RAY MANZAREK OF THE DOORS!

Raymond Daniel Manczarek, Jr., known as Ray Manzarek (February 12, 1939 – ∞)  was an American musician, singer, producer, film director, and author, best known as a founding member and keyboardist of The Doors from 1965 to 1973. He was a co-founding member of Nite City from 1977 to 1978, and of Manzarek-Krieger from 2001 to his death. Manzarek died on May 20, 2013. May he rest in peace and his brillian music live forever!

From left to right Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger

Ray Manzarek was one of the most individual and influential musicians in rock history. In a genre dominated by guitars, his sinuous, rhythmic, weaving keyboards, replete with jazzy flourishes, Gothic arpeggios and colourful splashes, provided the rich, fluid, ever-expanding backdrop to the greatest American rock band of the Sixties, perhaps of all time. 

                      'The music lives on. It may be a cliché but that doesn’t make it any less true.'

Manzarek was both the root of The Doors sound and its highest, wildest branches, providing slinky, funky bass with his left hand and noodly, hypnotic, surging, flowing, melodic and rhythmic adornment with his right. He was a dazzling musician, certainly, but he was a lot more than that – a bespectacled, thoughtful intellectual who approached rock music as he approached life, as a vehicle for self-exploration and higher possibility.

The Doors were a finely balanced group, one of those special units where every member counts, even if they are chiefly remembered now for the beautiful, brilliant, tragic Jim Morrison, the shamanistic frontman who established some of the abiding myths of rock and roll, a wayward, poetic archetype for living fast, and burning bright. 

                                              'The Doors should be taught in schools.'

That rather prosaic band name was actually a reference to Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception, itself drawn from a quotation by William Blake. Morrison effectively lived by Blake’s dangerous notion that the road to excess leads to the gates of wisdom. Sadly, wastefully, what he found there was alcoholism, heroin use and death at 27. Morrison’s self-destruction brought a premature end to a phenomenal musical unit while ensuring their immortality as symbols of rock’s dangerous power for both transcendence and destruction. Today, The Doors are almost celebrated more as an idea than a band but they left behind a lot of astonishing

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THE LOOK: MR GUILLAUME NÉRY!

Mr Guillaume Néry has some impressive statistics to his name. Take seven minutes and 42 seconds. That's the length of time that the French world champion freediver can hold his breath underwater. "I'm not a specialist," he deadpans. "To be truthful, I find holding my breath in a swimming pool quite boring. 

''You feel as if you are visiting another world, like you're going somewhere that nobody has ever been. It's very peaceful.''

Or how about 123m? That's how far below the surface of the ocean he has swum on a single breath. His chosen discipline, "constant weight" - the name referring to the fact that while swimming aids such as fins are allowed, diving weights are not - is the sport's prestige event, and Mr Néry's personal best, longer than a soccer pitch and a mere three metres shy of the world record, is a figure that marks him out as one of the biggest stars of the freediving world.

And there's one last number: 13.7 million. That's how many views his short film, Free Fall, has amassed on YouTube - an impressive total by anyone's standards. Created in 2010, the film is an underwater take on base jumping that sees Mr Néry dive headlong into the darkness of a 200m sinkhole in the Bahamas. It's an inspired idea, filmed to surreally beautiful effect by his wife and fellow diver, Ms Julie Gautier. As he falls through the water in apparent slow motion Mr Néry passes through "clouds" of suspended sand, and his hair is gently swept back as if by a gust of wind. "You feel as if you are visiting another world," he says of the experience, "like you're going somewhere that nobody has ever been. It's very peaceful. 

It's this ethereal, almost dreamlike state that Mr Néry and Ms Gautier endeavour to capture in their film-making. "We're trying to show people the beauty of the elements, of the water; the poetry, and not just the performance," he explains. And, by doing just that, he has boosted the profile of his sport in a way that a set of impressive statistics never could. 

MR PORTER met Mr Néry on a beautiful spring day in Cannes - just west of Nice, where he lives with his wife and daughter - to try out some carefree looks for summer. Check the gallery, below , to see what happened. 

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BLURRED LINES!

Have a productive week brothas!

MARIO TESTINO ROYALE: A LOOK INSIDE THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S L.A. HOME!

Channeling his Peruvian roots, the iconic lensman transformed a Los Angeles hacienda into a vibrant showcase for his aesthetic—and now captures the results with his own camera.

Mario Testino grew up in Lima, Peru, an endlessly intriguing city of brooding conquistador-era palaces and leafy suburbs surrounded by hills and lapped by the crashing Pacific. Here he disported himself with fellow gilded youths and partied in the grand, sequestered houses of the well-to-do. In these sprawling homes he absorbed the uniquely Peruvian approach to decor, reflective of the country’s layered history, with naïf seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of los arcángeles peering down on roomscapes crowded with colonial silver plates, the huacos artifacts of the Incas, and a jostle of imposing dark Spanish-inspired furniture and sleek mid-century design statements.

More pictures and the rest of the article after the break! 

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TRY TO GET LUCKY, RIGHT?

11:15 minutes of my favourite song this season!