MONEY HONEY ~

_____________________________________


Mitt Romney and his fellow suits at Bain Capital.

It isn't, but that could be John Edwards on the lower right.

Let's keep up our good work criticizing President Barack Obama ~
without him the future sure looks bright.





further:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/futures-executive-confesses-to-stealing-millions-from-customers/?hp



Imagine Romney even having a prayer in a country going destitute by the likes of this critter. What in the world are Americans thinking?!

EARTH~

EXAMINATION



tick of

the clock



measuring

you




[ BA ]

COOK ~
( & remembering Marion Cunningham )

the young M.F.K. Fisher

Honest Is Good


Many people think that gourmets, true connoisseurs of eating and drinking, must possess great wealth I do not believe this. The wealthy are gourmets, if so, inspite of their riches. It is much easier to eat honestly if one is poor and eats food prepared by cooks who must, at least occasionally, use their wits and their skills rather than the truffles and rare condiments of princely kitchens.


I think now of some of the best meals in my life, and almost without exception they have been so because of the superlative honesty of “poor fare,” rather than sophistication. I admire and often even like what is now called the Classical Cuisine ... the intricate sauces of great chefs, and the complexities of their sweets and their pastries. But for strength, both of the body and of the spirit, I turn without hesitation to the simplest cooks ....


I remember the best sauce I ever ate.


It was not at Foyot’s, in the old days in Paris. It was in a cabin with tarpaper walls on the rainswept hillsides in Southern California. The air was heavy with the scent of wet sage from outside and the fumes of a cheap kerosene stove within. Three or four children piped for more, more, from the big bowl of steaming gravy in the center of the heavy old round table crowded between the family’s cots. We ate it from soup plates, the kind you used to get free with labels from cereal packages. It was made from a couple of cottontails, and a few pulls of fresh herbs from the underbrush, and spring water and some “Red Ink” from the bottom of Uncle Johnie’s birthday jug ... and a great deal of love. It was all we had, with cold flapjacks left from breakfast to scoop it up. It was good, and I know that I was indeed fortunate to have driven up the hill that night in the rain and to have friends who would share with me.


I remember the best stew I ever ate, too.


It was not a bouillabaisse at Isnard’s in Marseille. It was made, further south on the Mediterranean at Cassis, by a very old small woman, for a great lusty batch of relatives and other people she loved. Little grandnephews dove for equally young octopi and delicate sea eggs, and old sons sent their rowboats silently up the dark calanques for rockfish lurking among the sunken German U-boat from the First War, and grizzling cousins brought in from the deep sea a fine catch of rays and other curious scaly monsters. Little girls and their mothers and great-aunts went up into the bone-dry hills for aromatic leaves and blossoms, and on the way home picked up a few bottles of Herby wine from the tiny vineyards they worked in the right seasons.


The very old woman cooked and pounded and skinned and ruminated, and at about noon, two days later, we met in her one-room house and spent some twenty more hours, as I remember, eating and eating ... and talking and singing and then eating again, from seemingly bottomless pots of the most delicious stew in my whole life. It had been made with love.


And from a beautiful odorous collection of good breads in my life I still taste, in my memory, the best.


There have been others that smelled better, or looked better, or cut better, but this one, made by a desolately lonesome Spanish-Greek Jewess for me when I was about five, was the best. Perhaps it was the shape. It was baked in pans just like the big ones we use, but tiny, perhaps 1 x 3 inches. And it rose just the way ours did, but tinnily. (Many years later, when I read Memoirs of A Midget and suffered for the difficulties of such a small person’s meals, I wished I could have taken to her, from time to time and wrapped in a doll’s linen napkin, a fresh loaf from my friend’s oven ...).


