The Golden Age

The following in an excerpt from W.B. Yeats's story The Golden Age:

A man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

God Bless Chris Rock

Salon quoted (and now Saturday Night Live) Chris Rock that the country may be ready for Barack Obama in the White House, "Is America ready for an African American president? I say, why not. We just had a retarded president!"

One More Story of the Sea

A postscript to the compilation Stories of the Sea is this track from that old sea dog Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Billy once released an entire record of instrumental sea chanteys. He returns to the sea for inspiration time and again.

This song comes from a performance in Scotland (I believe) combining Is It the Sea? with My Home is the Sea to create a haunting and triumphant tale and sound. It's worth the time to download and listen. Download here.

Creep Juice

This week I traveled to Raleigh for a conference and visited the North Carolina Museum of Art for the first time. A number of memorable works from Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, Daisy Youngblood and much more.

Though I've never been an enormous fan of Andrew Wyeth, this painting's enduring creepiness continues to haunt me. From the ghostly images in the upper left window to sheet pushed out of the upper right window looking like the head of a crazed ram, it's damned spooky. What doesn't translate in this scanned image is the placid water in the can in the foreground of the painting and the clothesline dividing the image in two.