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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Wow....
Horn-shaped cup with dragon handle, carved from a piece of white jade. China, Han Dynasty, 200 BC - 200 AD
Henryck Górecki’s Symphony No. 3.
Górecki, a Polish composer, called his 1976 third symphony “The Symphony of Sorrowful
Songs.” Each movement features a solo soprano singing texts inspired by war and
separation. The second movement was composed of text is taken from the scribblings
on the wall of a Gestapo cell during the Second World War.
Avdotia Ilyinichna Istomina
Avdotia Ilyinichna Istomina (1799–1848)
was the most celebrated Imperial Russian ballerina of the 19th century. Orphaned
at a young age, she was accepted into the Imperial Theater School. She debuted
in the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1815 to immediate acclaim.
Several people were killed dueling for her
heart, and her honor was defended in the fourfold duel (1817): Count Zavadovsky
killed Count Sheremetev, while the Decembrist Yakubovich shot through a palm of
the playwright Alexander Griboedov.
She was the first Russian dancer
en pointe. She served in the Imperial Ballet for twenty years. Istomina died of
cholera on June 26, 1848 in St. Petersburg.
Lee Morgan in New York, 1971 Photo Val Wilmer
Lee Morgan (July 10, 1938 –
February 19, 1972) was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. One of the key
hard bop musicians of the 1960s, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens,
recording on John Coltrane's Blue Train (1957) and with the band of drummer Art
Blakey before launching a solo career.
Morgan stayed with Blakey until 1961 and started to record as leader soon after. His song "The Sidewinder", on the album of the same name, became a surprise crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts in 1964, while Morgan's recordings found him touching on other styles of music as his artistry matured. Soon after The Sidewinder was released, Morgan rejoined Blakey for a short period. After leaving Blakey for the final time, Morgan continued to work prolifically as both a leader and a sideman with the likes of Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, becoming a cornerstone of the Blue Note label.
Morgan stayed with Blakey until 1961 and started to record as leader soon after. His song "The Sidewinder", on the album of the same name, became a surprise crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts in 1964, while Morgan's recordings found him touching on other styles of music as his artistry matured. Soon after The Sidewinder was released, Morgan rejoined Blakey for a short period. After leaving Blakey for the final time, Morgan continued to work prolifically as both a leader and a sideman with the likes of Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, becoming a cornerstone of the Blue Note label.
Morgan was killed in the early hours of
February 19, 1972, at Slugs' Saloon, a jazz club in New York City's East Village
where his band was performing. Following an altercation between sets, Morgan's
common-law wife Helen Moore (a.k.a. Helen Morgan) shot him. The injuries were
not immediately fatal, but the ambulance was slow in arriving on the scene as
the city had experienced heavy snowfall that resulted in extremely difficult
driving conditions. They took so long to get there that Morgan bled to death.
He was 33 years old.
Thomas Müller (https://artaxis.org/thomas-muller/)
In November of 2018, this painting sold for $92 million
Chop Suey, 1929, Edward Hopper.
In a bibliography by Gail Levin,
the location of Chop Suey is described, “…the setting recalled the inexpensive,
second floor Chinese restaurant the Hoppers had been frequenting in Columbus
Circle”. This might explain the primary focus on the woman (possibly his wife,
Jo) and the dullness of the surroundings. If it was a place Edward Hopper had
frequently visited then there would be no reason to concentrate on the
surroundings, but rather the moment of the scene.
According to art scholar David Anfam, one
"striking detail of Chop Suey is that its female subject faces her
doppelgänger."……Others have pointed out it would not be so unusual for two
women to be wearing similar hats, and that it is presumptuous to claim
doppelgängers when one subject's face is not visible to the viewer.
The literary set
John F. Kennedy, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams shooting clays
Hemingway in Africa
Hapless
You know where the word “hapless”
comes from? Some of it is from the old Norse work “happ” meaning
good luck and the old English word Laes meaning without.
Four amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece
Attic white-ground lekythos depicting a fallow deer. Artist unknown; ca. 540-525 BCE. Found at the ancient city of Ialysos, Rhodes;
The Histories by Herodotus (484BC
to 425BC) offers a remarkable window into the world as it was known to the
ancient Greeks in the mid fifth century BC. Almost as interesting as what they
knew, however, is what they did not know. This sets the baseline for the
remarkable advances in their understanding over the next few centuries – simply
relying on what they could observe with their own eyes.
