Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness

December 10, 2013

On Germany's Fairytale Trail - The Sleeping Beauty Castle

There are some fairy tales I really like but there are others that I consider almost unsuitable for children as they seem somewhat disturbing.

Or is it perhaps that there is no "and they lived happily ever after ending"?

For example I really don't like "The Red Shoes" by Hans Christian Andersen but I like others by him, for example "The Ugly Duckling". I don't like all of the stories written by the Brothers Grimm either,but there are some very good ones!

Like many nursery rhymes some fairy tales are rooted in social conditions that existed at the time they were written and have a much deeper and possibly even a more frightening meaning.

For example was "Ring a Ring of Roses" about the Black Death or plague?

I have always liked "Sleeping Beauty" and "Cinderella", especially the versions by Charles Perrault.

Below is the Walt Disney version of "Cinderella" which I grew up with.

Looking at references on the Brothers Grimm and Perrault it gets a bit confusing as to who wrote what!

Perrault lived in the seventeenth century so perhaps he deserves more credit?

The Brothers Grimm came somewhat later.

Perhaps many of these tales and rhymes simply reflect the human condition - good and bad?

PUSS in Boots strides towards me, a handsome fellow with a walrus moustache and a rapier on his belt. Next comes Red Riding Hood, a blonde girl with clogs that tap on the floorboards of the stage. Behind her slinks the Wolf, his eyes dark, his haunches quivering with power and desire.

Jasmine the puppeteer looks up from her marionettes. "I like the Cinderella puppet best, she is so beautiful. But at night it's scary in here. If you're rehearsing, there are shadows in the corners and things creak."

She folds the wolf away into the box where he lives and whispers in his ear: "Good night."

We are backstage at the puppet theatre in Steinau, central Germany. It's the town where the Brothers Grimm grew up and heard their first fairy stories. Even today, it's a magical place of half-timbered houses, a stone fountain in the cobbled square carved with fairytale figures. I am here - with my two children - to enter that world of childhood stories on which we all grew up, in the places they were found.

This year, the region of Hesse is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the death of Jacob Grimm, the elder of the two remarkable brothers who collected German folktales and published them in a series of books from 1812 to 1857. Steinau is the start of Hesse's Fairytale Route, which follows the places where Jacob and Wilhelm lived, and where the tales were set.

Their journey, and ours, starts here, at their childhood home - a half-timbered manor house where they lived in the 1790s. Inside, it shows displays on their lives, and the garden has a wooden cage with Hansel trapped inside. My daughter Sarah, 11, pokes a stick through the bars to see if he's fat enough to eat. Benjamin, 12, shakes an apple out of the tree above: luckily it is not poisoned.

I scoop them up and drive them off to a farmhouse in a forest. The Brathahnchenfarm Hotel is up a narrow track in a wood. Its ground floor is a series of low tavern rooms, rough walls lit by lanterns hanging from blackened beams. A fireplace crackles at one end, where spits of meat turn and smoke. It's the kind of place where stories might be told on a winter's night; or where a scullery maid might sweep cinders from a hearth and earn herself a nickname.

We enter the fairytale world more formally next day, 96km north, at the Marchenhaus in Alsfeld. A cathedral bell clangs above a tangle of 16th-century lanes. The Haus has "1628" etched above its wooden door and a well with a frog perched on its rim. Its white walls and brown timbers look like icing sugar and gingerbread. We tiptoe in.

The rooms of this museum are decorated with life-size tableaux from the tales. Statues of Hansel and Gretel creep up to a cottage where an old woman leers by an oven door. Rumpelstiltskin weaves gold thread from sweet-smelling bales of straw. A witch's kitchen features a black cat and a row of herbs above an iron stove. A storyteller eyes us up. "I am a herb woman," she announces. "I grow them in my garden. Stories come from them."

We leave fairly hastily and head for the safety of Snow White's cottage. It's an hour's drive away, in a village called Bergfreiheit. The cottage fails to impress Benjamin, who says it is a fake. But Sarah is amused by its seven bunk beds, the seven chairs around its kitchen table and the photo we take of ourselves in dwarfish hoods.

But on the edge of the village is a piece of real folklore.