Yes, that was and still is the best bread It came from the kitchen of a very simple woman, who knew instinctively that she could solace her loneliness by the ritual of honest cooking. It taught me, although I did not understand it then, a prime lesson in survival. I must eat to live; I want to live well; therefore I must eat well. And in these days of spurious and distorted values, the best way to eat is simply, without affectation or adulteration. Given honest flour, pure water, and a good fire, there is really only one more thing needed to make the best bread in the world, fit for the greatest gourmet ever born: and that is honest love.

from Good Cooking — The Complete Cooking Companion, 1950.
Republished in A Stew Or A Story, An Assortment of Short Works by M. F. K. Fisher
Gathered and introduced by Joan Reardon,
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006.

the cook at home in Sonoma Valley
Photograph by Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

& remembering Marion Cunningham:
(1922-2012)

Marion Cunningham, a former California homemaker who overcame agoraphobia later in life to become one of America’s most famous and enthusiastic advocates of home cooking, died on Wednesday morning in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 90. . .

. . ."Mrs. Cunningham — who loved to go to the supermarket and peer into the baskets of startled strangers, whom she would then interview about their cooking skills — made it her life’s work to champion home cooking and preserve the family supper table.

“No one is cooking at home anymore, so we are losing all the wonderful lessons we learn at the dinner table,” she said in an interview in 2002.

“People are living like they are in motels,” she added. “They get fast food and take it home and turn on the TV. Schools and sports groups have soccer practice or what have you during what used to be called the dinner hour. We don’t need more competitive sports. We need to sit facing people with great regularity, so we are making an exchange and we are learning to be civilized.”

Marion Enwright was born on Feb. 11, 1922, in Los Angeles to Joseph Enwright and the former Maryann Spelta. She spent the first half of her adult life raising two children, Mark and Catherine — who survive her — and tending the ranch home she shared with her husband, Robert Cunningham, a medical malpractice lawyer, in Walnut Creek.

For much of that time she struggled with agoraphobia , a fear of open and public places. It was so intense at times that she could barely cross the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. She also developed a drinking problem, and once she stopped, she became known for her love of a good cup of black coffee — sometimes ordered when everyone else was drinking Champagne."

The New York Times 11 July 2012

BANK ROBBERS ~

Investment Banking | Legal/Regulatory July 10, 2012

Rate Scandal Stirs Scramble for Damages

By NATHANIEL POPPER

As unemployment climbed and tax revenue fell, the city of Baltimore laid off employees and cut services in the midst of the financial crisis. Its leaders now say the city’s troubles were aggravated by bankers’ manipulation of a key interest rate linked to hundreds of millions of dollars the city had borrowed.

Baltimore has been leading a battle in Manhattan federal court against the banks that determine the interest rate, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which serves as a benchmark for global borrowing and stands at the center of the latest banking scandal. Now cities, states and municipal agencies nationwide, including Massachusetts, Nassau County on Long Island, and California’s public pension system, are looking at whether they suffered similar losses and are weighing legal action.

Dozens of lawsuits filed by municipalities, pension funds and hedge funds have been consolidated into a few related cases against more than a dozen banks that are involved in setting Libor each day, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Barclays. Last month, Barclays admitted to regulators that it tried to manipulate Libor before and during the financial crisis in 2008, and paid $450 million to settle the charges. It said other banks were doing the same, but none of them have been accused of wrongdoing.

Libor, a measure of how much banks must pay to borrow money from one another in the short term, is set through a daily poll of the banks.

The rate influences what consumers, businesses and investors pay on a wide range of financial contracts, as varied as mortgages and interest rate swaps. Barclays has said it and other banks understated the rate during the financial crisis to make themselves look healthier to the public, rather than to make more money from clients.

As regulators and lawmakers in Washington and Europe assess the depth of the Libor abuse and the failure to address it, economists and analysts are already predicting it could be one of the most expensive scandals to hit Wall Street since the financial crisis.

Governments and other investors may face many hurdles in proving damages. But Darrell Duffie, a professor of finance at Stanford, said he expected that their lawsuits alone could lead to the banks’ paying out tens of billions of dollars, echoing numbers from a recent report by analysts at Nomura Equity Research.

American municipalities have been among the first to claim losses from the supposed rate-rigging, because many of them borrow money through investment vehicles that directly derive their value from Libor. Peter Shapiro, who advises Baltimore and other cities on their use of these investments, said that “about 75 percent of major cities have contracts linked to this.”

