I’m going to hang this over my desk and read it whenever I’m tempted to argue politics on Facebook.

“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason.”- Thomas Sowell

This gr: Beethoven Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, "Fate": I. Allegro Con Brio

Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (metamechanics) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century by satirizing automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.

Speech By Mayor David Cassetti of Ansonia Ct., given this morning.

In his career as a civic Doctor Martin Luther King was outnumbered, gassed, clubbed, jailed without cause, insulted, and harassed by federal agents.

But in all that, he never, not once, issue a threat.

He never raised a fist in anger.

He never tossed a bomb or fired a gun.

And yet, this one man, changed the world and shook injustice to its very core. Through his career and his sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice, made with the absolute certainty that his fellow Americans would carry on with his mission to make this nation a better place, and we, a better people.

We are hurt. All of us across this nation. We are stunned. We are humiliated in the eyes of the world and we are angry. And justifiably so because what happened to George Floyd is despicable.

I wish I had great and insightful words, wise word, great words, that would heal us all, but I don’t have those words.

What I can offer you this, however, prayer. Pray for the soul of George Floyd. Pray that his family finds peace. Pray for justice. Pray for an end to the violence and anger that is separating us. Pray for healing.

Each and every one of us that stands for reason, who stands for justice, every person who calls themselves a child of God, and one nation under God, and we must conduct ourselves as ambassadors of reconciliation and hope. Let us pray for forgiveness of those who have wronged us as a people, and have committed injustice, because there is no reconciliation without forgiveness.

I want to read something to you, words that have always moved me. It’s from a speech that Senator Robert F. Kennedy made on the day that Dr. King was killed.  The Senator said this

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love…..we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

So I shall ask you tonight to say a prayer for the family, and  to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that and say a prayer for

Let us, as citizens, live exemplary lives as fair, decent, and good people who worked hard to create a just and fair nation, and although we often failed, as humans so often do, let them say “By God, at least they tried” 

My boys, Eli and Zen (zen is the smaller one)

My night table in the morning

My dog Eli after a long day at the office

The magic of black and white film

White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 - by Dorothea Lange.

Vivian Meier

Vivian Meier

@Robert Lebeck

“You could rattle the stars. You could do anything if only you dared.” - Sarah J. Maas

Try this, it works...............

Bokeh (BOH-kay/kuh)

noun: The blurred effect in a photograph, typically as a soft out-of-focus background, that results in a pleasing effect and helps to draw attention to the subject of the photograph. From Japanese boke (blur, haze) or boke-aji (blur quality

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” -J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Caracalla, was mean as he looks.

Marble portrait head of the Roman emperor Caracalla.  Artist unknown; 212-217 CE.  Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art..

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay

Poet and scholar, Festus Claudius McKay, famously delivers his speech in the ‘Throne Room’ of the Kremlin, Russia - 1922..

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay (September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican writer and poet as well as a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

He wrote five novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), Romance in Marseille (published in 2020), and in 1941 a manuscript called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem which remained unpublished until 2017.

McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).

His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953.

McKay was attracted to communism in his early life, but he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist Party USA. However, some scholars dispute that claim, noting his close ties to active members, his attendance at communist-led events, and his months-long stay in the Soviet Union in 1922–23, which he wrote about very favorably.

He gradually became disillusioned with communism, however, and by the mid-1930s had begun to write negatively about it. By the late 1930s his anti-Stalinism isolated him from other Harlem intellectuals, and by 1942 he converted to Catholicism and left Harlem, and he worked for a Catholic organization until his death.

If We Must Die

BY CLAUDE MCKAY

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Portrait of the composer Cesar A. Kyui

Joyce Bryant: Am ointeresting woman.

From Wikipedia (edited by me)

Joyce Bryant (born October 14, 1927) is an American singer and actress who achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a theater and nightclub performer. With her signature silver hair and tight mermaid dresses, she became an early African-American sex symbol, garnering such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always Remember".

Bryant left the industry in 1955 at the height of her popularity to devote herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. A decade later, she returned to show business as a trained classical vocalist and later became a vocal coach.

Joyce Bryant, the oldest of eight children, was born in Oakland, California, and raised in San Francisco. Her maternal grandfather, Frank Withers (né Frank Douglas Withers; 1880–1952), was an early jazz trombonist. Bryant, a quiet child raised in a strict home, had ambitions of becoming a sociology teacher

She eloped at the age of 14 but the marriage ended that same evening. In 1946, while visiting cousins in Los Angeles, she agreed on a dare to participate in an impromptu singalong at a local club. "After a while," Bryant recounted in a 1955 Jet interview, "I found I was the only one singing. A few minutes later the club owner offered me $25 to go up on stage, and I took it because I [needed the money] to get home."