Herodotus claimed that Africa was
surrounded almost entirely by sea. How did he know this? He recounts the story
of Phoenician sailors who were dispatched by King Neco II of Egypt (about
600BC), to sail around continental Africa, in a clockwise fashion, starting in
the Red Sea. This story, if true, recounts the earliest known circumnavigation
of Africa, but also contains an interesting insight into the astronomical
knowledge of the ancient world.
The voyage took several years.
Having rounded the southern tip of Africa, and following a westerly course, the
sailors observed the Sun as being on their right hand side, above the northern
horizon. This observation simply did not make sense at the time because they
didn’t yet know that the Earth has a spherical shape, and that there is a
southern hemisphere.
1. The planets orbit the Sun
A few centuries later, there had
been a lot of progress. Aristarchus of Samos (310BC to 230BC) argued that the
Sun was the “central fire” of the cosmos and he placed all of the then known
planets in their correct order of distance around it. This is the earliest
known heliocentric theory of the solar system.
Unfortunately, the original text
in which he makes this argument has been lost to history, so we cannot know for
certain how he worked it out. Aristarchus knew the Sun was much bigger than the
Earth or the Moon, and he may have surmised that it should therefore have the
central position in the solar system.
Nevertheless it is a jawdropping
finding, especially when you consider that it wasn’t rediscovered until the
16th century, by Nicolaus Copernicus, who even acknowledged Aristarchus during
the development of his own work.
2. The size of the Moon
One of Aristarchus’ books that
did survive is about the sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon. In this
remarkable treatise, Aristarchus laid out the earliest known attempted
calculations of the relative sizes and distances to the Sun and Moon.
It had long been observed that
the Sun and Moon appeared to be of the same apparent size in the sky, and that
the Sun was further away. They realised this from solar eclipses, caused by the
Moon passing in front of the Sun at a certain distance from Earth.
Also, at the instant when the
Moon is at first or third quarter, Aristarchus reasoned that the Sun, Earth,
and Moon would form a right-angled triangle.
As Pythagoras had determined how
the lengths of triangle’s sides were related a couple of centuries earlier,
Aristarchus used the triangle to estimate that the distance to the Sun was
between 18 and 20 times the distance to the Moon. He also estimated that the
size of the Moon was approximately one-third that of Earth, based on careful
timing of lunar eclipses.
While his estimated distance to
the Sun was too low (the actual ratio is 390), on account of the lack of
telescopic precision available at the time, the value for the ratio of the size
of the Earth to the Moon is surprisingly accurate (the Moon has a diameter 0.27
times that of Earth).
Today, we know the size and
distance to the moon accurately by a variety of means, including precise
telescopes, radar observations and laser reflectors left on the surface by
Apollo astronauts.
3. The Earth’s circumference
Eratosthenes (276BC to 195 BC)
was chief librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria, and a keen
experimentalist. Among his many achievements was the earliest known calculation
of the circumference of the Earth. Pythagoras is generally regarded as the
earliest proponent of a spherical Earth, although apparently not its size.
Eratosthenes’ famous and yet simple method relied on measuring the different
lengths of shadows cast by poles stuck vertically into the ground, at midday on
the summer solstice, at different latitudes.
The Sun is sufficiently far away
that, wherever its rays arrive at Earth, they are effectively parallel, as had
previously been shown by Aristarchus. So the difference in the shadows
demonstrated how much the Earth’s surface curved. Eratosthenes used this to
estimate the Earth’s circumference as approximately 40,000km. This is within a
couple of percent of the actual value, as established by modern geodesy (the
science of the Earth’s shape).
Later, another scientist called
Posidonius (135BC to 51BC) used a slightly different method and arrived at
almost exactly the same answer. Posidonius lived on the island of Rhodes for
much of his life. There he observed the bright star Canopus would lie very
close to the horizon. However, when in Alexandria, in Egypt, he noted Canopus
would ascend to some 7.5 degrees above the horizon.
Given that 7.5 degrees is 1/48th
of a circle, he multiplied the distance from Rhodes to Alexandria by 48, and
arrived at a value also of approximately 40,000km.
4. The first astronomical
calculator
The world’s oldest surviving
mechanical calculator is the Antikythera Mechanism. The amazing device was
discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900.
