tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:46:45 +0000current eventstelevisionFilmliteraturemusicblogspoetryfamilyChristmasTravelIrelandMad MenSteedItalyTravels with CadfaelQQF File9/11holidaystheaterThe Sopranosartnational poetry monthThe Road to TaiwanTVBurn NoticeDoctor WhoJames JoyceEasterThe Road to ChinaVienna/Prague/BudapestAmalfiMiami ViceSchooner GirlWest WingoperaLou ReedMorseNew YearsShelleySteven SpielbergThomas Hardyagatha christieyeatsBing CrosbyBorgesBrad PittByronEnglandEric ClaptonFranceJamaica KincaidJoseph ConradMichael MannMinghellaOscarsPeter O'tooleRigolettoRufusScotsStar TrekSwizerlandTIME person of the yearThe RomanticsWhitneyWorld War One; travelbookscriticismdancefammoviespolyphonyradiosingingtfamilytinnitusvacationvisionwritingThe Avengers and images are ©1961-9, CANAL+UK Ltd All Rights Reserved. Image is a screen grab via Wikipedia. All post text is copyright M.A.Peel. All rights reserved.http://mapeel.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)Blogger614125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-6275464472516449001Tue, 26 Apr 2022 23:45:00 +00002022-04-26T19:45:52.693-04:00current eventsliteratureTravel  I drank soda water and smoked and freted until light began to break   and the rustle of a rising breeze  turned me back to my bed.  Charles Ryder, Brideshead Revisited  April 2022: the weather remains oddly cold, dreary.  Where, oh where is our Spring?Nature's chill sends me back to my relationship with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I am nowhttp://mapeel.blogspot.com/2015/06/et-in-arcadia-ego-happy-birthday.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-2514969446562897536Tue, 28 Dec 2021 01:02:00 +00002021-12-27T20:07:10.058-05:00current eventsFilmliteraturepoetryThe streets are cold, it’s hard to get a cab, and your jacket isn’t warm enough--Metropolitan captures that chill discomfort and how the conversations that string between two people walking from one bleak stretch of the block to the corner are part of the invisible wiring of the city, the connective tissue through which memories, memoirs, novels, and, yes, movies are eventually made. James http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-years-reverie-when-memoirs-meet.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-5553098470300778355Thu, 23 Dec 2021 20:30:00 +00002021-12-23T15:30:22.016-05:00Christmasfamilyliterature There's a whole literature of vibrant writing from writers looking back to the Christmases of their childhood for memoir or fiction. My favorite is Dylan Thomas's wildly florid prose poem of A Child's Christmas in Wales: Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2013/12/snapshots-of-childs-christmas-in.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-3946602725962976016Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:16:00 +00002026-04-16T14:08:00.270-04:00family A guy sits down at a bar and says “Oh, I’m so tired from doing all those chores.”  Next barstool says, “What chores?” First guy, “I’ll take a Ballantine, thanks.” Did I mention it’s 1953? Even that detail wouldn’t have helped me get it entirely. This was a little joke my father once told me, and he had to explain it was a play on “What’s yours?” which is a way of saying “What’ll youhttp://mapeel.blogspot.com/2020/06/purity-body-flavor-stuff-of-lifetime.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-6027772828171038378Sun, 10 May 2020 15:09:00 +00002020-12-19T14:10:12.911-05:00familymusic Yoko & Isoko Ono; Ellen & Betty O'Neill Several years ago I stumbled upon Yoko Ono's Desert Island Disc, recorded Friday, June 15, 2007, when she was 73 years old.  Yoko's story brought me an unexpected connection to the whole beautiful, shared notion of mothers & daughters, a choral connection across cultures and decades. Amazing. It was for her selection of the song "http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-songs-our-mothers-sang-to-us-happy.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-2318767413687541879Sun, 03 May 2020 15:36:00 +00002020-05-03T11:40:06.858-04:00Filmmusic Bing Crosby’s birthday is today, May 2, as he cites in his autobiography Call Me Lucky: "Uncle George kept my father company, diverted him with his best stories and raised a comforting glass with him when I was born on May 2, 1904." OR it's tomorrow May 3, the date all the biographies site for him, including the Gary Giddens. And those bios cite 1903 as his birth year, not 1904. Turns http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2008/05/sexy-beast-i-mean-bing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-6992031895755751704Fri, 10 Apr 2020 15:15:00 +00002022-11-06T13:59:39.261-05:00Easterholidaysmusic Thanks to Gwen Toth, the amazing director of music of the early music group ARTEK, I learned an astonishing piece by the great Renaissance composer Orlando di Lassus. It's Lagrime di San Pietro, The Tears of Saint Peter, a setting of a twenty-verse poem by the Italian poet Luigi Tansillo (published in 1560), to which Lassus added a final motet. The music is rich and soaring and dense http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2012/04/good-friday-saint-peters-worst-day.