that’s all there is really
Kathleen Mallery via bobulate:
“What’s the best piano out there?” I asked.
The piano tuner’s eyes sparkled. ”I always get asked this question. Everyone always wants to know– what’s the best piano. And I always say, the piano that’s in your living room.”
The piano tuner ran his hands over the keys, played a scale and then a few notes. Our piano sounded much better. ”I fall in love with each piano,” he said more to my piano that to me. ”It’s all about getting it tuned right, bringing out its own sound and then when you play, you play the piano that’s in front you, and you see what it can really do. That’s all there is really. Tuning it and then playing what you’ve got.”
she said and took off
LA Times( via aldaily) on Philip K. Dick:
That was the period in 1974 when Dick either lost his mind completely or was visited, ravishingly, by God.
He had just had an impacted wisdom tooth pulled and was awaiting delivery of a painkiller from the pharmacy. When the doorbell rang, he was greeted by a beautiful dark-haired girl with a fish pendant on her necklace. “This is the sign used by the early Christians,” she said and took off.
Soon after, Dick began having nightmares and visions…
fill in the blanks and get your lawyers but not expensive ones because you will lose
“If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history, you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people — not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.”
In the context of Singapore,
“If you look through school textbooks in Singaporean history, you will find Lee Kuan Yew the Father of the Nation, the Great Vanquisher of the Communists, the Crybaby on TV — not Lee Kuan Yew the XXX, XXX, XXX, XXX.”
how do you know that you’re spending too much time on farmville?
… when you describe the shared printer in the office with a pile of uncollected documents as unharvested.
bring ruin upon oneself by extravagance in food
Osaka has always been the commercial capital of Japan, but has earned a reputation as a mecca for gourmet food. It has been called “kuidaore” – literally, “bring ruin upon oneself by extravagance in food”.
If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
xi – … and finally that Great Murderer of the Imagination – a world of unceasing, unkind, dinky, prissy Criticalness.
11 – Blake used to say, when his energies were diverted from his drawing or writing, “that he was being devoured by jackals and hyenas.”
12 – (William Blake) “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.”
13 – (William Blake) “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
19 – But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
22 – (Van Gogh) “In a few years I must finish a certain work. I need not hurry myself; there is no good in that—but I must work on in full calmness and serenity, as regular and concentratedly as possible, as briefly and concisely as possible.”
22 – (Van Gogh) “The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures,—not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express sincere human feeling.”
heroes, villains, and a happy ending
We don’t want ambiguity and complex systems; we want heroes, villains, and a happy ending.
art at the service of…
No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.
hope
As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”
guided by instinct and not by civilization
…recalled that those who survived the atomic bomb were, in general, the people who ignored others crying out in extremis or who stayed away from the flames, even when patients and colleagues shrieked from within them.
… Those of us who stayed where we were, those of us who took refuge in the hills behind the hospital when the fires began to spread and close in, happened to escape alive. In short, those who survived the bomb were, if not merely lucky, in a greater or lesser degree selfish, self-centered — guided by instinct and not by civilization. And we know it, we who have survived.
some people
They’re also trying to dispel rumors which are now rampant in the city. Last night around midnight or 11:00 there was a rumor right outside the place I’m staying in a central park that a tsunami was coming, and literally we had hundreds if not thousands of people screaming and running through the streets afraid that a tsunami was about to hit.
And it was basically a scam used by some people to get people to drop their possessions and run away, and then people would go in and take their possessions.
Eric Rohmer (1920-2010)
I was determined to be inflexible and intractable because if you persist in an idea it seems to me that in the end you do secure a following.
my latest idea
BBC News:
More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses by 2020, says the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In view of this great need, I think I just have about enough expertise to set up a consultancy called TAHAN.
we are most blind
John Mauldin begins his 2010 forecast letter with these quotations:
“Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating.”
– from Transition, by Iain M. Banks
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
– The Boxer, by Paul Simon
it can never recur just like it is
One of the central precepts of the tea ceremony is encapsulated in the expression ichigoichie. It means that every occasion for which people come together must be made special and unique as it can never recur just like it is.
this is the only way that we should fly
Some guy caused a massive mayhem (flights canceled, passengers evacuated) at Newark Airport by slipping past security just to give his girlfriend a goodbye kiss.
His roommate said this about him:
“We know that he’s very excited to have a real woman.”
how do you know that you’re spending too much time on farmville?
… when you very nearly sent a calendar invite titled “pre-load farming” instead of “pre-load review”.
tell me, what do i do now? what do i do?
The G-spot ‘doesn’t appear to exist’, say researchers.
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