If the banks submitted artificially low Libor rates during the financial crisis in 2008, as Barclays has admitted, it would have led cities and states to receive smaller payments from financial contracts they had entered with their banks, Mr. Shapiro said.

“Unambiguously, state and local government agencies lost money because of the manipulation of Libor,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is managing director of the Swap Financial Group and is not involved in any of the lawsuits. “The number is likely to be very, very big.”

The banks have declined to comment on the lawsuits, but their lawyers have asked for the cases to be dismissed in court filings, pointing to the many unusual factors that influenced Libor during the crisis.

The efforts to calculate potential losses are complicated by the fact that Libor is used to determine the cost of thousands of financial products around the globe each day. If Libor was artificially pushed down on a particular day, it would help people involved in some types of contracts and hurt people involved in others.

Securities lawyers say the lawsuits will not be easy to win because the investors will first have to prove that the banks successfully pushed down Libor for an extended period during the crisis, and then will have to demonstrate that it was down on the day when the bank calculated particular payments. In addition, investors may have to prove that the specific bank from which they were receiving their payment was involved in the manipulation. Before it even reaches the point of proving such subtleties, however, the banks could be compelled to settle the cases.

One of the major complaints was filed by several traders and hedge funds that entered into futures contracts that are traded through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and that pay out based on Libor. These contracts were a popular way to protect against spikes in interest rates, but they would not have paid off as expected if Libor had been artificially lowered.

A 2010 study cited in the suit — conducted by professors at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Minnesota — indicated that Libor was significantly lower than it should have been throughout 2008 and was particularly skewed around the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

A separate complaint filed in 2010 by the investment firm Charles Schwab asserts that some of its mutual funds, including popular ones like the Schwab Total Bond Market Fund, lost money on similar investments.

The complaints being voiced by municipalities are mostly related to their use of a popular financial contract known as an interest rate swap. States and cities generally enter into these swaps with specific banks so that they can borrow money in the bond market. They pay bondholders based on a floating interest rate — like an adjustable-rate mortgage — but end up paying their bankers a fixed rate through a swap. If Libor is artificially lowered, the municipality is stuck paying the same fixed rate, but it receives a smaller variable payment from its bank.

Even before the current controversy, some municipal activists have said that banks took advantage of the financial inexperience of municipal officials to sell them billions of dollars of interest rate swaps. Experts in municipal finance say that because of the particular way that cities and states borrow money, they are especially liable to lose out on their swaps if Libor drops.

Mr. Shapiro, who helps cities, states and companies negotiate these contracts, said that if a city had interest rate swaps on bonds worth $1 billion and Libor was artificially pushed down by 0.30 percent, which is what the lawsuits contend, that city would have lost $3 million a year. The lawsuit claims the manipulation occurred over three years. Barclays’ settlement with regulators did not specify how much the banks’ actions may have moved Libor.

In Nassau County, the comptroller, George Maragos, said in a statement that according to his own calculations, Libor manipulation may have cost the county $13 million on swaps related to $600 million of outstanding bonds.

A Massachusetts state official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of potential future legal actions, said the state was calculating its potential losses.

“We are deeply concerned and we are carefully analyzing all of our options,” the official said.

Anne Simpson, a portfolio manager at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System — the nation’s largest pension fund — said that the fund’s officials “are sifting through the impact, but there certainly is an impact.”

In Baltimore, the city had Libor-based interest rate swaps on about $550 million of bonds, according to the city’s financial report from 2008, the central year discussed in the lawsuit. The city’s lawyers have declined to specify what they think Baltimore’s losses were.

The city solicitor, George Nilson, said that the rate manipulation claims meant that the city lost out on money when it needed it the most.

“The injury we suffered during the time we suffered it hurt more because we were challenged budgetarily,” Mr. Nilson said. “Every dollar we lost due to illegal conduct was a dollar we couldn’t pay to keep open recreation centers or to pay police officers.”

