Thousands of items belonging to the charismatic Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, from manuscripts of his band’s biggest hits to furniture, paintings and knick-knacks are currently on auction in London.
Among the highlights of the Sotheby’s “evening sale,” which will be followed by two other live auctions and three online sales, is Mercury’s piano.
The Yamaha quarter-tail piano was bought by Mercury in 1975 and was used to create almost all of his greatest songs.
Photo: AFP
It is expected to sell for between ￡2 million and ￡3 million (US$2.5 million and US$3.75 million).
Also on sale is the original manuscript for epic hit Bohemian Rhapsody, whose 15 pages of pencil and ballpoint pen remarks reveal the different directions Mercury envisaged for the track.
It also reveals that it was originally going to be called Mongolian Rhapsody.
Photo: AFP
Paintings by Chagall, Dali and Picasso that adorned Mercury’s home, as well as the last painting he bought a month before his death from AIDS in 1991 — an oil on canvas by James Jacques Joseph Tissot — will also go under the hammer.
AUCTION FAN
All the items for sale are from Mercury’s home, Garden Lodge, in west London. The property’s green door, covered in fan graffiti, is one of the lots.
The entire collection is being offered for sale by Mary Austin, a close friend and one-time fiancee of Mercury’s.
“Mary Austin has lived with the collection and has cared for the collection for more than three decades,” said Gabriel Heaton, a books and manuscripts specialist at Sotheby’s.
Mercury “was not interested in having a museum of his life but he loved auctions,” to the point of being a regular at Sotheby’s sales, said Heaton.
Austin believes the artist — who was 45 when he died — would have “loved” this sale, he added.
Some 1,469 lots will go under the hammer at the famous London auction house, whose facade has been decorated with a huge moustache for the occasion. Many reveal another side of Mercury, including his passion for cats and for Japan — as evidenced by his collection of kimonos and prints.
MOUSTACHE COMB
Mercury’s most flamboyant stage costumes, Hawaiian shirt and Superman tank top will also find new homes along with his personal polaroids and legendary snapper Mick Rock’s shots.
The finest bottles from his cellar, such as Dom Perignon champagne, will be up for grabs alongside more intimate items, such as a book of personally annotated poetry and a moustache comb.
Among the more playful items are a set of games including travel Scrabble, at which Mercury excelled.
Before the sale, the auction house hosted the collection at a month-long exhibition, open to the public free of charge. Sotheby’s estimated when the auction was announced in April that the lots would fetch at least ￡6 million. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Mercury Phoenix Trust and the Elton John Aids Foundation, two organizations involved in the fight against AIDS. Sotheby’s says it is the largest collection, by volume, of a cultural icon to go to auction since the Elton John sale in 1988, when 2,000 lots sold for a total of ￡4.8 million.
Anyone who has been to Alishan (阿里山) is familiar with the railroad there: one line comes up from Chiayi City past the sacred tree site, while another line goes up to the sunrise viewing platform at Zhushan (祝山). Of course, as a center of logging operations for over 60 years, Alishan did have more rail lines in the past. Are any of these still around? Are they easily accessible? Are they worth visiting? The answer to all three of these questions is emphatically: Yes! One of these lines ran from Alishan all the way up to the base of Jade Mountain. Its
The only geopolitical certainty is that massive change is coming. Three macro trends are only just starting to accelerate, forming a very disruptive background to an already unsettled future. One is that technological transformations exponentially more consequential and rapid than anything prior are in their infancy, and will play out like several simultaneous industrial revolutions. ROBOT REVOLUTION It is still early days, but impacts are starting to be felt. Just yesterday, this line appeared in an article: “To meet demands at Foxconn, factory planners are building physical AI-powered robotic factories with Omniverse and NVIDIA AI.” In other words, they used AI
Last month historian Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published an opinion piece in the New York Times with suggestions for an “America First” foreign policy for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Of course China and Taiwan received a mention. “Under presidents Trump and Biden,” Wertheim contends, “the world’s top two powers have descended into open rivalry, with tensions over Taiwan coming to the fore.” After complaining that Washington is militarizing the Taiwan issue, he argues that “In truth, Beijing has long proved willing to tolerate the island’s self-rule so long as Taiwan does not declare independence
Big changes are afoot in global politics, which that are having a big impact on the global order, look set to continue and have the potential to completely reshape it. In my previous column we examined the three macro megatrends impacting the entire planet: Technology, demographics and climate. Below are international trends that are social, political, geopolitical and economic. While there will be some impact on Taiwan from all four, it is likely the first two will be minor, but the second two will likely change the course of Taiwan’s history. The re-election of Donald Trump as president of the US
RSS