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Schefflera Arboricola

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Posts posted by Schefflera Arboricola

  1. What do Objectivists think of the composition of my shots?

    (I am assuming that what you were asking was what the audience here at ObjectivismOnline thinks of the photographs. Forgive the nitpicky side of my nature here.)

    They look like a happy couple, and they will be treasuring those photographs for years to come.

    If you are aiming to make the $4,000 per wedding that your local photographers are making, here are some criticisms and suggestions.

    Criticisms: In a few of the photographs, there are background elements at a tilt (like the gazebo, or the shades of the window). And in the closeup of the bride and the groom where their faces are close together, their faces are very shiny. It makes them look sweaty or oily. I am ignorant of photography and what photographers do to make their pictures come out "picture perfect," but whatever those alterations are, I would want them done if I were paying thousands of dollars. This couple looks like happy young people who are thrilled to get married, and they wanted the pictures to record/commemorate the day. That is great, and they're probably going to be the easiest kind of people to deal with. But there are also going to be people who want that "perfect" look for their money.

    Suggestions: Can you compile a portfolio of photographs of the local wedding venues, to show brides what your photography is going to look like in the setting they want? Also, there will be local vendors (florists, caterers, equipment/prop rentals) who would probably love to have photographs of their work to show their own prospective clients, but they don't have someone to do that. You could offer to do photographs of their work, and in exchange you would have your name on that photograph they're showing their clients. Since the person finding the florist or the caterer is probably going to be the same person calling around to find a photographer, this could be good targeted exposure for you.

    Best of luck with that!

    --Schefflera

  2. So am I the only one who likes Strauss here? What are your thoughts on Strauss?

    I dislike Also Sprach Zarathustra so much that I bumped Strauss down in the queue of composers I'm learning. I like to spend a couple months to a couple years really learning one composer's music, before I spend too much time listening to new music from someone else. I think I have several hundred Schubert lieder committed to memory now, and it is time to move on.

    I loved the Brahms symphony I heard a concert a few months ago, so I've been gradually shifting in that direction. Tell me more about what you like about Richard Strauss, though, and I could be swayed to try it out. I'd especially like to hear about his vocal music.

    Danke!

    --Schefflera

  3. Good gravy! What Rachmaninoff piece did that to you? I'm with Sophia on this one. You must try it again.

    Yes. You have to get a good orchestra, a good conductor, and a good performer. It's not a matter of classical snobbery and fussiness; it's a matter of coherence. There are some classical pieces out there, like The Nutcracker, that are so simple that the main idea will come across no matter what. Even if you're listening to a third-rate Eastern European radio symphony orchestra trying to survive by churning out LaserLight recordings, it still falls together in the ear. But for Rachmaninoff's difficult and complex piano music, there are many variations in tempo and phrasing (just for starters). The artist-interpreter is going to make a huge difference. Martha Argerich is one of my favorite pianists for Rachmaninoff. For his piano preludes, there is a CD available from BMG Classical Music (the buy-1-get-12-free people) featuring Alexis Weissenberg, which I can recommend.

    My favorite Rachmaninoff piece is the Trio Elegiaque, on a Library of Congress recording with the Budapest String Quartet. Skip the Moscow Conservatory Trio's recording of the same piece; the violin goes flat in the high parts of my favorite passage.

    I would also caution that piano-heavy music is an acquired taste, like opera, or like much other solo-instrumental music. The first time I heard a violin concerto with double- and triple-stops (a particular way of bowing the instrument so that the violinist is playing more than one note at once), I thought that it was some sort of ghastly mix-up. As a horn player, I can enjoy dozens of Baroque horn concertos that other classical-music-likers just can't stand, because they aren't used to the sound of the instrument and it sounds out of place. The same thing was the case with piano. I couldn't stand the sound of solo piano music until after a few weeks of listening to it.

    Good listening!

    --Schefflera

    I don't like other composers of classical music. But I don't know many pieces by others. Once I bought a Rachmaninoff CD but found it depressing and threw it away.

    It was Isle of the Dead, wasn't it?

