To thine own self be true

the bassist, keyboard player, and main clown of the ’60s group The Monkees.

I was briefly a Monkees fan in my grade 12 year (’66-’67). I liked “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”, and even knew and played “I Want To Be Free” on my guitar at school. (I long thought “As Tears Go By” by the Stones is a better ballad.)

But, in the world of short-lived fads, I never bought a Monkees record and was well-aware of the limits of their singing and playing; an ‘ersatz band’–only two had musical experience and the four used a backup band on the road. Musical and writing talent as well as live-performing comparisons to The Beatles (upon whom they were modelled) were  far-fetched and bogus.

A good idea to gear down into Neutral while approaching all these innumerable slippery corners and turnoffs. This added braking effect beyond regular braking adds an extra step of protection  against out-of-control sliding, especially on a quick light change or the need for a sudden stop. You heard it here first.

Oh, and don’t forget to drive through yellow lights when someone is on your tail under conditions like these. Better to be safe than run into from behind.

After facing the prospect of half-blindness.
Sometimes you get lucky, as I’ve often said.

This was all unexpected two years ago, but sometimes things turn out better and you move ahead.

I feel I also have more focus and clarity, even in thinking and speaking of late, so there are sometimes these unexpected positives that emerge from what, for example, would have been certain half-blindness before 1993 medical technology finally made it possible for all like-patients to avert disaster.

Luck of the draw. Luck of timing yet again. (Paul Simon’s “Born at the Right Time” comes to mind.) As my wife’s prof used to say to his class n the late’60s: “You people are lucky to have been born when you were. These are the best days and times.”

“Humankind cannot bear much reality.”–T.S. Eliot

I Am Not Your Negro was a worthy nominee for AA 2016 Best Documentary Feature and has just been released on DVD. Certainly this film is a must-see for black American viewers in search of more information on their racial history in the U.S. As a Canadian white viewer and a long-time observer of Black American, literature, music, and culture, I found this powerfully-filmed record to be a fantastic introduction to James Baldwin, his work, his thinking, and his sensibility. The film truly gets inside Baldwin and turns him inside out for whoever sees this documentary.

Raoul Peck, the director, for his part, has found vivid images and colors to represent Baldwin and his work and made a good choice of a somewhat untypically quieter, nonetheless emotional Samuel L. Jackson for the narrator and as the voice of Baldwin.

I think one of the best ideas that emerges from I Am Not Your Negro is the view that white people of Baldwin’s time (and maybe some of ours today still) project their images of blacks back onto blacks in terms of action and response. The other strong, related idea is that actual, lived black reality is completely divorced from Madison Avenue and Hollywood social projections, reflected in many examples judiciously offered by Peck.

Throughout the film, we also see Baldwin speaking to groups (one, amazingly, an all-white young male group) and on television; in both, he is very forthright and no-nonsense, cutting through a lot of stupid, superficial white questions, assumptions, and observations.

I should also mention Baldwin’s response to the lives and deaths of Medgar Evans, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, three of his key influences who evoked destructively negative white reactions; this was, incidentally, the starting point of his last, unfinished work. Baldwin shows himself, throughout his life, to be a man of great sensitivity, who felt deeply and movingly the irrational hate and injustices of white Americans toward his people.

Not your average documentary for sure, but this one does a super job in reviving Baldwin’s relevance and his influence on the continuing story of prejudice and discrimination toward blacks in America. Highly recommended. Even if you consider yourself to be a liberal, this movie will illuminate much of what still, tragically, goes on today. And if you know nothing of Baldwin, this is a terrific, informative introduction to why he remains so significant  some 60 years on.

doesn’t mean they are smart, are honest with themselves and others, are truly good or nice people, have anything positive to offer, are to be trusted in any depth, or are broadly significant in any meaningful, consequential way. (There are sometimes/often limits to online/social media appearances and projections, and a (large) gap between image and experiential reality.)

“She’s a must to avoid/A complete impossibility”–from a Herman’s Hermits song

Boy, doesn’t that say it all about some people, the ones you definitely, clearly have to give a wide berth to or completely ignore. They are just not worth bothering about, are nothing but trouble, and who can even be toxic and destructive to you, others, and themselves.

Ah, the continuing wisdom of a long-forgotten pop song from the British Invasion of the ’60s.

simply does not ‘get it’. They are clearing away snow at this point rather than sanding intersections, corners, turning bays, roads, and sidewalks as vehicles continue to crash into others after two disastrous weeks of dangerous icy roads. A clown show big-time as usual.

“To think and to be fully alive are the same.”
–Hannah Arendt

“Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.”
–Jose Ortega Y Gasset

“When the mind is thinking, is it simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no?”
–Socrates

“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”
–Margaret Atwood

“One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him.”
–William Ellery Channing

“The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into Freedom.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life does not consist mainly–or even largely– of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s mind.”
–Mark Twain

The great humorist himself and the excellent Ken Burns documentary about him

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
–Hector Berlioz

“Time is the reef upon which all of our frail mystic ships are wrecked.”
–Noel Coward

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time for that’s the stuff life is made of.”
–Benjamin Franklin

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”
–Carl Sandburg

(Sandburg was once considered one of the top three American poets; Caedmon built its reputation on LPs, then cassettes, now CDs of famous American and other (Dylan Thomas opened the series) authors reading from their works; this major contribution to Spoken Word recording and the preservation of American arts and letters by the two founding sisters cannot be overstated.)

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”
–Henry David Thoreau

“I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.”
–William Shakespeare