April 2010
50 posts
Haydn: String Quartet In E Flat, Op. 33/2, H 3/38, "The Joke" - 4. Finale: Presto
Emerson Quartet
Joseph Haydn - String Quartet In E Flat, Op. 33/2 “The Joke” - IV. Finale
At the end of the Rondo, starting at measure 148, Haydn implements a joke in this piece. It begins with a grand pause that makes the audience wonder if the piece is over. This is followed by a sudden forte sixteenth note in the beginning of the adagio that shocks the audience. After this, the first violin plays the A theme of the opening phrase with rests interrupting the music every two bars. The rests get progressively longer, giving the impression that the piece is over many times in a row, making for an amusing ending. During this time period, it has been said that audiences would erupt in laughter at this humorous coda. Haydn used this coda not only to make fun of audiences confused as to where to applaud, but also amateur musicians who were too “beat-driven,” and what he deemed a redundant rondo form.
“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.”
—Dorothea Lange
Tame
Cookie Monster
“I’m trying to make a meme. It’s Cookie Monster singing a Pixies song.”
- My friend Eli who is pretty much my #1 favorite person in the whole world
Alright, we’ve got Max on board. Internet fame is inevitable.
This recording is, to put it quite simply, the natural culmination and apex of the entire history of Western popular song.
With a Girl Like You
The Troggs
The Troggs - With A Girl Like You
I’m posting this song because it is a song that I knew of but hadn’t heard or thought about for a long long time, and then today I finally listened to it, and I don’t know if it was me or the atmospheric pressure or whatever, but at that moment and in that place it sounded like the best god damn song ever written, and I just wanted to share a little piece of that feeling with the world.
“
A letter from a former slave to his former master:
Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, —the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson),—and the children—Milly, Jane and Grundy—go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday- School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost- Marshal- General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve, and die if it comes to that, than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
P.S. —Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson
” —Source: Reprinted in Lydia Maria Child, The Freedmen’s Book (Boston: Tickenor and Fields, 1865), 265–67. (via jsdillon)"What's the difference between an email and a pager?"
LawyersUSA coverage of the City of Ontario v. Quon Supreme Court Case:
During oral arguments today in the case City of Ontario v. Quon, which considers whether police officers had an expectation of privacy in personal (and sexually explicit) text messages sent on pagers issued to them by the city, the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved.
[…]
The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. - who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer - asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”
At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else. “Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider. “You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.
Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy. “Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
Well, at least Souter isn’t on the court anymore - he didn’t own a computer, television, cell phone, or answering machine.
Of course, that didn’t stop him from writing the majority opinion in MGM v. Grokster.
Light Years
The Comsat Angels
The Comsat Angels - Light Years
This song : me :: Eyjafjallajökull : Iceland
“Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black.”
—
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, in The Nation
Well worth reading in full.
I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio’s stories; and I am not ashamed of it.
- Elizabeth Barrett, from a letter to Robert Browning on March 20th 1845, in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1900) [full text]
“They walked along the sidewalk in the sunset and tried to talk in as many ways as they could about who they were. The way one tries to describe all of one’s sides so that a center, a core, can be inferred.”
—Dan Beirne
Play
