Off topic, but I like the new goings on at your Ka-Ching!
BillHJanuary 14, 2021, 1:42 PM
I had a sail boat when I was young (in my forties). Twelve foot sloop rigged with too-small a centerboard. It was great exercise. It would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it… it would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it….
Thank you for this Gerard. The music takes me back to 1979 and the visuals made me laugh because I’ve always in my mind seen sails…and stretched canvases.
gwbnycJanuary 14, 2021, 3:11 PM
I recollect some documentary film shot in the early 70’s, Stills was on stage in a full length sleeveless fur coat. A man, an audience member, started ragging on him for being greedy, “plastic” (quite the insult then), and a sellout. IIRC Stills came down off the stage and might have gotten into the chest-bump thing with guy.
An aquaintence, a singer, related to a group of us what it was like walking into her mother’s living room on occasional mornings and seeing David Crosby’s whale-corpse-like form beached on the couch.
Time passed and I wondered if the reason there were so many CSNY revivals was no one else would hang around with them.
Sailing. Yup, used to do that a lot. Crewed on various sailboats on Long Island sound and Chesapeake Bay, year round . Ocean racing on a 62′ yawl. Transatlantic on a 3-masted barque (twice). Gentle breezes to full gales. Great memories…the song remembers when.
MissyJanuary 14, 2021, 5:17 PM
Honeymooned in 1973 for two weeks on our Cape Dory 25’ sailboat. Chesapeake Bay. Nothing compares to sleeping, anchored, under the stars with the sounds of the halyards chinking against the mast. A general idea of heaven. I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked. So yes to the song.
ghostsniperJanuary 14, 2021, 5:48 PM
Missy sed: “I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked.”
=========
Indeed. A lot of people never learn the diff no matter how many times they marry.
Charlie Anderson: Do you like her?
Lt. Sam: Well, I just said I…
Charlie Anderson: No, no. You just said you loved her. There’s some difference between lovin’ and likin’. When I married Jennie’s mother, I-I didn’t love her – I liked her… I liked her a lot. I liked Martha for at least three years after we were married and then one day it just dawned on me I loved her. I still do… still do. You see, Sam, when you love a woman without likin’ her, the night can be long and cold, and contempt comes up with the sun.
David Crosby may be an ass of epic proportions, but you kind of have to admire him. He *is* a very good musician, part of three legendary groups. He’s been living large since the mid 1960s. He’s snorted a pallet of coke, gotten knob jobs from ten thousand pretty girls, and still gets into the news whenever he wants. That utterly smug expression in the “family picture” when wazhername, the redhead singer who was as big a drunk as Dave, hired him to be the sperm donor for the singer’s wife to get pregnant. “Yeah, I’ve been overweight and addicted to everything in sight for my whole life, had to buy a new liver, and they STILL picked me as great DNA . . . .”
Sailing is a disease, I to thought it romantic thirty years ago, I still own three boats. What was once romantic, is now a quest for speed, I still race my Santana525, wed nights here, in our beer can league. Back,then it as the leisure fleet, anything that floats, I, drove a Coronado 25, a beast of a boat, designed for the rough waters off of , it’s name sake.
Although an older boat, my Santana 525, is a fast nimble boat, an A class racer. Not as nimble as the Express 27s, with her handicap, quite capable of winning. She’s a pocket racer, an open water jet. Capable of planing down wind.
I have two others I pleasure cruise, a Hunter 25, with a bobbed keel and an Oday 28 for weekend adventure, big ,very roomy atomic 4 inboard, with a huge complement on sails. The cabin is standup for folks 6.2 tall, sleek and nimble, capable of taking me around the world.
I recently sold my ocean boat, a Hallberg RASSY, 34, moored just south of Santa Cruz. A classic Swedish boat, with low sexy lines, built by sailboat masters. The Woodward was stunning, the craftsmanship Second to none.
She’s currently on an around the world adventure, with the young man I GAVE it to. With my med conditions my Dr’s,talked me out of that same around the world adventure. A pity really.
Dirk
JackJanuary 15, 2021, 9:40 AM
Ghost, love your reference to Shenandoah. I loved that movie and met ‘the boy’, Phillip Alford back in the mid 60’s. He was a couple of years older than me, a nice cat and I believe he lives in MS or Alabama.
Sailboats….Dirk, I envy you. I’m not a racer, just a lover of all things sailboat. Several years ago before health issues, I restored and sailed a Pearson Ariel for a few years, inland. I sure learned a lot on that old sweetie and I really do believe that I’d leave everything I own, or that owns me, behind to take off on an extended offshore adventure. A 34′ Hallberg-Rassey…..damn!!
Dangit Boss! It’s around 14°F., the snow’s two feet deep, but after listening I might go out in the yard and do a little work on my Balboa 26.
I tented her in the fall so I can work under the snow, it’s a wee bit cold for painting but the swing keel winch needs some work I’ve been putting off.
AAJanuary 16, 2021, 2:34 AM
Thank you for this, Mr. G. I have my own reasons for loving this song. Someone I loved — truly, madly, deeply — loved this song, too. And was a sailor.
ghostsniperJanuary 16, 2021, 4:33 AM
@Jack, he was also in To Kill A Mockingbird, as Jem.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
![Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ginsbergnirvana-150x150.jpg "Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]")
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
The only toon he ever did that I could put up with. Not bad, in a dozing in a hammock on a summer day, sort of way.
But you can’t talk about boomer sailing toonz without mentioning:
Cool Change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bKwRW0l-Qk
and
Southern Cross
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw9gLjEGJrw
Off topic, but I like the new goings on at your Ka-Ching!
I had a sail boat when I was young (in my forties). Twelve foot sloop rigged with too-small a centerboard. It was great exercise. It would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it… it would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it….
Thank you for this Gerard. The music takes me back to 1979 and the visuals made me laugh because I’ve always in my mind seen sails…and stretched canvases.
I recollect some documentary film shot in the early 70’s, Stills was on stage in a full length sleeveless fur coat. A man, an audience member, started ragging on him for being greedy, “plastic” (quite the insult then), and a sellout. IIRC Stills came down off the stage and might have gotten into the chest-bump thing with guy.
An aquaintence, a singer, related to a group of us what it was like walking into her mother’s living room on occasional mornings and seeing David Crosby’s whale-corpse-like form beached on the couch.
Time passed and I wondered if the reason there were so many CSNY revivals was no one else would hang around with them.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/510fe09885ac4f3c0719513c5d59b6083ebd8f9a92c11ac07ef57b9bb461c55f.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/510fe09885ac4f3c0719513c5d59b6083ebd8f9a92c11ac07ef57b9bb461c55f.jpg
Sailing. Yup, used to do that a lot. Crewed on various sailboats on Long Island sound and Chesapeake Bay, year round . Ocean racing on a 62′ yawl. Transatlantic on a 3-masted barque (twice). Gentle breezes to full gales. Great memories…the song remembers when.
Honeymooned in 1973 for two weeks on our Cape Dory 25’ sailboat. Chesapeake Bay. Nothing compares to sleeping, anchored, under the stars with the sounds of the halyards chinking against the mast. A general idea of heaven. I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked. So yes to the song.
Missy sed: “I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked.”
=========
Indeed. A lot of people never learn the diff no matter how many times they marry.
Charlie Anderson: Do you like her?
Lt. Sam: Well, I just said I…
Charlie Anderson: No, no. You just said you loved her. There’s some difference between lovin’ and likin’. When I married Jennie’s mother, I-I didn’t love her – I liked her… I liked her a lot. I liked Martha for at least three years after we were married and then one day it just dawned on me I loved her. I still do… still do. You see, Sam, when you love a woman without likin’ her, the night can be long and cold, and contempt comes up with the sun.
Did someone mention David Crosby and sailing?
https://youtu.be/VVxMnNN005s
Apropos to the 20th:
https://youtu.be/LJxXu8MdL-A
It was Crosby and whaling.
David Crosby may be an ass of epic proportions, but you kind of have to admire him. He *is* a very good musician, part of three legendary groups. He’s been living large since the mid 1960s. He’s snorted a pallet of coke, gotten knob jobs from ten thousand pretty girls, and still gets into the news whenever he wants. That utterly smug expression in the “family picture” when wazhername, the redhead singer who was as big a drunk as Dave, hired him to be the sperm donor for the singer’s wife to get pregnant. “Yeah, I’ve been overweight and addicted to everything in sight for my whole life, had to buy a new liver, and they STILL picked me as great DNA . . . .”
Sailing is a disease, I to thought it romantic thirty years ago, I still own three boats. What was once romantic, is now a quest for speed, I still race my Santana525, wed nights here, in our beer can league. Back,then it as the leisure fleet, anything that floats, I, drove a Coronado 25, a beast of a boat, designed for the rough waters off of , it’s name sake.
Although an older boat, my Santana 525, is a fast nimble boat, an A class racer. Not as nimble as the Express 27s, with her handicap, quite capable of winning. She’s a pocket racer, an open water jet. Capable of planing down wind.
I have two others I pleasure cruise, a Hunter 25, with a bobbed keel and an Oday 28 for weekend adventure, big ,very roomy atomic 4 inboard, with a huge complement on sails. The cabin is standup for folks 6.2 tall, sleek and nimble, capable of taking me around the world.
I recently sold my ocean boat, a Hallberg RASSY, 34, moored just south of Santa Cruz. A classic Swedish boat, with low sexy lines, built by sailboat masters. The Woodward was stunning, the craftsmanship Second to none.
She’s currently on an around the world adventure, with the young man I GAVE it to. With my med conditions my Dr’s,talked me out of that same around the world adventure. A pity really.
Dirk
Ghost, love your reference to Shenandoah. I loved that movie and met ‘the boy’, Phillip Alford back in the mid 60’s. He was a couple of years older than me, a nice cat and I believe he lives in MS or Alabama.
Sailboats….Dirk, I envy you. I’m not a racer, just a lover of all things sailboat. Several years ago before health issues, I restored and sailed a Pearson Ariel for a few years, inland. I sure learned a lot on that old sweetie and I really do believe that I’d leave everything I own, or that owns me, behind to take off on an extended offshore adventure. A 34′ Hallberg-Rassey…..damn!!
Dangit Boss! It’s around 14°F., the snow’s two feet deep, but after listening I might go out in the yard and do a little work on my Balboa 26.
I tented her in the fall so I can work under the snow, it’s a wee bit cold for painting but the swing keel winch needs some work I’ve been putting off.
Thank you for this, Mr. G. I have my own reasons for loving this song. Someone I loved — truly, madly, deeply — loved this song, too. And was a sailor.
@Jack, he was also in To Kill A Mockingbird, as Jem.