N.

45°50′13.8″N, 84°36′59.7″W ...

The Style Council, "Headstart for Happiness"

Paul Weller, "A Man of Great Promise"

Dazzle.

I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.

Peter Ackroyd, from Hawksmoor

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Beauty.

The Sixteen, led by Harry Christophers, perform a program of songs titled, Reflection and Hope, captured in the beauty of Wigmore Hall ...

Importance.

A reminder of the importance of substance over symbolism ...

He is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion. And perhaps the principal reason for doubting Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials is that being a creation of social media, he has lost the sense that there is a civilization out there that stands above his deals and his tweets in a posture of disinterested judgment.

Sir Roger Scruton, from "What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism"

Our forefathers are watching and judging. 

Always.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Important.

David, Self-Portrait, 1794

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself. The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.

Jacques-Louis David

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Roaring.

Götheborg in the Roaring Forties off the Cape of Good Hope ...

Tony Rice, "Shenandoah"

Gimmicks.

Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Rev. Dr. Cornel West

With gratitude and apologies to Caravaggio.

Hang.

"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"

UFO, "Only You Can Rock Me" ...

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

Happy Birthday, Monteverdi

Strozzi, Claudio Monteverdi, 1630

Last week I overlooked celebrating the birth of Claudio Monteverdi who was born May 9, 1567.

John Eliot Gardiner conducts The Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists, and The London Oratory Juniors Choir in performing the maestro's Vespers of the Blessed Virgin ...

Mood.

Wyeth, Renfield, 1999

I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.

Andrew Wyeth

Content.

Chrissie Hynde, "Adding the Blue"

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Tried.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.”

H.L. Mencken

Again.

CONNECT

Schumann, Arabesque in C, Op. 18

Wilhelm Kempff performs ...

Loving.

My Mum instilled in me an appreciation for books and reading, art, music, and stillness.

She taught me how to cook.

She continues to live by the importance of faith and patience, skills I still aspire to.

When trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

Washington Irving

Today I'll raise a small glass ("not too much") of Johnny Walker Red, and toast her smile, her compassion, and her loving patience.

I love you, Mum.  Happy Mother's Day!

Admit.

Why not admit totally what we are rather than pretending that we're something else?

Jim Harrison

Mistake.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Illumination.

No merely critical standpoint can build, let alone "conserve" anything. One can lament the fire ravaging Notre Dame, but a dislike of fire confers exactly none of the knowledge required to build—or indeed, rebuild—that magnificent monument of Western culture. For that, you need architectural-mathematical understanding, aesthetic vision, as well as stone-carvers, carpenters, vitrailleurs, and so forth. Lamenting the Cathedral’s destruction is one thing; rebuilding it is another.

Sir Roger understood that. You can’t counter nihilism, you can’t defeat the iconoclasts, by critique alone. Indeed, even to focus primarily on critique is already to concede that the game is one of tearing-down, one of destruction.  

Once, when I asked him about how to build, and rebuild, he playfully replied: we can’t be about "debunking". Rather, we need "bunking". 

We need to know how to build.

Culture, he went on to say, is simply "the things we have loved". 

Love is the only principle capable of conserving, of transmitting, or of building, anything at all.

So-called conservatives too often think it is enough to be right: right about the economy, right about systems of government, right about civic association, right about fundamental freedoms and dignity. 

But being right isn’t enough. When you have young people burning cities and convinced that their culture is intrinsically oppressive, that its fundamental principles are perverse—then, it is safe to say to conservatives (as the meme goes)—you had one job, and you failed. 

A culture does not, it cannot, continue without mechanisms for its own transmission. The West, terrible though it is to say, no longer has those. 

Sir Roger understood that. He understood that the only way to pass along a culture, the only way to conserve those things we love, is actually to pass them along—to share that love, to instill it in another, and in the young especially. Naturally, Sir Roger knew this was a bedrock philosophical insight of the Western tradition, wonderfully articulated in Aristotle’s De anima, and taken up by Augustine, Dante, the Enlightenment, and elsewhere: that is, that an act of will follows, and only follows, the illumination of intellect. 

Stephen Blackwood, "Thoughts from a Life: The Importance of 'Bunking'"

Polishes.

Criticism polishes my mirror.

Rumi

Distinguish.

One of the saddest things about Prince Philip dying — and about a lot of people who die of his generation — is that they are the last of a generation who people talk about slightly glibly, but they were the wartime generation. He did see active service, he knew what it was like to command in great difficulty and at hours of great danger.  The values of his generation now feel quite far away. He wasn’t a sentimentalist, Prince Philip, but he was a tough egg.  He was the epitome of the stiff upper lip. I mean that in the best sense of the word. It wasn’t that he didn’t share emotion in any way, but he was a great believer in picking yourself up and getting on with it.

