Playing

Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb
GUILTY

-

Third gayest album in the collection.

Playing

Balkan Beat Box
SHOUT IT OUT

Playing

Chris Thile & Edgar Meyer
BASS & MANDOLIN

MARGARET LANTERMAN

There is a sadness in this world, for we are ignorant of many things. Yes. We are ignorant of many beautiful things. Things like the truth. So sadness, in our ignorance, is very real. The tears are real.

Playing

Trio Mediaeval
FOLK SONGS

SAMUEL BECKETT
Molloy

I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena.

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

The Beatles
REVOLVER

Playing

The Beatles
RUBBER SOUL

EDNA O'BRIEN
Girls in Their Wedded Bliss

Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more. Roaming around all that time with a bunch of men, fishing; and sermons-on-the-mount. Abandoning women. I thought of all the women who had it, and didn't even know when the big moment was, and others saying their rosary with the beads held over the side of the bed, and others saying, “Stop, stop, you dirty old dog,” and others yelling desperately to be jacked right up to their middles, and it often leading to nothing, and them getting up out of bed and riding a poor door knob and kissing the wooden face of a door and urging with foul language, then crying, wiping the knob, and it all adding up to nothing either.

Playing

The John Coltrane Quartet
AFRICA/BRASS

THOMAS MERTON
The Ascent to Truth

One might compare the journey of the soul to mystical union, by way of pure faith, to the journey of a car on a dark highway. The only way the driver can keep to the road is by using his headlights. So in the mystical life, reason has its function. The way of faith is necessarily obscure. We drive by night. Nevertheless our reason penetrates the darkness enough to show us a little of the road ahead. It is by the light of reason that we interpret the signposts and make out the landmarks along our way.

Daily Painting

Robert McGinnis
MURDER ME FOR NICKELS (1960)

Cover Art for the novel by Peter Rabe

Watching

THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Season Two (2018)

Creators
Margaret Atwood, Bruce Miller

Directors
Mike Barker, Kari Skogland, Jeremy Podeswa

Playing

Various Artists
DJ-KICKS: KRUDER & DORFMEISTER

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Existentialism and Human Emotions

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

-

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Les Séquestrés d'Altona

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Daily Painting

Inal Savchenkov
DO NOT BURY YOUR TALENT (2014)

Watching

THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Season Two (2018)

Creators
Margaret Atwood, Bruce Miller

Directors
Mike Barker, Kari Skogland, Jeremy Podeswa

Playing

Television
MARQUEE MOON

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The Words

She believed in nothing. Only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Watching

THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Season Two (2018)

Creators
Margaret Atwood, Bruce Miller

Directors
Mike Barker, Kari Skogland, Jeremy Podeswa

Playing

Charles Mingus
JAZZ WORKSHOP 1957-1958

THOMAS MERTON
The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal.

The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction.

Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

November 2, 1939

Playing

Teitur + Girls in Airports
KVÆÐI

JOSEPHINE BAKER
[After seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time]

It looked very different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one's color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises.

Watching

A WOMAN OF PARIS
Charles Chaplin
USA, 1923

Playing

Anton Rubinstein
THE DEMON

Boris Khaikin
All-Union Band Soloists, Academic Choir, and Orchestra

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child

When the great ship containing the hopes and aspirations of the world, when the great ship freighted with mankind goes down in the night of death, chaos and disaster, I am willing to go down with the ship. I will not be guilty of the ineffable meanness of paddling away in some orthodox canoe. I will go down with the ship, with those who love me, and with those whom I have loved.

If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant.

I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender; it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again.

What right have you, sir, Mr. Clergyman, you, minister of the gospel, to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine: neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.

Watching

THREE RESURRECTED DRUNKARDS
[帰って来たヨッパライ, Kaette kita yopparai]
Nagisa Ôshima Japan, 1968

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

Nirvana
NEVERMIND (1991)

Daily Painting

Piet Mondrian
MILL OF HEESWIJK SUN (1905)

Watching

DOUBLE SUICIDE: JAPANESE SUMMER
[無理心中日本の夏, MURI SHINJU: NIHON NO NATSU]
Nagisa Ôshima
Japan, 1967

Playing

The Cure
SEVENTEEN SECONDS

Playing

The Cure
THREE IMAGINARY BOYS

ANN DRUYAN

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again.

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous, but not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural.

We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful.

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Daily Painting

Peter Candid
ALLEGORY OF VANITY (1580)

Watching

SING A SONG OF SEX
[日本春歌考, NIHON SHUNKA-KŌ]
Nagisa Ôshima
Japan, 1967

Reading

Katherine Stewart
MONEY, LIES, AND GOD
Inside The Movement To Destroy American Democracy

Benjamin Slyngstad

DR. SEUSS from 1941

And on this platform, folks, those most perplexing people… the Lads with the Siamese Beard! Unrelated by blood, they are joined in a manner that mystifies the mightiest minds in the land!

Special Collections and Archives, UC San Diego Library.

Playing

DakhaBrakha
LIGHT

ISAAC ASIMOV

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

Daily Painting

Pavel Tchelitchew
AUTOPORTRAIT (1915)

Watching

VIOLENCE AT NOON
[白昼の通り, HAKUCHŪ NO TŌRIMA]
Nagisa Ôshima
Japan, 1966

Whenever I hear anyone say anything about "declassifying" the JFK files.

Playing

Willie Nelson
HEROES

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

Daily Painting

Jacoba van Hoboken
THE GOAT GIRL (1938)

Watching

THE PLEASURES OF THE FLESH
[悦楽, Etsuraku]
Nagisa Ôshima
Japan, 1967

There's something in here.

False flag.

Thirty Helens can't be wrong.

Playing

Toad the Wet Sprocket
PALE

AESOP
"The Wolf and the Lamb"

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Daily Painting

Inal Savchenkov
LARD IS POWER (1991)