Marking my birthday by getting back on my rowing machine for the first time in a long while. Listening to Anna Tivel.
"Yeah, I got heart, but I ain't got no locker, do I Mick?"
—Rocky Balboa
Scream about losing your liberty and freedom. Fling the words communism and socialism into decontextualized rants about the benefits of capitalism.
We know what word really scares you. Your night terror word. A word that everyone understands.
Sharing.
Hardware
It was a very good morning for the KU Crew! A clean sweep at the Stars & Stripes USRowing Central Masters Regional in Oklahoma City.
I'm late in posting this, but back on June 24th, these three ladies and their faculty advisor Steven Maynard-Moody, won all of their events at the Stars & Stripes USRowing Central Masters Regional in Oklahoma City.
Congratulations to these KU Crew rowers! Way to represent!
Results are here.
To quote Patrick Rhone, "Maybe what we need most is to have our minds blown."
Feeling pretty good about what Kansans did last night.
No.
No to cruelty.
No to control of the many by the few.
And for many of us, no to primitive ideologies that destroy the essence of our humanity.
First Paragraph:
“New Year’s Eve 1899 must have felt momentous even if you weren’t a four-year-old backstage at Proctor’s Twenty-Third Street Theater, still buzzing from last week’s Christmas gift: a big brown stitched-leather ball meant for playing an American game less than a decade old, which was just beginning to organize into professional leagues. Of course, Buster was still too young to grasp what it meant for one century to turn into the next, or for that matter what it meant that his parents—who had struggled so hard to find work in New York that winter that the three Keatons had at times gone cold and hungry—were suddenly flush enough to buy him such a lavish present."
—Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, 2022
These vids are from a project called The Cut with support from YouTube.
The songs were written way back in pre-video times, so Elton John held a contest to create videos for them.
I thought the Tiny Dancer video was especially good.
Hope you enjoy them.
Between here and her are rolling hills where
wind-weathered peoples once cornered game.
They walked and hunted and walked and lived.
You can save money crossing those hills if you have a K-Tag on your windshield.
Then great flats we only desire to know
as vectors of acceleration over time, sit upon
the largest unbroken tectonic plate in the world.
“This was once under a vast inland sea,” she said. “More than once.” he replied.
Between here and her is a massive orogenic phantasm.
Buried to its shoulder in its own eroded silt, still it looms.
Cloaked in a shroud of green, it is the preferred home
of the larger, more secretive mammals.
“A full-grown grizzly can stand as tall as a…”
Then desert, where they built a city to accelerate
the process of gaining and losing riches.
Beyond the light and noise of it, slow, ancient processes unfold.
The birth and death of that city will be an unnoticed flicker in time.
“If you have seventeen showing, it’s usually best to stick.”
Between here and her is
everything seen and everything hidden,
everything learned and forgotten,
everything created and destroyed
and it’s all just so damned beautiful and mysterious.
My arms would gauge the weight of her mysteries too,
If I could get from here to her.
—dj. 2020-12-03
This site would be a whole lot bleaker/blander without the colorful paintings my friend Kyra Mills occasionally shares with me.
Here in the Midwest, our memory of Summery things can fade quickly, so dose yourself up with some butterflies!
You can see more of Kyra's paintings if you scroll through the posts on this page.