On mind-melding and my favorite star war
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Occasionally I hang out with a famous jazz pianist in LA and one day I told him that it was unreal watching him play, because it’s like he mind-melds with the instrument—you can just see how all the thoughts and ideas seem to just spring effortlessly from his fingers.
He shrugged. “That’s cause I’ve been playing for sixty-something years,” he said.
“Oh, that’s like, more than twice as long as I’ve been alive!” I said, which in hindsight was not the most tactful thing to say.
For a number of reasons—I think largely because of the way our culture views talent—I always thought of certain types of mastery as something you’re either born with or will never have. I’ve been picking things out on the piano since before I started formal training, making up music on the spot as long as I’ve known how to play, and writing down some of the music I’ve made up since I learned music notation—but I still think of myself as someone who can’t play by ear, can’t improvise, and can’t compose, because those things never seemed to come as easily to me as stories about prodigies and geniuses say they should.
This week Patricia submitted the finished first two movements of the FMH Concerto to the org putting on the premiere, and right before the deadline she needed some little bits to plug some empty patches in the piano part. I (slightly disgruntledly, because “I can’t improvise or compose”) sat down and started messing around at the keyboard and, to my surprise, found that I could actually “think” through my hands. It was weirdly easy to just play out a few spontaneous ideas, which I filmed and sent to her as options.
I remembered what the jazz pianist had told me when I marveled at his ability to mind-meld; he didn’t say “Yeah I was just born with it,” or “That’s always been easy for me,” or something like that. His response was just to shrug and tell me that’s what happens when you’d had enough experience.
Book of the Week
I very much enjoyed Jean Hanff Korelitz’ The Latecomer and found myself really marveling at her craftsmanship and storytelling craftsmanship. She’s one of those authors who delivers plot twists and lines that would totally be cliche, hackneyed, or eye-roll-inducing in the hands of a lesser writer—when she does certain things, it just hits.
The book is one of those stories that toggles between the perspectives of different characters, and the book is so compelling that even when you’re in the head of a character you actively dislike, you’re still hooked. It’s both an intimate family drama that’s very character-driven and a thematic summation of several large-scale societal trends: political radicalization, religious zeal spurred by spiritual emptiness, the increasingly insulating nature of wealth.
Articles I Enjoyed
Looking at my archive of articles I read over this past week, the vast majority of them were about Twitter—news articles about the acquisition, thinkpieces analyzing What This All Means, technical deep-dives into the impossible paradoxical challenges of content moderation at scale, tech industry scoops about the latest from inside the building.
I think we’ve all had enough of News About Twitter, but luckily I did read some other stuff this week.
Gina Kolata: These Doctors Admit They Don’t Want Patients With Disabilities (New York Times)
While disability takes many forms, the doctors had much to say about people who use wheelchairs. Some doctors said their office scales could not accommodate wheelchairs, so they had told patients to go to a supermarket, a grain elevator, a cattle processing plant or a zoo to be weighed, or they would tell a new patient the practice was closed.
One said he didn’t think he could legally just refuse to see a patient who has a disability — he had to give the patient an appointment. But, he added, “You have to come up with a solution that this is a small facility, we are not doing justice to you, it is better you would be taken care of in a special facility.”
This is a pretty damning survey that reveals just how poorly disabled patients are treated in the healthcare industry, despite supposed protections under the law—and some of the reasons are almost comically mundane.
Imogen West-Knights: My Eight Deranged Days on the Gone Girl Cruise (Slate)
Tonight’s victims of my company are Monica and Kathleen, two women in their 70s from Vancouver, British Columbia, who invite me to come and stay with them there within 10 minutes of my sitting down. They are wearing matching pink T-shirts that read “Girls trip 2022: cheaper than therapy.” They didn’t know it was a Gone Girl–themed cruise until they boarded the ship. “We thought it was like: You’re gone, girl! Like it was a women’s travel thing,” one said.
Like most other people when I heard about it, I could not believe why a Gone Girl-themed river cruise could possibly exist. This bonkers recap of the experience is…a ride.
Javier C. Hernández: Music Thwarted by the Holocaust Will Now Be Published (New York Times)
“Our understanding of the 20th century is incomplete without these composers,” Robert Thompson, the president of G. Schirmer, said in an interview. He added that it was vital to guarantee that “composers who were silenced during World War II are not forgotten and their legacies are restored.”
[…]
“The Nazis wanted a world in which the music of Jewish composers would have been banned and forgotten,” Gerold W. Gruber, Exilarte’s founder and chairman, said in a statement. “It is therefore our obligation to counteract these policies by rescuing the music of exiled composers from oblivion.”
My sincere reaction to this: this is excellent, excellent news; I have gone on at length about the importance and fragility of legacy, and it is monumentally important to preserve as complete of a historical record as we can, and this field has an obligation to these composers and their music.
My flip reaction: between this and Florence Price—oh my god, is Schirmer good now???
(The backstory: I have always, always, always been told to avoid Schirmer editions at all costs because they tend to be the worst editions of everything and are the cheapest for a reason. Schirmer doing objectively good stuff like this creates a lot of cognitive dissonance in my head. When I hauled a ton of newly published Florence Price music, it felt kind of wrong intentionally buying so much Schirmer.)
What I’m Watching
I am not a big Star Wars person—I didn’t see a single star war until 2016, and have no nostalgic emotional connection to the franchise or original trilogy. So bear that in mind when I say that my absolute favorite Star Wars movie of all time is Rogue One. (My second all-time favorite is The Last Jedi. I know this is very controversial, but I don’t care.)
I have been watching the various Star Wars franchise TV shows on Disney+ with something a degree above indifference; I don’t really care about Boba Fett and I wish the entirety of The Mandalorian had just been scenes of Mando tenderly caring for Baby Yoda and reading him children’s books. So I didn’t have especially high hopes for Andor, even though it’s based on what I think is the best Star Wars movie of all time.
It is kind of shocking how good this show is. Again, I am not the most invested in this universe, so what makes this a winner for me is how the show world-builds in a way that doesn’t seem scaffolded by fan service and is held down by aggressive realism. I am way more fascinated by the depiction of the fascist Empire’s power being perpetuated by ambitious middle-managers jockeying for visibility and promotions than I was by the imagery of evil magicians in capes. The insights into just how the Empire keeps people ground down in poverty and labor feels eerily relevant—later-season scenes depicting the mass production usually hidden from the glitz of industrialized society (or the thrill of battle) reminded me a lot of recent reads about the exploited workers who grow and harvest our food, sew our clothes, sort through our waste, etc.
This feels like the Star Wars we need; I think when we envision what evil is, we think about the dictators, the pundits, the stormtroopers—we so rarely examine all the ways in which evil is perpetuated at the level of the mundane and invisible, and how anyone with a smidge of privilege actually benefits. Anyway! All of that is to say that I am into this show. Good job, giant all-powerful corporation that wields way too much capitalistic power. 🐭