The Kupferbergwerk mine is all that's left of an industry that may explain those seven dwarves. Off to work they went, with picks and shovels to dig copper and gold in the wooded hillside here, which is riddled with copper mines from the 16th century. These were often worked by children, whose short stature gained them a local nickname: dwarves.

You can go inside a disused shaft that dates back to 1552. Wooden pitprops frame rough walls as you descend its long dark tunnel. "This is copper," says the guide, pointing at a smear of green, "and this is fool's gold," by a wall of glittering crystals.

Miners here were given special freedoms and the village became a haven for runaways. Bergfreiheit translates as "freedom mountain". It's the perfect setting for a tale of escape and transformation such as Snow White's.

But there is more. A display at the cottage suggests the model for Snow White was Margarete of Waldeck, the beautiful daughter of a local count who fled from a jealous stepmother and died in 1554 - of poisoning. Her brother owned these mines. About then, a scandal spread of a father who had poisoned his children with bad apples. So this is how the tales emerged, from histories and scare stories woven together.

Margarete's castle of Waldeck is nearby, and that is where we'll stay tonight. These days it's an elegant hotel. Its towers and battlements rise above a glittering lake and we enter through a gothic hall. This is the world of princesses and kings, which fairytale figures might tame through marriage or success, but which also oppresses them - like Snow White or Cinderella. The heroes of the tales are seldom grand: more often they are woodcutters, peasants, fishermen and their fates impart the wisdom of the common folk.

Next day we descend to the dungeons. "Creepy or what?" says Sarah with a thrill of fear. Among the stone vaults is a torture chamber, a reminder of the world of power around the tales. There's a whipping bench and an executioner's block, a woodblock map of noble estates dated 1575, and a hand-drawn family tree with several Margaretes. I wonder which one she was.

To get a firmer grip on our history, we drive north to the city of Kassel, where the Grimm brothers moved from Steinau in 1798. They seem always to have lived close to each other, sharing a mission in life. In Kassel, they worked as librarians and published their classic book of Kinder- und Hausmarchen - tales for children and households - in 1812. This was a time of revolution and nationalism. Napoleon had occupied then abandoned the region, leaving behind new ideas about the power of the people and inspiring resistance to invaders. These would coalesce in the brothers' work, with its search for the soul of a people through their stories, and its wish to establish a German identity.

The city houses an elegant museum to the brothers and an exhibition to mark Jacob's anniversary year. We ramble through the latter, past manuscripts and portraits and first editions of their books. Then we head to the edge of town looking for an 18th-century roadside inn, the Brauhaus-Knallhutte. Here Jacob and Wilhelm gathered stories from the innkeeper's daughter, Dorothea Viehmann, who heard them from travellers. Still it is a roadside place - next to a ring road, behind a carpark, on an industrial estate. But inside it's a delight. There's a brass bar, a long dining room with dark beams and red banquettes, and soft light falling through stained-glass windows of huntsmen and barmaids.

Our final stop may or may not have a Grimm connection. But if it doesn't, it should. Sababurg claims to be Sleeping Beauty's castle. Its pepper pot towers from 1334 are surrounded by thickets of roses and magnificent beech woods that would deter many a prince. Inside the ruined great hall, we catch the daily performance of Sleeping Beauty. A young man in red velvet is wooing a pretty blonde, pink roses woven in her waist-length hair.

Walking on to the battlements, I spot a herd of deer on the slope below, like the strangely met animals of myths. Then we unlock a door at the foot of a tower and clamber up a spiral stair. On a landing is a spinning wheel. At the top are our rooms for the night, each with a four-poster bed. For the castle has been transformed into a wildly romantic hotel.

But that night, as we hop into the great carved beds, the children are spooked by the ruins and moonlight. We have stepped too far into the imaginative power of the tales. It's a long night, with every creak of ancient wood a fright. I read them the tales, where every ordeal leads to a happy ending.

In the bright light of the morning, we walk around the grounds, which claim to be Europe's oldest zoological gardens, dating from 1571. Roaming free are herds of deer, muskox and wild boar. At the far end we spot a creature that haunts the tales, as once he haunted the untamed woods of Europe: a wolf. He stares at us. His eyes are black and burning. He is the fear we meet in fairy stories and learn to overcome.

