Playing

Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars
SATCH PLAYS FATS
A TRIBUTE TO THE IMMORTAL FATS WALLER

SEAMUS HEANEY
"The Wishing Tree"

I thought of her as the wishing tree that died
And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,
Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

Need by need by need into its hale
Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail
Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision
Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,
Of turned-up faces where the tree had

Daily Painting

Juliette Wytsman
TREES IN A MEADOW WITH POPPIES IN BLOOM (1906)

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

They Might Be Giants
APOLLO 18

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
"Dinner Bell"

I've been leaving on my things
So in the morning when the morning bird sings
There's still dinner on my dinner
Jacket till the dinner bell rings

Experimental dog
Salivating dog
Good dog
Waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ring

I've been leaving on my things
So in the morning when the morning bird sings
There's still dinner on my dinner
Jacket till the dinner bell rings

I don't want a pizza, I don't want a piece of
Peanut brittle, I don't want a pear
I don't want a bagel, I don't want a bean I
Wouldn't like a bag of beef or a beer or a
Cup of chowder, corn, cake, or creamed cauliflower cause I'm
Waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ring

Shoulder, bicep, elbow, arm
Forearm, thumb, wrist, knuckle, palm
Middle, pinky, index, ring
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ding

I don't know whether I'd rather be having a bottle of vinegar
I don't know whether I'd rather be having an egg
I don't know whether I'd rather be having an order of bacon
Or whether I'd rather be having a basket of garlic bread
I don't know whether I'd rather be having some pie or
Saving my appetite 'cause I'm
Waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ring

I've been leaving on my things
So in the morning when the morning bird sings
There's still dinner on my dinner
Jacket till the dinner bell does the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, do the bell thing
I'm waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ding ding ding

Waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ding ding ding
Waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing
Dinner bell, dinner bell, ding

Daily Painting

Eugene Iverd
WHISTLING IN THE DARK (1935)

Playing

J Balvin
JOSE

WILLiAM STAFFORD
"Why I Am Happy"

Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

Daily Painting

Lucebert
UNTITLED (1975)

Watching

A TOUCH OF ZEN
[俠女]
King Hu
Hong Kong-Taiwan, 1971

Playing

Slowdive
SLOWDIVE

WENDELL BERRY
"The Peace of Wild Things"

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Daily Painting

Charles Mellin
THE TUSCAN GENERAL ALLESANDRO DEL BORRO (1645)

Watching

NOBODY'S HERO
[VIENS JE T'EMMÈNE]
Alain Guiraudie
France, 2022

Playing

My Morning Jacket
CIRCUITAL (2011)

JAMES BALDWIN
Quoted by Jane Howard in “Telling Talk from a Negro Writer”
LIFE Magazine - My 24, 1963

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to tell that.

I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.

Daily Painting

Chantal Joffe
MOTHER AND CHILD II (2005)

Watching

STAYING VERTICAL
Alain Guiraudie
France, 2016

Artist: Siegfried Woldhek

We fucking told you.

SHE fucking told you.

May the very worst that happens to any Harris voter be the starting point for the pain and suffering of every non-voter.

Playing

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
DIZ 'N BIRD AT CARNEGIE HALL

GOVERNOR JB PRITZKER
August 25, 2025

... To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country – I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically.

Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, "Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?" Instead, I say, "Mr. President, do not come to Chicago."

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power ....

To the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.

You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

As Dr. King once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Humbly I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.

Daily Painting

Victor Marais-Milton
L'INTRIGANT [THE PLOTTER] (1900)

Watching

DEEP END
Jerzy Skolimowski
UK-Germany, 1970

Playing

Lautten Compagney
CHIRPING OF THE NIGHTINGALE:
MR. PLAYFORD'S ENGLISH DANCING MASTER

Music by John Playford, Thomas, Ravencroft, Henry Purcell, Nicola Matteis

Daily Painting

Philip Guston
UNTILED (1980)

ALESSANDRA LYNCH
“Funeral: For Us His Gold”

          after Gerald Stern

The insect was yellow with crumpled-black banded legs
         and shellacked back that would outlast us
         and wistful eyes from what I could discern on that trail between
              fields,
and we laid him out in the open air under a sky fast-blue with change,
              wedging
         a leaf beneath his triple-belted belly so he didn’t rest on plain dirt,
         and we placed two cloverblooms by his head and he was old
you said, could tell by how definite the stripes were, how complete
         the patterns bold and dark, almost engraved,
and he was beautiful in that pasture of thirty-three cows and we drank
         milk in the blaring heat and ate the cake you’d made. We were
         the only humans there—unholy-seeming things with two legs,
              dismal histories—
drinking and eating around his elegant husk,
         and from the furze, fellow insects rose, a frenzied static around
              our bodies,
while he remained in situ an unremitting yellow, the color more
         vivid, louder now that he was a remnant. Was color the purpose
              here?
Yellow had alerted us to him, and we took care
         with leaf and clover to make his bed.
The insect’s gold our togetherness, its death from which we fed.

