tho' though have no spring.
Though in the ways of fortune or understanding or conscience
Thou have been benighted til now,
Wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed
Damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied til now:
Now God comes to thee,
Not as in the dawning of the day,
Not as in the bud of the spring
But as the sun at noon,
As the sheaves in harvest.
- John Donne
Meaningful.
Doisneau, Girls' Boat, 1945
Levine uses the term “authentic success” to differentiate success as it is traditionally viewed: titles, money, good grades, and prestigious schools. In the forward to her book, Levine writes that parents also need to encourage kids to “know and appreciate themselves deeply; to approach the world with zest; to find work that is exciting and satisfying, friends and spouses who are loving and loyal; and to hold a deep belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to society.”
Read the rest at 21st Century Fluency Project.
Perfect.
Karr, Untitled, 2012
You, music of my late years, I am called
By a sound and a color which are more and more perfect.
Do not die out, fire.
-Czesław Miłosz, from Winter
Thanks, wanderations.
Clutch.
Young now has seven homers and 14 RBI in 18 post-season games as a Tiger. Five of those homers have come against New York. In a previous era, Young might have earned the nickname “Yankee Killer,” instead many fans refer to their #5 hitter as “rally killer”. Even when he’s slugging the ball at a record pace and leading the Tigers to the Fall Classic, Young can’t satisfy his critics.
Young will be a free agent after the conclusion of this post-season, and with the return of Victor Martinez next year, DY doesn’t fit into the Tigers plans. His off-field problems (the case in New York will be resolved in court this off-season) are another reason the Detroit organization will likely bid Young farewell, which is their prerogative. At his young age (he’s younger than Quintin Berry), Young is really a one-dimensional player – he can hit a baseball – which makes him a DH. Some American League team will sign him to a multi-year deal (trust me, GM’s are taking notice of his post-season exploits) and he’ll face the Tigers in an enemy uniform. Most Tigers fans will be okay with that, and many will say “good riddance.” No amount of statistical evidence or post-season champagne popping will change the minds of stubborn fans who refuse to see the good that Young brings to a baseball team.
Does DY have his flaws? Yes. Is he Miguel Cabrera? No. But he deserves better from fans who usually know their baseball and normally embrace players who are clutch. No one – not even Miggy – has been more clutch these last two Octobers than Young.
Delmon Young will land on his feet somewhere in 2013, but first he has a World Series to play and he’ll probably do what he always does this time of year – hit the ball hard and drive in runs. He’s taken over the family business of hitting a baseball, and he does it well.
Earning the ALCS MVP won’t be enough to endear him to Tiger faithful. Some players, with half of Young’s track record, have written their own ticket in Detroit and been forever treated as heroes. But Young won’t be, and that’s too bad, because #21 has been a large part of the Tigers’ success these last two Octobers.
Read the rest at Detroit Athletic Co.
Thanks, Delmon!
Happy birthday, Rimbaud.
Opgenhaffen, Light Through the Trees, 2012
The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! So the poet is actually a Thief of Fire!
- Arthur Rimbaud
Thank you, Veerle.
19 October 2012
Singing.
The fragility of the birds is a fragility that touches upon transcendence. Franzen explains the relationship between birds and transcendence like this:
When I go looking for a new bird species, I'm searching for a mostly lost authenticity, for the remnants of a world now largely overrun by human beings but still beautifully indifferent to us; to glimpse a rare bird somehow persisting in its life of breeding and feeding is an enduringly transcendent delight.
Franzen calls the delight of birdwatching transcendent because he has been taken outside of himself. Human beings literally transcend our normal, everyday experience when we enter the world of the birds. Their relationship to the world has little to do with ours. Our own lives, our own worries and concerns, are shown, for the moment, to be irrelevant. Watching the birds is to be reminded that, from the perspective of nature qua nature, we do not matter so much. This, for Franzen, does not destroy human meaning. It makes it more precious.
Given Franzen's obsession with birds, it is not surprising to find out that he has also developed a minor obsession with Saint Francis of Assisi. You could say that Saint Francis is the patron saint of Farther Away. Francis was, as many know, a bird man. It was the passage in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells his disciples to live like the birds that inspired Francis to give away all his possessions and put his trust in providence. Jesus says to the apostles, "Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" Having been convinced to live his life like a bird, Francis could sometimes be found in the hills of Italy preaching only to the birds. Franzen writes that, "For Saint Francis, the crested larks, whose drab brown plumage and peaked head feathers resemble hooded brown robes of his Friars Minor, his Little Brothers, were a model for his order: wandering, as light as air, and saving up nothing, just gleaning their daily minimum of food, and always singing, singing."
Listen.
Satisfaction.
“I think that no experience which I have to-day comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood,” Thoreau wrote in 1851. “My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me ... I can remember how I was astonished.”
Read the rest at Humanities.
Metallica, "No Leaf Clover"
Pay no mind to the distant thunder
New day fills his head with wonder, boy
New day fills his head with wonder, boy
Transcendence.
