Monday Music: Christmas Time is Here (Vince Guaraldi)

I remember watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special the very first time it was aired. As an 11-year-old, I was already a seasoned fan of the Peanuts comic strip by Charles Shultz. Finding it in the “Sunday Funnies” was always a treat. Naturally, I took delight in the first televised cartoon of the Peanuts gang. Not only did A Charlie Brown Christmas tell an endearing Christmas story while presenting THE Christmas story, but it was also probably my first introduction to jazz with the musical score written by Vince Guaraldi. Many years later, I was very glad to have an excuse to watch the televised special again when my own daughter was young. The opening song, “Christmas Time is Here,” has since become an enduring Christmas classic, featured on many Christmas recordings.

Friday Funnies: Why Must We Suffer?

Another of my favorites from Charles Shulz

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Friday Funnies: No Tomorrow

One of my favorite Peanuts comic strips by Charles Schulz

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Monday Music: Ripple (The Grateful Dead)

                        Reach out your hand if your cup be empty, 

If your cup is full may it be again,
Let it be known there is a fountain,
That was not made by the hands of men.

There is a road, no simple highway,
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go no one may follow,
That path is for your steps alone.

Ripple in still water,
When there is no pebble tossed,
Nor wind to blow.

Songs for Christmas: Christmas Time is Here

During the month of December, I'll be posting a few of my favorite Christmas songs. I'll have a You Tube version of each song so that you can stop and listen if you like.

I remember watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special the very first time it was aired. As an 11-year-old, I was already a seasoned fan of the Peanuts comic strip by Charles Shultz. Finding it in the “Sunday Funnies” was always a treat. Naturally, I took delight in the first televised cartoon of the Peanuts gang. Not only did A Charlie Brown Christmas tell an endearing Christmas story while presenting THE Christmas story, it was probably my first introduction to jazz with the musical score written by Vince Guaraldi. Many years later, I was very glad to have an excuse to watch the televised special again when my own daughter was young. The opening song, “Christmas Time is Here,” has since become and enduring Christmas classic, featured on many Christmas recordings.

Things Fall Apart

I enjoy discussions about poetry, and I also enjoy philosophical and political discussions from time to time, but I love the way the late Charles Shultz could capture things in four frames of a cartoon. This is a newspaper clipping which I found recently that I had cut out years ago.









And here is the poem by W.B. Yeats, written in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I. Some say it describes post war Europe, some say it speaks to Yeats' belief in the emergence of a new cycle of history.


THE SECOND COMING
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



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