The Guitar Gods - Jeff Beck: "Apache" / "Sleepwalk"

https://youtu.be/wlyunWX6Y9s

Tracy Chapman and Eric Clapton - Give Me One Reason (1999)

https://youtu.be/YIXh0JNvuHs

Tracy Chapman - Give Me One Reason (Official Music Video)

https://youtu.be/V6hQ9HSKlIE

Patience And Fortitude

The Rolling Stones "Midnight Rambler" Marquee Club 1971

https://youtu.be/G-bBhgMtPsc

The Spider And The Fly (Remastered 2002)

The Spider And The Fly (Remastered 2002)

https://youtu.be/GsojoK7M3qo

The Spider And The Fly (Remastered 2002) - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com › watch

Lyrics

Sittin', drinkin', sinkin', drinkin'

Wonderin' what I'd do when I'm through tonight

Smokin', mopin', maybe just hopin'

Some little girl will pass on by

Don't wanna be alone but I love my girl at home

I remember what she said (what she said)

She said, "my, my, my, don't tell lies,

Keep fidelity in your head

My my my, don't tell lies,

When you're done you should go to bed

Don't say hi, like a spider to a fly

Jump right ahead and you're dead"

Sit up, fed up, low down, go round

Down to the bar at the place I'm at

Sittin', drinkin', superficially thinkin'

About the rinsed-out blonde on my left

But then I said "hi" like a spider to a fly

Rememberin' what my little girl said

She was common, flirty, she looked about thirty

I would have run away but I was on my own

She told me later she's a machine operator

She said she liked the way I held the microphone

Then I said "hi" like a spider to a fly

Jump right ahead in my web

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Keith Richards / Mick Jagger

The Spider and the Fly lyrics © Abkco Music Inc.

 

Music should enrich the soul

 

“Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.”
— Bill Evans
b. 16 August 1929

Aretha with King Curtis, Jerry Jemmott, Cornell Dupree, Bernard Purdie

https://youtu.be/7nQpRhGdPZE

Brendan Behan

 

 

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse ~ Brendan Behan

Frederick Buechner (1926-2022)

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

 

"My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours."

 

Be Kind

"We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out leaves as it draws near. We can be kind to each other. We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen."

— The Clown in the Belfry

Listen to Your Life

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

Enjoy Life

"The world is full of suffering indeed, and to turn our backs on it is to work a terrible unkindness maybe almost more on ourselves than on the world. But life indeed is also to be enjoyed. I suspect that may even be the whole point of it. I more than suspect that is why all the sons of God shouted for joy when he first brought it into being."

"My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours."

— Telling Secrets

Listen to Your Life

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

— Now and Then

Enjoy Life

"The world is full of suffering indeed, and to turn our backs on it is to work a terrible unkindness maybe almost more on ourselves than on the world. But life indeed is also to be enjoyed. I suspect that may even be the whole point of it. I more than suspect that is why all the sons of God shouted for joy when he first brought it into being."

— Telling Secrets

Be A Good Steward of Your Pain

"Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows."

— The Clown in the Belfry

Jesus Is Crazy as a Coot

"If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully — the life you save may be your own — and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion."

— Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner

Pay Attention

"From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein. . .

"Literature, painting, music — the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things. . .

"And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces, but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in."

— Beyond Words: Daily Readings in The ABC's of Faith

Boredom, Should Be a Deadly Sin

"Boredom ought to be one of the seven deadly sins. It deserves the honor.

"You can be bored by virtually anything if you put your mind to it, or choose not to. You can yawn your way through Don Giovanni or a trip to the Grand Canyon or an afternoon with your dearest friend or a sunset. There are doubtless those who nodded off at the coronation of Napoleon or the trial of Joan of Arc or when Shakespeare appeared at the Globe in Hamlet or when Lincoln delivered himself of a few remarks at Gettysburg. The odds are that the Sermon on the Mount had more than a few of the congregation twitchy and glassy-eyed.

"To be bored is to turn down cold whatever life happens to be offering you at the moment. It is to cast a jaundiced eye at life in general, including most of all your own life. You feel nothing is worth getting excited about because you are yourself not worth getting excited about.

"To be bored is a way of making the least of things you often have a sneaking suspicion you need the most."

"To be bored to death is a form of suicide."

— Beyond Words: Daily Readings in The ABC's of Faith

Two Kinds of Church

"The visible church is all the people who get together from time to time in God's name. Anybody can find out who they are by going to church to look.

"The invisible church is all the people God uses for his hands and feet in this world. Nobody can find out who they are except God."

— Beyond Words: Daily Readings in The ABC's of Faith

Compassion

"Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it's like to live inside somebody else's skin.

"It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too."

— Beyond Words: Daily Readings in The ABC's of Faith

Doubts

"Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving."

— Beyond Words: Daily Readings in The ABC's of Faith

The Rich Cultural Bond of Movies

"In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together."

— Beyond Words: Daily Readings in The ABC's of Faith

Handkerchiefs Called Saints

"In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints."

— Beyond Words: Daily Readings in The ABC's of Faith

 

 

Frederick Buechner (1926-2022)

Remembering the writer of Christian devotional literature and ordained Presbyterian minister.

