This humble blog has gradually become a repository for personal thoughts, anecdotes, and observations on everything and anything, a virtual wayward sundry variorum if you will. Even though admittedly an inveterate surmiser by nature, I do prefer intriguing ideas, even astonishing ones, with startling discoveries and novel juxtapositions.
Nat King Cole recorded "Nature Boy" in 1948 which was an immediate major hit. Rumour had it that the lyrics were apparently written by a homeless man who tried without success to present them personally to Mr. Cole, who didreceive them in due course and was impressed enough to want to meet the author, but alas, the man was never heard from again.
Turns out that Nat King Cole did indeed track the man down. His name was Eden Ahbez* [pictured below with his wife and son in the 40's], a songwriter and recording artist who was something of a personality in southern California, living a bucolic life, traveling in sandals and wearing shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He became the focus of a short-lived media frenzy when Cole's version of "Nature Boy" became a hit song. He continued to live on the street, or in his van or with friends. He died in 1995 at 87 of injuries sustained in a car accident.
“It's biology. Those who remember are dying, and the young are brainwashed by black-and-white versions of history which, in reality, is multi-coloured, like life” ... Poland's Jaruzelski (its last communist leader) pictured here recently in court at 86, commenting on why Poles don't seem to be interested in his take on the country's liberalization history and his role in it.
Some 25 years earlier, Jaruzelski imposed martial law, initiating a brutal 19-month crackdown on the pro-democracy Solidarity trade-union movement, an event which apparently bothered Pope John Paul II (himself a pole) sufficiently enough to prompt a visit. The poignancy of the moment captured in the iconic photo below is palpable.
Old Mother Hubbard Went to the cupboard, To give the poor dog a bone: When she came there, The cupboard was bare, And so the poor dog had none.
This wonderful dog Was Dame Hubbard's delight, He could read, he could dance, He could sing, he could write; She gave him rich dainties Whenever he fed, And erected this monument When he was dead.
The elderly man pictured is Franz Liszt, warts and all, a year before he died in 1886, juxtaposed with a younger Liszt in his prime at 47 (1858). In the time between, the man was transformed from a renowned brilliant pianist, and an important and influential composer, adulated everywhere he went, to a disconsolate person increasingly plagued with feelings of desolation, despair and death occasioned by a period of severe catastrophes in his private life. Music critic Robert Cummings writes of Liszt: he “was the only contemporary whose music Richard Wagner gratefully acknowledged as an influence upon his own. His lasting fame was an alchemy of extraordinary digital ability — the greatest in the history of keyboard playing — an unmatched instinct for showmanship, and one of the most progressive musical imaginations of his time. Hailed by some as a visionary, reviled by others as a symbol of empty Romantic excess, Franz Liszt wrote his name across music history in a truly inimitable manner”.
Perhaps Liszt’s“La Vallée d'Obermann” is as good an example as any of the man’s musical legacy, arguably the most profound work in an extraordinary collection of piano works entitled “Années de Pèlerinage” apparently initially inspired by scenes or moods associated with Liszt's travels with his one-time lover, Marie d'Agoult (a popular writer) throughout Switzerland and Italy during the period 1835-39, but in gestation for some 20 years before publication. This piece usually runs close to fifteen minutes and is the longest in the set. A quotation from Byron prefaces the music:
"Could I embody and unbosom now that which is most within me --could I wreak my thoughts upon expression, and thus throw soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, all that I would have sought, and all I seek, bear, know, feel and yet breathe --into one word; and that one word were Lightning, I would speak; but as it is, I live and die unheard, with a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword”.
According to recent biographical research, Liszt in later life resisted hearing his Vallée d'Obermann. Apparently whenever a student brought the piece to play he declined to hear it ... "his music seemed to be burdened with memories for him, some too painful to bear".
There exists a private recording of the work in a remarkable live concert performance (1966) by a celebrated virtuoso pianist which subtly captures the wonderful essence of the work, its power, deep pathos, and sheer majesty. The audio quality is a little muffled (obviously recorded from somewhere in the audience) and accordingly it lacks the full brilliant resonance of the publicly released professionally recorded version of a later Carnegie Hall performance by the same artist. Yet it is still fascinating because it almost seems like a surreal time warp sound-bite from somewhere in the distant past, conceivably conveyed directly and serendipitously from the great master himself:
"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land".
Mark Twain describes (in 1900) his political awakening, in the context of the Philippine-American War, from being "a red-hot imperialist"
... I’ve come to accept life as compared to a man on a train with no preference to either remain on board or disembark ...coming to a stop, he gets off, likes what he sees, and is just as glad to be there ...
Nat King Cole recorded "Nature Boy" in 1948 which was an immediate major hit. Rumour had it that the lyrics were apparently written by a homeless man who tried without success to present them personally to Mr. Cole, who did receive them in due course and was impressed enough to want to meet the author, but alas, the man was never heard from again.
