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Paul Simon: 2026 Ravinia Festival :: Hunter Pavilion, Highland Park, IL / July 17, 2026

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Further To Fly

There may come a time When you’ll be tired As tired as a dream that wants to die Further to fly Further to fly Further to fly Further to fly

Maybe you will find a love That you discover accidentally Who falls against you gently as A pickpocket brushes your thigh Further to fly

Effortless music from the Cameroons The spinning darkness of her hair A conversation in a crowded room going nowhere The open palm of desire Wants everything It wants everything It wants everything

Sometimes I’ll be walking down The street and I’ll be thinking Am I crazy Or is this some morbid little lie? Further to fly Further to fly Further to fly

A recent loss of memory A shadow in the family The baby waves bye-bye I’m trying I’m flying

There may come a time When I will lose you Lose you as I lose my sight Days falling backward into velvet night The open palm of desire Wants everything It wants everything It wants soil as soft as summer And the strength to push like spring

A broken laugh, a broken fever Take it up with the great deceiver Who looks you in the eye Says, Baby, don’t cry Further to fly

There may come a time When I will lose you Lose you as I lose my sight Days falling backward into velvet night The open palm of desire The Rose of Jericho Soil as soft as summer The strength to let you go

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“The idea of an afterlife is simply there to give existence a meaning - to give sixty years of banality a sense of purpose. I mean, the idea of an afterlife is just as valid as the idea of a hot dinner - it all depends if you’re hungry.” Robert Smith (via elige)

The Cure “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me” 1987 (inside design)

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“It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.” Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver), If on a winter’s night a traveler

THE VISITORS (1980). Cover art by Martin Hoffman.

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“Heaven and earth are ruthless and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.” —Lao Tzu

Andrew McCarthy :: @AJamesMcCarthy

"My favorite capture of the night: The moment the moon's shadow split the sunset in half, leaving a diamond ring in the sky and a breathtaking view. I call it "Shadows on the Balearic Sea"."

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“Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God - such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing.” – Martin Buber

Eclipse by Juan SanJuan Rebollar Popocatépetl and Ixtlaccihuatl

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“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’ And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it–have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”

Joan Halifax

(from Unfinished Vow)

“Alas, the political class would prefer to focus on its own anger issues. Republicans run on old tweets and transgender sports and spend too much time in office trying to defund and defang left-coded institutions, rather than solving problems. Democrats run on ‘saving democracy’ and expropriating billionaires, then pour their political hearts into investigations and prosecutions. This may work in a primary or in places that are very red or very blue, but it’s a lousy strategy in swing states and nationwide elections. For that matter, Hong couldn’t even win her primary, and that same night, election denier Mike Lindell went down in the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary. There’s a ray of hope in that, but only a flicker, since both candidates were unusually inept. The furious bases of the two parties will have more opportunities to nominate passionate ideologues who will at best go on to lose their general elections and at worst further destabilize American politics. I doubt their anger will ebb soon, and I won’t even argue that it should. Sometimes you have to accept that your anger may be justified, but that doesn’t mean it can be satisfied. And once you figure that out, it’s often best to put it aside and talk about something else.”

Sodium Dream

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And say that over the eons, countless millions of civilizations arose, many of them lasting long enough to venture into space. Spacefaring creatures found each other, linked up, and shared knowledge, their technologies accelerating with each new contact. They built great energy-harvesting spheres that enclosed entire suns and drove computers the size of whole solar systems. They harnessed the energy from quasars and gamma ray bursts. They filled galaxies the way we once spread across continents. They learned to weave the fabric of reality itself. And when this consortium mastered all the laws of time and space, they fell into the sadness of completion.

Fewer Missiles, More Hair. :: In the War Room.

Ian Sanders :: People.

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There’s a Japanese saying: “Darkness lies at the foot of the lighthouse”—meaning that by focusing too much on the distance, we may fail to illuminate what’s right at our feet.