Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Luxembourg Gardens

Luxembourg Gardens 

For the last five years of her short life, Katherine Mansfield struggled to find a cure for her pulmonary tuberculosis. Very ill, and sometimes hallucinatory, she spends her last day in Paris before resolving to stop writing while she finds a cure. A Mansfieldesque play about Katherine Mansfield.

Cast
Hattie Morahan ..... Katherine Mansfield
Clare Corbett ..... Ida
Olivia Ross ..... Waitress
Charlotte East ..... Laura
Luke Nunn ..... Bill
Carl Prekopp ..... Lawrence
Ian Dunnett Jr ..... Gardener
Sue Rivers ..... Grandmother
Eliza Pearce ..... Girl
Orla Pearce ..... Boy

Written by Katie Hims
Sound by Peter Ringrose
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Katie Hims is one of my favorite writers of drama.  I'd say one of my favorite writers of radio drama but she's one of the best living playwrights, period.   This isn't the usual kind of drama I post but it's excellent even for someone like me who is generally opposed to using real People in literary work.   The description from the BBC kind of implies it's appropriate in her  In case.  And it's Katie Hims.

Brad Mehldau Trio - August Ending - And My Cure For Nostalgic Tendencies And Warning Of Some Recent Bad Experience

 August Ending

 

  Brad Mehldau – piano
  Larry Grenadier – bass
  Jorge Rossy – drums

For some reason Blogger's not letting me post Youtubes directly again.   This is the kind of week I've been having.  I always feel kind of nostalgic about my school years around this time, which is odd because I generally hated school.   I won't tell you how many years it is, sometime early in September, that I performed for the first time in college,  I'm a lot older than my advisor and my piano teachers were then.   

But that's enough of that.  I recently took an old Raspberry Pi Zero I bought five years ago as a back up and stuck an old Raspbian imaged SD card in it and found the Sonic Pi program for composing electronic music.   I hadn't much tried Raspbian though I'm using the newer Raspberry Pi OS in the 400 I recently bought expecting this fifteen year old junker I've been using since shortly after I started blogging is about to conk out, completely. 

I think I'd taken a look at Sonic Pi quite a while back, heard the samples of pop music and figured it wasn't anything I needed to learn.  Was that ever a stupid mistake.  I've been looking into it and can say, without any reservation that this free program, on a micro-SD card about the size of one of my smaller fingernails, on a five dollar computer (it would set you back a whopping ten dollars, these days) can do more than must about all of the stuff that was in the electronic music lab I worked in back then.  No, it can actually do a lot more, a lot more precisely and a lot easier and you'll probably have a better sounding and more interesting recording at the end of it.   

I gave someone the tape of my creations from back then, I doubt he kept them so they're lost to the world - probably just as well.  But if I had the resources available today,  for free, this program,  the MuseScore music printing program, even just the basic level of word processing, not to mention the enormous catalogues of scores available from sites like IMSLP,  and the enormously better access to scholarship than we ever got even with the best of inter-library loans, I'd have made a lot more progress than I did.  Though the world in general would probably have been as indifferent as it proved to be.  Not that I'd give up having done music, I just wish I'd done it in a more wise way.

I hope beginning music students have some small amount of appreciation as to how much more they have to learn from than we did.   

That said, don't make the mistake I did, major in Music Education because you will need a job and NO ONE IS GOING TO WANT TO PAY YOU TO DO MUCH OTHER THAN TEACHING.  One of the reasons for that is I was an out-of-the closet gay man when that was still a major professional liability, especially in teaching.  Another was I had the stupid idea that I wanted to teach on the university level,  before I realized how unhappy most of the college teachers I knew were.  I rented from a couple of them, they weren't Whose Afraid Of Virginia Woolf bad but they drank way too much.  

I hope music majors now and into the future will have jobs with a decent income, good insurance, dental, especially, and the possibility of some security.   I wish you well, I wish you dental health.  Don't drink, it's more dangerous than you think.  

Be careful of Ibuprofen, it's way more dangerous than you think, too.  It should never have been released for over-the-counter sale. 

Another Answer To A Facist Commentator

Vandiemenlander commented on "I Only Saw One Saturday Night Live Coneheads Skit"
5 hours ago
When you are raised in a broken, violent home,

I wonder how many People of Color or, in fact, people who are Democrats you'd use that as an excuse for, but I don't have to wonder very hard because I've been reading your comments for a number of years now.  You wouldn't.  It strikes me that Vance's upbringing, father left the family, mother decided to send him home to her folks,  raised mostly by his grandparents was held far more against Barack Obama. 

