In the News – Page 23

Perfect Moments: “I Shot ’im, Paw.”

September 19, 2011 by John 15 Comments

The house in which The Missus and I live now is over twenty years old, as is our immediate neighborhood. But the area in general has only recently started to get built up. Real honest-to-gods wildlife, not yet squeezed out by housing and new roads, can still be spotted here and there — foxes, a rare deer, hawks and eagles, armadillos. We’ve heard reports of coyotes (although we haven’t seen any in the ten years we’ve been here), and a snake may show up from time to time.

(One particularly heavy rainstorm drove some rattlesnakes up to our elevation. But that was very, very unusual.)

Before moving here, though, The Missus and I lived over on the other (older) side of town. A wooded area abutted our back yard, true, but it was enclosed by shopping centers, apartment complexes, and the like. We had a good number of feral cats, which we caught, neutered, and re-released. But otherwise (and not counting everyday North Florida fauna like opossums, little lizards and frogs), nada.

Except the raccoons.

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Clear

September 11, 2011 by John 10 Comments

Not unusually for a Sunday, I took The Pooch for a longish walk this morning. The temperature had broken this week, and it was only in the high 70s. A couple of neighbors took advantage of the opportunity to fire up lawnmower and chainsaw, but few people otherwise had yet ventured out.

It was such a nice walk.

Still, I couldn’t help wishing the sky were a little less immaculate, less perfect. More strangely, I found myself wishing that even a single airplane would cross it. I didn’t want to remember that other clear blue morning sky. I didn’t want to forget the airplanes.

____________________

Update: The day has also brought my politically more outspoken friend FLJerseyBoy out of whatever hole he’s been hiding in for three-plus years. He’s suddenly popped up again at A Dog Starv’d, with a different take on it.

Something in the Air

September 9, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: at left, all the Earth’s water collected into a single ball, about 865 miles in diameter; at right, all the Earth’s atmosphere in a single ball, about 1240 miles in diameter, assuming sea-level pressure. (source)]

From whiskey river:

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

(Edward Abbey [source])

…and:

All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy: So I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze.

(Mumon Ekai [source])

…and:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

(Yamamoto Tsunetomo [source])

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Midweek Music Break: “Bad Moon Rising”

August 31, 2011 by John 6 Comments

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic gets most of its airtime around Halloween, maybe for obvious reasons: its association with John Landis’s great 1981 horror film An American Werewolf in London. Interestingly, in the film the song doesn’t get played in its entirety. Instead, the soundtrack plays just a few lines from the opening — almost as a joke — leading into the onscreen (and non-CGI) transformation of actor David Naughton from cute and charming lad to homicidal creature of the night.

“Bad Moon Rising” is also a favorite of disaster groupies, maybe for even more obvious — literal — reasons. Natural calamities have figured prominently in the news of late, and that business about rivers overflowing, earthquakes and lightning, well, it’s almost too perfect.

(If you’ve not been following the extinction-level-disaster/government-coverup-conspiracy chatter about the comet and/or brown and/or “dark” star Elenin, well, oh dear. You may have missed your last chance to survive. I recently saw a lengthy YouTube video, uploaded a few months ago, with a timeline of coming events. The fellow who made it claims that August 1 was the cutoff date — the last practical day to head for a cavern in the Ozarks to join with other believers prepared to live underground for at least a year. Even if you left on time, though, if you don’t arrive with an RV or U-Haul full of food, tough. They have no room for hungry, screaming, latecoming leeches.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Bad Moon Rising. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:20 long.]

[audio:badmoonrising_ccr.mp3|titles=’Bad Moon Rising’|artists=Creedence Clearwater Revival]

Lyrics:

Bad Moon Rising
(Creedence Clearwater Revival)

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning.
I see bad times today.

[chorus:]

Don’t go around tonight,
Well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers over flowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

[chorus]

All right!

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

[chorus]

[repeat chorus]

And for those who haven’t seen American Werewolf in London, here’s the five-minute lead-in to the transformation scene, right up to the point where Landis (having had his little laugh) abruptly cuts off the song:

The transformation scene itself took a little over two minutes, and you can find several clips of that here and there around the Web. (This one superimposes the full song over the scene, which in fact simply included sound effects and the character’s, um, vocalizations.)

Long, Languorous Tomorrows

August 26, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: “August Morning,” by Tracy, from “August in Ohio” at the Seasons Flow blog]

[Below, click Play button to begin Summertime (Charlie Parker). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:46 long.]