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-7729740386510383516Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:42:00 +00002020-08-30T11:00:26.736-04:00ByronShelleySwizerlandThe RomanticsTravel One night—it was in 1816, and one of those nights the Swiss believe God made for them alone—a boat approached silently, leaving behind her a wake brilliantly broken in the light of the moon. She drifted in towards the whitened walls of Chillon Castle and touched the bank without any shiver, without a sound, like a settling swan. From it stepped a pale-faced man with piercing eyes, his http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2019/08/history-of-two-weeks-tour-through.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-8262530855016365604Sat, 10 Nov 2018 03:11:00 +00002018-11-10T10:48:15.845-05:00current eventsliteraturetelevision "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected... Its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends... Millions were destroyed because two people, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, were shot... But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing meliorist myth... It reversed the idea of Progresshttp://mapeel.blogspot.com/2010/11/honoring-those-who-served-and-lived.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-6555178607681857785Thu, 23 Nov 2017 01:39:00 +00002017-11-23T10:21:51.131-05:00familyFilmTravel "Mareichtag and I are speaking nothing but English now. So we should feel at home when we get to America." "To America!" [Watch the wonderful scene.] I am a life-long fan of Casablanca, and as the years have gone by, I have discovered more and more cosmic connections to it. Ten years after I moved to West 103 Street in Manhattan, another fan succeeded in documenting that Humphrey Bogart http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2017/11/giving-deep-thanks-for-my-courageous.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-8931516130813859031Sun, 05 Nov 2017 03:01:00 +00002022-11-05T09:33:56.328-04:00current eventspoetryThomas Hardy While the men and lads were building the pile, a change took place in the mass of shade which denoted the distant landscape. Red suns and tufts of fire one by one began to arise, flecking the whole country round. They were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets that were engaged in the same sort of commemoration. Perhaps as many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2014/11/thomas-hardys-guy-fawkes-bonfire.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-6517308057085076617Mon, 04 Sep 2017 19:46:00 +00002017-09-04T20:35:00.010-04:00This is not another recap of Twin Peaks: The Return, just some observations I offer as part of the wonderfully participatory arena the whole TWR has provided. I enjoyed the whole series, and loved both parts of the finale. I also loved reading all the intellectual interpretations about the huge subtleties within the art. One of the questions the one-armed man asks in the Black Lodge (two times http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2017/09/twin-peaks-return-day-after.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-735503708988030563Thu, 31 Aug 2017 17:18:00 +00002017-08-31T13:28:59.064-04:00current events Time marches on. It is twenty years now since these two extraordinary women died 6 days apart in 1997. They had met just two months earlier that year, June 18, 1997, when Diana visited one of the Missionaries of Charity in the Bronx.  How oddly fitting that Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, who had some connections in life, are connected to each other in death because they died six http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2017/08/two-women-for-ages-princess-diana.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-1023847501266615700Sun, 14 May 2017 17:34:00 +00002017-05-16T14:48:16.556-04:00family Rena Waldis Brown at the Forest Lake Country Club circa 1918 Thinking of my maternal grandmother on this Mother's Day, whom I affectionately called Grammy Whammy because she was a pip. She died in 1993 at the age of 93, born when the 19th century became the 20th century. I have several of her belongings, but the one that is the most emotional for me is her Atlantic #511 washboard, from the http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2007/04/laundry-day.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-885286534129233686Sat, 22 Apr 2017 16:42:00 +00002017-04-22T14:01:25.790-04:00blogscurrent events The MTA has been failing its costumers on an epic scale lately.  