Sara Bareilles: Saint Honesty

Sara Bareilles – Saint Honesty (Official Audio) | Saint Honesty – Sara Bareilles – Live from Here

Sara Bareilles – Brave (Official Video) | Brave – Sara Bareilles with the National Symphony Orchestra |

Sara Bareilles What’s Inside album release concert at City Center in New York. Streamed live on YouTube on January 30, 2016.

From the web page: One night only show full concert. No right’s claimed, just wanted to share. Sara opens up about her experience writing the songs for the musical adaptation of Adrienne Shelly’s film “Waitress”.”

Set List

0:00 What’s Inside

1:10 Opening Up

5:55 Door Number Three

12:05 When He Sees Me (Dawn’s Song)

17:40 I Didn’t Plan It (Becky’s Song)

23:47 Soft Place To Land

30:20 Never Ever Getting Rid of Me

35:05 Bad Idea (With Drew Gehling)

40:50 You Matter To Me (With Drew Gehling)

49:20 She Used To Be Mine

57:45 Everything Changes

1:03:05 King of Anything

1:09:40 Love Song

1:16:40 Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay

1:23:14 Brave

1:28:05 Gravity (A Capella)

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Yellowstone’s Obsidian Cliff: Humanity’s Tool Shed for 11,500 Years

Above: This arrowhead from Obsidian Cliff glass is about 1,500 years old. Credit…Natalie Behring for The New York Times

Obsidian is among the most prized tool stones in the world, and this particular deposit, nearly 100 feet thick, is exceptional because of its continuous use by Indigenous people since the last ice age. Over the last 11,500 years or so, the stone has been fashioned into deadly knives, razor-sharp spear points, darts for atlatls, or spear-throwers, and arrowheads.

One lingering mystery of Obsidian Cliff stumps scientists to this day: How, some 2,000 years ago, did hundreds of pounds of obsidian wind up at what is now Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ohio, about 1,700 miles east of Yellowstone. Researchers do not know if the material traveled through trading networks or was gathered by people who went on a special journey to the cliff. That’s one of the major shortcomings of the X-ray analysis.

“If someone sends me an artifact, I can determine the origin of it with a good degree of confidence,” Dr. Shackley said. “But determining how it got there is the kicker.”

In the early 1890s, excavators digging in Mound 25 at the Hopewell location near Chillicothe, Ohio, found an altar with more than 100 burned and broken obsidian spear points, also known as bifaces. One point was more than 17 inches long and 6 inches wide and believed to have been designed for ceremonial purposes. About three-fourths the obsidian at Hopewell has been traced back to Obsidian Cliff using the X-ray tech.

“The largest of these bifaces are master works, really remarkable,” said Timothy D. Everhart, a museum curator and archaeologist at the Hopewell park.

The allure of Obsidian Cliff’s stone glass can be seen as well as felt in its efficient use as a sharp weapon. In a recent paper, researchers outlined its noteworthy elements — abundance, access, aesthetics and quality.

Source: Yellowstone’s Obsidian Cliff: Humanity’s Tool Shed for the Last 11,500 Years – The New York Times

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King Charles and Mr. Dick

A large crowd gathers outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall Palace to witness King Charles I's public beheading in 1649. The illustration is based on a contemporary 17th-century German print. [Source: Wikipedia]

No, it’s not what you think. The king isn’t the new one but the first of his name, who lost his head in 1649. And Mr. Dick isn’t some louche character in a Henry Miller novel. He is, well, Dickensian.

Mr. Dick is one of those irresistible minor characters in “David Copperfield”, the 1850 novel by Charles Dickens. Unlike Uriah Heap, a better-known minor character in the book, his name was not glamorized by a 1970s arena rock band.

Mr. Dick lives with David Copperfield’s Great Aunt Betsy in a cottage on the cliffs of Dover. You might say he is as mad as a hatter. Aunt Betsy will hear none of it. She won’t even utter the euphemism “a bit eccentric” to describe his state of mind. She defends him fiercely, knowing the anguish that made him that way. She provides the same refuge to David at a crucial moment in his youth.
Mr. Dick spends his days writing in his room. He is drafting a “Memorial” about the injustices levied on him by his mean-spirited family. Sometime every day, King Charles I creeps into his head. Mr. Dick knows the troubles with the king’s own head — crowned, beheaded, sewn together again — have something to do with his confusion. He can’t figure it out or let it go, so he stops writing and throws the day’s work in a corner. As the pages pile up, he glues them into a giant kite, more than seven feet tall. He hopes that flying it will disperse his troubled thoughts across the sky.

This book illustration from a 19th-century edition of David Copperfield depicts an amiable conversation between Mr. Dick and David (left). Both are seated. A stout older man, Mr. Dick folds his hands thoughtfully. A young boy, David listens attentively. The illustration was drawn by Fred Barnard. [Source: Wikipedia] David remembers wistfully, “Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he labored, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made, a deep impression on me. What Mr. Dick supposed would come of the Memorial, if it were completed; where he thought it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more than anybody else, I believe. Nor was it at all necessary that he should trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were certain under the sun, it was certain that the Memorial never would be finished.

