from Bruce
Anecdotes
Music
• A conductor once tried to use poetic language to describe how some music should sound: “The music should sound as if you were playing on top of a high mountain, overlooking a bank of clouds. You are fanned by the winds ….” The concertmaster, however, thought that this was nonsense and said, “Look, just tell us whether you want the music played loud or soft.” By the way, Walter Damrosch once conducted at a benefit concert that featured sixteen different pianists. Before he started conducting, he turned to the audience and joked, “What they need here is not a conductor, but a traffic cop.”
• Occasionally, Sir Thomas Beecham conducted music in which he had little interest. Viola virtuoso Lionel Tertis once speculated that Sir Thomas had given an entire program of “weak, sentimental French music” simply to prove that he could fill the concert hall no matter what program he conducted. Once, during a rehearsal of a piece of music in which Sir Thomas had no interest whatsoever, he continued to conduct after the piece had ended. When orchestra leader Albert Sammons whispered, “Sir Thomas, we have finished the work,” Sir Thomas replied, “Thank God for that!”
• In 1713, Giuseppe Tartini had a dream in a monastery where he was staying. In the dream, the Devil offered to buy Tartini’s soul for whatever price he wanted. Mr. Tartini made request after request, all of which the Devil granted, then, being a composer, Mr. Tartini requested that the Devil provide him with a sonata. The devil played a beautiful sonata on a violin, and Mr. Tartini fainted. In the morning, he did his best to recreate the Devil’s sonata, but felt as if he had recreated only part of it. Because of the inspiration he had received, Mr. Tartini called the sonata The Devil’s Trill.
• George Frideric Handel’s father wanted him to be a lawyer, not a composer, so he was against his son’s learning to play musical instruments. Fortunately, Handel’s mother was sympathetic to his love of music, and she smuggled a clavichord into the attic for him to practice on while his father was asleep. By the way, after hearing Mr. Handel’s Messiah in London, Thomas Hay, Lord Kinnoull, told the composer that Messiah is “a fine entertainment.” Handel replied, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wish to make them better.”
• Fritz Kreisler was playing his violin before the Sultan and his Court in Turkey when the Sultan began to clap his hands. Feeling immensely flattered, Mr. Kreisler played on, and the more he played, the harder the Sultan clapped his hands. Finally, the Grand Vizier said urgently to Mr. Kreisler, “Do you wish to lose your head? Don’t you hear His Majesty clapping his hands?” Mr. Kreisler replied that indeed he had heard the clapping, but what of it? The Grand Vizier exclaimed, “What of it? Why, the Sultan is giving you the signal to stop!”
• Famous pianist Moritz Rosenthal had a sharp tongue. While visiting the home of a Viennese composer (not named), he saw several scores by such notabilities as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Mr. Rosenthal exclaimed, “My goodness! I always thought you composed by ear.” By the way, after listening to a premiere of a work by Johannes Brahms, a Viennese composer said, “A splendid work, your new symphony, only sometimes it reminds me of some other music.” Insulted, Mr. Brahms snapped, “What other music—your next symphony?”
• Oscar Levant studied piano for several years under Sigismund Stojowski. Once Mr. Stojowski asked him what he was going to play for a certain program. Mr. Levant replied, I think I’ll play Debussy’s ‘Reflets dans L’Eau’ or ‘Poissons d’Or.’” Mr. Stojowski then said, “Your piano playing is not improving, but your French is.” By the way, Mr. Levant and George Gershwin were friends for many years. In fact, a chapter in Mr. Levant’s book A Smattering of Ignorance is titled “My Life, or the Story of George Gershwin.”
• Gioacchino Rossini’s mother wondered how one of his operas had been received. He sent her a drawing of an Italian straw-covered bottle—the kind called “fiasco.” By the way, when Mr. Rossini was 70 years old, his friends collected 20,000 francs so they could make a statue of Mr. Rossini and put it on a pedestal. Mr. Rossini joked that he would stand on the pedestal if his friends would give him the money.
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Create, Then Take a Break — Free Downloads
Create, Then Take a Break — Apple
Create, Then Take a Break — Barnes and Noble
Create, Then Take a Break — Kobo
Create, Then Take a Break — Smashwords
Create, Then Take a Break — Can Be Read Online Here at No Cost: Smashwords Online Reader
NEW BLOG - davidbrucebooks: FREE PDFs
Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "To Be a Gentleman"
Album: IT’S NOT ME IT’S YOU
Artist: The Lettermans
Artist Location: Springfield, Pennsylvania
Record Company: Punk Head Records
Record Company Location: Chicago, Illinois
Info:
Former members of the Lettermans went on to form another band: Dirty Flix.
“Dirty Flix is a Rock n Roll/Power Pop band heavily inspired by Cheap Trick, The Rolling Stones, The Replacements, New York Dolls, and everything in between. Made up of members from former pop punk band Lettermans lineup, Dirty Flix is taking their punk rock n roll power pop sound to the next level. Set Your Radio On Fire!”
