Sunset, Friday, 3 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

These posts have been a little intense lately, so I could go for a change of pace. Perhaps something more on the order of a Facebook style of discourse – so –

Is it just me or has this been a great year for grapefruit?

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Today by way of recognizing the birthday of my late father-in-law, Sidney Everette Sutherland (1937–2002), I’d like to put in a word for the guy who wrote one of his favorite songs, “Joy To The World” (for Three Dog Night). There’s something about Hoyt Axton I always liked and I just think he and Mr. Sutherland would have gotten along very well, if only on the strength of the sentiments in that song. Mr. Sutherland’s parenting style is nicely suggested by the lines “Joy to the world/ All the boys and girls ... ”

In addition, any doubt you could possibly still have about the limits of Wikipedia can be erased by the third line of its piece on this song: “The words are nonsensical.”

Hoyt’s mother, Mae Axton, co-wrote Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” ... and another of Hoyt’s songs, “Greenback Dollar” (Kingston Trio), is a folk song with virtually a rock beat, and easy to play, so in the 1960s it rescued countless high school hootenannies just on the strength of pure energy.

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Ragged clouds seemed cold and threatening but in places overhead actually as thin as smoke – I could see blue behind them, dirty orange light inside. Fake bad weather – gray containment of light, a cold diffusion of light with the effect of making everything on the ground seem solid, sculptural, clear, super-real. Today I would have had no trouble mapping the position on the ground of everything between here and the woods. Massive trunks of nearby red oaks could have served as horizons in themselves.