Ailing Cleveland

In 1893, Grover Cleveland - the US President commonly remembered as little more than the only Commander in Chief to serve two terms that weren't consecutive - disappeared for five days, having boarded a friend's yacht and not returned to shore. Though his term coincided with a burgeoning era of American journalism (in volume, if not universally in accuracy), standards being as they were at the time, his prolonged absence wasn't considered terribly unusual, and the official excuse of a leisurely fishing expedition marked by the extraction of a bad tooth was taken at face value. In fact, Cleveland was aboard that yacht for a then-pioneering surgery to remove a cancerous growth from the roof of his mouth. It had been decided that the surgery had to take place in secret to preserve national faith in the recently-reelected Cleveland - and by extension, the economy, which was faltering under the weight of railroad bankruptcies and a crisis over the question of a Silver Standard. (Oral cancer was a particularly touchy subject for the contemporary American public as it had recently killed Ulysses S. Grant, following an extended battle that had been covered with morbid curiosity in all the country's newspapers.) The story was broken by a single reporter, E.J. Edwards, who would face lasting repercussions for his journalistic daring.

This story is covered in The President is a Sick Man, an outstanding book by Matthew Algeo. The narrative is written in a compulsively entertaining fashion, making for presumably the most entertaining history yet written of an otherwise forgotten President. The book also does an excellent job of providing a succinct, detailed explanation of factors that contributed to the cover-up - Grant's death, and especially the Free Silver movement - and the evolution of modern medicine. The latter is particularly appropriate, given not only the stature of the patient, but the extremely complicated nature of the surgery itself. Despite being only a handful of years removed from the advent of antiseptic surgery, the skilled medical team managed to leave a wound that healed quickly even by modern standards, and to craft an adequate prosthesis to leave Cleveland's speech and appearance (relatively) unchanged by the radical alteration in the shape of his mouth. Cleveland's cancer was also never known to recur: certainly, it never reappeared in his mouth, and though he was too fat to check for certain using the diagnostic tools of the age, his eventual death (15 years later!) was not suspected to be related to cancer metastasized from his mouth. Of course, this alone led interested doctors to question for years the nature of his tumor. The questions were finally answered in March 1980, when studies on the preserved remains of the tumor were published in Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Cleveland was found to have had verrucous carcinoma, a comparatively benign cancer that rarely metastasizes, but one that would have restricted his eating and breathing if left untended. The doctors were thus posthumously found to have been precisely right in their choice of treatment - a fitting cap to an already remarkable feat. The study itself, published by John Brooks, Horatio Enterline, and Gonzalo Aponte, is incredibly difficult to track down, online or otherwise. When I wrote to ask him if he knew where I could find a copy, Mr. Algeo was kind enough to scan all 26 pages and email them to me. On the off-chance that anyone else on the internet was looking, and with any luck to save him the trouble of sending them again, the article can be downloaded here.

U2 - "Please"

In 1997, U2 released Pop, the band's ninth studio album and a continuation of the electronic influence that had defined its sound since the beginning of the decade. Unlike its predecessors, which had been huge critical and commercial successes, Pop fell flat. The production values that had made Achtung Baby and Zooropa such exciting records here lacked the same resonance, and perhaps partly in consequence, most of the album came off as uninspired - a term which for better or worse had never applied to U2 before. Over time it was revealed that Pop had been produced under enormous time constraints and that none of the band members had been satisfied with the final product, even prior to the critical drubbing. Tinkering with the better songs on the album continued well after the release date, both in studios, where the band's career-long fascination with remixes would pay handsome dividends, and onstage, during the infamously elaborate PopMart Tour. Ultimately, many of these songs would only reveal their true caliber in live performances, and many of the resultant recordings were released along with singles from the album.

One such example is the single release Please, which includes fine live recordings of "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "With or Without You," but centers around material from Pop. The CD ends with a live rendition of "Staring at the Sun," which substitutes its clunky in-studio sound for a stripped-down acoustic duet between Bono and The Edge that enhances its previously obscured emotional depth. The true highlight, though, comes from the title track. "Please" was surely one of Pop's strongest tracks, benefiting, in addition to quality songwriting, from an unobtrusive studio production that's retained in the cut that leads off the single. The song, a denunciation of ongoing sanctimony and violence in the fight for Irish autonomy, builds up to a crescendo over the course of its five minute duration, and was allowed to do so in an unassuming way that suits its earnest lyrics. The live version that follows it (see below) is nonetheless a considerable improvement. Bono turns in an appropriately less understated vocal, which comes completely unhinged at the end of the track and speaks to the mounting frustration at the refusal to compromise on both sides of the dispute, in addition to the mounting civilian casualties. Even more effective is Larry Mullen Jr.'s reprisal of the iconic martial drumbeat from "Sunday Bloody Sunday" midway through the song - it not only points ahead to the return to basics that the band would adopt for their next album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, but in invoking an protest song released nearly 15 years earlier, also offers an unsettling reflection on the inevitable cycling of history and war. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, U2 would decide the song was no longer appropriate to play. Nonetheless, Please offers compelling evidence of how good the band could be even at the lowest point of their career, and is perhaps the best place to start for Pop-era material.

Ernst Reijseger - "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

Werner Herzog's 2011 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams was rightfully released to near-universal critical acclaim. It's a lushly filmed portrait of the miraculously well-preserved cave paintings found in a French cave that was hermetically sealed millennia ago by a landslide, peppered with just enough of Herzog's typical eccentrics to lend the film flavor (including a perfumer who seeks out hidden caves in the countryside by smell). Somewhat lost in the mix was the amazing score for the movie, composed and in part performed by Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger. Even for the score of a frequently silent movie, Reijseger's music is an integral part of the film's appeal. Throughout, he contrasts soaring choral parts with the resounding bass of his cello (specially created to support an extra low F string), creating precisely the ethereal sound necessary to accompany a trip that literally carries you back twenty-five to thirty-two thousand years in time. The wordless sound of human voices adds to the peculiar humanity of the individuals who occupied the cave - and they truly are individuals, from a hand-painter with a noticeably crooked pinkie to a child accompanied or followed into the cave by a wolf. Like the film itself, Reijseger's score was inexplicably passed over for an Academy Award nomination, but luckily an extensive soundtack - 73 minutes of music from a 90 minute film - is available here. Herzog also devoted the DVD's only special feature to the music, a 40 minute short film entitled Ode to the Dawn of Man that documents the recording of the soundtrack. You can see an excerpt below, featuring Reijseger and organist Harmen Fraanje performing "Shadow."