To thine own self be true

Yesterday Putin wickedly gave Trump a World Cup soccer ball as a gift. This, of course, echoes the scene in Shakespeare’s play Henry V when the young king is insultingly sends tennis balls in response to a serious matter.

Yesterday, Putin suggested, similarly, that Trump is a superficial fool-dolt who likewise deserved nothing more than a ball to play with and amuse himself. Unlike Henry, though, Trump is, indeed, that shallow, stupid, and frivolous and Putin has figured that out. Trump was significantly ‘zapped’; a malicious calculated gotcha on Putin’s part for sure, showing his total lack of fundamental respect for the president.

(JT’s best live work on VHS: left: James Taylor In Concert, SMV Enterprises; right: Squibnocket–CMV)

During one Strathcona High school-day lunch-hour, five teachers lost in an hour of JT’s live Boston concert which I’d just recorded. Sitting in front of the tv monitor–all five of us in the same mesmerizing space listening to and watching the spell-binding JT.  All of us knocked out by his great songs:
Something in the Way She Moves
Fire and Rain
Smiling Face
Only One
Shower the People
How Sweet It Is
Up on the Roof
Everyday
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight
Never Die Young (which had just been released)
Steamroller
Carolina in My Mind
Sweet Baby James.
A stunning knockout set, still after nearly 30 years of lost watches.

All of us entranced, deeply moved, and yet each in his or her own private moment/s.

Later when the set ended, the afternoon warning bell rang and we all were literally re-awakened and thrust back suddenly into the cold winter reality of having to go back to our mundane classrooms and classes transformed, still mentally in JT’s web he had so slowly and consciously spun for his audience and unseen video viewers.

A totally unexpected magical, warm, romantic interlude–a seductive massage of both soul and heart. We all fell into it and were, for one brief hour, all on the same basically unspoken sensitive wave-length of sensibility.

Way leads on to way, and all five of us are no longer connected or as tight as we once really were that special day we all owed to the performance art of a master troubadour.
…………………………..
Also recommended, JT’s other video Squibnocket, recorded casually in a seaside Massachussetts barn with his then-musical friends and no audience. Simply outstanding. Works shining some three years after the previous video included:
Secret of Life
I’ve Got to Stop Thinkin’ ‘Bout That
You’ve Got a Friend
Fire and Rain
The Frozen Man
Shed a Little Light
Copperline
Sweet Baby James
Country Road
Mexico
Your Smiling Face
You Can Close Your Eyes.

At 70 now, JT still performs and talks of doing an album (finally) of other people’s songs. He remains intact and is very happy to be alive playing the same old songs that defined his life and career. Anyone who knows of or has experienced JT’s music has his or her own special memories and favorites. The above was mine. A special Moment of Being courtesy of James Taylor.

“David”–Earle Birney
“In Flanders Fields”–John McCrae
“The Cremation of Sam McGee”–Robert Service
“A January Morning”–Archibald Lampman
“The Lonely Land”–A.J.M. Smith
“The Bull Calf”–Irving Layton
“Adolescence”–P.K. Page
“The Swimmer’s Moment”–Margaret Avison
“This Is a Photograph of Me”–Margaret Atwood
“You Have the Lovers”–Leonard Cohen

Gordon Lightfoot
Bruce Cockburn
Joni Mitchell
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Leonard Cohen
Neil Young
Ian Tyson
Stompin’ Tom Connors
Bachman & Cummings
#10 –a toss-up

have permanently and unconscionably destroyed Edmonton–its roads, neighborhoods, the flow and access, events and tourism. Edmonton is now a dump, a demolition site, much like what you see in Third World countries on the news. Think of them as you ride the transit to Heritage Days and Taste of Edmonton.

Vintage Fork now open for breakfast, lunch, brunch, jazz nights, and afternoon tea.

Reservations online.

Obit. Claude Lanzmann, 92.
The filmmaker who took 12 years to make Shoah, his 9 1/2 honest documentary document on the Holocaust using horrific survivor testimony. We will not see his like again.

Yes, but sometimes
when I pick up my pen,
I remember Homer,
Shakespeare, Dante
Wordsworth, Blake
Tennyson, Keats
Whitman, Dickinson,
Eliot, Yeats
Auden, Cummings,
Thomas, Frost,
Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg–

the reality of impossibility
and limits of inspiration
make me reconsider.
Then whatever start
implodes into atoms
of acceptance
and a wise letting-go
of poetic illusion
or any other pretense.

All 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach rescued from the flooded caves. An amazing humanitarian effort and achievement. The truly feel-good story of the year.

Beaten by Croatians. Yes-s-s. Putin’s wrath will be focused on the goalie and the forward who missed the goal on a penalty kick; they will both end up in Siberia. But the sour mood shouldn’t last long with his president-acolyte coming to kneel before him next week. Maybe the Christopher Steele dossier had it right about The Donald watching Moscow prostitutes?  The openly traitorous prez seems to be so, irrationally, smitten with Putin: To Russia with Love.