...and Delilah, too, may be Samson.

[samsonisdelilah]

My wife said it beautifully one day, 'when you change limitations to opportunities, everything changes.' We are always told at 25 this has to happen, by 30 this has to happen, at 40 this will happen. It's a thing which is told to us constantly, whether it is sport or life, whether it is marriage, having kids, whatever it may be. But when you change that into opportunities, then the limitations go away.

-Rohan Bopanna, on becoming AO '24 men's doubles champion (oldest GS winner)

[samsonisdelilah]

To have the audacity to question somebody's self-identification and replace it with your own - that's ridiculous. You are not progressive.

Tyla, South African performer on American uproar over her choice to describe herself as "coloured"

[samsonisdelilah]

[H]ow do you vaccinate yourself against failure? One way is to court it. Use irony. Try without really trying. I’m not the only one I know who grew up doing this. Dancing around awkwardness is something we do. We are vigorously, pain­fully, self-aware, princesses waiting to call out the pea under the mattress. Look at all those earnest people throughout history! Hip­pies, flappers, Napoleon! Look how idiotic they were! We would never look so stupid, unless it was on purpose. We call attention to awkwardness as soon as it flares up so we can’t be accused of being oblivious. We keep announcing to the world how little we’ve studied so we can’t be called dumb. We put ourselves down before others can get the chance. Whenever any­thing seems like it’s on the verge of becoming earnest, we come blasting out with snark. Don’t be too earnest. Don’t look like you care. Then you’re vul­nerable. Life is full of opportunities for rejection, and if you start really trying, you’re going to start really failing. Hard. And it’ll hurt. So we put on dopey glasses and grimace so no one can tell us we’re not pretty. We drink lousy beer so no one can accuse us of having bad taste. We look stupid on purpose out of fear of looking stupid by accident. We don’t even try to dance. Anything to post­pone the moment when we are actually going to have to stand up, put ourselves out there, and be told it’s not good enough. The result of all these carefully assembled layers of irony? We get to feel that, if we look like idiots, it’s because we meant to. That we never failed, because we never actually tried. They never saw the real us, lurking inside, the ones who could have done it, if they’d wanted to. But after a point that’s a pretty thin satisfaction. And the trade-off is brutal. You never get to know if you would have made it or not. Maybe you wouldn’t have looked stupid. Maybe you’d have been incredible.

Alexandra Petri, A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

[happifying-things]

📷 by miss_poppet_the_samoyed

[samsonisdelilah]

Which one of these is not like the others?

[samsonisdelilah]

Holding self-righteous political opinions, for which you've paid no personal cost, does not give you the moral high ground.

James Damore (author of the “Google diversity memo”)

[samsonisdelilah]

He found song where others find formula; he conveyed song where others play scales.

The Los Angeles Times, on András Schiff

[samsonisdelilah]

The essence of a bear is that a bear is gonna bear.

The Original A-plus Bear

[samsonisdelilah]

Tickling Like Cat Whiskers

Positive-recurrent memories might just be those connected via gossamer marionette strings to the amygdala; a pseudorandom tug, and the tension in those threads reawakens, asking, “Do you wish to be puppeteered anew?  (For free will is so tiring (and oh darling, you look so very very tired)….)” And old paths are ravishingly familiar; even the metallic whiff of stale blood upon the jagged rocks that litter it, you recognize as none but your own. There exists some nondeterministic bipartite matching between past failures and present weakness; and in a rough-enough momentary stumble, ghosts of old tendencies call out beguilingly, in silky whispers, deceptively gentle at first, tickling like cat whiskers, finessing latent long-conquered cravings back into raging wakefulness.  For it is only fools who believe in immaculate exorcisms, in unimpeachable victories over peculiarly entrenched and ineluctable pathologies. Run, cat, run!—you with your nimble little paws; for you have only so much sprightliness per life, while interest on debts of gratitude compounds superexponentially, and mistakes are leaden albatrosses that accumulate, as if in the Fates’ cold ring-toss game, one by one ‘round your neck…till you wear a wreath of regrets that, given one errant step, wrings you dry.  And leaves you one life decremented, one spirit closer to shattered, and one set of foibles more securely enthroned.

[samsonisdelilah]

The [Chinese Communist Party] knows it needs lawyers; it wants them for economic development.  But essentially, the party would like lawyers to behave like dentists, like technicians.  I admire dentists very much, but I don't expect them to annunciate the values of my society.

Jerome Cohen, on the disappearance of (human rights) lawyers in China

Also--having cadres of lawyers for the purposes of “rule by law” (by decree), rather than the rule of law.

[samsonisdelilah]

Life is capable of driving you out of your mind. The way it all comes down these days, it’s some kind of miracle if you’re not insane. People have become separated from their bodies. They are no longer whole. ... And they behave badly. Their egos run wild; they become motivated by that which will eventually give them a massive stroke.

Henry Rollins, “Iron and the Soul”

[cloudthesamoyed]

Big Floff Inspection

[samsonisdelilah]

“Now, where did that thing go again???”

Me, all day, erryday.  Disorganized doggo people problems.

[samsonisdelilah]

I worked harder than anyone around me, and I worked alone a lot. I didn't care about accolades or people saying you're working really hard. I did it for myself.

Claressa Shields

A mentality that could always be owned better.

Because only then can you say, “I knew I had checked my boxes. All of them. I knew I had it...it was just about going out there and doing it, those last little 10 steps.“

[beautiful-wildlife]

Be Different by © Mohammed AlNaser

Cheetah, Masai Mara, Kenya

[samsonisdelilah]

Rushing headlong into.................!!

