so I went on a run just now and almost got attacked. I was running down my street, almost to my house, about to cross over the driveway for the dorm that’s right there. This guy is leaving and pulls right in front of me, but has to stop cause there is a car comming. Now he is so close that he obviously didn’t see me and almost ran me over, and to boot I’m running pretty hard. So as he’s about to pull off I smack into the side of his car. He pulls out, turns around tires smoking and pulls up next to me like it was my fault. Fucking asshole. anyways, I’m all like “so sorry, I couldn’t stop” and making out like I’m breathing super hard. Eventually he drives off but I’m so fucking pissed at him, like it’s my fault or something? goddamit. Anyways, back to your pretty pictures of cats…
Ren Xiong (1823-1857), The Ten Myriads, undated (album of ten leaves, ink and color on gold)
(via sealegslegssea)
So I just watched this for the second and a half time. And holy shit, I missed so much the first time. It still leaves mysteries for me, and I think the next time I watch it it will be with a notebook or sketchbook at my side. (spoilers) I’m confident that the eldest son is sean penn and the middle son dies. The final beach scene might be the afterlife or some view of it. Anyways, I love the photography of the everything to do with the movie. Good lord I want to watch that again already.
Prelude: Op.28 No.15 in D flat major (‘Raindrop Prelude’) - Frederic Chopin
“Chopin’s Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart… they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams…” - Franz Liszt
Written in the winter of 1838, while on a secluded vacation with his lover, George Sand, and her two children, Frederic Chopin’s “Prelude Op.28:No.15 in D flat major” - one of 24 preludes composed within in the same time period in a supposed tribute to Bach - ultimately emerged as one of the best known of all his compositions.
The four stayed in rooms at an old Carthusian monestary at Valldemossa, Chopin himself in a room which he later described as “a strange place”. But out of this “strange place” emerged a beautifully sad masterwork, a barely six minute piano piece that leads one through a lifetime of emotions, anchored by the repeating A-Flat that appears throughout the piece (thought by many to sound much like raindrops, hence its nickname).
The rain-inspired origin of the prelude is a bit hard to pin down, though popular belief is that Chopin composed it in the midst of an intense thunderstorm at Valldemossa in which his lover (Sand) and her son were stuck walking home in. Fearing greatly for their safety, Chopin supposedly calmed himself by improvising music around the sound of the rain falling on the roof of the monastary. Others believe an ailing Chopin actually wrote it while hallucinating in the middle of the night during a particularly powerful storm. And still others insist that Sand, a renowned author herself, had invented the entire thing, creating its myth by mentioning it in a later memoir:
“There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain - it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out “encampment.” The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, “Ah, I was sure that you were dead.” When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might - and he was right to - against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky…
-Histoire de Ma Vie, 5 vols., Paris, 1902–04, IV, pp. 439–40
Ultimately, origin aside, this nocturnal, rainy prelude made some kind of sense to Chopin on a winter’s night in 1838, and it makes every bit as much sense when I put it on after a particularly long day of work now, in the first month of 2012. No matter when or where you are in time, a song like this has the power, the ability, to hold you.
I honestly don’t know why I did this
Because you’re awesome? Now make one for the falls so I can laugh at it finally.
I- I- love it?
(Source: radiolocked)
I suddenly feel in way over my head. I’m bloated and sad, I need to run. Tomorrow? I should.
