La Môme Piaf

Nowadays I spend a lot of time listening to Édith Piaf before or after, or even during and instead of work. I have already posted her "La vie en rose" earlier. It made me think what makes me listen to her music so much. Not only her voice, as I realized after watching the movie about her life, which bears the same title as her signature voice just mentioned made in 2007. Actress Marion Cotillard has also a nice song, and yet I was always waiting to hear Piaf singing her songs (actually some of them were dubbed indeed). No, I think it is rather the intensity that she put into singing that is addictive.

Piaf had a very stormy life. Her career started in 1935, when a night club owner discovered her after hearing her singing on the streets. Despite some hardships (including her being considered as a suspect in the murder case of her patron), she continued to become the most popular French singer during and after the second world war. It was in the euphoria over the end of the war that she wrote the lyrics for La vie en rose. In 1949, "the love affair of her life", the boxer Marcel Cerdan died in a plane crash while on the way to meet her. This marks the beginning of the most intense period of her life, paralleled by the fast deterioration of her health, due to sickness, a series of accidents and addiction. She died at 47, looking some 20 years older. I have the intention here to show a number of video recordings from this period showing not only the dramatic changes she went through, but perhaps more importantly the unaltered intensity of her singing throughout. She sang the first song posted here, "Hymne à l'amour" only a month after Cerdan's death. The second one "Padam... Padam..." is from 1951, and I have chosen it for its intensity than for anything else.

In the 1950s she had several near fatal car accidents, breaking her ribs at one time, and leaving her with addiction to morphine and alcohol. The recording of "l'Accordéoniste" is from this period (1954). I am simply amazed by the strength of her delivery... Another song "La Foule" is of Latin American origin. The recording is from 1961, one of Piaf's attempts to save the L'olympia music hall from bankruptcy.

The series of performances she began in 1961 are sometimes called the suicide tour. Indeed, she died in 1963 in liver cancer wanting to perform until the last moment. One of the new songs written to her in this final period was "Non, je ne regrette rien". This song was in a sense the final stroke in her carrier, and it is only fitting to finish this collection of recordings with it. The recording is one of her last perfromances from 1962 in the Netherlands.

Applied Gymnastics

I am nothing like an athletic person, but I have always appreciated the combination of strength and flexibility... well, the sort of body language it conveys. The same is true for dancing and martial arts, I am much better at watching it, seeing the details, than actually doing it... :) But if this is a language, then what you are going to see here is a whole conversation. Recorded straight from the streets, as a matter of fact... I mean you rarely see athletes climbing over whole buildings during contests, don't you? ...and who said ninjas don't exist anyway???

Rain As Music

It was raining the other day, and I was looking for something on youtube, a video or sound record of the sound of the falling rain. I actually had an idea to try it myself, but I have found some very nice ones. People seem to find the sound of rain or flowing water tranquilizing and meditative. This is an interesting contrast to the fact that rainy whether is often referred to as depressive. Should I mention here Tarr movies, which are sometimes noted for their "depiction of hopelessness"? I think actually one thing that helps one to immerse in these movies is the constant fall of rain, which somehow puts you at ease, regardless of what other topics may come up. But then again, think of Gene Kelly Singing In The Rain for another association with rain... Rain is a nice thing. I used to enjoy walking around when it rained. It is just something that makes you wonder...

One Last Dance - Cha Mo

A kind of sad story of an assassin. This is the intro, the music is by Pakk Hui, it can be found on youtube as "Broken Orange". I saw this on the way home from China on the airplane. It is kind of dangerous to allow emotions enter your decisions if you are an assassin. Consequences soon follow... and yet... what's there without them?! suits my present mood perfectly...

Beauty In Art And Science

This is a little segment from a documentary about Nobel price winning physicist, Richard Feynman in which they discuss the notion of beauty in arts and sciences. To me, beauty seems to be the most important and most elusive universal concept. The greatest motivating force, the thing that captures our interests and as we chase it we discover newer and newer parts of the world around or inside us, which otherwise we would not have bothered to do. The thing that is beyond basic instincts to survive, and yet it can become more important than those. To admire it makes our lives worth living. And yet... there are many ways one appreciates beauty, some seem mutually exclusive, as one listens to this conversation. We could also say that while Feynman discusses the beauty in details, an analytic approach, his artist friend rather appreciates the whole. Anybody who ever did some science can appreciate what Feynman says about the beauty in details, and how those details fit together. And yet I also feel that science often fails to see that the imminent, spontaneous beauty of things do not survive if they are taken apart, as perhaps some artists cannot see beauty beyond their own scope of perception. So perhaps the questions raised could be put as follows, for the scientist "What does the knowledge of the details add to the whole if the whole is destroyed in the process?", and to the artisit "How can you say you know beauty, if you know nothing about the intricate details that make it possible?". I think the important thing to realize is we always have a choice what view we take for a specific occasion (or experiment with more than one even if they seem exclusive...). I mean it seems unlikely that even scientists would run havoc mutilating all flowers on a field of roses, or cutting up breasts for that matter, for the merits of details, for example... A scientific training is not a lifelong obligation to analyze, nor is an artist only capable of seeing only one dimension of beauty, despite the fact that people who exclusively insist on being one or the other (perhaps the majority, unfortunately) give you that feeling...

Einstein's Brain

One of the drawbacks of being a well-publicised genius is that the guy who does your autopsy may think it better to remove your brain in the name of science, and that your eyeballs would be a suitable present for your eye doctor. So at least it happened with Einstein despite his wish to be cremated and scattered. A man called Thomas Harvey, who did the autopsy, thought it was without question that the brain should be used for research and managed later to persuade Einstein's relatives. He than later took the brain as his personal possession and gave a piece to the occasional visitor who happened to have a good enough reason. In the video above, Harvey slices off a piece of brain with an elegant movement using a butcher's knife on the kitchen table for a Japanese Einstein fan, who wishes to use it for educational purposes... The video is part of the documentary "Einstein's Brain"; you may watch the whole thing on youtube. There seems to be very little other findings of scientific value at the moment.

Giant Centipede

Another one of god's strange creations is the giant centipede. It can grow some 30 cms long, and may eat bats or mice if hungry... Its venom is also toxic to humans, probably not fatal, though. In any case, I would certainly not risk a bite if I could avoid it...