Thomas Hardy's "Lines on the Loss of the Titanic"

Ryan Gosling as Sebastian in the film LA LA Land.

I don’t remember when I first read Thomas Hardy’s poem "Convergence of the Twain” but it is a haunting piece whose theme, unexpectedly, offers a comforting way to look at heartache.

It has one particular phrase—"and consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres"—that strikes all who hear it. I know, because of the literally thousands of people from around the world who have Googled the phrase and landed here. Hardy is in the unique echelon of "world literature."

The Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the Loss of the Titanic
Thomas Hardy

            I
      In a solitude of the sea
      Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
             
                  II
      Steel chambers, late the pyres
      Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
                  III
      Over the mirrors meant
      To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
                  IV
      Jewels in joy designed
      To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
                  V
      Dim moon-eyed fishes near
      Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?'...
                  VI
      Well: while was fashioning
      This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
                  VII
      Prepared a sinister mate
      For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
                  VIII
      And as the smart ship grew
      In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
                  IX
      Alien they seemed to be:
      No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
                  X
      Or sign that they were bent
      By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
                  XI
      Till the Spinner of the Years
      Said 'Now!' And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Rudyard Kipling put the word twain (from Old English twegen, meaning two) on the poetic map with one of his Barrack-room Ballads in 1892, declaring, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”  In 1912 the sinking of the Titanic was so overwhelming that Hardy needed to use the language of the Empire—perversely inverted to be the convergence of the twain—to start to make sense of the tragedy.

He begins the poem with a harrowing description of the Titanic on the bottom of the ocean, where sea-worms crawl over the “mirrors meant to glass the opulent.”

“Jewels in joy designed to ravish the sensuous mind lie lightless.” And moon-eyed fishes query “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”

Hardy explains that “The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything prepared a sinister mate" for the ship: “a Shape of Ice.”

"And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too."

How chilling, to think of the ship being built as the iceberg is simultaneously growing larger. In Hardy’s worldview, the twain meet in time and space when

 “the Spinner of Years said ‘Now!’ 

And each one hears, and consummation comes, 

and jars two hemispheres.”

Those Jazz Pianists--They Are Trouble with a Capital "T"

It is the definitive poem on the tragic fate of Titanic. It also had a very personal meaning for me. After a failed romance, it popped into my head as an amazing metaphor for when two people collide, and one sinks.

Most of us have experienced a catastrophic meeting of the twain: who hasn’t been sunk by another person, particularly a love? And from the black stillness of the ocean floor, as you lay stunned, trying to rally your senses, you start to think, how could this have happened?

Well, it happened much like Hardy imagined the epic sinking: you were growing “in stature, grace, and hue” and somewhere, so was he.

Then “the Immanent Will” or fate or chance or Match.com said “Now!” and you hit. It turns out that this, too, is a sinister mate. The extent of the injury from the impact is not immediately known (surely, there are 16 watertight compartments). But slowly you realize things are amiss, and then rapidly you are going down.

The comfort in Hardy’s poem, for me, is the sense of inevitability. The ship was built and the iceberg grew, and fate deemed they were going to hit. From that macro-view, it’s a no fault disaster.

On a personal level, I can accept that a catastrophic impact was going to be a part of my history, just as the Titanic sinking is part of world history.

IF he had never moved from Tennessee . . .

IF I hadn’t learned to play the piano . . .

IF IF IF . . .

IF things had been different, we twain would not have met. I would have been safer in Kipling’s world than in Hardy’s-—but I didn’t get to make that choice.

Read More

 Mapeel     12/16/2016     poetry, Thomas Hardy   

Woody's 1979 Manhattan Fantasy Meets 2016 Manhattan Reality

When I saw the schedule for New York Philharmonic 2016-2917 Art of the Score series my heart jumped: GERSHWIN!  I mean, the Woody Allen 1979 film, Manhattan.

And that was the rub. The brilliance of George Gershwin played live by the NYPhil set to the awe-inspiring cinematography of Gordon Willis was wrapped around the Woody Allen film with the story line involving a 42-year-old man and a 17 year-old girl.

My love of Gershwin won out over my disappointment in Allen, and I bought tickets for the Saturday, September 17 8:00pm performance.

The NYPhil did not disappoint. That opening sequence to Rhapsody in Blue was spine-tingling, the full power of a live symphony crashing below the stunning montage of Gordon Willis's cinematography. The audience broke out in wild applause after that opening, unable to retain the "we don't clap before the whole piece is over" protocol.

What I did not know was that while I was safely in my seat at Lincoln Center with my nephew, a bomb was exploding in Chelsea, and another was set. As of this writing, still unclaimed. Who set them? Why? What do they hate so much?

So chance had it that it was a night of two Manhattans: The romantic fantasy of 1979 Manhattan, which already had sad undertones of the reveals of Allen's personal life in the ensuing years,  colliding with the reality of violence 2016. My head and heart are spinning.


Back in the Day
I saw Manhattan in 1979 at the same age that Mariel Hemingway is in the film, the spring before I went off to college.

I was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island, but I already had a relationship with Manhattan since I commuted to an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a high school junior. It gave me that strong, life-long emotional attachment that "this is my city."

And so the film in 1979 was pure catnip for me: YES, the vistas, the music, the lightning fast lines of the character Isaac, and Diane Keaton's pseudo intellectual Mary. I think I recognized the pseudo part, but as I was off to college I still connected with the celebration of the cerebral. The film made me feel connected to the literary life I hoped lay beyond that Manhattan skyline for me.

The script is filled with memorable, funny lines, from when Allen "was still funny." I have known and quoted and loved these lines my whole adult life:

Isaac Davis: 

I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.

[They're] like the cast of a Fellini movie.

Really? Because I always feel very few people survive one mother.

. . . the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald emotional maturity award.