I’ll tell you what I think we have lost, that his generation had — we’ve lost any sense of proportion about what goes on. Everything is bulled up into an enormous drama, but if you’ve lived in that generation you’ve lived through an era of profound upheaval. And you learned to distinguish between what was important and what wasn’t important. I think we’ve lost that now.

Sir Nicholas Soames

CONNECT

Thanks, Mum.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Seger

Bob Seger was born on this day in 1945.

"Roll Me Away" ...

Hang.

"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"

Styx, "Borrowed Time" ...

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

Cultivating.

NINE POSSIBLE OBSERVATIONS to CONSIDER

1. The sound a bluejay makes, if it were a color, would not be blue.  It would be the color of something torn open.
2. The ubiquity of dust.
3. Two men enter a room.  One asserts time is an invention, the other claims it as a discovery.  They stare into one another’s eyes.  The exact length of this pause has yet to be determined.
4. Roughly half of all food is discarded, leading observers to conclude that we could, if necessary, live on the moon.
5. It is a truth universally acknowledged that absolutes are not to be trusted.  Fortunately, plans are underway to etch this into the cornerstones of public buildings.
6. Throughout history, each individual has found the fact of his or her impending demise to be implausible.  Most believed they were special.  This secret was held closely to their chests.  It apparently makes a dry, rattling sound when knocked loose.
7. Punctuation matters: the penis, mightier than the sword?
8. In modern parlance, we have one word for snow. Native peoples, however, had dozens of words for money, including bones, clams, bread, trees, meat, shells, and coca leaves, which, ironically, produce the aforementioned snow.
9. It is not possible to consider the next observation.
10. Directions can be difficult to follow.  The authorities are aware of this and have convened a committee to propose solutions.  Internal politics are slowing the process, however.  As in all things, it is a question of cultivating the proper discipline.

Michael Bazzett

After.

The Sun does not realize how wonderful it is until after a room is made.

Louis Kahn

True.

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations.  It is, hopefully, true.

Mary Oliver

Thanks, Steve.

Dances.

Ambler, Grackle, n/d

BIRD

It was passed from one bird to another,

the whole gift of the day.

The day went from flute to flute,

went dressed in vegetation,

in flights which opened a tunnel

through the wind would pass

to where birds were breaking open

the dense blue air–

and there, night came in.

When I returned from so many journeys,

I stayed suspended and green

between sun and geography–

I saw how wings worked,

how perfumes are transmitted

by feathery telegraph,

and from above I saw the path,

the springs and the roof tiles,

the fishermen at their trades,

the trousers of the foam;

I saw it all from my green sky.

I had no more alphabet

than the swallows in their courses,

the tiny, shining water

of the small bird on fire

which dances out of the pollen.

Pablo Neruda

Fruit.

Humility is the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure of one's self and one's mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one's self and status.

Rev. Dr. Cornel West

Untroubled.

Thank you, Rachel.  This one's a gem.

Aware.

It is a great error to be superior to others….It is such pride as this that makes a man appear a fool, makes him abused by others, and invites disaster. A man who is truly versed in any art will of his own accord be clearly aware of his own deficiency; and therefore, his ambition being never satisfied, he ends by never being proud.

Yoshida Kenko, from Essays in Idleness

Thank you, Kurt.

Happy Birthday, Scarlatti

Vaccaro, Alessandro Scarlatti, 1770

Alessandro Scarlatti was born on this day in 1660.

Juliette de Banes Gardonne, mezzo-soprano, Patrick Langot, cello, Benjamin Narvey, théorbo et Camille Delaforge, clanger, perform Scarlatti's "Se ti lascio" ...

Around.

While the fires are burned on the hills upturned in far-off wild country.

And felt the chill on your window-sill as the green man comes around.

Ian Anderson, from "Beltane"

Pirrating.

Hang.

"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" 

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, "Kings Road" ...

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

Exuberance.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Anne Sexton

Pass.

Kurt reflects on being "taken care of" ...

Increasingly, society has been forced to live in two worlds.  The first is a world of reality where we talk, communicate, work, and try to live normal lives.  The second world is the official world where we are treated as children rather than a free citizens.  We must be told what to do for our own good, forced to comply, and then “taken care of.”  I’ll pass on the second world from here on out.

CONNECT

Thanks, Kurt.  Well said.

Climb.

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency--and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency -- and a vice.

These same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always read and willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his church, or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful- apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This is Consistency with a capital C.

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency--and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.

Mark Twain

Technique.

Technique ...

... is the proof of your seriousness.

 

Wallace Stevens and The Eagles

Happy Birthday, Willie

Willie Nelson was born on this day in 1933.

"Red Headed Stranger" ...

Van Morrison, "Celtic Swing"

Right.