Winners and Losers

Katie Walsh

My granddaughter Kelsy Rae
A Winner

I can't get over the resemblance that Kesy has to Katie.  A raw and brave natural beauty. When I first stumbled upon Spencer Murphy's winning photograph of Katie Walsh I thought immediately of Kelsy.

Spencer Murphy has won the £12,000 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2013 with a photograph of  Katie Walsh, an Irish jockey who came third in the Grand National 2012 and is probably one of the best, if not the best, female jump jockeys currently riding in the UK.

Taken at Kempton Park Racecourse the winning portrait of Katie Walsh was photographed whilst shooting a series of jump jockeys' portraits for Channel Four's The Original Extreme Sport campaign. ‘I was keen to include Katie,’ says Murphy: ‘I wanted to show both her femininity and the toughness of spirit she requires to compete against the best riders in one of the most demanding disciplines in horse racing. I chose to shoot the series on large format film, to give the images a depth and timelessness that I think would have been hard to achieve on a digital camera’. 

The Guardian

Katie Walsh rides Seabass to third place the highest ever finish for a female rider in the Grand National 

Photo: Getty Images

Grand National 2012: Katie Walsh breaks new ground for women coming third on Seabass.  Ted Walsh insisted that “one day a woman will win the Grand National” after the trainer saw his daughter, Katie, partner Seabass to finish third at Aintree – the best placing ever achieved by a woman in the race. 

By a nose: Neptune Collonges pips Sunnyhillboy at the post to win the closest-run Grand National in history

And then there's the down side:

 

 Carnage: Horses jump Beechers Brook at the start of the race. There were two confirmed fatalities.  Only 15 out of the 40 horses that started the race, finished. 

The problem is compounded by the uniquely arduous nature of the Aintree course, which is four-and-a-half miles long, having been extended by half-a-mile in 1975. The horses have to jump over 30 fences, which themselves are larger than those on any other course in Britain.

According to Pete ridden by Harry Haynes, left, falls after jumping Becher's Brook. The horse later had to be put down

Synchronised (circled in red) starts to fall after jumping the notoriously difficult Becher's Brook during the Grand National

In one of the most dramatic of the 165 Nationals, Synchronised’s bid to become the first horse to complete the Gold Cup-Grand National same season double since Golden Miller in 1934 ended dreadfully when he fell at Becher’s on the first circuit, unseating champion jockey AP McCoy, and then suffered a fatal injury as he continued riderless over the next few fences. 

Daily Mail UK 

What Good Am I ?

Nicholas Simmons, 20, of Greece, N.Y., warms himself on a steam grate by the Federal Trade Commission, just blocks from the Capitol, during frigid temperatures in Washington, Saturday, Jan. 4, 2014. Read his story in The Democratic Chronicle

What good am I if I’m like all the rest
If I just turn away, when I see how you’re dressed
If I shut myself off so I can’t hear you cry
What good am I?

What good am I if I know and don’t do
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you
If I turn a deaf ear to the thunderin’ sky
What good am I?

What good am I while you softly weep
And I hear in my head what you say in your sleep
And I freeze in the moment like the rest who don’t try
What good am I?

What good am I then to others and me
If I’ve had every chance and yet still fail to see
If my hands are tied must I not wonder within
Who tied them and why and where must I have been?

What good am I if I say foolish things
And I laugh in the face of what sorrow brings
And I just turn my back while you silently die
What good am I?

Music and lyrics by Bob Dylan

from the album:

Oh Mercy

First Played

Oct 10, 1989 in New York City at the Beacon Theatre

Last Played

Nov 28, 2013 in London, England at Royal Albert Hall

Played in concert 216 times throughout Dylan's career.

It's all just a scheme, Babe

To Ramona

Ramona
Come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise
The flowers of the city
Though breathlike
Get deathlike at times
And there’s no use in tryin’
T’ deal with the dyin’
Though I cannot explain that in lines

Your cracked country lips
I still wish to kiss
As to be under the strength of your skin
Your magnetic movements
Still capture the minutes I’m in
But it grieves my heart, love
To see you tryin’ to be a part of
A world that just don’t exist
It’s all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feelin’ like this

I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
By worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin’ and returnin’
On back to the South
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand
Yet there’s no one to beat you
No one t’ defeat you
’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad

I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better ’n no one
And no one is better ’n you
If you really believe that
You know you got
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you must be exactly like them

I’d forever talk to you
But soon my words
They would turn into a meaningless ring
For deep in my heart
I know there is no help I can bring
Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I’ll come and be cryin’ to you

Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

St. John Nepomucene Neumann - The Immigrant Shepherd

Neumann was notorious for his frugality. He kept and wore only one pair of boots throughout his residence in the United States. When given the gift of a new set of vestments, he would often use them to fit the newest ordained priest in the diocese.

Neumann's efforts to expand the Catholic Church throughout his diocese was not without opposition. The Know Nothings, an anti-Catholic political party representing descendants of earlier immigrants to North America, was at the height of its activities. They set fire to convents and schools.  Discouraged, Neumann wrote to Rome asking to be replaced as bishop, but Pope Pius IX  insisted that he continue.While doing errands on 5 January 1860, Neumann collapsed on a city street, due to a stroke.  He lay crumpled in the snow a few blocks from his new cathedral on Logan Square.  By the time a priest reached him with the holy oils, Bishop Neumann was dead.  He was 48 years old.  At his own request he was buried in a basement crypt in Saint Peter's Church where he would be with his Redemptorist confreres.

