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Billy Bragg: Which Side Are You On

Ann Margret in Tommy, 1975.

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The Band: Last Of The Blacksmiths

Robert Herrmann: River Buildings, 1966

I dreamed (and you will not be interested to hear about it, but I am not recording it for you), last of all (but aren’t all the choicest dreams the last ones?), of a large pink cockatoo, flying above the cloud-darkened beach and the slates of the city, as the heavy-shouldered storm waded greyly in to shore.

And, being Nabokov, it's all like this, page after page of it

This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to Cincinnatus’ silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates.

From the opening chapter of Invitation to a Beheading. Why have I been reading the garbage I’ve been reading? I must stop reading garbage and read more Nabokov.

Route of Mar. 25 race

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68km, 2,300m climb.

And he writes like him, too!

Production still from Kerouac: The Inevitable Biopic, starring Steve Gutenberg in the role he was born to play.

In a spirit of exasperation, occasioned by conservative rhetoric

The first and most important step for working people must be to change their attitude towards other working people. When we regard someone who enjoys more leverage over his or her employers than we do over our own as a spoiled, greedy parasite, rather than a model, we are engaging in fantasy. Anyone with less than $100,000 a year who imagines that he is being impoverished by, say, public sector employees’ benefits is deluding himself. The reality is that these people are people just like us, on balance no lazier, no less competent, no less well-intentioned. To imagine otherwise is to fall into the error of identifying with people whose interests do not align with our own, of imagining that by saying what rich people say we are more likely to become rich ourselves; but we will not become rich in any case. If we cannot see that higher wages for ordinary working people—even for not particularly efficient or attractive working people—is what drives job creation, growth, and social cohesion, we will continue to grow poorer, never mind rich.

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Aerial photo (probably from a crane; note cables, right) of Portuguese quarry, from the project “Open Space Office”, by Tito Mouraz.

“Pull my finger.”