Marxism.

Rufus T. Firefly spells out his "Rules of the Administration" ...

Look.

Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the American government take care of him; better take a closer look at the American Indian.

- Henry Ford

J.S. Bach, Violin Partita No.3 in E major, BWV 1006

Hopkinson Smith performs ...

Well-being.

From Into Great Silence ...

Why be afraid of death? It is the fate of all humans. The closer one brings oneself to God, the happier one is. The faster one hurries to meet him. One should have no fear of death. On the contrary! For us, it is a great joy to find a Father once again.

In God there is no past. Solely the present prevails. And when God sees us, he always sees our entire life. And because he is an infinitely good being, he eternally seeks our well-being. Therefore, there is no cause for worry in any of the things which happen to us. I often thank God that he let me be blinded. I am sure he let this happen for the good of my soul.

It is a pity that the world has lost all sense of God. They have no reason to live any more. When you abolish the thought of God, why should you go on living on this earth?

Through.

Cezanne, Still Life with Seven Apples, 1878

The love (in Cezanne's art) is so thoroughly used up in the action of making that there is no residue.  It may be that this using up of love in anonymous work, which produces such pure things, was never achieved as completely as in the work of this old man; his inner nature, having grown mistrustful and sullen, helped him to do it. He would certainly not have shown this love to another human being, had he been forced to conceive such a love; but with this disposition, which, thanks to his reclusive eccentricity, was fully ripened now, he turned to nature and knew how to swallow back his love for every apple and put it to rest in the painted apple forever. Can you imagine what that is like, and what it's like to experience this through him?

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Bernard, Paul Cézanne in his studio, Les Lauves, 1904

Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left. 

- Paul Cezanne

Pärt, "Spiegel im Spiegel"

Anne Akiko Meyers performs ...

Solid.

Chardin, Boy Building a House of Cards, 1735

Charming child occupied with pleasure,

We jest at your fragile endeavours,

But between ourselves, what is more solid,

Our project or your castles?

- François Bernard Lépicié

Possibility.

O'Keeffe, Light Coming on the Plains III, 1917

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility! 

- Søren Kierkegaard

Thank you, Jess.

J.S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion

Karl Richter conducts the Munich Bach Orchestra & Choir ...

WINGS!

GAME ON!

GO WINGS!

In.

Rothko, No. 7 (Dark Brown, Grey, Orange), 1963 

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command. 

- Mark Rothko

Look closely ... here.

Many.

Look closely at The Very Many Varieties of Beer.

Connects.

Lezhneva.

On April 2, Julia Lezhneva will release her album Alleluia, a collectiom of sacred motets by Handel, Vivaldi, and Mozart.

Il Giardino Armonico is the accompanying ensemble.

Lezhneva's site is here.

Gitcha one here.

Fat.

2. Heat the duck fat and 1 popcorn kernel, over medium-high heat, in a large pot with a lid. As soon as the kernel pops, add the rest of the popcorn, cover the pot and shake over the heat—quickly moving the pot back and forth over the burner—until the popping stops.

The rest of this almost-perfect recipe for heaven can be found at D'Artagnan.

Bruce Springsteen, "Backstreets"

Happy birthday, Savall.

Jordi Savall was born on this date in 1942.

Here he leads Hesperion XXI in a performance of European music from the time of Caravaggio.  This performance was dedicated to the memory of the maestro's late wife, Monserrat Figueras ...

Time.

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

- Bill Watterson

Genius.

The 2004 BBC Documentary, The Genius of Mozart ...

"Miracle of Nature"



"A Passion for the Stage"



"The First Romantic"

Gigapan.

Photographer David Breashears of GlacierWorks has created a new way of photographing the Himalayan region: By stitching together 400-plus images into one giant, zoomable, interactive image — or a "gigapan" containing more than a billion pixels. He and his team just sent us something even cooler that they're currently working on: a Mount Everest you can explore, containing an estimated 3.8 billion pixels! 

Want to feel very, very small? Be sure to zoom in on the tent city in the lower left.  

NPR has the interactive photo here.

Prepared.

Say on, sayers! sing on, singers! 
Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth! 
Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost, 
It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use, 
When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.

- Walt Whitman

Mindful.

"We live in an incredibly busy world. Our pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we’re always doing something,” says Andy Puddicombe. “The sad fact is that we’re so distracted that we are no longer present in the world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us. The crazy thing is, people assume that’s just the way life is. But that’s not really how it has to be.”

In this talk, Puddicombe — who is as equally as turned off by incense as me — shares the fascinating story of how he became a monk, and gives a convincing argument for why it is worth it to take 10 minutes a day to refresh the mind.

“Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it’s much different than that,” says Puddicombe. “It’s more about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly — witnessing it coming and going — without judgment, but with a relaxed, focus mind.”

Read the rest at TED.

"A Slow Morning"

Palestrina.

The BBC's Simon Beale, along with Harry Christophers & The Sixteen, explore the musical world of Palestrina ...

Beyond.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.  Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.

- Ernest Hemingway

Wonderful.

