We saw "A Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood Saturday night, with 66-year-old Garrison Keillor on stage for more than three-and-a-half hours, including an 80-minute encore after the radio show ended which included some of the best music. That's when he and Heather Masse teamed up for numbers like Don't Get Around Much Anymore and, with Arlo Guthrie, Angel Band ("Bear me away on your snow-white wings to my immortal home"). The packed house sang pretty damn good too.
Bob Dylan also knows how to keep on keeping on. Leonard Cohen, at 73, put out a good double album last year recorded at a London concert. At 78, Clint Eastwood released "Gran Torino," which I reckon is his best movie. And Albany has 80-plus bluesman Ernie Williams. Three years ago, the movie of "A Prairie Home Companion" was all about mortality, and it turned out to be Robert Altman's last film. My new unoriginal ambition is to live long and die with my boots on.
Update: U.S. Grant still dead. His body was displayed at the Capitol in Albany in 1885, on its way down from Mount McGregor in Saratoga County, where the dying Grant completed the war memoir which posthumously restored the fortunes of his family. Massachusetts resident John Updike, who shared the Dutch-WASP heritage of Albany's founders, had a couple of posthumous books published this year, one being "Endpoint." That's also the title of a sequence of poems in the book, including this last one, "Fine Point 12/22/08". (Updike died of cancer on 1/27/09.)
Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel's defeats --
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.
We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely -- magnificent, that "surely" --
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.
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