Who The Fuck is Simon

Audio

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:44:14 -0400

uzowuru: hold on john, johnson & jonson aka my favorite...

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 04:34:33 -0400

uzowuru:

hold on john, johnson & jonson

aka my favorite song first semester of senior year

frankocean: desensitized eyes on this body i am…in this mirror...

Mon, 27 May 2013 11:07:26 -0400

frankocean:

desensitized eyes on this body i am…in this mirror i am. i got ostracized and didn’t notice till i closed my eyes last a.m. didn’t see. i need a point to keep these eyes in focus. i need my eyes to be quicker than your hands. they aren’t and won’t ever be- so when you do magic i won’t watch. see, my eyes have an ego. i need these eyes like..i need the holes in my head. i always find something off, like a hairline. symmetry gives me boner, it isn’t boring at all. my eyes don’t bore me at all. neither do yours. i never saw you fuck, except that one time? i still get off to the residue that the image left behind. what i see inside my mind now isn’t technically with my eyes. i heard about a third, but i’ll believe it when i see it blink on my forehead. big head. five head. eye don’t know. eyes just talking.

“War” by Edwin Starr (Original Video - 1969) (by Ben...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:03:51 -0400

“War” by Edwin Starr (Original Video - 1969) (by Ben Murphy)

Fyfe Dangerfield - She’s Always A Woman (by...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:01:32 -0400

Fyfe Dangerfield - She’s Always A Woman (by fyfedangerfield)

Audio

Tue, 14 May 2013 19:49:32 -0400

streetetiquette: Smooth.

Tue, 14 May 2013 19:45:45 -0400

streetetiquette:

Smooth.

James Rhodes: 'Find what you love and let it kill you' My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt

Wed, 08 May 2013 17:55:41 -0400

‘Isn’t it worth fighting back in some small way?’ Pianist James Rhodes. Photograph: Dave Brown 2012

After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is “I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up”. I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they “always had a book inside them”. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.

Do the maths. We can function - sometimes quite brilliantly - on six hours’ sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can’t even smoke?

Link to video: James Rhodes live session: How Beethoven wrote Piano Sonata in E Flat, Op31 No3 second movement (Scherzo)

What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece - these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you’re very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.

What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you’ve always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?

What if rather than a book club you joined a writer’s club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?

What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of “I love you” until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?

I didn’t play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be “good enough”.

Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view video
And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of, that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary. And I did that. I do it, to my continual astonishment, all the time.

The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing Arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn’t it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a Haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame and Heat photo-shoots that all our children now think they’re now entitled to becauseHarry Styles has done it.

Charles Bukowski, hero of angsty teenagers the world over, instructs us to “find what you love and let it kill you”. Suicide by creativity is something perhaps to aspire to in an age where more people know Katie Price better than the Emperor concerto.

George The Poet - Lemonade (by stampthewax)

Sun, 05 May 2013 12:10:55 -0400

George The Poet - Lemonade (by stampthewax)

George The Poet: Pink Matter (by Reload Sessions)

Sun, 05 May 2013 12:05:35 -0400

George The Poet: Pink Matter (by Reload Sessions)

George The Poet - ‘Estate Of Mind’ - Dropout Demo |...

Sun, 05 May 2013 12:00:57 -0400

George The Poet - ‘Estate Of Mind’ - Dropout Demo | Dropout UK (by DropoutUK)

Novaday - Beautiful Lies (by MrSuicideSheep)

Sun, 05 May 2013 09:24:34 -0400

Novaday - Beautiful Lies (by MrSuicideSheep)

Atu - Can Do It (by majesticcasual)

Sun, 05 May 2013 09:23:24 -0400

Atu - Can Do It (by majesticcasual)

Greyhat - Missed (by majesticcasual)

Sun, 05 May 2013 09:22:32 -0400

Greyhat - Missed (by majesticcasual)

Big Voyage - Cora Pearl (by majesticcasual)

Sun, 05 May 2013 09:20:23 -0400

Big Voyage - Cora Pearl (by majesticcasual)

J. Cole - Cole Summer the realest track I’ve heard in a...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:35:54 -0400

J. Cole - Cole Summer

the realest track I’ve heard in a while

ckck: Too Young To Go SteadyJohn Coltrane Sunday jazz.

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:09:55 -0400

ckck:

Too Young To Go Steady
John Coltrane

Sunday jazz.

Andre 3000 x Beyoncé - Back to Black

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:39:47 -0400

Andre 3000 x Beyoncé - Back to Black

blasianxbri: callmejayree: There should be no question why I...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:54:53 -0400

blasianxbri:

callmejayree:

There should be no question why I keep my fist raised so high.

Idk how you could be black and not feel compelled to reblog this.

Jimmy Kimmel tricked people at Coachella into professing...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:55:21 -0400

Jimmy Kimmel tricked people at Coachella into professing their love for bands that don’t exist, and it is absolutely hysterical.

I think the essence of this video is the reason I’m in a semi-constant state of vigilance/active suspicion and/or motionless eye rolling. The ability of people to talk disingenuous/useless/fluffy/patently false bullshit from their mouth holes like it’s completely cool is bothersome.