Mary Wilke: Hey, listen, I don't even wanna have this conversation. I'm just from Philadelphia, you know. I mean, we believe in God.

The situation with Allen's personal life can't take that away from me (cue Gershwin, yet again).

The most chilling dialogue in the script is when Isaac goes to confront Yale that Yale and Mary have reconnected. He plays the moral card. The 42-year old man dating a 17 year old, plays the moral card:

Yale: You are so self righteous, you know. We're just people! We're just human beings, you know. You think you're God!
Isaac Davis: I gotta model myself after someone!

Ouch. It might have seen self-aggrandizing to me in 1979, it's pathetic seen from 2016, given his voiced

"I’ll be hanging in a classroom one day and I wanna make sure when I've thinned out that I’m . . . well thought of” has become the polar opposite for many.

Current Context
I found some of the literary life in my Manhattan like I imagined before college. Professionally I had some direct connection to the film through the designer Burt Kleeger, who began designing Allen's poster with Interiors and with whom I worked for five years. He designed the iconic Manhattan film logo, and told me that when he brought it for review, the team of people with Allen said it was great, "but . . . " and offered all sorts of suggestions, as groups are want to do. Then Allen said "We'll use it as is." Sweeter words were never said to a designer.

I unknowingly moved to the block (directly across the street in fact) where Humphrey Bogart was born at #245 in 1899 and lived until 1925, the very year George Gershwin bought a townhouse at #316. Depending on the months of those moves, the two geniuses could have been the closest of neighbors without knowing it, since both were not yet famous.

I moved to the city in 1983, and experienced the last part of its recovery from the bankruptcy of the 1970s, to revert to a gritty, unsafe city in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to a fuller recovery through the Guiliani years. Then the horror of 9/11.

For me, Citibikes embodies the spirit of the romance of NYC that Allen captured. I've enjoyed commuting along the Hudson on the Greenway immensely. I sometimes hear Rhapsody in Blue in my head when I cycle north, the George Washington Bridge gleaming afore me.

And all of this connection, context, perspective, love, and spirit, takes shrapnel every time someone brings violence into the lives of my neighbors (and by my neighbors, I do mean the global community).  Surely then we must keep the arts alive even more passionately and fervently insist on creation and beauty for all in the face of destruction, as imperfect and flawed as that art is going to be.

NY Times photo of Chelsea explosion

Read More

 Mapeel     9/18/2016     current events, Film   

9/11 and the New York Times Crossword Puzzle: 15 Years, Day by Day

The week leading up to a 9/11 anniversary in New York City is very distinct: all flavor of law enforcement is highly visible, from troopers in full riot gear and high-powered firearms greeting the morning rush hour crush at 96th street to groups of 3 officers dotting various other commuter platforms and the midtown beats.

It sends my mind wandering, how to absorb this fifteenth year since the mass murders down the block. I have written about many, many aspects of my 9/11 experiences since I started this blog in 2006.

This year my mind wandered to the New York Times crossword puzzle. They have done a great job putting up an archive of past puzzles, all the way back now to 1993.

I have been a crossword solver my entire life, starting with watching my parents do the Sunday crossword in the Magazine Section, and then in college I discovered daily puzzles in the physical paper. That evolved to the beauty and agile finger-dance of doing it online.

So this week I was drawn to doing the Tuesday, September 11, 2001 puzzle, which I'm sure I did not get to do on that day. Of course it would have been set weeks before.

I continued with the daily for the week, then started doing the Sunday puzzles, starting with September 16, 2001. I vividly remember the flag that the New York Times printed on its back page on that Sunday, I had it on my door for years.  I do not remember any note on the puzzle.

The 2006 documentary Wordplay explored the reasons people do the NYTimes crossword every day, talking with high-profile solvers including Ken Burns, Jon Stewart, and Bill Clinton.  We all share many of the same reasons: family  history, many solvers are continuing a parent's habit; a tiny space of order amid chaos; the 'aha" moments when clues set delicious twists in how we "hear" a word.

It's a cerebral communion with what can feel like all of civilization in microcosm. Margaret Farrar, the founding puzzle editor of the New York Times who mentored Will Weng and Eugene Maleska, started the "no disease, no wars" convention, and believed the puzzle should be "a commercial-free zone that leaves readers in a joyful mood." Bless her.

This year I found some grounding in redoing the 2001 puzzles, in walking in those very same footsteps I did 15 years ago. The puzzle was there, amid the chaos. Civilization was in tact, in the face of a people trying to kill it off.

Prufrock measured out his life with coffee-spoons: in this century, day by day, puzzle by puzzle, the city and I moved on.

I was curious about today's Sunday puzzle, falling on the 15th anniversary. There is no overt mention, as is appropriate.  But the theme resolves around the goodness of rest and sleeping in our own beds. You can even see the bed in the center of puzzle. Along with the idea--that we have all felt-- that there are monsters under the bed . . .

A  9/11 puzzle after all.

Read More

 Mapeel     9/11/2016     9/11   

Somme Centenary Meets Brexit: Oh, What a Lovely, 4-Star War

Friday,  July 1, 2016.  100 years to the day that United Kingdom and the Commonwealth troops went over the top into certain death after 5 days of relentless shelling of the German line to make the assault easy.

 Thursday, June 23, 2016.  Great Britain votes to leave the European Union.

In the first instance, boys left their homes in the millions (wiki) to help defeat the Kaiser. and his allies.  Unlike WW11 and the Blitz of London, the enemy had not stepped on English soil. And yet an entire generation left their loved ones to defend the idea of national sovereignty: that the Kaiser was not allowed to simply invade Belgium, France et al. and take their lands.

Fast forward 100 years: as it's been somewhat determined--old age pensioners decide they "need their country back" and vote to leave the stabilizing influence of the European Union.

That Brexit would usher in the Somme Centenary is a cruel twist of fate.

That ISIS would assert itself, again, by bombing an airport  in Turkey is a cruel dose of reality.  If the West continues to come apart at the seams, it gives ISIS a huge opening to destroy the whatever and wherever they want.

Oh, what a difference a 100 years make. Can these different generations of Anglo Saxons really share the same DNA? Has the current day forgotten Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" ?

IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,	5
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less	10
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Here's just one of many tweets of Brits sharing about their granddads, uncles, etc. who went to defend France, not leave it. As on outsider to both England and France, this is all very confusing.

Oh, What a Lovely War: World War One Through the Lens of the 1960s

Oh, What a Lovely War (1969) is the first film Richard Attenborough directed, bringing the 1963 stage revue of the same name (except for dropping the musical's exclamation mark) produced by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop to the screen. I saw it last year for the first time on the invaluable TCM.

The film is a fantastical re-imagining of the stage revue, kicking out the confines of the stage into cinema's fullest power. I found it completely riveting. It is the visualization of a nation adjusting its cultural memory, its national identity, fifty years after the horror.  Much of the action takes place on the pier and pavilion at quintessentially English Brighton, which starts as a fanfare for the Edwardian visitors and slowly gets darker and more sardonic in tone.  The film visualizes many ideas that were in transition for England in the 1960s, including the appearance of a cricket board tallying the deaths on the Somme, with the ground (rarely) gained.

The TCM showing lead me to stumble upon Roger Ebert's original 1969 review of the film when it popped up in a general Google search for the film. He gave it fours stars.

 It's a mistake to review "Oh! What a Lovely War" as a movie. It isn't one, but it is an elaborately staged tableau, a dazzling use of the camera to achieve essentially theatrical effects. And judged on that basis, Richard Attenborough has given us a breathtaking evening.

As a student of WW1, I found it very moving to hear Ebert's own connection to the history:

"Like most people, I know World War I at second or third hand, through such sources as Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That." The most dramatic point Graves makes is that the war almost literally exterminated the generation that would have ruled Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Something like 90 per cent of the field officers were killed on some fronts.

And so this tragic event sank into the bones of the British memory. America, which came into the war rather late and sustained much lighter casualties, could afford the luxury of a "lost generation" in the 1920s. England literally lost her generation; it was dead and buried, and we seem to see it beneath the countless crosses stretching out behind John Mills in the last, stunning graveyard shot in "Oh! What a Lovely War."

As always, his whole review is worth reading.

The stage revue was based on a radio program by Charles Chilton, from 1961. He never knew his father, who died in the Great War, and he wrote a musical documentary in his memory that layered facts and figures about the war within a scripted story,  surrounded by songs of the period. The statistics of the deaths are staggering, and in this form, they were so clear and easy to understand, perhaps for the first time for the nation.

The visuals of Littlewood's film made the juxtaposition of the slaughter with jaunty songs even more powerful than on radio. And so the film is often credited with contributing to the shift in the British cultural memory in the 1960s from a general support for WW1 (though never reaching the "popular" stasis of WW2) to seeing it as an enormous, generation-destroying, soul-crushing catastrophe.

The film is a who's who of British actors: Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, John Mills, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier, Jack Hawkins, Corin Redgrave, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith, Ian Holm, Paul Shelley, Malcolm McFee, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Nanette Newman, Edward Fox, Susannah York, John Clements, Phyllis Calvert, and Maurice Roëves.

Pauline Kael did not very much like Oh, What a Lovely War, calling it a "big, heavy anti-war musical in the pukka-sahib tradition of English moviemaking," along with a swipe at Attenborough, who "has a stately, measured approach--just what the 50 musical numbers don't need."

I don't agree. I found it an engrossing tribute to the British nation coming to terms--50 years after the slaughter--with the slaughter and how it plays into their national identity.

The final scene is a helicopter shot of thousands of crosses on a green field. Oddly, they did not go to one of the many Commonwealth cemeteries in Europe for it.  Wiki tells us instead that they put the crosses up on hills around Brighton. It's an extraordinary shot,  done "for real" with no CGI.

Something like this cultural reckoning will need to happen for Brexit, ISIS, 9/11, Syria civil war. and too, too many other events, in the next 50 to 100 years to come. I hope the artists are up to the task.

Read More

 Mapeel     7/01/2016     current events, Film   

Allegri's Miserere: Turning Up All Over

There is so much sublime music for Easter, I can barely talk about it. The Renaissance composers saved their most brilliant writing to word paint the holy mystery of the Triduum-—Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil of Easter.

One piece is famous beyond the small circle of church music: the Allegri Miserere. It’s a hauntingly beautiful piece that goes between the simple chant melody of Psalm 51 (50) and cascading quartets, with the soprano going up to a high C, one of the highest notes a human voice can produce.

Its popularity is augmented by its intriguing, something-out-of-Indiana Jones like history. It was written by the Sistine Chapel composer Allegri around 1630 for matins during Holy Week on Wednesday and Friday. On penalty of excommunication the score was never to be seen or shown outside of the Chapel choir. The ornamentation was never written down at all, but passed along from singer to singer.

Audiences were allowed to attend matins even back then, and it became known as a “must-hear” for the elite, particularly those on the original Grand Tour of the 18th century.

Enter the 14-year-old Mozart, in Rome in 1770, during Holy Week. When he hears the Miserere, he decides to write it down, note for note, from memory. He goes back on Good Friday to double-check his work. (It's comforting that even geniuses need to double-check things.)

He shortly after encounters Dr. Charles Burney, the British church musician and musicologist. Somehow the piece passes into his hands, and he publishes it in 1771 (it seems excommunication was now off the table). The piece that is performed today was permutated over the centuries—-sometimes by design, sometimes by out-and-out mistakes of transcription—-so it is not very close at all to what Mozart heard. But what Allegri’s Miserere has become is still an exceptional musical experience that captures the imagination of most who hear it.

In the Movies and Onstage
I have sung the alto part numerous times, so I am privileged to know it very well. I heard it recently in two very surprising places.

One was me finally watching the John Woo movie Face/Off, with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. At the end, at the funeral for the director whom Travolta has killed, we see the funeral procession, and the music is the Miserere. (While it is so closely associated with Good Friday, Psalm 51 itself is used for Catholic burial.) Suprisingly, it is not listed in the Wikipedia write-up for the film, which does list other classical music that is used. How could they miss it?

The other instance was in the play The Seafarer, the Irish play by Conor McPherson (more about it here). The play is set on CHRISTMAS Eve. They turn the radio on at one point, and there we hear the Allegri Miserere. Very strange. With so much great Christmas music available, why would Conor (who is also the director) choose that? If anyone knows how to reach him, I would love to get an explanation for this.

Here is the performance by the exquisite English group The Sixteen, with the words below. (The high C comes around 1:45 minutes in and is repeated every other verse.)





Miserere Mei Deus
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

2 Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

3 For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.

4 Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.

5 Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

6 Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

8 Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

9 Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

11 Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.

12 Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.

13 Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.

14 Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

15 O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.

16 For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.

17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

18 Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem.

19 Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.

(Reposted and updated from 2008.)

Read More

 Mapeel     3/25/2016     music   

Grand Marshalls of the St. Patrick's Day Parade In a Yeatsian Gyre: From Violence to Peace

W.B. Yeats had a complicated/poetic view of the forces of history. Forces being the important word.  Not surprising, since he was born in 1865 into the tail end of the Protestant Ascendancy, which began in the 17th century with "the political, economic and social domination of Ireland by a minority of landowners, Protestant clergy and  all members of the Established Church (the Church of Ireland and Church of England) wiki."

Yeats experienced the shift in the declining power of his Protestant heritage as Parnell and Home Rule grew stronger in 1880s, at the same time Yeats discovered and fell in love with Irish Fenian Mythology, going back to ancient, pre-Christian mystical Ireland. That love became the basis of his earliest poems in a career that evolved and matured brilliantly and gave us some of the most distinct, bracing, extraordinary English sentences of the 20th century, including

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer"

History goes in cycles for Yeats. And that popped into my head as I experienced a small piece of history come full circle surrounding the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade.

I've been catching up with some of the details of the 255th edition of Parade. There will be less protesting, as our LGBT sisters and brothers are allowed in the line of march. Very Christian move, I say. And Pontifex just tweeted "No one can be excluded from the mercy of God. The Church is the house where everyone is welcomed and no one is rejected," so that clinches it.

And I learned that the Grand Marshall is Senator George Mitchell, one of the architects of what's known as the Good Friday Peace Agreement signed in 1998. (Like all things having to do with Irish/United Kingdom politics, it's complicated. You can read more about it on wiki.)  It hasn't been perfect, but it restored sanity to the cycle of violence that had overshadowed 20th century Irish lives for the decades known as The Troubles (in an even more active way than the centuries of British rule had done).

During this same time, it popped into my head to look back through the letters my Dad wrote to me when I was away at University in Southampton to see what he might have said about St. Patrick's Day 1983.

And lo and behold, he wrote all about the Grand Marshall that year.

From my Dad's letter to me dated March 19, 1983: 

"I was glad that you called St. Patrick's Day. We went to Mass but nothing else for festivities. We had a nice piece of corned beef and Grandma O' came down to join us. 

The Parade went well evidently, in spite of the controversy surrounding the Grand Marshall. I did not write about it because it bothered me, but a lot of dignitaries, organizations, and school bands boycotted the parade because the committee elected an IRA supporter as GM. 

His name is Michael Flannery--he is 81. He is the founder of the Noraid Society, which professes the help of families (widows, etc.) in Northern Ireland but which has been accused of supplying arms to the IRA. Flannery and several other Irish-Americans were acquitted last summer of such charges, brought by the US. Govt.

The worst part was Flannery made a comment to the effect that the Parade this year would show the Irish-American support for the IRA, which offended a lot of people, myself included.

I really feel if the Parade is going to be an expression or rallying point for political violence (last year Bobby Sands was the Honorary GM) then it should be done away with.

It is supposed to be, after all, an expression of love and honor for a man of peace--a Saint and a reflection of the Prince of Peace, Christ. 

Oh how we mortals can debase and denigrate the things that should be so dear to us."

I really never knew my father's political opinions. I had no idea he was so anti-IRA. He didn't share much when I was younger, and he died just when I was getting to be old enough to ask him about his views.

And by chance, I re-read his letter, after many years, on the year that someone he would have been proud of--a peace broker, a man who helped to heal all the destruction that the likes of Michael Flannery wrought in the name of loving Ireland--would be leading the line of march.  The gyre had turned far enough to spiral from violence, to peace.

What are the odds? Happy St. Patrick's Day to one and all (even the Irish curmudgeons who call it Amateur Irishman Day).

This video on YouTube is a real time capsule from 1983: a news report from some station, and then various functions during the week. 

Those who boycotted the parade in 1983 included Sen. Ted Kennedy, Former NY Governor Hugh Carey, Sen. Daniel Moynihan, and Congressman Tip O Neill, as well as John Cardinal O'Connor not reviewing the beginning of the parade, and various catholic school bands pulling out. 

Read More

 Mapeel     3/17/2016     family, Ireland   

Oscars 2016: "But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"

I don't watch many films, partly because they flood me with so many references, so many cross connections, it's actually uncomfortable.  And while I leave film criticism to my betters, I offer some thoughts on a few films before the 88th Academy Awards.

*******

There are three Best Picture nominated films that are deeply connected for me: Brooklyn; Spotlight; Room. That's the order I saw them in. They are tied together in my psyche by the two forces of nature that is Irish Catholicism.

"For on the night he was betrayed he himself took bread, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying:

Brooklyn
Brooklyn is a stylized snapshot of the emotional, inner life of the Irish who left the Emerald Isle and crossed the ocean in near steerage like "bricks for the Grand City Hall in New York. " {If you're of Irish heritage, you'll recognize that line.}

Some find it saccharine, and I can see why. That early elegiac scene with Eilis Lacey on the boat to the new world waving to her mother and sister on the dock feels contrived and cliched, and yet true. Generations of Irish parents watched as their sons and daughters left for a better life.  That took an enormous emotional toll on those people, those families. This film gives us a chance to feel some of that heartache, despair, sacrifice.

Eilis's entry to the US is sponsored by a priest from her village who left for the States long ago. He is like a fairy godmother: he gets her a place to live, and a job, the 2 most crucial needs for an immigrant. It seemed surprising to me that such an opportunity would be given to a young woman in the 1950s, and that the priest who sponsors her is not sinister. Imagine. An Irish priest from the bad old days (as opposed to the recent bad days) who is not abusing the protagonist. And I don't say that facetiously.

The film weaves its visual tale of Eilis overcoming homesickness, falling in love with an Italian American, and coming to terms with the duality of being an Irishwoman in New York. It evokes the era with the precision and beauty of Mad Men. And surprisingly, Eilis is not harmed. For some reason I kept waiting for something terrible to happen to her. I assumed Jessica Pare's shop supervisor was going to be cruel to her, and I was completely surprised by her compassion.

As a film, I think it has the most resonance for, well,  people of Irish Catholic heritage.

TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT: FOR THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.

Spotlight
The telling of the Boston Globe's exposure of the systemic protection of abusive priests within the Catholic Church is a superb film.

It captures the journalistic process of the sickening discovery of an evil reality with no gratuitous sensationalizing of the monstrous evilness of the criminals, both the offending priests and all of their protectors.

As it happened, it's Globe's new editor, Marty Baron, the ultimate outsider-- "an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who doesn't like baseball" played with searing humorlessness by Liev Scriber--who asks the team why they haven't followed up on the case of John Geoghan, a priest who actually had been accused of molesting young boys.  The small investigative  team who write under the special section of Spotlight is then focused and slowly uncovers the systematic reassignment of priests who their superiors knew had abused children, instead of calling the cops.

And it's Baron who insists that for the investigation to be effective, it all has to tie to the highest authority, to Bernard Cardinal Law. Which the team is able to do. Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Rachel McAdams, and Mark Ruffalo are all standouts as "real" people who have to come to terms with what until then had been the unthinkable.

Many of the reporters at the Globe are the progeny of the historic kinfolk of Brooklyn's  Eilis Lacey from County Wexford.

Only today I saw a tweet of a plaque from somewhere in Boston that reads:

"In 1847 alone, 37,000 Irish refugees landed in Boston, on the edge of death and despair, impoverished and sick."

It would take the clarity of the Boston Globe's reporting, the home-team paper, to help raise the consciousness of these people whose religion and its institutions were part of their identity.

It's been hard for me, for many, to reconcile the magnitude of the evil of the institutional church alongside the power and mystery of the Mass that Christ entrusted to it.

The Globe reporting ran in January 2002, just months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The numbness of those murders slid into the numbness of this other kind of evil.

Following in the years after 2002, when so much of the abuse came to light, and the millions, or is it billions now? of dollars of collective settlements were reported, a friend told me her sister was converting to Catholicism. She had been raised Presbyterian, not practiced, and was in her 40s.  I remember thinking, how can anyone be attracted to this institution now, to this overwhelming corruption. And yet, at each Easter vigil, there are people of all ages, races, sexual orientation, taking the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults.

Oh yes, because, the faith exists outside of the institutional church.

Spotlight affirms that smart, talented people can still investigate parts of the world that others want to keep hidden. And that there are equally talented storytellers who can bring their work into the broad cultural space that is mainstream moviegoing.

In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took the chalice, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, and gave the chalice to his disciples, saying:

Room
When I heard Room was from a novel by Emma Donoghue, I wondered if she was related to my old NYU professor Denis Donoghue, and yes,  she is his daughter.

Professor Donoghue, a leading literary scholar of Irish, English, and American literature, is one of those innately literary souls, and I enjoyed studying with him immensely. I also enjoyed his memoirs, Warrenpoint, of growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland. Denis met and married Frances Rutledge, and they had 8 children.

From an interview with Emma about her mother: "I'm her eighth child (the runt of the litter, she used to say fondly) and it's her boundless, playful and unsentimental kind of mother-love that I tried to pour into Room."

Emma was born and lived in Dublin for her first 9 years and was sent to Catholic Convent schools. I have no idea what her faith is now, but the knowledge is in her DNA.

In 2010 she published a novel about an evil and depravity of sickening proportions.  A man who kidnaps a 17 year old girl and imprisons her in a suburban shed to rape her every evening.

After 2 years a baby boy is born. The captor lets the baby live, and time moves on.

When the film begins, Jack has turned 5, and we see the routine of their lives together. Ma, as we first meet her, is doing an extraordinary job of giving Jack as happy a life as possible. He has no context for their dire situation, and so he accepts, and he laughs and plays like any other 5 year old.  We learn that Ma must be teaching Jack literary classics, as he knows the story of Alice in Wonderland very well. The egg-shell caterpillar, the toilet paper roll maze, the daily run around the tiny shed: all speak to the ingenuity, creativity, and staggering love of this mother for her son.

Brie Larson and Jack Tremblay both give luminous performances.

But the evil is so pervasive.

Like the priests who prey on children.


TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT: FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT; WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME.

