Celebrating.

Happy Birthday, General Pershing

If you know how to shoot, and are quite ready to shoot, the chances are that you won’t have to shoot.

General John J. Pershing, born on this day in 1860, from My Experiences in the World War

Frank Sinatra, "She's Funny That Way"

Nice goin', dad ...

We were once a proper civilization.

Happy Birthday, Ric Davies

Rick Davies was born on this day in 1944.

"From Now On" ...

Chance.

Steve points to the Mystic of Moyvane ...

What chance have we when that's where we think we live.

Happy Birthday, Gregg Rolie

Gregg Rolie was born on this day in 1947.

"Feelin' That Way" with Journey, including Ainsley Dunbar, before Jonathan Caine took over and musically neutered the band (just like he did with The Babys) .  

Yes, I'm still bitter.

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

See.

To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

John Ruskin, from "Of Kings' Treasuries"

Happy Birthday, General MacArthur

"Fudge the regulations!" he charged. "They're sometimes made to be broken for the good of the whole. Rules are mostly made for the lazy to hide behind."

General Douglas MacArthur, born on this day in 1880, from MacArthur Close Up

Jimmy Buffett, "Turn Up the Heat and Chill the Rose"

You need some imagination to deal with temperature fluctuation ...

Sviridov, Snowstorm

Vladimir Fedoseyev leads the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra in a performs of the "Echo Waltz" ...

Unite.

TWO TRAMPS in MUD TIME

Out of the mud two strangers came

And caught me splitting wood in the yard,

And one of them put me off my aim

By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"

I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind

And let the other go on a way.

I knew pretty well what he had in mind:

He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,

As large around as the chopping block;

And every piece I squarely hit

Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.

The blows that a life of self-control

Spares to strike for the common good,

That day, giving a loose my soul,

I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You're one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight

And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,

His song so pitched as not to excite

A single flower as yet to bloom.

It is snowing a flake; and he half knew

Winter was only playing possum.

Except in color he isn't blue,

But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look

In summertime with a witching wand,

In every wheelrut's now a brook,

In every print of a hoof a pond.

Be glad of water, but don't forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

That will steal forth after the sun is set

And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task

The two must make me love it more

By coming with what they came to ask.

You'd think I never had felt before

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,

The grip of earth on outspread feet,

The life of muscles rocking soft

And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps

(From sleeping God knows where last night,

But not long since in the lumber camps).

They thought all chopping was theirs of right.

Men of the woods and lumberjacks,

They judged me by their appropriate tool.

Except as a fellow handled an ax

They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.

They knew they had but to stay their stay

And all their logic would fill my head:

As that I had no right to play

With what was another man's work for gain.

My right might be love but theirs was need.

And where the two exist in twain

Theirs was the better right--agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Robert Frost

Thank you, Steve.

Happy Birthday, Russell Chatham

Arriving at the creek, I entered yet another dimension, one of quiet intimacy.  

The water gurgled softly over shallow riffles, but more often glided silently past watercress-lined banks.  Cottonwoods grew here, but the ground was protected and quieted by dense stands of willow and wild roses, home to many cottontail rabbits which were always silently appearing and disappearing.  

The fishing itself was slow and deliberate, but best of all, it was solitary. While I was kneeling by the creek, half in it, half out of it, the rest of the world ceased to exist.  It was a salve that mended the soul’s tears and abrasions.

As the years passed by, my familiarity with the creek itself grew, along with a more general appreciation of the landscape of the Northern Rockies. At some point in time, perhaps seven or eight years into it, I felt an easy familiarity with the creek, and my paintings were reflecting the spirit of their motifs with an increasing accuracy.

Some have argued that fishing is merely an escape from reality. My father used to tell me I had to get used to doing things I didn’t like because that was the definition of work. I didn’t believe it when he told it to me 35 years ago, and nothing since has caused me to change my mind.  The dark, silent water flowing past waving tendrils of moss, sometimes revealing the olive-colored forms of trout, is haunting. We reach out to it with our fishing rods, and by connecting ourselves to living things, we affirm that we ourselves are alive, not just in our clumsy bodies, but in our hearts and souls.  

Russell Chatham, born on this day in 1939, from "The Center of Things"

Frank Sinatra, "The House I Live In"

Don't let anybody make suckers out of you.

Smoky-Smelling.

But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along.You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy-ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month.  And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe'en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes

Dog-Like.

5

Demons

scarcely distinguishable from gods

play on the furrows of our souls

like instrumentalists

painfully but with panache

When they squeeze us

we whine

like dogs craving to get out

to bark at the dark

Dog-like

we'd love to bite them

our tormentors

only to find ourselves

biting our own tongues

Alfred Brendel

Happy Birthday, The Edge

The Edge was born on this day in 1961.

"An Cat Dubh/Into The Heart" ...

Poppy Ackroyd, "Murmurations"

More.

If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, dream all the time.

Marcel Proust

Happy Birthday, Gesualdo

Unknown, Don Carlo Gesualdo, n/d

Don Carlo Gesualdo was born on this day in 1566.

The Manchester Collective perform an arrangement of "Moro, lasso, al mio duolo" ...