    --Schefflera

  4. Indeed... have you listened to Maurice Ravel's "Bolero"? The same melody is relentlessly repeated, over and over, with harmonics and orchestration providing variety and color. It opens with a (barely audible) snare drum and flute, and finishes with the entire orchestra a blazin' away full-bore-- all under perfect control by the tempo and the still-repeating snare drum. A masterfully constructed piece.

    In Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind, he saw students' fondness for Ravel's Bolero as a mark of cultural decay. The single piece of classical music that young people had any affection for, he mourned, was this banal piece of orchestral music that repeats the same figure over and over, louder and louder, to the close.

    In my book, Allan Bloom can be a nitwit.

    --Schefflera

    Schoenberg - String Quartets (JUST KIDDING haha)

    "Don't Be Cruel" (Elvis Presley)

    --Schefflera

  5. At the risk of outing myself as an extreme minority here…

    I like this poem. (Charlotte cowers)

    I enjoyed reading your comments on the techniques used, and their effects. Thank you for sharing them.

    For me, this poem was somewhat like one of those George Winston tapes my mother has. George Winston is a pianist who records for Windham Hill, a New Age-ish label of sorts. Think "music you'd hear at the massage therapist." There are plenty of moments where you can say, "Oh, that was a poignant Neapolitan 6th chord," or "a clever little turn in the oboe accompaniment," but it doesn't add up to a piece of music.

    The difference is that with massage-piano music, I don't think it's supposed to add up; the music is intended for background relaxation, not attentive listening.

    Higher standards apply when our teachers tell us, "Read this. This is one of the greatest poems in Western literature." We may admire a particularly well-turned phrase. If we're a cooperative type, we may warm our imaginative sympathies enough to place the smaller details. We might write well-thought-out, insightful papers explaining how several items in the poem are related to each other. But just the fact that it contained enough layers of imagery to make a passable paper, doesn't make it great.

    The closest I've gotten to understanding why anything is "great" literature or a "great" poem (according to conventional standards), is: "Because X can kind of mean this, and Y can kind of mean that, and it's all related together in a way, and it ties into a theme that is important to Western literature."

    --Schefflera

  6. I think he is refering to differences in brain structure and function that have been found recently due largely to technological improvements in nuerology. Women and men, for example use diferent parts of their brains when performing identical tasks.

    That's like saying that since I use a pen and paper, and you use a calculator, we add differently.

    (Of course, that's not a precise analogy. There are more differences between pen/paper and calculator than between male/female brains.)

    --Schefflera

  7. Yeah, more and more evidence seems to indicate that men and women actually think differently. Maybe on some similar principles, but in some way they have distinct hard-wiring.

    Please be careful. It is wrong to say men and women "think differently" if all you mean is that some researchers have shown statistical differences in what men and women think about, or their style of verbal expression. "Think" is more specific. Men and women do not have different methods of cognition.

    If men and women do think differently, then I'm transgendered!

    --Schefflera

  8. This post is to announce the creation of this sub-forum. Since I almost exclusively use "View New Posts", I missed the fact that this new sub-forum had been created two days ago. So, I'm highlighting it for others who might have missed it?

    I'm not sure if this is the right place, but since this is not about a specific LTE, I think this is the best place to put my questions. I write well, and I follow current events, but I don't connect the two. I write letters-to-the-editor very rarely and keep them very narrow.

    The first set of questions are for people who write and send letters to the editor, or letters to their elected officials.

    1. Were you in the habit you had before you became an Objectivist? How long were you "intellectual" before you became "activist"?

    2. What was the first LTE you wrote and sent? What was your favorite?

    3. What do you get out of it?

    The second set of questions are for anyone who reads LTEs.

    1. What makes an LTE memorable? Not "good," but something that sticks in your brain?

    2. Has an LTE ever changed your mind about anything? (I would say that it has never changed my mind, but I have seen good points that I might not have thought to use otherwise.)

    Thank you in advance for any answers or help you have to offer.

    --Schefflera

  9. I appreciate any input to this. It may seem like I am rambling. This is the exact reason why I feel the need to post, to create some concrete ideas from this confusion.

