Ennio Morricone was an Italian composer, a veritable monument.
He composed over 400 scores for cinema and television, as well as over 100 classical works.
“Dies Irae Psichedelico” (1968)
He is best known for the characteristic sparse and memorable soundtracks of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns: “Man with a Harmonica” from Once Upon a Time in the West and the theme to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. The first has a haunting harmonica and the second an immediately recognizable flute/whistle.
When I compiled the Jahsonic 1000, I also included “Dies Irae Psichedelico” (1968) and “Ma Non Troppo Erotico” (1971).
Max Crook was an American musician whose name is virtually unknown.
“Runaway” keyboard solo.
Some research yields his co-authorship of “Runaway” (1961), the Del Shannon song.
In that song he also plays the keyboard solo.
That solo was played on a self-invented electric keyboard called the “Maximillian” which was based the clavioline, which was in turn a variation on the Musitron.
Lewis John Carlino (1932 – 2020) was an American screenwriter known for several films.
In our book, he wrote the screenplay to Seconds (1966), a film about an ordinary and unfulfilled man who wants a second life and is reborn in a new body.
‘Orgy’ scene
There is an ‘orgy’ scene (above) which was supposedly only included in European films, a practice which was common at that time.
Zeev Sternhell was an Israeli scholar known for his study of fascism, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (1989).
I headed for the university library and found that book.
I read the introduction and the rest of the book ‘by index’.
Doing that, I stumbled upon the grand sweeping statements by T. E. Hulme on his hatred for the Renaissance, Rousseau and Romanticism:
“That is why he [Hulme] was so hostile to romanticism: underlying romanticism and the French Revolution, he believed, was the Rousseauist concept of the individual. Rousseau, he wrote, taught the people of the eighteenth century “that man was by nature good,” that he was “an infinite reservoir of possibilities,” and that the source of all evils was “bad laws.” According to Rousseau, the destruction of the existing oppressive order would open up infinite possibilities of progress. Classicism, wrote Hulme, was defined by an opposite conception, namely, that “man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.””
The citations are from T. E. Hulme’s Speculations (1936).
It is interesting to note that Sternhell locates the origins of fascism within the artistic realm:
“A desire to cleanse the world of the defilements of the eighteenth century and to introduce various forms of discipline such as classicism and nationalism, no less than a rejection of liberal and bourgeois “decadence,” united in a single tide of sentiment some of the most important literary and artistic avant-gardes in Europe.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón was a Spanish novelist best known for his 2001 novel The Shadow of the Wind, the most successful novel in Spanish publishing history after Don Quixote.
The Bookworm (c. 1850) by Carl Spitzweg
The novel starts with the sentence:
“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”
That first sentence is reminiscent of the first sentence of Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967):
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Once the boy is taken to this library with his father, this is what he sees, a library which has been compared to The Library of Babel (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges:
“The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiraling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked.
“Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.”
When you read the obituaries of Zafón, you read a lot about frustration of being a bestseller author lacking critical acclaim.
Vera Lynn was a British singer who is best known for the song “We’ll Meet Again” (1968).
“It Hurts to Say Goodbye”
However, I want to draw your attention to the original recording of “Comment te dire adieu” generally known as a song by Françoise Hardy/Serge Gainsbourg but actually a version of “It Hurts to Say Goodbye” (1966).
