Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Paul Weller, "My Ever Changing Moods"

Purposely.

van Gogh, Flowerpot with Chives, 1887

I expect to be drawing a lot more. It's good and hot already, I can tell you.

I must add an order for colours to this, though in case you'd rather not get them at once, I can do a few more drawings and it will not be time wasted. Also, I divided the order in two, according to what is more or less urgent.

What is always urgent is the drawing, and whether you do it straight off with the brush or with something else, say a pen, you never get enough done.

I am trying now to exaggerate the essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague.

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to Theo van Gogh, 26 May 1888

Released.

The Rolling Stones released Exile on Main Street on this day in 1972.

"Rocks Off" with the Rock & Roll Rooster ...

Good morning.

Process.

Ari Weinzweig on quality ...

Rather than the usual more logical, reasoned language of business books, Pirsig’s framing is more of a stream-of-consciousness rant that gets to the point in a beautiful way: 

Quality ... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others ... but what's the betterness? ... So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?

Thinking back on all my years in business, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t claim to be in support of improved quality. Both Pirsig and every expert I’ve engaged with advocate in favor of it. All make clear how critical having high quality is to the health of one’s business, but their definition of it, to me, always seemed sort of confusingly circular. It’s accurate, but ultimately, for me, wholly unhelpful. My friend Seth Godin got me smiling when he summed up the same point super succinctly: “Quality as defined by Deming and Crosby: Meeting spec.” While delivering what we’ve committed to deliver to our customers makes complete sense to me, it sure seems like we need something more than shooting to hit formally specified standards to make our work meaningful. The emphasis on “making things as we’re supposed to make them” certainly isn’t inappropriate, but it feels as if there are deeper questions that are being dismissed in the process. As Pirsig puts it, it’s as if “the truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I'm looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

Skilled.

If Harbaugh hadn’t gone to Michigan and become a famous football player and coach, what skilled trade would he have undertaken?

Cheap Trick, "Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Ticonderoga.

Davis, Ethan Allen's Capture of Fort Ticonderoga, 1879

On this day in 1775, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys captured the British-held fortress at Ticonderoga, New York.

Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country. 

Ethan Allen

From the American Battlefield Trust's series, The Revolutionary War in Four Minutes, Fort Ticonderoga curator, Matt Keagle explains the details of this pivotal event ...

Further details at the Battlefield Trust's site.

Dvořák, Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, No. 1

Seiji Ozawa putting the Vienna Philharmonic through its paces ...

Good morning!

Drawback.

The best defense against a usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

William F. Buckley Jr.

Robert Palmer, "Looking for Clues"

Somewhere.

Dr. Brad Lepper discusses the cosmopolitan culture of the Hopewell Mound groups ...

In a paper published in the current issue of the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, avocational archaeologist George Colvin and American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Neil Landman consider “one of the lesser known but more unusual and exotic items recovered from the Hopewell Site.”

The item in question is a culturally modified fragment of an ammonite fossil. Ammonite fossils are the mineralized spiral shells of squid-like critters that went extinct at the same time as most of the dinosaurs — about 66 million years ago.

Ohio’s rocks are all much older, so this fossil must have come from somewhere else. According to Colvin and Landman, it came from the Badlands of southwestern South Dakota.

Released.

The Style Council released Our Favourite Shop and Internationalists on this day in 1985.

"Boy Who Cried Wolf" ...

Necessity.

Laubin, Paper Tiger (Leon Krier), n/d

Leon Krier argues that it is traditional urbanism − not dense Modernism − that offers the solutions to the planet’s ecological problems ...

We need a global environmental project to respond to global ecological problems. The proliferation of so-called "sustainable" green-suburbs, green-skyscrapers, green-transport, green-food, green-fuel and green-everything are distracting ploys that will postpone peak-oil by a mere few days. For the time being, the daily abuse of the terms erodes their social and political potential and postpones the advent of eventual solutions. What needs to be grasped is that building typology and building styles, urban densities and mixed uses are issues not of artistic, political or transcendental beliefs, but of ecology and technology.

For the time being, the daily abuse of the terms erodes their social and political potential and postpones the advent of eventual solutions. What needs to be grasped is that building typology and building styles, urban densities and mixed uses are issues not of artistic, political or transcendental beliefs, but of ecology and technology.

