Friday, June 17, 2016

Friday Night Is Music Night - Tango

JD presents a selection of tango... in we go!





This is an excerpt from the film "Tango" by the Spanish film director, Carlos Saura. The whole film is a visual and musical delight and well worth seeing:



"Gotan is, as you will have guessed, just tango with the last syllable placed at the front of the word. It is a style of 'argot' in the Boca district of Buenos Aires.

"I first came across it years ago when I was listening to a girl yakking away over the dinner table and she kept saying Tabogo and the penny dropped eventually when I realised she was talking about Bogota!"

- More to come in the weeks ahead.


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Thursday, June 16, 2016

They are different

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Rich Boy (1926)

There is much that one could say about this quote. Few of us would turn down the chance to be rich if there were no insuperable caveats, but few of us would use it well. The rich are still different today and there are more of them, but not only the rich. Celebrities are different too, and as far as one can tell they are often different in much the same way because they think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are.

It is something we do to people via money or status, including political status. The problem affects both left and right political classes in that they think they know what is best for us. Those who don't tend to be corrupt in one way or another, apart from a modest few who actually try to leave political life in a better state than they found it.

In Wikipedia there is an interesting quote from Matthew Bruccoli about Fitzgerald's story.

"'The Rich Boy' is a key document for understanding Fitzgerald's much-discussed and much-misunderstood attitudes toward the rich. He was not an envious admirer of the rich, who believed they possessed a special quality. In 1938 he observed: 'That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton...I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.' He knew the lives of the rich had great possibilities, but he recognized that they mostly failed to use those possibilities fully. He also perceived that money corrupts the will to excellence. Believing that work is the only dignity, he condemned the self-indulgent rich for wasting their freedom."

Money corrupts the will to excellence, but not money alone. When the political classes become too secure in their status, their generous salary and allowances, their opportunities to mix with the rich and powerful, then they too seem to ape the self-indulgent rich. They too waste the freedom they have been given to make the world a better place. The will to excellence is easily corrupted.

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Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Each Man's Thumbscrew

Find out each Man's Thumbscrew. ’Tis the art of setting their wills in action. It needs more skill than resolution. You must know where to get at any one. Every volition has a special motive which varies according to taste. All men are idolaters, some of fame, others of self-interest, most of pleasure. Skill consists in knowing these idols in order to bring them into play.

Knowing any man's mainspring of motive you have as it were the key to his will. Have resort to primary motors, which are not always the highest but more often the lowest part of his nature: there are more dispositions badly organised than well. First guess a man's ruling passion, appeal to it by a word, set it in motion by temptation, and you will infallibly give checkmate to his freedom of will.

Baltasar Gracian - The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Does Cameron keep his hand in his pocket these days? I must check.

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A Turner sunset



...he resembled a Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side Of Paradise (1920)

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Sunday, June 12, 2016

Sunday Serenade - Folk music

JD is back, after his little local IT difficulty.... 

Before I was rudely interrupted I was compiling a miscellany of English folk music which may not please the puritans but I like them plus a few more I can't find just yet.

Richard Thompson:


Wilson Family:
 

Florence Welch singing Shakespeare's sonnet 29:


Perhaps not a recognised 'folk singer' as such but... Florence Welch - What the Water Gave Me:


 And now for some folkoric dancing(?) - Three man morris:


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Thursday, June 09, 2016

The chocolate Referendum

It has become apparent that the Referendum voters do not know what they are voting for. To correct this defect, the EU has commissioned an updated edition of Fry's famous "Five Boys" chocolate bar:


It is only right that the citizens should associate the mouthwatering delight of an iconic luxury consumer item with the sweet five Presidents of the EU who, like Fry's, are there to serve and please them.

Coming soon: bucking the trend of Wagon Wheels and Cadbury's Creme Eggs, the EU plans to make its product even larger (but don't tell anyone yet, it's "under wraps"!)...



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Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Duck luck


A mallard duckling tries to scale a waterfall on the river Dove this morning. Its mother was pecking around on top apparently unconcerned. Could explain why she only had one duckling left.

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