The device is now fragmented by
the passage of time, but when intact it would have appeared as a box housing
dozens of finely machined bronze gear wheels. When manually rotated by a
handle, the gears span dials on the exterior showing the phases of the Moon,
the timing of lunar eclipses, and the positions of the five planets then known
(Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) at different times of the year.
This even accounted for their retrograde motion – an illusionary change in the
movement of planets through the sky.
We don’t know who built it, but
it dates to some time between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, and may even have
been the work of Archimedes. Gearing technology with the sophistication of the
Antikythera mechanism was not seen again for a thousand years.
Sadly, the vast majority of these
works were lost to history and our scientific awakening was delayed by
millennia. As a tool for introducing scientific measurement, the techniques of
Eratosthenes are relatively easy to perform and require no special equipment,
allowing those just beginning their interest in science to understand by doing,
experimenting and, ultimately, following in the foot steps some of the first
scientists.
One can but speculate where our civilization
might be now if this ancient science had continued unabated.
In Our Time. A short story by Ernest Hemingway
chapter 1
Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.
chapter 2
The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t get the sword in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring.
chapter 3
Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned. The old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle moving. The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts were jammed solid on the bridge with camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded along the procession. Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.
chapter 4
We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that.
chapter 5
It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old wrought iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.
chapter 6
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.
chapter 7
Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi, big backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well. Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully and looked down at Rinaldi. “Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a separate peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. “Not patriots.” Nick turned his head carefully away smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience.
chapter 8
While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.
chapter 9
At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevetts got frightened when he found they were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t to have done it. There’s liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.
—They’re crooks ain’t they? said Boyle. They’re wops ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?
—That’s all right maybe this time, said Drevitts, but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them?
Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops a mile off.
chapter 10
One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Ag could hear them below on the balcony. Ag sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.
Ag stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table, and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anæsthetic holding tight on to himself so that he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperature so Ag would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Ag. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Ag in his bed.
Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to knew about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.
Ag wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.
After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Ag would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padova to Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye in the station at Padova they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.
He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Ag went back to Torre di Mosta to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter the major of the battalion made love to Ag, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote a letter to the States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.
The Major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Ag never got an answer to her letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl from The Fair riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.
chapter 11
In 1919 he was travelling on the railroads in Italy carrying a square of oilcloth from the headquarters of the party written in indelible pencil and saying here was a comrade who had suffered very much under the whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid him in any way. He used this instead of a ticket. He was very shy and quite young and the train men passed him on from one crew to another. He had no money, and they fed him behind the counter in railway eating houses.
He was delighted with Italy. It was a beautiful country he said. The people were all kind. He had been in many towns, walked much and seen many pictures. Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca he bought reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of Avanti. Mantegna he did not like.
He reported at Bologna, and I took him with me up into the Romagna where it was necessary I go to see a man. We had a good trip together. It was early September and the country was pleasant. He was a Magyar, a very nice boy and very shy. Horthy’s men had done some bad things to him. He talked about it a little. In spite of Italy, he believed altogether in the world revolution.
—But how is the movement going in Italy? he asked.
—Very badly, I said.
—But it will go better, he said. You have everything here. It is the one country that everyone is sure of. It will be the starting point of everything.
At Bologna he said good-bye to us to go on the train to Milano and then to Aosta to walk over the pass into Switzerland. I spoke to him about the Mantegnas in Milano. No, he said, very shyly, he did not like Mantegna. I wrote out for him where to eat in Milano and the addresses of comrades. He thanked me very much, but his mind was already looking forward to walking over the pass. He was very eager to walk over the pass while the weather held good. The last I heard of him the Swiss had him in jail near Sion.
chapter 12
They whack whacked the white horse on the legs and he knee-ed himself up. The picador twisted the stirrups straight and pulled and hauled up into the saddle. The horse’s entrails hung down in a blue bunch and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the monos whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods. He cantered jerkily along the barrera. He stopped stiff and one of the monos held his bridle and walked him forward. The picador kicked in his spurs, leaned forward and shook his lance at the bull. Blood pumped regularly from between the horse’s front legs. He was nervously wobbly. The bull could not make up his mind to charge.
chapter 13
The crowd shouted all the time and threw pieces of bread down into the ring, then cushions and leather wine bottles, keeping up whistling and yelling. Finally the bull was too tired from so much bad sticking and folded his knees and lay down and one of the cuadrilla leaned out over his neck and killed him with the puntillo. The crowd came over the barrera and around the torero and two men grabbed him and held him and some one cut off his pigtail and was waving it and a kid grabbed it and ran away with it. Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am not really a good bull fighter.
chapter 14
If it happened right down close in front of you, you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him, and when the bull charged he swung back firmly like an oak when the wind hits it, his legs tight together, the muleta trailing and the sword following the curve behind. Then he cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung back from the charge his feet firm, the muleta curving and each swing the crowd roaring.
