Piet Mondrian

Pier and Ocean

Peter Singer

Excerpts from Practical Ethics from the section "From Equality of Opportunity to Equality of Consideration"

...equality of opportunity is not an attractive ideal. It rewards the lucky, who inherit those abilities that allow them to pursue interesting and lucrative careers. It penalizes the unlucky, whose genes make it very hard for them to achieve similar success.

...When we pay people high salaries for programming computers and low salaries for cleaning offices, we are, in effect, paying people for having a high IQ, and this means that we are paying people for something determined in part before they are born and almost wholly determined before they reach an age at which they are responsible for their actions. From the point of view of justice and utility there is something wrong here.

"First of all, how good looking is my wife?"

Mark Rothko

No.14 1960 Painting

President Barack Obama

Excerpts from Inaugural Address

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors...

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics...

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America...

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more...

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace...

Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Charlyn "Chan" Marshall - Cat Power

"Colors and the Kids" from Moon Pix

Must be the colors and the kids that keep me alive

'cause the music is boring me to death

must just be the colors and the kids that keep me alive

'cause I want to go right away to January night

I built a shack with an old friend

he was someone I could learn from

someone I could become

will you meet me down on a sandy beach

we can roll up our jeans

so the tide won't get us below the knees

yellow hair, you are a funny bear

yellow hair, such a funny bear

slender fingers would hold me

slender limbs would hold me

and you could say my name

like you knew my name

I could stay here, become someone different

I could stay here, become someone better

it's so hard to go in the city

'cause you want to say hello to everybody

it's so hard to go into the city

'cause you want to say 'hey I love you' to everybody

when we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky

now all we want is to go red places

and try to stay outta hell

must be the colors and the kids that keep me alive

'cause the music is boring me to death

must be the colors and it must just be the kids

that keep me alive on this January night

yellow hair, you are a funny bear

yellow hair, such a funny bear

William Carlos Williams

"A Matisse" from Imaginations

On the French grass, in that room on Fifth Ave., lay that woman who had never seen my own poor land. The dust and noise of Paris had fallen from her with the dress and underwear and shoes and stockings which she had just put aside to lie bathing in the sun. So too she lay in the sunlight of the man's easy attention. His eye and the sun had make day over her. She gave herself to them both for there was nothing to be told. Nothing is to be told to the sun at noonday. A violet clump before her belly mentioned that it was spring. A locomotive could be heard whistling beyond the hill. There was nothing to be told. Her body was neither classic nor whatever it might be supposed. There she lay and her curving torso and thighs were close upon the grass and violets.

So he painted her. The sun had entered his head in the color of sprays of flaming palm leaves. They had been walking for an hour or so after leaving the train. They were hot. She had chosen the place to rest and he had painted her resting, with interest in the place she had chosen.

It had been a lovely day in the air.-What pleasant women are these girls of ours! When they have worn clothes and take them off it is with an effect of having performed a small duty. They return to the sun with a gesture of accomplishment.-Here she lay in this spot today not like Diana or Aphrodite but with better proof than they of regard for the place she was in. She rested and he painted her.

It was the first of summer. Bare as was his mind of interest in anything save the fullness of his knowledge, into which her simple body entered as into the eye of the sun himself, so he painted her. So she came to America.

No man in my country has seen a woman naked and painted her as if he knew anything except that she was naked. No woman in my country is naked except at night.

In the French sun, on the French grass in a room on Fifth Avenue, a French girl lies and smiles at the sun without seeing us.

Martin Luther King Jr.

"The Need To Be 'Maladjusted'" from The Power of Nonviolence speech

Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word "maladjusted." Now we all should seek to live a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. i call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, "Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

Richard Brautigan

"Counting Toward Tijuana" from The Abortion

What an abstract thing it is to take your clothes off in front of a stranger for the first time. It isn't really what we planned on doing. Your body almost looks away from itself and is a stranger to this world.

We live most of our lives privately under our clothes, except in a case like Vida whose body lived outside of herself like a lost continent, complete with dinosaurs of her own choosing.

"I'll turn the lights out," she said, sitting next to me on the bed.

I was startled to hear her panic. She seemed almost relaxed a few seconds before, My, how fast she could move the furniture about in her mind. I responded to this by firmly saying, "No, please don't."

Her eyes stopped moving for a few seconds. They came to a crashing halt like blue airplanes.

"Yes," she said. "That's a good idea. It will be very hard, but I have no other choice. I can't go on like this forever."

She gestured toward her body as if it were far away in some lonesome valley and she, on top of a mountain, looking down. Tears came suddenly to her eyes. There was now rain on the blue wings of the airplanes.

Then she stopped crying without a tear having left her eyes. I looked again and all the tears had vanished. "We have to leave the lights on," she said. "I won't cry. I promise."

I reached out and, for the first time in two billion years, I touched her. I touched her hand. My fingers went carefully over her fingers. Her hand was almost cold.

"You're cold," I said.

"No," she said. "It's only my hand."

She moved slightly, awkwardly toward me and rested her head on my shoulder. When her head touched me, I could feel my blood leap forward, my nerves and muscles stretch like phantoms toward the future.

My shoulder was drenched in smooth white skin and long bat-flashing hair. I let go of her hand and touched her face. It was tropical.

"See," she said, smiling faintly. "It was only my hand."

It was fantastic trying to work around her body, not wanting to startle her like a deer and have her go running off into the woods.

I poetically shifted my shoulder like the last lines of a shakespearean sonnet (Love is a babe; then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth grow.) and at the same time lowered her back onto the bed.

She lay there looking up at me as I crouched forward, descending slowly, and kissed her upon the mouth as gently as I could. I did not want that first kiss to have attached to it the slightest gesture or flower of the meat market.