ARTIST SONIC/VISUAL COEUR POEMS RHYTHM SPIRITUALS LOVE SEAS SENSUOUS EXODUS ACTIVIST TRUE BLUE TRUTH LOTUS HEART GOSPEL VOICES AUTHENTICITY INTEGRITY TOUCH INFINITE GRACE LOVE ENERGY RISING
I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.”
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Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
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cher·ish
CHeriSH
verb
verb:cherish;
protect andcare for (someone) lovingly.
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🐝 MY 💞!
🐝 MY 💞!
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The DailyOM on Valentine’s Day 2020:
It is important to choose our partnerships consciously. Sometimes forged quickly during times of need, we may find ourselves rushing into unions with perhaps not the clearest intentions. Partnerships created from those starting point might serve our immediate needs, but the repercussions of a union so quickly fostered without much thought can be difficult to recover from. Granted, there is something to learn from every relationship, but looking to another to fix or complete us can turn a partnership into a dependent bond. If we can stay clear about what we want and what we need in a partnership, while staying grounded and remembering that we are our own source of happiness and fulfillment, we can create partnerships that support and enhance the best of who we are.
Everyone in our lives is a mirror reflecting back the parts we love and dislike about ourselves. If we have the courage to recognize our reflections in each other, we can grow through our partnerships. A partnership that offers both acceptance of who we are and an opportunity for personal transformation can be fertile ground for growing a healthy, lasting union. When we find this kind of partnership, we are more likely to want to keep it, invest in it, and nurture it.
Life is a collaborative effort. Much of what we do can be enhanced through partnership. Together we are stronger because our personal power is multiplied by two. Through partnership we experience the joys of working, living, and loving together.
Hold your head up Keep your head up, movin’ on Hold your head up, movin’ on Keep your head up, movin’ on Hold your head up Keep your head up, movin’ on Hold your head up, movin’ on Keep your head up, movin’ on
Rafiq Bhatia started the new year by taking a fresh look at perennial jazz standards in a four-song EP called Standards Vol. 1. The record subverts our expectations — for both a guitarist best-known as a member of the band Son Lux and for songs we know well, half of which were written by the great Duke Elington.
Standards Vol. 1 opens with a rendition of Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood,” but without a heads up, you might not even realize it. Bhatia’s transformation renders the song almost unrecognizable, but the liberties he takes are in line with Ellington’s own stance on genre boundaries. In a 1964 CBC interview, Ellington was put off when asked about the music of “his people.”
“That’s a strange question,” he says. “My people — now which of my people? I’m in several groups. I’m in the group of the piano players. I’m in the group of the listeners. I’m in the group of what? Oh yeah, those who appreciate Beaujolais.”
Ellington echoes those thoughts in his 1976 memoir, Music Is My Mistress, writing, “There really are no categories, you know. Everyone is so alone — the basic, essential state of humankind.”
“I think that’s the best answer to that question I’ve ever heard,” Bhatia says. “It helps me make sense of my own resistance to that kind of classification.”
Bhatia has been called a jazz musician, an experimental musician, and his guitar shredding has been compared to that of Jimi Hendrix. He’s not offended by the shorthand, but his latest work, which deploys recording techniques as much as performance chops, questions the act of reinterpretation.
Across Standards‘ four tracks, Bhatia plays for less than a minute. “Is it possible to ‘play these pieces’ without playing an instrument?” he asks. “And, can you express who you are without picking up an instrument?”
Bhatia says when he listens to the recordings of Coltrane, or Monk, or Ellington, he has an immediate sense of who they are — and that’s not exclusive to the jazz greats. “That’s a quality that extends to a lot of other different kinds of music that have evolved in the years since and are evolving right now,” he says. “When I hear Madlib, or Flying Lotus, or Tim Hecker, or Ben Frost, I hear a similar kind of thing, where a few seconds happen and you know who it is.”
Bhatia’s sonic signature provokes a certain amount of disorientation for his listeners.
“I think I have a general interest in otherworldliness, and the surreal, and the language of dreams and these kinds of spaces in which we might be able to have an experience with it that is more emotional and less rational,” he says.
But on this new project, his music-making uses his listeners’ familiarity with landmark recordings to guide them through his ideas. If you have already heard Ornette Coleman’s recording of his song “Lonely Woman,” you can hear its melody recurring in Bhatia’s version, over and over, jumping registers and moving from instrument to instrument.
On Standards Vol. 1, Bhatia shows himself in his choices, just one of which was asking Cecile McLorin Salvant to sing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a perennial on Roberta Flack’s setlist. Salvant’s rendition is haunting and meaty.
“She’s able to inhabit a song and tease out these other kinds of layers under the surface of what the song might have been written to mean, and maybe even pull those things out with her vocal delivery in a way that makes us all confront them,” he says.
Another distinct choice was the way Bhatia recorded pianist Chris Pattishall playing Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose.”
“If you had been in the room with Chris,” he says, “you actually would not have heard any notes.” That’s because they laid a piece of felt inside the piano, between the hammers and the strings, dampening the instrument’s reverberations and leaving, he says, “all the sound of human action without any pitches. And we just recorded it with a lot of volume and dynamic processing added to it so that it would bring the notes back out.”
