royable
royable's JournalOne's path through life can certainly be convoluted!
I feel like I've left a long trail of "what if"s in my wake.
Thanks for sharing your tale. Sounds like it could make for a good story.
How about some turn-of-the-century piano music by composers you've probably never heard of
that can be found on this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@SeigneurReefShark
I especially like listening to this nine-hour recording with scrolling music score:
as I work. I find most of the music fascinating and exciting and novel and inspirational. At times, I'll say, "HOW is the music written to achieve that effect I've never heard before?" and I'll look at the score to see. But that's just me. A description of that recording:
Medtner - 14 Piano Sonatas (Many performers)
"I repeat what I said to you back in Russia: you are, in my opinion, the greatest composer of our time." – Sergei Rachmaninov (1921)
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this set. The 14 Medtner's piano Sonatas are the peak of the great Russian romanticism. Musically, technically and intellectually his works are very difficult, and don't show-off, which may explain their neglect.
Born on December 24, 1879 according to the Julian calendar (in use in Russia at that time), Nikolai Medtner was a few years younger than Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, who had long overshadowed him before his music was the object a new craze, thanks in particular to the interpretations of pianists like Emil Gilels and more recently Geoffrey Tozer, Marc André Hamelin, Hamish Milne and Severin von Eckardstein, who allow a new rediscovery of Medtner's music these years.
Recitalist and concertist, Medtner was also a professor at the Moscow Conservatory but chose to leave Soviet Russia in 1921. He lived in the United States then in Paris and finally settled in London, where he died. He had the extravagant good fortune to arouse the enthusiasm of the Maharajah of Mysore (in the state of Karnataka, India), who allowed him to record his own compositions.
Most of Medtner's works (fourteen sonatas, three concertos, chamber music works, melodies) are intended for the piano or use the piano. To put it quickly, they show romanticism, nostalgia, passion, tragic, violence (not brutal though). Medtner never recognized himself in the research carried out by his contemporaries, as he explained in his book The Muse and Fashion (1935) where he defends "the sacred laws of Eternal Art".
I don't have to act like everyone else. Almost every I do in public now is mask-optional
and very few people wear them. But as for me, I've got my trusty N95 strapped tightly to my face.
I haven't gotten COVID yet (crosses fingers, knocks on wood) or even had a cold since COVID hit in early 2020, most likely due to my wearing an N95 when out in public anywhere, and lots of hand washing and trying to curb the habit of touching my face and eyes.
Yes, I luckily don't (ordinarily) have to hang out in close quarters with the coughing, sniffling unmasked masses, but it seems that what I've been doing has helped, considering how often I'd get colds before that.
I don't care at all if I'm the only masked person in a crowd, and on the very rare occasions over the past almost-three years I've been asked why I'm wearing a mask, I patiently explain that it's for their health as well as my own.
(Then I proceed to lower my mask and cough all over them... Joke.)
What a gorgeous image! Mt. Washington is so stunning when the leaves drop
and BOOM there it is, 120 miles away! I remember that as a kid growing up in central Maine. You're very lucky to have a view of it from your home.
Out here in southern Arizona, when I'm up near the top of the Santa Catalina mountain range northeast of Tucson, on a clear day I can see the much less-steeply-sloped silhouette of Mt. Baldy about 125 miles away near the New Mexico border to the northeast in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. It's just a slightly higher, slightly darker and greener-tinted place on a distant horizon broken by some closer peaks. But every time I see it I remember the feeling of wanderlust that would come over me when I'd see distant Mt. Washington. I think it's the steepness of the mountain that makes it look so arresting. Mt. Katahdin would affect me similarly, though it had its own very different mystique to me.
Here it is...my 1000th post. Took me 14 years.
