Here is a photo I found on the Rufus Wainwright message board taken by someone at Patrick McMullan Company. After much speculation on the RWMB about Rufus’s new beau, it was leaked that his new friend was called “Jorn,” but then we were told it was Jörn (mit umlaut) (”sounds more like yearn than porn”). Now I see on PMc that this chap is called Bjorn Weisbordt (no umlaut on this website). More importantly, there was much discussion as to their heights: the consensus seems to be that Rufus is 5′11″ and Bjorn is 6′1″. Hmm, so much to learn.
I, and many on the RW message board, are very happy for Rufus and Bjorn [or Bjørn, or Björn].
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Update: his name is Jörn Weisbrodt. See comment below for more details.
This is the most famous video on YouTube this week. Can you tell why? This youngster, named Isaiah Chevrier, is 4 years old and shows his amazing skill playing the African djembe. The facial expressions and expressive body language are those of an adult. He must have had a great teacher, speaking of which, could this be a new Suzuki method in the making?
This guy didn’t: (warning: may be disturbing to some; there are no close ups)
In 1912, Austrian tailor Franz Reichelt leaped from the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower in a combination overcoat-parachute of his own design. He expected to fly. He did not.
Two legends: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. I imagine Frank felt rather old generation here next to a hormone popping, knee buckling Elvis, fresh back from the army. Look at Elvis’s eyelashes: his face is so emblazoned in our memory, and his eyes are icons of pop culture. We all know those eyes. There they are. Blinking, and making girls SCREAM.
Franz Mesmer practices animal magnetism on a a patient while friends look on.
[Here is the next installment in a continuing series called the spirit highway, about people and concepts found along the way.]
Somewhere along the way, I read that it is a good thing to channel one’s own sexual energy into one’s higher spiritual and/or psychic power. Being terrified of coming out of the closet as an undergraduate I embraced this lofty goal. It also helped with my music studies: avoiding sex does wonders for a whole variety of endeavors.
I discovered a biography on scientist Franz Anton Mesmer who posited a concept of “animal magnetism.” He also theorized that the body had other kinds of fluids in it that would get blocked, and only a person with animal magnetism could help unblock the flow. It had something to do with aura massage. Everyone supposedly has an aura: some are healthier than others and can be used to heal, or mesmerize those with sickly auras.
A ha! Spiritual truth! or is it spiritual science? I must find out whether I have animal magnetism (growls). I need a willing volunteer. [Ding dong; the doorbell rings, and in comes Dave.]
“Dave! old buddy old pal, I have a proposal for you.” I was fairly certain Dave was not gay, but knew he would humor me for my experiment. “I need you to lie down on my bed, arms at your side and close your eyes.” He obliged without question. My animal magnetism was throbbing, er, welling.
“I’m going to try to hypnotize you without touching you” I told him confidently. I got onto the bed, and straddled him. “Uh uh, keep your eyes closed.” Then I got down to work. There was electrical energy shooting out of my finger tips, and with that energy, I began to massage his aura from the top of his head (the crown chakra) to his navel (the navel chakra) without (drat!) touching him. I did this for maybe 15 minutes and then stopped. He cracked one of his eyes and said “Is that it?” I asked: “are you hypnotized?” He said, “no, I don’t think so but that was very relaxing.” I unmounted, thanked him for his help, shared a cigarette and he left.
It turns out Mesmer was very likely a fraud. Louis XVI commissioned a team of experts (including Benjamin Franklin) to investigate Mesmer’s claims — they were found to be false.
I figured this out myself. I had animal magnetism alright: I was just barking up the wrong tree.
[Doorbell rings. Prof Berlioz hollers down. Rufus waits patiently. Sound of keys against the door. Swearing in French, wrong keys. Silence. Sound of footsteps up from downstairs. More key sounds. Door opens. Rufus appears with a big smile and a flashdrive in his hand. Berlioz slaps him on the back and they move to the studio. Rufus plugs his flashdrive into the professor's new MacBook Pro. Rufus opens two examples and begins to speak. Berlioz is amused, sits down and cleans his glasses squinting up at Rufus. Open on the screen are two scores from his work "BLOOM" both which show use of the circle of fifths.]
Rufus: Professor, I’ve done as you asked and have two examples of a cappella use of the circle of fifths. I’ve sung them in time and in tune per your request. This first one is just the chorus, well, actually it’s all me, singing in four parts using a three legged sequence to go through the circle of fifths and get home again:
Berlioz: Bravo my beamish boy! Bravo! Excellent performance, in tune, marvelous examples of exactly what I asked you for. Now go and use that in something that’s not a rock song.
(TO BE CONTINUED: the next assignment: Writing for strings I)
[Note to readers: these are excerpts from "Hope is a thing with feathers" used in his BLOOM dance/chorus collaboration..]
I look back at my childhood as a young music lover and musician, and see that it was peppered with “heros,” “role models” (or so I thought), “cool people,” wayshowers, big brothers. These people ranged from local Green Bay heros like Jim and Lou Seiler who could do Byrd music as though they were the Byrds [and Jim could have been one of the great rock voices--but whatever happened to him?] to various rock stars. Over time, each person I had put up on a pedestal fell off. Why? Oh, because they did something human like drugs, or saying something stupid, or doing something stupid, or any number of things PEOPLE do.
We all go through this with PEOPLE, but it happened to me spiritually as well. (I have a category of posts called “The spirit highway” where I relate the various things I discovered on my spiritual drive.) In many of them, some damned PERSON gets in the way and screws it up.