Yesterday's commuting nightmare also had Con Edison pitching in: NY Times "Why a Midtown Power Failure Snarled Your Morning Commute."  Snarled is a pretty cozy word for soul-sapping mess.   Funny thing, when I was googling for info about yesterday's mess (April 21, 2017), I kept landing on articles I thought were http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2017/04/massive-mta-failure-sadly-nothing-new.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-9220034747269962345Thu, 20 Apr 2017 01:03:00 +00002017-04-19T21:29:40.036-04:00Filmliteraturetelevision I am all in for the niche ruminating about The Leftovers after the premiere of its 3rd and final season last Sunday because there is so much fun to be had. The series is a triumph of imagination, combined with the highest arts of TV writing, directing, and acting. It is pure enjoyment to be pulled into its narrative spell and try and makes sense of what’s going. Warning: The below presumeshttp://mapeel.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-leftovers-im-all-in-for-final.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-7078495402739068272Fri, 14 Apr 2017 05:31:00 +00002021-04-13T22:29:39.607-04:00current eventsFilm The wheels of history have turned to align us today to the same days to dates as 1865. In Daniel Mendelsohn's excellent 2012 New Yorker article "Unsinkable, why we can't let go of the Titanic" he noted an historian once quipped that "three most written about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic." This weekend hits this trifecta perfectly.  1. http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2012/04/our-titanic-catharsis.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-3293994079317306721Thu, 06 Apr 2017 16:14:00 +00002021-01-24T12:06:13.298-05:00current events An American Doughboy receives a medal from King George V, World War 1 Updating this post on April 6, 2017, commemorating one hundred years ago today we entered World War 1. An odd occurrence connects my recent trips to Italy and England. It concerns two conversations with Englishmen of a certain age (let's say somewhere 60 to 70) in both places. In general chit chat with each man I http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-archduke-is-shot-100-years-ago.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-7859658905495230468Sat, 25 Mar 2017 17:45:00 +00002017-12-20T17:18:52.806-05:00literaturenational poetry monthpoetry "It has been estimated that at the time of Keats' death, the combined sales of the three books published during his lifetime amounted to 200 copies."  Andrew Motion, The Guardian January 23, 2010 Yet here we are, two hundred years later, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association is running an international prize for essay and poetry celebrating the publication of the first volume. How http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-editions-of-romantics-that-which_25.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-8420952599796099819Sat, 07 Jan 2017 22:20:00 +00002017-01-07T17:51:22.787-05:00Bing Crosbyblogsmovies A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. . . . His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. James Joyce, The Dead James Joyce http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2017/01/going-their-way-attention-must-be-paid.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-7357143444630718101Sat, 17 Dec 2016 02:09:00 +00002024-01-11T20:08:13.665-05:00poetryThomas Hardy 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 http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2007/02/thomas-hardy-and-titanic.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-788884597212293433Sun, 18 Sep 2016 19:09:00 +00002016-09-28T12:45:23.717-04:00current eventsFilm 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 ahttp://mapeel.blogspot.com/2016/09/woodys-1979-manhattan-fantasy-meets.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-5313901612361972954Sun, 11 Sep 2016 21:19:00 +00002016-09-11T22:38:18.668-04:009/11 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 http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2016/09/911-and-new-york-times-crossword-15.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-6277924890641330356Fri, 01 Jul 2016 04:13:00 +00002017-04-07T22:36:29.818-04:00current eventsFilm 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)http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2014/08/england-declares-war-on-germany-aug-4.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1273420145917074292.post-2658069369315284568Sat, 26 Mar 2016 02:56:00 +00002016-04-07T08:21:32.672-04:00musicThere 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 http://mapeel.blogspot.com/2008/03/allegris-miserere-turning-up-all-over.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Mapeel)7