To thine own self be true

Phil Grabsky who did comprehensive DVD treatments of Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin, also did a great service to fans of Haydn and for those who have/had yet to realize that he is one of the Big Four, deservedly up there with Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach.

Haydn was a classical composer in the generations after Bach and before Mozart and Beethoven. However, Haydn was a friend of Mozart and taught Beethoven and the latter two greatly looked up to him and have many passages that are clearly influenced by Haydn. But, as this nice documentary shows, Haydn himself had an interesting life and was incredibly busy composing and performing some 160 CDs worth of material, exceeding the output of both famous composers who followed him.

As with the other composer DVDs, Grabsky uses a chronological approach, interspersing defining samples of Haydn’s work discussed and played by prominent modern musicians. In Haydn’s case, the different genres and instruments he wrote for are widely covered. And, as usual, the filmmaker includes ample uninterrupted extras of more of the composer’s pieces to round out the picture.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Grabsky is a skilled filmmaker who has also done incredible docs on famous artists like da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Monet, in case there are viewers who want to see more of his work. It goes without saying that his films on the other aforementioned classical composers are, likewise, outstanding. The viewer is given much seriously-digested information and unique insights into the composer’s character, work, and style.

In Search of Haydn is a significant contribution which makes a strong case for Haydn being one of the Big Four and deserves a place alongside the other greats of classical music. A wonderful homage and a real eye-opener from Grabsky as usual.

“Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.”

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

‘Twas a good day for hot chocolate.

Remembering a memorable Edmonton Poetic Performance Trio

SPIRITUS–Glen Kirkland, Dean McKenzie, and Richard Davies (all senior high ELA teacher-poets)

(We published two editions of this chapbook. We were on C.B.C. Radio reading our famous 3-in-1 poems, breaking up Marion Coomey. Cover was done by Kees Wouters, a former Scona colleague, now a B.C. artist.)

(Otherwise known as This, That, The Other, 1991–Dean took shadow impressions of our heads for the cover. “This” was Glen aka “Spook” for his Catholic connections, Richard was “That”–aka “Laddio”, and Dean was “The Other” aka “Daddio”. (Daddio, Laddio and The Spook.) We were regular readers at Café la Gare (Thanks to Thomas Trofimuk, himself now a famous novelist) and at places such as U of A, the Banff Springs, Southgate Woodward’s, Aspen Books, et al)

(Our foray in 1988 into drama and the Fringe. Glen played a puppet show host who had redone Hamlet, Dean played a children’s show character who had gone into WWF wrestling and singing obscene songs for children, Richard played The Producer, a cowboy singer, and Bob Dyin’. Poster by one of my students, Judd Hampton.)

(Spiritus with Margaret Moody (Lynn Joberg), Spiritus with Solon McDade (bass) and John Towill (didgeridoo) live at Ike and Iggy’s on Whyte Ave.. Dean later went on to become The Jazz Poet and recorded 2 CDs and 2 videos still on the ‘net.)

(full throttle: Woodward Books, Southgate on a December 1990 Saturday afternoon; later bringing the passing crowd to a standstill.)

(planning another reading in the mid-’90s)

Sadly, Glen passed in 2010 and Dean in 2013. I read a eulogy for both of them (Glen’s memorial at a full-house chapel), and also read one of Dean’s poems with the Andrew Glover Trio at his full-house celebration.  Their poetry and spirits continue to live on.

A good day to remember these remarkable, talented guys during an impending full moon after transferring onto 3 CDs a selection of live Spiritus readings at Cafe la Gare (including the one with the waiter reading an unexpurgated poem complaining about his job, after which he was fired!) as well as our 2 CBC Radio show appearances back in 1991. We were at the zenith of our career and well-received on the local front.

*For a selection of my poems, use blog Search: Richard Davies/Poems.

(some LF artifacts from my own collection; you can tell I’m a fan; what his most important book looked like in the first edition–echoes of The Great Gatsby cover?; his splashy signature)

(sometimes we get very lucky; bought new,  his first signed book in this limited 50th anniversary ed.)

(all those wonderful poems read by The Author in 1999)

(a trip down Memory Lane to a memorable live Beat reading with a jazz quintet and the other granddaddy of the Beat scene Kenneth Rexroth)

(nicely done CD & DVD set; watch LF recording the poems)

(a 2010 excursion into Ferlinghetti’s world, writing, and life with many special guests and hardcore fans)

(the ultimate fun photographic glimpse into LF; author: Christopher Felver)

Obit: The longtime spiritual godfather of the Beats and insurgent-art poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021), 101.

LF is the famous co-owner of San Francisco’s City Lights Books since it opened in 1953 (still planning to reopen after the pandemic after fans’ massive donations). It was the first place in America where you could purchase paperbacks en masse and sit around the store casually reading its stock. It was also a famous publishing house which produced Beat books by Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Michael McClure.

Ginsberg’s Howl (IMHO, on a par with Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as the great 20th century poem) was initially censored and this led to Ferlinghetti being charged as a ‘dirty book’ publisher. This turned into a significant First Amendment case and Ferlinghetti was acquitted. (The trial over D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover was to follow soon after that.)

LF was a very witty, intelligent, culture-referenced, social-conscious poet who, ironically, considered himself less of a Beat poet than the last bohemian poet. His classic A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) was his most successful collection and the top-selling modern poetry book with over 1 million copies printed, including those in multiple languages in addition to English. (In passing, my favs in the book are “The world is a beautiful place”, “Sometime during eternity”, and “Constantly risking absurdity” and the long poems.)

LF was quite the interesting, funny, ironic guy and you can still videos online of him reading up to recently. He studied literature at the Sorbonne and his Master’s thesis was on John Ruskin and J.M. Turner, reflecting his interest in great visual art. (There are many allusions to famous paintings in his poems.) Like Eliot in “The Waste Land”, he also freely referenced previous high-culture figures and works.

