To thine own self be true

Old movie title starring Jack Lemmon.

Today my Sikh neighbour’s grown-up son came over while my wife was shovelling the front driveway with two feet of drifted snow and basically took over and did most of the job. (I did the back and side earlier.)

I find that I am pleasantly surprised by our neighbours, whom we seldom see, how they come through for this 74 year-old couple.  It is always surprising how many people will selflessly jump in and help of their own free will, their best/better sides rising to a challenge and the moment.

It is in moments like this that one’s faith in humanity and ordinary people is restored all over again. One has to be careful not to negatively over-generalize about human nature, eh?

Classy-looking fold-out, slipcased book.

Hokusai’s 46 (10 extra were commissioned later) views of Mt. Fuji done in the 1830s, featuring “The Great Wave” (on slipcase cover below).

below: Inside the slipcase, a booklet (on left) introducing the series and explaining each illustration and the fold-out shimmering-surfaced book itself (on right), to be read in order from back (right) to front (left).

below: first view–“The Great Wave”; all the pictures are of Japanese people in Nature with Mt. Fuji in the background

below: the book per se opens up accordion-style with silk screen illustrations on one side, which can be stretched out in full on a long, flat table surface

to coal mining companies. So much for the environment, redneck Alberta-style.

“Git yer mountain while it lasts!” “Kill Natural Beauty! Make a fast buck!”

Skip to my loo?

3-way stop in Ellerslie has now become a 4-way stop of quite another kind.

Another Edmonton Beautification Project: “It’s All about the Go.”

(Popular hit parade song, 1969, by Joe South)

La-da-da, da-da-da, da-da
La-da-da, da-da-da, da-dee
La-da-da, da-da
La-da-da, da-da-da

Whoa, the games people play now
Every night and every day now
Never meanin’ what they say now
Never sayin’ what they mean

While they wile away the hours
In their ivory towers
‘Til they’re covered up with flowers
In the back of a black limousine

La-da-da, da-da-da, da-da
La-da-da, da-da da, da-dee
Talkin’ ’bout you and me
And the games people play now

Whoa, we make one another cry
Break a heart then we say goodbye
Cross our hearts and we hope to die
That the other was to blame

But neither one will ever give in
So we gaze at an eight by ten
Thinkin’ ’bout the things that might have been
And it’s a dirty rotten shame

La-da-da, da-da-da, da-da
La-da-da, da-da da, da-dee
Talkin’ ’bout you and me
And the games people play now

Now look here
People walkin’ up to you
Singin’ glory hallelujah, ha-ha
And they try and to sock it to you
In the name of the Lord

They’re gonna teach you how to meditate
Read your horoscope, cheat your fate
And furthermore to hell with hate
Come on, get on board

La-da-da, da-da-da, da-da
La-da-da, da-da da, da-dee
Talkin’ ’bout you and me
And the games people play

Now, wait a minute
Look around tell me what you see?
What’s happenin’ to you and me?
God grant me the serenity
To just remember who I am

‘Cause you’ve given up your sanity
For your pride and your vanity
Turn you back on humanity
Oh, and you don’t give a
Da, da, da, da, da

La-da-da, da-da-da, da-da
La-da-da, da-da da, da-dee
I’ll keep a-talkin’ ’bout you and me, brother
And the games people play now, now

La-da-da, da-da-da, da-da
La-da-da, da-da da, da-dee
Gonna talk ’bout you and me
Oh, and the games people play
…………………………………………………..

Take care of and look after yourself (physically, mentally, and spiritually).

Look after and be helpful to family and pets.

Stay connected to good friends and interesting acquaintances.

Learn something new each day.

Ignore all the political crap and crazy trolls.

The first Joanie doc, How Sweet the Sound, provided a more conventional overview of her long, successful career. So why this one?

I’m guessing she felt the need to amend the previous picture and to give fans a glimpse into the many emotional and psychological doubts, struggles, and setbacks that have largely escaped her fans’ attention. I suspect she wanted to also set the record straight that it hasn’t been easy, regardless of how many big moments she’s had in her 80 years.

The doc, with the title that is underwhelming and does not do justice to the content of this film, was put together by Magnolia which specializes in offbeat, unconventional movies, which this one is. It is also directed by three women, which is an odd choice, suggesting a possible bias when it comes to the film’s late revelations of possible sex abuse by Joan’s dead father, who cannot defend himself.

That said, Joan certainly reveals warts and all here, confessing to various career mistakes, personal foibles, and broken relationships, claiming responsibility in the instance of Bob Dylan and David Harris, her younger, political husband. In many ways, this doc is about a lifelong depression from some inner centre of darkness which also afflicted her younger, similarly-confused sister Mimi.