Traditional architectures are part and parcel of building technology. To condemn them as historical and dead languages amounts to an ideological brainwashing, to a technological dis-education, to the loss of millennial technical experience and knowledge. While the knowledge of handling synthetic building materials has progressed in the past century, the know-how and capacity to handle natural building materials has catastrophically regressed. Experience is by definition a matter of the past. The "fear of backwardness" holds control of a vast and worldwide fraternity, a global brotherhood, believing in the sanctity and exclusive legitimacy of Modernism, a theory that has been brain-dead for half a century, yet keeps dominating positions in academia and its dependent culture industry. This theory, at first fired by fossil fuel energies combined with an atavistic belief in infinite progress, is now held alive by fear of regression. The angst of backwardness is what blinds its victims to the technological treasure house of traditional architecture and urbanism. The resulting technological and artistic amnesia is responsible for the cataclysmic worldwide degradation of the built environment.

Traditional architecture and urbanism is a body of technical knowledge: it is definitely not a theology nor a transcendental theory, but the technology for settling the planet in ecological, aesthetic and ethical ways. The return to traditional architecture and settlement patterns will − contrary to what I have previously argued − not come about by democratic choice, but by fate and by overwhelming necessity. Geography, climate and ecology will eventually define again their forms and materials, their number, location, size and scale.

Since.

Studied.

van Gogh, Sprig of Flowering Almond in a Glass, 1888

I was struck by how firmly the slender trunks stood in the ground — I began them using a brush, but because of the ground, which was already impasted, one brushstroke simply disappeared. Then I squeezed roots and trunks into it from the tube, and modelled them a little with the brush. Yes, now they stand in it — shoot up out of it — stand firmly rooted in it. In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint. Probably then I would have learned to ignore effects like this. Now I say, no, that’s exactly what I want — if it’s not possible then it’s not possible — I want to try it even though I don’t know how it’s supposed to be done. I don’t know myself how I paint. I sit with a white board before the spot that strikes me — I look at what’s before my eyes — I say to myself, this white board must become something — I come back, dissatisfied — I put it aside, and after I’ve rested a little, feeling a kind of fear, I take a look at it — then I’m still dissatisfied — because I have that marvellous nature too much in mind for me to be satisfied — but still, I see in my work an echo of what struck me, I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me and that I’ve written it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that are indecipherable — errors or gaps — yet something remains of what the wood or the beach or the figure said — and it isn’t a tame or conventional language which doesn’t stem from nature itself but from a studied manner or a system.  

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to Theo van Gogh, Sunday, 3 September 1882

Happy Birthday, Hayek

In any society, freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.

Friedrich August von Hayek, born on this day in 1899, from The Road to Serfdom

Bounds.

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present,—I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?—But this is more pleasant.—Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which, is according to thy nature? But it is necessary to take rest also.—It is necessary. However, Nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will. But those who love their several arts exhaust themselves in working at them unwashed and without food; but thou valuest thy own nature less than the turner values the turning art, or the dancer the dancing art, or the lover of money values his money, or the vain-glorious man his little glory. And such men, when they have a violent affection to a thing, choose neither to eat nor to sleep rather than to perfect the things which they care for. But are the acts which concern society more vile in thy eyes and less worthy of thy labor?

Marcus Aurelius, from the Fifth Book of Meditations

The Sheepdogs Mini-Concert

"Laid Back"

"I Don't Get By" 

"Right On"

Detached.

The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group.  I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

George Carlin

Gordon Lightfoot, "Early Morning Rain"

Paul Weller does it honorably ...

Content.

If you ever happen to turn your attention to externals, for the pleasure of anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life. Be content, then, in everything, with being a philosopher; and if you wish to seem so likewise to anyone, appear so to yourself, and it will suffice you.

Epictetus, Enchiridion, Chapter Twenty-Three

Happy Birthday, Tchaikovsky

Kuznetsov, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1893

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on this day in  1840.

Daniel Barenboim conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" ...

Sustained.

The Coronation Chair has taken centre stage during coronation ceremonies at Westminster Abbey since 1308. It is one of the most precious and famous pieces of furniture in the world. Conservator Krista Blessley talks about the history of the Chair, the damage it has sustained, and how it is cared for before it is used again for the first time in almost 70 years ...

Happy Birthday, Brahms

Johannes Brahms was born on this day in 1833.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt leads the Vienna Philharmonic and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir through Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 ...

Gold.

A PECK of GOLD

Dust always blowing about the town,

Except when sea-fog laid it down,

And I was one of the children told

Some of the blowing dust was gold.

All the dust the wind blew high

Appeared like god in the sunset sky,

But I was one of the children told

Some of the dust was really gold.

Such was life in the Golden Gate:

Gold dusted all we drank and ate,

And I was one of the children told,

"We all must eat our peck of gold."

Robert Frost

Vigilant.

Salute.

Four thousand British military personnel perform the Royal Salute for the newly-crowned King and Queen ...