When he started to kill it was all in the same rush. The bull looking at him straight in front, hating. He drew out the sword from the folds of the muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over. Villalta standing straight and the red kilt of the sword sticking out dully between the bull’s shoulders. Villalta, his hand up at the crowd and the bull roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs caving.
chapter 15
I heard the drums coming down the street and then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner, all dancing. The street full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them. He was drunk all right.
You go down after him, said Maera, he hates me.
So I went down and caught up with them and grabbed him while he was crouched down waiting for the music to break loose and said, Come on Luis. For Christ sake you’ve got bulls this afternoon. He didn’t listen to me, he was listening so hard for the music to start.
I said, Don’t be a damn fool Luis. Come on back to the hotel.
Then the music started up again and he jumped up and twisted away from me and started dancing. I grabbed his arm and he pulled loose and said, Oh leave me alone. You’re not my father.
I went back to the hotel and Maera was on the balcony looking out to see if I’d be bringing him back. He went inside when he saw me and came downstairs disgusted.
Well, I said, after all he’s just an ignorant Mexican savage.
Yes, Maera said, and who will kill his bulls after he gets a cogida?
We, I suppose, I said.
Yes, we, said Maera. We kills the savages’ bulls, and the drunkards’ bulls, and the riau-riau dancers’ bulls. Yes. We kill them. We kill them all right. Yes. Yes. Yes.
chapter 16
Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Someone had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passage way around under the grand stand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on a cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the corral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera wanted to say something and found he could not talk. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.
chapter 17
They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The men had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes. They were very frightened. One of the white men sat on his cot with his head in his hands. The other lay flat on his cot with a blanket wrapped around his head.
They came out onto the gallows through a door in the wall. There were six or seven of them including two priests. They were carrying Sam Cardinella. He had been like that since about four o’clock in the morning.
While they were strapping his legs together two guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to him. “Be a man, my son,” said one priest. When they came toward him with the cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards who had been holding him up dropped him. They were both disgusted. “How about a chair, Will?” asked one of the guards, “Better get one,” said a man in a derby hat.
When they all stepped back on the scaffolding back of the drop, which was very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on ball bearings, Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight, the younger of the two priests kneeling beside the chair. The priest skipped back onto the scaffolding just before the drop fell.
chapter 18
The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he told me, would not allow him to go outside the palace grounds. Plastiras is a very good man I believe, he said, but frightfully difficult. I think he did right though shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been altogether different. Of course the great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself!
It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.
True story:
True story: In 1970 some
political anti-war radical decided to break into a draft board office in
Delaware. However the interior door that opened to the draft board office was
always locked and attempts to pick the lock failed.
Several hours before the
burglary was to take place, one of the radical wrote a note and tacked it to
the door: "Please don't lock this door tonight."
When they came back later
that night, someone had obediently left the door unlocked. The burglars entered
the office with ease, stole the Selective Service records, and left. They were
so pleased with themselves that one of them proposed leaving a thank-you note
on the door.
be a poem
When I say be creative, I don’t mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.
Beethoven - Grosse Fuge
One of the last pieces Beethoven wrote for string
quartet and also one of his celebrated late quartets. It’s a one-movement
experiment in structure that was meet with a poor reception in its day.
The New
Yorker
Great
Fugue
Secrets
of a Beethoven manuscript.
By Alex
Ross
January 30, 2006
Last summer, a librarian at the
Palmer Theological Seminary, outside Philadelphia, reached onto the bottom
shelf of a basement cabinet and pulled out a lost manuscript by Beethoven. It
was a draft of an arrangement for piano, four hands, of the composer’s “Grosse
Fuge,” or “Great Fugue” (or, as the cover inexplicably said, “Grande Tugue”).
Once the property of a nineteenth-century industrialist-composer, it had
disappeared, “Citizen Kane”-style, into the clutter of his belongings, some of
which the seminary inherited. The manuscript was handed over to Sotheby’s,
which sold it in December to an unnamed buyer for $1.95 million. Shortly before
the sale, the manuscript was put on display. With some misgivings, I went to
Sotheby’s to have a look.