Driving away from the castle, we stop in an endless stand of fir trees. There are wild blackberries among long grass, pine needles on raw earth, and rows of trees stretching away forever. We seem tiny in this world. The branches are crooked fingers, clutching out at us. We are children among dark powers.

Once these forests stretched across northern Europe and Asia, and they figure still - in fairytales, in Shakespeare, in Hollywood movies - as a place of challenge and change. Then Sarah picks a blackberry and Benjamin lobs a pine cone at me, and we are innocents once more, protected by the joy of our journey and the wisdom of what we have seen.

Jonathan Lorie was a guest of the Hesse tourism board.

hessen-tourism.com

grimms.de

With thanks to The Australian

According to Scientists, This Is The most Relaxing Song Of All Time

This eight minute song is a beautiful combination of arranged harmonies, rhythms and bass lines and thus helps to slow the heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress. The song features guitar, piano and electronic samples of natural soundscapes.

A study was conducted on 40 women, who were connected to sensors and had been given challenging puzzles to complete against the clock in order to induce a level of stress. Different songs were then played, to test their heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and brain activity.

The results showed that the song Weightless was 11 per cent more relaxing than any other song and even caused drowsiness among women in the lab.

It induced a 65 per cent reduction in overall anxiety and brought them to a level 35 per cent lower than their usual resting rates.

Moreover, sound therapies have been used for thousands of years to help people relax and improve health and well-being. Among indigenous cultures, music has been the heart of healing and worship. The song, weightless is ideal for unwinding and putting an end to a stressful day.

According to Dr David Lewis-Hodgson, from Mindlab International, which conducted the research, this song induced the greatest relaxation, higher than any other music tested till date. In accordance to the Brain imaging studies, music works at a very deep level within the brain, stimulating not only those regions responsible for processing sound but also ones associated with emotions.

The song Weightless can make one drowsy and hence should not be heard while driving.

Follow us: @dailyhealthpost on Twitter | dailyhealthpost on Facebook

With thanks to Daily Health Post

From You Tube:

It slows your breathing and reduces brain activity to such an extent that Weightless, written by Manchester band Marconi Union, is said to be the 'most relaxing song ever'.

The eight-minute track is so effective at inducing sleep, motorists have now been warned they should not listen to it whilst driving.

The band worked with sound therapists to get advice on how to make the most effective use of harmonies, rhythms and bass lines. The result on listeners is a slowing of the heart rate, reduced blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol." (Daily Mail, David Gerges)

Marconi Union are a British musical trio Richard Talbot, Jamie Crossley and Duncan Meadows, with strong links to the Manchester based DOTCA arts collective. Their music incorporates elements of electronica, ambient, jazz and dub.

December 09, 2013

Elvis At 21 - National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Another exhibition, yet again highlighting an example of Western culture.

Like him or loathe him there is no denying the influence Elvis Presley had in his heyday and it continues on and on.

There are so many performers who have tried to imitate him: to look like him and sound like him, and even more that were inspired by him.

Many of these performers are among my own personal favourites.

For example The Beatles.

"Nothing really affected me until Elvis," John later reflected, and this simple statement just about says it all. At that moment the effect upon him was total, almost as if everything that had happened to him until then didn't matter. Sure, John had been impressed by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and by the spectacle of the classroom violence instigated by the menacing young Vic Morrow in The Blackboard Jungle, but that was only acting. Elvis, on the other hand, was the living reality”.

Excerpt from “The Influence of Elvis Presley on John Lennon”.

Lots more there.

When The Beatles came along, they in turn inspired many, many other performers all around the world. I guess the most obvious effect was the “British Invasion”.

Elvis was not the first person to have a huge group of hysterical fans. This happened earlier to Rudolph Valentino and much later to Frank Sinatra.

And it is still happening to today’s contemporary musicians.

I have chosen the clip of “Jail House Rock”. It was not Elvis’s first single but it is the title song of this 1957 movie. I think Elvis did the choreography if I remember correctly.

I sometimes wonder, but will never know for sure, if this clip inspired Rob Marshall’s choreography and direction of Chicago’s “Cell Bock Tango” and also his “Be Italian” in the movie “Nine”. Both clearly show Marshall’s style.

Since I am a fan of rock music I really appreciate all the results of Elvis's existence.

So, in spirit, “Elvis has NOT left the building”!

And hopefully never will.

IT was 1956, the year Grace Kelly married her fairytale prince in Monaco, Morocco and Tunisia gained independence from France and Melbourne held the Summer Olympics. There was the Suez Crisis, a vanquished Japan became a member of the UN, and a singer from Memphis, Tennessee, stood on the precipice of unimaginable fame.

The world was fast changing but history is a fickle affair and unarguably the most culturally important of those events was the emergence of a black-haired, blue-eyed southern boy with swivelling hips and the soulful voice of a gospel artist.

In 1956, Elvis Aaron Presley, 21 years old and dangerously handsome, had arrived like a hurricane with a roar that would wake up God-fearing, straight-back-and-sides America.

The singer the critics said probably couldn't even spell Tennessee would soon "own" Tennessee and borders beyond. As James Brown would later say: "He taught white America to get down."

This seminal year in Elvis's evolution marked the start of his real stardom and the end of his anonymity. In 1956, long before the likes of Madonna and Sting got ahead with a singular name, the goldmine who'd always be known simply as Elvis had entered the public consciousness, his rise hurried along by the powerful pull of the new medium of television.

Fathers everywhere soon knew they'd need to keep their daughters safe from the anti-Christ, the gyrating devil who newspapers as diverse as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Tacoma News Tribune denounced as "morally insane" and "untalented and vulgar".

As Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog topped the charts and decent young American women fainted at Elvis concerts, a sign at a Cincinnati used-car dealer's lot announced: "We guarantee to break 50 Elvis Presley records in your presence if you buy one of these cars today."

In March that year, perhaps with as much prescience as promotional nous, the RCA Victor recording company hired a freelance entertainment photographer, Alfred Wertheimer, to spend about 10 days with Elvis during the spring and summer of the 12-month period that would prove to be the making of the king of rock 'n' roll.

Wertheimer was given virtually unbridled access to snap candid shots as RCA's newly signed singer cut an increasingly visible swath from Tennessee to New York and back to his heartland roots.

In January 2010, to mark what would have been Elvis's 75th birthday, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC launched a travelling exhibition, Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, which has since successfully toured the US.

The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra is the show's first overseas venue.

NPG associate registrar Maria Ramsden says: "The Smithsonian has specified the exhibition layout but allowed a few tweaks from our designer. The images follow a timeline within the short period that Wertheimer was with Elvis . . . after this, Elvis's manager, Tom Parker, was incredibly protective about Elvis's image and tightly controlled who got close and what images were released to the public."

There are 56 black-and-white quadratone prints in the exhibition, including 40 large-format framed images. "The works are digital pigment prints [and] we are seeing more of this technique in our [photographic] collections," Ramsden says.

What is instantly apparent in the Wertheimer oeuvre is that these are not fan pin-ups or staged portraits. In a shot of Elvis kissing an unnamed girl in the stairwell of the Jefferson Hotel in Virginia (June 30), for example, the viewer feels like a voyeur; it's as if Elvis is completely unaware of the camera.

Aside from their unscripted feel, what is so remarkable is that Elvis often appeared to be unrecognised by those around him. In many, he even looked puzzled -- sprawled on a couch in his room at the Warwick Hotel in New York (March 17), he was reading fan mail. There were not hundreds of thousands of letters but a few dozen and he appeared, like a true southern gent, to be reading every one.

Elvis was filling time between a rehearsal and performance for big band leaders Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey's Stage Show. Wertheimer was a fan of Tommy's and that's why he accepted the RCA commission. The photographer, who was 26 in 1956, is still alive and in interviews associated with the premiere of the Smithsonian showing, he insisted he had never even heard of Elvis.

That night after the Dorsey show, Elvis met a few rugged-up fans outside a stage door at CBS Studio 50 (later to be the Ed Sullivan Theatre) and Wertheimer was there for the shot. But the momentum was growing -- compare that picture with one taken on the night of July 1, after he had performed Hound Dog on The Steve Allen Show. Fans in the audience at the Hudson Theatre reached out to touch him, waving autograph books; the hysteria had started.

