Here is a delightful exploration of the roots of Domenico Scarlatti’s musical style. Scarlatti’s music was one of my first musical loves, somewhere around age five or six. The host is also a superb conductor; I have linked a great performance he conducted.
Conducting link: Music sharing thread. Links only. No chit chat - #800 by Conrad_Melville
If humility would be a more widespread trait, I’m convinced many of humankind’s negative properties would diminish.
As I said in another post, I had the great good fortune to spend two years in a piano trio with two excellent musicians during my sophomore and junior years in college (actually it started as a quartet, but we lost the viola after the first semester). One of the pieces we performed was Aaron Copland’s “Vitebsk” Trio. This is not the Copland of Rodeo or Appalachian Spring, but the avant garde Copland who learned his art in Paris in the 1920s. I was going to post this, as usual, in the “no-chat” music thread, but I discovered something that I think is worth further comment.
Comparing a professional performance and a student performance of this work is very illuminating. The pros, presented first, are not perfect, as they have some minor intonation problems in a couple places. This is not surprising, as playing in tune is one of the hardest tasks in this piece, because several passages feature strong dissonances between the instruments (not easy to play in tune when that means out of tune). Also, playing together on the many rhythmic unisons between cello and violin is really hard.
The high school students are outstanding from a technical standpoint (albeit in a slower tempo) and have been well coached, yet their performance lacks passion. It sounds too careful, like they are afraid to make a mistake (no doubt!). What they lack is the intensity—the ferocity—of the professional performance. That quality requires not just a good attack on the notes but following through by digging in and maintaining the same intensity to the end of each note. Listening to this prompted me to wonder just how much passion we expressed in our performance.
Meanwhile in Japan
https://twitter.com/hase5335/status/1455727960497868811
Hm. Video sometimes doesn’t play on forums /: Oh well
On youtube there’re proper longer videos about the event
Dr. Peter Kreeft gives concise and insightful comments on some wonderful books. I especially appreciated his comments on Our Town, a play that I dearly love, but which seems to be increasingly under-appreciated today. Although I have read most of the books on his list, I now feel spurred to read three that have long been on my radar: Augustine’s Confessions, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, and Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.
Peter Kreeft is one of my favorite Catholic writers of all time. I greatly enjoyed Because God Is Real: Sixteen Questions, One Answer. He is a very influential figure for traditional Catholics such as myself and really anyone who wants to grow in their relationship with the Lord and improve their moral life and understanding.
Just as that documentary displays, I love Kreeft’s thirst for quality literature and his understanding of its importance in a person’s life, particularly with the many moral lessons and thoughtful themes that fuel inspiration. Regarding Augustine’s Confessions and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I have read neither but my dad has read both of them and said they are both fantastic. Definitely well-worth the time.
That being said, based on my knowledge of Saint Augustine’s life and his great influence on the Catholic Church, he lived a truly phenomenal that shows how a boy and young man who lived a profoundly immoral life of lust and selfishness came back to the teachings of the Catholic Church taught to him by his mother and was transformed into a priest and eventually bishop, in addition to becoming one of the greatest philosophers in all of history in my opinion. Thus, his Confessions are quite literally an analysis of the immorality of his youth and the direction he was headed. It is frequently put off by many Catholics because they think it will be a story of profound sadness and tragedy, highlighting the profound terror of sin and its effect on man, but it is actually quite the opposite in many ways, highlighting instead the story of a boy who was “lost” so to speak, and the profound mercy God displayed as well as His love for Augustine. I have been told that it really makes the reader think about how God works and influences our lives everyday and turns a sinner into a saint.
I have also been told that his City of God is supposed to be really good.
I have not watched this but it is probably well worth the time to get a brief insight into his character:
Showing how evolution works. A bit like Conway’s “Game of Life”, but adding individual behaviour determined by genes and an environment that determines which individuals survive to pass on their genes to the next generation.
Evolution is life’s way to automatically increase survival in given circumstances and it feels very similar to how AI learn.
Heartwarming Christmas ad from the Norwegian postal service:
Of course! 
It actually depends on seasons.
In summer it’s hot, you don’t want to eat hot dishes for lunch, so maybe you’ll go for a salad.
And in winter sometimes you’d probably prefer some soup sometimes.
And sometimes you’ll want to change a little and eat some rice instead.
But most people would eat pasta at least once a day.
And pizza at least once a week.
And wheat bread everyday, many times.
I think it’s a remarkable reflection upon our human psyche that we can anthropomorphize something like this and even identify with it.
It reminded me of this
According to Wikipedia, more than 100k people live today in Norlisk, so these must be abandoned sites near a living city.
I wonder how those buses and trains may have fallen on their side. If that’s because of storms, they must be scary.
An Italian actor and photographer, Sandro Giordano, made a series about abandoned towns, some in Italy some abroad. It was named “ghost town” (in English in the original) and it was very suggestive. It’s available on YouTube
I remember Norilsk for being incredibly polluted by the mines and heavy industry and still having a special status as closed city, besides of being way up north - I think it’s one of the worst places to live anywhere around the globe, short of an active war zone 
Thank you for the informative video. So sad—made even sadder by the demoralization of the residents. Of course, similar scenes of squalor have existed and do exist in many places. The garbage images called to mind the recent exposé of the massively littered freight tracks in LA, where looters regularly prey on shipping containers in transit. With the spreading phenomenon of urban encampments in U.S. cities, I felt like I was looking at our future.
That’s relaxing for sure. One can try to pretend real world doesn’t exist for a second.