In honor of American military veterans, here is a excerpt of the Glee Club of the USMA at West Point singing ‘America’. A DVD is available at Stand Ye Ready.
Veterans Day is intended for the living, but during a time of armed conflict it is sadly also a memorial day. I compared the list of glee club singers against a list of Army fatalities in Iraq, and found these two matches.
My buddy D.F. Rogers points out that the synopsis of David Michaelis’ biography of N.C. Wyeth isn’t all that distinctly different from that of his biography of C.M. Schulz.
For forty-three years, starting in 1902, N.C. Wyeth painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals, as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literature. Yet despite worldwide acclaim, he judged himself a failure, believing that illustration was of no importance. David Michaelis tells the story of Wyeth’s family through four generations — a saga that begins and ends with tragedy — and brings to life the huge-spirited, deeply complicated man, and an America that was quickly vanishing.
After a lot of furious flipping through various portions of the Michaelis biography of Schulz, I am now slowly and deliberating reading it front-to-finish. Yes, Schulz was complicated, but in the book “complicated” does indeed seem to mean the same thing as “negative.” By definition, a single significant aspect of someone’s personality isn’t what makes them complicated.
I got a laugh of out Monte Schulz’s comment about his brother Craig that’s in a previous post.
I just wanted David Van Taylor to tell a more complete story and to give some clarification to a story my brother tells regarding “us” riding our dirt bikes on the roads and not being bothered by the cops — none of us except him either owned or rode dirt bikes, and David only used that clip to “show” how pampered we were back then, and privileged, neither of which was true.
The reason it’s funny to me is my brother rode dirt bikes, but I never did. I would have the same reaction as Monte if my brother said “we” in a way that sounded like a reference to our family, rather than to his friends. Here’s Craig on a dirt bike.