Life, y u do dis 2 me?

[samsonisdelilah]

There are wonderful large halls, but in general I think most music for solo piano is not meant for big halls.  It was meant to be played in a small hall, and sometimes in a very small space, indeed.  I have my own private theories that some music was not meant to be played for other people, even.  It was only meant for the player.  Bach’s solo cello pieces, for example, like the Bach fugues, are meant really to be played and to be experienced by being played and to be listened to, but not to be performed.  In some ways there’s a certain amount of music that lets us experience it if it’s at its best and can be captured; there’s almost no outward component of being presented at all, but you experience the music as you play it and people hear it, but it’s not a performance. ~~~ For me, piano playing rarely registers or radiates a joy of, “Isn’t it marvelous to be playing the instrument?”  It’s always more serious than that; there’s always something else involved, which maybe is as it should be….There’s a certain joy of doing it, and it even enters into the music itself.  But far too often one does also hear people who are carried away by their own fluency and, “Love me, love my sound.”  That is really more of a problem in music-making — people who are not attentive enough to music, and hear only themselves in the mirror of the instrument.  But the other thing is really important, too.

Richard Goode

I had a terrible time with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 1 the first time I played it.  Probably it was because as an angsty teen, I didn’t find nearly enough Sturm und Drang in it; and because I had been indulged with late Beethoven sonatas–along with a good deal of stuff from bona fide Romantic repertoire–before encountering it.  I just couldn’t be bothered.  Not enough technical fireworks, not enough drama…it bored me to tears.  I didn’t even think it sounded good.

I revisited it a few months back, when flipping through my volumes of Beethoven (and dreaming of another life when I’ll have enough talent and big enough hands to play the Hammerklavier–well), and was surprised at the density of pencil markings and comments on the pages.  All the stuff I just…refused to do.  And now…I just don’t know why.

Sure, it’s not as stylistically “transgressive” or technically demanding as late Beethoven works, but Sonata No. 1 is actually beautiful.  The way the Mannheim rocket dovetails with the sweet counterpoint in the exposition, and how the motif from that counterpoint is echoed in the development before being reworked in the recap (above*)….  It asks to be played with care and conscientiousness and love.  And perhaps above all, it asks to be listened to.

Among the comments on my busy-looking score is “elegant” (my teacher didn’t have the most inventive English, though recalling her words doesn’t do justice to all she was able to convey).  She was, well…the kind of person who would find “elegance” where others would not; but here, I think it’s fundamentally not about elegance.  I think it’s about a certain chasteness, a certain purity–i.e., what I most admire in Bach.  There is something prayerful in its seeming simplicity.  Those meditative snippets juxtaposed with the fierier sections (which in Beethoven I always like to infuse with perhaps more bite than is justified)–they are a window into how one might talk to God, when all alone.

IIRC, S once pooh-poohed Beethoven as being “melodramatic”.  Even if I disagree, I can understand the sentiment (so I forgive you, S).  But this is perhaps where the difference between early and late Beethoven comes in.  I also messed around with Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 2 a few months ago, and after realizing that I actually hadn’t heard it in years, dug out my reference, Szeryng.  I was surprised and honestly a little affronted by the romanticism in the Andante–there was an overstated warmth, a lushness that seemed out of place.  Certainly, it wasn’t nearly as offensive as Hilary Hahn’s take, which had a richness that telegraphed, “I want to be playing Brahms”, and made me want to hurl.  But Szeryng’s made me think of (a tasteful rendition of) the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique.

Yes, that’s a piece I sometimes pull out when I’m emo (in private), and I think it’s not quite fair to Beethoven that it has become “clichéd emo movie theme song”–but while I think many interpretations of it are overwrought, the sadness in it isn’t exactly meant to be understated.  It is a “the tears flow; I let them” sort of sadness–cantabile at its heart; whereas in the Andante of Bach’s Sonata No. 2, the mournfulness is of a very quiet and collected and sober sort.  It very much makes me think of a heartbeat–of a solitary walk in the forest (as Beethoven was purportedly wont to partake in, incidentally), where it’s quiet enough to hear your own heartbeat (and footsteps)…and where, in your sadness, that is all you want and need to hear.  In it there’s a clarity that is both humbling and uplifting.  And we glimpse it in some early Beethoven, like Piano Sonata No. 1.

I haven’t found any renditions of this piece that I love, aside from Richard Goode’s–the lyricism is there, without compromising the agitato undercurrent where it’s present.  I’ve never performed it, but I think it’ll be a piece I keep to myself, something I add to my collection of personal meditations.

*99% sure my score has staccatos in many of the places where that has staccatissimos.  The latter looks excessive, but then again, I’m inclined to play them thus, anyway.

[antigonick]

What are we made of but hunger and rage?

Anne Carson, excerpt of To Compostela (via antigonick)

Too much, yet not enough.

[samsonisdelilah]

It is well established that evidence of purpose beyond the face of the challenged law may be considered in evaluating Establishment and Equal Protection Clause claims.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, re: Trump’s Muslim ban

Amen.  Justice shall die another day.

[nichtdaslicht]

[samsonisdelilah]

Well, that’s a rather convoluted explanation of R^4....

(Why are humanities people so prone to thinking that complexity implies sophistication?  A really tangly knot between your shoelaces probably means...you didn’t know how to tie them correctly.)