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Showing posts from September, 2013

Daddy and Daughter Memories

This weekend is my daughter's first away from home when family or moving-in to college was not involved.  She has a free weekend.  Her boyfriend will be visiting her.  They are going to the Braves game tonight.  I Facetimed with her this afternoon.  And so she starts the path toward adulthood.  By coincidence, Jennifer found this video on Facebook.  I don't do Facebook.  But the video touched my heart thinking about time when my daughter and I did silly things at a silly age. Tonight You Belong to Me was first recorded in 1927.  I have blogged before about how much I enjoy music from this period .  My daughter and I used to sing songs together every morning when I took her to school from pre-K up until she started driving herself.  We practiced harmonies together and made up three or four songs that she often requested we sing.  So this video was particularly pertinent and poignant to me tonight.

The Dalai Lama and "New Pope"

Late Friday I stuck my head in the office of my company's IT manager. He is relatively new with us, an interesting guy, very knowledgeable about history and music, laid back and jovial. A pleasure to chat with. In recent weeks, we have discussed a wide range of topics albeit usually brief and punctuated with snide comments and humor. Nothing too serious. But this time our conversation drifted over to the fact that his wife was reading a book by the Dalai Lama , which naturally caught my attention. He and his family are Episcopalian, which is often one of the more open and liberal of the many Christian pathways. So I sat down and we talked a bit about Buddhism. I mentioned to him, for the first time, that I had spent six months in India in the mid-1980's mostly studying yoga (which, as I pointed out to him, had more to do with Hinduism). And that I had personally met the Dalai Lama in the late 1980's after a talk he gave at Emory University. I was part of a Buddhist

Neil's Newest Song

Neil Young showed up at a small club  in the northeast two nights ago with his wife Pegi's current band .  He did a set with them that featured a nice bluesy jamming new song.  "Ain't going home to mama..."  Rock it, Neil.  Nice guitar work.  That's Spooner Oldham on keyboards and Rick Rosas on bass, both of whom worked the CSNY 2006 Freedom of Speech tour (among several other recent albums by Neil) which Jennifer and I caught in Atlanta.  Find out more here .  CSNY has a long-awaited live release of their 1974 tour  which is being delayed for various reasons until 2014, the 40th anniversary of the tour.  David Crosby , for one, hopes Neil will meander back toward the historic foursome and tour a bit next year to promote the album's release.  That would be awesome but you can never predict what Neil will do next. Neil is filling in some time since Crazy Horse had to cancel their remaining tour.  Neil and the Horse recently ranked Number 5 on Roll

Into September: The Unlikely Story of the 2013 Atlanta Braves (so far)

If you had told me in March that going in to September the Atlanta Braves would have the best record in all of baseball with Dan Uggla (.184) and BJ Upton (.194) both playing regularly and batting under .200, I would have thought you were an idiot. Image how you can play 136 baseball games saddled with two major free agent signings that cannot hit the ball. Yet that is the unlikely story of the 2013 Atlanta Braves. They are 83-53 going into to play today.  How did they get here? Well mostly with pitching. Good starting pitching from young arms. Great relief pitching, maybe the best in baseball. The Braves bullpen has the best ERA of any team .  The Braves offense has been mediocre overall this season but some players are shining.   Feddie Freeman (batting over .440 with runners in scoring position) and, surprisingly, Chris Johnson (leading the league in hitting with a .333 average as of this post) are hitting opposing pitchers without mercy. Brian McCann is back with hi

Berthe Morisot and Friends

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Berthe Morisot Reclining,  by Eduoard Manet.  1873. The history of art contains several wonderful feminine achievements. But overall in terms of painting and music, for example, men dominate the scene, especially the further back you go in time. So, it is of interest to me when I come across a maverick woman who was able to break through the various cultural challenges for her time and gain notoriety alongside her male colleagues. Such is the case with Berthe Morisot , an impressionist painter whose work I have admired for years, though certainly not with the same awe as with Renoir, Monet, and Manet. I knew comparatively little about her, however. But recently completing Sue Roe's group biography The Private Lives of the Impressionists expanded my knowledge of all the French Impressionists and about Morisot in particular. The early impressionist movement was an extraordinary time in the history of art. Roe captures how Monet , Renoir , Pissarro, Sisley , and Cezanne