David Prashker's Book Of Days: July 25

Amber pages

Elias Canetti, author, inter alia in Italia, of "Crowds and Power", born today in 1905

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young debuted, today in 1969. Or should that read Crosby-Still-Nash and Young debuted, because there seems always to have been the three-and-one, or just the three, or just the one, but never really the four.

Most artists are egotists, because most art is, to at least some and usually a very considerable degree, the exploration of the inner life, the bleeding of the inner wounds and the cauterising of the inner scars, and this is something that one cannot do quite so easily in groups (go tell that to the psychiatrists!) If you simply think it might be fun to do music for a career, hey let's get together and write some pop songs, you do lead guitar, I'll handle the harmonies, then playing in a band may well be a perfectly good idea (though there are still egos to contend with!), and for C, S and N it was exactly that: even those of us who followed them closely down the years struggle to remember the name of a single song that any of them wrote, and when we do suddenly get a memory, it turns out either to have been a really awful song ("Our House"; name another; "Teach Your Children"; even worse, name another), or else, and this applies to Buffalo Springfield as well as CSN&Y, to have been a Neil Young composition anyway: Broken Arrow, Hello Mr Soul, Suite:Judy Blue Eyes.

But in the end Neil couldn't work with the other guys (he and Stills came down from Canada together...), and in the end they couldn't work with him... maybe he just came from a very different tribe?

And because I honestly don't know on what date to put this thought, but the incident that keeps prompting it has just occurred to me again today...

Rather like my Colour Chart (below), I find myself completely flawed each time I update a Book of Days page, and need to find the original Word-copy in the digital folder. Word automatically saves everything in alphabetical order, so the calendar is transformed, and hunting for particular days requires thinking about it: June comes after July, for example, December is the third month of the year, and then comes February, followed by January, while at the other end November leads into October, and then comes September. Simply a matter of alphabetics...