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Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC.
Clay Aiken Sings 'God Bless the U.S.A.'
Remembering John M. Steele
'Longest Day' Is Vivid Memory
The longest day has been immortalized in books and on the movie screen. The biggest day in World War II also lives wherever John M. Steele is.
June 6, 1944, D-Day for the Allied invasion of Normandy, is portrayed in the parade of autographed pictures, newspaper/magazine articles, medals and documents that line the walls of a special room in the Wilmingtonian's home.
That was the headline and lead for a feature I wrote for the Wilmington Morning Star in 1963 about one of 13,000 paratroopers dropped into France during the D-Day invasion. Like many, Private Steele missed the drop zone and was carried over the town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise where his chute caught on a church steeple when he tried to steer away from a burning building.
At the Washington premiere of the 1962 movie The Longest Day, John met Red Buttons who portrayed him in the film. "Thanks a lot, John," the actor quipped. You got me four days of work with 20th Century!"
"He's a nice guy and a real character!" the original steeple climber said with a grin.
Pvt. Steele (third from right) and team prior to D-Day invasion.
In the first hour of the invasion, Steele hit the church roof and slid down, his chute wrapping around the spire. When he tried to free himself, pain shot through his leg and his combat knife clattered to the street below.
With the battle raging all around him, the trooper wisely decided to play dead and dangled on the spire for 2 1/2 hours. Later, a group of German soldiers, intent on stripping the "body" of cigarettes and other rations, discovered he was still alive and took him prisoner.
Three days later during an American tank attack, he and another wounded soldier leaped through a window and escaped to friendly lines. Following two weeks in an English hospital, Pvt. Steele returned to the war and was among those who broke through to Bastogne where the 101st was surrounded in the Battle of the Bulge.
For these actions and his wounds, the soldier was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor and the Purple Heart.
I especially remember John Steele and The Longest Day on Memorial Day. When I interviewed him the summer before my junior year in college, he had cancer and was planning to enter a veterans administration hospital for cobalt treatments.
John Steele monument in Ste. Mere Eglise, France.
According to his bio at Wikepedia, he died on May 16, 1969, in Fayetteville, just two weeks short of the 25th anniversary of D-Day.
An honorary citizen of the first village liberated by the Americans in June 1946, John (I'm pretty sure I called him "Mr. Steele" in '63) visited Ste. Mere-Eglise several times before his death. His story is commemorated in the Airborne Forces Museum in the center of town.
National Symphony Orchestra in concert. (Capitol Concerts photo)
Events Salute Those Who Served
At graveside ceremonies, parades, concerts, and other festivities in Washington, DC, and throughout the nation, America this weekend pays tribute to those who have served and sacrificed for their country.
Featuring the National Symphony, a mix of dramatic readings, documentary footage, and live musical performances, the National Memorial Day Concert is slated for 8 p.m. ET Sunday on the west lawn of the US Capitol.
The concert, which will be broadcast on PBS stations live and in an immediate rerun, will also be seen overseas by US military personnel in more than 175 countries and aboard more than 200 US Navy ships at sea on the American Forces Radio and Television Network.
The National Memorial Day Parade, an annual tradition of remembrance with patriotic marches and floats in Washington, DC, is slated for 2 p.m. Monday. The 2010 event, which will include a special tribute to the US Marine Corps, will be televised live to US service members around the world.
On Monday, Vice-President Joe Biden will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
At 3 p.m. local time, according to the 2000 National Moment of Remembrance Act passed to emphasize the meaning of Memorial Day, all Americans should "voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a moment of remembrance and respect.'"
Clay Aiken performs "God Bless the USA" at 2004 concert.
Graphic by Ashes links to the video on YouTube.
On Memorial Day, we honor the John M. Steeles of our lives. Have a very special Memorial Day Weekend!
Caro
PCPA Theaterfest on the central California coast, will present the American premiere of My Fairytale, a musical about Hans Christian Andersen — featuring music and lyrics by Broadway's Stephen Schwartz — in 2011.
The exclusive engagement will preview in the Marian Theatre in Santa Maria, CA, Aug. 12-19, 2011, and will then open under the stars in the Solvang Festival Theater in Solvang, CA, Aug. 26-Sept. 25, 2011. The run will coincide with the centennial celebration of Solvang as a Danish-American community.
