Richard Feynman

"I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

Sometimes You Just Gotta Rock

Almost Ashore - Gerald Vizenor

 The Author

 

winter sea

over my shoes

shadows

and bright

round stones

at san gregorio

every wave

turns a season

forests adrift

empty shells

memory of fire

so faraway

in the mountains

and canyons

silent pools

raise my faces

by early tide

slight my hand

shoulders

almost ashore

light breaks

over the plovers

certain steps

my traces

blood, bone, stone

turn natural

and heavy waves

rush the sand

Gerald Vizenor, “Almost Ashore” from Almost Ashore. Copyright © 2006 by Gerald Vizenor.

Two Views of Venus

By Sandro Botticelli:

---

By Jean-Leon Gerome:

Ginger

Goldiggers of 1933

Autumnal Equinox - Mabon

 Link to the artist
 
It is the time of the autumn equinox, and the harvest is winding down. The fields are nearly empty, because the crops have been plucked and stored for the coming winter. Mabon is the mid-harvest festival, and it is when we take a few moments to honor the changing seasons, and celebrate the second harvest. For many Pagan and Wiccan traditions it is a time of giving thanks for the things we have, whether it is abundant crops or other blessings.

More information on Mabon

Salvatore Quasimodo: Alley (“Vicolo”)

Sometimes your voice calls me back,
and I do not know which skies, which waters
awaken in me:
a net of sun streaks incisions
on your walls, where in the twilight,
a swinging of lamps,
from old shops
full of mirrors and sadness.

Another time: a loom beat in the court
and you could hear at night a cry
of pups and children.
Alley: a cross of houses
calling one another softly,
and they do not know it is terrifying
to be alone in the dark.

(Translation by Anny Ballardini)

Mermaid

The artist's web site

Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

 

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”

Jennifer Frautschi

Web site

Wendy Warner

Web site

Lawrence Yang

The artist's web site

Hymn to Selene

 

Link to the artist 

Daughters of Jove, whose voice is melody,
Muses, who know and rule all minstrelsy,
Sing the wide-winged Moon! Around the earth,
From her immortal head in Heaven shot forth,
Far light is scattered--boundless glory springs;
Where'er she spreads her many-beaming wings
The lampless air glows round her golden crown.
But when the Moon divine from Heaven is gone
Under the sea, her beams within abide,
Till, bathing her bright limbs in Ocean's tide,
Clothing her form in garments glittering far,
And having yoked to her immortal car
The beam-invested steeds whose necks on high
Curve back, she drives to a remoter sky
A western Crescent, borne impetuously.
Then is made full the circle of her light,
And as she grows, her beams more bright and bright
Are poured from Heaven, where she is hovering then,
A wonder and a sign to mortal men.
The Son of Saturn with this glorious Power
Mingled in love and sleep--to whom she bore
Pandeia, a bright maid of beauty rare
Among the Gods, whose lives eternal are.
Hail Queen, great Moon, white-armed Divinity,
Fair-haired and favorable! thus with thee
My song beginning, by its music sweet
Shall make immortal many a glorious feat
Of demigods, with lovely lips, so well
Which minstrels, servants of the Muses, tell.
--Unknown, 7th century B.C. ?
Translated from Greek by Percy Bysshe Shelley
From Homeric Hymns

Heroism

Well done, Marine.

Official website of the Congressional Medal of Honor

Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

A melancholy autumn wind
Blows through the world;
The pampas grass waves,
As we drift to the moor,
Drift to the sea

  

  Picture source

James Jones

“A man loves a thing. That don't mean it's gotta love him back.”

Harvest Moon

The dazzling full moon sets behind the Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert in this photo released June 7, 2010 by the European Southern Observatory. The moon appears larger than normal due to an optical illusion of perspective.
CREDIT: Gordon Gillet, ESOFull Story

T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Eliot

Piercings

JuJu - Nightwalk

Anne-Sophie Mutter

Anne-Sophie Mutter, Reluctant Goddess

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post  • November 19, 2006

Anne-Sophie Mutter is barefoot in the studio, Stradivarius tucked firmly under her chin, listening. At the piano, accompanist Lambert Orkis begins to trace a delicate theme -- the Menuetto from Mozart's Sonata in E Minor, K. 304 -- and after a moment Mutter raises her bow and starts to play.

The effect is electrifying: The theme, first gentle, deepens into tenderness, then darkens in anguish. The emotions shift like quicksilver; grief stabs through, wavers, then gives way to a landscape of limitless hope. It's a profound and moving performance, and through it all Mutter is completely absorbed, rocking slightly back and forth as she probes deeper and deeper into the music -- playing, as a British critic recently wrote, like "a goddess stepped down from Mount Olympus."

"Well -- better than being a devil!" Mutter says with a laugh, relaxing back at her hotel a few hours after the recording session at National Public Radio has ended.

At 43 she has spent most of her life as one of the world's most celebrated violinists, and she takes all the "goddess" stuff completely in stride. Mutter is still the drop-dead beauty she was when, as a teenage prodigy, she stormed the concert halls of Europe. The Breck Girl hair still shines, the lips are as bee-stung as ever, and those gravity-defying gowns still rock the classical world. But Mutter has evolved from mere goddess into something much more interesting -- one of the hardest-working musicians on the planet.

And her approach to the Mozart sonata -- which she's scheduled to perform tomorrow night at the Kennedy Center -- is a prime example. She has spent much of the past 18 months immersed in Mozart's world, studying the composer's letters, analyzing his scores in minute detail, even reading his father's treatise on the violin -- anything she can do to get completely inside the music. It's an impossible task, she admits. "Mozart," she says, "is an endless story."

