Not to Blame - Joni Mitchell

December 30, 2020

The story hit the news
From coast to coast
They said you beat the girl
You loved the most
Your charitable acts
Seemed out of place
With the beauty
With your fist marks on her face
Your buddies all stood by
They bet their fortunes
And their fame
That she was out of line
And you were not to blame
Six hundred thousand doctors
Are putting on rubber gloves
And they're poking
At the miseries made of love
They say they're learning
How to spot
The battered wives
Among all the women
They see bleeding through their lives
I bleed--
For your perversity--
These red words that make a stain
On your white-washed claim that
She was out of line
And you were not to blame …

(from Not to Blame by Joni Mitchell)

Merry Everything

December 25, 2020

Solstice sky over the old Queen Mary Nurses Home

December 20, 2020

Deeper Than Love

There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.

First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives
alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.

Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.

And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the
violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature's pride,
the dark, naif pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.

Love is of twoness, and is lovely
like the living life on the earth
but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride,
subterranean,
and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of
the middle
which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable
fire of all things
and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion
and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness
and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial
imperative.

All this is deeper than love
deeper than love.

- D. H. Lawrence

#ElfOnTheShelf

December 12, 2020

“The latest viral meme trend among the rich and famous is a clever twist on “The Elf on the Shelf,” the popular children’s book that inspired a Christmas tradition involving small, magical house guests that pop up around the holiday season to keep an eye on kids vying for a spot on Santa’s nice list.

But instead of “Elf on the Shelf,” Garcelle Beauvais, Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Banks, Sterling K. Brown, Kerry Washington and other entertainment luminaries have been flexing their rhyming skills with their own Photoshopped creations.

It all started with actress Beauvais’ “Garcelle on a Pharrell”: An image of a tiny Beauvais casually sitting on singer-producer Pharrell Williams’ shoulder. And a flood of similarly cheesy posts soon followed...”

LA Times

Blanche Violet Maher

December 10, 2020

I accepted the challenge to bake these biscuits using a recipe from 100 years ago in the notebook of photographer Blanche Violet Maher.

There was no Method in the original recipe so I referred to the “Basic Biscuit Recipe” from The Commonsense Cookery Book first published in 1914. I also used my great-grandmother’s *Bakewell mixing bowl. The camera featured in this image is my 90 year old mother’s Box Brownie.

Blanche Violet Maher (b.1874) was an Australian photographer who lived with her family on Collaroy Station in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia.

By all reports the biscuits were delicious and reminiscent of Ginger Nuts.

* #BakewellBrothers Ltd was established by William Bakewell, born in England in Nottingham county, who began making bricks and pipes on their Erskineville site in around 1884. The firm gradually developed to include the manufacture of tiles, pots, jars and other domestic and commercial wares.