 

https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/explorations/teachers/view/18/frederick-buechner

Muddy Waters With Buddy Guy + Junior Wells ‎— Messin' With The Blues

https://youtu.be/IJIFNLjys-Q

Time

 

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• Two Kenneth Koch Poems About Time

TRAVERSING

Two Kenneth Koch Poems About Time

August 13, 2022Posted in Poetry One comment

When you’re young and of a certain un-Eeyore sensibility, each day dawns pregnant with possibility, and once you’ve stretched out and shaken off whatever thickness might linger from the previous night’s indulgences, you can easily enough conjure the “Work hard, Play hard” mantra displayed on t-shirts and billboards, assuring you that all of life is there for the taking if you’re just bold and desirous enough to grab its lapels.

Then you get older, and while you may still feel some or most of that pulse-quickening sense of open-endedness regarding the course of your dawning day, what is even more quickening is the pace of the sun as it arcs across the sky without you having all that much to show for it.

…Koch assumes an intimate stance akin to a favorite wise uncle who has our very best interests at heart regarding something important that he knows so well at this point in his life that he can impart it with an undertone of almost bemused detachment.

Really now: the sun has stayed true to its daily mission, but what happened to you?

Is it simply that you haven’t worked and played hard enough? To some degree, sure. There’s little doubt that one’s youthful stamina for both mental and physical expenditure wanes over time, only partially compensated for by working smarter/more efficiently.

But here’s the more important point for people of any age, via another, dueling maxim to “Work hard, Play hard,” and which tends not to make its way onto t-shirts for obvious reasons: “You can’t have it all.”

I realize that sounds like anathema to America’s and youth-everywhere’s can-do spirit, but bear with me just a moment as I set up a poem that will elaborate on this theme far more lyrically than I, from a poet I think you’ll be glad to learn a little about (so you can feel you’ve accomplished a little something on this day…).

***

***

  YOU WANT A SOCIAL LIFE, WITH FRIENDS

                      By Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends–
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

***

“Highly energized by the mystery and pleasure of being alive.” I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t happily settle for that as a remembrance of them in a eulogy, or inscribed lovingly below their name on a tombstone.

That’s the way Ron Padgett happily described his fellow poet and friend Kenneth Koch in the introduction to the volume of Koch’s “Selected Poems” that Padgett edited and had published in 2007, five years after Koch’s death from leukemia at age 77.

Kenneth Koch

In addition to his poetry, Koch wrote dramas, songs, and was a much beloved professor at Columbia, known for his theatrical, sometimes raucous presence in front of classrooms. He was in many ways a hard-charging, fun-loving free spirit, willing to go to the edge of social and poetic conventions, but most always with an accessible, direct style.

That accessibility is nowhere more evident than in the poem above, in which Koch assumes an intimate stance akin to a favorite wise uncle who has our very best interests at heart regarding something important that he knows so well at this point in his life that he can impart it with an undertone of almost bemused detachment. This is so that you, too, can accept its veracity without anguish, disappointment or, perish the thought, guilt.

I love the way he sidles up to us with knowledge borne of the very time of which he speaks, yet which he intones both casually and confidentially, as the self-evident truth it is: “There isn’t time enough, my friends–…”

Oh!

He’s right, of course—there never is!

All the t-shirt maxims in the world exhorting us to just push a little harder—so that we might stop time, appreciate time, reverse time, relativize time, make the most of time or slow time down—cannot overcome time’s own relentless chewing through the universe at large, along with our own universe of experience and relationship, our joys and loves and losses all eventually eclipsed.

It’s not that we can’t live and enjoy ourselves. Two out of three here, maybe three of four over yonder and seven of eight on a good day or a fortunate life. Not bad!

But only gluttons with unlimited means get all they want, only to discover that getting it all somehow manages to fall short anyway, and now they have run out of the time to pursue whatever else the all may have been.

And it is ever thus, the all always elusive, fleeting, like a mirage of water in the desert to a thirsty man who ends up with his tongue in the sand.

Koch did not want to be that man, which led him to pursue a more playful, often whimsical poetry that he once described as “having as one of its main subjects the fullness and richness of life and the richness of possibility and excitement and happiness.”

So I will leave you here with another such poem, also about time but in the sense of a particular time and era of one’s life—Koch’s 20s. It’s in the form of a loving ode to that delicious decade (Oh, I know it may have been challenging, but they all are, in their own way!) of exploration, of trying on adulthood, often finding it deficient but soldiering on anyway, in a spirit of openness and play.

Koch writes of it in probably my favorite lines: ” I find there on/The street instead, a good friend,/X—N—, who says to me/Kenneth do you have a minute?/And I say yes! I am in my twenties!/I have plenty of time!”

And indeed he did, which he seemed to make the most of, while it lasted.

***

          TO MY TWENTIES

          By Kenneth Koch

How lucky that I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman—
O woman! O my twentieth year!
Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey! And then another
And another—and water!
I’m still very impressed by you. Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable
For the moment in any case, do you live now?
From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I find there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X—N—, who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time! In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies. I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.
You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest
Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy. What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how to best use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

***

***

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Work Hard Play Hard by Fabio Olivera  https://www.flickr.com/photos/fabioooliveira/

Hourglass by Aron Visuals  https://unsplash.com/@aronvisuals

Koch portrait from the public domain

Tags:  confronting Play Hard Work Hard, Kenneth Koch humor and whimsy, Kenneth Koch To My Twenties analysis, Kenneth Koch You Want a Social Life With Friends analysis, play hard work hard discussion, relentlessness of time, You Want a Social Life With friends poem meaning

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Copyright © 2012-2017 Traversing - to pass or move over, along, or through. A blog about books, religion, arts, politics, odds and ends. Many thanks to photographers Elizabeth Haslam and Larry Rose, whose photos grace the banner at the top of this page. Elizabeth Haslam. Some rights reserved. © 2015 Larry Rose All rights reserved.

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