Which is better, ice cream or water?

Both are best consumed cold. Both were invented in ancient Egypt. Both are contenders for the Democratic nomination. But there the similarities end.

BM on the marbles

To see how pathetic and tortured the British Museum's reasons for hanging onto the Parthenon marbles are, please click on the title of this entry. "Context"?

Harry

I have one word to describe Harry Nilsson: whimsical.

Travel to Alsace

In one month's time I shall be drinking the greatest wines of Alsace. I won't have much time, so I'll drink them quickly. And then I'll ask an Alsatian cook to make me spätzle, which I'll consume less hurriedly.

My body

Endangered humans

I was listening to a BBC4 interview with Julie Christie. Christie is extraordinary. And so I learned about this short documentary that she'd narrated.

The years (preliminary)

1669: Sonata representativa (H. I. Biber)
1722: Das wohltemperierte Clavier (J. S. Bach)
1762: Orfeo ed Euridice (C. W. Gluck)
1783: Grosse Messe in C Minor (W. A. Mozart)
1791: Die Zauberflöte (W. A. Mozart)
1827: Il Pirata (V. Bellini)
1875: Carmen (G. Bizet)
1913: Le sacre du printemps (I. Stravinsky)
1927: Potato Head Blues (Louis Armstrong)
1941: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (O. Messiaen)
1957: Agon (I. Stravinsky)
1959: So What (M. Davis, B. Evans, C. Adderley, P. Chambers, J. Cobb, J. Coltrane)
1961: All of You (B. Evans Trio)
1963: Talkin' World War III Blues (B. Dylan)
1966: Wild Thing (The Troggs)
1968: In a Station (The Band)
1969: Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones)
1971: The Wind (Cat Stevens)
1975: The Köln Concert (K. Jarrett)
1977: Watching the Detectives (E. Costello)
1978: White Man in Hammersmith Palais (The Clash)
1979: I Zimbra (Talking Heads)
1981: Themes for Great Cities (Simple Minds)
1993: Past the Mission (T. Amos)
1995: Helicopter String Quartet (K. Stockhausen)
1998: Crawl Back (R. Thompson)
2003: Paranoid Android (B. Mehldau)

Making light

This morning I dressed my wound. I removed yesterday's bandage, applied antibacterial ointment, and began to open a fresh bandage. Bandages come in sealed individual envelopes. You open one by pulling apart two flaps, the loose ends of the two pieces of platicked paper that make the envelope. I was standing in the dark because the sun had not yet risen. As I pulled at the two flaps and the envelope opened, light was released along the unsealing edges. I stopped; the light went out; I continued; the light reappeared. Wonderful.

I fight dirty

25

Here's how I'd describe the playing of Brad Mehldau

Imprecise, adventurous, shy of the dramatic gesture. He'll never do a cover of Richard Thompson's "Hard on me" (one of the angriest songs ever, with two agonized guitar solos wrenched from the diseased pit of murderous despair). He's angular, heading along a road he's never even scouted, trying something he can't quite do but gloriously failing.

Quiz

What do all of these people have in common?

Marcia Wachs Dam
Tosh Junior
Jonelle Niffenegger
Polly Sippy
Hy Speck
Lindy Trigg

Music

There's been some excitement about the rock band Led Zeppelin recently. The guy who sings (Robert Plant, ancient) did a record with a girl who sings (Alison Krauss, middle aged). Also there was a concert this week.
Leads one to think: painful as the Cordula Lippert memory may be for me, this is a truly marvelous band. No one has ever rocked more mightily. Some people think jazz should be one thing (thrilling?), classical another (Apollonian?), folk something else besides, which is tosh. But if you like your rock & roll Dionysian (a word Iggy Pop has to explain to Tom Snyder here), then surrender to the Zepp.

Here's how I'd describe the playing of Kenny Barron

Architectural, yet full of surprises. Bill Evans had the power of enchantment; Barron thrills me. He seems utterly in control, utterly composed, utterly sly. And there is considerable soulfulness.

Antonioni does the great debate

By taking the terms of the debate quite literally in his masterpiece, Blow-up, Michelangelo Antonioni showed that he sided with Sandburg.

Frost, belittling Sandburg: "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."

Sandburg, replying insufferably: "The poet that without imagination or folly enough to play tennis by serving and returning the ball over an invisible net may see himself as highly disciplined. There have been poets who could and did play more than one game of tennis with unseen rackets, volleying airy and fantastic balls over an insubstantial net, on a frail moonlit fabric of a court."

Reworking a piece of work

Author, actor and male model Fabio says U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton is his candidate of choice for U.S President. In an online interview, he explained Clinton's virtues: "She's, you know, my biggest reward, because I would love to have two success with her, with a woman president. And so it will be, to me, forgetting the first time I love the women I owe one to. Women: you're smart."

Species

What is a species? Am I one? Have I one on my tongue? Will my offspring be a different species from me? Are there species in outer space?

Bangladesh

Bangladesh exists to remind us that if there is a god, it should be crucified.

Dream of apples

This morning I dreamed that I was visiting a secret neighborhood in San Francisco. Hidden somewhere near Twelfth and Lake is a long country road, with handsome houses to either side, and at the end a house inhabited by Kelly Jo Maynard. I was driving along this dirt road and stopped to look at the house. I recalled that I'd been in it before. I parked and as I got out of my car I wondered whether it would be okay to go inside--it was evident no one was about. I remembered that I used to visit it without permission, while the inhabitants were away, long ago. I stood on the porch, then walked back to my car, seeing apples in an apple tree on the west side of the road. And a black man walking along a road that struck out up the hill to the west. I admired the apples. I saw that I had left my car door open. I closed it and walked back to the house and entered. I walked through the kitchen to a desk. From the bookcase next to the desk I took some of Kelly Jo's cassette tapes and played a recording of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The house was very empty. I was calmly putting tapes back in a fashion I thought Kelly Jo would approve when I took fright. I headed for the door just as some people were arriving. I opened the door before them and passed out, saying "Hello." The group of three young European (?) bohemians, two men and a woman, replied to my greeting quite calmly. Maybe they were guests of the house. I ran. I ran as fast as I could to my car, but it took ever so long to get to it.

I had dinner with this woman (click here)

Her house is full of damaged animals, not all of them human.

Sohcahtoa

The cars go one way, the leaves another
As the wind brushes east,
Taking what the trees cast off.

I'm not quite ready, my thoughts a disorder
Of ambition unspent,
Plans beginning where I leave off.

Another rattling, shushing gust.

A Sunday alone is that uncountable blessing
At age forty-three, when my untattooed,
Childless arms reach for books, music, lunch,
In the sunlit trigonometry of home.

---------Where things make sense in terms of
What's not here.