To thine own self be true

Grandparents and grand-kids. Interesting to be interacting with kids 66 and 63 years younger than one. Keeps one sharp for sure. Also very exhausting for long sustained hours at a time. If you can keep 3 and 7 year-olds entertained, amused, and informed, you can probably talk with anybody or potentially hold an audience.

“What once was a person is now a network data point, isolated from future profit.”
–Mark Kingwell, today in The Globe and Mail

Naturally no one else can find any source or proof of Trump’s dark sadistic obsession. (He mentioned it several times in interviews). It exists only in his perverted mind, but now he’s made it public and foisted it onto unsuspecting listeners. This is what he likes? What he personally prefers? Who can say?

I think it’s significant that the tape is recurringly reported to be about tape over/across the mouth to stop the women from talking. A Nancy Pelosi projection?

Meantime, North Americans are still recovering from last night’s Stephen Colbert “Build the peach!!” conceit/satire of Trump’s wall.

or what’s a meta-phor?

(great reading and resource for poets and lovers of the Word)

“Flowers always make people better, happier, and more hopeful: they are sunshine, food, and medicine to the soul.”
–Luther Burbank

“Earth laughs in flowers.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
–Iris Murdoch

“A flower is a plant’s way of making love.”
–Barbara Kingsolver

“A flowerless room is a soulless room in my way of thinking; but even one solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.”
–Vita Sackville-West

“One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.”
–Henry David Thoreau

Astrud Gilberto was a Brazillian housewife, but veteran sax player Stan Getz suggested she sing some English lyrics on the Getz/Gilberto jazz album, which became one of the most popular jazz albums of all time along with Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.

“The Girl from Ipanema”, a name based on a real teen who used to frequent a Brazillian beach area, became a gigantic 45 rpm hit world-wide. The song itself was carefully excerpted from the original album cut which, ironically, featured her husband-guitarist-vocalist as the featured singer on the song. Despite his protestations and those of the composer, the famous pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim, Getz prevailed with his record company Verve, and the rest was pop recording history.

Getz’s call was bang-on and the housewife became an instant star and sensation with the crown jewel hit of the brief pop wave of Bossa Nova. This, incidentally, remains Getz’s most famous recording BTW and his playing is beautifully simple, lyrical, soft, sweet, and very sexy. (He stopped playing it, though, in his later years.) The album is also the most famous Bossa Nova album of all time and one of the top-selling jazz albums of all time too.

I first heard it in grade 9 as the Beatles launched their charge on North America. It blew me away for a host of reasons:
-the songs of Jobim are beautiful, wistful, sensuous and very romantic (this is easily the most sensuous, seductive jazz album of all time)
-the voice of Joao Gilberto is wistful, delicate, and very poignant; he sings in Portugese; incidentally, his voice is the first you hear on track #1, not Astrud’s
-the accompaniment is very subdued as played by the bassist, drummer, and Jobim’s solos are tender single-note noodling at its best
-this is an album of high romanticism, perhaps the best love soundtrack of all time with a strong emphasis on feeling and lyricism

If you have never heard this album, you’re in for a treat. You won’t be disappointed; the music and sound are awesomely sublime, beautiful, ‘to die for’.

Death Is Nothing At All

By Henry Scott-Holland

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.

All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

(for two fine poet-friends Glen Kirkland and Dean McKenzie)

I will miss his smile and good ole boy/aw shucks persona. A likable guy on screen in his best, typical work.

His classic 1968 solo recital, Alone, on CD. One of the most beautiful jazz piano albums ever recorded. Highly recommended for the listener soul.