Doggie mandala


Photo was taken by me at the Tibetan Buddhist Hemis monastery in Ladakh. The visual link to Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala can be found here and the esoteric link to Le Sacre du Printemps can be found here.

Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2014. Also on Facebook and Twitter.

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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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These photos were taken on my recent spirit quest in Morocco to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Chamharouch, which is seen above. A 75 minutes drive from Marrakech brought me to Imlil where the road ends and the mountains begin. The hamlet of Sidi Chamharouch - which is one of those blessed places which returns a blank in a Trip Advisor search - is at an altitude of 2350 metres and is reached by a tough and potentially dangerous two hour climb up a rocky path. Access is impossible for wheeled vehicles and supplies are brought in by the mules seen in my photos. Beyond Sidi Chamharouch is Jebel Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest mountain in North Africa. During my trek I was struck by the similarity between the High Atlas and Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet . Film director Martin Scorsese was also struck by the similarity. With Tibet a no-go zone he used this region for location shooting of his 1997 movie Kundun ; this depicts the Dalai Lama 's flight into exile fro...
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XL - On An Overgrown Path

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XL is the new choral work by English composer Antony Pitts . It uses the same forces as Tallis' sublime 40 part motet Spem in Alium , and was composed as a companion piece. XL is on a new Harmonia Mundi CD sung by the Rundfunkchor Berlin directed by Simon Halsey. It also includes the Tallis motet, Knut Nystedt's Immortal Bach , and Zoltán Kodaly's substantial Laudes organi. Other posts linking to the work of Antony Pitts, and well worth reading are Jerry Springer rebel grabs Gramophone accolade and Raindrops are falling on my chant .
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Leaders destroy followers and followers destroy leaders

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That photo of Marrakech's celebrated Jemma el-Fnaa was taken by me a few weeks ago. One of the books that illuminated my visit to the Red City was Stephen Davis' To Marrakech by Aeroplane . Stephen is best known as the biographer of Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones, and ghost writer for Michael Jackson, but he also collaborated with me on a two part feature about the Master Musicians of Jajouka , who come from the Rif Mountains in the north of Morocco. Performance artist Brion Gysin , who was a long time resident of Morocco, played a pivotal role in bring the Master Musicians to the attention of Brian Jones , and it was the Rolling Stones' posthumously released album of their music which introduced the Master Musicians to an international audience. To Marrakech by Aeroplane , which is rich in anecdotes about Brion Gysin's Moroccan circle, is published by Inkblot Publications , and that Rhode Island based independent publisher has also made available ...
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Requiem for grandson of Hitler’s pianist

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My recent article on Ernst Hanfstaengl, court composer and pianist to Hitler, and Harvard alumni, attracted a lot of readers. But the final paragraph left a mystery unsolved: Peter Conradi's excellent life of Hanfstaengl (right) ends with his death. But there is a fascinating coda to this extraordinary story, where fact is often far stranger than fiction. On the penultimate page of Conradi's book the author writes: '(Hanfstaengl) took great pride in his grandchildren - especially Eynon, the eldest, who had inherited his grandfather's musical talent, taking an impressive twenty-fourth place in the prestigous Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June 1974.' The pianist career of the junior Hanfstaengl seem to have been obscured by the mists of time, and my researches found no further information on this. But tantalisingly my search found a German German film actor and writer called Eynon Hanfstaengl . One of his acting roles was Count Durkheim in the 1972 movie Lud...
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What was on Hitler's iPod?

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If you like Mahler - and who doesn't? - try this

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Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

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Audio perfectionists are an almost extinct breed

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A Philippa Schuyler moment

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