I had reservations because there
is something ghoulish about the cult of classical artifacts. Not even the most
ambitious new work—Pascal Dusapin’s new Faust opera, for example, which opened
last week in Berlin—inspires anything like the flurry of media interest that ensues
whenever a scrap of Beethoven’s or Bach’s handwriting turns up in some
Pennsylvania basement or Swabian attic. Even creepier is the attention devoted
to organic relics of the Masters; someone recently wrote an entire book about
Beethoven’s hair, and, a few weeks ago, Austrian television breathlessly
reported on a DNA analysis of an alleged piece of Mozart’s skull. Like radical
opera stagings, ventures in period performance practice, and gala birthday
celebrations, manuscript finds are all too easily exploited as part of
classical music’s wax-museum strategy, serving to reanimate the past, to give
it the veneer of the new.
Yet the pull of the past can be
hard to resist. There I was, staring transfixed at the pages on which
Beethoven’s hand had copied out the wildest, grandest fugue ever composed. One
reason that many distinguished people went gaga over this discovery—Lewis
Lockwood, the leading American Beethoven authority, said to the Times, “Wow, oh
my God!”—is that the Great Fugue is more than a piece; it’s a musicological
Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by
the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow
in Beethoven’s wake, it became a kind of political object. Arnold Schoenberg heard
it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention. (“Your
cradle was Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,” Oskar Kokoschka once said to Schoenberg.)
Benjamin Britten, who took pride in tailoring his music to the needs of
particular performers and places, was heard to complain that Beethoven’s late
works were at times willfully bizarre, prophetic of avant-garde, obscurantist
tendencies.
In fact, Beethoven was always
negotiating between the demands of his muse and the desires of the world, as the
history of the Great Fugue shows. It was written in 1825, as the final movement
of the String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130. Even before the first
performance, it caused puzzlement, according to Beethoven’s conversation books,
which allowed others to talk to him after he became deaf. “Why do you have two
eighth notes [tied together] rather than a quarter note?” the violinist Karl
Holz asked him. Evidently, Holz didn’t get a straight answer, for he posed the
same question several months later. (The conversation books are Sphinx-like:
many questions, few answers.) At the quartet’s première, in March, 1826, a
debate immediately flared up; some listeners were fascinated by the Fugue,
while others expressed the hope that Beethoven would replace it with a more
friendly finale, which, surprisingly, he did. A colleague created a four-hand
piano arrangement of the Fugue, so that people could come to terms with this
strange creation. (Back then, arrangements served the function that recordings
do now, spreading music to a wide public.) Beethoven found this version
unsatisfactory, however, and redid the arrangement himself, making sure that
the publisher paid him twelve ducats for his trouble.
What does the long-lost
manuscript tell us about Beethoven’s thinking? I had only half an hour to look
at it, with the indulgence of the Sotheby’s staff, and there is no guarantee
that I would have been granted any great insights if I had stayed longer. But
one thing that struck me was that Beethoven had tampered in an interesting way
with the first bars of the Fugue’s introductory section. The quartet version
begins with loud unison G’s, spread over three octaves and one and a half bars.
In his initial draft of the piano arrangement, Beethoven replicated the
original. Then, apparently, he decided that the G’s needed more strength and
weight. The manuscript shows that he squeezed in two extra tremolando bars,
expanding the moment in time. He also added octaves above and below, expanding
it in space. The dynamics increased from forte to fortissimo. For the most
part, the differences between the quartet and piano versions don’t seem
profound, but this insistence on the G’s stands out.
Musicologists have long seen
significance in the fact that Beethoven stresses G at the outset of the Fugue.
When the piece is restored to its former position, as the finale of the Quartet
Opus 130, a correspondence emerges: the first-violin part in the preceding
movement, the Cavatina, comes to rest on the same note. In opera, a cavatina is
generally an aria of a short and simple type; this one is as slow, gentle, and
lyrical as the Fugue is headlong, ferocious, and cerebral. First, it sings, and
then it sobs and shivers; one section is marked “beklemmt”—stifled, anguished.
This is apocalyptic lyricism, which knows that it cannot last. That the Fugue
so vehemently takes up the note on which the Cavatina ends seems almost like a
destructive act. Looking at the manuscript, I thought, Beethoven’s fury is even
stronger now. He is shaking his fist at the world.
