OLD DOGS AND CHILDREN AND WATERMELON WINE

Funny? how life deals you some crappy,hands? my old dog, Died, just last week..
....then I..hear this song on the radio....

Haikku

江戸の雨何石呑んだ時鳥

えどのあめなんごくのんだほとゝぎす

edo no ame nan goku nonda hototogisu

how many gallons

of Edo's rain did you drink?

cuckoo

[Issa]

Miami Beach

                                                                                 Mann!

SAMUEL CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) (1835-1910)

http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/oal/lit5.htm

Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway's famous statement that all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author's towering place in the tradition.
 Early 19th-century American writers tended to be too flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious -- partially because they were still trying to prove that they could write as elegantly as the English. Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice.
 Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm.

For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Thus it was profoundly liberating and potentially at odds with society. The most well-known example is Huck Finn, a poor boy who decides to follow the voice of his conscience and help a Negro slave escape to freedom, even though Huck thinks this means that he will be damned to hell for breaking the law.

Twain's masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the Mississippi River village of St. Petersburg. The son of an alcoholic bum, Huck has just been adopted by a respectable family when his father, in a drunken stupor, threatens to kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck escapes, feigning his own death. He is joined in his escape by another outcast, the slave Jim, whose owner, Miss Watson, is thinking of selling him down the river to the harsher slavery of the deep South. Huck and Jim float on a raft down the majestic Mississippi, but are sunk by a steamboat, separated, and later reunited. They go through many comical and dangerous shore adventures that show the variety, generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationality of society. In the end, it is discovered that Miss Watson had already freed Jim, and a respectable family is taking care of the wild boy Huck. But Huck grows impatient with civilized society and plans to escape to "the territories" -- Indian lands. The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic American success myth: the open road leading to the pristine wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of "civilization." James Fenimore Cooper's novels, Walt Whitman's hymns to the open road, William Faulkner's The Bear, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road are other literary examples.

Flowers in America

For My Mum,xxx.



for any Steel Guitar, fans...like me..I, also love the lyrics...

God, Bless America....

Nietzsche, was wrong about Liverpool.

'that which does not kill you, only makes you stronger'---[Nietzsche]

                 Nah. You are wrong Nietzsche. That's why you are Dead.

Anyone who thinks otherwise, must be God.

Take the Long Way Home Roger Hodgson with Orchestra

Jefferson

http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/french-revolution

Some Americans, notably George Washington, never forgot that the motive of King Louis XVI in sending officers to serve in the American Revolution was not devotion to anti-monarchical principles but a plan to regain territory that had been lost to England after the Seven Years War. For this reason, Washingtonsought to keep America nonaligned between England and France by maintaining a policy of neutrality. French commercial losses suffered during the war strained diplomatic relations, butAlexander Hamilton's efforts to repay on a regular basis the debts incurred to France helped establish cordiality. Many Frenchmen found models for French social reform in American institutions.Lafayette was a pivotal figure in this enchantment with liberal ideals. In his library on the Rue de Bourbon, he displayed a picture frame, half of which contained the Declaration of Independence, and the other half empty. When asked about the empty half, Lafayette replied that it would hold the "French declaration of rights."^[2]

Jefferson saw the stirrings of discontent with the established church and state as natural consequences of the example America had set in its state and federal constitutions. Even if Jefferson did not at first see America as the torchbearer of liberty to the world, his experience in France gradually convinced him of the world-ranging implications of the political creed he penned in the Declaration of Independence in 1776.^[3] When the Bastille fellin 1789, Lafayette-recognizing the indebtedness of the French Revolution to Americans-sent the key of that prison toWashington. Jefferson, who had recently returned from France to become Secretary of State (Lafayette was at this farewell dinner in Paris), was actually more enthusiastic about the revolution than was France's minister to America, Jean Baptiste de Ternant. Jefferson thought the French experiment would confirm the American one and possibly spread to other parts of the world. When the National Assembly in France, conscious of the model offered by the Declaration of Independence, issued Lafayette'sDeclaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, it was supposed to be adaptable to any country. Jefferson's political advice at this time was to persuade Louis XVI to issue a charter of rights-a modest proposal that would have left the monarchy intact.

