Memorial Day 2017

My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity ...
All a poet can do today is warn.
– Wilfred Owen

British composer Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, first performed on 30 May 1962, was commissioned to mark the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid. The reconsecration was an occasion for an arts festival, for which Michael Tippett also wrote his opera King Priam.

Britten, a pacifist, was inspired by the commission, which gave him complete freedom in deciding what to compose. He chose to set the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead interwoven with nine poems about war by the English poet Wilfred Owen. Owen, who was born in 1893, was serving as the commander of a rifle company when he was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal in France, just one week before the Armistice. Although he was virtually unknown at the time of his death, he has subsequently come to be revered as one of the great war poets.

In time this piece has become the world's most powerful anti-war statement, played by orchestras all over the US for Memorial Day, and on Armistice Day, also known as Remembrance Day, in other countries in the British Commonwealth and Europe.

Wilfred Owen's poetry is an integral part of Britten's piece; it is poetry written by a front line soldier during the action of war, and accurately reflects the feelings, thoughts, and reactions of people directly involved in the fighting. As such it is a powerful, and personal, argument against the waging of war, and especially the deceptive attitude of "we must fight this war in order to end all war." History has shown that war only begets more war, a point emphatically made in Eric Bogle's song "No Man's Land":

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.

Before I post the video of a performance of the War Requiem, conducted by Britten himself, I'd like to post this Wilfred Owen poem called "Strange Meeting" one of the last poems he wrote before his death and the final poem used by Britten in the requiem.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”

“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery;

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now. . . ."

And now, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. May all those killed in war rest in peace, and may we end this madness so that no more need to die!

Photo © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Memorial Day 2015

"Either war is finished, or we are." - Herman Wouk,  War and Remembrance 

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."

- Jimmy Carter, Nobel Lecture, December 10, 2002

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, January 10, 1946

"If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both."

- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Photo © 2014 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Memorial Day 2013

Music appropriate for the day - the great Eric Bogle's "No Man's Land", reaction to the death of a WWI soldier and a rumination on the nature of war and the governments that declare it.

War is sometimes necessary, but there's nothing glorious about it whatsoever. As General William Tecumseh Sherman is famous for telling some new recruits in 1879: "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell." However, most wars aren't necessary at all, but rather the result of greed, aggression, or failed foreign policy - avoidable, except that those who declared them had a vested interest in waging war. Someone somewhere (I forget who now) said that if the old men who declare war had to fight in them we'd have world peace tomorrow. Another quote about war, this time about the causes, come from Baha'i leader 'Abdu'l-Baha on a visit to Paris in 1912: "Land belongs not to one people, but to all people. This earth is not man's home, but his tomb. It is for their tombs these men are fighting."

And those who suffer are the ones sent to fight for somebody else's cause. As Eric Bogle says in "No Man's Land":

And I can't help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you 'The Cause?'
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

And again, as John McCutcheon writes in his own song "Christmas in the Trenches":

The ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame,
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.

So today we pay respects to the young men and women who were sent to do somebody else's dirty work. We pray long and hard that humanity will come to its senses and start to see war as a last resort and not as a standard foreign policy tool. And we pray that those now in harm's way in another part of the world come home safe and sound.

Photo © 2009 and text © 2010 by A. Roy Hilbinger; lyrics to "No Man's Land" © 1976 by Eric Bogle; lyrics to "Christmas in the Trenches" © 1984 by John McCutcheon.

For Aurora

For the people of Aurora, CO in their time of grief.

Photos © 2008 - 2012 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Memorial Day - A Peace Garden

I went up to the Shippensburg Memorial Park - a park and sports complex dotted with memorials to Shippensburg's dead in the nation's wars - to get photos for this, my annual Memorial Day post (a day early because I'm working tomorrow). And in the process of searching out the various memorial plaques I stumbled across this Peace Garden, which turns out to be the centerpiece of the memorial park. And really, isn't that the real purpose of this holiday, to pray that this madness we call war never happen again? I tip my hat to whoever planned this park for making the idea of peace the center around which the memorials to the dead revolve!

 Dona nobis pacem!


© 2012 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Good-bye Etta!

The sad news is in - Etta James finally lost to her multitude of ailments and passed away at the age of 73. Etta was up there in my pantheon of favorite singers, and I had the privilege of seeing her live several times - two or three times in Newport at the Rhythm & Blues Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival, and one memorable occasion at the original House of Blues in Cambridge, MA. I thought I'd include a couple of my favorites for this tribute - her version of Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me to Do" and her big hit "I'd Rather Go Blind"; when she did this one at the House of Blues they damned near tore the roof off the place! Go in peace, Etta. We'll miss you!

