Being content,

as it says, I believe, in the Bhagavat Gita, that we ought to be, with that which comes with little effort--I have always been inclined to think that this noblest (considering its proveniance) of excuses for Sloth should, when extrapolated, contain the further meaning that we ought to be downright pleased as punch (nay, fuckin' thrilled) with that which comes with no effort at all:  as when we win a lottery that somebody else has bought us the ticket for (like, for example, Babette's winning lottery ticket in Babette's Feast).   And I can think of several (at least two) such occasions in my charm'd life which illustrate this [the infinite, yet perfect, gratuitousness of Divine Providence].  But that is for another time...I actually began this morning's blog with some notion of its being a logical, if somewhat whumsical, sequel to the last written entry, in that it should be similarly based  on the unanticipated provision of unguessably good chicory coffee.  Having come (through the divine agency of Douglas Camuso, who loaned me his foodstamps against my promise of repayment at the first of the month in cash, with interest) into a sufficiency (a 15 oz. can) of Café du Monde chicory-and-coffee to see me through the end of the month, with an assured two heaping tablespoons brew per morning--I yet faced the prospect, when my meager supply of milk ran out, of having to drink it iced, with just barely enough sugar, but sadly, not au lait.  And I doubted, frankly, that it would--or could--be adequately delicious.  O me of little faith!  The last couple of days have proven that Café du Monde Chicory And Coffee, with sugar only and no milk, iced, is (Ta da!) exquisite.

Except that the horns of the moon's crescent are pointing the wrong way in this image, this really is the beauteous spectacle that greets us these days at dawn--and is a perfect complement to the crowing of a feral rooster, the expectant baying of dogs (in the dog pound next door), and this giant-size, steaming, fragrant bowl of chicory-coffee au lait.  Ah, is this not happiness? 

I am thinking that what would be more perfect, and even greater happiness, would be to send my credit card number to the folks at the C.S. Steen Syrup Mill in Abbeville, Louisiana, and have them ship to me several cans of their fine cane syrup, which is so extra-specially good in chicory-coffee au lait.

Mozart - Le Nozze di Figaro - D'Arcangelo, Damrau (part 1/2)

Mozart: Die Zauberflöte (Pape, Damrau, Groves, Grundheber, Gerhaher)(2006)

Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Barenboim, Chéreau, 2007) (complet - ST de-...

Kathleen Battle - Myself I Shall Adore 04 / 16

Renee Fleming & Joyce DiDonato "Ah guarda sorella" Cosi fan tutte

Chance Encounters

So, boarding the bus around 5:00 p.m., I headed towards my usual evening meal at the 'Animal Shelter' (homeless men's shelter), carrying with me to read on the way my latest Maigret detective novel, La Jeune Morte, which I had nearly finished--and, by dint of reading ceaselessly during the first jaunt on the #1 bus, and continuing through the ten minutes' halt at the bus transfer point, and on till about halfway through the second and last jaunt on the #20 bus--where, with mingled regret and satisfaction, I came to the end of the book.  I woke as from a dream and found myself sitting next to a  charming, blond 'young' woman in her late thirties, notably well-groomed and chic for all her touristy déshabille, who was looking right into my eyes and smiling.  I found myself saying to her--blurting rather--as if we'd just been having an ongoing conversation, "I have just read the most wonderful detective novel!"  And without missing a beat, she answered,

"Et vous l'avez lu en français?"

"Bien sûr.  C'est très bien écrit.  Mais--Vous êtes française?"

And so, for the three remaining minutes of my ride, my newfound friend and I talked about Simenon and the Maigret detective novels, and how truly, densely idiomatic they are, and difficult for foreigners, and where she (I never did learn her name) was from exactly:  "Niort--entre Bordeaux et Nantes."