It's hard for anyone to reconcile evil with an all-loving God.  Satan, Original Sin, all the explanations pale in the sight of horrifically hurt people.

And with so much pain in the different worlds of these films, a song drifted up from my memory:

"I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"

Such a simple, melodic song from the musician we knew as Cat Stevens (born Steven Demetre Georgiou), who after a spiritual journey became Yusuf Islam back in 1978.  My BFF had an older sister, which is how Tea for the Tillerman came into my life, back in the day. I didn't know it was written for Patti D'arbanville, but the "remember there's a lot of bad and beware" struck me, even at 10 years old.

I love this line from Yusuf's Wikipedia entry: "Although his father was Greek Orthodox and his mother a Swedish Baptist, Georgiou was sent to St. Joseph Roman Catholic Primary School."



* * * * *

So what do I think should win Best Picture?

The Martian.

Read More

 Mapeel     2/27/2016     Film, Ireland, literature, Oscars   

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: Death Amid the Beauty

A cautionary tale about the beauty of the snow from 2010.

“Whose woods these are I think I know”

Central Park. The genius of Olmstead and Vaux's landscaped naturalness, an oasis of primordial power amid the world's greatest concrete canyon. Its majesty and magic beckons city dwellers, even on

“the darkest evening of the year”

when the city is being socked by a monstrous mixture of wet, heavy snow, sleet ice, rain, wind.

No equine is present in this tableau to give a harness bell a shake,
But there is some sense of cosmic mistake.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

That is our park, especially with the fairy land decoration of snow amidst its arboreal splendor of 80-foot high American elms trees.


“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

Robert Frost captured for the ages a man’s pause, hinting at the weariness of life and evoking a moment of ambivalence about the point of going on.

The man who was killed today in Central Park when a 100-pound branch fell and struck him directly had no such moment. He was walking through the woods on a snowy evening, and then he was dead.

If this tragic scene wasn’t poignant enough, he was walking on the Mall, through the Literary Walk stretch, where Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Friedrich Schiller and others stood helpless witness to his death.

A mighty tree branch, falling under the weight of snow and hitting one individual: you can almost see Death himself leaning on a power saw at the base of the tree, pulling his dark robes tighter around him as the sleet starts bouncing off his bones.

May this gentleman, at this writing not yet named, find peace in eternal rest, as surprised as he will be to be approaching the Pearly Gates.

 “How strange, I was just walking through the Park on my way home . . . “

I hope St. Peter gently fills him in on the details.

Read More

 Mapeel     1/23/2016     current events, literature   

A Tale of Driving in the Blizzard Meets O. Henry

In honor of today's blizzard, here is a New Yorker’s first-hand account I found of driving in a blizzard from Teterboro, New Jersey to Massapequa Park, Long Island. I like it for its detail of the great roads of the Metropolitan area and the sheer driving description. Though a city girl with no car, I love the roadways of Gotham and the car culture of the people who know them intimately.

Plus, there is an O. Henry-like twist at the end.

“I left Teterboro (NJ) at 3 pm and the ground was already covered. The snow fell heavily (but fine)—about 2 to 3 inches per hour.

"I made good time to the GW Bridge, but then the back-ups began. We moved ever so slowly along the entire length of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (Ha!). After finally navigating a rise at the juncture of the CBX and The New England Thruway the way was pretty open to the Throgs Neck Bridge. It was difficult, though, because the road had not been plowed, and the snow was blowing and blinding and my windshield wipers were not working very well.

"The rise in the road I mentioned was part of the problem with the CBX and set the stage for the rest of the trip—many cars (the drivers really) could not climb even the slightest incline without skidding and getting stuck. Quite a few of them ended up perpendicular to the traffic flow.

"I took the Throgs Neck without a problem and the Clearview Expressway to Northern Blvd., where I got gas (Thank God!) This phase of the trip was relatively uneventful.

"Back on the Cross-Island things crept along. (I had thought about staying on Northern Blvd. but I knew the further East I went the hillier it would become so I decided against it.) No one could get on or off the L.I.E. because the entrance ramp/incline was blocked by snow.

"We inched along, sliding and avoiding the abandoned cars. It was incredibly slow going.

"Finally, after getting up an incline near New Hyde Park road I saw another world---there was no backed-up traffic! Eureka! There were a few cars moving in front of me in a single file and I joined the procession. There was only one lane open (still no plowing, but some plows passed us on the other side, going into Queens), and with my windshield wipers not working at all by this time, I found it difficult to keep in line, but somehow I managed.

"This strange caravan wound its way to the junction of Northern State and Meadowbrook Pkwy and since the cars in front of me went on Northern State, I did too. Soon the three cars in front of me pulled to the side to either rest or clean their windshields or whatever. That left me in the lead!

"I was virtually driving blind. I sat forward as far as I could with my forehead practically pressed against the windshield with my chin on the steering wheel. Besides struggling to stay in the lane that had been traveled before (and de facto plowed) I had to be careful not to hit the abandoned cars. Grueling doesn’t begin to describe it. And it just didn’t end.

"The whiteout effect was so strong that I missed the turnoff for Wantagh Pkwy, which I had intended to take. I finally managed to cross-country (practically) at Hicksville Rd and make my exit. I was making progress when I ran into a snow bank on my left and the snow blew up and completely blocked my windshield so I had to stop and clean it off.

I must say it was quite an ordeal. I was really afraid I would not make it home. I finally did, NINE HOURS later. I had a triple martini.”

(As a point of reference, Teterboro to Massapequa Park is a 2-hour trip.)

/>

Here’s the thing about this description: it’s from a letter my father wrote in me on Ash Wednesday, 1983, when I was away in England as a senior in college!

He wrote me letters once or twice a week, this being the world before email. My father was an expert driver-—I love the swipe he takes at the drivers who can’t keep from skidding (it’s not the cars, it’s them).

Holding the letter in my hand brought me back to my flat at Southampton University, sitting on my bed reading it for the first time. He had a distinct, beautiful hand writing that some people found hard to read.

He could not have imagined me rereading it in the 21st century. Nor did he know he would die two years after writing it. We know not the hour nor the day.

Pomegrantes: My madeleine to La dolce vita & the Zeffiro Villa, Sicily

Pomegrantes. I had pomegrantes as a garnish this evening with some lamb tacos, and they had the amazing effect of the Proustian "episode of the madeleines." 

I traveled to Sicily in 2008, which is mythically linked to Persephone and the fateful 6 pomegranates that Hades tricked her into eating. 

As the snow storm clouds gather over NYC, and you can feel the freezing moisture in the air, I dreamily think of the beauty and warmth of Sicily. From 2008:

Persephone first crossed our path in Rome, freed as she was from the block of marble by the hands of Bernini only to be captured by Hades and forced into the underworld. Some legends say that she was playing in fields on Sicily when the earth swallowed her up.

When her mother, Demeter, the goddess of all fertility, goes after her, she deprives the earth of its ability to grow food. Hades relents to the mother, and says Persephone can go, if she hasn’t eaten anything; he then tricks her into eating six pomegranate seeds. Demeter still strikes a deal with Hades: Persephone will spend 6 months in the underworld, during which her mother is sad and nothing grows, and then 6 months on earth, and her mother is so joyous that the earth blossoms into spring.

From Rome we went to Sicily, and one evening entered a Fellini film . . .

It’s dusk in July in Triscina, a small beach town adjacent to the great Greek temple site of Selinunte. Pre-dinner cocktail hour is commencing on the patio of a house that sits at the end of a public beach of beautiful, fine white sand.

A man appears in frame beside a bareback horse. He slowly leads the appaloosa into the water, gently deeper and deeper, until they both cannot stand. Floating man and beast, as the sun continues to set.

Next a pair of men appear, one older, with white hair, dressed in white linen, and a younger beatnik looking man, with goatee. They stand together on the bottom step on the public access beside the house. The younger man takes out a sheet of paper, and reads something aloud to the sea. Then they walk on to the beach, and away from the house.

Original man and beast then emerge from the water, cross the short depth of the sand to the same stairs and ascend, leaving the line of sight.

As the party reassembles on the patio, an ultralight--one of the man-in-a-flying chair marvels--buzzes across the water line right above our heads. We wave at the pilot and he waves back.

And, CUT. That’s a wrap.

Only, we weren’t in a Fellini film (from the later art years). It just felt like it. We were on vacation in Sicily. Intriguing, extraordinary Sicily, and all this actually happened within 20 minutes one sultry evening.

I didn’t know what to expect in the great island of the south. As a city dweller I was so happy to be on the beach for a week. I rented the Villa Zeffiro from Gabriella Becchina, whose family makes the exquisite Olio Verde products from their olive grove in Castlevetrano.

Triscina does not see many Americans, nor even our British cousins. The southwest of Sicily has the strong African influence and the remnants of the great Greek civilization. In an homogenized world, it is still exotic, while the teenagers hanging out at night on the beach were beautifully eternal.
 
* * * *

Mary Taylor Simeti, who wrote the engaging Persephone’s Island, has her own take on the myth: “Persephone, the eternal expatriate, the goddess of unreconciled contrasts and alternate allegiances, chose to eat the seeds of the pomegranate, that she might enjoy two roles, two worlds.”

Nice idea, or just making lemonade from her abduction.

Read More

 Mapeel     1/21/2016     Italy   

Life on Mars: A Telling Critique on Life and TV Watching Itself, and a David Bowie Homage

David Bowie died yesterday,  January 10, 2016. I wrote this post back in 2008, when I discovered the compelling BBC series Life on Mars in a marathon (that being the days before the present-day bingeing.) I am the age of those for whom David Bowie was truly the soundtrack of our lives. I will admit that by 2008 I had not connected with that towering talent for a while, since the days of dancing in clubs. And so reconnecting with Bowie was another thrill of finding this series and one of my personal memories when I heard of our enormous cultural loss.

I have this photo of the great Bowie above my desk at work, I have for years, and oddly enough, I found myself wearing a poncho this week. The seventies seep in wherever they can.

I ran into a marathon of the British Life on Mars one recent Saturday on BBC America, and I was enthralled. How great that Bowie's song could inspire an entire series, and such an imaginative one at that.

[Spoilers now.]

DCI Sam Tyler of the Greater Manchester Police gives a quick, clear exposition for the series in the opening credits: "My name’s Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up back in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever's happened, it's like I've landed on a different planet. Now, maybe if I can work out the reason, I can get home."

It’s a tantalizing premise. Sam (John Simm, the Master for Doctor Who fans) walks into his police precinct, but it’s filled with typewriters and old style lightening, men in wide ties and leisure suits. To his cop colleagues, he has been transferred from Hyde. He starts to work cases—what else is he going to do?

The center of the show is his relationship with boss DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), and the clash of cultures, methods, sensibilities, and knowledge. The music, the writing, the acting, the storytelling are all stellar.

And the mystery. Things start seeping into Sam’s world. He hears voices of doctors. He hears his mother say she’s still with him. He hears deafening sounds. Which start to stack the deck to his being in a coma, but the suspense is very well played out.

And now for a word about the American version: for me it pales in comparison, but it may grow into its own solid new piece. I also agree with added issue of the American Sam waking up at the base of the World Trade Center. He didn’t have enough of the emotional response that anyone would have with that experience. For great discussion on this, pop over to Alan Sepinwall

Back to the Brits. What also gives the series its strength is the ending. For the whole series, Sam just wants to go home. This homesickness is a powerful, poignant part of his character. Finally, in a life-and-death shootout between his colleagues and the bad guys, he wakes up in the hospital. He has been in a coma. The series has been in his head.