Happy Birthday, John!

John Winston Lennon, 10/09/1940 - 12/08/1980. We still miss him!

Insanely Great - Goodbye Steve Jobs. AND Bert Jansch

I got home from work last night a little after 10 and booted up my Mac, only to read that Steve Jobs had finally passed away from his pancreatic cancer. This was not unexpected; after all, the man had been ill for years and had recently resigned from his position of CEO of Apple for health reasons. We knew it was coming. Still, it's a sad day, and his death literally exemplifies the old cliché "the end of an era". It truly is.

I've been using Apple computers since the pre-Macintosh days of the Apple II. Yes, children, I'm an old ancient from the days of the Apple II and the Commodore 64 (both of which I've used). Remember the old days of Kinko's, when it was more a funky printer with computers on site so you could design your flyers and pamphlets right there and send them directly to the printer, instead of the soulless corporate giant merged with FedEx that it's become now? Ah, those were the days! And they used Apple computers exclusively; they didn't add Windoze PCs until well into the '90s (at least that's when it happened in Newport). That's where my love affair with Steve Jobs' brainchildren started, and I've never looked back.

And let's not forget that Apple actually fired Jobs back in 1985, only a year after he launched the Macintosh. Steve went on to found NeXT computers, which didn't do so well, and then on to lead and develop Pixar Studios, which did very well indeed. Meanwhile, Apple computers had degenerated into generic beige boxes not much different, except for the Macintosh operating system, from most of the other personal computers on the market.

Jobs came back to Apple when the company bought NeXT in 1996, and by 1998 Jobs was back in the CEO seat. He re-energized the place, ending the generic era and reintroducing creativity, innovation, and uniqueness with the iMac and the new slogan: "Think Different". And from that point Jobs and Apple never looked back. Now, in addition the the regular Apple computers running OS X, we have the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, all industry standard-setters.

I've been using the results of his genius since pretty close to the very beginning, and I'm using them still. I'm putting this post together on a Powerbook G4 running OS X 10.5.8. This is borrowed, and when I'm back on my own I'll be working on my eMac again (G4 1.4 GHz processor). I have an iPod Shuffle, and while I don't own an iPhone (only because my wireless carrier doesn't carry them yet), I have an LG Optimus S, which wouldn't exist if the iPhone hadn't been created. And I'm surrounded my Macs here. Mt sister-in-law uses a Powerbook (although my fuddy-duddy brother still uses a Windoze laptop), and there are two iPad 2s here in the house. And when their Verizon contracts end later this year they'll both upgrade to iPhones. And since the new iPhone 4S is now running on the Sprint network, and since my own carrier - CREDO Mobile - uses the Sprint network, I'm sure I'll be upgrading to an iPhone in about a year and a half when it's time to renew my contract.

Added to all that, my late Dad was a dedicated Mac user. What makes that interesting is that he was a microelectronics engineer; he created computer hardware systems for the aerospace industry, including many of the systems used on the Apollo missions. The myth goes that engineers use IBM/clone computers while artistic airhead hippie types use Macs; PCs are for serious computer users while Macs are for dilettantes. Obviously Dad busted that particular myth!

In any case, here are some videos included as a tribute to one of the great innovators of the 20th and 21st centuries, the man who literally changed the way we interact with the world. The first is the great TV commercial announcing the Macintosh in 1984:

And then there's the "Here's to the crazy ones..." to push the "Think Different" campaign; this one moved me profoundly when I first saw it. It still does.

And then after I read about Steve Jobs' passing, I also read about Bert Jansch. For those of you not familiar with the man, he was one of the great guitarists out of Great Britain's folk revival of the '60s and '70s. Born in Scotland, he mastered the finger-style playing style by listening to recordings of Big Bill Broonzy and Brownie McGhee. He teamed up with fellow guitarist John Renbourn for gigs and a record - "Bert and John" - and then added singer Jacqui McShee and formed the group Pentangle, which was the premier group of the British folk revival movement. On his own he was sometimes referred to as the British Bob Dylan. He was a talented man and a great musician, and he'll be sorely missed.

An old girlfriend introduced me to Pentangle back in '74, and I've been a fan ever since. The first video is Pentangle on BBC in 1970. Bert's the acoustic guitarist (John Renbourn plays electric) and the guy who announces the song.

And here's Bert on his own in 2008 with "High Days". Goodbye Bert; we'll miss you!

