Once Upon a Time... in the West

Italian maestro Sergio Leone, the talented film director who reinvented the genre of the western, died twenty years ago today at the age of 60.

Based on a True Story

Columnist Steve Lopez is at a dead end.

The newspaper business is in an uproar, his marriage to a fellow journalist has fallen apart and he can't entirely remember what he loved about his job in the first place.

Then, one day, while walking through Los Angeles' Skid Row, he sees the mysterious bedraggled figure Nathaniel Ayers, pouring his soul into a two-stringed violin.

At first, Lopez approaches Ayers as just another story idea in a city of millions. But as he begins to unearth the mystery of how this alternately brilliant and distracted street musician, once a dynamic prodigy headed for fame, wound up living in tunnels and doorways, it sparks an unexpected quest.

Imagining he can change Ayers' life, Lopez embarks on a quixotic mission to get him off the streets and back to the world of music. But even as he fights to save Ayers' life, he begins to see that it is Ayers – with his unsinkable passion, his freedom-loving obstinacy and his valiant attempts at connection and love – who is profoundly changing Lopez.

[The Soloist]



The real Steve Lopez on the real Nathaniel Anthony Ayers... in the real LA Times.


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Music, Odours, Thoughts

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Music, When Soft Voices Die)

The First Commandment

Or at least one of the ten:

Every reader who requests a correction "MUST receive a response in some form." [WP]

Save the Priests

The great ecclesial tradition has rightly separated sacramental efficacy from the concrete existential situation of the individual priest and so the legitimate expectations of the faithful are appropriately safeguarded. However, this correct doctrinal explanation takes nothing from the necessary, indeed indispensable, aspiration to moral perfection that must dwell in every authentically priestly heart.

Precisely to encourage priests in this striving for spiritual perfection on which, above all, the effectiveness of their ministry depends, I have decided to establish a special "Year for Priests" that will begin on 19 June and last until 19 June 2010. In fact, it is the 150th anniversary of the death of the Holy Curé d'Ars, John Mary Vianney, a true example of a pastor at the service of Christ's flock.

(Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the members of the Congregation for the Clergy)

Gonzo Journalist

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson is a 2008 documentary film written and directed by Alex Gibney.

Go-And-Tell Philosophy

"I wanted to tell the story of these women and the war in the Congo and I couldn't find anything about them in the newspapers or in the library, so I felt I had to get on a plane and go to Africa and find the story myself. I felt there was a complete absence in the media of their narrative. It's very different now, but when I went in 2004 that was definitely the case."

Lynn Nottage, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for her play "Ruined", which explores rape as a weapon of war and is set in a Congolese brothel.

[E&P]

Emile Blondet

"Many years after these events, during the winter of 1837, one of the most remarkable political writers of the period, Emile Blondet, reached the last degree of destitution, having previously concealed his condition beneath the external appearances of a life of splendor and fashion. He was hesitating about resorting to some desperate step, for he saw that his labors, his mind, his learning, his knowledge of affairs, had led him to nothing except to work like a machine for the benefit of others, and that all the places were filled; he felt that he was on the verge of middle life, without position or fortune, and he saw that bourgeois fools and idiots were replacing the courtiers and incapables of the Restoration and that the government was being reconstituted as it was before 1830."

(Honoré de Balzac, The Peasants)

Pirates

A Greek saying: όπου υπάρχει θάλασσα, υπάρχουν και πειρατές (where there is a sea there are pirates).

AD 1209

"And when the Lord gave me some brothers, no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High Himself revealed to me that I should live according to the form of the holy Gospel. And I caused it to be written in few words and simply, and the Lord Pope confirmed it for me."

(Francis of Assisi, Testament)

These last words of St Francis refer to the oral approval of the (original) first rule of the Franciscan order, given by Pope Innocent III, 1209.

Here We Are

"Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad . . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world."

(Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan)

Happy Easter and Passover

To you all.

Sermons

I ran from the office-seekers who shatter the earthly fate of the people while throwing into their eyes the golden dust and filling their ears with the sounds of meaningless talk.

I departed from the ministers who do not live according to their sermons, and who demand of the people that which they do not solicit of themselves.

(Khalil Gibran, The Tempest)

It's Time for Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach: Matthaeus-Passion (BWV 244).
Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Soloists conducted by Ton Koopman.

Questioner, Not Doubter

"...I aint a doubter. But I am a questioner.

White: What's the difference?

Black: Well, I think the questioner wants the truth. The doubter wants to be told there aint no such thing."

(Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited)

State of Journalism Movies

Oh yeah, another movie about journalists and journalism!

"State of Play" is a political thriller starring Russell Crowe as a reporter, Ben Affleck as a congressman and the great Dame Helen Mirren as the editor of the Washington Globe.

The film is a big screen adaptation of a BBC mini-series from 2003...

Johnson from Horace

The snow dissolv'd no more is seen,
The fields, and woods, behold, are green,
The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again,
The sprightly Nymph and naked Grace
The mazy dance together trace.
The changing year's successive plan,
Proclaims mortality to Man.
Rough Winter's blasts to Spring give way,
Spring yields to Summer's sovereign ray,
Then Summer sinks in Autumns's reign,
And Winter chills the world again.
Her losses soon the Moon supplies,
But wretched Man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is nought but Ashes and a Shade.
Who knows if Jove who counts our Score
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share
At least you rescue from your heir.
Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,
When Minos once has fix'd your doom,
Or Eloquence, or splendid birth,
Or Virtue shall replace on earth.
Hippolytus unjustly slain
Diana calls to life in vain,
Nor can the might of Theseus rend
The chains of hell that hold his friend.

(Samuel Johnson's translation of Horace's Ode 4.7)

Via Dolorosa, Via Crucis

The earthquake in central Italy's Abruzzo region...

Today's front page of the Abruzzo daily newspaper Il Centro:



The Telegraph and The Guardian lead with the Italian quake:

Morality and Politics

"...there are just two things that make the world go round: morality and politics. Morality, a very footling thing, means being fair and honest. It is, so they say, the basis of a number of rather boring virtues...

SUZANNE. And politics?

BÉGEARSS. Ah! Politics is the art of making things happen, of leading people and events by the nose: it's child's play. Its purpose is self-interest, its method intrigue. Always economical with the truth, it has boundless, dazzling possibilities which stand like a beacon and draw you on."

(Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, The Other Tartuffe, or The Guilty Mother, Act IV, Scene 4)

The Original

Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler) in the 70s sitcom Happy Days.

Smile and Say Cheese!

Richard Lewis/Newsteam.co.uk - Crown Copyright
Flickr: London Summit's Photostream

Barack Obama, Silvio Berlusconi, Dmitry Medvedev...
[G20 London Summit]

In One Place

We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie,
Christs Crosse, and Adams tree, stood in one place;
Looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;
As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adams blood my soule embrace.

(John Donne, Hymne To God My God, In My Sicknesse, Divine Poems)