In other words, they cranked it up way past eleven, to convert a series of gentle thuds into something both ethereal and close.
“It’s like bottling the act of expression,” Bhatia says, describing a crucial component of Bhatia’s aesthetic. For as much as he’s intrigued by the possibilities of technology that didn’t exist in 1959, the year “Single Petal of a Rose” was first recorded, he’s not going for scrubbed perfection.
“If all of these techniques are available to us,” he wonders, “why aren’t we using them in service of making ourselves feel like the listener is sitting there and playing the piano and it’s speaking back to her in this way?”
Growing up the son of South Asian Muslim American immigrant parents in North Carolina, Bhatia says he didn’t see many people who shared his identity. That void meant he made it up himself, according to his own rules.
“I can think of no better exemplar or North Star for people who have done that than Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman,” he says. “So even though I’m not sure … how other people see my relationship to that music, I know that there’s no way that I would be able to be here doing what I’m doing with sound if it wasn’t for their example.”
The courageous Senator Mitt Romney (Utah – Republican).
Senator Mitt Romney will always be remembered not as a traitor
but as a honest man who had the courage to speak up against President Trump.
The truth is the truth even if you are a minority of one.Mahatma Gandhi.
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The Constitution is at the foundation of our republic’s success, and we each strive not to lose sight of our promise to defend it. The Constitution established the vehicle of impeachment that has occupied both houses of Congress for these many days. We have labored to faithfully execute our responsibilities to it. We have arrived at different judgments, but I hope we respect each other’s good faith.
The allegations made in the articles of impeachment are very serious. As a senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise “impartial justice.” I am a profoundly religious person. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong.
The House managers presented evidence supporting their case; the White House counsel disputed that case. In addition, the president’s team presented three defenses: first, that there can be no impeachment without a statutory crime; second, that the Bidens’ conduct justified the president’s actions; and third that the judgment of the president’s actions should be left to the voters. Let me first address each of those defenses.
The historic meaning of the words “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the writings of the Founders and my own reasoned judgment convince me that a president can indeed commit acts against the public trust that are so egregious that while they are not statutory crimes, they would demand removal from office. To maintain that the lack of a codified and comprehensive list of all the outrageous acts that a president might conceivably commit renders Congress powerless to remove such a president defies reason.
The president’s counsel noted that Vice President [Joe] Biden appeared to have a conflict of interest when he undertook an effort to remove the Ukrainian prosecutor general. If he knew of the exorbitant compensation his son was receiving from a company actually under investigation, the vice president should have recused himself. While ignoring a conflict of interest is not a crime, it is surely very wrong.
With regards to Hunter Biden, taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory but also not a crime. Given that in neither the case of the father nor the son was any evidence presented by the president’s counsel that a crime had been committed, the president’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the president would never have done what he did.
The defense argues that the Senate should leave the impeachment decision to the voters. While that logic is appealing to our democratic instincts, it is inconsistent with the Constitution’s requirement that the Senate, not the voters, try the president. Hamilton explained that the Founders’ decision to invest senators with this obligation rather than leave it to voters was intended to minimize — to the extent possible — the partisan sentiments of the public.
This verdict is ours to render. The people will judge us for how well and faithfully we fulfilled our duty. The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”
Yes, he did.
Senator Mitt Romney (Utah – Republican)
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HEAVENINMYMOUTH Catherine L. Johnson 2012
PRIVATE COLLECTION: Charles Lloyd + Dorothy Darr
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Thank you
COURAGEOUS SENATORS
who HONORED your oath to the Constitution,
who UPHELD y/our values of y/our DEMOCRACY,
and
who spoke with
TRUTH
+
RESPONSIBILITY
+
ACCOUNTABILITY
“HEAVENINY/OURMOUTH“
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“Don’t lose hope.”
“There is justice in this world and truth and right.
I believe that.
I wouldn’t be in this government if I didn’t.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
I direct my final message not to the house managers, not even to my fellow senators but to the American people.
My message is simple: Don’t lose hope.
There is justice in this world. And truth. And right. I believe that. I wouldn’t be in this government if I didn’t. Somehow, in ways we can’t predict, with God’s mysterious hand guiding us, truth and right will prevail. There have been dark periods in our history. But we always overcome. The Senate’s opening prayer yesterday was Amos 5:24. “Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
The long arc of the moral universe, my fellow Americans, does bend towards justice. America does change for the better. But not on its own. It took millions of Americans hundreds of years to make this country what it is today. Americans of every age and color and creed who marched and protested, stood up and sat in, Americans that defended this beautiful democracy in its darkest hours.
On Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendel Holmes told his war-weary audience that, quote, “Whether one accepts from fortune her spade and will look downward and dig, or from aspiration her ax and cord and scale the ice, the one and only success which is yours to command is to bring to your work a mighty heart.”
I have confidence that Americans of a different generation, our generation, will bring to our work a mighty heart to fight for what’s right, to fight for the truth and never, never lose faith.
NAVY BLUE: soUnd Catherine L. Johnson 2020
I direct my final message not to the house managers, not even to my fellow senators but to the American people.