Take a listen to a newly re-mixed version of the Prologue to “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera.” This is also an mp3 file, not an AAC file like the one in the post below (which will be consigned to the dustbin of podcast history after iTunes gets around to adding this mp3 version.)  Feel free to download this. And get yourself over to the iTunes and subcribe for free to receive notice of future podcasts, Web casts and live performances by the WebTheater of WestVirginiaVille (WTW), the producer of “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera.” The ending of this new version also includes a brief ad for the WTW, introducing your program host, Peggy Desiree Nash.

Come to his event if you like the Spoken Word, good food in a good place and good people on a good night. Head to Bluegrass Kitchen on Valentines Day this Feb. 14 for “Love Jones Poetry,” and hear performances by Affrilachian poet Frank X Walker, along with Tuesday Taylor, Chekera Evans, Gregg Carroll, the Cardinal of Crows and others. Hosted by Crystal Goodwoman with a special Sade listening party at 7 p.m. The word starts after 7:30 p.m. Admission $8 (includes hors d’ouevres). Bluegrass Kitchen is at 1600 Washington St., Charleston, W.Va.

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Flyer design by MoltoMediaWorks of WestVirginiaVille ~ Click on the X in ‘Frank X Walker’ to super-size for download.

Here’s the YouTube version of a stroll through some religious iconography in Milan, Venice, Verona and Rome in Summer 2008, titled “A Time Ago: Church and Empire from Milan to Rome”. (I just wanted to use the word ‘iconography’ once this month.) I much prefer the full-screen SoundSlides version of this audio slideshow, with its Ken Burns effects, which YouTube strips out. (Click on the tiny four-arrows icon to watch both the YouTube and SoundSlides full-screen.) But you gotta yelp on YouTube to find a few more viewers, either in Banska Bystrica or Princeton, West Virginia. (Shout out to the ladies down on Mercer Street...)

And before you leave this mortal coil, be sure to visit 1)  Il Duomo in Milan, seen in the first few photos inside a cathedral said to be big enough to house 30,00 people, then pop up onto the roof amid its party of statues). 2) Go inside the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola at Campus Martius in Rome (or, as your map will say, the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola). Look up. My goodness. That’s the last ceiling in the show. A showstopper. The instrumental music is  a piece called “Gladiator Song” by the Silent Gondoliers, featuring guitar, cheesy organ and bodhran.

Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, Rome, 2008 | MoltoMediaWorks | click bigger

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There’s a difference between
people who do things
and people who

don’t.
The difference is
people who

do things,
do
them.

People
who don’t,
don’t.

~ EPIGRAMMAR, Vol 2 | ‘Songs from the Other Side of the Street’
from “A Cardinal of Crows Reader” | The Spartan Eaglesburg Press, 2010

The managing editor of my newspaper called me away from my Saturday sofa a couple weekends ago to cover the arraignment of comedian Andy Dick, arrested in Huntington for being a Dick. According to police reports. The bizarro animated piece above on Dick’s arrest comes from one of the coolest action news teams on planet Earth.  Adult Swim re-posted this animated piece by NMA News (or Apple Action News) in Taiwan.  Note the accurate Marshall University flags outside the club. Quality work. And they read the police report pretty closely. You’ll have to sit though the “My Little Bastard” iPhone ap ad, which is vaguely entertaining once, sort of excruciating a 2nd go-round. You could YouTube search NME’s other stuff including their equally strange and absorbing Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien piece. There’s also a dramatic re-enactment of the Transgressions of Tiger Woods. I wish my local ‘News at 11″ station was this good. And this much fun.

P.S. ~ As you’ll see when you click on the story link above, you can no longer link to my full story, just the first few paragraphs on the story’s comments page as it has disappeared behind the Gazette online library’s ‘read it in 7-days or fork over $5‘ pay wall. Welcome either to the future – or the death – of local online news links.

