One sunny morning in Pau, one of the neighbors came to take some plants for his garden. The elderly gentleman in the photograph on the right is Monsieur Romanov — a descendant of the Romanov family, rulers of Russia from 1613 until the Russian Revolution in 1917.
Continue reading → A Romanov in a Pau Garden: A Glorious Last Moment in Living History
J’attendrai is one of those songs that, when you first hear it, you want to play it on the guitar and sing it in performance. The melody is perfect. I have yet to see a performance of the song that didn’t glide with a gracious humanity.
Translated from French as — “I Will Wait” — J’attendrai was first made popular in 1938 by Rina Ketty and was written by Dino Olivier and Nino Rastelli. J’attendrai is the hallmark song for the start of World War II as people all over the world prepared for an uncertain and dramatic future:
I will wait night and day,
I will wait forever,
For you to come back, I will wait, [I will wait]
For the bird flying away
Comes to seek oblivion in its nest.
Time flies and runs,
Beating sadly in my oh so heavy heart
And yet I will wait for you to come back
The most resonant, historic, performance of J’attendrai belongs to magnificent Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and expert violinist Stéphane Grappelli.
Continue reading → J’attendrai: Melodic Beauty and Grace in Performance
Two years ago, I moved to Portugal. I moved from a culture where kissing and hugging as a greeting was reserved for family and close friends to one where kissing and hugging are a far more widespread form of greeting. This is further complicated by the fact that my partner is French and that our social circle includes family – English, Portuguese and French, friends – English, Portuguese, French, Danish, German and Dutch and business colleagues and acquaintances which include all of the above plus Spanish and Italians as well. They all have different rules for social greetings!
As he walked, Jean-Michel tried to think of the last time he went out on a date. When was it? A year ago? Surely it couldn’t have been more than that. Indeed, it had been; nearly a year and a half, unless he was mistaken. It was a blind date, set up by a friend of his he no longer talked to as much, though not because of how the date had gone; sometimes friends just grow apart, over time, if they are separated by distance. In any case, the date did not go nearly as well as Jean-Michel hoped it would; he was so terribly distraught that he swore to himself an abstinence from dating. Was he still abstaining? What had been so terrible? Nearly colliding with a homeless man wearing a garbage bag caftan, he reflected on the events of that evening. She had come to his apartment to pick him up.
You must be logged in to post a comment.