Monumental Vibrations
Ryan Knighton
pp. 16-18
The website for the John Cage Project offers detailed information about the composer, the composition, the instrument, and the medieval monastery in which this miraculous performance is taking place over 639 years. Visitors can listen to the haunting hum of the current note, take a virtual tour of St. Buchardi church, and trace the history of the project from 1036, when the cornerstone for the church was set in Halberstadt.
Ryan Knighton’s journey to Halberstadt is the subject of the forthcoming documentary As Slow as Possible. A website for the film features a photo of Ryan with his young guide, Justus, and an extended trailer that follows Ryan from Vancouver to the doorstep of the German church.
Probe Knighton’s “Private Bits” and “Propaganda” at his quirky website. By way of introduction, see the article originally published in the Globe and Mail that begins, “I’ve been going blind for fifteen years now. That’s serious procrastination, true to my slacker ethic.”
If Knighton’s sightless journey sparked your imagination, try Jason Roberts’s A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Roberts, a contributor to the Village Voice and McSweeney’s, tells the story of James Holman, a 19th-century naval officer who lost his sight in his twenties but went on to become a professional travel writer. Peppered with offbeat characters and engaging prose, Holman’s adventures through Africa, Siberia, and China make for compelling reading.
Lords of the Lobby
Margo Pfeiff
pp. 18-22
More than simple bellhops or doormen, concierges have a long and storied history that dates back to the Middle Ages. Quebec’s Merici International Concierge Institute has posted a brief account of the evolution of this “grand tradition.” For a more anecdotal treatment of the subject, read Henry Nicolaides’s Concierge Confidential (Victoria, Australia: Pennon Publishing, 2002), in which the author dishes on the secret lives of those passing through the Rydges Melbourne Hotel. In French director Jean Girauld’s 1973 farce, La Concierge, leading man Bernard Le Coq plays an intellectual, sexually-driven university graduate who becomes an apartment concierge after he rescues — and beds — one of the building’s tenants.
For those considering entering the profession, a good primer is McDowell Bryson and Adele Ziminski’s The Concierge: Keys to Hospitality (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1992). The training manual includes chapters on concierge culture in the US and Europe as well as on technical aspects of the trade, such as “The Hotel and Its Management: How the Concierge Helps Other Departments” and “The Concierge Desk: Location and Design.” The unsatisfied dilettante might also follow up with a reading of Holly Stiel and Delta Collins’s Ultimate Service: The Complete Handbook to the World of Concierges (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994). Perhaps, though, a four-star hotel would provide the better education. Locate a concierge savant near you on the Clef d’Or website.