I recall when the first IBM computers came out in the early ’80s, then going to tutorials and being turned off by the ridiculous cumbersome, un-user-friendly instructions. It was only when Apple came out with the iMacs in the late ’80s, that computers became more user-friendly, more common-sensical and basic, and less weirdly complex and immediately off-putting, making people slaves and robotic in their interactions with the machines. (There were some older people then who did not get into computers then because of this. That and poverty, signified by the low percentage of 80+ users and the 22% have-not number, in the States, for instance.)

Anyway, I’ve never had a problem with basic, functional technology (c.f. my Apr. 23, 2020 blog-piece on useful, beneficial technology; I remain, in any case, most impressed by medical technology). But others, I’ve passed on. I can do for myself with what I’ve got, thanks.

Thus, thought I as I brushed my teeth this morning with a regular brush and shaved with an old Gillette Sensor which still works for me. I can feel and hear the cuts with this olde standby, knowing I’m not missing anything. Comfort technology from an earlier time complete with sensory affects.

But I’m not one to pass on any personal technology which makes sense, is easy to use, and fast. Therefore, the velcro-strips on my walking shoes and snow-boots.

And I have, long since, ‘sold out’ and moved into using computers and printer daily (laptop and main frame) to do my daily writing, poems, and blogs. It was a no-brainer when the iMacs came in to send discs (or run-off hard copies with a printer) to Toronto to do up my textbooks and for me to prepare my teaching materials and conference materials using the same computer. Faster and a far cry from a manual typewriter in the ’60s and ’70s and my electric typewriter in the late ’70s and ’80s. Each technology in its own time, methinks.

Today my computers are second-nature and get a lot of use blogging and writing. In fact, being and becoming computerized was a great enabler and freed me to express myself faster and easier than before. I eventually found a technology that can keep up with my ephemeral, stream-of-consciousness brain. Check.

But, as mentioned, the olde creed still remaineth. Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify”; keep it simple, stupid. Know one’s limits and limitations where technology is concerned. And there is still a sweet, pleasurable autonomy about not upgrading unnecessarily (just because the technology is there and can be used; no one ever seems to question anymore if all this technology is any good, harmful, or dangerous).

And so, a sense of balance, common sense, and the practical above all else. That and the ever-pleasurable choices of being a unique individual. Not selling out conventionally, completely, and irrationally.

…………………….

ps/To say nothing of the untrustworthiness and un-security aspects of e-technology. As in AB Health’s immediate failure online this morning when they opened up their site to take bookings for seniors to get vaccines in order to protect them and save lines. No, indeed, what many have long known about the frequent, recurring unreliability and limits and limitations of computers everywhere and, deep-down, when it really matters.

for stating the bleeding obvious yesterday about Tiger Woods. Unlike the American new networks which are falling all over themselves to praise and glorify the golfer, they pointed out his previous serious driving accidents and infractions, including supporting footage. Like, yeah, Context and facts, anyone?

(live reading at a local cafe during the local Poetry Festival)

Long overdue. This weekend I recorded famous poems (onto computer files and CDs) that influenced me basically from age 2 to 21 (end of university)/1951-1972. This is a chronological reading of the following poems with commentary.

Great Poems Remembered

Part 1

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star–Jane Taylor
Hey diddle, diddle–Mother Goose
Hickory, dickory, dock–Mother Goose
Alligator Pie–Dennis Lee
Someone Came Knocking–Walter de la Mare
Sea Fever–John Masefield
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud–William Wordsworth
Invictus-William Ernest Henley
The Road Not Taken–Robert Frost
Birches–Robert Frost
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer–John Keats
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802– William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us–William Wordsworth
Ozymandias–Percy Bysshe Shelley
To Autumn–John Keats
Ulysses–Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Dover Beach–Matthew Arnold                                                                                                        Because I Could Not Stop for Death–Emily Dickinson
My Last Duchess–Robert Browning
Snake–D.H. Lawrence
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds– William Shakespeare
I Am a Rock–Paul Simon
Blowin’ in the Wind –Bob Dylan
A Kite Is a Victim–Leonard Cohen
anyone lived in a pretty how town–E.E. Cummings

Part 2

Preludes–T.S. Eliot
Fern Hill–Dylan Thomas
The Bull Calf–Irving Layton
Annabel Lee–Edgar Allan Poe
Jabberwocky–Lewis Carroll
Otherwise–Jane Kenyon

Still, today, in 2021:

-confidence in one’s own mental powers; a belief in the individual: “A man can do all things if he will.”–Alberti)
-a belief in common sense, knowledge, truth, and wisdom
-a knowledge that, at a given moment, there are innumerable creative possibilities
-a sense of permanence achievable through the Word/language and the Arts
-a sense of eternity as being ever-present in the here-and-now
-a belief in presence of individuals, things, and Nature
-compassion, benevolence, charity, humanitarianism, and helping others
-the dignity entitled to/for all human beings, especially those in need
-the benefits of civil relationships
-an appreciation of great people, the Arts, and basic practical or helpful technology
-an appreciation of energy, enthusiasm, creativity, bright-mindedness, passionate engagement, and curiosity in individuals
-the ability to lose oneself completely in a/the whole while gaining a more intense consciousness of being
-the good, maximal use of leisure time
-the value of select close, intimate company, books, literature, and poetry, music, good meaningful conversation, and fine sensibilities
-all/any expansion of human faculties and spirit
-having a sense of Beauty and an appreciation of Genius
-the value of heroic will and spiritual force
-application of gentleness and forgiveness as much as possible in daily living