Over at Alias Clio's. As I note in a comment there, almost every line is an aphorism. And a very wise one. I must read more Browne. Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js

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(1) Grumbling to myself yesterday about Chris Rea's Blue Cafe not being distributed (through normal channels) in this country, it occurred to me to look him up on Wikipedia and see if there was any interesting information about his work over the past few years. Quite a lot, as it turns out: he was seriously…

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…that makes some people do things like this, and makes other people, for instance me, laugh at them. Even funnier, though, (and nothing to do with Bono) is the title of the last song on that album: "We Built This Village On a Trad. Arr. Tune." (If you don't get the joke, don't worry—in fact,…

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I noticed a headline on CNN's site a little while ago saying that the astronaut involved in the infamous NASA love triangle incident some months ago is back in court. When the story first appeared I naturally thought at once of Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos; specifically, the first of the two science fiction…

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Chris Rea: Auberge Everytime I hear Chris Rea I wonder why he isn’t more popular. His warm, gruff voice is striking and powerful, and his slide guitar work, although not flashy, is expressive in a way that doesn’t rely on the standard blues vocabulary. His best songs are terrific. He deserves a bigger audience. Then…

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Five Books Everyone Should Read Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago to name five books I think everyone should read. As an habitual maker of pop music lists (see the movie High Fidelity) I was intrigued, but the scope of the charge was really impossibly broad, so I had to narrow it somewhat…

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I'm going to be out of town for a couple of days. For your entertainment and education, here are a couple more pictures from Hurricane Katrina. I don't do graphics very well at all, and it always takes me a while to get images cropped and size to appear correctly on this page, so I'm…

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I take a day off work to hang around at home while two guys from Affordable Plumbing rework all the plumbing in the house. They finish around 1 and I sit down at the dining room table with one of them to settle the bill. While he's writing it up I idly scan the tv…

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What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world of speculation.What might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never openedInto the rose-garden. —Eliot, “Burnt Norton” As regular readers have probably…

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Procol Harum: Shine On Brightly The conversation with Ryan C about this album (see comments on this post) made me get it out and give it a listen for the first time in quite a few years. Shine On Brightly was Procol Harum’s second album, and I still find it, as I did when it…

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