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, "Roll Me Away"

Stifle.

Cheap cigars come in handy; they stifle the odor of cheap politicians.

Ulysses S. Grant

Happy Birthday, Seger

A good Michigan boy, Bob Seger, was born on this day in 1945.

Here's The Sheepdogs covering Bob's "Rosalie" ...

Chirping.

Greatest.

Least.

Wyeth, Jamie, Jenny Whibley Sings, 2008

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.

Italo Calvino

Beyond.

Susan Magsamen: "Leveraging the Arts to Service The Human Brain" ...

Think of the impact thinking method as the scientific method, but as played by an orchestra. Where traditional science identifies a specific problem to solve and builds upon its findings, neuroarts identifies all the key players that make up an artistic experience and translates the effects of this symphony of sensory experience immediately to our health, well-being, and learning.

Every time you read poetry, listen to music, see a film, explore new architecture, or dance, you are biologically changed. Engaging with art sparks an emotional release that Aristotle called catharsis. Cultures everywhere have developed rituals and customs using art – singing, dancing, expressive writing, drawing, and storytelling – to facilitate catharsis. But the benefits of the arts and aesthetic experiences extend to other areas of our physical and mental health beyond catharsis.

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

The accompanying website is HERE.

Beethoven, String Quartet No. 1 in F major, Op. 18, No. 1

The Borromeo Quartet performs the Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato ...

Gloriously.

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Story HERE.

Released.

Echo & The Bunnymen released Ocean Rain on this day in 1984.

"Silver" ...

Infinite.

Rude.

Rolling Stone on Iron Maiden's annual snubbling by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Little League Award Ceremony ...

In 2018, a journalist asked Bruce Dickinson how he felt about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The Iron Maiden singer inveighed, “If we’re ever inducted, I will refuse — they won’t bloody be having my corpse in there.”

This year's indictments ...

Performer Category 

• Kate Bush 
• Sheryl Crow 
• Missy Elliott 
• George Michael 
• Willie Nelson 
• Rage Against the Machine 
• The Spinners 

Musical Influence Award 

• DJ Kool Herc 
• Link Wray 

Musical Excellence Award 

• Chaka Khan 
• Al Kooper 
• Bernie Taupin 

Ahmet Ertegun Award 

• Don Cornelius

What's a DJ Kool Herc? 

Released.

Aerosmith released Rocks on this day in 1976.

"Sick as a Dog" ...

Gordon Lightfoot, Rest in Peace

Gordon Lightfoot has passed.

Wisdom comes through suffering.

Trouble, with its memories of pain,

Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,

So men against their will

Learn to practice moderation.

Favours come to us from gods.

Aeschylus

My favorite Lightfoot tune, "Restless"

Like a specter from the past ...

Wang Chung (no offense), "To Live and Die in L.A."

Jethro Tull, "Jack-in-the-Green"

Ran.

  'Twas the vintage-day of field and wood,

When magic wine for bards is brewed;

Every tree and stem and chink

Gushed with syrup to the brink.

The air stole into the streets of towns,

Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns,

And betrayed the fund of joy

To the high-school and medalled boy:

On from hall to chamber ran,

From youth to maid, from boy to man,

To babes, and to old eyes as well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "May-Day"

Work.

Kaminsky, The Violinist, 1946

We sat together at one summer's end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

W.B. Yeats, from "Adam's Curse"

Published.

Mozart, "Non so più cosa son", 1786

Mozart published The Marriage of Figaro on this day in 1786.

Anna Netrebko performs "Deh vieni non tardar" from Act Four ...

Anchorage.

 Wyeth, Spring Beauty, 1943

In prayer, we come nearest to making a real clearance in the thicket of thought.  

Prayer takes thought to a place of stillness.

Prayer slows the flow of the mind until we can begin to see with a new tranquility. 

In this kind of thought, we become conscious of our divine belonging.

We begin to sense the serenity of this clearing.

We learn that regardless of the fragmentation and turbulence 

in so many regions of our lives, there is a place in the soul 

where the voices and prodding of the world never reach.

It is almost like the image of the tree.  The branches can sway and quiver in the wind,

the center of the tree, there pertains the stillness of its anchorage. 

In prayer, thought returns to its origin in the infinite.  

Attuned to its origin, thought reaches below its own netting. 

In this way prayer liberates thought from the small rooms where fear and need confine it. 

Despite all the negative talk about God, the Divine still remains

the one space where thought can become free. 

There we will be liberated from the repetitive echoes of our own smallness and blindness.

Prayer is the path to the secret belonging at the heart of our other lives.

John O'Donohue