[audio:summertime_charlieparker.mp3|titles=’Summertime’|artists=Charlie Parker]

From whiskey river:

Late August

Let me enjoy
this late-summer day of my heart
while the leaves are still green
and I won’t look so close
as to see that first tint
of pale yellow slowly creep in.
I will cease endless running
and then look to the sky
and ask the sun to embrace me
and then hope she won’t tell
of tomorrows less long than today
Let me spend just this time
in the slow-cooling glow
of the warm afternoon light
and I’d think
I will still have the strength
for just one more
last fling of my heart

(Jon Bohrn [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Directions

You know the brick path in back of the house,
the one you see from the kitchen window,
the one that bends around the far end of the garden
where all the yellow primroses are?
And you know how if you leave the path
and walk up into the woods you come
to a heap of rocks, probably pushed
down during the horrors of the Ice Age,
and a grove of tall hemlocks, dark green now
against the light-brown fallen leaves?
And farther on, you know
the small footbridge with the broken railing
and if you go beyond that you arrive
at the bottom of that sheep’s head hill?
Well, if you start climbing, and you
might have to grab hold of a sapling
when the going gets steep,
you will eventually come to a long stone
ridge with a border of pine trees
which is as high as you can go
and a good enough place to stop.

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Still, let me know before you set out.
Come knock on my door
and I will walk with you as far as the garden
with one hand on your shoulder.
I will even watch after you and not turn back
to the house until you disappear
into the crowd of maple and ash,
heading up toward the hill,
piercing the ground with your stick

(Billy Collins [source])

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When Cats and Boxes Converge…

August 21, 2011 by John 9 Comments

…the boxes lose.

[hat tip: Eschaton]

_____________________

P.S. A follow-up video is called “The box which Maru can’t enter.” Oh, yes, Maru can.

Make Your World

August 19, 2011 by John 9 Comments

[Above: an image designed to induce binocular rivalry: an attempt by one’s senses to forge a single thing from two conflicting images. See here for instructions on how to use.]

From whiskey river:

When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us — and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great respect for things! One’s self — for other people — is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps — these things are all expressive.

(Henry James [source])

…and:

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

(Terence McKenna [source])

…and:

Kneeling

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great rôle. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

(R. S. Thomas [source])

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What’s in a Song: Body and Soul (1)

August 13, 2011 by John 3 Comments

It starts in silence. By the end, the singer has thrown him- or herself melodramatically, almost operatically on the mercy of a lost love. It’s drenched in self-pity, but was written for and first performed by a woman once dubbed “Hollywood’s first maneater.” One of its most famous covers includes no vocal at all, and barely follows the tune. And it’s gone on to become, arguably, the single most-recorded pop standard in history.

Finding something to say about “Body and Soul” isn’t hard. What’s hard is shutting off the tap.

—-

John W. “Johnny” Green was a Harvard economics graduate working on Wall Street at the cusp of the Great Depression — not a great place to be building a career at that supremely wrong moment of history. Luckily, he didn’t care much about economics; his real interest was in writing music. Indeed, in 1928, at age 19, he’d already co-written (with Gus Kahn and Carmen Lombardo) a hit Broadway song, “Coquette.” With his father-in-law’s encouragement, Green started to establish working relationships with other musicians in New York.

And right about then, in 1929, British actress Gertrude Lawrence sashayed into his life.

Alas, I couldn’t think of a way to crowbar the story into this post. But while researching it, I came across a fascinating 2009 article at the Mail (UK) Online site, looking back at Lawrence’s life and career. The image presented in the first few paragraphs alone may be burned into my brain for years.

—-

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Making an Illuminated Manuscript

July 28, 2011 by John 5 Comments

In the category of “Things Our Ancestors Did to Humble Us,” this mini-documentary [UPDATE: a little over six minutes long] from the J. Paul Getty Museum:

(If you go to the page at the ArtBabble site where I found this, you might also like some of the “related videos” in the right sidebar there.)

Knowing What You’re Looking At

July 22, 2011 by John 9 Comments

[Image: graffiti artist Bansky visited a subway archway in central London, adding a caption to a wall which just happens to fall within the view of a surveillance camera.]

From whiskey river:

All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic skeptic, has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.

(Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism [source])

…and:

You’re like a witness. You’re the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you’re in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I’m a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you’re in the room but you’re not. You’re looking at the room, you’re not in the room.

(Julio Cortázar [source])

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