Sunday, March 30. 2008
I guess I am a bit of a Gilbert Munger (1830-1904) fan, although I cannot say that he had an entirely coherent body of work - but who does? Others of the Hudson River School achieved much more prominence, and one of Munger's claims to fame was spending a day sketching with Bierstadt, the master of the School. But Connecticut-born Munger did get around a bit, from Yosemite to Venice, his work evolved, and did not have the over-dramatic Victorian quality that Bierstat is sometimes accused of. But man, would I like to have a Munger over my office fireplace. The image is is Cazenovia Cornfield, but look at his pictures on the link - good stuff. This is his Lake Marian, Humboldt Range, Nevada, 1871: 
Saturday, March 29. 2008
 It says 1997, not 1998, on these fine cigars our friend Nathan sent me. Many interesting tart, sweet, funky, sexual, and multi-layered aged flavors in them. I like the 43 ring size, but my humidor is a bit too high on the humidity right now - I think. Stepped on the meter like a complete klutz and broke it a while ago, and I think it is like the Everglades in there right now, judging from the draw.
I did spill some water in there, too - don't ask. I think I will leave the thing open for a few hours to dry out a bit, and order another crappy $5 hygromificateristicalmeter. Got some fine tobaccy in there: I want it in perfect condition when Nathan visits from Jerusalem next month.
Jim Kweskin's Jug Band with Geoff Muldaur, 1963. Good stuff, but unfortunately without a video:
From The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature by Brian Boyd in The American Scholar (an excellent magazine, BTW). A quote: For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.
Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.
Read the whole thing.
Friday, March 28. 2008
 Canada's #1 Dating Site: Adult Moose Finder
Roger de H. advises: Make sure you plug in "man" seeking "interracial elk" from the drop down list. And check out the dropdown list for "Country"
The artist Samuel F. B. Morse (Phillips Academy and Yale) is better known as an inventor - and for Morse Code. This is his Niagara Falls from Table Rock (1813), owned by the MFA, Boston. 
Wednesday, March 26. 2008
Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire, 1940. The film is a bit washed out, but it's worth it.
Tuesday, March 25. 2008
Looks like my bedside table: Take Your Choice, 1885, oil on canvas, John Wilmerding Collection
Sunday, March 23. 2008
 Oh man, do I love getting my investment advice in the comments section of Maggie's Farm. It's Bretton Woods crossed with the Algonquin Roundtable around here.
If you huddle around our investment topic entries, a virtual hobo campfire, burning hyperinflated banknotes, appears in the comments. Everybody's nervously fingering their Mauser triggers and wondering what will happen if they're the first guy to fall asleep with a pocket full of Spanish Main money in their raggedy (but thank god, not leveraged or made in China) clothing. It's great fun. There are, as they say in the garden, a few hardy perennials. Let's have it one more time, for old time's sake: -There's going to be a run on banks! They'll run out of currency and you'll have to settle for deposit slips and lollipops! Um yeah, sure. There's $150,000 on your average mall ATM. But we're all going to be at the window at Mr.Potter's bank trying to get our doubloons before our neighbor does. Then we'll bury it in the yard! It'll be grand. -Buy gold! Gold I say! Yeah sure; of course it lost ten percent of its value last week, but hey, it recently passed the value it had - in 1980. Fantastic investment, that. You would have done better to hoard Member's Only jackets since then and sold them at flea markets near colleges now. You are laboring under the illusion that you're hoarding a superior sort of money, and all you've done is gone from being an equities investor, or a plain saver, to a commodity futures investor. And with all your money in one material. Profoundly dumb -- unless you're Hillary Clinton posting on the Internet under an assumed name. And the Internet doesn't work that way. Everybody is really a guy pretending to be a hot seventeen year old girl. -I bought loose diamonds! This is my favorite. I remember this one fondly since the first time I heard it on a low-rent golf course in the eighties. A guy wearing hand-me-down clothes telling you he's got all his money in "investment grade diamonds" that he knows how to sell in all the international hot-spots he read about in CondeNast in the dentist's office once. "You know," he says sotto voce while shanking a putt, "for when the really heavy sh*t comes down." Let's do an experiment in "investment grade" diamonds, (snerk) shall we? Buy one. Walk right back into the same place you bought it and talk to another clerk. Offer to sell it to him. He'll offer you 30% below wholesale. You paid retail. Of course, if the world turns to the Road Warrior (snerk) every fat housewife has a diamond, superior in every way to yours, (the skinny wives with big boobs have ten) and holds it simply for sentimental reasons. So in a real pinch, everybody sells theirs and your diamonds are less than worthless. And of course, you're assuming that even with running gun battles in the streets over the last Twinkie in the world, the diamond merchants will still be open. Maybe not. At any rate, it won't be a total loss -- you could make metal cut-off saw blades with your diamonds if you've got enough glue, I guess, and go into plumbing, which is an honest profession. I tell you what: let's test our hypothesis. Go into the same diamond store with a $100 fiat currency bill (oh noes! the debbil's money!). Ask as a favor if they'd break it into small bills so you can get money for the meter. Now go back in and give them all the small bills back and ask for your hundred. I doubt they'll offer you $30. But the doomsayers are probably right. You will save a lot of money on your water bill if you drink your own urine to wash down the Kruggerands you're eating in your bunker. I think we can all agree on that. I'm going to break with a long tradition of never offering anybody any advice. Here's mine: Happy Easter everybody! Use your worthless fiat currency to buy a great big ham and a bottle of wine! Enjoy! And God bless you, every one!
