To thine own self be true

“It is better to live rich than to die rich.”–Samuel Johnson

“To live poetically is to densify life.”–Vilhelm Ekelund

“My business, my art is to live my life.–Montaigne

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”–Socrates

“I shop, therefore I am.”–Barbara Kruger

“Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.”
–Francis Bacon

(first robin in backyard)

“Where’s the worms?”

(rare signed 1994 Ready-to-Wear movie book about the European fashion world; a less successful movie, this was the first one he made after a heart transplant in his 70s)

Highly recommended documentary for any Altman fan or serious fan of indie-style movies. Altman is featured in many clips and his wife and other family members comment on what he was like and how he approached film-making. All of his 39 films are mentioned in passing and there are some rare behind-the-scenes clips. I liked most of them, though MASH, Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, Images, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, The Player, Short Cuts, Cookie’s Fortune, and Gosford Park remain personal favorites. Altman took lots of risks and let his actors be his collaborators. He was the last of the true American maverick filmmakers.

(unposed pic of Peter Cottontail rabbit, floor vent to left of plant; the serviettes sitting beside it were not placed or moved for the pic)

Safe Read-Only site–ignore any security warnings when opening pix.

Easter morning here. I’m changing a light bulb in the dining room. My wife and I are talking about how my son and his wife (nicknamed ‘The Bunnies’) enjoyed the rabbit design on yesterday’s dinner serviettes. The heat comes on just then, striking an animated rabbit doll sitting on the family-room coffee table about four feet from the vent.

The rabbit has a butterfly on its nose which has magnetic contacts so you have to lift and put back the butterfly to activate the original version of the classic “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” song. Somehow, at that precise moment, as if the conversation has caused the subsequent synchronicity, the heat (perhaps?) lifts and drops ever so slightly the butterfly, and the music is magically and mysteriously activated on Easter morning without any human contact.

That exact moment–after that random parallel 3-level topic of discussion–adding an appropriate tangential fourth level audially. An audio reminder and confirmation of the day and all things bunny. What are the odds? “There are more things….”

and we think we have now found our purpose and meaning and will try to hang onto ‘the feeling’ as long as possible, thinking in the backs of our minds that we will be mindful this time, and do our best not to let the precious fleeting moment or episode change or slip away. In those precious few moments, happy and mentally/innerly/spiritually free; care-free for certain.

It is this–that desire that informs our ongoing struggle or conflict between the real and the dream, between time and eternity, between change and permanence. We ‘catch a glimpse’ as Gatsby did or as did F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s major influence–Keats–in his poems about the nightingale and Grecian urn. Like the two authors, we also flirt with the dream of eternity and try to hang on to it, when we are briefly lucky, knowing we have found something we have long been seeking, but which will, necessarily and finally, elude us at last.

In the past, I can recall telling others, when immersed in some happy, joyous mutual enterprise or experience, to sa-vour the moment, to look around, to ‘take it all in’, to try to remember details for memory’s sake. Later will come recalled golden moments and dreams in Wordsworthian recollections of joy or tranquillity, as the case may be. To enjoy the peak experiences, the moments of being as the bird or spirit flies.

O, one shall, inevitably return to earth as Keats did in both of the aforementioned reveries; of that, one can be absolutely certain, living in the physical sphere of time, mass, and Nature that we all do. Time and change being our frequent, ‘proper’, contextual conditions in the ongoing processes of Life.

“Man would devour the stars if only he could.”–Rudolf Schroder

(bridge from “I Can’t Get Started with You”–lyrics by Ira Gershwin)

You’re so supreme, lyrics I write of you
Scheme, just for the sight of you
Dream, both day and night of you
And what good does it do?

of high Western culture/civilization, that no terrorist can/will never destroy: “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss II. An eternal joy forever, it permanently transcends the ignorant, destructive hatred of the Middle-Eastern anarchists every time it is played and heard.

We meet, and the angels sing
The angels sing the sweetest song I ever heard
You speak, and the angels sing
Or am I breathing music into every word?
–Benny Goodman (“And The Angels Sing”)