Recent quotes:

The Art of Dying | The New Yorker

One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room.

Los Angeles Churches Make Worship...Hip? - The New York Times

“What Waze is doing is navigating the scene,” he said, to a chorus of “yeahs” and “mm-hmms.” “It’s taking in all the information, it’s taking in other people’s traffic patterns, it’s taking in, what’s happening that we don’t even know behind the scene, and Waze makes decisions for us that we don’t realize is for our benefit. “What we need to do when we interact with God,” he said, “and he tells us to go somewhere, we need to be like Waze, where we are excited about the journey, to take turns that we didn’t even realize were ahead of us. We’re going to go to places that we weren’t even certain we wanted to go.” Mary Tanagho Ross, a lawyer and longtime Mosaic congregant, said the church’s style of preaching resonates. “I love that I can understand what they’re saying, and I don’t need somebody to interpret that for me,” she said. “It just feels really real, really authentic. I think that’s what people want: authenticity and simplicity.”

Letter of Recommendation: Egg Shakers -

On the other hand, get a load of the Band, with their fury of twang and jangle and notes splattering out of a Wurlitzer like tracers of lard from a hot pan — all that noise careening precariously around the downbeat, like a pub full of drunks slurring half-remembered lines of iambic pentameter. Plenty of room for me and my egg shaker — not a chance to pilot the plane through that turbulence, or even co-pilot it, but just to be one whirring turbine blade in an engine somewhere on the wing.

Bread and courts in Hungary

In his opinion, “to be a judge of the Constitutional Court in Hungary is an entirely different matter from being one in Denmark or in the Netherlands.” His favorite example is an international meeting he attended while serving as an ombudsman. The Swiss ombudsman had to ascertain that seven refugees had washing machines and driers and could have daily showers while the ombudsman from Azerbaijan had to make sure that 300,000 refugees had at least 300 grams of bread and a liter and a half of water. Translating that into differences between constitutional courts, I assume he means that in Hungary people must be satisfied with less legal redress than the citizens of European countries with greater means enjoy.

Mark Knopfler's New Album

Knopfler's quicksilver guitar is understated, and he delivers stories of stoic ache like an old watchmaker on a pub stool — quietly riveting.
“It’s getting exciting — and I’m not BS-ing you,” Brat said in an interview last month. “This district is conservative and idiosyncratic, and they’re not overwhelmed by the establishment and their millions. It’s David vs. Rome.”
“It gives her a chance to work on important, discreet issues,” said David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s longtime adviser. “She would be wise, however, to stay out of the updraft of the Washington tizzies du jour for as long as possible. It is a mixmaster that grinds you down.”
The world is made of language, and we live in the “condensations of our imaginations”, as Terence McKenna articulated. The amount at which that condensation drips into the world around us has been mediated by the lag time that lies within our flirtatious and creative use of linguistic seeds. These memes penetrate and spread through a womb of syntactical ovulation, gestating and birthing technological children, whom evolve and mature into cell phones, automobiles, airplanes and space stations.