Banding Together
...to make the very most of the week ahead
As someone who is almost DEFINED by my lack of affinity for the game of football, I still admit to enjoying certain aspects of the Fall gridiron spectacle—notably, the marching band. I love the uniforms and the gleaming brass instruments and the clever choreography. I love the camaraderie of band kids (not that I’ve ever been one, but I hear tell). So I say: strike up the (marching) bands on the first day of Spring! At a lazy midsummer beach picnic! Let them serenade the swim meets and the July ice cream socials! Go forth, young folks, and play the heck out of those tubas!
FILM CLIP: CELLO IN BAND (TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN)
I hesitate to give Woody Allen any “band”width for obvious reasons, but his early movies did have some hilarious moments…
SONG: MARCHING BANDS OF MANHATTAN (DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE)
When I was having my really tough bipolar year (2006), I listened to this Death Cab song on repeat. It blended my love for New York and my grandiose manic emotions. Even without that baggage, it’s a wonderful song…
CLASSIC MOVIE TRAILER: THE BAND WAGON
One of the great movie musicals of the 1950s, The Band Wagon has memorable numbers, from “That’s Entertainment” to “Dancing in the Dark,” and a terrific cast including Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and Nanette Fabray. A tuneful escape from everyday life (not that any of us needs THAT these days:-)
POET: MARIE HOWE
I was a little late to jump on the modern poetry bandwagon, but in recent years I’ve been enjoying some fabulous contemporary poets. Marie Howe, whose work I love, just won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize for her New and Selected Poems.
Here is her lyrical tribute to the song of creation…
HYMN
It began as an almost inaudible hum,
low and long for the solar winds
and far dim galaxies,
a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,
a song without words for the snow falling,
for snow conceiving snow
conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,
the hum turning again higher—into a riff of ridges,
peaks hard as consonants,
summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices
then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows,
the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking
waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:
the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming, some of us rising
as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down
as it turned into dark; as each of us rested—another woke, standing
among the cast-off cartons and automobiles;
we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,
left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices,
in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields,
in the mud of the shantytowns, breaking into
harmonies we’d not known possible, finding the chords as we
found our true place singing in a million
million keys the human hymn of praise for every
something else there is and ever was and will be:
the song growing louder and rising.
(Listen, I, too, believed it was a dream.)
and here’s Marie Howe’s 2011 terrific interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, where she discusses, among other subjects, the haunting poem she wrote as a letter to her late brother John, “What the Living Do.”
BLOG PREVIEW: MERCY BUCKETS!
Inspired by this article posted on WordSmarts, I share some international words and phrases, and (you knew this was coming) I invent a few of my own!
INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
The fleeting nature of life gives it both its sweetness and its sourness too—its MUCHness, in every way. Remembering the immortal lyrics of Seals and Crofts, “we may never pass this way again,” so let’s make the most of it!! Have a sweet week, friends!