Perhaps, though, Beethoven’s
emotions were not so dire. Perhaps he simply wished to add some pizzazz, some
drama, to his opening. The introduction is marked “Overtura,” which is an odd
word to find in a fugue. In his later instrumental music, Beethoven sometimes
played with vocal stylings, with arialike solos and recitativelike interludes.
In the eighteen-twenties, the operas of Rossini were the rage, and Beethoven
was both irritated and fascinated by the phenomenon. With the pseudo-operatic
gestures of his late works, he seems to be paying half-ironic, half-sincere
tribute to the popular music of his day. Beethoven and Rossini met in 1822,
and, if Rossini’s report is to be believed, the old man expressed his delight
with “The Barber of Seville,” while also making condescending remarks about
Italians.
The Fugue is the consummation of
Beethoven’s strict contrapuntal writing, which he succeeded in integrating into
Classical forms. What if it were also some kind of crazed opera buffa, full of
arguments, misunderstandings, confessions, and reconciliations? It has several
passages of hushed expectation, corresponding to the favorite Rossinian device
of the “frozen moment,” in which all the characters onstage pronounce
themselves dumbfounded by some uncanny apparition or revelation. Also, its
placement next to the Cavatina creates a familiar dramatic situation. Rossini
wrote cavatinas of various kinds, but his preferred use of the form was as part
of a larger scenic sequence in which a heroine meditates upon some great mishap
in her life. First, seemingly overwhelmed by circumstances, she sings a slow,
sad cavatina. There follows a fast, florid episode, which later came to be
known as the cabaletta, in which the diva picks herself up, gets mad, and tests
the extremes of her vocal range and agility. I’m ordinarily a docile girl, says
Rosina in “Barber of Seville,” but if you cross me I turn into a viper. Perhaps
the Great Fugue is Beethoven’s cabaletta—the masculine, Germanic equivalent of
a diva on a tear.
My admittedly speculative theory
about the Fugue was influenced by a particular performance that was ringing in
my earphones as I went to and from Sotheby’s—the Takács Quartet’s recording,
which appears on a recent three-CD set of Beethoven’s late quartets, on the
Decca label. Over the past several years, the Takács players have been
recording the complete Beethoven quartets, and their survey, now complete,
stands as the most richly expressive modern account of this titanic cycle.
Their way with the Fugue may disappoint those who want to hear a narrative of
unrelenting struggle and agony; the players lavish all their inborn eloquence,
warmth, and tonal security upon the music, taking it out of the mystic realm
and making it more human. The performance makes the point that the tensions of
the Fugue gradually subside after the initial firestorm, in which a hundred and
twenty-eight consecutive bars are marked “forte” or above. The final section
has a zesty, almost goofy tone. It sounds much like the short, happy finale
that Beethoven later substituted for the Fugue.
The Takács players present the
Quartet Opus 130 according to Beethoven’s original grand design. They are
hardly the first ensemble to do so, but they make the strongest possible case.
This astounding work runs the gamut of musical knowledge, from sonata-form
cogitation to bel-canto aria, from peasant dance to counterpoint. In writing
the Fugue, Beethoven wasn’t turning from a more popular to a more inward mode
of composition, as Schoenberg thought; instead, he was showing, as Joseph
Kerman argues in his classic book on the Beethoven quartets, that in any given
genre or emotional world he would go to the extreme. In his last years, he went
from the “Ode to Joy” to existential despair, and then back to childlike
innocence. In Opus 130, he does it all in under an hour. This explains why, a
hundred and eighty years after the fact, someone would pay nearly two million
dollars for evidence of a menial arranging task that Beethoven considered a
waste of his time.
If any living composer can
challenge Beethoven on his transcendent turf, it is the eighty-two-year-old
Transylvanian master György Ligeti, whom the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center recently celebrated in a three-concert festival. Reinbert de Leeuw, the
conductor, dissolved the difficulties of the Chamber Concerto and the Hamburg
Concerto; the soprano Barbara Hannigan ran brilliantly amok in a scene from the
opera “Le Grand Macabre”; Pierre-Laurent Aimard made the piano Études glitter
and roar. With Beethoven on the brain, I listened most closely to the Horn
Trio, which Aimard, Mark Steinberg, and Marie Luise Neunecker played with
precision and heart. Ligeti wrote it in 1982, just as he entered his own late
period. It begins with a salute to Beethoven—a distorted variation of the
“farewell” motif from the Sonata Opus 81a. It ends with a Lamento, a ravaged
landscape full of dying cries, in which the composer seems to gaze back on a
century that killed off most of his family and much of his faith in humanity.