I will not go into whether or not the portrait of his family "JD" (no Democrat who had changed their name multiple times would ever, ever be allowed to live that down, "JD" hasn't gotten any real flack from it) is true or not because I have never seen any verification of it or refutation of the accusations that he misrepresented it.  As is generally the case with middle-class and, especially, upper-class straight, white men he rather unexceptionally landed on his feet.   From what I've seen, his "Hillbilly" book would seem to be what so much memoir is, more of a novel than reliable.

and then actually go to a war zone, (and not just brag about doing it when you really retired early to avoid it) yeah, sometimes you don't ever recover and act, "normal."

My father was wounded in battle during WWII and had a permanent disability.  He grew up hard-scrabble in the lower class suburbs of Philadelphia to parents who never went past 8th grade in a family riddled with alcoholism and he "recovered" and could act, "normal."  But, then, he had empathy for those who weren't as fortunate as he was, detested self-pity in himself,  and he wasn't in the habit of lying about his past to suck up to billionaires like Peter Theil and millionaire criminals like Donald Trump hoping to get an escalator ride to the top.   He never would have written a memoir so as to promote a picture of himself, he'd never have exposed his family, subjecting them to false charges and shame in the way that a Vance or a Clarence Thomas did.

Of course, if he was Dem, and filming himself fucking whores, doing crack, knocking up strippers and abandoning them and the baby...

You'd defend him because that [D] is all that matters.

Give me names and let's see who I've defended with that CV because they were Democrats.  I doubt anyone's been harder on Bill Clinton, that is without lying about what we know he did.  If it's Hunter Biden I'd point out I've said if he were guilty of any crimes and convicted of them, I'd have no problem with him going to prison for it.  So, who is it you're referencing so salaciously?

Yes, I know Hunter, despite Joe's best efforts, isn't running for anything.

"Despite Joe's best efforts?"  When has Joe Biden ever, ever suggested that his son Hunter run for office?  When has he promoted him as a candidate for even appointed positions?  Unlike your man-god, Trump who put his gangster son-in-law and daughter (no Democrat could so creepily and incestuously drooled over his daughter and gotten the nomination of the Democratic Party like Trump did) into actual positions of power.  Not like the Bush would-be dynasty who ratfucked the 2000 election with the help of five out of the seven Republicans on the Supreme Court.  Not like many others I could name.  The Sununu family of N.H. for example. 

But if he were, your defense would be identical. Hell, you were one of the true believers who thought Biden's cognitive decline was a media myth! You probably believe he dropped out of his own accord and without any persuasion.

And I thought Republicans who called Bush II intelligent were naïve.

What about the ones who believe Trump or, for that matter, Vance are smart enough to be president?    Vance ain't exactly a Thomas Jefferson,  or a Barack Obama, generally considered two of the smartest to have ever been president.  Though I'd put Lincoln and Biden a lot higher than they're put in those rankings, they generally get the stupidest ones in the lower positions. 

While intelligence can be useful, it's more important to be good.  I've never known of a good person people would think the world would be better off without, I can name hundreds of smart people who would go on that list.   J. D. Vance is not in any danger of goodness, his self-promoting hypocrisy alone would ensure that. 

I've called-out the current moral situation of the Republican Party in terms of total and complete amorality of the kind that the Republican tech-bros like Thiel, the degenerate anti-democrats of the Heritage Foundation, the Leonard Leo, billionaire financed court capture groups demonstrates so fully.  Trump is, beyond any doubt, the stupidest man to have ever been made president.  Previous contenders such as Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Cal Coolidge, didn't have the generally debilty of those raised on American TV, movies and time-wasting. reality dissolving internet to work with.  Yet you think Trump, beyond doubt among the most criminal of men ever to get the presidency, the only one actually convicted of felonies, should become our dictator, as he has stated he intends to be and which the present day Roberts Court has made a real possibility. 

Your party went from a proto-fascist party under Nixon to an indisputably fascist party under Trump.  That's the truth of it.  It is Nixon harnessing America's indigenous fascism of white supremacy after Johnson got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed that paved the way for Trumpism.   Though there were Republicans who peeled off after Nixons' crimes, as the crimes of the Bushes and the policies of Reagan were made manifest, anyone who didn't peel off before or even after Trump's actual intentions, acts and character were known is, in fact, a fascist.  Including the entire Republican caucus of Congress and the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court.  If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz don't win this election, if Democrats don't control the Congress, American democracy is dead.  Even America as an anti-democratic republic is dead.  And you're OK with that.