Daily Painting

Helen Frankenthaler
MOUNT SINAI (1956)

Playing

Marianne Faithfull
GO AWAY FROM MY WORLD

HANIF KUREISHI
Intimacy

I am aware how susceptible to illusion we all are. How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

Daily Painting

Ellen Bernard Thompson
THE IMMIGRANTS (1899)

Playing

Björk Guðmundsdóttir & Tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar
GLING-GLO

TOVE DITLEVSEN
"Divorce 1"

He would
in case of divorce
lay claim to half
of everything
he said.
Half a sofa,
half a TV,
half a summerhouse
half a pound of butter
half a child.

The apartment was his
he said
because it was in his name.
The thing was
he loved her.

She loved another
whose wife would
lay claim to half
of everything.

So the marriage act stated.
As clearly as
two and two makes four.

The solicitor
said so too.

She broke half of everything
and ripped the tax bill apart.
Then she left for
the women’s shelter on Jagtvej
with half a child.

The child was teased at school
because he only had
one ear.
Other than that,
this life too
was bearable
since things couldn’t be
any different.

-

Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

Daily Painting

Anna Ancher
INTERIOR, BRANDUM'S ANNEX (c. 1920)

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Reading

Hanif Kureishi
INTIMACY

Playing

Benjamin Britten
BRITTEN SONGS

Ian Bostridge

Antonio Pappano, Xuefei Yang

LI BAN
"Drinking Alone with the Moon"

A tankard of wine in the midst of some flowers
I drank alone, no one was with me
Raising my cup, asking the bright moon
Bring me my shadow let us be three.
Alas, the moon couldn’t drink,
And my shadow stared at my vacantly.
Still, for a while, I had these two friends,
To cheer me up as Spring was ending.
On the spot, I composed a poem, the moon encouraged me,
I got up and danced, my shadow stumbled along.
All along, we two bosom companions.
Finally drunk, it was then I lost him.
Eternally tied, lacking emotion, one wanders,
We two for a time watching the Starry River.

Daily Painting

Florence McGillivray
AFTERGLOW (1914)

Playing

Franz Xaver Dussek
FOUR SYMPHONIES

Aapo Hakkinen
Helsinki Baroque Orchestra

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

God was a lazy programmer.

Daily Painting

Christopher R. W. Nevinson
ANY WINTERY AFTERNOON IN ENGLAND (1930)

Playing

Ben Webster & Gerry Mulligan
GERRY MULLIGAN MEETS BEN WEBSTER

WILLIAM STAFFORD

"Love the Butcher Bird Lurks Everywhere"

A gather of apricots fruit pickers left

gleam like reasons for light going higher, higher;

I look half as hard as I can to tease

the fruit out of its green.

        (It is time to run lest pity overtake us,

        and calamity pit invents to accompany itself:

        to sigh is a stern act—we are judged by this air.)

Down the steady eye of the charging bear

a gun barrel swerves—intention, then flame;

and willows do tricks to find an exact place in the wind:

resolution steady, bent to be true.

        (While there’s time

        I call to you by all these dubious guides:

        “Forsake all ways except the way we came.”)

Daily Painting

André Masson
ERRANCE I (1959)

Playing

Bryant Myers
LA OSCURIDAD

TED GREENWALD
"Staring Doesn’t Help"

Staring doesn’t help
Nor does running around
Music doesn’t help
Especially songs
Getting together doesn’t help
Nor does staying apart
Seeing someone else doesn’t
Nor does seeing you
Sleeping doesn’t help
Nor does waking
Dreaming doesn’t help
Nor do any facts
Running doesn’t help
Nor does sitting around

Daily Painting

George Morrison
ABSTRACT COMPOSITION (1950)

Playing

Ludwig van Beethoven
STRING QUARTET NO. 11 IN F MINOR, OP. 95
STRING QUARTET NO. 9 IN C MAJOR, OP. 59/3

Borodin String Quartet

JOYCE CAROL OATES

There is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

Daily Painting

Brenda Goodwin
SELF-PORTRAIT 61 (2007)

Playing

Antonin Dvořák
SYMPHONY NO. 2 IN B-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 4

Bernard Haitink
Das Concertgebouw-Orchester, Amsterdam

MARY OLIVER
Upstream

Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight.

Daily Painting

Andrea Kowch
SOIRÉE (2019)

Playing

Kuniko Kuniko
CANTUS

-

Arvo Pärt - FÜR ALINA
Steve Reich - NEW YORK COUNTERPOINT
Arvo Pärt - CANTUS IN MEMORY OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Arvo Pärt - FRATRES
Hywel Davies - PURL GROUND
Arvo Pärt - SPIEGEL IM SPIEGEL

LIU ZONGYUAN
"River Snow"

A thousand mountains, not a bird in sight
Ten thousand paths, not a human track
Alone in a boat, wearing a straw cape and hat, an old man sits
Fishing alone, in the winter snow

Daily Painting

Karel Appel
LITTLE GIRL (1947)

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

Manuel Ponce
COMPLETE PIANO WORKS VOL 1

Álvaro Cendoya

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
A Single Man

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.

