The prisoner's song.

I've had this song stuck in my head for days.  Aren't we all prisoners in one way or another?  Recorded in 1924.

My kind of kid

Mr. Lonely

Such a lovely song.  Thank you Mr.Vinton 

and your experience in the US Army that inspired you!

US Army, Germany, 1960

Sentimental and Sweet

One of my favorite songs from my favorite era.  

I have to refrain from

humming along a la Glenn Gould.

Opened April 11, 1940, London, just before the Battle of Britain.

A bit sad...

This ad is from the late 1930s.  The text is quite evocative:  "The piano is intensely personal, sensitive, responsive...the instrument to which musicians have ever turned for the deepest and most rewarding evocations of the spirit."
The ad also mentions four famous pianists:  Hoffmann, Horowitz, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff.  I wonder how many have even heard of them today.

Kids say the darndest things...

What is it about wearing his shirt that makes a guy go crazy?  Well, whatever makes you happy.  The guy mowing the lawn looks pretty happy, too.

1909

Two and a half minutes of the wonder and beauty of western civilization as it once was.  

From the mind of Claude Debussy, composing in 1909.

Sur la luzerne en fleur assise,
Qui chante dès le frais matin ?
C'est la fille aux cheveux de lin,
La belle aux lèvres de cerise. 

~ Charles-Marie René Leconte de Lisle

Time flies

My kind of guy

Ditto!

Disagreeable people looking for an argument.  Who needs it?

Strike a pose!

 

When I was an undergraduate, I posed as a figure model for art classes, so I can empathize with this comic strip.  Funny thing is, if a 16-year-old boy had gone into a strip club he would have been thrown out, and the owner might have risked being arrested.  But an art class?  No problem!

Most of the models made it clear as they posed that they were indifferent about or bored by what they were doing, and ignored the...um, I almost said "audience," lol, but "aspiring artists" is the better term.  But I didn't.  I looked them over, gave a few a faint smile (mustn't break the pose!) and otherwise engaged with them in subtle ways.  When the class was over, other models would dash off as if relieved to be done with the odious task, but I would linger a bit and look over the sketches and paintings, express interest and chat a bit.  It was fun.

I guess

Overheard:  "You win some, you lose some, and taxes take the rest."

My solace

When the world is too much, when nothing makes sense, my solace is music.  I lose myself in it, forgetting everything else. There is nothing else.  How could there be anything else?



Stephen Foster's lovely "Beautiful Dreamer," the last song he ever wrote, composed a few days before his death, arranged for solo piano.

Foreign ways

I don't know why Japanese do this, but it's almost a law that they jump up, kick their heels and flash double peace signs whenever they get their photos taken at some tourist spot, even if the "tourist spot" is a battlefield where hundreds of Japanese soldiers perished in a banzai charge or is the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.  I've even seen them do it at the suicide cliffs memorial on Saipan, where you'd think they'd realize acting like a jackass is inappropriate.  But nope.
Oh, well.  Better them than us, right?

Future department head

A child's summer

Don't you remember how it was?

Hey

Hi, Wanda,
It was nice to see you again.  It's hard to believe we haven't seen each other since we were passing through MKAB.  That's a long time ago already.
I know I promised to keep in touch and let you know how things were going with me. I meant to, I really did.  But you know how it is.
I hate to think that we are moving on farther and farther into our own worlds and away from the friendship and shared experiences that we had and that we thought would always be important and tie us together.   But life moves on, doesn't it?  Your boat drifts on that current, mine on this one, and soon enough we can't hear each other, even if we shout, and then, finally, we can't even see each other any more.
But I will always remember you, wonder what you are doing at this moment that I think about you, and hope that you are happy and content.
Your friend,

Do I remember?  Do I?  Every day.  Every day I remember.

Pavane for a dead...civilization

Have we lost the battle?  Did we fight?

Once upon a time...

       

    Well, I think...

War

“We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand.”
    ~ Ernest K. Gann, Fate is the Hunter

I've been thinking of something Dickey Chapelle wrote in her autobiography. She was a war correspondent on Iwo Jima in 1945 and had just photographed a wounded marine:

The photograph she took.

“After I took his picture, while the chaplain administered the last rites as the corpsman began transfusing him, he came back to consciousness for a moment. His eyes rested on me. He said, “Hey, who you spyin’ for?”
“The folks back home, Marine.”
“The folks back home, huh? Well, fuck the folks back home!” he rasped. Then he closed his eyes. I didn’t see where his stretcher was carried.
After we had ceased loading for the day, his voice haunted me. What lay behind that raw reflex answer? What dear-John-I-know-you-understand letter? What other betrayal?
I remembered his wound. A piece of a giant mortar shell had sliced across his stomach. So I went down into the abdominal ward with my notebook in my hand. There were no names in it yet because I wasn’t willing to hold up moving stretchers while I spelled out names. But I had copied the dogtag numbers of each man as I made his picture. The nurses’ clipboard listed the serial numbers of the men being treated. The number I wanted wasn’t there. I thought perhaps I had been mistaken about the kind of wound he had, so I tried to find him in the other wards, the other decks, even those of the officers. I couldn’t find his number.
There was only one more set of papers aboard. This showed the dogtag numbers of the men who had died on deck. The number for which I was looking was near the top of the list.
So I think I was the last person to whom he was able to talk. And I had heard him die cursing what I thought he had died to defend.
It was my first and most terrible encounter with the barrier between men who fight, and those for whom the poets and the powers say they fight.”

Dickey Chapelle

Chapelle herself was killed in Viet Nam in 1965 while on patrol with marines during Operation Black Ferret.