Way To Nail An Audition

This is most definitely the way to nail an American Idol audition - well, any audition for that matter ...

... and to see one of our own up there doing it in such style is for me icing on the cake.

I just love how, in a completely controlled way, Jacob pours all of his heart and soul into this performance of 'God Bless The Child'.

Delicious!

The Peace Hotel On The Bund, Shanghai

The Peace Hotel, The Bund, Shanghai, China

One of the great joys of travel can be the hotels and 'hotels' you stay in - whether it's a yurt in in Huahouta in Inner Mongolia ...

... the Maharajah of Jaipur's Palace in India ...

... or the back-packer Sun Hotel ...

... with its resident monkeys ...

... and peerless view over the Ganges and its ghats ...

... at extraordinary Varanassi ...

I lived for a year in China - in 1988, just before the Tiananmen Square incident - and had another of those magic hotel experiences at the famed Peace Hotel on the Shanghai Bund alongside the Huangpu River ...



Completed in 1929 as the exclusive expatriate mens' club, the then Sassoon House was in a severe Art Deco style, but with lavish interiors ...

The Ballroom (During Restored)

A Passage Way and Stairs (During Restored)

... its passage ways and rooms encrusted with now priceless Lalique glass artwork. still in evidence when was stayed there.

There have of course been changes since the late '80s, not the least of which the transformation of the paddy fields on the opposite side of the river, viewable in 1988 from the second floor dining room, into the now bustling metropolis of Pudong ...

But what's in fact really amazing about this establishment is its quirky and anecdotal history.

In 1949, with bullets flying round the streets outside the hotel, a desperate refugee from the mayhem banged admittance on the front door, only to be asked by those leaning over from an upper balcony:

But are you a member sir?

The reply No! led to a hastily convened club committee meeting to advice on the complex question of temporary membership. It's not recorded whether the motion was passed or otherwise!

A myriad of delicious memories now come flooding back.

A hotel employee telling me that in the 1920s at the racecourse nearby there was a sign that read 'No dogs or Chinese allowed'.

And another that Noel Coward finished 'Private Lives' in the hotel.

But in fact my most enduring recollection is of the jazz band that had been performing in the basement since the 1930s ...

... with its then trumpet player a dead ringer of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong - a totally surreal experience at 3am!

So, at least for me, my accommodation can be a far greater part of the travel experience than is conventionally accepted!

Have you guys had any such out-of-body hotel experiences?

Things That Usually Happen Only In Nightmares

A number of people have emailed me about the recent flooding in the state of Queensland here.

And I've been thanking them for taking the time to ask and feeding back a bit about the disaster.

The worst inundation has been about 500 miles north of Sydney and, while the loss of life and the damage to property is obviously horrific, the full and tangible impact of the catastrophe only became apprent to me today, looking at a set of photographs taken on a farm at Heidon as the Lockyer Creek ran it's banks.

As you can see from the time on each image, the surrounding countryside was submerged in just 22 minutes - 3.16pm to 3.38pm.

Like in a nightmare where legs turn to lead and you can't escape trains bearing down on you, or approaching thugs intent on robbery ... I can too easily imagine the feeling of helplessness in the face of such rapidly on-coming waters.

Some of the footage of people telling of loved ones lost and lifetimes' work swept away has been truly heart-breaking.

And I reflected on how easy it is to watch the litany of tragedies around the world on the evening news with chilling detachment. Pause for thought.

Question is, gentlemen, ... .

Question is love of which of the two following 'blast from the past' music videos would best suggest ...

[1] a fine taste in popular music?

[2] unexcelled retro fashion sense?

[3] faultless appreciation of high production values?

[4] a deep understanding of the choreographic possibilities of a piece of music?

[5] a general smoothness and all-round super and current coolness?

Better accompany your choice with reasons, guys.

Courage ladies and gentlemen!

BTW this post is perhaps just an excuse to have two oldies but goodies out there ... yet again.

Just There Leaning Out A Window

Just about everyone must know about Anne Frank and her now famous dairy - German born and moving to near Amsterdam in the 1930's to flee anti-Jewish sentiments, hiding with her family in concealed rooms in her father Otto's office building when Hilter's forces occupied the Netherlands, dying with her sister Margot of typhus in March 1945 in the concentration camp of Gergen-Belsen.

What fewer may know is that the diarist was filmed in 1941 leaning out of a window during a neighbour's wedding day.

The Merwedeplein building where the Frank family lived from 1934 to 1942

I love Anne's gesture of tossing back her hair as she turns to respond to something happening in the room behind her - it's hard not to try to imagine the dimensions of this cheerful domestic situation - so at odds with the horrors to come.

'A Window Out The Past' rather than one into it.