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $9.99 (USD) for 11-track album.
Genre: Pop Punk.
Links:
IT’S NOT ME IT’S YOU
Punk Head Records on Bandcamp
Punk Head Presents on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
davidbrucebooks: EDUCATE YOURSELF - Free PDFs
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Cannabis Exodus
New Venture
Michael Egan
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
Ukraine
Biden Can Seize Russian Cash In U.S., Harvard law Professor Says (MSNBC)
Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe joins MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell to explain his belief that current U.S. law allows Pres. Biden to liquidate tens of billions of dollars Russia has in the U.S. in foreign exchange reserves which officials have already frozen.
'I’m Done Talking': Malcolm Nance On Fighting In Ukraine (MSNBC)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia has begun an all-out offensive in the east. In his latest video, the Ukrainian leader said that the Russian military has begun the battle for the Donbas. Malcolm Nance, executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project, joins us from Ukraine, where he is fighting with the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.
Other Links:
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
davidbrucebooks: EDUCATE YOURSELF - Free PDFs
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and a bit cooler than seasonal.
Democracy Summit June 13 in LA
Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama will deliver the keynote address at a democracy summit sponsored by a national, nonpartisan voting organization she helped create, the group announced Wednesday.
The former first lady’s June 13 remarks to When We All Vote’s inaugural Culture of Democracy Summit in Los Angeles will be her first in-person appearance before a large audience since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers said. She last addressed When We All Vote in person in 2018 before the midterm elections.
Conversations during the June 10-13 summit will center around protecting democracy, combatting voter suppression and ensuring equal access to the ballot box for this fall’s November midterm elections and political contests beyond, organizers said.
Artists, athletes, academics, grassroots organizers and technology, civic and corporate leaders are among the 1,500 people expected to participate.
The former first lady leads When We All Vote with an all-star group, including actors Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Kerry Washington and Tracee Ellis Ross, “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, television producer Shonda Rhimes, singers Janelle Monae, Jennifer Lopez and H.E.R. and professional athletes Stephen Curry, Chris Paul and Megan Rapinoe, among others.
Michelle Obama
Covers ‘Everything’
Pam Grier
Pam Grier doesn’t look back that often. If she did, she said this week from New Mexico, “I’d be drinking.”
But when Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz called to ask if she’d consider being the focus of the new season of his podcast “The Plot Thickens,” she knew she had to do it. She’d listened to and loved the previous season that explored the career of Peter Bogdanovich and had an idea of what it would entail. But the main reason she wanted to do it? Her death. Really.
“You never know when you’re going to kick the bucket,” Grier said.
At 72, Grier is not ready to call it quits quite yet. She’s in the new “Pet Sematary” prequel as well as a thriller with Damon Wayans and is hard at work getting an adaptation of her 2010 memoir, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts” off the ground. She said it’s likely to now be a miniseries as opposed to a film and she already has some exciting people ready to direct episodes.
But she is interested in thinking about her career with the wisdom and perspective she’s picked up along the way. After all, it’s been 49 years since she became a star and a trailblazer with “Coffy,” Jack Hill’s 1973 Blacksploitation classic about a nurse out to get revenge against the men who turned her niece into a drug addict. Full of violence, nudity and action, the low-budget pic became a hit and even managed to unseat James Bond from the top spot at the box office.
Pam Grier
Childhood Home Gets Historical Landmark Status
Fred Hampton
The Illinois childhood home of Fred Hampton, an iconic Black Panther Party leader who was shot and killed during a 1969 police raid of his Chicago apartment, has been designated a historical landmark.
In a news release, organizers of the Save The Hampton House initiative, led by Hampton’s son and his mother, announced that the Maywood Village Board voted to recognize the house as a historical landmark.
The Tuesday night vote in the Chicago suburb follows a yearlong campaign that was tied to the Academy Award-winning film about Hampton and his death called “Judas and the Black Messiah.”
The designation is part of a broader effort to see the Black Panther Party and the U.S. Black liberation struggle represented alongside landmarks to the nonviolent civil rights movement. With the designation, organizers plan to transform the site into a place where the works of the Black Panther Party can be displayed.
Fred Hampton
Bold Shakespearean Twist
‘The 47th’
To run or not to run - that is the question troubling Donald Trump Individual #1 at the start of Mike Bartlett’s play “The 47th,” an audaciously Shakespearean take on recent and future U.S. politics.
The title of the play, running at London’s Old Vic Theatre, refers to the next president of the United States. The plot depicts a high-stakes 2024 election in which former Trump placeholder (the 45th), President Joe Biden (the 46th), Vice President Kamala Harris, and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, are all key players.
The play opens with Trump the grifter in Mar-a-Lago retirement, hankering to return to his role as disrupter-in-chief, and asks whether he could succeed — and at what cost. It’s not so much docu-fiction as a fantasia on power, democracy and populism.