There are many positive moments with her older sister and her grown-up son whom she neglected in his youth and who eventually played percussion in her last bands. There are a number of reconciling moments which help to aid  the prevailing mystery and gloom of Joan’s inner life.

The viewer gets to see many off-stage, behind-the-scenes moments of the popular entertainer who had no problem entertaining audiences in the thousands, but could sustain a single relationship, one-on-one with anyone else.

Joan’s has been a strange journey, for sure, and despite an archived room full of interview tapes, photos, and her drawings, her central, recurring mystery remains unresolved, though she has made her peace with everyone including her unsupportive older sister who didn’t want to live under Joan’s shadow, her ambiguous but influential deceased mother, and her even more bizarre, egoic father.

I should add that Dylan’s influence, as in several songs, photos, and a painting included, looms quite large. For anyone who ever was unsure–yes, he was the love of her life and he did ‘break her heart’ after she had shamelessly promoted and accompanied him everywhere back in the mid-’60s.

There is a  vagueness that periodically colors all of this–as in her letters to home and the somewhat inaudible read-aloud diary entries and self-pitying tapes sent to her family. The last half-hour, focused on the possible sex abuse, has a weird muzziness of inconclusive, imperfectly remembered moments from her own past with her father, which I found unconvincing and far from conclusive. What likely happened to Mimi once doesn’t necessarily transfer to her mostly uncertain sister.

What the viewer is left with are two docs on Baez, the second which purports to be more truthful. I am reminded of a concluding line from John Ford’s movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That may make the more/most sense to her long-time fans (as well as–I might add–the many fans of Buffy Sainte-Marie, another famous folk singer of the sixties, who did much for natives and native causes, but has been recently taken to task by the media. It is important to remember what made these people special, important, and great in the first place.)

Stephen Ames won the PGA Champions tournament.

The Two Big Assumptions: 1) Things will always be permanent and remain the same. 2) The Moment or Opportunity will still be there tomorrow and requires no action or choice in the here-and-now.

–Richard Davies

Money is not needed to buy one necessity of the soul.

–Henry David Thoreau

When money speaks, the truth is silent.

–Russian Proverb

I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.

–Albert Einstein

We have met the enemy and he is us.

–‘Pogo’/Walt Kelly

Common sense is very uncommon.

-Horace Greeley

Shallowness spreads.

-Daniel Liebert

I shop, therefore I am.

-Barbara Kruger

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

–Proverbs

I have to protect myself from the toxicity of this culture.

–Kate Braverman

Man’s inhumanity to man/Makes countless thousands mourn.

–Robert Burns

Violence is suicide.

–Mahatma Gandhi

An unexamined life is not worth living.

–Socrates

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

–Henry David Thoreau

Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

–George Orwell

Most people would rather die than think and many of them do.

–Bertrand Russell

The quality of your happiness depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

–Marcus Aurelius

Irony is wasted on the stupid.

–Oscar Wilde

The goal of the journey is to discover yourself as consciousness.

–Joseph Campbell

Be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.

–Buddha

The last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

–Viktor Frankl

Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.

–Joseph Campbell

In delay, there lies no plenty.

–William Shakespeare

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

–George Eliot

A man can do all things if he will.

–Leon Battista Alberti

Follow your bliss. Live from your own center.

–Joseph Campbell

Be yourself.; everybody else is already taken.

–Oscar Wilde

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.

–William Blake

The proper study of mankind is books.

–Aldous Huxley

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug of mankind.

–Rudyard Kipling

Music is the best means of digesting time.

–W.H. Auden

Art serves to rinse out our eyes.

–Karl Kraus

Genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

–Matthew Arnold

We all live in the hope that authentic meeting between human beings can still occur.

–R.D. Laing

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

–Jean Anouilh

I think women need kindness more than love. When one human being is kind to another, it’s a very deep matter.

–Alice Childress

Touch is the meaning of being human.

–Andrea Dworkin

Enthusiasm is life.

–Paul Scofield

The stars  are in one’s brain.

–Bertrand Russell

I am large….I contain multitudes.

–Walt Whitman

That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.

–Willa Cather

The most exquisite pleasure is giving pleasure to others.

–Jean de La Bruyere

Happiness can only exist in acceptance.

–George Orwell

I am an optimist. It doesn’t seem too much use being anything else.

–Winston Churchill

If you want to be happy, be.

–Leo Tolstoy