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.
Don't worry. I got this.
I understand everything I read.
Loneliness builds character.
A fiscally based environmental policy is smarter than an environmentally based fiscal policy.
Lima beans have any redeeming qualities.
Misty Copeland is real.
A cold walk in the dark tonight.
At home today it was obscure Chet Baker and then a few hours of this Joe Henderson treasure.
Out walking I took MBV to try and stave off the cold.
But I should have taken…
Because I ran across…
Photo by Berkan Küçükgül
Am I a stupid, silly man?
Would I add my desires to the weight of her struggles?
Would I hold her a pixie, a sprite I conjure to relieve my lonely hours?
But yes.
I would have her fall into me and
feel what strength remains in my arms and
I would lift her up and kiss her eyes.
What is it to anyone else if I am a stupid, silly man?
—d.j.
I went for a walk downtown.
I tried the door of a restaurant but it was locked. I went somewhere else to eat. I went into a store and bought a book by an author I’ve read before.
I stopped in a coffee shop and got a large cup. Paper or styrofoam? Paper please.
I walked home, taking a different route.
I don’t know how far I walked. I didn’t take the device that measures. There will be no more ledgering the vectors of trips like these.
I have a commitment to measure something I’ll do later this month. After that, I will lop off those metrics forever and see what might replace them.
Poet Mary Oliver.
It was the birthday of Mary Oliver two days ago. Oliver passed in 2019. I am just now discovering the wealth of poetry she left for us.
“Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was an officer in the Union Army. He stood six feet three inches tall and had a soldierly bearing. In later life, he loved to use military metaphors in his speeches and his conversation; he didn’t mind being referred to good-naturedly as Captain Holmes; and he wore his enormous military mustaches until his death in 1935, at the age of ninety-three. The war was the central experience of his life, and he kept its memory alive. Every year he drank a glass of wine in observance of the anniversary of the battle Antietam, where he had been shot in the neck and left, briefly behind enemy lines, for dead.”
—Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
“I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this when the war ended. The war ended depending on which war you mean: those we started, before those, millennia ago and onward, those which started me, which I lost and won—these ever-blooming wounds.”
—Natalie Diaz, Post Colonial Love Poem
Natalie Diaz writes of her heritage, her connection to earth and water, and her lovers, as if they are all part of the same emotional (erotically charged) experience. The synthesis is eloquent and moving.
Pulitzer prize for Poetry, 2021
—Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
“IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.”
—Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth: Locked Tomeb 1
“When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside – the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. Once we were more settled, Manager allowed us to walk up to the front until we were right behind the window display, and then we could see how tall the RPO Building was. And if we were there at just the right time, we would see the Sun on his journey, crossing between the building tops from our side over to the RPO Building side.”
—Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun