Month: May 2011

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Remembering (a repost)

Tomb of Unknown Soldier

Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.

— Guy Gavriel Kay

“The Green Field of France”, by Eric Bogle

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

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Whew….


Bookstore, originally uploaded by testpatern.

I like to look at photos like this because it makes me feel a little less bad about the teetering stacks of books all over Casa Jaquandor.

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Saturday Centus

OK, so I messed up last week — but I went ahead and did it anyway, because who’s gonna stop me? That’s what I thought. Heh!

And now, on to this week’s prompt. Obviously the prompt was inspired by the upcoming Memorial Day, but I guess I had food on the mind:

Alright, listen up, folks. Sign says “The Legacy of Heroes”. Sign says that because I made it. Hung it myself a week before I opened the place. Because they’re called “heroes”. That’s what they are. You want one, you gotta call ’em that.

So stop comin’ in here and askin’ for your Hoagies ’cause you ain’t getting’ one. No po-boys either, got it? I ain’t servin’ no subs, no Wedges, no Blimpies and no Bombers. The only Grinder you’ll see here is the one I use to make sausage. I make Heroes. Get it right.

‘Kay? ‘Kay.

So. Whaddaya have?

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Saturday Centus (the “Last Week” edition)

Oops. I wrote it last week, I swear. I just forgot to post it.

Joe staggered, cursing, into the bathroom. Getting up at six for a construction job? How had his life come to that?

“Oh yeah, that’s how,” he thought as he looked down at the newspaper wadded up in the trash. “Scarpoliti Guilty”, the headline read. Poor old Nick Scarpoliti was goin’ up the river, and partly on Joe’s say-so. He’d taken the offer of a new life to sing the Feds a nice song about old Nick.

Joe looked up at the reflection in the mirror. Guy behind him, gun already lifted. “Witness protection,” Joe thought as Nick’s guy whacked him.

And to think, I don’t even like mob stories….

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T-minus zero

This is amazing: a shuttle launch recorded by a camera mounted to the shuttle’s solid-fuel rocket booster. The camera records the entirety of the rocket booster’s voyage, from launch to separation to splashdown. If I’m not mistaken, when the ship is far above the clouds but before the separation, you can see the shadow of the launch thrust contrail on the top of the planet’s cloud cover, trailing off to the left.

I was never a huge fan of the shuttle; it was the only game in town for far too long, and now we’re in the disappointing position of having no game in town because we seem to have collectively decided that space is basically a place for satellites to make communications easier and monitor climate change that most of us annoyingly don’t think is happening anyway and…well, that’s about it.

But it’s still thrilling to see a ship launch for space. I hope this is a momentary interruption in our explorations, and not the start of our abandonment of space.

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Something for Thursday

I enjoy jazz, and many times I’ve wished I had more of an ear for it. I gave jazz a game effort in high school and college, but I inevitably had to conclude that from a performing standpoint, I just wasn’t cut out for it. But no matter — I can still listen to it.

Here’s One O’Clock Jump.

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“Well, we all can’t come and go by bubble!”

Last week, the family and I saw Wicked at Shea’s in downtown Buffalo. What a wonderful, fun, amazing show it was!

The Wife read the book a few years ago when I bought it for her for Christmas, and she liked it so much that Gregory Maguire has become a “buy in hardcover” author for her. I haven’t read the book (or any of its sequels), but I knew the basic thrust of the show: it’s the life of the Wicked Witch of the West, from that standpoint that maybe she had reasons for being, well, “Wicked”.

It’s clearly not meant to be a revisionist take on The Wizard of Oz, but an addressing of themes of good and evil told by cleverly shifting the vantage point of a deeply familiar story that originally sprang from an era with a much more simplistic view of good and evil. Wicked takes into account the fact that we’re all basically the heroes of our own story, and creates a Wicked Witch who is intelligent, funny, and motivated by real concerns.

I knew next to nothing about Wicked as a show when I went in, other than the story idea, but the whole thing was a delight. The songs are actually memorable and well-written (with one of them, the Act I finale showstopper “Defying Gravity”, having been in my head ever since the show ended), and I loved the show’s “book” (Broadway-speak for “script”). I didn’t discover until intermission that the book was written by Winnie Holtzman, whose work I have long-admired (Holtzman being one of the main writers of the brilliant Once and Again). I also liked the production itself, with backdrops depicting the workings of a clock.

Wicked is a lot of fun for many of its Wizard of Oz in-jokes and references (“Lemons and melons and pears? Oh my!”), and the second act mostly takes place literally during the events of the movie, not unlike the second Back to the Future movie. The entire show sparkles with genuine wit and charm and good humor. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

UPDATE: When we saw the show, the lead actress in the traveling production was out, and the role of Elphaba (the Wicked Witch) was taken over by an understudy named Mariand Torres. Her performance was fantastic, and if she’s the understudy, I wonder how good the lead is!

(My next Broadway production at Shea’s will likely be Les Miserables, when it comes to Buffalo next February. I expect that to be an emotionally overwhelming experience.)

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