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/libor-rate-rigging-scandal-sets-off-legal-fights-for-restitution/?hp

nytimes

CELAN ~

Paul Celan

"If there is a country named Celania — as Julia Kristeva once proposed — its holy texts are filled with doubt, and they overcome this doubt almost successfully, with words of wrenching, uncompromised beauty. . .The book in your hands is not intended to become one of those heavy scholarly tomes that serve as a "proof" of one's position in the literary/academic hierarchy. Rather, this is a collection of various works, directed at, or inspired by, the words of Paul Celan. What we wanted to make was a living anthology, in which authors observe the poet's work, read it deeply, penetrate and discuss it. but also play with it, remake it, and attempt to fit it into their own worldviews.

A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to a thousand listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his privacy this poet creates a language in which he is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time."

Ilya Kaminsky, from the Introduction

______________________________

THERE WAS EARTH INSIDE THEM

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.



They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.



They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.



There came a stillness then, came also storm,
all of the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and it, the worm, digs too,
and the singing there says: They dig.



O one, O none, O no one, O you:
Where did it go, then, making for nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you,
and the ring on our finger awakens.

translated from the German by John Felstiner

Homage to Paul Celan
edited by Ilya Kaminsky & G.C. Waldrep
Marick Press, 2011
www.marickpress.com

"It has an inexorable logic about it. A poetry that seems — now that we have it — had to be. A six-pointed star etched into our minds — a splintered star.

How could it not "stand out"?"

~ Cid Corman

MUSIC TOUR ~
( mv & ee )

MV & EE

Free Range Festival ~ Belfast, Maine
April 29, 2012
w/ Matt L'animaux on bass, Carson Arnold on drums
Erika Elder & Matt Valentine

"MV & EE is a Vermont-based group of musicians focused around Matt "MV" Valentine and his partner Erika "EE" Elder. Matt Valentine was in the neo-psychedelic group, The Tower Recordings and has also released music under his own name and the pseudonym, Matthew Dell. While the duo recorded under many different names, including MV & EE Medicine Show and The Bummer Road, most of the records center around both artists and feature a rotating cast of additional musicians. Their style is self-described as "lunar ragas", with many of the lyrics dealing with celestial imagery. They combine Indian raga style composition with Appalachian folk and post-psychedelic electrical experimentalism. "



Our son Carson is about to hit the road again with MV & EE. If they are within a stone's throw of you, maybe you can catch one of their shows

The first show is in Albany, NY
TONIGHT !

(click on image to enlarge for concert dates)




Albums
_____________________

Tonight! One Night Only! MV & EE In Heaven 2001 (Child of Microtones)
Ragantula 2002 (Child of Microtones)
Daybreak Of Cocola & The Plumage Overtones Of Black Patti 2003 (Child of Microtones)
Fantastic String Music 2003 (Child of Microtones)
Moon Jook 2004 (Child of Microtones)
Cosmic Dust & The Electrobeam Hermit Thrush 2004 (Child of Microtones)
Lunar Blues 2004 (Child of Microtones)
The Uranian Ray 2004 (Child of Microtones/Spirit Of Orr)
Ragas & Blues 2004 (IDEA)
Livestock Moon Forms: Rural Ragas Volume One 2005 (Child of Microtones)
The Light Of Cocola Octo Escapes The Golden Dawn Of Blues: Rural Ragas Volume Two 2005 (Child of Microtones)
The Suncatcher Blossoms A Nova And Is So Grateful It Is No Longer Willing To Dark The Sun: Rural Ragas Volume Three 2005 (Child of Microtones)
Zone of Domes 2005 (Child of Microtones)
We Offer You Guru 2005 (Child of Microtones)
Suncatcher Mountain 2006 (Child of Microtones)
Mother of Thousands 2006 (Time-Lag Records)
The Cowboy's Road 2006 (Child of Microtones)
Play Ellas McDaniel's "Who Do You Love" 2006 (Three Lobed Recordings)
Rural Dimensions 2006 (Child of Microtones)
Green Blues 2007 (Ecstatic Peace)
Goodbye Moonface 2007 (Wabana Records)
Mars Delta 2007 (Child of Microtones)
Eye in the Pines 2007 (Child of Microtones)
Ragas of the Culvert: The Ground Ain't Dirty 2007 (Child of Microtones)
Gettin' Gone 2007 (Ecstatic Peace!)
Foxgod in Flight 2008 (Child Of Microtones)
Pray For Less w/ Willie Lane 2008 (Blackest Rainbow)
Total Loss Songs 2008 (Three Lobed Recordings)
MV & EE Meet Snake's Pass & Other Human Conditions 2008 (Singing Knives)
Drone Trailer 2009 (Dicristina Stair)
Barn Nova 2009 (Ecstatic Peace!)
Space Homestead 2012 (Woodist)