Text © 2011 by A. Roy Hilbinger

The Far Shore

I'm home today; it's one of my days off this week. I'm not going anywhere, though; it's gray, gloomy, and overcast, and I have a nasty cold. But I went out on the deck to see if there were any critters about, and this bit of scenery caught my eye. I call it "Ivy, Moss, and Wood".

When searching my iTunes library for appropriate music, I came across A Produce's "The Far Shore (solo version) and realized I hadn't done a tribute to him yet. Barry Craig, aka A Produce, passed away September 4. I've always been a fan of his music, so it was a sad surprise to read of his passing on John Diliberto's Echoes blog. This particular piece of music since Barry wrote it as a tribute to fellow ambient musician Pierre Lambeau on the occasion of his death back in the '90s. As one person commented on John's blog - flow in peace, Barry.

Photo & text © 2011 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Farewell to the "Big Man"

Clarence Clemons, The Big Man, along with Bruce Springsteen himself the heart and soul of Springsteen's sound. He's gone, passed away Saturday, June 18, from complications from a stroke he suffered on June 12. He was 69, and that's just too damned young!

The Boss and The Big Man were musical soul mates; they both believed that and said so publicly. Of their original meeting Clarence said this:

One night we were playing in Asbury Park. I'd heard The Bruce Springsteen Band was nearby at a club called The Student Prince and on a break between sets I walked over there. On-stage, Bruce used to tell different versions of this story but I'm a Baptist, remember, so this is the truth. A rainy, windy night it was, and when I opened the door the whole thing flew off its hinges and blew away down the street. The band were on-stage, but staring at me framed in the doorway. And maybe that did make Bruce a little nervous because I just said, "I want to play with your band," and he said, "Sure, you do anything you want." The first song we did was an early version of "Spirit In The Night". Bruce and I looked at each other and didn't say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other's lives. He was what I'd been searching for. In one way he was just a scrawny little kid. But he was a visionary. He wanted to follow his dream. So from then on I was part of history.

And Springsteen said this in a public press release on Clarence's death:

Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.

The music will never be the same, so much so that many are wondering now if the E Street Band will go on, or if Springsteen will go back to playing solo. Certainly there will never again be any moments like this:

Nor will there be any more experiences like this:

Rest in peace, Big Man. That proverbial band in heaven just got a helluva lot better!

For Japan

Photo © 2011 by A. Roy Hilbinger

A Belated Anniversary Tribute

February 2 is the late Eva Cassidy's birthday, and I usually do an online tribute to her (you can read last year's here), but I somehow missed it this year. I picked two photos I've done which reflect the mood Eva's music puts me in and added the YouTube video of her signature song - her arrangement of Harold Arlen's and Yip Harburg's "Over the Rainbow". Happy birthday Eva. We really do miss you.

Photos © 2011 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995 - Lest We Forget

For those who assume that all terrorists are foreigners who look, dress, and worship differently than themselves. On April 19, 1995, a massive truck bomb was exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, injuring 680 and killing 168, including 19 children under the age of 6. Were the perpetrators Arab or Pakistani Muslims? No, they were Americans who considered themselves "patriots" defending American liberty - Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. We need to remember that our own people are as inclined to despicable acts in the name of God, Country, or whatever as any foreigner.

Music: "In Paradisum" from Gabriel Fauré's Requiem

May the choir of angels receive you and with Lazarus, once poor, may you have eternal rest.

Photo © 1995 by Charles H. Porter IV

Good-bye, Doug!

Yesterday, February 14, 2010, Doug Fieger passed away after a long battle with cancer; he was 57. He was the frontman and chief songwriter for the seminal New Wave power-pop band The Knack, known as "The Band That Killed Disco", and their 1979 #1 hit (for 6 consecutive weeks) "My Sharona", principally written by Fieger (guitar solos composed by Berton Averre), was known as "The Song That Killed Disco" (I've done a feature on the song on Citizen K's Just A Song blog here). The Knack were part of a movement back to straight-ahead Rock & Roll that happened on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, starting with Punk in the late '70s and moving on to New Wave. The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, Elvis Costello. Patty Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Blondie, Talking Heads... That was a great time in popular music, and Doug Fieger put The Knack firmly in that pantheon of gods who put Rock & Roll back at the top where it belonged.

Fieger came from the Detroit area, and was playing in bands starting in high school. In fact, in 1970 and 1971 Fieger played bass and sang lead in the group Sky, which was founded by producer Jimmy Miller (Rolling Stones, Traffic, Blind Faith) when Fieger was still in high school. He continued to play in bands and even did some producing before forming The Knack in 1978. He'd moved to California by that time, and The Knack was playing in LA area clubs like Whiskey A Go-Go and The Troubador when they were discovered and signed by Capitol Records.