The Last Tasmanian

Fanny Cochrane-Smith (1834-1905)

Mainstream white histories tell us that Trugernanner [Truganini] (1812-1876) ...

Trugernanner [Truganini] (1812-1876)

... was the last surviving full-blood Tasmanian aboriginal.

As a not directly relevant issue here, aboriginal people I know say aboriginality is a matter of identification rather than full bloodedness.

Truganini is now widely used by liberals, like me (and you?) to signify the genocide with repect to the indigenous inhabitants of this country by the European settlers.

However, born on Flinders island of a Tanganutura mother of the North-eastern tribe and of a Nicermenic father from the Robbins Island group of the Northwestern tribe, Fanny Cochrane-Smith (1834-1905) LINK can better claim to be the last of her race from the Australian island State of Tasmania.

That Fanny's claim has been largely ignored may well be due to the politics surrounding identity and its requirement of living a more complete and typical indigenous lifestyle. From the age of seven and with no known aboriginal name, she lived and later worked in white homes and institutions and married married a white man, the English lawyer and ex-convict, William Smith.

Fanny, husband William Smith and perhaps two of her sons

However, Fanny continued traditional practices - hunting, gathering bush food and medicines, making baskets, diving for shellfish and engaging in aboriginal religious rituals. And was heralded as the 'last Tasmanian aboriginal' at a concert held in her honour in 1899 in Hobart.

You must know by now I'm pretty drawn in by the 'Window into the Past' experience - and it was flung wide open this morning in cyberspace, when I happened across some wax cylinder recordings made by Fanny between 1899 and 1903.

Fanny - 1903 Recording

They are the only extant examples of a Tasmanian aboriginal dialect - spoken and in song, songs which in some cases she also recorded in English ...

... and just just managing to survive, due to the dawn of wax cylinder recording!

A Story Looking For Its Movie

Some stories just seem to be looking for their movie, and this one is particularly high on that list.

Rather than a too long-winded telling the story, I thought I'd bullet point a few of the more startling events in the particularly startling life of Mathilde Kschessinskaya (1872-1971) - and there were certainly plenty of them.

• As the C19 drew to a close, she was the Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg

• At the age of seventeen, the ballerina had became the mistress of Nicholas II, when grand duke

• Even more scandalously for the day, she then formed a ménage à trois with two Grand Dukes of the Romanov family - Sergei Mikhailovich and his cousin Andrei Vladimirovich

• In 1902, she gave birth to a son, Prince Vladimir Sergeyevich Romanovsky-Krasinsky ('Vova'), who quite naturally was never sure who his father was

• Throwing realism completely to the wind, the ballerina would have selections from her valuable jewels sewn onto her costumes - for example, coming on stage as the Princess Aspicia in The Pharaoh's Daughter wearing a diamond encrusted tiara and choker - not a little like the American opera singer Leontyne Price who infamously jewelled up for the role of the enslaved Nubian princess in 'Aida'

• Kschessinskaya comissioned the famed Russian jeweller, Carl Faberge, to design a fetching gold and pearl encrusted, shall we say, 'top'

• It was from the balcony of her elegant house in Moscow that Lenin addressed a revolutionary crowd on his return from Finland in 1917

• In staggeringly stereotypic fashion, Mathilde escaped the Russian revolution with her jewel collection intact, moved to Europe and in 1921 married Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, becoming Her Serene Highness Princess Romanova-Krasinskaya

• The impresario Serge de Diaghilev invited the prima ballerina to dance with the famed Ballets Russes at the Paris Opera but she declined

• The family moved to Monte Carlo, where Mathilde dissipated the remaining wealth of family at the gamblimg tables - the remainder was sequestered by the crash of 1929

• Back in Paris, Grand Duke Andre was reduced to driving a taxi

• Kschessinskaya opened a ballet school in the French capital, teaching at times the likes of Ballets Russes ballerina Dame Alicia Markova, the Ballets Russes 'baby ballerinas' Tatiana Riabouchinska and Tamara Toumanova and The Royal Ballet's Dame Margot Fonteyn

Mathilde Kschessinskaya teaching 'baby ballerina' Tatiana Riabouchinska

• The prima ballerina absoluta performed one last time, aged 64, at a charity event with TheRoyal Ballet at Covent Garden

• Mathilde Kschessinskaya died in her 100th year.

'Alright already'!

Now this post was primarily prompted by my having come across 1920s footage of this 'larger than life' character at some kind of outdoor social gathering - she is seen in characteristically imperious mode greeting guests and firmly directing proceedings. And at the end there's a little section showing her son 'Vovo' loading up his plate from the outdoor buffet!

Her dying words?

'My life was beautiful'

You betcha baby!

And it makes our own seem just a tad on the dull and uneventful side. Well, mine at least - I don't know about yours!!!