 From The Art Revolution in Cuba, in the WSJ, which begins:
John Crago, an agricultural exporter from Colorado, took a business trip to Cuba last spring. He came back with 60 paintings, from island landscapes to abstract works, rolled up in his carry-on luggage. With art from Asia and Russia in demand, some in the art world are betting on Cuba to be the next hot corner of the market. Prices for Cuban art are climbing at galleries and auction houses, and major museums are adding to their Cuban collections. In May, Sotheby's broke the auction record for a Cuban work when it sold Mario Carreño's modernist painting "Danza Afro-Cubana" for $2.6 million, triple its high estimate.
Photo of decaying Havana by Carlos Garaicoa, from the WSJ article Also interesting: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz. He creates things with everything from Bosco to shovels. Much of his stuff defies definition.
Wednesday, March 19. 2008
Tuesday, March 18. 2008
 Don't look at it. It will distract you from Maggie's Farm and cause you to waste time. There is only so much time in the day:
The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys.
Mini-daffodils, and Brant decoy. (That's a tall Schipka "Skip" laurel out the window.) 
Monday, March 17. 2008
Basket of Fruit, 1597. I note that this still life, and the previous one, both had flawed apples. Makes it more interesting. 
Sunday, March 16. 2008
- reposted from April, 2005
By guest author Shaun L. Kelly His distinct tenor, reassuring and cerebral, was the second-most heard male voice of my childhood. Only my father’s fixed baritone surpassed his as the soundtrack of my years growing up in the greater Boston area. For thirty-two summers - with discernible sagacity and style - Ned Martin served as the principal voice of the Boston Red Sox. In an age where humility and grace slowly receded from our national character, Martin’s modesty and elegance separated him from a host of other announcers – and people. He never intentionally developed a defined signature call for a homerun. The ball was simply “gone”. And yet, he used words as a composer uses the notes on a scale. He seemed to embrace the notion first put forth by Emerson “that every word was once a poem”. There was nothing ever “programmed” about Ned Martin. Cogent phrases seem to tumble from his mouth like falling stars. Unlike most sports announcers, Ned Martin was able to frequently quote from the most gifted bards of English literature - Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hemingway - in order to put the narrative of baseball into its proper context. He was a reader, and he brought a reader’s sensibility to each and every broadcast. Ned Martin was also a deeply-rooted theorist and philosopher. Because he had dipped into the bonfires of hell as a Marine at the close of the Second World War, Ned described each game as an inherent existentialist. Like his beloved Frost, he had a lover’s quarrel with the world. But Ned Martin was more than just a Red Sox announcer. To me, he served as a personal captain, steering me through the choppy waters of both youth and adolescence - guiding, nurturing, and instructing me as I listened intently, his most loyal and devoted student.
Read rest of piece below:
Continue reading "Thank you, Mr. Ned Martin"
Saturday, March 15. 2008
Saw it today, in NYC. See it, if you can. Well worth the trip. One heck of a cast.
 That's what my check-out gal said to me today at Home Depot. I inquired "How do you know to say that to me?" She said "Honey, I can just tell."
"God bless you too," I said, although He obviously already did. She found a hole in a manure bag, and ran off to get some tape to cover it, even though I didn't care. I spent $120 on cow manure, but I can get the bull's stuff "free" from the politicians which will cost me much more in the end...but it won't grow the stuff She Who Must Be Obeyed wants to grow. The BS from bulls - or cows - is far more useful to us, and smells better. I am mixing up a wholesome soil stew for boxes and planters. Pansies first, then the really good stuff in a while, after frost season if global cooling gives us a break.
Only two very short videos exist of Woody Guthrie performing. Here's one of them, from 1945:
 The family has always enjoyed The Cloister on Sea Island for cozy, comfy getaways. We will miss the old Cloister which felt like home to us, but the new building has opened and it looks good (photo). Their relatively new "Lodge," where I have also stayed, is splendid, and its bar is huge and plain wonderful for an apres golf gin Martini or two.
Their azaleas will be in their full glory soon, if not sooner. For decompression mental-health short and relatively inexpensive vacations (with great golf), it often comes down to a choice between The Cloister and Cambridge Beaches in Bermuda (assuming you know somebody with a Mid-Ocean Club membership). Both places guaranteed glitz-free zones - leave your jewelry at home - and thus Maggie's Farm types of places. Pearls at dinner are OK, but no tacky gold.
Friday, March 14. 2008
Creative destruction, the economists call it. In an unfettered free market, livelihoods are always in jeopardy from the possibility that other demands or desires might supersede your desire to continue in your job for your entire life. I had a rough and tumble job for a long time: logging. It was hard work, sometimes dangerous, but I liked being out in nature, in the company of those like myself. And I wasn't a Johnny-come-lately to logging. I am the last in a long line of loggers in my family. But technology, and the desire of many people who are concerned about the environmental impacts of my trade, keep such as I from working at the only thing I've ever known. The world has moved on, and I must accept that.
It's not that bad really. I could have fussed and protested. Some of my former workmates still go out and log illegally; partly for their daily bread, but mostly I suspect because it is ingrained in their very being. I've moved on. I submit to the will of the greatest amount of people, who use as their instrument the hidden hand of the market to signal me to do something different now. Please do not judge my efforts too harshly; though it's unlikely I'll ever get much better, I try as hard as I can in my new chosen profession.
Thursday, March 13. 2008
Do not look at photo on continuation page.
Continue reading "Horrible Accident"
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