"And be contented to charm/ the birds off the trees..."

Playing. Cole Porter's song "Get Out of Town" (Ella Fitzgerald singing, of course) is playing in my head, against my photograph with iPad sketch-markings:

WHY WISH ME HARM
WHY NOT RETIRE TO A FARM
AND BE CONTENTED TO CHARM
THE BIRDS OFF THE TREES

Watching the birds whirling around the sky... some migrating, others flying up, dark against the pinks and greys of the now-receding fog. Our hummingbird is still for about 5 seconds, taking a very small rest on a branch, then visiting the flowers on the tree outside our window. His body is again on a branch, but his head is constantly moving; he is perched for longer now, 10 seconds, perhaps... tiny movements of the natural world silhouetted on the greys of more distant pipes, air conditioners, stuccoed walls of the apartments across the way.

 And now lines from an old Seals and Crofts song from my college years come back:

Hummingbird, don't fly away, fly away
Hummingbird, don't fly away, fly away

"I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences...

And gaze at the moon until I lose my senses..."  (from "Don't Fence Me In," written by Cole Porter, who went to Yale & Harvard Law School and lived in Paris, Venice, New York and Santa Monica, none of them places most cowboys traditionally roam... still, it is my favorite cowboy song).

My brother-in-law was visiting from Australia; he is an insanely talented painter and print-maker and is looking to return here to teach.  While he was here, we three talked about: etching using zinc plates, painting at the kitchen table, his coming around to Matisse, diabetes, family, living alone, beaches, and we debated whether art should be taught as though the paths taken were as inevitable, and single-minded, as the unrolling of a long carpet, and we sang songs by Dan Hicks and the Lovin' Spoonful and Pure Prairie League (that would be "Amy, what you wanna do/ I think I could stay with you..."), the Allman Brothers ("Whippin' Post"),  and any other song that echoed anything anyone said.

But, on our final night, when we had pretty much covered all the topics any reasonable person could expect to have considered... we found ourselves in a French restaurant in Berkeley.  As we waited for the first course (flammenkuche to share and asparagus with pancetta and a poached egg) we started on lists: our best list, over the course of the night, was the 10 best Westerns of all time (in our humble opinion ... and the deal was, it had to be unanimous ... and the brothers were the most vocal ... just sayin').  The top 10 list, with no recourse to the web (we were in a lovely French restaurant, so here we go, un-checked), in no particular order:

open range
once upon a time in the west
hombre
the wild bunch
magnificent seven
the missouri breaks
red river
dances with wolves
left-handed gun
shane

And yours?

So, today, thinking over both rich sauces and cowboy movies ... I also cleaned up my storage areas:

and looked, yes, again, at the pear and river painting ... I  have worked on it, yet something is wrong. So I have turned it upside down to find the spatial weaknesses ... "until I lose my senses..."