Read the rest at elephant.
Dark.
The dark filled all the room, and the fire died down, and the shadows were lost, and still they played on. And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes; and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music.
Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold.
The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep, where dark things sleep,
In hollow halls beneath the fells.
For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gloaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.
On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.
Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To claim our long-forgotten gold.
Goblets they carved there for themselves
And harps of gold; where no man delves
There lay they long, and many a song
Was sung unheard by men or elves.
The pines were roaring on the height,
The winds were moaning in the night.
The fire was red, it flaming spread;
The trees like torches biased with light,
The bells were ringing in the dale
And men looked up with faces pale;
The dragon's ire more fierce than fire
Laid low their towers and houses frail.
The mountain smoked beneath the moon;
The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.
They fled their hall to dying -fall
Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.
Far over the misty mountains grim
To dungeons deep and caverns dim
We must away, ere break of day,
To win our harps and gold from him!
As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up--probably somebody lighting a wood-fire-and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again.
He got up trembling. He had less than half a mind to fetch the lamp, and more than half a mind to pretend to, and go and hide behind the beer barrels in the cellar, and not come out again until all the dwarves had gone away. Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped, and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark.
“Where are you going?” said Thorin, in a tone that seemed to show that he guessed both halves of the hobbit's mind.
“What about a little light?” said Bilbo apologetically. “We like the dark,” said the dwarves. “Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Hobbit, or There And Back Again
- J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Hobbit, or There And Back Again
18 October 2012
ROCKTOBER.
Boston, "Feelin' Satisfied"
Reminds me of my sister pounding on the wall shouting, "Turn it down!"
This cracks me up ...
Reminds me of my sister pounding on the wall shouting, "Turn it down!"
This cracks me up ...
17 October 2012
ROCKTOBER.
Sssssssstones, "Under My Thumb"
From Hampton, Virginia, December 18, 1981.
It was Cassano's that night ...
Thanks, Shelli.
From Hampton, Virginia, December 18, 1981.
It was Cassano's that night ...
Thanks, Shelli.
Machete.
Batter after batter, they went down like chopped vines. A harmless popout. A dribbler to second base. Justin Verlander would machete through the Yankees, sit down for 20 minutes, come back and do it again. A fly to left. A pop foul. A strikeout. A lawn mower doesn't flatten things this easily.
Read the rest at The Freep.
Sacred.
If you haven't visited the sacred spaces of wanderations lately, do yourself a favor and witness the glory of awareness ...
16 October 2012
Happy birthday, Wilde.
Oscar Wilde was born on this date in 1854.
Where there is sorrow there in holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do, - and natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, - waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are able to understand, not merely how beautiful ____'s action was, but why it meant so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will realize how and in what spirit they should approach me . . .
- Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis
Mozart, String Quartet No.17 in B sharp, K. 458, "The Hunt"
The Amadeus Quartet performs ...
I. Allegro vivace assai
II. Menuetto, Moderato
III. Trio
IV. Allegro
I. Allegro vivace assai
II. Menuetto, Moderato
III. Trio
IV. Allegro
15 October 2012
Danced.
Lutzke, Gold, 2012
I drifted on a river I could not control.
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers:
Yelping redskins had taken them as targets
And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.
I was indifferent to all crews,
The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons
When with my haulers this uproar stopped
The Rivers let me go where I wanted.
Into the furious lashing of the tides
More heedless than children's brains the other winter
I ran! And loosened Peninsulas
Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub
The storm blessed my sea vigils
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
That are called eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses!
Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children
The green water penetrated my hull of fir
And washed me of spots of blue wine
And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook
And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;
Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
The bitter redness of love ferments!
I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,
And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves
And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!
I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,
Lighting up, with long violet clots,
Resembling actors of very ancient dramas,
The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!
I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows
A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea,
The circulation of unknown saps,
And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!
I followed during pregnant months the swell,
Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs,
Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans!
I struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas
Mingling with flowers panthers' eyes and human
Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins
Under the horizon of the seas to greenish herds!
I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!
Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm,
And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!
Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!
Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!
I should have liked to show children those sunfish
Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish.
—Foam of flowers rocked my drifting
And ineffable winds winged me at times.
At times a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll,
Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers
And I remained, like a woman on her knees...
Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels
And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes
And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes
Drowned men sank backward to sleep!
Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves,
Thrown by the storm into the birdless air
I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued
By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats;
Free, smoking, topped with violet fog,
I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall,
Bearing, delicious jam for good poets
Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,
Who ran, spotted with small electric moons,
A wild plank, escorted by black seahorses,
When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels
The ultramarine skies with burning funnels;
I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off
The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms,
Eternal spinner of the blue immobility
I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!
I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer:
—Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself,
Million golden birds, o future Vigor? –
But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor
O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!
If I want a water of Europe, it is the black
Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.
No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,
Follow in the wake of the cotton boats,
Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.
- Arthur Rimbaud
Thank you, Kathy.
Thank you, Kathy.