http://www.mvandee.blogspot.com/

BACK ROAD CHALKIE ~

Once In Vermont film
© bob arnold

HAND WAVE ~

Ah!


Just went out with Sweetheart, shade taking over and an elegant coolness starting for evening (still roasting in the sun) and put a new chalkboard quote up.


When I got done and was walking away, a young fellow slowed down in his silver pickup truck (a kid in the back bed ), shirtless, cap, wrap around shades, stopped and read the board:


"My formula for success is rise early,
work late,
and strike oil"

~ J Paul Getty.


Guy says, "We just went down to go swimming and were so disappointed nothing was on the board. So happy to see something now on."


I held up and showed my thick piece of chalk.


The guy smiles.
"Have a Great Day!"
Big wave goodbye.


Old America just paid old America a visit
all's well, Bob




1st as a letter to JD
photo : "Obi-Wan Kenobi" (Alec Guinness)

EARTH ~

Liu Xiaobo


___________________________

The most painful thing about translating this collection was not being able to consult with Liu Xiaobo or Liu Xia — the former serving hos eleven-year prison sentence, the latter under strict house arrest. It was an unnerving, unsettling experience to think of Liu Xiaobo's isolation while fiddling with his ruptured lines from the tomb. My study is a room with open doors and windows, my country a democracy of drone planes killing Pakistani and Afghani villagers, a democracy of more prisoners than any other nation, of privatized prisons, people directly used for private and public profit. And there the walls of Angel Island, there Guantanamo. China, meanwhile, holds around a trillion dollars in US bonds. Or elsewhere consider the artist Owen Maseko who was recently arrested in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, for organizing an art exhibition around the memory of the Gukurahundi Massacre. Or the circle of Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring. Where does the code of signals lead to and through? Toward what reckonings and reconciliations? There is no ground here for self-righteousness to root. The only conversation I could have with Liu was through his poems, through the verb of translation, thinking of what I thought he might say to a certain translation choice along the way.


Jeffrey Yang
from translator's afterword
June 2011


_____________________________________________

Experiencing Death

Qincheng Prison, June 1990
First anniversary offering for 6/4



1


Monument waves of weeping
marble grain fused with blood-stained veins
Belief and youth beaten beneath
a tank's rust-chained treads
Ancient story of the East
leaks out new hope unexpectedly



The glorious crowds have little by little disappeared
like a river that slowly, steadily dries away
landscape on both shores transformed to stone
Every throat has been strangled by fear, every
trembling has traced the dissipated niter smoke
Only the executioner's steel
helmet glints, luminous glints




2



I cannot recognize the flag anymore
The flag like an unknowing child
who's flung upon Mother's corpse
returns home weeping
I cannot tell day from night anymore
Time has been petrified by gunshots
like a paralytic without memory
Gun's muzzle presses into my back
I've lost my passport and identity card



Into the bayonet-inflamed dawn
that once familiar world
cannot find a handful of dirt
to bury itself in



Naked red heart
collides with iron and steel
Earth without water without greenness
ravaged by sunlight






3



They wait and wait
wait for time to invent an exquisite lie
wait for the transformation of the bestial hour
Indeed, wait until
fingers transform to sharpened claws
eyes transform to a gun's mouth
feet transform to chained treads
air transforms to a command
It arrives
at last it arrives
the five-thousand-year awaited command



