🎧 🎵 The Band (1969) by The Band: If rock music had emerged in the 19th century instead of the 20th. Rootsy dad-rock of the first order, always loose yet somehow always tight, featuring three different lead vocalists—always a plus in my book—as part of a rock quintet who is also on the record playing fiddle, mandolin, accordion, trombone, tuba, various saxophones, melodica, and slide trumpet.
(a phone call while Carla, Éa, and Scott are away for the weekend soccer tournament):
Carla: Hi, Honey! What’s up?
Sullivan, 16: Hi, Mom. Where’s the alcohol?
a very effective hedgerow ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Judy Chicago
American, b. 1939
Three Faces of Man, 1985, from PowerPlay
Sprayed acrylic and oil on linen
54 × 108 inches
I saw this large set of three paintings today on my first visit, along with Aaron and Carla, to the new Palmer Museum of Art. It isn’t the first time I’d seen the work, but it is the first time the work arrested me. The artist apparently means it as a comment on the limited yet borderline violent range of emotions she sees 20th-century men as constrained to display. And while I applaud her comment (and doubly applaud her application of it to the Kavanaugh hearings), that’s not how I took it. Instead, it halted me as depicting the almost sublime power of very expressive emotion. I sympathized with its intensity. While I’m not known for big emotions, I am often, as my daughter has put it, “too facey;” that is, I am known for having an intensely expressive face. And I even feel like I hold back! I often wish I could be more freely intense in my facial and verbal expression without intimidating others.
Maybe that makes me the very man upon which Chicago is commenting.
Less weightily, I also found the work to be cause for celebration because, me being a sometime...
// read full article →🎧 🎵 slutte og byne (2020) by Valkyrien Allstars: Generously arranged Norwegian prog folk rock fronted by a winsomely simple-toned, frequently double-tracked alto named Tuva. Winner of a Norwegian Grammy Award in 2020. My favorite musical find during our family time in Norway. Also my most recent CD acquisition.
Let me look at my tomorrow. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
My head is full of things I do not care bout
Or should not care about, anyway
But the cost of living here
……………eer
………that’s what they say.
“Quietist!” they cry.
“Rebel!” I reply.
It’s a war for the mind, that’s for sure. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
🎧 🎵 The Score (1996) by Fugees: The beats, the rhymes, the flow, and her singing (sometimes in harmony with herself). A hip-hop feast.
An elaborated 1 John 2:15-16 with some eye toward Ecclesiastes 11:9: Have desires of the flesh, but do not love those desires. Have desires of the eyes, but do not love those desires. Possess things, but do not love the pride of possession or estate.
Have desires of the flesh. Have desires of the eyes. Possess things. But do so lightly. Instead of loving them, love YHWH your god, and love your neighbor as yourself. 🧘♂️
Note to self: Discretize everything. It will maximize concentration, keep you from hurrying, and keep you from losing sight of God. 🧘♂️
All my good jeans are inherited.
— Éa
The pitch clock has worked: Baseball has become enjoyable to watch! ⚾️
🎧 🎵 Ram (1971) by Paul and Linda McCartney.
An oddball, trifling McCartney album I enjoy front to back. (One of only two.) Proof that music need not be deep to be good. The most Beatlesy of all their solo albums, full of fun melodies, interesting chord progressions, charmingly goofy singing, and production that’s generous without ever falling into schmaltz. It’s fun to picture Paul enjoying cutting records with his wife! (And I’ll listen to Linda over Yoko any day.) The album is not the headwaters of indie pop, as has been claimed; that’s the Beach Boys’ two 1967 albums. But it is a very good early exemplar. The only criticism I’ll brook is that it may come across at times a tinch too self-consciously mannered.
As I age, I find I’m less of a Lennon guy and more of a McCartney guy. Is that progress? Is that common?
🎨 I’m dithering writing to myself about Paul McCartney while wife is making this:
“Only rich people can live like Wendell Berry,” said my friend Josh last night, helping me articulate a misgiving I have about what The Farmer advocates. I don’t think it’s entirely true, but I do think it’s an examining thought worth bringing when you read Berry. 📖
🎧 🎵 I’m glad I kept my CD copy of Superchic[k]’s Karaoke Superstars. Cute, catchy, honest, lightly theistic punk-pop whose lead vocalist was clearly in her early twenties when she wrote it but was nevertheless equipped with the kind of wisdom that twenty-somethings need.
In conversation with a friend last night, we developed a fourfold list of precepts that, if held together (in partial tension, for sure), will lead to a happy life:
- Give thanks in all circumstances.
- Do what you’re doing. Don’t worry about the rest.
- Follow the impulses of your eyes and the desires of your heart, yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things.
- It’s a fact that you will not accomplish and experience all the things you want to before you die.
The ideal birthday communication is neither the tired greeting card not the awkward phone call. The first is unremarkable; the second requires too much of the recipient. Instead, it’s a heartfelt voice message sent via text. 🎉
Circumvent Google’s default search results page—including its new, unwelcome AI results—and return to a simple list of blue links. 💻
Saying “thank you for your patience” before the speaker knows his listener will give it is presumptuous. Better to say “I’m sorry.”
I stand with carbohydrates. 🍞
🎧 🎵 I happened across a CD copy of local bluegrass stalwarts Tussey Mountain Moonshiners’ 2016 album SHINE last year at the AAUW used book sale. It cost me a dollar. It’s (more than) good enough to make me feel as if I have stolen from them.
Hypothetical future album title: Self-Preservation for the Sake of Others
What is microblogging for?
Is style a virtue? If so, how?