Daily Painting

Ismail Fatah
UNTITLED (2000)

Playing

George Butterworth
THE BANKS OF GREEN WILLOW

Grant Llewellyn
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666

He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south.

He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening.

He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary.

Daily Painting

Sidney Nolan
LANDSCAPE WITH A MAN AND A CAMEL (1966)

Playing

Mumford and Sons
WILDER MIND

ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

Daily Painting

Purvis Young
UNTITLED (1988)

Playing

Anuel AA
REAL HASTA LA MUERTE 

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
The Moon and Sixpence

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.

Daily Painting

Richard Diebenkorn
UNTITLED (1949)

Playing

Franz Ignaz Beck
SYMPHONIES, OP. 2

Kevin Mallon
Thirteen Strings Chamber Orchestra

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

Daily Painting

Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson
UNEMARTYR (SAINT THECHLA) (1923) 

Playing

Bad Bunny
X 100PRE

Playing

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber
MISSA BRUXELLENSIS

Jordi Savall

La Capella Reial de Catalunya
Le Concert des Nations

EDNA O'BRIEN

I am far from those I am with, and far from those I have left.

Daily Painting

Oswaldo Guayasamín
TEARS OF BLOOD (1973) 

Playing

Joaquin Rodrigo
ARANJUEZ

Thibaut Garcia

Ben Glassberg
Toulouse Capitol National Orchestra

MARGARET MEAD

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

Daily Painting

Jane Dickson
WOMAN ON THE STAIRS NO. 2 (1984)

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

Pink Floyd
THE WALL

MAYA ANGELOU
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

Daily Painting

Philip Guston
RED BOX (1977)

Playing

Antonio Meneses and Maria João Pires
THE WIGMORE HALL RECITAL

-

Schubert - Sonata in A minor 'Arpeggione', D821

Brahms - Intermezzi (3), Op. 117

Mendelssohn - Song without Words for Cello and Piano in D Major, Op. 109

Brahms - Cello Sonata No. 1 In E minor, Op. 38

JS Bach - Pastoral in F Major, BWV 590

HERMANN HESSE
"Trees"

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Daily Painting

Fred Cecil Jones
CHIMNEY STACKS AND INDING WAYS, WHITBY (1936)

Playing

John Coltrane
OFFERING - LIVE AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

TOMICA BAJSIĆ
"When You Hit Yourself with an Axe While Chopping Wood"

You don’t think about poetry then
or about great deeds
or about politics
you don’t defy God.
you are as small as a pea
as you wait for the pain
to go away.

When you’re riddled with shrapnel
from a mortar grenade
you don’t think about the effect
you have on women
or about the national anthem.
you crawl under a rock
as you wait for the pain
to go away.

When the prison door
bangs shut behind your back—
that’s when you think about freedom.

Translated from the Croatian by Nina Bajsić

Daily Painting

Kuno Veeber
POTATO HARVEST (1918)

Playing

Pink Floyd
ATOM HEART MOTHER

MARY OLIVER

"Why I Wake Early"

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

and spread it over the fields 

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even,

the miserable and the crotchety—

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light— 

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

Daily Painting

Vlastimil Beneš
VRŠOVICE GARDENS IN WINTER (1960)

Playing

Amira Medunjanín and Merima Ključo
ZUMRA

J.R.R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring

It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.

Daily Painting

Thomas Fransioli
RAIN IN CHARLESTON (1951)

WILLIAM STAFFORD
"A Key to an Old Farmhouse"

One of the raindrops going by
might find that key we lost and wash
it away where it fell from the picnic table
or bounced when we ran. One of the birds
might carry that key to its nest, metal
in the sun, glittering from its deep light
and waiting there, slow. The family then -
swallowed by time - are gone, but that key we lost
shines on, a silver monument that nobody
knows, fumbled by rain, cherished
forever by birds wherever it goes.

Daily Painting

Nicole Eisenman
SELFIE (2014)

Playing

Various Artists
MOJO Presents WHITE WINTER HYMNAL
15 Songs For Cold Days and Long Nights

Fleet Foxes, The Waterboys, The Chill, Thea Gilmore, Galaxie 500, Vashti Bunyan, Rachel Unthank & The Winterset, The Watersons, PG Six, Blind Willie McTell, Albion Christmas Band, Laura Cannell, Joanna Newsom, Sam Lee, Elizabeth Fraser, Plinth