Nature Boy... or Nothing New Under the Sun

Nature Boy 
photo by Jay York

I built "Nature Boy" in 2012. Nat King Cole recorded a song called "Nature Boy" in 1948, which I love, and I am very fond of images of the Infant of Prague. I am also enchanted by plastic decorative items that I occasionally find in the second hand market place. The base used in this piece is one of a pair of wall sconces, which I painted with the same turquoise on my Little Fellow's leisure suit. I repainted a detached doll's head...another found object, attached it to a block, and my brother Peter helped me to mount the block onto the sconce, not such an easy thing as it turned out...the screws had to go in at an odd angle. Tiny floral barrettes form the corona around a wooden oval panel. I used a very good bronze powder with a wonderful luster after priming the background of the block, and odd bits here and there. I finished with a golden polyester bow. Very earnest and devout folk have been decorating and dressing the Infant of Prague for centuries, his costume has been observed to change with the times. He is said to be responsible for many cures...who am I to argue? I have taken liberties, as may be imagined, but I avoid blasphemy.

Back to  "Nature Boy" the song ... its composer Eden Ahbez was accused of appropriating the work of  Herman Yablokoff. Eden Ahbez claimed to have heard the melody emanating from the mountains which form the Los Angeles Basin...anything is possible, I suppose. However, the plot thickens...

Herman Yablokoff claimed that the melody to "Nature Boy" came from one of his songs, "Shvayg mayn harts" ("Be Still My Heart")... To that end it is worth noting that the first two measures of the song's melody also parallel the melody of the second movement in Antonin Dvorak's Piano Quintet No. 2 in A, Op. 81 (1887). It is unknown if Ahbez and/or Yablokoff were familiar with Dvorak's piece, or if they arrived at the same melodic idea independently.  

I gathered the information above from Wikipedia. Who knew? I love Wikipedia. 

This brings me to the title of my blog. I thought that "Dispatches from the Rabbithole" would be an entirely original name for my blog, and perfectly descriptive of my wanderings through world wide webbery, as well as the unexpected paths one follows when involved in the creative process. But someone else thought of it first...as a novice blogger I lost my own blog and had to go hunting for it on Google ( I blush to tell the tale)...and found a Facebook Group of the same name devoted to things metaphysical, dating from 2012. It really is very interesting, with articles on Machu Pichu, Gnosticism and so on. While I may feel compelled to change the blog's title going forward, for now it's working for me, along with a line from Eden Ahbez' song, which kept coming into my head while working on my piece...giving me its title.

The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.  

Nature Boy