Rather than go into a long retrospective of Doug's career, I just want to post some videos from the early days of The Knack, all live performances. This, more than anything else, shows who Doug Fieger was and what he was all about.

Of course, the first video has to be "My Sharona"; this performance looks to be from the mid '80s.

Next is "Good Girls Don't", a very Beatlesque tune.

"Let Me Out", a nice, hard-driving tune perfect for getting audiences all worked up!

And finally, "Frustrated". a perfect example of Doug's vocal theatrics.

Good-bye Doug. You'll be sorely missed, but at least you left us a legacy we can enjoy for a long, long time.

Text © 2010 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Eva Marie Cassidy - An Anniversary Memorial

Today would have been Eva Cassidy's 47^th birthday. Unfortunately she was taken from us on November 2, 1996 at the age of 33, the victim of melanoma gone wild. With the voice of an angel and an exquisite sense of musical style, the tragedy of her life was that she was an obscure laborer in the fields of the music world whose fame came posthumously.

Eva's musical material covers a wide range, but mostly she's known as one of the finest interpreters of the American Songbook, singing Gershwin and Berlin and Cole Porter and Arlen & Harburg... The list goes on. She also covered many more modern "classics", like Paul Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" and Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time", bringing to them the same musical craftsmanship and stylistic sensitivity that she brought to the older standards.

As a talent she was beyond compare, but during her lifetime she was almost solely known from her gigs in the clubs in the Washington, DC area and two recordings, one a live album recorded at Blues Alley in DC in January of 1996, and a 1992 album with Go-Go (the DC version of Philly Funk) artist Chuck Brown. She was no stranger to the recording studio and had lots of material on tape, but she died before all but the live album were released. Soon after her death, in early 1997, the album she'd been working on - Eva By Heart - was released. After that, any music of Eva's released was recorded well before her death.

It was the 1998 release - Songbird - that led to her posthumous emergence from obscurity. It was a compilation of tunes from Eva By Heart, Live at Blues Alley, and The Other Side (the album she did with Chuck Brown), and it went pretty much nowhere (from a lack of promotion and poor distribution) until 2000, when it was discovered and promoted in Great Britain by BBC-2 DJ Terry Wogan. Especially popular was the recording of Harold Arlen's and Yip Harburg's "Over the Rainbow", which had become Eva's signature song during her performing career. After Wogan "discovered" Eva, her fame crossed the Atlantic back to the US, and in May of 2001 ABC's Nightline aired a short documantary of her life and career. From there everything really took off, and popular demand required that her musical "executors" - her family and former producer Chris Biondo - release more unreleased tapes and remastered versions of already-released material. On that scant discography Eva Cassidy became a legend. The tragedy is that Eva's no longer here to enjoy that fame, or to give us more.

As reported above, Eva did a gig at the Blues Alley in Washington, DC in January of 1996 which was recorded and released as a live album. Somebody also video-recorded the event, and the clips from that concert have become some of the most watched videos on YouTube. I'd like to share my favorites from that collection.

First is a more modern "classic", Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time". Eva brings it out of Lauper's quirky pop universe and makes a great torch song out of it:

Also in the "torch" category, but with much more swing to it, is her cover of Bill Carey's and Carl Fischer's "You've Changed". This song was performed by the immortal Lady Day (Billie Holiday), Ella Fitzgerald, and Nancy Wilson (it's Wilson's so-very-sexy version that still gives me the shivers every time I hear it) among others. Eva's version fully deserves to be included in that pantheon.

Eva could also swing like Ella or Dinah, as this version of Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek", first popularized by Fred Astaire, attests.

But Eva Cassidy is probably best known, and most beloved, for her down-tempo tunes. She sings them with an emotional intensity that brings out the full potency of the lyrics. Her version of Louis Armstrong's hit "What a Wonderful World" by Thiele and Weiss is a perfect example; she never failed to leave an audience in tears with this one. What's especially poignant now about her version of this song is that she closed the set with it at her farewell concert at The Bayou in September of 1996. She and everybody in the audience of friends, family, and long-time fans knew she was dying, so closing the set with this song had a special poignancy that still closes throats and brings tears.

And last but not least, Arlen's and Harburg's showpiece for Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, "Over the Rainbow". Eva personalized it and made it her signature song, and I can think of no better way to close out this birthday tribute to her. Thank you, Eva!

Text © 2010 by A. Roy Hilbinger