Daily Slow Chat

4 comments

1. I watched the Red Violin finally! It took me a while to get hold of it. Man, it’s such a great movie that nobody talks about anymore (I guess also because it’s hard to find). It is about, well, a violin’s life throughout centuries in different countries and in the hands of different players. The soundtrack is amazing as well (thank God, I mean the whole thing is about music).

   The premise of the movie is that the Italian master who makes the violin paints it with the blood of his wife who dies during childbirth. Before her death, there’s a scene where an old woman is doing a tarot reading for the wife and kind of foretells strange events which then happen to the violin. So the woman becomes a violin, in a way. It is a bit fitting with how women became the subjects of art through centuries while they themselves never having the chance to create art and dying unknown.

   One great thing about the movie is the story of little Kaspar (it’s made of vignettes that take place in different countries and then come together at the end). Kaspar is a child prodigy orphan from Vienna in the 18th century, who loves his violin but unfortunately dies very soon due to his weak heart. It is so heartbreaking, also because they found the most beautiful, angelic child to act as Kaspar. And he can definitely play the violin. In fact, he (Christoph Koncz) grew up to become a famous violinist and conductor. You can see him [play pieces from the soundtrack here](https://youtu.be/1pcN1wfcHHg?si=bymPcgSdP0GVOoeR). That was my favorite part of the film (you can watch that part on YouTube [here](https://youtu.be/hbh9X2pt1IM?si=ptyDkKyaHbkLCOpP)) and I felt a bit vindicated for the poor baby that died so soon in the movie.

   Anyway, good film. Definitely watch it if you can find it.

2. So I came across an interesting article the other day and I thought it had a lot to teach us about the power of false assumptions.

   Most of us know that Immanuel Kant was most famous for being one of the greatest Western philosophers of all time. What’s less known though (including by me, until recently), was that he was also a very accomplished scientist and laid out many basic theories of star and planet formation that were wildly ahead of his time. Despite this, he was also a religious man and took every word of the Biblical account of Noah’s flood completely literally. This became a problem for him as he just couldn’t understand where all of this extra water would have come from to be able to submerge the entire planet to the extent described in the Bible (15 cubits, allegedly), and how to reconcile the Biblical numbers with, well…everything else he knew about the world (including the whole fossils-being-older-than-6000-years-old thing, which was a major conundrum for pretty much every one of his intellectual contemporaries)

   To resolve the dilemma, he came up with an ingenious solution. He surmised that, at the time of creation, Earth had a ring orbiting it made up of small ice particles, just like Saturn does today. Then, at the time of Noah’s flood, a passing asteroid caused a gravitational perturbation in the orbit of the ring, bringing the ring of ice particles crashing down to Earth and thereby raising sea levels to the required 15 cubits. And sure enough, there was a paper that came out last year that hypothesised that the Earth did indeed have such a ring a few hundreds of millions of years ago whose formation and dissolution had a major effect on the Earth’s climate.

   Now, it’s very difficult to argue that Kant was a stupid man. He was just working from a very silly paradigm of fundamental assumptions about the world. And I think that’s true with people today whose political beliefs seem completely incomprehensible to us. They’re not necessarily stupid, evil or misinformed. They’re just making sense of the world based on a rather strange set of assumptions and personal experiences that we don’t share.

3. Today, I would like to talk about art, and stuff. We went to a museum a few days ago. It had a couple of Van Goghs, and other well-known and lesser known Dutch masters. And apparently, you should be touched by such art, and feel something, stand in awe of something like that. But for me, it’s just a painting, nice and all, but nothing more. Certainly, I can see the craftmanship and skill of the painter, the eye for detail and such, although if they told me they were from a very good amateur painter I would have believed it too. But it doesn’t do anything for me. The Van Goghs even were just boring, bland, brown and colourless. From his potato-period, it seems.

   And it got me thinking. I have a university education, a PhD, a high income, so I’m part of the elite of society. I should love art, literature, classical music, opera. But I don’t. I’m a headbanging (well, I would, if I still had hair) heavy metal, SF-reading and football loving guy. Only thing art-related I like is Esscher. I don’t feel ‘bad’ about it, if that’s the word. I know why it is so. I come from a poorer working class family, first one to ever see a university from the inside. Art, classical music, reading? We got no time and money for that stuff.
   And while you can take the man out from the environment, you can’t take the environment out of the man. And while I don’t really care, I can feel the divide with colleagues. Had the same thing while at university. Call it class-conscientiousness, a feeling of ‘I don’t belong here’.

   Hmm, I was trying to make a point with this, but I have forgotten what it was along the way. Ah well, I just wanted to share it.

4. Tonight I’m making ‘beer cheese soup ‘, which is apparently a recipe popular in Wisconsin.First time,I saw an interesting looking recipe and decided to try it.

   I’ve made the classic German beer soup before and liked it, but it’s quite different from this one

   Anyway I’ll see how it turns out!

   Do any of you ever cook using beer? Have you ever made an American beer cheese soup?