“It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in, and it came lower and down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart.”

If you went to junior high school in Ohio in the 1960s, you probably read, or claimed to have read, a Dickens novel. I had to read Great Expectations and I hated it. At age 15 I decided life was too short for the novels of Charles Dickens. I needed 50 years to change my mind. If the assigned reading had been “David Copperfield”, things might have turned out differently.

Or not. I had not lived long enough to really understand it. I had not yet written enough misbegotten words. And I never was any good at flying a kite.

About THE Images: (above)  A large crowd gathers outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall Palace to witness King Charles I’s public beheading in 1649. The illustration is based on a contemporary 17th-century German print. [Source: Wikipedia] (below)This book illustration from a 19th-century edition of David Copperfield depicts an amiable conversation between Mr. Dick and David (left). Both are seated. A stout older man, Mr. Dick folds his hands thoughtfully. A young boy, David listens attentively. The illustration was drawn by Fred Barnard. [Source: Wikipedia]

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A Timely Scorecard On English Primogeniture

EARWORM WARNING! In case you need a timely scorecard on English primogeniture, here’s one from Horrible Histories. [hat tip to the BBC World Service]

 

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Annie Ernaux Has Broken Every Taboo of What Women Are Allowed to Write — The New York Times

By Rachel Cusk : Perhaps with no clearer motive than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older — intelligence and good manners,” we packed up our possessions during the last dark days of one December and decided to move to Paris. It was pleasant, I had often been told, for a writer to live somewhere where reading and writing were accorded the highest respect, and it was true that — in Paris at least — these were semipublic activities: In every park and cafe, on the Metro and on the benches along the Seine, people were openly engaged in what for me had always been the most private and solitary of occupations. Bookstores still held their ground here among the shopfronts, and the deification of French writers living and dead was evinced everywhere in street names and statues and advertising hoardings for new novels. I listened on the radio to an astronaut reading passages aloud from Marguerite Duras from his space station to his earthbound audience below.

Then, last October, the writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Frenchwoman ever to do so. We had been in France for nearly two years, and amid the alternating sensations of regeneration and disarray that this upheaval had inevitably incurred, Annie Ernaux had come to represent for me a troubling point of constancy. During my initial months in Paris, when it seemed for the first time in my life that lying on a sofa reading a book was something I was not only permitted but encouraged to do, I made my way slowly in my clumsy French through one slim text after another: “A Man’s Place,” “A Woman’s Story,” “Simple Passion,” “The Possession,” “The Years.” The story they told, rigorously excluding anything that did not directly pertain to it, was that of Annie Duschene (Ernaux’s maiden name), only child of a working-class French couple who ran a humble café-epicerie in Yvetot, a small town in Normandy.

By means of scholarly excellence, Annie claws her way out of the mire of her origins to teacher-training college, marries the first man who presents himself, is submerged in a bourgeois purgatory as housewife and mother and slowly breaks her way out of that new prison by writing books — books that try to stop time by questioning and reconstructing as precisely as they can the events that have brought her to the existence she is now leading. Who is she, and where has she come from? Who were her parents, and why did they live as they did? Why did she act in certain ways as she became free of them, and to what degree is her life the consequence of those actions? Has she ever lived consciously even for one minute, or is this task of writing and reconstruction the effort to apply consciousness to blind fate?

Despite the differences — of nationality, generation, social class, familial situation — between my own life and that of Annie Ernaux, I found myself plunged as I read into a more and more profound state of recognition. Yet what I seemed to be recognizing were things that no one generally admits. Ernaux’s honesty had the effect of illuminating a profound and unsuspected lack of freedom in her reader. How, through the simple story of her origins, had she laid her hand so surely on the human tragedy of our ability to make ourselves unfree? The answer perhaps lay in her faith in writing as a sacred and transcendent activity. She believed in writing as some people believe in religion, as a sphere where the self, the soul, is entitled to find refuge.

Source: Annie Ernaux Has Broken Every Taboo of What Women Are Allowed to Write – The New York Times

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Safe Passage, Gordon Lightfoot

Even when I couldn’t raise a radio station out of Thunder Bay or Sault Ste. Marie, his songs played in my mind on long Lake Superior canoe trips. Cold, wet, pockets full of sand. I’d stand on the beach and wonder whether to launch or stay. If the fog lifted, the wind would rise. Flat water wouldn’t last. So I’d best be on my way in the early morning rain.

Then there was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. Not a hopeful paddling song after you’ve watched the waters where it went down.

Canadian Railway Trilogy

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‘A History of the World According to Getty Images’ releases striking historical footage | Here & Now

Footage of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster is stored behind paywalls. “A History Of The World According To Getty Images” makes it and other historical documents available to the public. (Sam Shere/Getty Images)Here & Now’s Scott Tong speaks with filmmaker Richard Misek about his new documentary, “A History of the World According to Getty Images,” which makes a bold statement about who owns history.This segment aired on May 1, 2023.

Source: ‘A History of the World According to Getty Images’ releases striking historical footage | Here & Now

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