During the late 1940s, Bryant had slowly acquired a series of regular gigs, from a $400-per-week engagement at New York's La Martinique nightclub to a 118-show tour of the Catskill Mountains hotel circuit.[4] Her reputation and profile eventually grew to the level that one night, she appeared on the same bill as Josephine Baker. Not wanting to be upstaged, Bryant colored her hair silver using radiator paint, and performed wearing a tight silver dress and silver floor-length mink. Bryant recalled when she arrived onstage, "I stopped everything!"Bryant's silver hair and tight, backless, cleavage-revealing mermaid dresses became her trademark look and, combined with her four octave voice, further elevated her status into one of the major headlining stars of the early 1950s, by which time she became known by such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always Remember.

 Etta James noted in her 2003 autobiography, Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story: "I didn't want to look innocent. I wanted to look like Joyce Bryant. [...] I dug her. I thought Joyce was gutsy and I copied her style–brazen and independent."

Beginning in 1952, Bryant released a series of records for Okeh, including "A Shoulder to Weep On", "After You've Gone" and "Farewell to Love". Two of her most well-known standards, "Love for Sale" and "Drunk with Love", were banned from radio play for their provocative lyrics. Upon the release of "Runnin' Wild" two years later, Jet noted that the song was Bryant's "first to be passed by CBS and NBC radio censors, who banned three previous recordings for being too sexy." Bryant remarked in 1980, "what an irony that my biggest hit record was 'Love for Sale'. Banned in Boston it was, and later...just about everywhere else."

Bryant, who often faced discrimination and was outspoken on issues of racial inequality, became in 1952 the first black entertainer to perform at a Miami Beach hotel, defying threats by the Ku Klux Klan who had burned her in effigy.

She was critical of racial billing practices at night clubs and hotels and advocated for entertainers as a group to fight Jim Crow laws. In 1954, she became one of the first black singers to perform at the Casino Royal in Washington, D.C., where she said that she had heard so much about the segregation practiced there that she was surprised to see so many African-Americans attend the downtown club. "It was a great thrill," she said, "to see them enter and be treated so courteously by the management."

A Life magazine layout in 1953 depicted Bryant in provocative poses, which film historian and author Donald Bogle said were "the kind that readers seldom saw of white goddesses."

 The following year, Bryant–along with Lena Horne, Hilda Simms, Eartha Kitt, and Dorothy Dandridge–was named in an issue of Ebony one of the five most beautiful black women in the world.

Bryant earned up to $3500 a performance in the early 1950s, but she had grown weary of the industry. The silver paint had damaged her hair, she didn't enjoy working on the Sabbath, and she felt uneasy with her image. "Religion has always been a part of me," she said. "and it was a very sinful thing I was doing – being very sexy, with tight, low cut gowns."

She also recalled: "I had a very bad throat and I was doing eight performances a day [...] A doctor was brought in to help and he said, 'I can spray your throat with cocaine and that will fix the problem, but you'll become addicted.' Then I overheard my manager say, 'I don't care what you do, just make her sing!'" Further, Bryant hated the men, often gangsters, who frequented the clubs in which she worked.

 She was once beaten in her dressing room after rejecting a man's advances. Her disenchantment with the drug and gangster subcultures, combined with pressures from her management, led Bryant to quit performing late in 1955.

Devoting herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Bryant enrolled in Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. Ebony published a feature article in its May 1956 issue entitled "The New World of Joyce Bryant: Former Café Singer Gives Up $200,000-a-year Career to Learn to Serve God".

 Traveling for years through the South, Bryant grew angry when she saw hospitals refuse care for those in critical need because they were black.[11] As a result, she organized fundraisers for blacks to buy food, clothing, and medicine, and she continued to put on concerts – wearing her natural black hair and no makeup – to raise money for her church.

She met frequently with Martin Luther King, Jr.–a fan of her singing–to support his efforts to bring basic material comforts to blacks. Bryant believed the struggle for civil rights to be the struggle for all people who believed in God, but when she confronted her church, asking it to take a stand against discrimination, the church refused with the reasoning, "But these are of earthly matters and thus of no spiritual importance."

