Happy Holidays-- a song and a vision

It has been almost four years since I've made a post on this blog.  I want to wish my friends a merry Christmas (or Hanukah) and a happy new year.   I'd like to congratulate my old friend Mike Jackman for producing the movie, "Conclave" a thriller about the election of a new Pope starring Ralph Fiennes.  It is  a captivating film with a brilliant score and wonderful performances, including the stern and pivotal one by Isabella Rosselini as a head nun.  Not to spoil, but the ending is a surprising and timely twist on gender.  I also recently re-watched "The English Patient," released in 1996, with a young Ralph Fiennes as the dying Hungarian count whose passionate romance with a married Kristin Scott Thomas, is told in flashbacks from his bed in a bombed out monastery taken over by the guileless and determined Canadian nurse played by the beautiful Juliet Binoche, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress. The film is set in the North African desert and in Italy during WWII.  Seeing this epic drama again, has prompted me to get Ondaajte's novel, on which it is based. The film has personal resonance for me because on the way to see it in 1997, my voices told me to go to the hospital and I was admitted to a psychiatric ward in Cambridge Hospital for two weeks.  Then I returned to New York City to finish my first CD, "Being Visited" on the Knitting Factory label.  

Back to the holidays.  Here's a glorious rendition of one of my favorite Christmas Carols by Celine Dion.  

https://youtu.be/Y1oLk54R5Xg?si=MGVONoOEE7-rDbsJ

I would also offer this vision of the Virgin Mary de Guadalupe as a Christmas icon.  She appeared to Juan Diego, an Aztec man, who converted to Christianity.  He built a shrine in her honor.  

In late January, early February Metapsychosis Journal will publish five poems of mine about my ordeal with the Hindu deity Ganesha.  I will record the poems with my friend, pianist and composer, Eric Zinman.  Brian George has provided a splendid layout for the poems with graphics, including pictures of the deity from Tibetan lore.