Tonight we went to see and hear Caetano Veloso sing at the Jackie Gleason theatre. After the concert we got to meet him. this was a huge event for me personally. I was awestruck. I gave him an autographed copy of Rise and Shine and showed him his name in the liner notes. Showed him how we covered a famous Brasilian song on the album. We spoke very briefly. Laughed some. It was a good feeling. He is much smaller in person than on stage. Older, greyer. Very soft and soft spoken. This was a dream of mine. This year I have had the opportunity to go see Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Boccelli, U2, and Caetano in concert. This has been a very good year.
Listen to the man sing.
The following is from an email by a man named John MaCenulty. It is good. Very good.
There are times when societal actions are extremely clearly wrong, outrages
that reach into us deeply. We feel a sense of hopelessness and despair that
things may be falling apart. A sense of wrong and dread pervades.
And there are times when things come to a focus and really are threatening.
It is not an illusion that will pass in the blink of a magical eye. Some
things are deep and structural, inherent in the way of things. They have been
going on for a long time.
Negative energies flare and wane. We are watching a flaring.
The history of humanity is the story of these risings and fallings. Ever has
it been so.
Yet within the structure of pain and suffering has been an awesome spiritual
beauty that has never been defeated by the awful things that have passed
through us. Hope seems to, indeed, spring eternal.
Beethoven and Mozart wrote in times of war. Enduring beauty was created.
Now I pray again, deeply, for peace, fairness, justice, love in my world,
this beautiful, betrayed, discouraging world.
It is through the very act of prayer that I am fulfilled, not in the
answering of my prayer, in the very act.
When I seek the divine I create the divine. I activate that energy in my
consciousness and it comes into me.
The sadness without prayer is overwhelming.
I focus on the stillness and it comes over me, into me. There is always my
very nature, beautiful beyond all failings, a light within me that will not
darken.
I rise and fall too.
New web site address:
Copyright © 2002 by John MacEnulty
11/22/2002, St. Louis, MO
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