Photo by Douglas Imbrogno | 2000, Belfast, Northern Ireland |

I’ve re-designed my Web site, re-posting past articles that may be of interest. This was written after a trip to a most interesting conference in 2000 in Northern Ireland, featuring the Dalai Lama and Father Lawrence Freeman of the World Community for Christian Meditation. Rirst published in my old Buddhist feature magazine on the Web, which bore the name of my current site, and was called ‘Hundred Mountain Journal.‘

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BELFAST DIARY

By Douglas Imbrogno | 2000

A bomb hasn’t gone off in downtown Belfast for years now. That’s good news if you’re sitting downtown in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Great Victoria Street as the sun comes up, enjoying a caramel cappuccino and chocolate croissant. This is the life, you think. To be traveling abroad to a peace conference featuring His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with seven more days of travel around Ireland to follow.

Why, even the American franchise shop in which you sit has been civilized by its arrival in Europe. “Will ye’ be sittin’ in?” says the doughnut shop clerk, in a barely understandable Belfast brogue, as she prepares to make my genuine cappuccino at a genuine espresso machine. (Coffee-wise, the Dunkin’ Donuts back home in West Virginia is still in the Stone Age, offering godawful ersatz cappuccinos that taste like coffee-flavored Kool-Aid.)

What’s civilized and what’s not, is all relative. The rising sun paints the flanks of the downtown buildings salmon pink. You peer out the doughnut shop window and see the Grand Opera House across the street– bombed scores of times by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Nearby, stands the Europa Hotel, which the “Let’s Go” travel guide beside your coffee cup describes as “Europe’s most bombed hotel.” The guide put the tally at 32 bombs, noting that after the hotel installed shatterproof windows in 1993, the bombings tailed off.

And you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

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LISTEN: An a cappella version of “Wagoner’s Lad” |

I’ve fallen into a Wednesday night gathering in Huntington, W.Va., of ne’er-do-well singers and players with the entertaining band The 1937 Flood. They live up to their billing as “West Virginia’s most eclectic string band.” After each session, they post a song from that night’s playing, and last week Charlie, the master of musical ceremonies, requested my a cappella version of “Wagoner’s Lad.” I first learned this version from an old Trapezoid album, “Another Country,” a version sung by the late, lamented Freyda Epstein.

After discovering the song on Charlie’s Facebook fan page, I went and checked the lyrics to see if I’d mis-remembered any of them. Turns out, as is often the case with these old story ballads, that there are several versions, especially in one of the key lyrics. The way I learned it, the woman says “her parents don’t like HIM because he is poor….” Other versions have it that “His parents don’t like ME because I am poor…” I am inclined to go with the second one and re-learn that lyric as it would add more pathos to her tale. (Although asking my brain to re-learn a song deeply itched into its neural pathways after two decades, might be asking too much of the poor, tired thing.) The provenance of old songs is always fascinating and I appreciated Charlie fleshing out the story behind this sad Celtic tale of a woman in love, bound by the restrictions of her birth and time. Charlie writes:

This song is related to a lot of American folk songs, from “My Horse’s Ain’t Hungry” and “Rye Whiskey” to even “Pretty Polly” and “On Top of Old Smokey.” The verses, found in many songs, can be traced back to England in the 1730s and a song called “The Ladies Case.”

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One day in Rome in late June 2008, after properly appreciating the many pleasurable sights around the Roman Coliseum, we rounded the corner of the Via dei Fori Imperiali and headed into the warren of side streets that lead to the Villa Cellimontani and its outdoor Alexanderplatz Jazz Club series. This slideshow pays homage to both, part of a trip across Italy with my then 18-year-old son, Lucas, and his cousin, Neil Ross. The instrumental soundtrack is by the Silent Gondoliers. See more Italia slideshows here. P.S. The flute-ish sound you hear is my sister-in-law Marylin’s grade-school flutaphone, which I long ago exappropriated from her Capon Springs childhood bedroom. 

NOTE: You can view a larger-screen, higher-definition (and personally preferred) version of this SoundSlides by clicking here. But YouTube is where the masses hang, so you have to hang your video hat there, too.