Open fire—kill people
kill people—open fire
Peaceful petition, hands unarmed
as old man's cane, a child's torn jacket
The executioner will never be swayed
Eyes burnt to red
Gun-barrels shot to red
Hands dyed red
A bullet
A mud-thick secret spills out
A crime
A kind of heroic fast



How relaxing
death's arrival
How easy
bestial desires are satisfied
Young soldiers
recently clothed in uniform
still haven't felt
the intoxication of a girl's kiss
but now in an instant
experience the bloodthirsty pleasure
of murder, their youth's beginnings



They who
cannot see the blood-soaked dress
cannot hear the struggle's scream
through steel helmets cannot perceive life's fragility
They aren't aware
of the fatuous old man
transforming the ancient capital
into another zone of Auschwitz



Brutality, inquiry rise up from the earth
like the splendor of a pyramid
while life crumbles into the abyss
where even the faintest echo cannot be heard
The massacre has engraved a nation's tradition
years, months as remote as an abandoned language
that enacts a final farewell






4



I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
a flood with joy



Faraway places
I've exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ's birth
I cannot face the blinding vision of the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I've drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring's
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers



Deep in the night, empty road
I'm biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I'm handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere



A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I'm still alive
On Central Television News
my name's changed to "arrested black-hand"
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I'm listed up high by the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I've experienced death
so that "black hand" becomes a hero's medal of honor



Even if I know
death's a mysterious unknown
being alive, there's no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I'm still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares



Beside a lie
I own nothing


_______________________


from JUNE FOURTH ELEGIES
by Liu Xiaobo
translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang
(Graywolf Press 2012)

Chinese poet, literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule in China — Liu Xiaobo (b. December 28 1955) is currently incarcerated as a political prisoner in China.

He has served from 2003 to 2007 as President of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is almost entirely funded by the US Congress. On 8 December 2008, Liu was detained because of his participation with the Charter 08 manifesto. He was formally arrested on 23 June 2009 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power." He was tried on the same charges on 23 December 2009, and sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment and two years' deprivation of political rights on 25 December 2009.

While in his fourth prison term, Liu was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." He is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China. Liu is the third person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention, after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky (1935) and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). Liu is also the second person (the first being Ossietzky) to be denied the right to have a representative collect the Nobel prize for him.

(wikipedia & other)

ARTIST ~

please click onto image to enlarge

Alex Katz
Naked Beauty

DERROLL ADAMS ~

Donovan & Derroll Adams



Derroll Adams was a folk musician born in Portland, Oregon November 27, 1925 and died in Antwerp, Belgium 74 years later. He is best known for his husky style and voice, banjo playing, and teaming in his early years with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and later taking Donovan under his wing. Some say the American traditional music heard in early Donovan recordings is a result of Derroll Adams.

Have a look again at Pennebaker's documentary film of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour in the UK, Don't Look Back (1967), where Derroll Adams also shows up.

Here Donovan returns a favor, singing one of Adams' songs — a beauty, and do listen to the lyrics — with that Donovan gypsy quality for his American troubadour friend.

The Mountain

(Derroll Adams - Donovan Music Ltd. London)

It was up some laughing river
Where I'd gone to spend the day
I had such fantastic visions
I could hardly stand to stay
And I stood up within myself
And suddenly felt free
And I stood above the burdens
That puzzle you and me

I became awareness
That was shared with all around
With the trees the sky the flowers
And the wind the sun the ground
I heard the birds were singing
And I found them same as me
And I understood our sorrows
And why they should not be
I saw this plane of living
It was nothing more than faith
A skin that covered glory
Far beyond our love or hate
A living crystal fairy land
Where loving is our grace
A pyromanic garden
That knows no time or space

I saw what we've been doing to it
Saw it as insane
Still a-marching like good Christians
With our wars the sword the flame
To crash down all those infidels
To defend what should be shame
And again I shared our sorrows
Knew we all must bear the blame

