Thursday, December 31, 2015

Travels with Cadfael: A New Year's Tale of Two Feasts, Rome and New York

Nothing exotic this New Years, but fond memories of a New Year's Eve in Trastevere, Rome, with my Benedictine monk friend Cadfael—whom I had met while I was studying chant in Solemes, which lead to a series of terrific travel adventures—while my then recent ex walked down the aisle in New York. When...
           , ,    

Sunday, December 27, 2015

2015 Where Blogs Are Alive & Well: Vagabond Scholar's Yearly Round-up in Honor of Jon Swift

 From the Vagabond Scholar blog: "Welcome to a tradition started by the late Jon Swift/Al Weisel, who left behind some excellent satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. As Lance Mannion put it in 2010: One of his projects was a year-end Blogger Round Up. Al/Jon...
              

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Bill Murray Channels Bing & Frank for a Very Merry Christmas

There's no doubt: My Christmas spirits have been sagging. There is so very much pain in the world, it has taken my blogging voice away. And then. I finally watched A Very Murray Christmas on Netfilx, and it woke me up, just in time. It spoke to my DNA, and with that connection I realized that I can't...
           , ,    

Sunday, December 20, 2015

The Master Celtic Interpretation of "A Christmas Carol"

Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol was published as a novella on December 19, 1843, in London. For me, the 1951 Alastair Sim film version--released as Scrooge in the UK--is one of the most perfect realizations of literature to film ever created.  Wiki lists more than 100 adaptations of Charles...
           , ,    

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Giving Thanks for John Thaw and Inspector Morse

"People who do crosswords..... have blanks in their lives, and no clue how to fill them"   Adele to Morse, Death Is Now My Neighbour My inaction to get a flu shot in October lead to--or at least contributed to--enduring a terrible bout of influenza in November. Maybe not of the...
           , ,    

Friday, October 30, 2015

Orson Welles's War of the Worlds: First-hand Accounts from Steve Allen, John Houseman, and Howard Koch

'Twas the night before Halloween, 79 years ago in 1938, and America experienced a collective reaction to a media phenomenon—not unlike news flashes we now experience on Twitter—except the reaction was in "real life," not virtual. They had been listening to the radio, surfing around the dial, when...
              

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Kairos in Croatia, aka Carpe Diem, Trogir-Style

Left: Trogir, Croatia, Town Hall. Bas relief of Croatian hero, Petar Berislavić sculpted by  Ivan Meštrović. Right: Full-size bronze statue of Ivan Meštrović sculpted by American Malvina Hoffman. I spent the week of Labor Day in the extraordinary country of Croatia, where history lives...
           , ,    

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Sing Polyphony & See the World. But not Cuba.

September 19, 2015: I'm watching Pope Francis arrive in Cuba, in advance of this visit to the US. I tried to go to Cuba 3 years ago, shortly after Pope Benedict visited, to sing in one of the polyphony courses I do around the world.  It was an idea before its time: the US Department of the...
              
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)