Cinderella in a party dress
…”A Dustland Fairytale,” track number five (and my personal favorite) from The Killers‘ 2008 album, Day & Age, performed as a poetically arranged duet with The Boss.
Springsteen’s appearance with The Wallflowers at the 1997 MTV VMAs is still his most legendary on-stage collaboration. And part of me wishes deeply that he’d barreled up to share the same mic with Brandon Flowers. But the intergenerational overlaid image of the two frontmen at 2:49…yeah, that’s enough…and it makes this performance of this unique song even more of a wonder.
Heroes get remembered, but legends never die
Not even the recent anti-government protests or the threat of contracting the coronavirus can keep this Hong Kong legend from doing what he loves best. And epidemic or not, he’s not about to change how he looks.
“Elvis doesn’t wear a mask,” he says.
Elvis Presley impersonator Melvis on the ferry to Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Born Kwok Lam-sang in Indonesia, he has been performing Presley songs in Hong Kong Island bars for nearly 30 years. Photo: James Wendlinger
On December 29th of last year, Melvis died of kidney failure. His life was chronicled by the SCMP, the New York Times, and a hundred newspapers in between, the way a true legend deserves.
As a man incapable of dancing, I agree
I submit that there is nothing that anybody in the world has ever done that is more civilized or sophisticated than to dance elegantly, which is to state with your total physical being an affirmative attitude toward the sheer fact of existence.
…writer and music critic, Albert Murray, describing swing jazz in From the Briarpatch Files
Principles
Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.
…René Mathis, agent of the French Secret Service in Ian Fleming‘s Casino Royale.
Poets
If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.
…Socrates was as weesh as they come, but in Phaedrus, Plato got this right.
Opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity
She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor – was consuming herself.
….from The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende
An affirming flame
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
…from W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939“
How Men Comfort Themselves
I wouldn’t call Musashi ordinary.
But he is. That’s what’s extraordinary about him. He’s not content with relying on whatever natural gifts he may have. Knowing he’s ordinary, he’s always trying to improve himself. No one appreciates the agonizing effort he’s had to make. Now that his years of training have yielded such spectacular results, everybody’s talking about his ‘god-given talent.’ That’s how men who don’t try very hard comfort themselves.
…Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
A Prayer for 2020
Grace is Somehow Violent
Zeus, who guided men to think,
who has laid it down that wisdom
comes alone through suffering.
Still there drips in sleep against the heart
grief of memory; against
our will temperance comes.
From the gods who sit in grandeur
grace is somehow violent.
…Strophe C, lines 181-182, Agamemnon by Aeschylus, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore