Two work colleagues and friends have spent much of the week past in African conflict zones, filing their raw stories to the Factory where I happen to be the last person to set eyes on them before, sometimes, you do.
They become news in your paper or on the Net, you may hear the words read on some radio station oceans distant from these friends. The violence they've seen -- even getting its perpetrators and victims to "explain" it in anger, shock and grief -- can be close to incomprehensible. Managing to describe it fast and clearly is an astounding ability in people I know to be neither hardened nor motivated by anything but the task at hand.
Thus my working day ended, I was soon home.
The bloodshed these colleagues are still covering for the agency is hard to find words for and they never use adjectives such as "senseless", "savage", "inhuman" and "terrorist", leaving those for the politicians and priests.
Poets and song-writers are just as cautious with vocabulary if they're drawing on direct experience, but do more than tell stories. I've never known why such a legacy from World War I particularly moves me. It's probably a mix of reasons: the silence of a grandfather about it, the enormous scale of that conflict, and historical change in the methods of slaughter from the face-to-face and hand-to-hand to a widespread use of long-distance killing machines. And the way generations of enlisted men were embroiled in it and some left accounts it is easy to identify with if they survived.
For three days, since many of my plans for the log are currently in winter gestation, I've felt inclined to stop exploring and treat myself to a dose of sure musical values of such quality they need no more words from anyone.
 There's maybe still something to say when a musician of international renown combines the theme of people blindly caught up in violence with the grace and emotional power of age and experience. I've never had the luck to be at one and I've never heard anybody who has talk of a Joan Baez (home) concert with less than the highest regard, a treasured experience.
For one, Ron Baker, who took the full shot of this photo detail at a San Francisco festival last year, "Joan Baez is still singin' protest songs with a voice that's as clear and beautiful as it was 40 years ago" (Hardly Strictly Bluegrass).
Three days? Not quite; yesterday I forgot my iPod on leaving for work and did without her, but otherwise it's been nothing but the 1993 collection, 'The Best of Joan Baez' and the 1995 live Ring Them Bells'.
They're scarcely the latest and there's a little overlap in the choice of songs, but while the first is a fine selection of the styles Baez performs in, the second is equally outstanding as a mostly folk and ballad album full of gorgeous acoustic guitar work and vocal duets.
The ballads include a Baez performance of 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda'* that almost made me cry in the Métro. The last time a woman did that to me with a story of World War I was when I finished Pat Barker's novels, 'The Regeneration Trilogy', a staggering achievement not least for her insight into the minds of men, right on throughout. By the end of 'The Ghost Road', I was so shaken and blinded by tears I couldn't use my computer for half an hour.
I asked an Australian mate on arriving today who wrote the Gallipoli song. James told me: Eric Bogle, a Scottish Australian. One fellow says a bit more.
"It's an anti-war song, nominally about Gallipoli, but really about Vietnam (different decades, different countries, different protagonists, much the same outcomes)," says Roger Clarke's Waltzing Matilda site with the full story.
No wonder Joan Baez does it so well, though the lyrics (*linked and put online by Clarke) say nothing of the Vietnam connection Bogle did in 1971 while watching a veterans' parade, giving us instead a searing parable about "patriotism" and the youths whom it mutilates as surely as the corpses witnessed by my friends.
How fortunate I feel to be able to read that for around seven hours a day and then abandon it for a spell. For sure values, how fortunate everybody is if they're able to hear the likes of Joan Baez, who can get the message across about some kinds of violence in three minutes and then herself move on to something else.
She's a beautiful way to end a hard week.
9:52:30 PM link 
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