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.

“How do we speak poetry — which is metalanguage — in a culture in which the primary means of communication is visual . . .?”

~ Hilton Als in the article “Sideshow: Deconstructing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 2010)

"Wonderland For Rent" | Charleston WV 2010 | MoltoMediaWorks

Here’s a shortcut to Wonderland. I don’t know what the Landlord of Wonderland may be charging. |
iPhone photo taken on Brawley Walkway in downtown Charleston, W.Va., Jan. 18, 2010. | Click bigger.