So, this morning, first Googling (before even checking my email), I find that Niort, of which before last night I had never heard, is the birthplace of two very interesting people:  (1) Mme. de Maintenon and (2) Santiago de Liniers y Bremond (July 25, 1753 -- August 26, 1810), Cavalier of the Order of San Juan, Cavalier of the Order of Montesa, Captain in the Spanish Royal Navy, whose life, and death, is the tragic and heroic story of the Argentine War of Independence and the resistance of the tragic and heroic Argentine people to the two (count 'em) British Invasions.  And I had thought that the Opium Wars were pretty much the extent of British 19th century iniquity.  Hah! 

Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A major K622 - Julian Bliss.

Mozart - Symphony No. 29 in A, K. 201 [complete]

Th

In the Heavens...

Our especially brilliant Morning Star these days is Venus, nearly at its westernmost "elongation" (i.e., distance from the sun), which will, for this year, actually occur sometime tomorrow.  Precious, argotic astronomers always give their Mother-Latin a twist, to make her mean what they mean--lest, I suppose, the world forget, that there would be no vast, austere body of impersonal, absolute astronomical knowledge without the devoted formulative groundwork of individual--quirky, and sometimes even cute, though of course entirely self-effacing--particular astronomers.  The wonder is that any female astronomers at all have mastered the ceremonial linguistic flutings and flutterings of the Noble Science.  

Referencing now our Google doodle for this date, a major minimalist work by one Agnes Martin, whose 102nd birthday it is (or would be if she had not died ten years ago) today, and who called herself an "abstract expressionist."   There are Imperial shills, stooges and lickspittle whores (art critics and pundits made fashionable by the New York Times) who may claim to see in her work the genius and skill equivalent of a Mary Cassatt or a Berthe Morisot, and who will call my derisive hoots and rude guffaws, jeers and sneers--at the fatuous absurdity of such a comparison--philistine.   I find that reassuring.  

O Angelic Art!

Some thirty or forty years ago, having much reflected upon, and closely listened to, music [There was, at about the same time, a sweet, comely and not unintelligent young man who, having observed me listening to music on the radio, said to me wonderingly, "Nobody listens to music with such rapt attention as you do!"] I said (to myself, and later repeated in conversation with friends), definitively, "Music is the progressive revelation, or the logical demonstration, of the occult (or not immediately apparent) relationships, or relative resonance, among musical tones."  I was thinking primarily of the Well Tempered Clavier when I said that, but, when I thought about it, it seemed equally well to apply to the puzzling enharmonics of Chopin mazurkas, to the voluptuous/ethereal love/death of Tristan und Isolde, to the haunting "dissonance" of K. 465, and to the Depiction of Chaos as imagined by Haydn at the beginning of The Creation--as well as to all the less problematic, more simply beautiful, but no less profound, music written before and since those peculiarly enigmatic masterpieces.  Impossible as it is for the amusic--and for those haplessly deafened and desensitized by the Molochean trumps and timbrels into which our neo-Carthaginean imperium has, with hideous clangor (as though to drown out the shrieks of immolated children) popularly devolved--to imagine, for those (few though they be) with ears to hear, there is an element of surprise, always renewed and always gratified, in even the simplest of great music; of something proposed, and of something neatly (or wittily, or interestingly) resolved.  And it's something you're aware of and can talk to other people, with similar awareness, about--or you're not aware of it, and you cannot be argued or reasoned or shamed into an awareness of it.  A good example in the modern world is Haydn quartets:  If you find them boring, you're in numerous company.  So do most people.  And God, how you all bore me!  As well, of course, as appall, disgust and infuriate me.

Mozart - Clarinet Quintet in A, K. 581 [complete]

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Mozart - String Quintet No. 4 in G minor, K. 516 [complete]

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W. A. Mozart: String Quintet in E-flat, K. 614 (Hausmusik)

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Mozart / String Quintet No. 5 in D major, K. 593

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Mozart - String Quintet No. 3 in C, K. 515 [complete]

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Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K503 (Paul Lewis Piano, BBC Pr...

Ave verum corpus- William Byrd

Rameau, Platée, La Folie !

