music clip of the day

My heart’s on fire . . .

Nona Hendryx (with Ronny Drayton, guitar), Philadelphia, 2012

“Temple of Heaven”

*****

“Rock This House”

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lagniappe

reading table

Her life, she said, was an out-of-tune piano played with passion.

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This evening I sat listening to five presidential candidates offering their imaginary solutions for a country that doesn’t exist.

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“Imaginary maladies are much worse than the real ones, because they’re incurable,” an old friend who walks with difficulty was telling me.

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Much of what our eyes see and our ears hear is lost in translation.

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 “An alarm clock with no hands, ticking on the town dump,” is how he described himself.

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They gave the nice old gentleman I met at the bake sale several medals for the misery he caused in some country that no one could find any longer on the map.

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I bet all our elected representatives in Washington spend a great deal of time in front of mirrors admiring themselves. They lift their noses and chins, stare straight ahead without moving an eyebrow or a muscle, then nod their heads gravely and smile to themselves as they go out to meet the people.

***

He sat on a bench in Washington Square Park whispering something extremely confidential to his dog, who sat before him with ears perked, wagging his tail cautiously from time to time.

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The crosses all men and women must carry through life are even more visible on this dark and rainy November evening.

—Charles Simic, “A Year in Fragments” (excerpts), New York Review Blog, 12/31/12