Welcome to all.
It's been so hot that I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone episode where the world is ending and everyone is cold - but it's really bloody sweltering heat!
If Dante's Inferno really exists, we're already in it.
On to new adventures and, hopefully, an end to this infernal humidity.
On Thursday evening, July 22, 2010, my first show of Power and Glory will debut on area24radio.com from 7PM to 9PM. Once you get to the website, just press in the center and it will take you to the show that is currently playing.
Power and Glory will be a little bit of everything: storytelling, stories that you were never told or taught, music, fun and guests.
The first show is a tribute to Russian poet, Andrei Voznesensky, whose passing was announced on June 1, 2010. My guest for our premiere show is poet Kenneth Pearson.
The sixties and seventies didn't just happen. It was as if everywhere in the world we were all awakening from the nightmare that had been World War II.
Krushchev had announced that Stalin was nothing but a bloody murderer. In the U.S.,we had just passed from the oldest elected president (Dwight Eisenhower) to the youngest elected president (JFK). The tragedy of the assassination pierced us all.
And people of all ages were realizing that our society was not exactly perfect and the War in Vietnam globalized protests against all forms of war everywhere.
I don't believe in nostalgia. I don't believe in glorifying the past. In fact, Andrei entitled one of his books of poetry, Nostalgia for the Present. I like that but the sixties and seventies had traits of a Renaissance when it came to Music, Literature and, certainly, movies.
The Russian people have poetry in their blood and young poets filled arenas like rock stars and they had a lot to say. One of Andrei's poems has the following lines:
Life is a series of burned-out sites.
Nobody escapes the bonfire:
If you live - you burn.
We all felt a lot like that - we were all on fire for whatever cause we supported.
We were young and we were going to change the world.
After all these years, I really don't know what we changed. The capitalistic materialism we allegedly renounced is smothering us all. The U.S. isn't fighting one war: it's fighting two and in certain areas of the country, we are more apart than we have ever been.
And Sony and the Jackson Family sell the songs of the Beatles to anyone who pays them the right price.
But the one thing that remains is the art that we loved and cherished. What remains is what it meant to us.
The one thing that always remains is art, literature, music and our own twentieth century art form: the movies.
There are certain people, always artists, who although we have never met them belong to us. I met Andrei Voznesensky for a brief moment and the autograph he gave me is fading away. His words, however, will never fade away.
And so to all artists out there and all of us who love them, I wish you a glorious goodnight.
Or as Andrei wrote in OZA:
I know that people consist of atoms and particles, just as rainbows consist of shining specks of dust, or as sentences consist of letters. You only have to change the order and your meaning changes.
For me, Maria, it's time to change those shining specks of dust again.
It's time to go in search of new rainbows.
And what a pleasure it was to be part of this show Maria. Not only did I learn more about Andrei, but I learned about Phil Oochs, Billy Bragg, and more about Russian poetry. The most memorable piece for me Yuvtushenko's "People." It ranks among the great pieces I've read and I thank you for sharing it with me.
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