Playing

The B-52s
MESOPOTAMIA

Playing

The B-52s
PARTY MIX

MOOR MOTHER AND JOE MCPHEE
"Joe McPhee Nation Time Intro"

Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie
All y'all ready?
Holler, scream, shout
It's nation time
It's nation time, it's nation time for real

Yo, cops in patrol cars, cops on the beat
We'll be standing on the corners, we'll be marching in the street
Helicopters overhead, another brother shot dead
What time is it? It's nation time
Racist fascists in our White House, neo-Nazis in the streets
We got miles to go and promises to keep
Culture vultures in our beds, another bullet in our heads
What timе is it? It's nation time

Daily Painting

Aukusti Uotila
BOAT HOUSE (1884)

Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where's the streetwise Hercules
To fight the risin' odds?
Isn't there a white knight
Upon a fiery steed?
Late at night, I toss and I turn
And I dream of what I need

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero till the end of the night
He's gotta be strong and he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero till the morning light
He's gotta be sure and it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life

Playing

Moor Mother
JAZZ CODES

LI BAI
“Clearing at Dawn”

The fields are chill, the sparse rain has stopped;
The colours of Spring teem on every side.
With leaping fish the blue pond is full;
With singing thrushes the green boughs droop.
The flowers of the field have dabbled their powdered cheeks;
The mountain grasses are bent level at the waist.
By the bamboo stream the last fragment of cloud
Blown by the wind slowly scatters away.

Daily Painting

William Blake
CERBERUS (1824)

Playing

Sun Ra and His Arkestra
JAZZ IN SILHOUETTE

PATRICIA ROBERTS-MILLER
Demagoguery and Democracy

We don't have demagoguery in our culture because a demagogue has come to power; when demagoguery becomes the normal way of participating in public discourse, then it's just a question of time until a demagogue arises.

Daily Painting

Ivan Pylypenko
THE RIVER OF TIME (2020)

Reading

Cecilia Blomdahl
LIFE ON SVALBARD
FINDING HOME ON A REMOTE ISLAND NEAR THE NORTH POLE

It took several hours to finally investigate what this Cracker Barrel nonsense was all about. 

It took a few seconds to start losing grey matter.

I shit you not. 

This is what the half-wit MAGAt snowflake manufactured outrage machine went apoplectic about today.

This is what biologically adult men are melting down over today.

This is what is on the mind of incels today.

The clip begins with:

"Classrooms shouldn't be stages upon which teachers can preach their various indoctrination masquerading as eternal truths. And similarly, museums that that are over 70 percent funded by the federal government shouldn't be laboratories for political experiments."

Playing

Brave Combo
A NIGHT ON EARTH

FRANK HERBERT
Dune

Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest.

-

“Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest.” Thus the Padishah Emperor advised you. And he tells you: “If you want profits, you must rule.”

There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: “Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?”

Daily Painting

Ohara Koson
EVENING SAIL BOATS (1930)

Watching

WELCOME TO L. A.
Alan Rudolph
USA, 1976

Evil is depthless. American hate and American hated of facts run deeper.

From The Guardian

White House budget director Russ Vought sent letters to eight museums demanding information about exhibits within 30 days and instructing officials to implement “content corrections” including replacing “divisive” language.

“President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable."

Playing

Philipp Heinrich Erlebach
THE SIX SONATAS FOR VIOLIN, VIOLA DA GAMBA, AND CONTINUO

Rodolfo Richter
Alison McGillivray, Silas Standage, Elgio Quinetro, Peter McCarthy

MASHA GESSEN
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

It was the oldest trick in the book - a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity. ... You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. you need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless.

Daily Painting

Paul Starrett Sample
CELEBRATION (1933)

Watching

REMEMBER MY NAME
Alan Rudolph
USA, 1978

He's literally showing world leaders his already-made merch for a third term in blatant violation of The Constitution.

For an endless dictatorship.

Buy a Trump 2028 hat. Own the libs. End the United States of America for just $35.00 with bonus, almost free cult membership. Operators are standing by.

He's already said it out loud, on the world stage, in front of cameras.

Playing

Kate Pierson
RADIOS & RAINBOWS

MASHA GESSEN
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Arendt pointed out that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes conducted periodic purges or crackdowns, which she called "an instrument of permanent instability." Constant flux was necessary for the system's survival: 'The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop - one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth." Indeed, she wrote, 'The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability."

Daily Painting

Jack Butler Yeats
THE RIVERSIDE, LONG AGO (1922)

Watching

THE SHOUT
Jerzy Skolimowski
UK, 1978