Banff National Park, Alberta

Well… there’s a good chance I’ll make it out to the Rockies this summer after all. Stan the Van-Man is currently massaging Bettie a little (old Dames do like that so, don’t they), and with any luck I’ll find myself out in my favorite vertical playground within the week…

Photo: Castle Mountain (aka Eisenhower Tower) as photographed on 24 June 1884 by geologist and explorer A. P. Coleman. His ascent of Castle was one of the first significant climbs in Canada.

Vienna, Austria

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century (and described by Bertrand Russell as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”)

Wittegenstein’s influence has been felt in nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences. Here are some of my favorite “quotables” of his…

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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness,
but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

If people never did silly things
nothing intelligent would ever get done.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive
a somewhat different world.

If a lion could talk, we would not hear him.

A new word is like a fresh seed
sown on the ground of the discussion.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

The face is the soul of the body.

A picture is a fact.

Munich, Germany

Simplicissimus was a satirical German weekly magazine started by Albert Langen in April 1896 and published through 1967, with a hiatus from 1944-1954. It took its name from the protagonist of Grimmelshausen’s 1668 novel Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch.

Combining brash and politically daring content with a bright, immediate, and surprisingly modern graphic style, Simplicissimus published the work of writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. Its most reliable targets for caricature were stiff Prussian military figures, and rigid German social and class distinctions as seen from the more relaxed, liberal atmosphere of Munich. Contributors included Hermann Hesse, Gustav Meyrink, Fanny zu Reventlow, Jakob Wassermann, Frank Wedekind, Heinrich Kley, Alfred Kubin, Otto Nückel, Robert Walser, Heinrich Zille, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann and Erich Kästner.

A remarkable group of artists contributed to the publication over the years, including George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, John Heartfield, Thomas Theodor Heine, Olaf Gulbransson, Edward Thöny, Bruno Paul, Josef Benedikt Engl, Rudolf Wilke, Ferdinand von Reznicek, and Karl Arnold.

Images: a sampling of century-old illustrations from a rich online Simplicissimus collection here. These remind me more than a little of work by the Beggarstaffs.

White Lake, New York

This weekend marks 40 years since the Woodstock Music & Art Fair held at Max Yasgur’s 600 acre dairy farm. Thirty-two acts performed during a rainy weekend in front of nearly half a million concertgoers—little did they know at the time that ‘Woodstock’ would come to be regarded as both the height of the peaceful counterculture revolution as well as one of the greatest moments in popular music history (the three top acts of the 1960s, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan had all declined to appear at the festival). Later that year Joni Mitchell wrote a hit song commemorating the event—performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The song’s lyrics:

Well, I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road

And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going?

This he told me

Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm,

Gonna join in a rock and roll band.

Got to get back to the land and set my soul free.

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion year old carbon,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I roam beside you?

I have come to lose the smog,

And I feel myself a cog in somethin’ turning.

And maybe it’s the time of year,

Yes and maybe it’s the time of man.

And I don’t know who I am,

But life is for learning.

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion year old carbon,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion year old carbon,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock,

We were half a million strong

And everywhere was a song and a celebration.

And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes

Riding shotgun in the sky,

Turning into butterflies

Above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are caught in the devil’s bargain,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. 

Resinelli, Italy

Mountaineering legend Ricardo Cassin reached his ultimate earthly summit a week ago today… read a fitting tribute here. (I had posted on the occasion of his hundredth birthday earlier this year, here).

Climb on…

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

So… it’s after a relaxing Friday-night dinner, and a nice bottle of wine, and my Sweetie and I are discussing geo-politics and classical rhetoric (of course :-) and we start reminiscing, and I bring up influential voices from the past (the past we didn’t share)… and we start Googling and YouTubing and somehow we end up with social critic and songster extraordinaire Randy Newman.

Seems not very much has changed since the 1970s, eh?  Here’s a performance to an appreciative European audience a full 34 years later.

Takes one back to those halcyon days of yore, no? (from The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies compiled by Lou Brooks… “where tools of the trade that have died or have just about died a slow slow death are cheerfully exhibited.”)

Thanks for the link, Nance!

A few days ago, friend Ronald Shakespear from Buenos Aires sent me the text of a poignant letter written by the late Richard Avedon…

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“In 1970, I showed my father for the first time one of the portraits that I had made of him in the years just before. He was wounded. My sense of what is beautiful was very different from his. I wrote to him to try and explain.

Dear Dad,

I’m putting this in a letter because phone calls have a way of disappearing in the whatever it is. I’m trying to put into words what I feel most deeply, not just about you, but about my work and the years of undefinable father and son between us. I’ve never understood why I’ve saved the best that’s in me for strangers like Stravinsky and not for my own father.

There was a picture of you on the piano that I saw every day when I was growing up. It was by the Bachrach studio and heavily retouched and we all used to call it “Smilin’ Jack Avedon”—it was a family joke, because it was a photograph of a man we never saw, and of a man I never knew. Years later, Bachrach did an advertisement with me—Richard Avedon, Photographer—as a subject. Their photograph of me was the same as the photograph of you. We were up on the same piano, where neither of us had ever lived.

I am trying to do something else. When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. I want your intensity to pass into me, go through the camera and become a recognition to a stranger. I love your ambition and your capacity for disappointment, and that’s still as alive in you as it has ever been.

Do you remember you tried to show me how to ride a bicycle, when I was nine years old? You had come up to New Hampshire for the weekend, I think, in the summer when we were there on vacation, and you were wearing your business suit. You were showing me how to ride a bike, and you fell and I saw your face then. I remember the expression on your face when you fell. I had my box Brownie with me, and I took the picture.

I’m not making myself clear. Do you understand?

Love, Dick

Jane Birkin (in a mini), a Citroën DS… sometimes I miss the 1960s!