Today, 8 January, would have been Elvis Presley’s 80th birthday. In remembrance of his fascinating life we’re sharing a slideshow from the beautiful images in Elvis Presley: A Southern Life by Joel Williamson. How did this Southern boy make it from Nashville and Vegas, to Grafenwoehr and the White House?

Featured image credit: Headline and 1956 photo from article on Elvis and Mae Axton, who wrote “Heartbreak Hotel,” just after the record sold 1 million copies, 1956. Published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Courtesy of the Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library & Information Center.

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By Cretien van Campen

Frail older people are more oftentimes considered a burden for society, than not. They are perceived to require intensive care that can be expensive while producing nothing contributory to society. The collective image is that frail older people are ‘useless’. In my opinion, we do not endeavor to ‘use’ them or know how to release productivity in them.

Around the age of 70, the extremely frail wheelchair bound musician Johnny Cash made the music video ‘Hurt’ with the help of film director Mark Romanek and producer Rick Rubin. The video was a tremendous success, receiving abundant critical acclaim and becoming a favorite with many for all time. The song was taken from a series of albums, the ‘American Recordings’, Cash created in his frailest period, selling millions of copies. The albums have been regarded as outstanding contributions to American culture and many people have found strength, joy and solace in his recordings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cash was no exception. He was not the only frail older person who flourished in his last years. The painter Henri Matisse, the music conductor Herbert von Karajan, and others reached creative summits in the last seasons of their lives. Also non-artists like sawmill worker Lester Potts became a creative painter in his later years when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. In other types of dementia, such as frontotemporal dementia, creativity can be released as well.

The case of Cash also is an example of what is needed to release creative productivity in a frail older person — and what has to be avoided. In his last years Cash suffered from several complex diseases and physical limitations, a long and sad process which biographer Robert Hilburn has described with compassion and in detail. Cash was successively diagnosed among others with Parkinson’s disease, Shy-Drager syndrome, and double pneumonia. These contributed to hospital admissions several times a year and receiving prescriptions in quantities that greatly impacted the long time Dexedrine (speed) addict. (Cash had been addicted during his career as a touring artist.)

By the end of the twentieth century Cash was in forlorn condition, exhausting himself in a mixture of drugs and over-extended tours. Of deeper emotional consequence, his records did not sell the numbers they once had. His musical career was considered by many to be over by the time he was approached by producer Rick Rubin. In retrospect Rubin gave Cash two ingredients that supported his creative productivity: mental reminiscences and physical exercises.

In elongated sessions at home Rubin and Cash played old and new music, evoking reminiscences with musical roots and connecting them with the music of younger generations, which created new flourish and renewed hunger for music in Cash. He transformed from an older musician playing golden oldies into an interpreter of contemporary songs with vision, re-honing his craft. Mentally, he returned from living in the past to living in the present and creating new interpretations, which revived a sense of direction to his life. He connected to younger generations and inspired them with his interpretations as he mutually was inspired by their music.

Not only in the mental and spiritual domains did he regain strength, but also in the physical domain. Rubin engaged a befriended physiotherapist. Physical exercises got Cash out of his wheelchair and walking independently again, while simultaneously bringing back feeling in his fingers to play the guitar with agility. By exercising his body, energy returned and he was able to sustain longer recording sessions, his most valued passion.

Rubin is an artist, not a doctor. He did not cure Cash. Instead he gave a man whose health was rapidly declining renewed opportunities and stimuli to thrive and find meaning in his life. Cash often said that all he wanted was to make music. The music gave him the will to survive, and to fight the diseases.

Although the medical records of Cash are confidential, reports from his family share indications that he was overmedicated. According to his son, his father would have lived longer and produced more songs and recordings if the medication had been decreased – something his physiotherapist pleaded for several times after another hospital admission.

Returning home after this hospital stay, every inch of his body appeared unduly medicated. As well meaning of his professional caregivers were in prescribing such pill-induced treatments, he actually lived in a medical cage, and his brilliant mind suffered. Fortunately some of his family members and friends understood he needed physical, mental, and spiritual space to flourish. They helped in opening that cage with recovered mental and physical strength and he eloquently delivered to us some of the most heart-provoking songs in the history of music.

Cretien van Campen is a Dutch author, scientific researcher and lecturer in social science and fine arts. He is the founder of Synesthetics Netherlands and is affiliated with the Netherlands Institute for Social Research and Windesheim University of Applied Sciences. He is best known for his work on synesthesia in art, including historical reviews of how artists have used synesthetic perceptions to produce art, and studies of perceived quality of life, in particular of how older people with health problems perceive their living conditions in the context of health and social care services. He is the author of The Proust Effect: The Senses as Doorways to Lost Memories.

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Image credit: Johnny Cash 1969, Photograph by Joe Baldwin. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Willie Nelson has landed a book deal to tell the “unvarnished, complete, and tremendous story” of his life.

Nelson has published a number of books over the course of his prolific career, but the publisher promised “none will be as personal or as wide in scope as this.”

Little, Brown and Company will publish the book in the summer of 2015. David Vigliano of Vigliano Associates negotiated the deal with executive editor John Parsley.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I love this song--it's like a short story waiting to be written, don't you think?

You know what?  Skip everything I’ve ever suggested about visiting the Bologna Book Fair.  Airflights take a lot of time.  Your sleeping schedule gets off.  And then there’s all that walking.  Phew!  It’s enough to exhaust you just thinking about it.  No no, far better to just watch this little video created by Bart Moeyaert.  It’s the fair in 90 seconds.  You’re in.  You’re out.  Slap your hands together and you’re done!  Couldn’t be easier.

In other news, my library is doing this:

First off, I love that it makes my workplace, the building where I earn my daily bread, look like something out of a movie (and not just the set like in The Adjustment Bureau and Arthur, both in theaters now).  So cheers there.  Second, this is a game inspired by our upcoming Centennial celebration.  You can see the website for the game here, if you’d like to join in.  You have to fill out an application by April 21st, though.  There’s nothing specifically keeping employees like myself from participating, but I suspect that since my body these days conks out effectively at 10:30 each night, I am in no position to add my own expertise.

When you are a child of the 70s or 80s you may have a unique gift.  Thanks to television shows like Sesame Street, it’s entirely possible that your brain is filled with small animated shorts and clips that will burst into fiery remembrance when seen.  Take, as today’s example, the news that Maurice Sendak has a new picture book coming out soon.  Called Bumble Ardy, the book was originally a short on Sesame Street.  Now, if you had stopped me on the street and asked me if I had ever seen said short I would have given a sharp bark of a laugh.  Me, forget a Maurice Sendak bit of animation?  Not hardly!  Then I started watching this and the memories . . . oh the memories . . .

Those memories just keep on coming back.  Probably the only time you’ll hear Jim Henson’s voice (as Bumble at the end) voice a Sendak character too.  Thanks to Mr. Schu for the link.

More of this please.  More, I say.  MORE!!!

Big time thanks to 0 Comments on Video Sunday: Too bad his duck is so crazy as of 1/1/1900