Vast as it is, though, her "Mozart Project" -- with its recordings of the concertos, the piano trios and 16 of the sonatas, as well as a grueling series of concerts with Orkis that has taken her from Tokyo to Moscow -- is only part of Mutter's life as a musician.

... was the most glamorous woman in classical music really hanging up her bow? ...

She's become a leading proponent of contemporary music -- she'll be premiering ferociously complex new concertos by Sofia Gubaidulina and Andre Previn next year -- and she and Orkis are preparing their next in-depth project, on Johannes Brahms.

Then there's her teaching at London's Royal Academy of Music, a long string of benefit concerts, her Circle of Friends Foundation (which helps talented young string players) and her relentless badgering of the Bavarian government to implement her ideas on early music education.

"That's what she's like," says cellist Daniel Muller-Schott, who recently recorded the Mozart piano trios with Mutter. "She does everything at super speed."
So when Mutter seemed to announce on French television last month that she would be retiring on her 45th birthday -- causing great tearing of hair and rending of Gucci among her fans -- it threw the classical world into a minor panic. Was the most glamorous woman in classical music really hanging up her bow?

"No!" she says, running a hand through her hair in exasperation. "No no no no! That statement was completely misinterpreted. I've always said that I would not go on forever, because I didn't want to fall into the trap of just repeating myself. When I think I cannot bring anything new, anything important, anything different to music, I will stop. But this is not related to age!"

And that's quintessential Mutter, her colleagues say. Discovered at 13 by famed conductor Herbert von Karajan, she rocketed to superstardom and hasn't stopped pushing herself since.

"She's one of the premier violinists of all time," says cellist Lynn Harrell, who has performed extensively with Mutter. "But she's always searching for something more in the music, something special. There's no sitting on her laurels."

While the retirement rumors were overblown, Mutter's life does seem to be shifting gears. Last month, she announced that her marriage to the composer and conductor Sir Andre Previn, whom she wed in 2002, had ended in divorce. She won't talk about it, but musicians in Europe say they weren't surprised; the 34-year age difference between the two was just too great.

"We were very happily married, and we will always stay good friends," she says quietly. "Let's leave it at that."



Mutter and Previn will continue to play together, but her personal life -- long the subject of European tabloids -- is becoming almost ordinary.
She lives in an art-filled house in Munich with her two children (Arabella, 16, and Richard, 12) from her first marriage to lawyer Detlef Wunderlich, who died of cancer in 1995. And while she still travels in stratospheric circles, her glamorous Monte Carlo days, she says, are "definitely over." Gone are the fast cars of her youth -- she famously bought a Porsche before she was old enough to drive -- replaced by a string of Chrysler Voyagers. (She's gone through four of them.)

"Working is a little more difficult, now," she says. "I have to be over by lunch, because the rest of the day is driving kids around."

In person, Mutter is unaffected and relaxed, with a quick sense of humor, and she dismisses the whole megastar thing as barely worth mentioning. Those sleek, elegantly sexy John Galliano gowns she performs in? "Just work uniforms," she shrugs.

She doesn't even listen to classical music, she says -- she's an Elvis fan, has Madeleine Peyroux on her iPod, and her cellphone plays Ennio Morricone. She jogs, meditates, does a little yoga, monitors her daughter's taste in rap and can't wait to see the new James Bond movie. In short: more the mini-vanned yuppie than Strad-packing diva.

"These days in Munich, it's not uncommon to see her out in the streets in jeans and a sweat shirt, boarding the subway with the kids," says pianist Orkis. "A decade ago that just wouldn't have happened."

But there's another side to Mutter as well, one that's brought her a steady stream of criticism. She's often seen as remote and even imperious onstage -- a sort of stern, unsmiling Valkyrie of the violin, barely noticing the mere mortals at her feet, accepting multiple curtain calls but rarely deigning to give an encore.


    "I've never seen a performer who gives less onstage," says noted British critic Norman Lebrecht. "It is perfect, it is extremely well played, but she doesn't communicate with the audience. There's no eye contact. And she doesn't seem to bring any part of her personality to bear on the music. She's not so much a presence in the music, as an absence."

Mutter heatedly rejects the criticism. "I look pretty grim and gruesome when I play," she admits. "But I'm not an actor -- I'm a musician! I've never seen my role as having to 'act' something, on an out-of-music level. I'm communicating through the music, and my soul is out there, naked."

Her voice rises: "I'm not in the mood to smile while I'm playing; I'm there to transmit the music!"

To many, that's what makes her great.

"She hasn't based her career on the razzle-dazzle of the virtuoso," Harrell says. "She plays the violin as well as anyone has -- ever -- but she isn't out there to play faster or more brilliantly. She's out there to bring the listener closer to the intrinsic value of the music."

And what is the value of music? Mutter pauses for a moment, thinking.

"Music is a microcosm of life -- that's what Lambert and I try to bring forward in the Mozart sonatas," she says. "Everything is there -- everything. Like the Sonata in E Minor," she says, referring to the piece she played earlier that morning. "He wrote it around the time of the death of his mother, and he also had to leave his first love. It's very subtle and totally heartbreaking. When we're done, we have to go offstage and take deep breaths."

She smiles, as if hearing the music in her mind. "Because, you see," she says with quiet finality, "it's directly connected to the heart."

Alexis Smith

A statuesque, smart Canadian-born beauty with blue/green eyes and a seductively husky voice who lent a touch of class to her leading lady roles of the 1940's and 50's.

Happy Birthday, Rock