Prepare to have your mind blown. Are you sitting down? Turn up your speakers and have a glass of booze if you roll that way, or meth and oxy and booze – whatever chills you down.
Martha Argerich playing difficult music on a piano when I was 3 and she was 20:
Notice something at 0:40? Yeah. No sheet music. Argerich’s notable for memorizing 30+ minute concertos.
She also is fluent in something like 8 languages, which, I suppose is helpful because she’s traveled the world playing piano and being interviewed. I wonder how many times she has been asked the same questions, and what they are?
I’m not a pianist, so I don’t understand what I’m looking at a lot of the time. But there’s something – a je ne sais quoi about Argerich’s hand-work that is kind of playful. It’s as if she knows the music so well (and I guess she does) that she’s got time to get a bit showy. I’m not even sure what ‘showy’ would mean, in the context of playing 35-minute piano concertos from memory, but it’s a bit showy.
That’s not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is that she’s been doing this all along. She still performs. She still does a 30-minute Chopin sonata from memory. And she turned 80 last summer.
Single-handed, she helps offset the shittiness of the world. As a consquence of her producing nearly 60 years of performances there is enough material by her on youtube that you can take a couple of days and just catch the highlights.
I’m trying not to dwell on the general shittiness of everything, because I’m pretty sure we’re all unhappy with certain things that are happening in the world. But, hey, did you see that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has re-booted the F-35 program? Now everyone is going, “must have next-gen warplanes!” which maybe makes sense except the maintenance costs are astronomical.
Absolutely lovely.
I saw Brubeck in concert when he was in his eighties, and while I just coasted along with the music most of the time, the best part of the concert was realizing that Dave, after playing some of the same tunes for over fifty years, was still interested in them.
During another players solo’s Dave would stand up and listen, and laugh when he heard something new, and even play it back when he had the lead again.
I don’t know how many times Brubeck had played “Take Five” or “Unsquare Dance”, but it never got old for him. He could always find something new.
Sometimes my work reminds me of Lord Dunsany’s short tale, “The Songless Country” found in the collection, The Food of Death – Fifty-One Tales. I need more music in my life. Thanks for sharing.
Why would they be saying that, when drones have clearly come of age and are dominating the current war?
The drone operators who halted Russian convoy headed for Kyiv
Reginald Selkirk @2, wrote,
Who knew that the military-industrial complex would eliminate itself by developing cheap, disposable, replacements for aircraft?
Defense-Contractor 1, “Quick, we need to make these drones more expensive! They are ruining our profit margins!”
Defense-Contractor 2, “How about we put pilots into them?”
Yeah, I know, it’s just a fantasy.
Marcus:
Are you testing whether we are paying attention? ;-)
1965-1941 != 20
Piano Drone
“Argerich’s notable for memorizing 30+ minute concertos.”
Bah, sheet music is for tyros. Both The Illiad and The Odyssey were performed from memory for millenia. Jacques Pepin only cooked from written recipes after he had become the chef at the French equivalent of the White House and had been requested by an official (not the President of France) to serve him rare dishes. Good stage actors can recite you hours of the plays they have performed decades after their last performance. Even I can deliver most of the ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech from Julius Caeser that I memorized almost a half century ago.
OT, I know Marcus you are interested in Chernobyl — did you see this?
“Energoatom said Thursday that the Russian decision to reallocate forces was influenced in part by soldiers’ contact with radiation from the site and resultant symptoms, which sparked concerns. ” — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/russia-ukraine-war-live-updates-biden-could-announce-major-release-n1293717#ncrd1293757
One of the things that used to annoy/amuse one of my friends at uni was when he’d quote the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in some context or other, and I’d correct him. And he’d know I was right. So one day he tested me, with the book in his hand, starting with the opening monologue.
Ford and Arthur were on the Heart of Gold before he picked me up on something, and that was mostly because I didn’t know how to properly pronounce “petit four”, because I didn’t know what one was. The memory is a wonderful thing. It’s just a shame I put mine to such a useless… use.
flex@3:
Asimov: The Feeling of Power.
But I’m guessing you already know that.
On topic of @2, @3 …: Sci-fi film can look dated pretty quickly, but I’d put my money on steepest … dt/dt (if you see what I mean) with Oblivion: why-oh-why-oh-why does Mr. Cruise actually sit in the helicopter thing? (I know, because plot etc), but for robotics nerds, it looks so, … 60’s?
Reginald Selkirk @2: If your point is that drones can replace fighters, I’d love to see your reasoning. The question is “are there things a fighter can do that a drone can’t do?”. Not a military expert by any means, but I’m guessing the answer is a resounding “duh”. And if you do need fighters, it’s preferable that they be at least as good as the other guy’s.
@11 Have you not gotten past the “make shit up and pretend my opponent said it so I can argue against it”stage? The technical term for that is a ‘strawman fallacy’ and you should be ashamed of yourself.
