Sixty's talk about his beloved big bamboo put me in a mood for some vintage Cheech and Chong. Their second album, called "Big Bambu," hit the record shelves in 1972, just around the time I hit middle school. It was perfect puerile fodder for imitation. I used to know these skits by heart and could recite them doing all the voices. Good times.
The online presence of a number of commenters whose stories and opinions I’d been reading for years (more than ten for some of them) was suddenly gone. What followed was a lot of missing. Missing that included recall of some of the familiar memes and themes presented in the past; along with some recognizable moments in the present that appeared to tie in to the known interests, issues and concerns others had expressed. Among them, an Egyptian Cat, a Food Story (with pics) on Salt, a Recall of Butter Moments, along with other Signs and Wonders.
From there, thoughts on Egypt and Leave-taking brought me back to the story of the Israelite’s Exodus, where they reached the desert part of their journey and started to remember with longing some of the good left behind, to include memories of the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic they’d enjoyed while enslaved. This happened while they were experiencing the ongoing and everyday sameness of daily provision received in the seemingly miraculous form of manna. The story, recorded in Numbers 11, is intriguing. Even though Moses and Yahweh both start off on the same page, Moses reaches the end of his rope first, and lets fly with the ancient version of “Just kill me now if this is how it’s going to go!”, while Yahweh responds to the grumbling, discouragement and lack of trust with “What? You think my arm is too short?” When all is said and done, a solution (albeit with consequences) involving a different kind of provision is found, and the journey continues on toward the Promise of Something More in the face of loss and change.
I experienced something similar this week after coming across the addition of an emailed comment on a recent Althouse post. It was written by someone whose opinions I’d come to regard as thoughtful and thought-provoking over the years. And finding it brought back a sense of familiar connection; while also providing meat from the sky with the recommendation of a new book out, written by a 95 year old German theologian, entitled Resurrected to Eternity: On Dying and Rising.
Fifteen years ago, following my younger brother’s death from blood clots and anaphylactic shock after taking a newly approved antibiotic (one later given three black box FDA warnings), I was left looking for a way to process that death and loss. At that point, the religious teachings I’d received and held in the past left me with more questions than answers. And that prompted me to set aside the boxed set of what I thought I knew and believed, and start looking for more. I started by reading collected accounts of Near Death Experiences from a variety of people with different backgrounds and religious beliefs. Then, with the impending death of my mom coming down the pike, I expanded that reading to books about death written by doctors, nurses and hospice workers, which meshed with some of the mysteries and oddities I encountered with her, including her conversations with deceased loved ones just prior to the start of morphine and her passing.
All of this to say, I ordered the book in the hope it might hold a helpful thought or two to consider, and possibly add to the collection of beliefs, experiences and hopes I now hold. If it doesn’t, I’ll set it out as meat for another to try by leaving it in the Little Library Box near the studio.
The expression on the face of the embalmed Egyptian cat below, who appears to be looking for the next box to jump into in the Great Beyond, portrays how I’ve often felt in my own search for more on that subject.
Wild ramps thrive in Wisconsin if you know where to look. I had the good fortune to be shown that healthy patch above. Ramps appear early, and the Indians showed the settlers the health benefits of eating the plant after a long hard winter. Ramps are sometimes called wild leeks and have a distinct garlicky flavor. I've used them in potato ramp soup, sautéed with butter and used whole uncooked leaves as a tasty hors d'oeuvre that riffed on bagna cauda.
So, ya think you're safe?
Ya had the shot(s).
Ya can go out and be with people.
WRONG!!!!!!!
In the latest in our series of posts for Mama, we bring you the real news about the shots.
Turns out they more dangerous than advertised. Just as legalizing marijuana has proven it's not just a harmless little high, so too is the latest on the "vaccines".
It's been found that mRNA vaccines, such as Pfizer and Moderna, could trigger Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and other neurological and cognitive degenerative diseases.
Add that to the fact that over 50 percent of the new cases of the Brown Bilharzia involve people who have already been vaccinated and you have a real indictment of the push for the shots.
You heard it here first.
I've loved that movie since I was a kid. I read the Gaston Leroux novel and paid respect to the Opera House when I first went to Paris. But I wasn't really into opera then.
Lon Chaney, Sr. was a gifted actor in his day -- probably the best actor in his day. If they had given out Oscars then, he'd have had a couple few.
I recall Chip Ahoy's reaction to Chaney's life story here. I don't recall who hear was first interested in ASL, Chip or Sixty. They both posted on it. They both knew it. How fascinating.
For winter's rains and ruins are over,And all the season of snows and sins;The days dividing lover and lover,The light that loses, the night that wins;And time remember'd is grief forgotten,And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,And in green underwood and coverBlossom by blossom the spring begins.
--A.G. Swinburne, Chorus from Atalanta in Calydon, 1865
The aria works for me on several levels:
It's Mozart -- who doesn't like Mozart?
The Italian libretto uses the 2nd person plural: voi che sapete...(ye who know). This looks like the second person singular (formal) in French: vous qui savez (you, sir, who know): French uses its second person plural vous form to address single people formally, while Italian reserves that pronoun -- voi = vous-- for addressing more than one person (second person plural). Italians use their third person (pronouns Lei and Lui) and corresponding verbs to address someone formally.
