Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
Given to Fly
1st song: Contact - Violence
2nd: Diz Organ & Sackcloth Fashion - Under Man
no green/blue screen in this video
ⓒMatchstick Productions
Soaring, skimming, what a rush.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Paper Moon
“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,
just as phony as it can be,
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
if you believed in me.”
Amanda Palmer "Ukulele Anthem"
Amanda fucking Palmer......I want to buy you an ice cream and walk together through Central Park strumming our ukes.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
The Vaccines
The Vaccines performing If You Wanna, Nørgaard & Wreckin' Bar live on Jools' Annual Hootenanny 31st December 2011.
Jack White "Sixteen Saltines" & "Freedom at 21"
I want to walk a mile in Jack White's shoes......Ooooooooooooooo, I got the 'wanna be Jack White' blues.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
The Mystery of It All
Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images
Mountains Rise, Mountains Fall; Change is Constant.Great Article by Adam Frank:
The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.
We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem.
It might even be THE problem.
Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the "rules," the "precepts" or the "doctrine" then certainty can be obtained.
Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty.
It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It's this aspect of science that I value more than any other.
But science does not exist alone as practice. It's also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false defense against the rootlessness that roots of our existence.
My co-blogger Marcelo Gleiser put it beautifully two weeks ago when he wrote, "what is pompous is to think that we can know all the answers. Or that it's the job of science to find them." When science as an idea is used to push away the tremulous reality of our lived existential uncertainty then it, too, is degraded. It becomes just another imaginary fixed point in a life without fixed points.
Of course it doesn't have to be this way. The world's history of spiritual endeavor contains many beautiful descriptions of authentic encounters with uncertainty. Ironically these often serve as gateways to the most compassionate experience of what can be called sacred in human life.
Buddhism's First Noble Truth, which focuses specifically on the reality of change and suffering, serves as one example. In the Christian tradition works like the "Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century paean to the importance of experience over doctrine or dogma, serves as another. Dig around in most of the world's great religious traditions and you find people finding their sense of grace by embracing uncertainty rather than trying to bury it in codified dogmas.
For science, embracing uncertainty means more than claiming "we don't know now, but we will know in the future". It means embracing the fuzzy boundaries of the very process of asking questions. It means embracing the frontiers of what explanations, for all their power, can do. It means understanding that a life of deepest inquiry requires all kinds of vehicles: from poetry to particle accelerators; from quiet reveries to abstract analysis.
Though I am an atheist, some of the wisest people I have met are those whose spiritual lives (some explicitly religious, some not) have forced them to continually confront uncertainty. This daily act has made them patient and forgiving, generous and inclusive. Likewise, the atheists I have met who most embody the ideals of free inquiry seem to best understand the limitations of every perspective, including their own. They encounter the ever shifting ground of their lives with humor, good will and compassion.
In the end, embracing uncertainty is to embrace a quality I have written about many times before: mystery. These lives we live, surrounded by beauty and horror, profound knowledge and pitiful ignorance, are a mystery to us all. To push that truth away with false certainty, falsely derived from either religion or reason, is to miss our most perfect truth.
We are, after all, just "such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Burnt Norton
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened.......
by T.S. Eliot
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
50 Inspiring Travel Quotes
1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine
3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson
5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell
6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb
8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang
11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley
12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson
13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese 15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
16. ″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi
17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence
18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark
19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard
21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber
22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru
23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux 24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot
32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain
34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy
35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou
38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew 39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France
40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca
41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon
42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith
43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark
45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling
46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton
48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman
49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni
50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins
51. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
52. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
Friday, May 4, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Ratt & Michael Schenker "Oh Well & Born on the Bayou"
Two of the best rock guitarists (Michael Schenker & Warren DiMartini) trading licks on "Bayou" and I always thought Stephen Pearcy had one of the best rock/blues voices.
Ramones live at CBGB 1977
A little more New York flavor....
Full show at CBGB'S, NY, 1977
Part 1:
1. Blitzkrieg Bop
2. Sheena is a Punk Rocker
3. Beat on the Brat
4. Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue
David Bowie "Andy Warhol"
I'm in NYC this week so hows about a bit of Andy Warhol for your senses.
Video By Kord Chandler
Like to take a cement fix
Be a standing cinema
Dress my friends up just for show
See them as they really are
Put a peephole in my brain
Two New Pence to have a go
I'd like to be a gallery
Put you all inside my show
Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all
Andy walking, Andy tired
Andy take a little snooze
Tie him up when he's fast asleep
Send him on a pleasant cruise (hm hm hm)
When he wakes up on the sea
He sure to think of me and you
He'll think about paint and he'll think about glue
What a jolly boring thing to do
Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all
Cowboy Junkies "Angels in the Wilderness", "Misguided Angel", "Fairytale"
25 years and her voice is still as soft as a new down pillow.
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