    I don't like to suggest something without being available to give a lot more backup, which I can't do right now due to an imminent cross-country move. But I'm reading your post right now, and thinking how it's so similar in some crucial respects to the way I was at university 10 years ago. So let me just say: consider medication a possibility. Talk to a doctor; talk to ten of them if that's what it takes to get one who is knowledgeable and answers your questions. But don't rule it out. Some things cannot be fixed by willpower. I speak from experience.

    --Schefflera

  10. So what do you do?

    You take advantage of the distinctive cover art on Ayn Rand's books. It can be spotted from half a mile away. Sit in the park, or on the quad, or the lunchroom, and read Atlas Shrugged.

    I know someone who got a girlfriend that way, and it was not even intentional on his part. He was reading AS on break at work. "So," said a voice, "is this the first time you read that?" It was. The voice belonged to the attractive co-worker he'd noticed a few days before.

    Chance favors the prepared mind.

    --Schefflera

  11. That's the day I'm waiting for! When I have to stop explaining...and be with someone who truly understands.

    It's great. But you don't get to stop explaining; instead, you find more and more things to explain to each other. I think I understand what you meant, though. You want to stop explaining the basics. And you don't always want to be the teacher or explainer. You want someone else to bring something new to you, too. :)

    --Schefflera

  12. The problem is, every once in a while I find myself getting into an ethical or political debate that brings out the pure irrationality in people, and it sours my mood for the rest of the day and I become completely uncivil and take it out on people not involved.

    So the problem is that it brings out the irrationality in other people?

    My guess: I think you're frustrated because you feel like you didn't make a good showing, not because the other person disagreed with you. There's something left fuzzy or untangled, and you feel like the debate made things more fuzzy and tangled, not less. You don't feel like you got to say what you really wanted to say. You spent a lot of time talking at cross-purposes with someone who you value enough to spend time with, and that was naturally frusterating.

    As an example, tonight I saw the movie Blood Diamonds with a friend. On the way home, she mentioned how she wanted to join the peace corps, and we got into a big debate about whether or not it helps. Now, I personally think an organization that gives more to people the worse they are is only furthering the problem, and she is convinced that peace corps and similar organizations are the only way to solve the problem.

    I am not privy to the context, but I think you didn't define the question well enough to have a fruitful debate. "[W]hether or not it helps"--helps what? And what is "the problem" which is either being furthered or solved? If you are trying to debate whether nations with Peace Corps activity are generally helped or hurt by it, you have put yourself in a tough position. You'd have to explain away or dismiss every concrete instance where the Peace Corps did bring some measure of literacy or health to a region. You'd also have to establish that the Peace Corps does give more to people the worse they are. Unless you've already read up on it in detail to make that specific point, it's not something you can do.

    Now, I can understand a difference of opinion, but when we debated she dismissed my ideas as unrealistic and used the "life's not that simple" card, and refused to accept the posibility that her ideas might lead to harm in the area.
    I'm not sure it's fair to say she refused to accept that possibility. You were saying that the Peace Corps makes problems worse. Not "might" make them worse. And if you didn't have the concretes to back up your ideas, they're going to get dismissed unless you're talking to a person who already shares them. It's never pleasant to feel dismissed.

    Since then, I've been moody, snapped at both my parents and a few of my friends, and am in general feeling like shit. I hate that this bothers me so much, and I hate having this issue over and over again... In fact, if I'm not in a good mood you can almost be sure it is because of this issue. Any thoughts are greatly apreciated.

    I think you should go back to this friend and say something along these lines: "I owe you an apology. We went out to see a movie, and then you talked about the Peace Corps. I get angry because sometimes these helping organizations cause a lot of damage to real human lives, but it seems like everybody cuts them slack because of their 'good intentions.' But you were talking about something you wanted to do in the future. I let my opinions about humanitarian organizations in general get in the way of asking about your specific plans. What are they?" She's feeling dismissed right now, just like you are. She was expecting some interest and approval. You don't have to approve, but if you call her a friend, you owe it to both of you to dig further before you try to tell her she's doing the wrong thing.

    She may even surprise you with something interesting.

    --Schefflera

  13. If I have trouble focusing on what I am doing, I usually conclude that it is something which I do not really want to do (right now). I am just forcing myself to do it because I think I should (unselfishly). So I stop doing it and do something else.