@12: Please tell me what I’m making up. You questioned anyone saying “must have next-gen warplanes” because of the ‘coming of age’ of drones. If you can’t explain yourself, just admit it like a grown-up.
Thank you for the awesomesauce and the beauty Marcus. A fine end to Women’s History Month and something my mother who was born today would have loved.
I learned how to play piano and part of learning how to play it was not only brain-memorizing works but installing those things deep into your finger memory. Page turners are there for symphonic works with pianos mostly to let everyone else know what page the piano player is on and so the piano player can synch with the orchetstra herself.
Her fingerwork playing looks exactly correct in the way you are supposed to play that I never did quite get. What looks fun to you in the first vid this is POWER and PRECISION, which she totally the heck has goddamn. Chopin was said to be a more delicate pianist and she does more of that in the second video.
Or y’know she plays with her lips and her shoulders so it could be the French in you. :) She does a little bit of the lips and shoulder things in the earlier video but is trying to suppress them back when because “you aren’t supposed ta”. At eighty she wears heels that are much easier to pedal with (men are not allowed, some heel helps), is no longer trying to be Argentine with a capital A, and she no longer gives any fuck.
@13 What do I have to explain? You are the one propagating fallacies.
I have not agreed that that is the question. YOU are stating that it is THE question, without any input from me. Are there no other questions? If I were a bleephole like you, I could construe that as your support for biological and chemical weapons (they can do things that other weapons cannot do). I could point to cost-benefit. I could do all kinds of things that would not be a concession that you have accurately identified THE question in choice of weapon systems.
seachange@#14:
she no longer gives any fuck.
I think she has transcended the fuck.
Rob Grigjanis@#11:
I’m going to dig into your comment exchange with Reginald, since it’s a good case study that may shed some light on commenting interactions between you/Reginald, you/me, and almost certainly you/others.
Reginald Selkirk@#2 writes:
Why would they be saying that, when drones have clearly come of age and are dominating the current war?
And you reply@#11:
If your point is that drones can replace fighters, I’d love to see your reasoning
That comes off as a bit aggro, especially since you appear to have more or less completely missed Reginald’s point. Reginald’s point, as I interpreted it, is exactly what they say: “drones have clearly come of age and are dominating the current war” they’re not talking about air superiority, they’re talking about that drones have demonstrated their utility as a tactical surveillance tool with a limited but serious strike capability. I’m pretty sure that Reginald, who is normally quite articulate, would have been capable of writing something like, “now that drones have demonstrated they can achieve tactical air superiority…” – which is what they did not write.
But that’s the assumption you jumped off to, which appears to be that they were claiming something completely different and you then proceed to launch a weak/inept attack on that premise. It’s especially embarrassing since your tone in your initial comment is kinda “gotcha snark” as though you caught Reginald in an embarrassing mistake when, in fact, you’re not just barking up the wrong tree – you’re in the wrong forest.
Reginald Selkirk@#12:
Have you not gotten past the “make shit up and pretend my opponent said it so I can argue against it”stage? The technical term for that is a ‘strawman fallacy’ and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Reginald calls you out on it (as I have, when you’ve done similar to me) and I’ve got to agree – it looks a lot as though you jump from A to C without passing B, in order to construct a hypothetical dishonest claim or missed point that you can post a snarky comment about. Perhaps you were raised to think that that’s how smart people engage with others, but – in case you still have that delusion – you’re probably wrong on all accounts. A more rational approach, if you think a comment like Selkirk’s is sketchy (which I still don’t) would be to ask, “what do you mean?” and not try to score wiseass points, because the way you’re doing it now you just collect negative wiseass scores.
In a similar comment-thread over at PZ’s, you pulled similar shit on me: mis-characterized something I said and then stridently declared that I’m wrong about nearly everything I choose to pontificate on. Given that you’re usually the person jumping after the wrong tree, that’s the kind of claim I think you should re-assess; it seems to me that you’re just misunderstanding people, not asking for clarification, and firing your snark in the wrong direction. Remember – this is a public blog; most of us (including me) aren’t going to give a shit when you do that, we’re just going to file you under “ignorable” and wait for you to go away.
Rob Grigjanis@#13:
Please tell me what I’m making up. You questioned anyone saying “must have next-gen warplanes” because of the ‘coming of age’ of drones. If you can’t explain yourself, just admit it like a grown-up.
I don’t see anything about next-gen warplanes in this comment thread, and it was pretty obvious from the link Reginald posted that was entitled “The drone operators who halted Russian convoy headed for Kyiv” that they were not talking about air superiority.
I think what happened is that you mistook Reginald’s comment for a continuation of a discussion from elsewhere, and your mistake led you to believe that you could score a few rhetorical points on Reginald based on his comment. That’s kind of obnoxious behavior – this is not a game where people compete to win or lose – it should be more like a friendly discussion. Coming in and basically accusing people of intellectual dishonesty over your mistake isn’t friendly, it’s just stupid so please stop.