"From the darkened stage of the Royal National Theater in 1846, Hans Christian Andersen is launched on an epic adventure through the timeless landscape of his own imagination. What he discovers there not only changes his life, but the world. His life's fairytale, illuminated by beauty and longing, was the genesis for some of the world's most beloved stories."You can also read more about the muscial at Stephen Schwartz's website. The musical premiered in Copenhagen in 2005 for Andersen's bicentennial celebration.
by Patricia Duncker is released stateside in July but is already released in the UK--here's the Amazon.co.uk link--where I found a review by Eilis O'Hannon explaining that:References to Orpheus and Eurydice, Bluebeard's Castle, and many other myths, fairy tales and Bible stories, litter the book; images of entrapment trip over one another in giddy succession. Even the title of the book, while ultimately loaded with different layers of significance, sounds half-fabulous.
The bodies are discovered on New Year's Day, sixteen dead in the freshly fallen snow. The adults lie stiff in a semicircle; the children, in pajamas and overcoats, are curled at their feet.
When he hears the news, Commissaire André Schweigen knows who to call: Dominique Carpentier, the Judge, also known as the "sect hunter." Carpentier sweeps into the investigation in thick glasses and red gloves, and together the Commissaire and the Judge begin searching for clues in a nearby chalet. Among the decorations and unwrapped presents of a seemingly ordinary holiday, they find a leather-bound book, filled with mysterious code, containing maps of the stars. The book of the Faith leads them to the Composer, Friedrich Grosz, who is connected in some way to every one of the dead. Following his trail, Carpentier, Schweigen, and the Judge's assistant, Gaëlle, are drawn into a world of complex family ties, seductive music, and ancient cosmic beliefs.
Hurtling breathlessly through the vineyards of Southern France to the gabled houses of Lübeck, Germany, through cathedrals, opera houses, museums, and the cobbled streets of an Alpine village, this ferocious new novel is a metaphysical mystery of astonishing verve and power.
references come to mind) but it is fun and brings past times closer to our minds today. Never a bad thing.
From Slashfilm at Aaron Johnson and Andrew Garfield Meet For Jack the Giant Killer, Production Pushed Back to 2011:
While no one has been officially cast as the young farmer Jack in Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Killer, a few actors have been name-checked as having meetings for the role, including Kick-Ass star Aaron Johnson and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus/Social Network star Andrew Garfield.
The film, which was originally scheduled to begin shooting this Summer in England, has now been been pushed back to February 2011, in an effort to give Singer more time to better figure out the visual effects. According to HeatVision, Singer will use a process that will supposedly allow him to see the giants in-camera as the actors play opposite them.
Romance, treachery and skating skills were the order of the day at the Theatre Royal as The Russian Ice Stars kicked off their five-day Glasgow stint of Snow White on Ice.
The show runs for the next four nights at the Hope Street theatre, which has been transformed to accommodate industrial pool liners and some four tons of ice.
Irina Tkachuk and Valdis Mintals play the starring roles of Snow White and her prince in this take on the classic fairy tale, The show, which combines ballet, gymnastics, aerial aerobatics and ice-skating is billed as a real family event for adults and children alike.
Latest promo for Clay Aiken: Tried & True
CD available everywhere on June 1!
View at YouTube
Tried & True Coming June 1
Fan Club Site Opens Without Me!
Wouldn't you know the new Clay Aiken Fan Club site rolled out Thursday just as I completed spring music lessons ... and I have yet to gain admittance to what sounds like a wonderful showcase for the singer and meeting place for him and his fans!
Everywhere I read -- Twitter, Facebook, and 3-4 message boards -- almost all CA fans are having a blast settling into the new digs, befriending each other, listening to a trio of Tried & True tracks, including "Unchained Melody," the song I will play first when I purchase the CD on June 1!
I understand the three full tracks originally playing on the new site have reverted back to snippets. While I'm happy for Clay friends, it has been painful reading all the adjectives, exclamation points, and "squeees" describing songs I couldn't hear.
Even as I deleted Temporary Internet files/browsing history and tried every trick imaginable to log in with either IE or Mozilla, my email box was receiving requests for assistance getting into the site, posting a new avatar, and whatnot.
Clickable cap of new Clay Aiken website. (Thnx to SueReu!)
Ground(ctrl) Hosts Clayaiken.com
Hosting clayaiken.com is an impressive group over at ground(ctrl. Clay's new web masters have been nothing but courteous, personable, and very helpful to anxious fans with access problems. For some, all it takes is a phone call or an email and they are in. Below are US/international/web support contact info (M-F, 9 am - 5 pm. PT):
U.S. Support 1 (877) 463-2975
International Support 1 (916) 443-9205
support@groundctrl.com
For those of us still riding the caboose, the new Clay Aiken fan club home will happen in due time. According to a tweet from Team Clay on Thursday, "the new site needs to propagate throughout the Net." This can take between 24 and 72 hours.