Rameau, Platée, Scène de La Folie

G.F. HANDEL. Ariodante: Dopo notte

G.F. HANDEL. Ariodante: Scherza infida

Tempesta di mare: Simone kermes / Luca Mares & Venice Baroque Orchestra

Cecilia Bartoli, Sacrificium. (+playlist)

Further Reflexions on Civilisation

The thing about civilisation is that it doesn't happen in any order or logical progression.  Sometimes, as with the Romans and the Harappans and the Aztecs, it begins thousands of years ahead of itself, and when it collapses, or is conquered and overrun, it leaves the world wondering and bemused and utterly perplexed about what might have been its great driving concepts and achievements.   What the Aztecs achieved with their careful garbage collection and waste management--and the punctilious fulfillment of what they took to be their religious obligations--was simply ignored, never thought twice about, by stout Cortez and all his men, who proceeded, once they had gained final, absolute, murderous control of the Mexique (the three or four per cent that was left of them), to foul the streets, shit in the water supply and, so far as they were able, without specially meaning to, to turn New Spain into a feculent semblance of the thoughtless, Stygian insanitation of Europe.

Of Harappan civilization, and its unprecedented ditching and draining directly into the Indus River--at least it got the sewage out of the house and on down to the edge of town--from what are nominated (by eager, suspectly anachronous archaeologists) bathing pools and flush toilets, we know essentially nothing...und daüber, penso io, sollten wir doch schweigen: nemmeno non sappiamo perchè non ci sono copie nelle civiltà ereditàrie....

Concerning ancient Roman civilisation--based on an amazing shared appetite for violent entertainment (or, as Gore Vidal finely said, on a fascination with murder) and an overwhelming desire (lust? fetish? need?) on the part of each and every Roman to spend at least four hours a day communally urinating and defecating (in constantly self-flushing communal toilets) and bathing nakedly together in pure, fresh, hot, tepid and cold water (the purest that could be brought from the calcareous Appenines to Rome, and from karst springs elsewhere), to which end, all their engineering and material resources (left over after the Games) was, by unanimous consensual approval, dedicated--we who have succeeded it are still stunned and dazzled by it, and fundamentally incredulous and uncomprehending of it.  Machiavelli, for all his idolization of his country's glorious past, never once, I think, mentions the Thermae, and pretty certainly has no concept of their significance.  So it was that when Attila the Hun cut the aqueducts in the year 456 Romans began to stink.  Then, of course, it was the least of their worries, but over the succeeding centuries they--worse than forgot--dimly half-remembered what it had been not to stink, until, by the first decades of the twentieth century, when Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas went on walking tours among them, "Italian" was synonymous with Garlicky Body Odor Overlaid with a Splash of Nauseating Perfume.  Then, in the 1990's a miracle happened:  Fast-recovery hot water heaters.  And, by the year 2001, much to the astonishment and delight of Americans and Northern Europeans--for the first time in 1,537 years, Italians ceased to stink.  Nay, they even smelled good.  It was as if the heavens had parted.

Like many another American in this the second decade of the Third Millennium,

I've been watching--binge-watching--television shows on Netflix on my computer.  Id est, I'm up most nights till early the next morning watching consecutive episodes of television shows.  Just now I'm about halfway way through the third season of Burn Notice.  I am also au courant with the latest episode of Arrow, which, disloyally, I watch on Hulu, along with the occasional exquisite movie--lately, the best flics I've seen have been Fargo, Babette's Feast and Strapped (which is, I believe, the only realistic, objective, yet sympathetic and insightful movie ever made about the life and loves of a young male prostitute).  'Tanyrate, I am delighted to be participating with my countrymen in a vast, popular cultural movement, which, 'tis said, must inevitably result in the demise of both television and television cable service as we know it.  Yea!  I hasten to say that I have not seen a single episode of House of Cards, Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad--nor will I ever, for I eschew moral insanity.