Now we are all back in 2006. Sam gets out of the hospital, and returns to work to the wistfully distinctive strains of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s “Over the Rainbow.”

The coloring becomes cold blues and blacks, instead of the warmth of the seventies color palette. That visual sums up what he’s feeling: his friends, his life is back with Gene and the guys and WPC Annie Cartwright in 1973.

And so he walks out of a meeting, goes to the roof, and jumps. It is a startling moment of television.

He wakes up back in the action in 1973, between the cops and the bad guys.

I had two strong reactions to that ending. The first is an inverse-Hamlet fear. “There’s the rub.” How did Sam know he would get back to 1973? What if he committed suicide, and didn’t “perchance to dream?”

But more importantly, the theme of “living in your head” was a subtle subtext to the series. If real life is boring, you can create a whole world in your head that is preferable. And that includes the worlds we ingest while watching television. At the very end of the series, the Test Patern girl-—a British institution who popped up on various episodes-—appears with her clown, and leans forward and turns off the tv. That wakes us the viewer up. That puts the viewer back into 2008. We are all Sam Tyler.

Watching tv or a film is a reality, but it is also in place of reality. I never met a Sonny Crockett, but I was attracted to that character-—as I would have been to a man if I had met him--and wanted to spend time with him. And so watching Miami Vice on Friday night when it was first on was more enjoyable than going out.

All these ideas enriched the Brit Life on Mars. We’ll see if the American version offers anything more on the subject. (Update 2016: It did. Let's just say that it took the Bowie song very literally, 8 years before The Martian.)

Oh man!
Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?



And the character DCI Gene Hunt naturally lead to a spate of fan videos set to the great "Jean Genie."

Read More

 Mapeel     1/11/2016     television   

Melchior, His Cousin Fred, Gaspar, & Balthazar: A Four Wise Guy Epiphany

Robin is now right. It's the 12th day of Christmas, Little Christmas, the appearance of the Magi, aka Epiphany. Christmas is over.

The word epiphany comes from the Greek “epiphaneia” meaning “manifestation." The feast originated in the Greek Orthodox faith, there called Theophany, and it celebrates when the Christ child’s divinity shone through his humanity, as acknowledged by the Magi’s adoration.

James Joyce is generally credited with the crossover of such a religiously charged word to secular life and literature. A Google search brings this definition: "Epiphany in fiction, when a character suddenly experiences a deep realization about himself or herself; a truth that is grasped in an ordinary rather than a melodramatic moment."

The Bible does not delineate three Magi, but three gifts: gold as a symbol of kingship on earth, frankincense as a symbol of deity, and myrrh (an embalming oil) as a symbol of death.

Catholic tradition added a name and slight identity to each: Melchior representing, Europe; Gaspar, Asia; and Balthazar, Africa, and so the trio has shown up in creches since the 16th century.

And So, The tale of Melchior and Fred

My mother handmade me a nativity set many years ago. The figures are soft sculpture dolls filled with old nylon stockings. The set is a perfect representation of faith, love, and talent.

For the Wise Men, she used hat pins that had been her mother's as the jewels in each of their crowns. For the gifts, she found small trinkets for two of them, and wrapped up a sugar cube in tinfoil for the third, Melchior in fact.

Fast forward 20 years or so. When I open the Nativity box I see that the front of Melchior's robe is completely stained brown. Over the years, the sugar cube had finally liquified, or something, and that's what stained.

It was a shame, because the front panel of his midnight blue robe was a beautiful silver sparkle material.  So my mother took Melchior home to fix the robe.

A few months later I open a small present from my Mom, and it's Melchior, in another robe. Well, it turns out it's not my old Melchior, it's a new king, whom I call Fred, with a fourth jeweled hat pin.

The oddest thing had happened. My mother lost Melchior. She had brought him down to her favorite thrift store to look for a remnant of material, and he disappeared. The thrift store ladies were as baffled as she. They had looked at him together, and then my Mom put him down to look for the fabric, and  when she was ready to leave, my little king was simply gone.  The ladies said they were sure he would turn up, and so my mom left.

The months passed, and the little king did not turn up. So that's when my mother made another one. Luckily she had one more hat pin, and so Fred joined Gaspar and Balthazar at Christmas 2011. He did a good job.

Fast forward to my birthday, October 2012. I open a present, and it's the original Melchior! After more than a year, he did turn up at the thrift store.

Where had he been?  It's such a cinematic story.

He had fallen, unnoticed, into an open box in the thrift store while everyone's attention was elsewhere engaged.  Maybe someone's elbow knocked him, maybe when someone opened the door enough breeze came in and he teetered down. It would be fascinating to have a videotape of what actually happened.

He fell straight to the bottom of a box, below the other things on top. Later that day a lid was put on that box, and it was put into a storage room. Echoes of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, right?

In the summer of 2012, the thrift store did an entire overhaul of their space, and that storage space had to be emptied. To do that, every box was opened and looked through, and that's when the thrift store lady found him. She could not believe it.  And thank goodness it was one of the ladies who knew about the Nativity set and my mother. She could not wait to give it back.

My Mom finished the repair on the robe, and gave it to me in October. What a surprise. If I were an animator, I would make this tale into a Toy Story-like movie, detailing Melchior's adventures in that box for a year. Like Woody and Buzz he probably got out of the box a bunch of times and bonded with other dolls stuck in that storage room, always waiting and hoping for the time when he would get back to his mission to bring gold to the Christ child.

And so for Epiphany, I have 4 kings in the creche. A reminder that where's there's life, there's hope, in all things. Always.

Up Max Steiner music.

Read More

 Mapeel     1/03/2016     Christmas, Film