Did I mention we just got back from Napa Valley?

The Fireballs......................................Bottle of Wine

 

An understatement...................

 

But I also think that it is important to separate out what is real from what is just a comforting lie that we tell ourselves.

-James O'Malley from his Music Just Changed Forever post

expanded horizons.......................

      I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer.  My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots.  William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .

Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people.  I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer.  I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor.  By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.

     Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers.  Anyway, writing is not a competition to me.  Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller.  I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Life Its Ownself.......................

 ...........the joys of parenting — and grandparenting:

The "Million Dollar Quartet"..................

My Sweetie and I ventured out to Newark's Weathervane Playhouse last evening.  On the bill was their final performance of Million Dollar Quartet.  (Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis all putting on a show for Sam Phillips at Sun Records).  Amazing doesn't quite do justice to the show. Special kudos to Connor Richardson for his impersonation of Jerry Lee Lewis.  Live theatre at its finest.

Opening sentences..................

 

I grew up under the Cantor's gaze.  The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born.  Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare.

-John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

thanks Kurt

harmony here and discord there.....

 

There's always a lesson to be learned

whether in a hotel bar

or over tea in a teahouse,

no matter which way it goes, 

for you or against,

what you want to hear or what you don't.

Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,

with two then three saxophones

in his mouth at once

and a kazoo, no less,

hanging from his neck at the ready.

Even in my youth I saw this

not as a lesson in keeping busy

with one thing or another,

but as a joyous impossible lesson

in how to do it all at once,

pleasing and displeasing yourself

with harmony here and discord there.

But what else did I know

as the waitress lit a candle

on my round table in the dark?

What did I know about anything?

-Billy Collins, The Five Spot, 1964

Making the music....................Part One

Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys...........God Only Knows

Making the music.....................Part Two

Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys...........God Only Knows