Icons: What's in a Name?

A quick view of how a word can change over the years, yet there is an underlying meaning that perhaps remains the same:


Medieval Icons

20th Century Icons

21st Century Icons

*

I'll Be Seeing You

No, I'm not going anywhere. It's just that I awoke the other day with this song in my head. It's one of those from the Great American Song Book, of the WWII era. I can't recall ever actually sitting down to listen to it in its entirety, but would recognize certain phrases from the song. I suppose it's one of those tunes that has become ingrained into the public consciousness. I had to look it up online to learn that the music  for "I'll Be Seeing You" was written by Sammy Fain, and the lyrics by Irving Kahal. First published in 1938, it was from the Broadway musical, Right This Way.

Here's how the song came into my head: I was dreaming that I was singing the song. I was standing at the microphone and wearing a gray jacket and black tie; there was a lady at the piano, and the number began with great delight. I guess I was Frank Sinatra, or Dino (only in my dreams).

Sometimes a dream is to be interpreted, sometimes it just needs to be celebrated. So here are two renditions that I found on You Tube, representing the old and the new. Michael Buble bring a fresh new face to an old classic with this first video. In the second video, I don't know who the people are in the slide show, but the musical rendition is worth it. How can you top the great Jimmy Durante with that gravelly voiced stacato delivery and that upbeat style of his? He was the quintessential showman.













"Good night, Mrs. Calabash...wherever you are."



*

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?



*