Bertrand Russel sums them up well: Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy--ecstasy so great that I would have often sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness-- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, lead upwards toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered to me.
Movers and shakers
I was born into a family of dead heads and jazz fanatics: so I’m genetically predisposed to loving the Grateful Dead, Dawg Music, and folk musicians like Doc Watson, David Grissman, and Tony Rice. The Pizza Tapes is maybe one of my most beloved albums; likewise Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Miles, Mingus, Coltrane, Ellington, Max Roach, Colemen Hawkin, Ornette Coleman and the like are near and dear to my heart. Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, the Beatles, Beck, Radio Head, Tin Hat Trio, Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Etta James, Aesop Rock, Against Me, Outkast, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Bell and Sebastian, Ravi Shankar…and this is impossible to even begin to get into…
Look for Dr. Charlotte’s Top Picks at a Dr. Video near you.
see i can answer this one because i hardly watch television: Rosanne, Arrested Development, Mystery, and I get sucked into some strange things at the gym…
Our Ecological Footprint by Wackernagel & Rees; Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner; The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond; Rubbish! by Rathje and Murphy; Nature's Operating Intructions (a Bionners publication); The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken; Song for a Blue ocean by Carl Safina; Everything by Jane Austin; All Arundhati Roy; Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez, Ramanyana, edited by Buck, Native Son by Wright, A Long Day's Jounrney into Night by O'Niel, A raisen in the Sun by Hansburry, what i read of Don Quixote, A room with a view by Forester, The Unbarable Lightness of being by Kundera, everything by John Steinback, what i've read by Mark Twain. Fuck it: too many books, too little time (thank you Julia Frizzy hair). The following i love too: T H E S P I R I T O F C H R I S T M A S BY KURT LUCHS (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/07/17christmas.html)
Sarah Asia Agusta Lipshitz