    It is a mistake to treat this as a disease and treat it with drugs. It is a problem with integrating one's values and actions.

    The person you were responding to said that their frequent difficulty with paying attention was a symptom of a disorder. If you are able to cognitively work your way through it in the way you described above, then of course it is a mistake for you to attempt to treat the problem with drugs instead. But not all cognitive symptoms have purely cognitive solutions!

    --Schefflera

    Edited to remove a word typed twice, ironically enough.

  14. What is that point? Which men have it in their nature to be effeminate, and in what ways? I can understand a fellow not having a deep voice, but that is a form of handicap as far as I know: and I don't agree with those who embrace their disabilities.

    How is that a handicap? Not in the romantic arena, surely. I find a clear, light, precise voice to be extremely sexy. Much sexier than a subsonic rumble.

    This isn't to say that I don't think "castrato" when I hear boy bands...

    --Schefflera

  15. I have discovered the most Objectivist video game ever made, bar none. The best part is that every single person with a computer has it.

    Tsk, tsk. May I remind you of the existence of the Macintosh and Linux operating systems, among others?

    b1LL 0\|/n$ u!!!

    --Schefflera

    P.S. Your post made me laugh.

  16. North Korea wants the US to follow through on the commitments it made back in 1994 (?) under the deal brokered by Carter which probably stopped a second Korean war.

    That statement would require a lot of backup.

    The US hasn't bothered to follow through on most of its promises (which included giving them a light water nuclear reactor).

    Did the North Korean government follow through on its end? I thought that the US government's "promises" were made conditionally. My recollection could be wrong, of course, and so I would welcome the opportunity to examine whatever backup detail you can present for your position.

    Of course, I'm not arguing that our government should have made or kept such a suicidal bargain.

    --Schefflera

  17. Well, I have an idea. It's not about why you feel numb, though, but why I might feel numb if I were in the same situation.

    I would like the idea of being free to pursue a relationship with someone whose long-term interests and goals were more closely aligned with my own. But I would also feel guilty over that, because I'm "supposed" to feel sad over a breakup, and because I would blame myself for making the decisions that put me in this situation in the first place. Also, I'd feel guilty if I were at all happy while my ex (who still is a valuable person to me, or so I tell myself) was presumably heartbroken.

    So instead of being happy, I'd tell myself I was feeling nothing.

    --Schefflera

  18. "The four agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz. A lot of similarities to objectivism and marvellous. It´s "companion book" has great excercises in the "Domestication" section: you identifiy ALL of your ideas you hold as thuths and challenge them.

    The Four Agreements are:

    1. Be impeccable with your word.

    2. Don't take things personally.

    3. Don't make assumptions.

    4. Always do your best.

    The Four Agreements is written by a shaman/faith healer who says that his book is based on ancient Toltec wisdom. Even if the historical gaps were small enough to allow his claim to be plausible (the Aztecs invented a lot of what we "know" about the Toltecs), I wonder why anyone would choose to base a belief system on "wisdom" from a culture widely credited with the introduction of mass human sacrifice.

    TOLTEC PEASANT: This looks kind of scary. I'm not sure I want to go through with it.

    TOLTEC PRIEST: Stay! You must be impeccable with your word. Now, relax and hold still--and don't take this personally.

    TOLTEC PEASANT: You're holding a rather large knife in a threatening manner. Are you about to cut my heart out or something?

    TOLTEC PRIEST: Don't make assumptions!

    TOLTEC PEASANT: Well, it's just that without my heart, it would be kind of hard to go on living.

    TOLTEC PRIEST: You can always do your best.

    --Schefflera

  19. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone has any means of controlling thinking what you want and don't want to think about. How do you prevent thoughts from "just popping in"? Has it never been a problem with you? Do you have an effective way of dealing with it? I myself have been having less and less of a problem with having my mind stray all over the place, though I'm not yet 100% sure what the exact cause of it is. I still get thoughts that "pop in" but I'm more effective in propelling them away from my consciousness when I don't wish to invest any time thinking about them. I'm hoping to bounce this question against people here to see what they can come up with, and I will do my own introspection in the meantime. :)

    The book White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, by Daniel Wegner, has plenty of good material and leads.

    --Schefflera

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