[Note to my 'note' yesterday- To be clear, the 'break' that I am taking is from daily blog postings. I will, in all likelihood, continue posting things as the spirit moves. Here's hoping you'll stay with me and as always, please let me know what's on YOUR mind. Please don't stop listening to the music! Ciao.]
. . . There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period. - Brene Brown
(from Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx)
". . . Being at liberty again, I gave this serious consideration. I asked Chico what he could do to break me into his field. I couldn't have asked him at a better time. He was then working at a beer garden in Yorkville but he had just been asked to play in a nickelodeon across that street, where the piano player, a kid named George Gershwin, had been fired because customers complained his music hurt their ears. . . "
[Note: this will be my penultimate blog, for now. After 12 years of daily consecutive blogging, I intend to take a break, take stock, catch up on other things, and then who knows what?}
(from Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx) ". . . It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of becoming Americans. Every Irish kid who made a Jewish kid knock under was made to say "Uncle" by an Italian, who got his lumps from a German kid, who got his insides kicked out by his old man for street fighting and then went out and beat up an Irish kid to heal his wounds. "I'll teach you!" was the threat they passed along, Irish to Jew to Italian to German. Everybody was trying to teach everybody else, all down the line. This is still what I think of when I hear the term "progressive education." . . . "
Positivity to temper, accompany, and inundate the empty hours; facilitating a transcendence from this mere mortal coil with all its toil, trouble and injustice.
". . . All successful democracies rely on informal rules that, though not found in the constitution or any laws, are widely known and respected. In the case of American democracy, this has been vital. . . the unwritten rules of a half-court game of pickup basketball are familiar to anyone who has played it. . . Democracy, of course, is not street basketball. Democracies do have written rules (constitutions) and referees (the courts). But these work best, and survive longest, in countries where written constitutions are reinforced by their own unwritten rules of the game. These rules or norms serve as the soft guardrails of democracy, preventing day-to-day political competition from devolving into a no-holds-barred conflict. . . "
Changing, modifying, tweaking. . . the usual stuff.
This version of the song is played on a physical, Kawai, baby grand piano, my favorite instrument, although editing is more complex, so it is limited here. I prefer the organic experience of the real instrument which provides the ability to be more expressive.
". . . In 1779 in England David Garrick was the first actor to be labeled a "star" by J. Warner, saying, "The little stars, who hid their diminished rays in his presence begin to abuse him. . . The term was in common use in the Music Hall Era. This is reflected in the slightly passe phrase "movie star" or "Hollywood star" to refer to the type of celebrity who is famous from cinema, not stage. . . The earliest uses all speak to brightness of the star. Thus "star" likely meant "stand-out performer." By the 1907 Music Hall War it was widely understood to mean "well-known performer.". . ."
". . . A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth make them appear as fixed points of light. The most prominent stars have been categorised into constellations and asterisms, and many of the brightest stars have proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. The observable universe contains an estimated 1022 to 1024 stars. Only about 4,000 of these stars are visible to the naked eye, all within the Milky Way galaxy. . ."
Thinking about songs that I've loved and admired over the years, this one always comes to mind. The lyrics present a very human reflection on one aspect of life in a very innocent, but still unapologetic way. This combined with sophisticated, jazz-inflected chord changes and a sparse instrumentation always drive the point straight home for me.
". . . Let us call them the sinister possibilities of human nature in general that here come to light. German human beings, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them it is, who have perpetrated what humanity shudders at; and all that is German now stands forth as an abomination and a warning . . . We are present at the last gasp of a blood state which, as Luther put it, "took on its shoulders" immeasurable crimes; which roared and bellowed to the ravished and reeling masses proclamations cancelling all human rights . . . "