Miles Davis and John Coltrane
THE FINAL TOUR
The Bootleg Series Vol. 6

 

MARK TWAIN

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

The Tallest Man on Earth
THERE'S NO LEAVING NOW

 

ALBERT CAMUS

A Happy Death

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory. Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.

THUG KITCHEN
Eat Like You Give a Fuck

Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway

Louise Farrenc
SYMPHONY NO. 2
SYMPHONY NO. 3

Christoph König
Solistes Européens, Luxembourg

 

DakhaBrakha
LIGHT

TAO YUANMING

“Returning to Live on the Farm I”

____________________

Since my youth, what was popular didn't suit me;
my basic character was love of hills and mountains.
Mistakenly, I fell into the dusty net,
and trapped, I lost all of thirty years.
A caged bird years for the ancient forest;
a fish kept in a pond will miss old waters.
I'll clear the wasteland at the southern border,
I'll stay honest and pure, and keep to the fields.

Elms and willows shade my back eaves,
peach and plum are heaped in the front hall.
The nearest hamlet is dim in the distance;
its smoke seems reluctant to leave the village.
Dogs bark from deep within the lanes;
chickens squawk through the tops of mulberry trees.
No dust swirls through my courtyard door;
empty rooms offer abundant leisure.
For so long I've felt I lived in a prison.
I am restored, content to return to nature.


Translation by Deng Ming-Dao

Johnny Cash
AT FOLSOM PRISON

 

Miscommunication sometimes leads to arguments, and arguments sometimes lead to fights. Anger is usually present in arguments and fights. Anger is an emotion, usually classified as a negative emotion. Negative emotions can cause severe problems in our environment and to the health of our body. 

Happiness, usually classified as a positive emotion, can bring good health to our body, and spread positive vibrations into our environment. 

Sometimes when we are ill, we are not on our best behavior. By ill, I mean any of the following: physically ill, emotionally ill, mentally ill, and/or spiritually ill.

Claudio Monteverdi
SECONDO LIBRO DEI MADRIGALI

 (1590)

La Venexiana

SAM SHEPARD

I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do know it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our demise

This notion that not only were we given this land by God somehow, but that we’re entitled to do whatever we wanted with it, regardless of the consequences, and reap all the fortunes out of the land, much to the detriment of everyone else

This rampant puritanical class of European colonialism behind the whole thing is land hungry Europeans wanting to dominate. The move westward was promoted by advertising with words like “Free Land,” “Manifest Destiny." 

We always prefer the fantasy over the reality.

SAMUEL BECKETT 

The Expelled

____________________

I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

Antonio Vivaldi
L'OLIMPIADE

Marianna Kulikova, Sara Mingardo, Laura Giordano, Riccardo Novaro, Sergio Foresti 

Rinaldo Alessandrini
Concerto Italiano

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

____________________

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.”

Nina Simone
I PUT A SPELL ON YOU

 

TAO TE CHING

____________________

The heavy is the root of light.
Stillness is the ruler of agitation.

That is why the wise journey all day,
   but never stray from their supply carts.
They may have glorious views,
   but they pass them over
   and settle themselves comfortably instead.

How can the lords of ten thousand chariots
carry themselves lightly through the world?
   If they are light, they lose their roots.
   If they are agitated, they lose rulership.

Nick Drake
FIVE LEAVES LEFT

 

FERNANDO PASSOA

____________________

I’ve never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

The Cure
BOYS DON'T CRY

 

Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane
AT CARNEGIE HALL

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

“Bon Voyage, Mr. President"

____________________

The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.

Art Tatum and Ben Webster
THE ALBUM

 

JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

____________________

Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.

Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.

RYŌKAN

___________________

Though frosts come down
night after night,
what does it matter?
they melt in the morning sun.
Though the snow falls
each passing year,
what does it matter?
with spring days it thaws.
Yet once let them settle
on a man’s head,
fall and pile up,
go on piling up –
then the new year
may come and go,
but never you’ll see them fade away

The Magnetic Fields
69 LOVE SONGS

 

ALBERT CAMUS
The Fall

____________________

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fucked and read the news. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

Tom Waits
NIGHTHAWKS AT THE DINER

 

George Frideric Händel
JEPHTHA, HWV 70

James Gilchrist, Susan Bickley, Sophie Bevan, Robin Blaze, Matthew Brook, Grace Davidson

Harry Christophers
The Sixteen

TOMAS TRANSTRŌMER

“Six Winters”

______________________

1
In the black hotel a child is asleep.
And outside: the winter night
where the wide-eyed dice roll.

2
An élite of the dead became stone
in Katarina Churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.

3
One wartime winter when I lay sick
a huge icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, unexplained memory.

4
Ice hangs down from the roof edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.

5
On a side-track, an empty railway-carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.

6
Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself
is floating before us. Our smiles
on the way home. Bewitched avenue.

Hypnotic Clambake
SQUARE DANCE MESSIAH

WANG WEI
“Stone Gate Temple in the Blue Field Mountains”
____________________

Creeks and summits are brilliant at sunset.
I laze in a boat, my way in the wind’s hands.

Watching wild landscapes I forget distance
and come to the water’s edge.

Gazing at lovely far woods and clouds
I guess I’ve lost my way.

