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Tag: Marcel Proust

2012

Tuesday, 2/14/12

two takes

“La-La (Means I Love You)” (T. Bell & W. Hart)

Bill Frisell (guitar) with Tony Scherr (bass) & Kenny Wollesen (drums)
Live, Rochester (NY), 2007

***

The Delfonics, 1968

(First clip originally posted 5/28/10.)

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lagniappe

reading table

And this disease which was Swann’s love had so proliferated, was so closely entangled with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he wanted after his death, it was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.

—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (translated from French by Lydia Davis)

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2012

Tuesday, 1/24/12

If you’re looking for sunshine, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

This is one of the saddest, darkest, most chilling things I know.

Nina Simone, “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair”

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lagniappe

reading table

[L]ife needs a lot of imaginative fixing, since it regularly fails to provide us with wild adventure and comfortable closure. ‘In life,’ Proust wrote in a notebook, ‘novels don’t finish.'”

—Michael Wood, “At the Movies,” London Review of Books, 1/5/12

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2011

Sunday, 11/27/11

Al Green, “None But the Righteous,” live, Tokyo, 1987

***

I’ve got that Holy Ghost religion . . .

—Al Green

More? Here. And here. And here. And here.

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lagniappe

reading table

How much more sharply suffering probes the psyche than does psychology!

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When we see ourselves on the brink of the precipice and it seems that God has abandoned us, we no longer hesitate to ask him for a miracle.

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The kind of plagiarism which it is most difficult for any human individual to avoid (and even for whole nations, who persist in reproducing their faults and aggravate them in so doing) is self-plagiarism.

—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time,
v. 6; trans. Peter Collier)

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2011

Thursday, 7/21/11

Time for just one?

I’d go with Alfred Cortot.

*****

favorites
(an occasional series)

Of beauty you cannot have too much.

Frederic Chopin, Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 (1835-36)

Take 1: Vladimir Horowitz, live, New York (Carnegie Hall)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 2: Krystian Zimerman, live

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 3: Claudio Arrau

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 4: Alfred Cortot

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 5: Sviatoslav Richter, live (Kiev)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

More Chopin? Here. And here. And here.

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

[T]he things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyse them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is that thing that causes us the specific ecstasy we feel from time to time and which, when we say ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbour, in whom the same sun and the same weather set off quite different vibrations.

—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (1925), trans. Carol Clark

(Originally posted 12/27/10.)

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2011

Wednesday, 3/30/11

I find it hard to understand why some folks wall themselves off from classical music. Jazz, blues, rock, classical: it’s all music. Sure, the musical lines and paragraphs—the units of expression—are usually (though not always) longer and more complex in classical music. But that’s simply a matter of form. Raymond Carver and Marcel Proust, for all their formal differences, both take you places you can’t get to any other way. So too do both Beethoven and Art Pepper, both Magic Sam and Mozart.

Bela Bartok, String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, 3rd movement
The Parker Quartet, live, 11/23/09

Vodpod videos no longer available.
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2010

Monday, 12/27/10

Of beauty you cannot have too much.

Frederic Chopin, Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 (1835-36)

Take 1: Vladimir Horowitz, live, New York (Carnegie Hall)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 2: Krystian Zimerman, live

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 3: Claudio Arrau

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 4: Alfred Cortot

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*****

Take 5: Sviatoslav Richter, live (Kiev)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

More Chopin? Here. And here. And here.

**********

lagniappe

musical thoughts

[T]he things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyse them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is that thing that causes us the specific ecstasy we feel from time to time and which, when we say ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbour, in whom the same sun and the same weather set off quite different vibrations.

—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (1925) (trans. Carol Clark [2002])

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