Comments on: Open thread 3/30/22

By: Le Mot Juste

Le Mot Juste — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 21:46:59 +0000

Yo Frank — (tardy) thanks for that Moe Berg stuff. One fascinating dude. Shared it with my brother, who like me played a lot of ball (and also had Latin and ancient Greek shoved down his throat by Jesuits).

By: Barry Meislin

Barry Meislin — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 06:44:47 +0000

Ah yes, the great Moe Berg, who inspired one of baseball’s better jokes (i. e., not by Yogi Berra): Berg could speak seven languages but couldn’t hit in any of them…

By: AesopFan

AesopFan — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 05:40:02 +0000

These are treats, discovered in the sidebar to Bream’s lute post.
Clearly, players of the Spanish guitar repertoire are ambidextrous.

Julian Bream & John Williams, Enrique Granados, Danza Espanola No11 (Part 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAVpqfAaReE

Julian Bream (Consort) / The Earl of Essex’s Galliard by John Dowland (lute and small chamber orchestra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbpJoLUmPdY

Remember the old TV show?
Julian Bream, This Is Your Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAgFFIDexEk

By: AesopFan

AesopFan — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 04:58:12 +0000

@ Rufus > “Or was early guitar only about finger picking and no strumming?”

Yes.
See the lute players at work.
No strumming, or very, very little.
Same as the very early guitar, the vihuela, and of course the Spanish school of acoustic guitar.

Also, it seems to me that banjo picking is more common than strumming, unless you are the back-up band for someone else.

Lute – Julian Bream, virtuoso guitarist as well.
Excellent views of the instrument and the playing technique.
Fastest-moving piece is Dowlande’s Fancy at 8:56.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSCvIc36Bik

Vihuela – La Capilla (The Chapel)
Performed by Gaspar Ruiz Cardona
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmyxnLmy0jY

This picture (in reproduction, of course) hangs on my parlor wall.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/Orazio_Gentileschi_-_Il_suonatore_di_liuto_%28National_Gallery_of_Art%29.jpg/440px-Orazio_Gentileschi_-_Il_suonatore_di_liuto_%28National_Gallery_of_Art%29.jpg

Information on the instruments
https://takelessons.com/blog/what-is-a-lute-and-how-is-it-different-from-the-guitar/

NOTE: Bream’s 2nd piece, the King of Denmark’s Galliarde, is frequently played by Spanish guitarists; we have one of his CDs that includes it.

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 02:54:07 +0000

BTW if you are (or were) a baseball fan, I offer this little story as a humble contribution: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cPuhLzjgSAhWCZ7fg8eRH5p8pvm5nPPz/view?usp=sharing.

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 02:47:09 +0000

Le mote juste, I totally agree. Carlton was great, but until arthritis stopped him, Mr. K. was like the comic book creation of 2 boys from Cleveland who shared his heritage. Watching him and Juan Marichal pitch was spellbinding TV when I was a sprout. It was early times in televised baseball (Saturday mornings), and they occasionally experimented with camera angles. I vividly remember they tried one from over the catcher’s shoulder when Marichal was pitching. There was 5 seconds of stunned silence after a curve, then the first announcer to recover said, “Let’s try that again, I think something went wrong with our camera,” and it happened again. I could not believe anyone could possibly hit a pitch with that kind of movement. I swear it curved left at the tip of the plate and then curved back right as it crossed!

I got to see the Jews in Baseball exhibit at the Jewish Museum in LA a number of years ago and was fascinated. Learned about Moe Berg, the catcher who spied on Japan for the US preceding WWII after learning the Japanese language on the ship over for a baseball tour of Japan. As a tourist, he got great pictures of the Japanese Navy at its berths. Later at a pre-war conference in Geneva, he picked the brains of German physicists to give us intel about where the Germans were in their atomic research. The exhibit also had the actual bill of sale of Ruth’s contract from the Red Sox to the Yankees on display. My wife was a little bored, but she had actually found the exhibit for me and indulged my fanboyishness. We were actually there to see a Tibetan temple exhibit at the Getty (just down the canyon) the next day to indulge her interests.

By: huxley

huxley — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 02:19:31 +0000

It always seemed to me that guitarists have it backwards. The hand on the neck ought to be the dominant, most dextrous hand and the one strumming ought to be the weakest.

Rufus:

So it seems to me as well. After all piano players generally play the melodies with the right hand and the rhythm with the left.

Though the times I’ve picked up a guitar and fooled around, knowing only a few chords, it just seemed natural to pick notes on the left and strum on the right.

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 02:17:11 +0000

Mythx, thanks for the info about basketball. I’m not as familiar with that sport. I also remember a TV report where they analyzed the famous Marathoner Frank Shorter who was known for having bad technique. After studying his anatomy on a treadmill, they concluded he was absolutely optimizing the use of his own body by breaking all the “rules” for doing it the right way according to trainers. We do great harm by not treating individuals as individuals, and even if we can train most people to be better by “optimizing” them to the best way for the average person, we should be humble enough to recognize when it doesn’t work.

By: huxley

huxley — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 01:51:44 +0000

Doesn’t Paul McCartney (a lefty?) also play a right handed bass flipped upside down?

Rufus:

My understanding — he’s left-handed and started on a flipped right-handed guitar. When George joined the band as a guitar player, McCartney switched to bass. I guess he flipped that one at first, then later, with fame and fortune, switched to left-handed versions.

McCartney also says he can play a right-handed guitar right-handed, but not nearly so well.

I concluded a while back that McCartney is a mutant who can do whatever the hell he wants to do musically, but mostly he wants to have a good time and charm your socks off rather than impress anyone with his genius.

By: jvermeer

jvermeer — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 01:43:07 +0000

Re: Chagnon and Art Deco, who has an anthropology skeptic friend. Chagnon is now politically incorrect; he worked before most social sciences were thoroughly corrupted. I worked in a college bookstore in the 70s and “The Yamanamo” was a common text. It’s now probably banned as, we all know, the only violent cultures are white, straight and Christian/Zionist.