Playing

Paul McCartney and Wings
BAND ON THE RUN

MARY OLIVER
"What Gorgeous Thing"

I do not know what gorgeous thing
the bluebird keeps saying,
his voice easing out of his throat,
beak, body into the pink air
of the early morning. I like it
whatever it is. Sometimes
it seems the only thing in the world
that is without dark thoughts.
Sometimes it seems the only thing
in the world that is without
questions that can't and probably
never will be answered, the
only thing that is entirely content
with the pink, then clear white
morning and, gratefully, says so.

Daily Painting

John James Audubon
ARCTIC BLUE BIRD (1856)

Playing

Víkingur Ólafsson
MOZART & CONTEMPORIES

D. H. LAWRENCE

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me … and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

Daily Painting

Cy Twombly
LEDA AND THE SWAN, ROME (1962)

Playing

Chuck Mangione
FEEL SO GOOD

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden; or, Life in the Woods

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Daily Painting

Oswaldo Guayasamin
THE HANDS OF TENDERNESS (1974)

Watching

TAM-LIN
[aka THE DEVIL'S WIDOW]
Roddy McDowall
UK, 1970

Reading

Jean Giono
HILL

Playing

Third Coast Percussion
PERSPECTIVES

Works by Danny Elfman, Philip Glass, Jlin, Flutronix

Daily Painting

Amrita Sher-Gil
THREE GIRLS (1932)

Watching

LA NOTTE
Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy, 1961

Playing

Dawn McCarthy & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
WHAT THE BROTHERS SANG

RYŌKAN
“For Children Killed in a Smallpox Epidemic”

When spring arrives
From every tree tip
Flowers will bloom,
But those children
Who fell with last autumn’s leaves
Will never return.

Keep your heart clear and transparent
And you will never be bound.
A single disturbed thought, though,
Creates ten thousand distractions.
Let myriad things captivate you
And you’ll go further and further astray.
How painful to see people
All wrapped up in themselves.

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deep despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.

Sometimes I sit quietly,
Listening to the sound of falling leaves.
Peaceful indeed is the life of a monk,
Cut off from all worldly matters.
Then why do I shed these tears?

I’m so aware
That it’s all unreal:
One by one, the things
Of this world pass on.
But why do I still grieve?

When I think
About the misery
Of those in this world
Their sadness
Becomes mine.

Oh, that my monk’s robe
Were wide enough
To gather up all
The suffering people
In this floating world.

Nothing makes me
More happy than
Amida Buddha’s Vow
To save
Everyone.

If you are not put off
By the voice of the valley
And the starry peaks,
Why not walk through the shady cedars
And come see me?

At dusk
Come to my hut—
The crickets will
Serenade you, and I will
Introduce you to the moonlit woods.

SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren

Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

Daily Painting

Ron Francis
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE (2022)

Watching

THE LOBSTER
Yorgos Lanthimos
Ireland/UK, 2015

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

Dinah Washington
IN THE LAND OF HI-FI

ALBERT CAMUS

On certain mornings, as we turn a corner,
an exquisite dew falls on our heart
and then vanishes.

But the freshness lingers,
and this, always,
is what the heart needs.

The earth must have risen
in just such a light,
the morning the world was born.

Watching

THE END
Joshua Oppenheimer
Denmark/UK, 2024

Nooooooooo.

Playing

Kruder & Dorfmeister
THE K & D SESSIONS

WENDELL BERRY
"To Know the Dark"

To go in the dark with a light
is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark.
Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too,
blooms and sings,

and is travelled by dark feet
and dark wings.

Daily Painting

Alfonso Ossorio
SACRIFICIAL MEAL (1950)

Watching

ADUA AND HER FRIENDS
[ADUA E LE COMPAGNE]
Antonio Pietrangeli
Italy, 1960

"You guys doing some painting later?"

No lies detected, but I worry that Miller hasn't had his rabies vaccinations.

Playing

Tom Waits
BONE MACHINE

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden; or, Life in the Woods

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked.

Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at any thing which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim,—“By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked.

In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he “liked to have the little fellers about him.”

Daily Painting

Vincent Van Gogh
THE SOWER AT SUNSET (1888)

Nothing about this filthy joke of a governance is sustainable.

Unfortunately, Thiel is about to swoop in.

Playing

Philip Glass
IN THE PENAL COLONY

Omar Ebrahim and Michael Bennett

Michael Rafferty
Music Theatre Wales

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden; or, Life in the Woods

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.

The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,” and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate himself for his day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues;” but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory,—never alone, hardly in their dreams.

It would be better if there were but on

Daily Painting

J. M. W. Turner
THE SCARLET SUNSET (ND/1830s)

Watching

STILL WALKING
[歩いても 歩いても]
Hirokazu Kore-eda
Japan, 2008

Playing

Fats Waller
LONDON SUITES

LAURA INGALLS WILDER

You venture into the unknown land because that is where your heart will take you. In the end, it is not what you want to do, it is something you have to do.

Daily Painting

Paul Klee
HEAT (1940)

Just don't.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving north-east rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection.

In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago.

Men frequently say to me, “I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” I am tempted to reply to such,—This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.

This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar…. I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called “a handsome property,”—though I never got a fair view of it,—on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton,—or Bright-town,—which place he would reach some time in the morning.

Daily Painting

Joan Eardley
SETTING SUN (1958)

Reading

Henry David Thoreau
WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS

Groomers.

Playing

Philip Glass
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Joseph Li

Jonas Hacker, Ben Edquist, Matthew Adam Fleischer, Nicolas Nestorak, Madison Leonard,

Wolf Trap Opera
Inscape Chamber Orchestra

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden; or, A Life in the Woods

Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges,—a sound heard farther than almost any other at night,—the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake,—if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there,—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply.

Daily Painting

Frida Kahlo
THE SUN AND LIFE (1947)

Watching

OUTSIDE
Carlo Ledesma
Philippines, 2024

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

You do you, little boy.

Playing

The Miles Davis Quintet
MILES IN FRANCE 1963 & 1964
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden; or, A Life in the Woods

Are we certain that what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied?

Daily Painting

Alfonso Ossorio
DOUBLE PORTRAIT (1944)

Daily Painting

Wassily Kandinsky
RED SUN AND SHIP (1925)

Watching

8 1/2
Federico Fellini
Italy, 1963