Crosby Stills and Nash

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN) are a folk rock/rock supergroup made up of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, also known as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) when joined by occasional fourth member Neil Young. They are noted for their intricate vocal harmonies, often tumultuous interpersonal relationships, political activism, and lasting influence on music and culture. Initially formed by the trio of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, the genesis of the group lies in two 1960s rock bands, The Byrds and The Hollies, and the demise of a third, Buffalo Springfield. Friction existed between David Crosby and his bandmates in the Byrds, and he was dismissed from the Byrds in the fall of 1967

Crosby, Stills and Nash – Teach your Children.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash - Our House

The art of Candido Portinari

Candido Portinari; born in  Brodowski, December 29, 1903  and died in  Rio de Janeiro, February 6, 1962

He was one of the most important Brazilian painters and a noted influence of the neo-realism style of painting.

He was born of Italian immigrants in a coffee plantation near Brodowski, in São Paulo. He studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (ENBA) in Rio de Janeiro and in 1928 he won a gold medal at the ENBA and a trip to Paris where he stayed until 1930. He eventually returned to Brazil.

He joined the Brazilian Communist Party and stood for senator in 1947 but due to political unrest and persecution he left Brazil and travelled to  Uruguay. He returned to Brazil in 1951 but by this time he was already suffering ill health. He died in 1962, sadly  due to lead poisoning from his paints.


Portinari's works can be found in galleries and settings in Brazil and abroad, ranging from the family chapel in his childhood home in Brodowski to his panels Guerra e Paz (War and Peace) in the United Nations building in New York. The range and styles of his work is remarkable. It includes images of childhood, paintings depicting rural and urban labour, refugees fleeing the hardships of Brazil's rural north-east, key events in the history of Brazil, portraits of family and Brazilian intellectuals, book illustrations, tiles decorating the Church of São Francisco at Pampulha, Belo Horizonte. There were a number of commemorative events in the centenary of his birth in 2003, including an exhibition of his work in London.

Been creative with my sewing machine

The Reason I’ve been off line for the last couple of days.


This is the reason. I’ve spent the last couple of days working on my sewing machine. My grand daughter Erin has been taking Scottish dancing lessons for the last year and we thought she should have the ‘proper kit’. To buy a complete dancing outfit, (kilt, shirt and waistcoat) from a specialist supplier apparently costs somewhere in the region of £250.00+, crazy when you think they only use it for shows and exams and they grow out of it annually. So I scoured the second hand market, bought an old kilt, an old school shirt, a large blue velvet top and put them together with some off cuts of blue/green tartan material I already had. I unpicked, cut, sewed and ironed and this is what we ended up with. It’s not exactly the same as the professional and expensive version. The shirt is supposed to have what Erin describes as ‘white fluffy bits down the front’’, but as I didn’t come across any old lace, a tartan ruffle around the neck and sleeves will have to do. The most import thing is, Erin is pleased, and if she’s happy, we’re all happy.

Song saturday; Blood Sweat and Tears

Some weekend music.............not heard these for ages but at their best..... they are the very best.
Blood sweat and tears

Blood, Sweat & Tears (also known as "BS&T") is an American music group, originally formed in 1967 in New York City. Since its beginnings in 1967, the band has gone through numerous iterations with varying personnel and has encompassed a multitude of musical styles. What the band is most known for, from its start, is the fusing of rock, blues, pop music, horn arrangements and jazz improvisation into a hybrid that came to be known as "jazz-rock". Unlike "jazz fusion" bands, which tend toward virtuostic displays of instrumental facility and some experimentation with electric instruments, the songs of Blood, Sweat & Tears merged the stylings of rock, pop and R&B/soul music with big band, while also adding elements of 20th Century Classical and small combo jazz traditions.

The last of my Garden for this year

The last of my Garden 2009

It has rained and rained and rained…………….and then rained some more. It rained so much my pond overflowed and the grass around the pond turned into a boggy mess. There have been floods and people stranded all over the North East of Scotland,  thankfully it’s not been that bad here but it has been very, very wet.
When I came home from work today there was a temporary reprieve from the rain. I opened the gate and realised, my garden summer is over. I always get sad when it’s time to tidy up the garden ready for the winter, and today was the day.

For weeks now my garden table and chairs and the wonderful little wood burning stove have sat in my garden, it has been like an extra room to my house, a lovely place to sit with a glass of wine in the evening or to take the newspaper and coffee in the morning.

Before the evenings grew shorter I invested in some small solar lights that sit on the steps up to my door, now there is hardly enough sunlight to charge the batteries during the day.

There are a couple of small jobs left to do next year, I ran out of time before I had to go back to work. I didn’t manage to do the tiling around the little rockery; the odd looking frames at the back of the little rockery are the supports form underneath the bath.

I’ve planted honeysuckle and jasmine ready to grow around them next year. I didn’t manage to get the sink and pedestal bolted to the shed wall either, that will be one of the first jobs on the list next year.

As I pack away the summer things I make sure I clean out and fill up all the bird feeders, the garden looks sad in the winter but I do get a lot of bird visitors and now is the time of year I like to start feeding.

The leaves are already falling from the old apple tree and the nesting box and the feeders quite exposed.

The dog roses are long gone and now we have the rose hips. The white winter berries are also beginning to grow, they seem quite early this year.

I looked out of my back window and realised my neighbours Rowan tree has already lost all the berries. They don’t last long because the birds devour them almost as soon as they grow.
My garden looks so bare without the summer furniture. I do have something to look forward to, it's my birthday soon and I think my daughters are going to get together and buy me a camera...............oh how I have missed my camera this summer, so with luck these could be the last pictures posted here  taken with my phone

calling all gardeners..............and I know there are loads of you out there. My herbs are pretty well established and I've got a tiny piece of garden devoted to wild life. Now is the time to think about GROWING FOOD. Remember my garden is small, I'm thinking of starting with some berries, raspberries grow well here and I love the preserves and jam, maybe some potatoes or root veg in some sort of potato barrel.............what about growing food indoors?? when replying please remember the SCOTTISH CLIMATE, also remember I can't do heavy digging any more. I used to have a mini orchard with lots of fruit but I don't have the space for that now .....so what do I plant and when??

Poetry Wednesday; Philip Levine, The simple Truth

The Simple Truth

Philip Levine
The Simple Truth was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.

Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light.

The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true

they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering

in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,

and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

Philip Levine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Levine_%28poet%29

Levine grew up in industrial Detroit. The familial, social, and economic world of 20th century Detroit is one of the major subjects of his life's work. His portraits of working class Americans and his continuous examination of his Jewish immigrant inheritance (both based on real life and described through fictional characters) has left a monumental testimony of mid-20th century American life.

It can be best found in books such as "They Feed They Lion," the National Book Award-winning "What Work Is," "A Walk with Tom Jefferson," and in his "New Selected Poems." Growing up, Levine faced the anti-Semitism embodied by a local celebrity, the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.

Art work by
Martin Johnson Heade 1864-1865

Hudson River School painter was born in 1819 in a rural community in Buck's Head County, Pennsylvania. His father, the owner of a successful farm and lumber mill, encouraged him to study art from a young age, and he received his first art lessons from local portrait painters Edward and Thomas Hicks. In time Heade's skillfulness and sophistication as an artist greatly increased, and he is now recognized as one of the greatest and most versatile American painters of his day.