For Mr Brilliant

April 13, 2007 in Uncategorized

In the three years I’ve been writing 37days, Mr Brilliant has never asked me to post something. Until today. This is for him, a little Bruce for a Friday afternoon, singing in East Berlin the year before the Wall fell. Take 6 minutes and 58 seconds out of your day. Put on those head phones and crank it up.

"Tell people to watch the whole thing; it really heats up at about 3 minutes. It actually made me cry for I don’t know what reason…maybe it’s just the power of the moment. There must’ve been at least a half million people there," he wrote. Since Mr Brilliant isn’t an overly flag-waving, patriotic kind of guy, his urging made me sit up and take notice.

Look at the sheer numbers. Music has power. [I also love this version, also sent by Mr Brilliant]

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

3 comments to " For Mr Brilliant "


J Ptak

April 13, 2007 AT 3:47PM

Maybe its the Wall, maybe its fucking Vietnam, maybe its the closed refineries, maybe its the beat dog, maybe the simple want of love, maybe the simple want. Maybe its the weight of a half million people singing in a language they don’t understand, raising something up in a dead, FUBAR society. Ultimately, its the chance of hope. I think. Thanks PD.

J Ptak

April 13, 2007 AT 4:20PM

If you look in the upper left corner of this video you’ll see the discrete “DDR 2”, initials for the culture and information arm of the Staatliches Komitee fuer Rundfunk, the programming body directly controlled by the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. “DDR-2” in computing (double data rate) replaced DDR which replaced SDRAM—basically one system of memory replacing another (poetically correct if not technically so). In East Germany DDR-2 certainly worked tirelessly for years replacing incorrect memories with the correct Soviet ones; I don’t know how in the world they would’ve replaced this one….

jylene

April 16, 2007 AT 7:21AM

gotta love the boss! thanks for a great start to a cold and dreary april monday in ohio! and thanks to J Ptak for the first comment.