Almost immediately devout souls were drawn to his grave. They came from far and near. More than a few were claiming extraordinary miracles of grace. It was as though John Neumann, now dead, continued his works of mercy among his people.  

The various Irish Societies of Philadelphia have made formal pilgrimages to the tomb of this humble man of God who, as bishop, did so much for their immigrant forebears in the 1850's -- this "foreigner" who went to the trouble of studying enough Irish to be able to hear the confessions of those who "had no English," up in the coal regions of nineteenth century Pennsylvania.
 
Those of Italian extraction remember Bishop Neumann as the founder of the first national parish for Italians in the United States. At a time when there was no priest to speak their language, no one to care for them, Bishop Neumann, who had studied Italian as a seminarian in Bohemia, gathered them together in his private chapel and preached to them in their mother tongue. In 1855 he Purchased a Methodist Church in South Philadelphia, dedicated it to St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi, and gave them one of his seminary professors, Father John Tornatore, C.M., to be their pastor.

Click on the link below to see
360 degree panoramic view of Neumann shrine

Three Poems by Manolis Anagnostakis

Poetics

You're betraying Poetry again, you'll tell me,
Man's most sacred expression
You're using it
again as a means, a pack mule

For your sinister objectives
In full knowledge of the damage you're doing
To the young through your example.

Tell me what you have not betrayed
You and your kind, for years and years,
Bartering your possessions one by one
In international markets and common bazaars
So you're left without eyes to see, without ears
To hear, with lips sealed and you say nothing.
For which of man's sacred rights are you arraigning us?
 

I know: preaching and rhetoric again, you'll say.

Well, yes! Preaching and rhetoric.
 

Words have to be hammered like nails.
If they're not to be lost in the wind

 Old Streets

Old streets I loved and hated endlessly
me walking under the shadows of the houses
unavoidable nights of homecoming, and the city is dead

I find my insignificant presence in every corner
make me meet you once lost range of desire I am too
Forgotten and untamed I walk
holding a flickering a spark in my wet palms

And there I was walking through the night without knowing anyone
and not even one, not even one knew me, knew me….

The Morning 

 

In the morning
At 5
The dry
Metallic echo
After the loaded trucks
That shattered the doors of sleep.
And the final ‘adieu’ of the day before
And the final steps on the damp tiles
And your last letter
In the arithmetic notebook from your childhood
Like the grill on the small window
Which slides up the parade of the morning’s
Joyous sun with perpendicular black lines

Tink Among The Bears

I found Tink, aka Bella

on the top bunk in the kid's room.
It reminded me of "Where's Waldo?"

I took the picture

but I didn't write on it.

It must have been

my little granddaughter

who added the pink-lettered caption.

A Man & His Cars

My Dad 

In this picture he is about to chauffeur a wedding with his 1941  Packard 180 Touring Sedan. 

When my father was about 73 years old he answered an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer, looking for vintage cars and their owners to be in the film "Birdy" being shot in North Philadelphia. He was accepted and became a member of the cast of extras. I believe he got a SAG card after working 3 days. I'm not sure, but he went to work everyday for a month or so and some days had to do a lot of sitting around, mostly on the front steps and porches of people who lived in the neighborhood where they were shooting. He also got meal vouchers.

This experience was very exciting for him. He was raised in a family of movie theater owner's and theater equipment specialists. His father, who came to this country from Italy in 1898, and settled in Northern Pennsylvania, built a movie theater in the little town where my father was born and raised. My grandmother sewed the huge velvet curtains that opened and closed on the screen. One of my father's older brother's, called Scissors because of the way he could "cut those keys" played the piano for the silent films that were shown. My father, the baby of the family, made and sold the popcorn. So this movie stuff was in his blood, and being part of a major production like Birdy, even though it was just a quick little drive in a yellow Chevy Bel Air, up a hill and out of site, over before you could blink an eye, was a big and beautiful deal for him.

This is a video showing the  style and features of a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air.  It's not my dad's actual car, which was 31 years old when the movie Birdy came out and not restored.  I suppose the authenticity of my dad's little Chevy contributed to his getting chosen as an extra for the film.

Birdy is a 1984 American film directed by Alan Parker and starring Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. It is based on the novel of the same name by William Wharton. The story is about two friends, Birdy (Modine) and Al (Cage), who become friends at school and serve in Vietnam. Birdy already has a disturbing fixation with birds and his Vietnam experiences push him over the edge: when he returns from the war, he is sent to a mental hospital for assessment and his friend Al stays with him to try to reach him before it's too late and he'll be separated from Birdy, leaving him alone and lost inside his mind. The film contains many flashback scenes of their life together as teenagers in 1960s America and their developing friendship and views of life.

The film's soundtrack was written and performed by Peter Gabriel. The music contains some adaptations of tracks on Gabriel's third and fourth albums. The music makes heavy use of the Fairlight CMI IIx music computer, which was one of the first sampling systems, Peter Gabriel being one of the first customers.


Would you like to work as an extra? Click HERE