Heading home a few days later to Memphis on the Southern Railroad, however, Elvis appeared solitary, unrecognised. At Chattanooga, he sat at a counter in the station diner -- no fans, none of the bodyguards, police escorts, stalkers or opportunistic hangers-on who would infest his later life. It was as if he only really existed in the public eye for the moments just before, during and after his performances.

There's even a shot Wertheimer took in the train's washroom. Paper towels had run out so Elvis flicked his hands dry, hips at a dance angle; the temptation to hum All Shook Up while looking at it is irresistible.

Later that day he was at home at 1034 Audubon Drive, Memphis, the home he bought for his parents when Sun Records sold his contract to RCA (he purchased Graceland in 1957). Freshly showered and bare-chested, Elvis was with his high-school sweetheart, Barbara Hearn, listening to cuts of his songs from the New York recording sessions. It was such an average domestic scene that it's hard to imagine Wertheimer was ever in the room. It's this non-intrusive technique, and the young star's pensive demeanour, as much as the subject matter, that gives the collection such a sense of immediacy.

"Elvis permitted closeness," Wertheimer has said. "I put him under my microscope and studied him, only my microscope was my camera lens. He permitted you to go as close as three feet from his face and he wouldn't act any different than if you were 20 feet away. He was able to focus so much on what he was doing."

Wertheimer shot about 2500 pictures of Elvis, but it wasn't until the star's death in 1977 and a phone call from Time magazine that interest in the collection was renewed. Wertheimer reckons: "The phone hasn't stopped ringing since."

The interest in early Elvis among fans of all ages seems insatiable; there seems to be a collective hunger to recapture that moment of possibility, all but frozen in time, like the fascination with the early promise of Marilyn Monroe and the unfulfilled potential of James Dean.

True fans gloss over the (burger) king of the 1970s, that choc-fudge cookie and cornbread-eating Graceland recluse given to dubious taste in sequinned jumpsuits. In 1993, the US Postal Service couldn't decide which image to use for a commemorative stamp -- slim Elvis the Pelvis or the bloated crooner -- so it sent out ballot papers across the nation. The Love Me Slender lobby won, declaring it would be a case of Return to Sender if a photo from the fat years were used.

In 1983, the Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Centre opened in Memphis; it's a proper medical facility, although the name suggests fans could check in to deal with grief-induced depression, albeit 36 years after the king's death. I am one such die-hard devotee and have been twice to Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, "to be received" but, unlike the Paul Simon lyrics, for reasons I could explain.

In 1995, on August 16, Elvis's "death day", I attended a candlelight vigil by the king's memorial at Graceland. Elvis Presley Boulevard had been blocked off and about 20,000 fans had set up camp with sleeping bags and homemade shrines featuring devotional images of the young Elvis with the licorice-slick sideburns, the quiff, the pelvis and the pout.

Members of the Looking for Elvis Spotters' Club handed out recruitment flyers as did zealots from the First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine in New Jersey -- their religion requires them to face Memphis daily and pray. Equal opportunity Elvis impersonators strutted their stuff -- dark-haired, white-skinned adult males were outnumbered by wheelchair-bound grannies, black jivers and Asian Elvises.

I met a woman of about 50 who insisted she was married to Elvis (who didn't die but was relocated by the FBI "for his own safety") and when I looked sceptical, she produced a photo of herself in a bridal gown, standing next to a cut-out cardboard figure of Elvis, circa 1960, in his US Army uniform.

Many a thesis has been written aimed at decoding Elvis and his legacy.

After Elvis's death, Pat Boone said: "There's no way to measure his impact on society or the void that he leaves."

Many believe just in the alchemy of timing and talent.

John Lennon famously declared: "Before Elvis there was nothing."

Elvis's shoot to stardom paralleled the emergence of a generation who were crying out for significant change, stifled by the straitlaced mores of the postwar era. His very differentness and his accentuated sexuality gave young America -- and soon the world -- a reason to rebel, an idol of their own.

The jury may be out on the ultimate legacy of Elvis but, for his legions of loyal fans, the signature tune Always on My Mind, (below), rings clear and true. I am full of giddy-headed excitement over the Elvis at 21 exhibition. Long live the king.

Elvis at 21 is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, from December 7 to March 10.

By Susan Kurasawa

With many thanks to The Australian