Only after his return to America in 1789 did Jefferson's rhetoric about the revolution become more heated, largely as a symbolic aspect of his larger domestic battles with Hamilton, whom Jefferson saw as an anglophile. Hamilton, like Jefferson, thought French republicanism would spread to other countries, but he thought the prospect to be destabilizing. He warned Washingtonthat any new government in France would not have the same claim upon America as had the one that actually supplied help to America in its time of crisis. Jefferson argued that people can alter their form of government without giving up prior claims to other nations. Meanwhile, by 1790 a propaganda war had broken out over the future of the French Revolution. Thomas Pain wroteThe Rights of Man in response to Edmund Burke's defense of ancient establishments in Reflections on the Revolution in France.Jefferson recommended Paine's book to its American publisher as an answer to the controversy that had arisen in America over the French Revolution. When Jefferson's recommendation was published, he had to apologize for what was taken to be an attack on Vice-President John Adams' Discourse on Davila, a work in which Adam's denounces France's experiments with freedom.

Because reports of events came slowly to America, there were great misunderstandings on all sides of the debate. In 1792, the news that France had declared war on the alliance of kings led Jefferson to believe that France had been forced to take pre-emptive steps. He was not aware that Lafayette had concluded that his government was out of control. While leading French troops against the Austrians, Marquis de Lafayette had defected from the army. His letters from jail posed delicate problems for an administration that wanted to help an old ally without committing America to either of the sides Lafayette had already taken. Jefferson pinned his hopes on Brissot de Warville, a leader of the Girondin faction, who spoke of "our" revolutions and republics (Washington deleted "our" from one of Jefferson's documents addressed to France, however.) The execution of aristocrats by popular tribunals led to nervous arguments in America and Jefferson's famous letter on which he falls into arguing that the revolution's glorious ends justified apocalyptic means: "My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to the cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is."^[4]

When Jefferson wrote these words, he did not know that Louis XVI had been executed on January 21, 1793. By the end of the year, Jefferson's feelings about revolutionary France had cooled, mainly because of the embarrassing efforts of Genet to undermineWashington's neutrality policy-efforts Jefferson thought might discredit him and his allies. Jefferson later denounced the atrocities of Robespierre; he wrote that he would have voted for removing the king but not for killing him. The notorious XYZ Affair, whereby Talleyrand and the French Directory attempted to exact tribute from American diplomats, further alienated him from the Jacobins' successors. Thomas Paine had even tried to arrange to have Louis XVI conducted into exile in America. Americans began to realize that revolution meant one thing in a country deposing its ruler and another in colonies seceding from an empire. The death of the king raised the stakes of this revolution, for its sympathizers as well as its participants.

 Jefferson concluded that the French people were not yet "virtuous" enough to accept a sudden republicanism after so many years of superstition and despotism and that Louis XVI could have been retained as a limited monarch, thus staving off "those enormities which demoralized the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy, millions and millions of its inhabitants."^[5]

ART

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.


Herman Melville.

Around Town...

I love this Song...

The Bell Bird - Trio Los Paraguayos - Pajaro campana

Mike Nesmith - Rio

Logjammin'

David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture

Now in his seventies, David Hockney RA is characteristically breaking new ground to fill the vast spaces of his RA show with works on a colossal scale. He tells Martin Gayford why he is using the latest digital technology in innovative ways to tackle a subject that has preoccupied artists for centuries – nature

David Hockney RA declares, ‘The great thing to say is that this is not a retrospective.’ He is talking about his forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, ‘A Bigger Picture’, and he is absolutely correct. Although a few earlier works are included to provide context, essentially this is the opposite of a career overview. Of course, Hockney has been an enormously prolific and celebrated painter for half a century, and much of his earlier work – the cool images of Californian life from the mid-1960s, the grandly naturalistic portraits of the late 60s and early 70s, the photo-collages of the 80s – has already passed into the art history books. But this exhibition is not about that. It is a more unusual, indeed unprecedented, affair.

Almost the entire space of the main galleries at Burlington House will be filled with recent work by the 74-year-old artist: much of it made within the past four years, a good deal in the past 12 months. ‘These are some of the best rooms in London to hang very grand paintings,’ he says. ‘That’s what they were made for, that’s how the lighting was designed. It’s a fantastic opportunity, and I think I’ve responded to it.’

David Hockney, 'Winter Timber', 2009. Oil on 15 canvases, 274.32 x 609.6 cm. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson. © David Hockney

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-magazine/winter-2011/david-hockney-a-bigger-picture,315,RAMA.html

RA Magazine Winter 2011

Issue Number: 113

Helpless