The theater piece is written in deliberately Bard-like blank verse and alludes to Shakespearean plots. One moment Trump is like King Lear, deciding which of his children deserves to succeed him; the next he is Richard III, scheming to seize the crown.
‘The 47th’
Now a Life Coach
CIA’s ‘Torture Queen’
America’s War on Terror changed millions of lives irrevocably. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis, Somalians, and Syrians saw their homes, jobs, and family members stolen in a two-decade wave of violence that has yet to fully subside. Thousands of people – some guilty, some not – were abducted, interrogated, tortured, and detained without trials.
The woman who presided over or witnessed many of these crimes is now a life coach.
Alfreda Scheuer (née Bikowsky), was an infamous CIA operative dubbed “The Queen of Torture” by The New Yorker in 2014. You may remember her as the partial inspiration for Jessica Chastain’s character in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 jingoist, xenophobic masterpiece Zero Dark Thirty, though her name was never connected to the film. You may recognize her name, too, as her husband, Michael Scheuer, is a former CIA official who has made news in recent years for pushing outlandish conspiracy theories, calling for Trump to impose martial law after the 2020 election, and writing that Americans should hunt down and “eliminate” Democrats, journalists, doctors, teachers, Black Lives Matter activists, employees of Ivy League universities, and pretty much everyone else in the country who isn’t a hardcore adherent to every extreme of the MAGA movement.
Reuters on Wednesday published the first on-the-record interview with Alfreda Scheuer since she left the clandestine services. Her identity was long shielded from the public, despite Scheuer’s disastrous record in several high-ranking positions at the agency (The New Yorker wrote that she was the source of “years’ worth of terrible judgment”). Judging by what she told Reuters, she doesn’t regret a thing, telling the publication that waterboarding was not torture, and that she received criticism a male spy wouldn’t have gotten in a similar role.
Regarding the “Queen of Torture” moniker, she was similarly defiant. “I got that title because I was in the arena,” she said. “In fact, I raised my hand loud and proud and you know, I don’t regret it at all.”
CIA’s ‘Torture Queen’
Stamp Sells Out
'Snake Island'
The commemorative postal stamp memorializing a now-iconic moment of Ukrainian resistance earlier this year has sold out in person after scores of Ukrainians waited in hours-long lines to snatch up the limited-edition seal.
The stamp, which features a Ukrainian special forces fighter defiantly raising his middle finger to a Russian warship, has quickly become a collector's item among Ukrainians and their supporters.
In the past week, Ukrainians have formed long lines, often waiting hours to purchase the $1.77 and $1.83 iterations of the stamp. The stamps have also become apparent money-makers, according to The New York Times, re-selling for up to $100 each on eBay.
The national postal service released a set of one million stamps, which commemorate the early-invasion incident in which Ukrainian border guards on Zmiinyi (Snake) Island reportedly told Russian troops to "Go fuck yourselves," after being asked to surrender.
'Snake Island'
Ancient Human Species Could Still Alive?
Flores Island
In 2003, archaeologists looking for evidence of the migration of modern humans from Asia to Australia stumbled across a small, fairly complete skeleton of an extinct human species on the Indonesian island of Flores, which came to be known as Homo floresiensis. Or, as it became more commonly known, the Hobbit, after the small, breakfast-guzzling creatures from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit.
The species was initially thought to have survived until relatively recently, around 12,000 years ago, before further analysis pushed that date back to around 50,000 years. But one retired professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta says that evidence that the species' continued existence may have been overlooked, and the Hobbit may still be alive today, or at least within living memory.
In an opinion piece for The Scientist promoting his upcoming book Between Ape and Human, Gregory Forth argues that palaeontologists and other scientists have overlooked Indigenous knowledge and accounts of an "ape-man" living in the forests of Flores.
He writes that local folk zoology by the Lio people inhabiting the island contains stories of humans transforming into animals as they move and adapt to new environments, which he likens to a type of Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired physical characteristics.
The Lio identify these creatures as animals, not having the complex language or technology that humans possess. However, their eerie similarity to humans is noted.
Flores Island
New Species Of Millipede
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift has one of the biggest music careers of all time, but she now has something very tiny named after her.
The newly discovered Nannaria swiftae -- a brown and orange millipede discovered in a Tennessee forest ? got its name honoring the 11-time Grammy winner thanks to the Swift-loving scientist who identified it.
“I’m a big fan of Taylor’s music, and I listened to her music a lot during graduate school,” entomologist Derek Hennen told HuffPost on Monday. “It brought me joy and helped me through some difficult times, so I wanted to show my appreciation. Since this new species is from Tennessee and she lived in Tennessee for a while, I thought it was a nice fit.”
The wriggly arthropod, which will also go by the common name of Swift twisted-claw millipede, is one of 17 new species revealed in a study published last week by Hennen and other researchers at Virginia Tech.
Taylor Swift
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