He recalled with immoderate reverence his burgeoning love at age ten for looking at paintings and listening to classical music, the lack of mind in his pleasure.  How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

Jim Harrison's latest collection of novellas is out.

Wickersham, "Steam Whistle"

The Chesapeake & Ohio #614 whistling through Hawk's Nest, West Virginia ...



Thanks, John!

Fight.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
- Ira Glass

Alive.

Thank you, Brain Pickings.

Demolition Man.

Word on the street is Homer's retiring ...

I think it is pretty safe to say that if you ask all the goalies in the NHL who they least like to face, the majority of them will say Holmstrom. There is a reason that he is known as the "Demolition Man". By using his body to redirect shots and screen the goalie, Homer became loved by Wings fans for doing what no one else wanted to do.

Read the rest at Winging It In Motown.

Wu Man.

Watch the world's reigning pipa virtuoso play ancient music from her Chinese homeland in the NPR Music offices. When her fingers start to fly, Wu Man can create scenes of cinematic grandeur or serene, moonlit moments.

Set List:
"Ambushed From All Sides"
"Night Thoughts"
"White Snow In Spring"

Patterns.

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

― Oliver Sacks

Mysteriously beautiful fractals are shaking up the world of mathematics and deepening our understanding of nature.

A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity.

Fractals: they're famously found in nature and artists have created some incredible renderings as well. Fractals are purely a wonder -- too irregular for Euclidean geometry; iterative and recursive and seemingly infinite. They turn up in food and germs, plants and animals, mountains and water and sky.

From NOVA ...

Catford, "Ocean Waves"

Jonny Hardie, from Old Blind Dogs, on fiddle ...

Catford's site is here.

Homework.

I don't take any risks at all.  I do my homework.  And if you do your homework, you don't take any risks.

For instance, I've been a whitewater kayaker, and doing dangerous rivers, first descents of rivers and things like that.  The day I really learned how to kayak, I did a river next to may house in Wyoming that is a difficult river, it falls more than a hundred feet a mile, and I did it one day without a paddle.  If you don't have a paddle, you have to think way ahead, you  have to be seated correctly in the seat, and you basically have to go down a river like a fish.  I did that and I had a perfect run.  And so, people say, "Wow, that was a crazy thing to do.  That was really risky."  You know what?  It wasn't risky.  The worst that could've happened is I would've lost my boat, picked it up a few miles down, I would've swam out ...

But, by taking small risks, it gave me the confidence and the technique to not be so dependent on my paddle ...

Listen to the rest at NPR.

Flies.

Sinclair, Yemen, 2012

Eleven-year-old Turki Ahmed flies a kite amid the rubble of Sadah, a northern antigovernment stronghold near Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia. 

 

The best of 2012 National Geographic photography is here.

 

Stephanie Sinclair's site is here.

New.

 

And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that never were.
 
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Jim Malcom, "Ay Fond Kiss/Auld Lang Syne"

Meaghan Smith, "It Snowed"

Flowing.

Karr, Solo, 2012

 

 

It’s so easy it’s ridiculous. It’s so easy that I can’t even begin – I just don’t know where to start. After all, it’s just looking at things. We all do that. It’s simply a way of recording what you see – point the camera at it, and press a button. How hard is that? And what’s more, in this digital age, its free – doesn’t even cost you the price of film. It’s so simple and basic, it’s ridiculous.

It’s so difficult because it’s everywhere, every place, all the time, even right now. It’s the view of this pen in my hand as I write this, it’s an image of your hands holding this book, Drift your consciousness up and out of this text and see: it’s right there, across the room – there… and there. Then it’s gone. You didn’t photograph it, because you didn’t think it was worth it. And now it’s too late, that moment has evaporated. But another one has arrived, instantly. Now. Because life is flowing through and around us, rushing onwards and onwards, in every direction.

Read the rest at Seen Sense.

Thanks, Jess.

Gordon Lightfoot, "Song for a Winter's Night"

Lisa Hannigan " Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"

King's College Choir, A Festival of Lessons and Carols

From 1954 ...

Truce.

Here is the History Channel documentary on the temporary cessation of hostilities in the trenches of the Western Front in December 1914 ...

 

Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker

Jethro Tull, "Ring Out Solstice Bells"

Musing.

Sculthorpe, Crisp, undated

See, Winter comes to rule the varied year,

Sullen and sad, with all his rising train—

Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme,

These, that exalt the soul to solemn thought

And heavenly musing.

- James Thomson, from Seasons

Arises.

Sheepdogs can't be everywhere at once.  Sometimes the sheep are on their own, and evil people know this. They chose to attack at that moment because they know that there will be no one there to stop them.  If someone has an insatiable darkness in their heart, there is no law given by man or God that will stop them in their quest to act upon their terrible desires.  Out of sheep, sometimes a sheepdog arises. 

Read the rest at BLACKFIVE.

Jimmy Buffett, "Apocalypso"

... dancing when we go.

Roberto Luti, "Dark Was The Night"

Stardust.

... it was pretty obvious … we’re stardust.

- Edgar Mitchell

More at Brain Pickings.