Imagine Lennon today. He’d have been brilliant on Twitter.
Also for your perusal, an earlier City Jackdaw post about cosmic connections: Lennon, Morrison, and me:
https://cityjackdaw.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/entrances-and-exitsmorrison-and-lennon/
This is my wife’s ticket for the Trade Centre, from when she went to the top of one of the twin towers just six days before the terrorist attack.
Six days.
It’s like playing Russian roulette with the calendar.
Remembering all of those who were there that awful day.
Remembering Sharon Tate who, along with her unborn child and four other people, was savagely killed fifty years ago today by the Manson Family.
I can’t believe it’s a year since I posted about the sudden death of Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of the Cranberries. This first anniversary was marked today by the release of the song All Over Now, which comes from the album In The End, an album for which Dolores had recorded final demo-stage vocals for. The three surviving band members honoured Dolores with the finishing of the album, confirming it will be the group’s final one.
Another honouring was this video that I found online. Dolores was from Limerick, in Ireland, and Limerick artists of every genre came together to record a version of the Cranberries song When You’re Gone. It’s a diverse and moving tribute from her fellow hometown musicians.
The sofa features in the video as a reference to one that appeared on several Cranberries’ album covers.
I decided to also include the original Cranberries video at the bottom of the post, the initial inspiration. It was played at the end of the singer’s funeral last year.
R.I.P Dolores.
In the wake of the Arena bomb, the city drew the creatives to itself, as though, in some act of self-healing catharsis, beauty was brought to counter the ghastly.
Along the city’s highways, and especially in St Anne’s Square which was fast becoming the focus for the people’s outpouring of grief and defiance, artists could be seen hunched over easels and pavement flagstones, etching hearts, bees and other symbols of resilience onto the bones of her wounded body.
Even now, on the eve of the anniversary, we turn to art to express our deepest responses.
In the wake of the Arena bomb, musicians could be found playing the music of their fellow Mancunians; recognisable core DNA transmuted through classical, reggae and ballads of bleeding. Mourners broke vigils with spontaneous outpourings of adopted anthems.
Even now, on the eve of the anniversary, we quote the words of some of her favourite sons.
Tomorrow is twelve months. The healing goes on.
The conception of ‘(He)art’ was created by my fellow blogger Laura Bruno Lilly. http://laurabrunolilly.com/blog/
Wow, I’m sick of doubt
Live in the light of certain
South
Cruel bindings
The servants have the power
Dog-men and their mean women
Pulling poor blankets over
Our sailors
I’m sick of dour faces
Staring at me from the TV Tower
I want roses in
My garden bower, dig?
Royal babies, rubies
Must now replace aborted
Strangers in the mud
These mutants, blood-meal
For the plant that’s ploughed
They are waiting to take us into
The severed garden
Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
Comes death on a stranger hour
Unannounced, unplanned for
Like a scaring over-friendly guest you’ve
Brought to bed
Death makes angels of us all
And gives us wings
Where we had shoulders
Smooth as raven’s claws
No more money, no more fancy dress
This other Kingdom seems by far the best
Until its other jaw reveals incest
And loose obedience to a vegetable law
I will not go
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant family
The Severed Garden-James Douglas Morrison
City Jackdaw 