Disillusioned, Bryant returned to entertaining in the 1960s and trained with vocal teacher Frederick Wilkerson at Howard University, which led to her winning a contract with the New York City Opera.

 She also toured internationally with the Italian, French, and Vienna Opera companies. She returned to performing jazz in the 1980s and began a career as a vocal instructor, with such clients as Jennifer Holliday, Phyllis Hyman, and Raquel Welch. A documentary, entitled Joyce Bryant: The Lost Diva, is in the works.

Every now and then, in a world of junk architecture ....

The beauty of black and white

Photo © Victor Dallons

Scotland, Photo by William Reed, 1921.j

Antonio Canova: Look at this, how magnificent this is. I need this. In what is often a stupid and crass world, I need this.

Roy Lichtenstein photographed by Dennis Hopper.

which is why I refuse to wear a Goddamned mask or call looters "protestors"

As a conservative and a parent (of older children) it troubles me that my government hasn't FORCED private business to do something to help parents with young children. How will the middle class grow without their support?

1926~“Antigone” play at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Athens

I use to enjoy television when it was used to entertain, but those days my friend, are long gone.

They burned and looted the city, these morons helped them. 

Grace, beauty, discipline and talent.

Thomas Lund in Napoli (Royal Danish Ballet).

This is how a friend greeted me at his house the other day

Here and now

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this." Henry David Thoreau

Well, maybe not in bed, but I'm sticking around the house.

The written word...

Came across this list recently....

 ENGLISH PROVERBS

A brave retreat is a brave exploit.

A carper can cavil at anything.

A carrion kite will never make a good hawk.

A child is better unborn than untaught.

A custom more honored in the breach than in the observance.

A dogmatical tone, a pragmatical pate.

A diligent scholar, and the master’s paid.

A dog’s life, hunger and ease.

A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther of the two.

A fair field and no favor.

A fault confessed is half redressed.

A fine new nothing.

A fool always comes short of his reckoning.

A fool will not be foiled.

A forced kindness deserves no thanks.

A good cause makes a stout heart and a strong arm.

A good name keeps its lustre in the dark.

A grain of prudence is worth a pound of craft.

[214]

A great city, a great solitude.

A honey tongue, a heart of gall.

A man may buy gold too dear.

A man must sell his ware at the rates of the market.

A man never surfeits of too much honesty.

A nod for a wise man, and a rod for a fool.

A penny saved is a penny got.

A wicked book is the wickeder because it cannot repent.

A wager is a fool’s argument.

All complain of want of memory, but none of want of judgment.

All the craft is in the catching.

An unpeaceable man hath no neighbor.

Antiquity is not always a mark of verity.

As wily as a fox.

Better lose a jest than a friend.

Better to go away longing than loathing.

By ignorance we mistake, and by mistakes we learn.

Children are certain cares, but uncertain comforts.

Clowns are best in their own company, but gentlemen are best everywhere.

Conscience cannot be compelled.

Cutting out well is better than sewing up well.

Danger and delight grow on one stock.

Decency and decorum are not pride.

Different sores must have different salves.

Dexterity comes by experience.

Do not spur a free horse.

Even reckoning makes long friends.

Every age confutes old errors and begets new.

Every man hath a fool in his sleeve.

Faint praise is disparagement.

Force without forecast is of little avail.

From fame to infamy is a beaten road.

Great businesses turn on a little pin.

Great spenders are bad lenders.

He is lifeless that is faultless.

[215]

Heaven will make amends for all.

Let your purse be your master.

Idleness is the greatest prodigality in the world.

Ignorance is a voluntary misfortune.

It is a wicked thing to make a dearth one’s garner.

Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.

Self-love is a mote in every man’s eye.

Sloth is the key to poverty.

Some sport is sauce to pains.

Subtility set a trap and caught itself.

Temporizing is sometimes great wisdom.

The goat must browse where he is tied.

The poet, of all sorts of artificers, is the fondest of his works.

The prick of a pin is enough to make an empire insipid.

The purest gold is the most ductile.

There’s a craft in daubing.

Thrift is good revenue.

Too much consulting confounds.

Truth needs not many words, but a false tale a large preamble.

Truths too fine-spun are subtle fooleries.

Upbraiding turns a benefit into an injury.

Use your wit as a buckler, not as a sword.

What God made, he never mars.

When honor grew mercenary, money grew honorable.

Where vice is, vengeance follows.