Wednesday, June 11, 2014

President Lyndon Johnson: LBJ as a boy, circa 1915

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Ed.

This is a fascinating photo of LBJ as a youth.  As a wise man once said, "the child is the father to man. . ."


click to enlarge
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Monday, June 09, 2014

Shakespeare quote of the day - Lord Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost



"Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation:
I do forswear them."
--Lord Berowne from "Love's Labour's Lost" (Act V, sc. 2)

A Georgia O'Keefe style cave or fissure - Life imitates art

Context & photographer unknown.

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Sunday, June 08, 2014

Spatter painting

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge
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Neil Young's album "A Letter Home," recorded in a voice-a-graph recording booth

By Jack Brummet, Music Ed.

Neil Young recently recorded a collection of covers with Jack White on a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth at Jack White's Third Man's Nashville headquarters.  Yeah, the same kind of machine my dad recorded a voice letter home for his mom at some port in World War II.  These were still around when I was a kid.


The Voice-O-Graph is about the size of a phone booth, with a fairly crude microphone, and directly cuts grooves onto a 6" vinyl record.  You can only record 111 seconds on a disc, so obviously some of these tunes are spliced. I love the fuzzy warmth of these tunes, the scratching sound of the needle in the grooves, and hearing what old songs Neil decided to record (Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Tim Hardin, Willie Nelson, etc.). The sound is roughly equivalent to that on Harry Smith's amazing Anthology of American Folk Music. Neil describes it as "an unheard collection of rediscovered songs from the past recorded on ancient electro-mechanical technology that captures and unleashes the essence of something that could have been gone forever."

The funny thing about Young releasing a low-fi, mono (and no overdub) album like this is that he has spent the last few years developing the highest fidelity system yet for music reproduction—Pono—that delivers music at up to 30 times the resolution of an MP3.  His autobiography from last year goes into great detail on the Pono sound system, and he mentions over and over that even the modern CD only captures a fraction of the actual music recorded.


This is almost all Neil, but Jack White does vocals and piano on On The Road Again and vocals and guitar on  I Wonder If I Care As Much.


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Friday, June 06, 2014

Four poems

By Jack Brummet



A touch of evil

Darkness, after having been eliminated,
furtively obtrudes again.

Does the wind blow over the earth
or does it blow under heaven?
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Mission Statement

You don't need to see
A discounted cash flow analysis.

You only need to know
If the right people are in your pocket,

And, if not, whom should be bought off,
Scared off, or bumped off?
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"I contain multitudes"

We all have a platoon
Of partly-contained

Spooky and multiple personalities
Ready to burst

From the confines
Of our clown car.
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We need to put our fingers in the dike

I mostly believe otherwise,
But on a bad news day,
It's like we're not all in this together,

That we are just the latest revision
Of a complex species
Drawn together in a social order 

That masks our genetic disposition
And puts the lie to any notion
Of compassion, altruism, and love.
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Fidel Castro lays a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial (with footnote on Guerrillero Heroico)

By Jack Brummet, Latin America Ed.

In April 1959, Alfredo Korda [1]  shot this photograph of Fidel Castro, the new leader of Cuba, laying a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial.

This image is copyrighted. The copyright holder allows anyone to use it, provided it is not used to denigrate the Cuban revolution

Castro admired Abraham Lincoln and kept a bust of him in his office.  He once wrote about Lincoln's devotion “to the just idea that all citizens are born free and equal."
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[1] Korda also shot one of the most famous images of all timeGuerrillero Heroicothe shot of Ernesto Che Guevara at a memorial.  According to the Wikipedia page about this photo, "To take the photo, Korda used a Leica M2 with a 90 mm lens, loaded with Kodak Plus-X pan film. In speaking about the method, Korda humbly remarked that  'this photograph is not the product of knowledge or technique. It was really coincidence, pure luck.' "


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An air kiss from Mayor Rob Ford

By Mona Goldwater, Gestures Ed.

It's Friday! Blow someone a kiss. Hey, if Mayor Ford can do it. . . 


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