Maggie's Farm

A new Tom Lehrer DVD. The promo video with interview isn't embeddable, but it's here.

A new Cormac McCarthy, The Road. I didn't realize he had a new one (h/t, SDA). I read all of his stuff. Does he still live in a fleabag motel in New Mexico?

Everything is as green as can be, and my Wisteria is coming into bloom. Yes, the big bridge is washed out but I am fairly sure it is getting fixed.

Entropy rules, but we do the best we can.

After church yesterday, Mrs. BD and I decided to do an inspection tour of our church cemetery. We noticed that the columbarium was in bad shape, and that some good friends had bought a nice modest granite stone for their plot. I hope they do not need it anytime soon. We also noticed that the grass is getting high and the dandelions and weeds are everywhere, but that's as it should be in a New England graveyard.

When I got home, I learned that one of my good tennis buddies had dropped dead last week, where he would have wanted to do it, on the tennis court. He had a slick, tricksy game, wonderful tennis exhuberance, and near-perfect technique: no flash, but steady as a rock. He was a professional wordsmith too.

Too soon, my friend, but that is the right way to depart. Now, nobody is left who is willing to give me those special sarcastic critiques of my flubbed shots.

I wondered about them, anyway:

The history of the guitar in America. The six-string guitar was considered so easy to play that every stableboy could play it.

The history of the banjo. For me, the Banjo has an ominous, menacing sound. But maybe that is just me.

Photo is an 1840 French guitar from this restorer's website

Adjusting one's insides is a lot tougher than changing one's outsides. A good post on psychotherapy: Change. One quote:

...why see a therapist? Because it is very difficult to see yourself clearly. Just as a camera cannot photograph itself except in reflection, the kinds of changes that are the heart of therapy need someone to serve as a mirror, as someone who can see and hear you without having an agenda about or for you, someone who can be caring and brutal. I can't think of anyone I know who has done that without help, including myself.

Therapy isn't about being happy, it's about honestly knowing who you are, and then picking a suitable life.

Also, a Psychiatric Manifesto via blue to blue 

Excellent, from Daniel Pipes: In Europe, Remorse Has Turned to Masochism. He nails it. One quote:

... it is Europe’s very readiness to acknowledge its faults that prompts self-hatred, for societies that do not engage in such introspection do not lacerate themselves. Europe’s strength is thus its weakness. Although the continent has “more or less vanquished its monsters,” such as slavery, colonialism, and fascism, it chooses to dwell on the worst of its record. Thus his book’s title, The Tyranny of Guilt. The past, with its violence and aggression, is frozen in time, a burden Europeans expect never to throw off.

Related, Sowell's Misusing History: Inhumanity, like humanity, is universal.

We saw this play in NYC a year or two ago, but now it's back in town at the Westside Theater: The Screwtape Letters.

It is straight from CS Lewis' book. Mrs. BD's lady's Alpha group is going to see it together.

"After a century of épater le bourgeois, why on earth can’t le bourgeois épater l’artiste primitif? And why is the bourgeois and reactionary management of the Museum of Modern Art stifling the artistic creativity of its customers?"

I posted this early Sunday morning:

Farm chores for my aging parents regularly pull me away from church, but this morning we trek down to NYC to meet the pup at Gascogne for a cheap brunch (I'll have the mussels - I always do when they are on a menu - and a healthy and organic Bloody Mary) before treating her to Paul Taylor ll's final day at the Joyce.

Mrs. BD is a big Taylor fan. Our blog pal Neoneo loves Taylor too. Despite being married to a dancer/choreographer for about 100 years, I remain a bit of a dance agnostic. I always did like Merce Cunningham, though, and Meredith Monk. Very quirky.

Follow-up:

It was a wonderful program from the Paul Taylor ll (the 80 year-old Taylor's 6-person touring company), but I would have been fine just seeing Esplanade. In fact, just one dance is really all my brain can process in one day. Powerful stuff, Esplanade. Substantial. Recklessly physical and driven by physical momentum, romance, and gravity and, as I sometimes say about some dances, a poem without words - or like a dream. Mrs. BD could discuss it endlessly; how his Graham background evolved and how ballet training is essential to modern dance, etc., but I lack the skill, the words, and the knowledge. The dance is in my head, though, along with the Bach.

Brunch was good, too. Free Bloody Marys. And it is always a treat to spend some time with the Bird Dog pupette Wall Streeter who returned to work after the performance. Those folks work on weekends, keeping the engines of capitalism humming so that people have money to support Paul Taylor.

I stumbled onto Myron Magnet's fine 2003 essay of the above title. Magnet says that good writing is about higher and deeper truths than "knowledge," "information," or "data" can provide, and I agree of course.

One quote:

What’s wanted is wisdom: the ability to see into the heart of things. This is the kind of knowledge that Plato describes so poetically in that most literary of all philosophical passages, the allegory of the cave: the knowledge that sees through the world of appearances to the Truth, of which the appearances are but an emanation—a knowledge that requires a lifetime of reason and study to attain but that comes finally in a flash of intuition, because the Truth is in us, in an inner nature we can glimpse by introspection and intuition, as well as in the world. And this is the knowledge—a knowledge, one might say, that resides in our souls as well as in our minds—that great literature embodies.

He includes a smack-down of the one-dimensional pomo critics, but that's far from his main point.

And since Magnet mentions Cosi Fan Tutte so often in his piece, here's the truly ridiculous and lovely Act 1 Finale, in which the cheating suitors fake committing suicide to re-engage their girlfriends:

I have always thought that Cape Dory made fine boats.This pretty 33' Cape Dory is for sale.

I know The Barrister has fond memories of the old Bar Cars on The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad (now Metro-North). I have some such memories, also.

People smoking and drinking Scotch, and the bow-tied, white-jacketed bartender who knew everybody's choice. A cozy cheerful place on the 6:14 from Grand Central. A smoke-filled decompression chamber between work and home.

The famously alcohol-fueled and adultery-fueled bar car on the branch line from Stamford up to New Canaan and Ridgefield, CT used to have their own web site, but I can't find it now.

Photo below from the NYT photo essay. I never saw a bar car like that one, though. In my time, usually more packed with people (including chic gals and MILFs on their way home from shopping and hair-dos at Kenneth's) and so full of fragrant and wholesome tobacco smoke that you couldn't see from one end to the other.

Addendum: A reader has kindly sent us a Bar Car site

Walter Ostanek, Canada's Polka King:

Here. A few comments:

1. Watch that Speed Dating video
2. Don't get the wrong idea from the comments - Merc and I do not watch this show together - it just turns out we both watch it. Merc and I never watch TV together.
3. House's character is Sherlock Holmes (get it? House - Holmes). Holmes, you will recall, was an addict too, who did not tolerate fools gladly and who had his own sidekick, Dr. Watson (Dr. Wilson-Dr. Watson).
4. Hugh Laurie does a pretty good American accent, doesn't he?
5. There are plenty of Docs with brains and arrogant, prickly personalities like House (minus the addiction). Rarely in private practice, though. House's bedside manner, or lack thereof, would not work. He is not Dr. Marcus Welby.