But the harmony never turns as dark as it should. Faint triads, stretched over
many octaves, provide a glimmer of hope. At the end, three tones glow in the
night: a G, low on the horn; a C, high on the violin; and an A, sounding weakly
in the middle range of the piano. Here, too, is a slight echo. The notes appear
in reverse order at the start of the last movement of Beethoven’s final string
quartet, in F major; below them are written the words “It must be.” ♦
Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music
critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.”
He will publish his third book, “Wagnerism,” in September.
Lionel Hampton
Lionel Leo Hampton (April 20, 1908 – August 31, 2002) was an American jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, and bandleader. Hampton worked with jazz musicians from Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, and Buddy Rich to Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and Quincy Jones. In 1992, he was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1996.
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément
Cocteau ( July 5 1889 – October
11 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual
artist and critic, best known for his
novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre Blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles
(1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934),
Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux
têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles
(1948), from his own eponymous piéce, Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus
(1949), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and
Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy.
Cocteau was born in
Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a town near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife,
Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer
and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine.
From 1900–1904, Cocteau attended
the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with
schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would later reappear throughout Cocteau's
oeuvre.
He left home at fifteen.
He published his first volume of
poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen.
Cocteau soon became known in
Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he
published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom
every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the
Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau
became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice
Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the
Ballets Russes; the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav
Nijinsky. During World War I Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance
driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire,
artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and
artists with whom he later collaborated.
Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded
Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917. It
was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire
and the music by Erik Satie. The piece was later expanded into a full opera,
with music by Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel. "If it had not
been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull
shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would
have gouged our eyes out with hairpins”
He denied being a Surrealist or
being in any way attached to the movement.
Cocteau wrote the libretto for
Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original
performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on May 1927.
An important exponent of
avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a
group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other
members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit,
a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no
small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.
Cocteau's experiments with the
human voice peaked with his play La Voix humaine. The story involves one woman
on stage speaking on the telephone with her (invisible and inaudible) departing
lover, who is leaving her to marry another woman. The telephone proved to be
the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings, and
"algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication.
Biographer James S. Williams
describes Cocteau's politics as "naturally Right-leaning.” During the Nazi
occupation of France, Cocteau's friend Arno Breker convinced him that Adolf
Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in
mind.
In his diary, Cocteau accused
France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality.
Cocteau effusively praised Breker's sculptures in an article entitled 'Salut à
Breker' published in 1942. This piece caused him to be arraigned on charges of
collaboration after the war, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing and had
used his contacts to his failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob.[10]
In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent,
Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful.
He also worked with Pablo Picasso on several projects and was a friend of most
of the European art community. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and
directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into
French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave
genre.
In 1945 Cocteau was one of
several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew
inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making Tribute to René Clair: I
Married a Witch.
Jean Cocteau never hid his
homosexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical
Le livre blanc (translated as The White Paper or The White Book), published
anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated its authorship and a later edition of
the novel features his foreword and drawings.
Frequently his work, either
literary (Les enfants terribles), graphic (erotic drawings, book illustration,
paintings) or cinematographic (The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Beauty and the
Beast), is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or
outright camp.
In 1947 Paul Morihien published a
clandestine edition of Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, featuring 29 very
explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In recent years several albums of Cocteau's
homoerotica have been available to the general public.
It is widely believed that
Cocteau had affairs with Raymond Radiguet, Jean Desbordes, Marcel Khill, and
Panama Al Brown. In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumored to have had a very brief
affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and
herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.
Cocteau's longest-lasting
relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom
Cocteau formally adopted.
Cocteau died of a heart attack at
his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on October 11, 1963 at the age
of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was
announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said that his
heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Actually, according to author Roger
Peyrefitte, since early that year Cocteau had been devastated after a breach
with his longtime friend and extremely wealthy and generous patroness Francine
Weisweiller: since 1960 she was having an affair with a minor writer, which
cooled her off towards Cocteau. He had a very severe heart attack on April 22.
According to his wishes Cocteau
is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in
Milly-la-Forêt.[20] The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the
chapel reads: "I stay with you" ("Je reste avec vous").
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