I watched the new DVD on Gram Parsons last night and watched the fall of an old childhood hero. Such promise. Such beauty. Such profound sadness in his voice, and that coupled with heart wrenching chord progressions, Gram infects our musical minds and lives on in us.
Gram’s father, “Coon Dog” was a heavy drinker who ultimately committed suicide (he left a note: “I love you Gram”), and his mother, Avis, was also a heavy drinker who loved her son deeply. Even Avis’s second husband, Bob Parsons, died of too much drink. Being the heir of the Snively orange juice industry in Florida, Gram had money from a trust fund. Bob supported Gram from an early age. He bought a night club so that Gram could have a performing outlet. Gram was spoiled rotten. Until one day Bob and Gram had a falling out: big time. All his friends said that from that time on he spiralled downward into drink and drugs. Eventhough his career was taking off, and he even believed it so, Gram’s self destructive momentum finally killed him at age 26. Yeah. Right along with Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, et al.
Gram also struck up a hero relationship with Rolling Stone member Keith Richards. He abandoned his band and friends for this new friendship. They learned a great deal from each other, but sadly, around this time, heroin entered the scene. Mick and Keith urged Gram to go home and get to work with his band.
With the falling out with his stepfather and a go-away from Keith, Gram lost his heroes.
The moment when one realizes that all heroes are human is a difficult one. The truth can be too much to bear. Spiritual beliefs are like heroes in that we embue in them the answers to our ultimate questions; we put them on a pedestal. When one realises that a long held spiritual belief is likely untrue, the transition from a faith-based belief to empirically-based belief is a painful one. The existential pain of this transition to one of “no-heroes” is palpable.
Santa Claus doesn’t exist
My parents are just regular people
I understand the value of the phrase “question authority”
I question government
I question my religion
I question my society’s wisdom
My hero [fill in the blank] has fecal matter whose olfactoric quality is no different from the general populations’.
My hero is not a god or God. S/he is a human.
To survive this transition requires, it seems to me, courage, renewed self-belief, and a blind optimism tempered with a world-wise wariness. Gram’s spirit wanted to get to this place. Gram’s body made the decision to go to Joshua Tree national monument for a one last “cleansing” so that he could clean himself up and move on. It didn’t happen. The booze and whatever drugs he was on killed him in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn. (I stayed in that room some years back as a kind of pilgrimage.) One of the interviewees on the film said: “if Gram were alive today, he’d be dead. He seemed to really have a death wish.”
Astrologers tell us that their charts indicate the potential of people and situations. I hold more stock in the genetic horoscope, and Gram’s sun was in whiskey, and his moon in heroin, with two parents that had double shots of the blood of Dionysus.
WARNING: Be careful taking heroes down from pedestals. The withdrawal period can cause severe anxiety.
Alexander Pushkin: Tragedies petites. “Mozart and Salieri”
Xylography by V.A. Favorsky.
When people these days hear the name “Salieri” they conjure up the role played by F. Murray Abraham in AMADEUS whose character was envious of this brat who was touched by the hand of God. One of the short plays that I’m considering setting by Thornton Wilder is called MOZART AND THE GREY STEWARD (ca. 1927). I was surprised to find a very similar story in Peter Shaffer’s AMADEUS’s. I gasped “copyright infringement!” took a deep breath, deciding I should look into it.
It turns out that Alexander Pushkin wrote “Mozart and Salieri” in 1831 and Rimsky Korsakov made it into an opera in 1898. The Thornton Wilder play is only five pages long. My guess is that they both stem from the Pushkin original.
I’ll chat with Messrs. Wilder and McClatchy as I’m hot to get going.
Check this out, here is the end of MOZART AND SALIERI, Scene I by Alexander Pushkin and translated by Alan Shaw:
Salieri
Mind you, I’ll be waiting for you.
No, now I can resist my fate no longer.
I have been chosen: I must be the one
To stop him. Otherwise we all will perish,
All of us priests and ministers of music,
Not only I with my dull-ringing fame.
What use is it if Mozart stays alive
And reaches even newer summits yet?
Will he uplift the art by doing so?
No; it will sink again when he is gone;
He leaves us no successor. What’s the use
In him? He brings us, like a cherub, certain
Songs of paradise, and afterwards,
When he has roused in us, us children of
The dust, a wingless longing…flies away!
So fly away! The sooner you do, the better.
Here’s poison; it’s Isora’s final gift.
For eighteen years I’ve carried it with me,
And often in that time my life would seem
A wound not to be borne. I’d often share
A table with some careless enemy,
And never to the whisper of temptation
Did I yield, although I am no coward,
Although I feel an insult deeply and
Care little for my life. No, I held back.
When thirst for death tormented me, I thought:
Why should I die? It could be life will bring
Some sudden gifts to me, it could be too,
I will be visited by rapture, by
The night of the creator, inspiration.
It could be some new Haydn will create
Great things, and I will take delight in him.
While I was feasting with my hated guest,
I’d think: it could be I will find a worse
Enemy yet, and that a bitterer
Insult will blast me from a prouder height.
Then you will not be lost, Isora’s gift.
And I was right! At last I have found both:
I’ve found my enemy, and a new Haydn
Has made me drink deliciously of rapture!
And now — it’s time. Most cherished gift of love,
Tonight you pass into the cup of friendship.
Here is a clip from a recent Brian Wilson documentary on the making of SMILE. It’s from 1966. In this touching sketch, Brian barely opens his eyes, he’s so lost in the song. The piano part, in his head, is the full band/orchestra but we mortals only get to hear the chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk piano part move along. He’s not performing for us here, he’s performing for himself and someone captured it.
Happy birthday Brian. You’re the best.
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