It seems that every European language -- whether derived from Latin or not -- chose a particular way to address strangers but especially royalty. The Germans took over their third person plural for this purpose: Wissen Sie (literally "They who know" is used to address one person; Greeks, like the French, use their second person plural; We, like the Italians use our third person singular verb form which you can see in vestigial English: "Does his majesty wish" (third person, singular). Anything but the familiar tu, du, thou's to address royals. If you think this is confusing, try holding all these in your head when playing polyglot.
The word nozze in Italian is intriguing. Where does it come from? The closest English cognate is nuptials.
Back to the aria itself. I should see "The Marriage of Figaro" before I die. I am a perfect candidate for enjoying opera, especially Italian. I have a good working knowledge of the language. Back when when I first studied it as my first foreign language at UW Madison, it was just me and a bunch of female music students in that class. Good times! I was just a local bumpkin -- not even matriculated -- trying to show off for those young women. That worked out well. But I always thought opera too highbrow for the likes of me. My sad loss.
Overheard at Lem's:
Some Seppo said...
We ate Imperial in the 60's. My guess is because it was cheaper than butter, not because of the Sturgeon General's fishy data.
My parents drove over the border to Illinois back then (we lived near Madison) to buy "colored oleo" which was yellow margarine. At the time, it was illegal to sell margarine that looked like butter in Wisconsin. Oleo margarine was especially high in trans fats because of the way it was made: Hydrogenating vegetable oil using a supported heterogenous catalyst essentially guaranteed it.
Remember all the margarine commercials back then?
And this was my personal favorite:
Overheard at Lem's:
My cousin recently visited our family plot in Kentucky and noted the same sort of thing - first, many, many children, many of whom never reached their majority, and kind an odd sense of family and communion with those who have gone before.
Under the way things go, coming across a mention a year ago at the Althouse blog of a book that had just been published prompted me to order a hard copy. And that resulted in, How to be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz, arriving to reside in my art studio as part of a stack of books I randomly pick up to read before I begin painting. It’s also how the photo a-TOP this post came to be here as part of my ongoing Considerations of Unfairness, stirred by a recent post on the subject at Levity.
On the Good Friday before Easter (and the Advent of the Second Great Comment Shutdown at the Motherblog), I happened to sit down in the afternoon (after reading TY’s post on Unfairness as the Word of the Day) to open the Saltz book to a chapter entitled, “Picasso and Matisse at the Border”. In doing so I was exposed to something I hadn’t seen before, which involved the two different approaches to borders revealed by those two artists in their paintings. In Saltz’s words, subjects in Picasso's paintings “don’t run off the canvas. His figures and faces aren’t cut off. Almost every shape, body, plane, line, breast, anus, face, or form he painted fits within the four sides of the canvas.
His friend and rival, Henri Matisse followed no such classicism. In his paintings "legs and feet go off canvases, heads are cropped willy-nilly, elbows are cut off. Patterns shoot right past the edges of his work.”
Also mentioned was the painter Eric Fisch (whose work I hadn’t seen before), who describes “heaven” and “hell” compositions like this: “In heaven compositions, things are orderly, homogeneous. Priority is given to the whole over the parts. Hell composition is marked by chaos; it’s emulsifying, broken, textural and it can veer to extremes.”
Curious as to what types of compositions Fischl put together and painted, I looked him up on my phone to find numerous paintings of differently sized men and women in differently sized bathing gear, before landing on the painting posted at the head of this post. And when I did, I sat there sort of stunned for a moment. I felt intrigued and amazed, and a smile of wonder started to form as it dawned on me, I’d landed on an unusual and unique representation of unfairness that covered (and uncovered) a whole lot of ground! Ground that extended beyond the more obvious young to old man comparisons, and the loss of standing, vitality, potency and naivete that life and time (as evidenced by the worn watch?) can bring.
Painted in 2016, and entitled “Late America” that painting by Fischl was part of a collection supposedly done to invite awareness, or perhaps skewer or provoke a response regarding Trump- era Privilege. Five years later, when looked at in light of what’s transpired to bring us to 2021, an even later view of America can be considered with a touch of irony . Making me wonder what can be seen inside the border and what might be standing outside the border? A female Secret Service agent? A nippy dog? A seemingly endless line of undocumented immigrants awaiting for their chance to clip more hedges, straighten more pool chairs, or serve as paid-under-the-table care givers to children with teddy bears?
I had fun with this painting, enjoying the opportunity to consider the way one artistic representation can serve multiple purposes. And I wondered, "What do others see happening? What thoughts and/or feelings might this scene provoke or bring up today with regard to Late America in 2021?"
Loveliest of trees, the cherry nowIs hung with bloom along the bough,And stands about the woodland rideWearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,Twenty will not come again,And take from seventy springs a score,It only leaves me fifty more.And since to look at things in bloomFifty springs are little room,About the woodlands I will goTo see the cherry hung with snow.A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896