I see it all as part of us
To know and share alike
With a universal willingness
To know and do what's right
To understand our brotherness
And stop this awful race
Let our children run and grow in peace
Know their lives shall not be waste
First there is a mountain
Then it seems the mountain's gone
But then if you take another look
Why - it's been there all along
We can be just like a river
As it laughs along it's way
Or stand beneath the shadows
That take the sun away

DAY OFF ~

ONE MORE RIDE! ~
( Holiday )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_%28roller_coaster%29

MORE TRAIN ~
( prone )

I wouldn't

EARTH ~
( Full Moon )

CROSS COUNTRY



In all our windows

It’s the moon

On the train





[ BA ]







see: Go West
(Coyote Books ) or
American Train Letters
by Bob Arnold
(Coyote Books / University of New York at Buffalo)

BOB'S MURAL ~

Think of yourself on the back of a bird — a barn swallow — viewing Bob Arnold's double wall mural from his tool room in Vermont.

The mural was painted on the off hours while rebuilding a room on the other side of these two walls.

once in vermont films

art & film ©bob arnold

EARTH ~

please click onto image to enlarge

Looking for Bruce Conner
by Kevin Hatch
MIT Press

LOVE ROLLERCOASTER ~

Summer, Saturday night — here's summer Saturday night in case you haven't felt it yet via Big Joe Turner. He was wide in girth and sang across the chasms. Took you into Sunday morning; took you to the Fourth of July. He'll bring it up in this song.

Who doesn't like a rollercoaster, just to look at! You can stay on the ground if you want to. Who doesn't like the Fourth of July? Fireworks?! You can still hide away on the Fourth of July.

Revere Beach rollercoaster & boardwalk, 1914

For American history sake, Henry David Thoreau moved to his habitat Walden Pond on the Fourth of July 1845. It was a small, self-built and well-built hut on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The hut was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres that Emerson had bought,1.5 miles from his family home. Think of that when crowded with heralders, noise, traffic, shoppers, fireworks, jams, bonanza wheeling & dealing. One of the great experiments in American history, so long ago, and today if you make a visit to the pond it doesn't look any older than you.


Play the song a few times. It's a rollercoaster.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
"Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"
Walden





early 20th c. photograph of Thoreau's Walden site with stone cairn
(there to this day, enlarged, a stone at a time)



Henry David Thoreau's last sentence, while dying
"Now comes good sailing"

BIRTHDAY BOY ~





Today is Cid Corman's birthday. If you don't know who Cid Corman is, Google his name and go and have some fun exploring. I could pinpoint to our own website of Cid and a ton of his books we have available by Cid but you'll come across all that if you go searching. It's sometimes fun to search, especially on a summer day. Or evening.


We were painting the big red farmhouse today and as I started to climb the 30 foot aluminum ladder with swinging paint bucket in my right hand, Sweetheart said from her step-ladder below, matter of factually, "Today's Cid's birthday."


It was said with such common decency, like, "Look at those morning glories." No pomp and ceremony. Like it will be important and will be with us all through the painting day, and so it was.


And so I loved two people even more.

drawing of Cid Corman © bob arnold
Calligraphy by Shizumi Corman
Cid Corman
(b. 29 June 1924)

EARTH ~

The Long Way Home [Shanachie, 1994]

Dama is a classic folkie, a cosmopolitan leftist credited with inventing Malagasy nueva cancion, an elected legislator as renowned in Madagascar as Victor Jara was in Chile. D'Gary is a classic find, a prodigy-protégé from cattle country where the main road is an 11-hour walk away. Though their rainbow rhythms are formally unique and patently pleasurable, not even producer Henry Kaiser claims to apprehend them fully. The hook is D'Gary's distinctively Malagasy way with his recently acquired guitar, and even more, since that wasn't enough to put his solo album over, Dama's calm, good-humored, deeply assured vocal presence--a politician's gift from a place and time where oratory is still entertainment. Despite excellent notes, the satisfactions remain fairly general for the English speaker. But Kaiser and friends' understated filigrees remind me that said satisfactions far exceed those of similar projects--Ry Cooder's Ali Farka Toure soundtrack, say. B+
~ ROBERT CHRISTGAU