How could I know this lucid stream
would turn, leading me into mountains?

I abandon my boat, pick up a light staff
and come upon something wonderful,

four or five old monks in contemplation,
enjoying the shade of pines and cypresses.

Before the forest dawns they read Sanskrit.
Their nightly meditation quiets the peaks.

Here even shepherd boys know the Dao.
Woodcutters bring in worldly news.

They sleep at night in the woods
with incense, on mats clean as jade.

Their robes are steeped in valley fragrances;
the stone cliffs shine under a mountain moon.

I fear I will lose this refuge forever
so at daybreak I fix it in my mind.

People of Peach Tree Spring goodbye.
I’ll be back when flowers turn red.

Art Tatum
DISCOVERIES

 

RAY BRADBURY

____________________

Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered - sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks.

The Dead South
GOOD COMPANY
 

ANAÏS NIN
Little Birds

____________________

He was whispering over and over again the same phrase, “You have the body of an angel. It is impossible that such a body should have a sex. You have the body of an angel.” 

The anger swept over Fay like a fever, an anger at his moving his penis away from her hand. She sat up, her hair wild about her shoulders, and said, “I am not an angel, Albert. I am a woman. I want you to love me as a woman.

Leonard Elschenbroich

Sergei Prokofiev

CELLO SONATA IN C MAJOR, OP. 119

Dmitry Kabalevsky

CELLO CONCERTO NO. 2 IN C MAJOR, OP. 77 

Alexeri Grynyuk, Peter Limonov

Andrew Litton

Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Nausea

____________________

It is one-thirty. I am eating a sandwich in the Café Mably, everything is more or less normal. Anyway, everything is always normal in cafés and especially the Café Mably, because of the manager, M. Fasquelle, who has a raffish look which is positively reassuring. It will soon be time for his nap and his eyes are pink already, but he stays quick and decisive. He strolls among the tables and speaks confidently to the customers. “Is everything all right, Monsieur?”

Johann Sebastian Bach
JOHANNES-PASSION

Sebastian Noack, Mark Padmore, Sibylla Rubens, Andreas Scholl, Michael Volle, Dominik Wörner

Philippe Herreweghe

Collegium Vocale Gent, Enoch zu Guttenberg

The 2001 Recording

ALBERT CAMUS

A Happy Death

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Like that sky. It's rain and sun both, noon and midnight. I think of the lips I've kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I'm all those things at once. I'm sure there are times when you wouldn't even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness—I can't say it.

MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations, 12.19
____________________

Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful and divine than what causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind? Is it not fear, suspicion, desire, or something like that?

Voice of the Turtle
BRIDGES OF SONG
Music of the Spanish Jews in Morocco

 

EMMA LAZARUS
“The New Colossus”

____________________

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Henry Purcell
DIDO AND AENEAS

Susan Graham, Ian Bostridge, Camilla Tilling, Cécile de Boever, Felicity Palmer, David Daniels, Paul Agnew

Emmanuelle Haïm
Le Concert d’Astrée, European Voices

 

 

La Venexiana
L'ARTE DEL MADRIGALE
Madrigals by Wert, Marenzio, Luzzaschi, Gesualdo and D’India

CORMAC McCARTHY

Blood Meridian

____________________

The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World Revisited

____________________

Given unchecked over-population and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy. 

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms - elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts, and all the rest - will remain.

The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial - but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. 

Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers, and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

Jakub Józef Orliński

ANIMA SACRA

Maxim Emelyanychev

Il Pomo d'Oro

Frédéric Chopin
PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN E MINOR

Emil Gilels

Eugene Ormandy
The Philadelphia Orchestra

 

H. L. MENCHEN in 1920

____________________

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

HAROLD PINTER

____________________

Language, under these conditions, is a highly ambiguous commerce. So often, below the words spoken, is the thing known and unspoken. My characters tell me so much and no more, with reference to their experience, their aspirations, their motives, their history. Between my lack of biographical data about them and the ambiguity of what they say there lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore.

You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we’re inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling. But it’s out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where, underneath what is said, another thing is being said.

THE SUN

Issue 542
February 2021

 

Ryan Adams
HEARTBREAKER

 

GEORGE ORWELL
1984

____________________

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture repainted, every date altered. The process is continuing day by day, minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which The Party is always right.

Steve Martin and Edie Brickell
SO FAMILIAR

 

Franz Schubert

WINTERREISE

Ian Bostridge
Leif Ove Andsnes

 

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

____________________

I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hate in the world is religion and organized religion. Absolutely convinced of that. And I think it should be - religion - treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.

So when I say that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity.

It says we can’t be moral without “Big Brother,” without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. It means we must be afraid.

We must also be forced to love someone whom we fear - the essence of sado-masochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the Master/Slave relationship. And that it knows death is coming, and can’t wait to bring it on.

I say that is Evil.

And though I do, some nights, stay home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and this ultimate stupidity.

ANAÏS NIN
Little Birds

There are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night – like the stories of the werewolf, for instance – were invented by men who saw women transformed at night – from idealized, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.

Nina Simone

FOLKSY NINA

RACHEL AMA'S VEGAN EATS
Tasty Plant-Based Recipes for Every Day

Rachel Ama