R.I.P. Maureen O’Hara. She was 95 and had quite a life.
She made five movies with John Wayne (lucky lady!),
but she made a lot of other good ones too, like Oscar-winner How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Parent Trap (1961) with Brian Keith and Hayley Mills and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) with Natalie Wood. In fact she was in quite a few of my favorites! She even made a movie with John Candy–she played his mother!–Only the Lonely (1991).
In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected Maureen to receive the Academy’s Honorary Oscar. She was only the second actress, after Myrna Loy in 1991, to receive an Honorary Oscar without having previously been nominated for an Oscar in a competitive category.
Maybe I’ll watch Rio Grande (1950) tonight…
and toast Maureen O’Hara!
Into paradise may the angels lead you. At your coming may the martyrs receive you, and bring you into the holy city Jerusalem. (BCP, 500)
My oh my what a wonderful time in flyover land we’ve had while daughter #1 has been in town!
Here she is wearing a vintage ensemble put together from items unearthed from the back of her childhood closet.
We went to an estate sale, ate out, checked out the new IKEA store (where I bought some more stemless wine glasses), blew a fuse when simultaneously blow-drying our hair, went to church, took multiple walks, went to Ted Drewes, shopped, updated my iPhone and synched it with my laptop, bar-b-qued with the boy and daughter #3 and watched more old home movies, and generally displaced the OM who didn’t grumble too much.
Sadly, she heads back to NYC tomorrow on the 5:55 a.m. flight, because all good things, as they say, must come to an end.
Tomorrow is the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, at which the English king, Henry V, and his small army trounced the flower of French knighthood.
a 16th century miniature depicting the battle
Naturally, the occasion has garnered a fair amount of attention, especially in England. The National Archives in London has a good online exhibit as does Agincourt 600, a “Registered Charity to promote international friendship and understanding and advance knowledge and commemoration of the battle.” The former has posted a number of documents, including what appears to be an excerpt from Holinshed describing the battle:
King Hen(ry) Vth Battaill of Agencourt
The English Battail and the French
Being both sett in a redines to fight ye battail
The constable of France encouraged
his Frenchmen with an eloquent oratie
valliantly to fight for ye honor of France
King Henry yr fifte likewise did sooe
Now King Henry had placed 200 arch-
ers privilely in a lon medow neer
unto ye forward of the French army
but yet separate wth a great dich: and
they whar commanded to keep close till
they had a token given them to shoote.
For those of us who can’t get to the battlefield, don’t find online exhibits particularly edifying, and don’t feel like reading Shakespeare, why not watch a movie? The three best known film versions are, in reverse chronological order, Tom Hiddleston’s Henry V in “The Hollow Crown” 2012 TV series, Kenneth Brannagh’s 1989 film, and Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1944 classic. Here are their respective “St. Crispian’s Day” speeches.
I haven’t actually seen the whole performance, so my comments are provisional. But much as I like Tom Hiddleston, I thought the speech (and particularly the camera work) a bit on the anemic side. It’s still better than Kenneth Brannagh’s movie, though. At least The Hollow Crown made TH look suitably heroic.
I have seen the entire Brannagh film — it didn’t do much for me.
I can’t really say anything positive about that movie. In trying to be “authentic”, Brannagh resorts to bad slow motion re-enactment fighting and lots of grime. And let’s face it, by emphasizing the “war is madness” angle, he misses all the nuance. Shakespeare deserves better.
As for the 1944 version, it’s easy to imagine how stirring it would have been to see, as the Allies prepared to invade France and WWII headed toward its inevitable crescendo.
Yes, the scenery is fake, the armor is tinny and awkward, and Sir Laurence whips through the lines in his own inimitable, velvety-voiced style, but there’s a purpose and immediacy to his performance that the others lack. Clearly, contemporary events have an impact on actors’ performances and audience reception.
Whichever performance you prefer, take some time to remember “those few, those happy few” and good king Hal (aka Hank Cinq)
Now I’m off to serve lunch at the church bazaar. Have a great weekend!
*John Keegan describing Agincourt in The Face of Battle
Yesterday daughter #1 rode in from NYC for a little flyover R&R.
This time she will not be running in a half marathon but recovering from one she ran two weeks ago on Staten Island. ‘Taking it easy’ will be the byword for the weekend.
(Aren’t those white Keds the cutest things ever?)
I must also note that today is the birthday of my distant cousin, Dwight Yoakam!
Old Dwight (who is my age) has had quite a career. Fifteen-time Grammy nominee and three-time winner, his music career has been stellar indeed. But he must be congratulated for doing a great job of transitioning from country music heart-throb to “character actor.”
Would that we could all do it as gracefully.
Happy birthday, Dwight! We’ll be toasting you big time tonight!
“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.
When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about “design” and “balance” and getting “interesting planes” into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest “a” tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.
