glen hansard and market irglova and most of the frames at the riverside. it was a beautiful, beautiful show, hysterical at turns and deeply moving at others. glen started it out on stage, by himself, stepped out to the lip of the stage and performed "say it with me now" without mic or amp, and it was really fantastic to see a sold-out auditorium suddenly become so still you could hear a pin drop.
and he has such a powerful, gorgeous voice, low growl in one moment and then high and clear as a bell in the next. and the interplay between marketa and glen, little conversations and smiles, his teasing of the bandmates, the perpetual and stereotypical bored expression on the bass player's face, representing for all bass players everywhere. it was just a lovely evening.but the highlight, maybe, was when they played "falling slowly." look, obviously everyone and their mother knows that song now but back when this was just starting to sort of creep into the consciousness i fell in love with it, and the movie, and odds are probably very good that it'll be the wedding song. glen starts to talk about how someone had emailed him an invitation to come see a choir perform the song, and that he responded with why don't you come sing it with us and all these kids start filing on stage, and it's the whitefish bay 8th grade choir and the audience just goes nuts. and it's not like their singing is amazing, or whatever, but it's the spirit of it, and the warmth of glen and marketa and the band and their generosity in opening up that stage and making an amazing moment in the lives of these kids that everyone responded to, i think. and yes, i totally cried. plus, he totally got them to sing backup for a cover of the pixies "gigantic" as the second song, which was funny on too many levels to count.
if you do a youtube search with glen and marketa and whitefish bay you'll find the videos. good stuff.
memorial day is coming up, and that we have started, from the beginning, to read the roll of those who have died since this all began during the weekly prayers of the people at church. fifteen a week, and if no one else died it'd be 2013 before we were done. i get physically ill thinking about this, am emotional about it in ways i don't fully understand myself.
the things that carried him
it's a long read, from last month's esquire, but chris jones does incredible work, telling one soldier's story from the moment he dies til he's laid in the ground and i guess i feel the need to keep bearing witness, somehow. to keep sending condolences to families i don't know for soldiers i've never met but to whom i still feel in some way connected. it has to end. it has to.
and because i don't know if i'll end up back this way before the end of the month, one of my favorites, from archibald macleish:
the young dead soldiers do not speak.
nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:
who has not heard them?
they have a silence that speaks for them at night
and when the clock counts.
they say: we were young. we have died.
remember us.
they say: we have done what we could
but until it is finished it is not done.
they say: we have given our lives but until it is finished
no one can know what our lives gave.
they say: our deaths are not ours: they are yours,
they will mean what you make them.
they say: whether our lives and our deaths were for
peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say,
it is you who must say this.
we leave you our deaths. give them their meaning.
we were young, they say. we have died; remember us.