I've been getting my DU fix almost daily almost since its inception, back in those dark Bush/Gore days. I finally created an account on October 29, 2008. Obviously, I don't post much, seeing as I'm just now hitting 1000, as I have much going on in my life and DU is just one part of it. I post when I have the time and feel as though I have something relevant to say. Some of my postings are quick or silly replies to others' OPs, and some I really work at to craft something meaningful that I want to share with others. On rare occasions, such as this one, I create a new thread. I have a sampling of my postings from the past few years on my Journal page, wich I started using once I discovered it was there. I've covered a lot of ground, from postings of local news with national importance, to tutorials in math and use of the word "it's" vs. "its", to speculations, to congratulations, to thank-yous for hearts.
Reviewing my journal entries, I thought I might see a stand-out post, but none jumps out at me, so I'll just post a short one I like, from December 2020:
May I propose a new collective noun for elected republicans:
an “incarceration.”
I'm so thankful that DU is here, providing links and feedback on the latest breaking news, multiple ways to view and interpret the issues of the day, insights into the lives and thoughts of people much different than myself, beautiful photography and much more. This site is an incredible resource and and you all are such a supportive community.
I'll celebrate by renewing my star membership!
This has also happened with the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Arizona.
The Letters to the Editor page of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson has been flooded the past two weeks with people complaining about the terrible reduced selection and format and microscopic size of the daily comics and puzzles, and many people have said they won't be renewing their subscriptions.
What really burns me is that in this case, the editor didn't fess up as to why the change was happening, and explain the full story, that this change was being pushed upon them (unclear to me whether it was forced) AND all other of the 77 papers controlled by Lee Enterprises. Instead, the editor proffered up some pablum about how they'd listened to reader opinion and were providing us with a new improved selection of comics and puzzles while saving money that could allow more of a focus on local reporting and investigative journalism, of which there has yet to be any evidence (though, to be fair, that could take a while).
During the past two weeks, all these people have been writing in complaining about the daily comics, and last weekend, the Sunday comics were the same as they have been, so this week, some letter writers were grudgingly saying, well, my favorites are still in the Sunday comics, so perhaps I can accept that. Then this weekend (yesterday) the NEW version of the Sunday comics hit. Talk about a hot mess. You'd swear the layout staff have never heard of the concept of maintaining aspect ratio of an image, and everything has been stretched or squished to fit the width of the page while maintaining uniform height. And the selection, while horrific, doesn't even match the selection in the weekday/Saturday papers. I am fully expecting another flood of letters to the editor this next week.
Lee was threatening a few weeks ago to discontinue all letters to the editor because readers said they were too divisive but so far that hasn't happened. The paper also has announced it's no longer going to endorse local and state political candidates. I feel as though the paper is being remade into an instrument of corporate media, feeding us ads for car dealerships and luxury real estate that keep the paper afloat through advertising dollars, so we are told. Oh, those magnanimous car dealers and luxury home realtors!
But what can we do about it? The paper went with a standardized online presence a couple years ago (likely also something offered by Lee) that is terrible, and flooded with advertising of all annoying types, and is plagued by unuseful navigation tools. I don't want to swap out the printed paper for an e-version. But the printed paper now costs $525 for 24 weeks, up from $386 in March 2019, up from about $200 a few years before that. (It's probably rising faster than college tuition!) And my subscription is up for renewal today. I can't even find online what the e-version only subscription costs--they don't tell you, apparently, unless you call them up to ask.
One more person unsubscribing from the newspaper brings it that much closer to its demise, cascading into loss of local jobs and loss of local news and loss of investigative reporting. I've read a newspaper all my life. I'm miffed.
La Push WA to Quoddy Head Lighthouse ME
About as far west, and as far East, as one can get in the lower 48. I’d love to see much more!
Unlike Drumpf, it appears to be his family name going back generations, with an umlauted capital O.
However, rather than disgrace L. Frank Baum's wonderful creation through association, I prefer to think of "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
"...Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
And I think Shelley would likely concur.
How about interspersing sections of banned texts with passages from the Bible
with matching subject matter?
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Member since: Tue Oct 28, 2008, 06:25 PMNumber of posts: 1,264