Definitely the WORD OF THE DAY for CA fans, propagate means "to cause to spread out and affect a greater number or greater area." For a better understanding of what many are experiencing, see What is DNS propagation and why does it take so long? by Rich Smith.
Before leaving for the Memorial Day Weekend, ground(ctrl) personnel provided active users with login problems an alternative for entering the site:
If you are still experiencing problems logging in to the new Official Fan Club on www.clayaiken.com with your old OFC email and password, PLEASE use the new password clay2010 along with your OFC email address to log in. Once logged in, quickly reset your password in your Account Settings.
All day I was seriously wondering which would come first -- Clay's website or his new Tried & True CD. Right after uploading this blog, 24 hours into the new roll out, I finally crossed the Cyber threshold into the singer's new digs.
Have an awesome weekend, Clay Nation!
Caro
NEXT: America Honors Military Heroes
is on the short list of nominees for the Hugo for Best Graphic Story this year. All week, Brit Mandelo has been reviewing the nominees on Tor.com. Today she wrote about Fables and admitted it's also her pick for the winner. You can read her full article at Best Graphic Story Nominee #5: Fables—The Dark Ages but I'll share some highlights here:The fifth and final nominee this year is Fables: The Dark Ageshaving the highest entry bar—that goes to Fables. There’s more or less no way at all to start reading the series here and know what’s going on. In fact, I think it would be some kind of travesty to start here, like skipping to page three hundred or, hell, the last chapter of a book before you read the rest. The good news is, Fables is easy to find in bookstores around the country, not just comic shops, and I can’t recommend it strongly enough, so there’s still time to catch up before the voting.
Fables and its creator(s) have a fantastic awards record so far. It’s won a total of twelve Eisner Awards, some for story and some for art. The Eisners are the big-deal award for comics, sort of like the Hugos and/or Nebulas are for SFF. It was also a Best Graphic Story nominee last year for the eleventh volume, War and Pieces.
I suppose I could try to make an argument similar to the one I made with Girl Genius—that this isn’t a big plot-solver volume—but I think what it does do is much more important than that. Fables is all about retelling and reinventing stories, tales, and tropes. That’s what it does. So, for it to continue and in fact gain momentum after the point in the story where most fairytales end… That’s significant. It’s doing its thematic work with strong hands, right there, reinventing the idea of the fairytale again and again by showing what happens behind the scenes. It’s the difference between happily-ever-after (which never really happens), and having to face the consequences of every action.
This year, the Hugo Awards are doing things a little differently. Rather than a physical packet of reading material, they are releasing the entire list electronically to members, including supporting members who are not able to attend the conference in Australia. What that means is that for $50US or $70AUD, you can get copies of six novels, six novellas, six novelettes, five short stories, four graphic stories (plus a couple to read online only), and a number of related works, fanzines and other writing excerpts in various categories, all of which were considered to be prize-worthy examples by the awards committee. I found a password on one PDF (and, yes, most of the packet is in PDF form, although there are a few with multiple formats and I saw at least one PRC/Mobi file on a quick look-thru), so that one will be a PC only read, rather than moving to my Kindle and there are a few that include links to online only reads (a few graphic/comics sites are online only publications, for example), but otherwise they should work well on an ereader.
If you don't want to join, a number of the short stories, novelettes, novellas and graphic stories are available online to read, for the duration of the voting period (yes, you are expected to vote, but there is little to stop you from skipping this part), which ends 31 July 2010 23:59 PDT. You can sign up online, HERE, but you will have a decision to make: let them process the charges in Australian dollars, which will mean possibly paying a small exchange fee to your bank or credit card company, and a total based on the current exchange rate (when I checked, it worked out to around $65US; PayPal tells you how much before you complete the transaction), OR you can use their manual registration and payment option via PayPal and pay a flat $50US (directions are on the registration page). If a bargain price is your main consideration, the latter is the way to go. However, you'll want to add to your PayPal message that you wish to get all your material via email, or they will send you everything via snail mail - adding at least a week to get anything, here in the States. In addition, rather than the automated system set up to issue registration info (which you need to download the books), your registration is handled manually, by a group of volunteers; even with several emails to them to check on status, mine took three weeks to complete and get my password via email. With only two months left in the voting period, that would not leave much time to read the entries if I chose that method today.
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