Singer Songwriter John Martyn (1948 - 2009)

John Martyn

May You Never

I'd Rather Be the Devil

He Got All the Whiskey

One for the Road

Head and Heart

Bless the Weather

Hurt In Your Heart

More at
http://www.johnmartyn.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/30/john-martyn-obituary

Ray Anderson - Trail Blazer in Corporate Sustainability

Ray Anderson

Ray Anderson on the business logic of sustainability TED 2009

More at:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/farewell-to-a-recovering-plunderer/
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/fbeinecke/remembering_ray_anderson_a_tra.html

Philip Levine - Three Poems

Philip Levine

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.



An Abandoned Factory, Detroit

The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.

Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
In the sure margin of eternity.
The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes
Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,

And estimates the loss of human power,
Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
The gradual decay of dignity.
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
Which might have served to grind their eulogy.

Among Children

 I walk among the rows of bowed heads--
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to the widows of the suburbs. You can see
already how their backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like
to sit down among them and read slowly
from The Book of Job until the windows
pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea
of industrial scum, her gowns streaming
with light, her foolish words transformed
into song, I would like to arm each one
with a quiver of arrows so that they might
rush like wind there where no battle rages
shouting among the trumpets, Hal Ha!
How dear the gift of laughter in the face
of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings
without coffee and oranges, the long lines
of mothers in old coats waiting silently
where the gates have closed. Ten years ago
I went among these same children, just born,
in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned
down to hear their breaths delivered that day,
burning with joy. There was such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
dosed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.
Eleven years from now they will become
the men and women of Flint or Paradise,
the majors of a minor town, and I
will be gone into smoke or memory,
so I bow to them here and whisper
all I know, all I will never know.



For more see article "Champion of the Working Class Named Poet Laureate"
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44087337/ns/today-books/

Paulo Coelho - Quotes from The Alchemist

If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man...Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living right now.

When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

Everything on earth is being continuously transformed, because the earth is alive ... and it has a soul. We are part of that soul, so we rarely recognize that it is working for us.


The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there.
When you want something with all your heart, that's when you are closest to the Soul of the World. It's always a positive force.


Never stop dreaming. Follow the omens.

When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.


It's called the principle of favourability, beginner's luck. Because life wants you to achieve your destiny.


When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.


Dreams are the language of God.


The boy didn't know what a person's "destiny" was.
"It's what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their destiny... It's a force that appears to be negative, but actually shows you how to realize your destiny. It prepares your spirit and you will, because there is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth."


Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.

More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_(novel)

The Film Music of Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone

The Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso

A Fist Full of Dynamite

Once Upon A Time In America (Deborah's Theme and Childhood Poverty)

A Fist Full of Dollars

Malena (end titles)

More at:

http://www.enniomorricone.it/

Ballad of the Sleepwalker by Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca

Green I want you green.
Green wind.  Green branches.
The ship on the sea
and the horse upon the hill.
With her waist wrapped in shadow
she dreams on her veranda,
green flesh, green hair,
with eyes of frozen silver.
Green I want you green.
Beneath the gypsy moon,
things keep watching her,
and she cannot see them.
             
Green I want you green.
Huge stars of frost
appear with the fish of shadow
that opens the way for dawn.
The fig tree rubs the wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the thicket, a theiving cat,
bristles its sour spears.
But who could be coming?  And from where?
She lingers by the railing,
green flesh, green hair,
dreaming of the bitter sea.

—Compadre, I want to trade
my horse for your house,
my saddle for your mirror,
my knife for your quilt.
Compadre, I come bleeding
from the Cabra passes.
—If I could do it, young man,
that deal would be closed.
But I am no longer myself,
nor is my house my house.
—Compadre, I want to die
a decent death in my own bed.
Of steel if it can be,
with sheets of Dutch linen.
Don’t you see the wound
that runs from my chest to my throat?
—Three-hundred dark roses
adorn your white shirt-front.
Your blood reeks and oozes
about your sash.
But I am no longer myself,
nor is my house my house.
—Let me at least go up
to the high railings.
Let me go! Let me go up
to the green railings.
Balustrades of the moon,
where the water thunders.
               
The two men go up now
toward the high balustrades.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of tears.
On the rooftops
tin lanterns were trembling.
A thousand crystal tambourines
wounded the dawn.
             
Green I want you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two men went up.
The long wind left in the mouth
a strange taste
of mint, of gall and of sweet basil.
Compadre!  Where is she?  Tell me,
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she waited for you!
How many time she would wait,
fresh cheeks, black hair,
on this green veranda!
               
Over the face of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swaying.
Green flesh, green hair,
with eyes of frozen silver.
An icicle of moonlight
suspends her above the water.
The night grew intimate
like a small square.
Drunken civil guardsmen
were pounding at the door.
Green I want you green.
Green Wind.  Green branches.
The ship on the sea,
and the horse upon the hill.

More at:

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Federico_Garcia_Lorca

G. K. Chesterton Quotes

G. K. Chesterton

"Shouldn't atheists have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?"


"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." 


"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost." 


"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously." 


"Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly," 


"It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands." 


"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." 


"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination." 


"It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything." 


"If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?" 


"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."


"I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles." 


"[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."


"Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out." 


"We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty." 


"Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."


"The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland." 


"It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world." 


"Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much." 


"Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble." 


"With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand." 


"That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child." 


"Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish." 


"There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect."


"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. "


 "The things we see every day are the things we never see at all." 


 "When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale." 


"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world." 


"In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and loves flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone."


"The simplification of anything is always sensational." 


"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all." 


"I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet."


"The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange." 


"In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness." 


"I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward." 


"Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home." 

Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.


Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. 

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. 

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. 

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle. 

I cannot live without books. 

In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty. 

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. 

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. 

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it. 

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear. 

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. 

One man with courage is a majority.