But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”
―Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
It has been awhile since I shared Brenda Ueland with you. I think she is so great. I agree that Art is about Love and sharing what you love with others.
On another subject, but related–I drove a Subaru for years. It was totally against stereotype, but I loved that car . So I thought it was pretty great when the Subaru people worked “Love” into this ad campaign.
Now they are even using a Gregory Alan Isakov song in an ad:
I hardly watch any television these days with commercials, but I saw this and was pleased. There are still some smart people out there working for the Man.
Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil. I could see the oaks turning brown on the edge of the hockey field, and see the scoured silver sky above shining a secret, true light into everything, into the black cars and red brick apartment buildings of Shadyside glimpsed beyond the trees. Pretty soon all twenty of us–our class–would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I’d been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other’s socks. I thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school’s driveway. Now we’d go, too.
–Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
This time of year always makes me take a wistful look backward at my schooldays. I have always been an observer, watching other people do things. Sometimes I was taking pictures, sometimes writing about it. Sometimes I was just listening. Whatever.
I was never as cool as Annie Dillard, that’s for sure, never as connected. But we both felt the same desire to get the heck out of Dodge and move on.
Speaking of moving on, I re-read Dillard’s short memoir looking for a quote and I didn’t think it was as great as the first time I read it. Time and age again. Sigh.
I didn’t do a whole lot this weekend. I went to a few estate sales and I puttered around the house. I walked around my neighborhood. It is the perfect weather for that.
I watched Furious 7 (2015) with Vin Diesel et al.
It was ridiculous but highly entertaining. Indeed, the movie deserves an Oscar for special effects, because I certainly could not tell you where the real Paul Walker began and ended. Those Weta Digital people are pretty amazing.
I didn’t go to church but stayed home and re-read Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner, the third in his trilogy of memoir. It was the first book I ever read by Buechner and I was sold for life. But I guess he is not for everyone. When I first discovered him over twenty years ago, I recommended him to everyone I knew. One friend read The Sacred Journey (the first book of memoir) and thought he was a whiner. That is the last way I would describe him, but to each his own.
“The passage from Genesis points to a mystery greater still. It says that we came from farther away than space and longer ago than time. It says that evolution and genetics and environment explain a lot about us but they don’t explain all about us or even the most important thing about us. It says that though we live in the world, we can never really be at home in the world. It says in short not only that we were created by God but also that we were created in God’s image and likeness. We have something of God within us the way we have something of the stars.”
Halloween is fast approaching and it’s time, once again, to consider tales of horror and the supernatural. As a rule I don’t go for scary things. Certainly I abhor the current trend of movies that substitutes gore for character and content. In fact, when I’m in the mood for shivers, I usually return to old favorites like Shirley Jackson or Algernon Blackwood. Ambrose Bierce is just too creepy for me. Still, there’s nothing so good as a haunted house, is there?
“No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.” (Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House)
It fits this picture pretty well, doesn’t it? And then there’s this one:
“Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighborhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.” (Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House and Other Stories)
Aside from the fact that those two passages are remarkably similar (albeit Jackson’s is notably better), they both emphasize the possibility that a house can simply be bad from the start. Nowadays, I suppose, we’d say the feng shui needed work. In any case, there’s no denying that people react to places and that some places seem intrinsically creepy.
“There’s nothing more haunted than a house. Doesn’t matter where, how grand, how small, made of brick, straw, stone, or gingerbread, whether perfectly cared for or blown to bits. Beings gather there. Every house is a planet, exerting gravitational pull. Every house is in a dark wood, every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother…”
She seems to be trying to capture the house as a trap for “accumulated human experience”, but I don’t see why that has to be negative. I LIKE the patina of age and use. The only houses I’ve ever been in that really bothered me were the perfect, everything-in-its-place, carpeted-to-silence, and as impersonal- as-a-hotel type of house. They are as soulless as the people who live in them. Now THAT’S scary.
Give me a crumbling haunted house any day. At least it was once a home.
The Battle of Glasgow was fought 151 years ago on October 15, 1864 in and near Glasgow, Missouri as part of Gen. Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition during the Civil War. A Union garrison of 800 men was located in Glasgow, under the command of Colonel Chester Harding. The size of the Confederate forces was reported as being between 1,500 and 1,800 troops.
General Sterling Price
Although the battle resulted in a Confederate victory and the capture of significant war material, it had little long-term benefit as Price was ultimately defeated at Westport a week later, bringing his campaign in Missouri to an end.
Glasgow is halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City, about 35 miles north of Columbia. Early in its history, Glasgow was a mecca of commercial activity, shipping vast quantities of hemp and tobacco from its steamboat port. Glasgow now ships large quantities of corn by river barge and rail line. Shipping by river is still possible because Glasgow is one of the few towns left with its commercial business district right on the river bank. Many river towns were left stranded, miles from the fickle path of Missouri River.
It definitely looks like a place to add to the itinerary of my imagined car trip to Kansas City!
