The first grand slam

Well, in this article I would like to talk about all of them at once. I feel like once I've done this, I lose the motivation to continue on this blog, even though there are many things I want to talk about the influences between science, art, and music. It's like the dream fulfilled, and really what more do you need for

To be honest, I don't know a lot of things about art, I wish I do, but art is something I should "know", although the Japanese educational system literally taught me how to draw. Itself was very interesting and useful to my life though, like the lesson on perspective helped me the understanding of geometry and coordinate system. I can draw those things much better although I can't draw people's head better than I draw a potato.

Anyways, so of course, in front of the mighty mathematics and science I thought anything artistic is not worthy - but then, I've encountered the work of Salvador Dali. I remember that I was shocked, like how can a person draw such a crazy drawings so beautifully. It has easily been more than 10 years since so I don't remember if you ask me which one in particular, but I remember that feeling very well. Dali, what a genius. BUT what I remember more is the quote by Muhammad Ali "dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee". I don't know why (okay, I don't remember why to be more precise) there was a section for Muhammad Ali but yeah that quote has always been in my mind since then. I'm not a boxer, so I can't really dance and sting like those, but this is like one of the dividing point of what's elegant and what's not I guess. It isn't necessary to be how I act, but you know, how I do things (if you don't know, forget it).

I think, for artists and scientists, the imagination/inspiration is an artefact of an illogicality in our logical thinking, which somehow makes sense logically in some certain context. Well, even if it doesn't seems to be logical to anyone in the world, for creators of the arts, it is totally logical to themselves. I think that's what distinguishes us from machines.... Science is like an art, I've read it somewhere that unlike mathematics, the scientific truth needs some kind of elegance to be accepted. Elegance is a weird concept to be defined properly, but I think the flat earth theories sounds hideous (if you are believer of the flat Earth, try votex math) because the logical steps that they have some steps which doesn't match to your sense of beauty. Well, if they don't sound hideous then may be your sense of beauty matches to theirs and may be you can live a happy life by thinking that the Earth if flat. I'm not against that, I'm just saying that I think that's how things are. I mean we cannot all agree even with a statement that is something as trivial as "Earth is flat", how can a computer to make us to think in certain way and accept certain thing as an absolute truth?

To end this post, I think I should make some remarks about music. Yeah, as the title "the first grand slam", suggests, I was trying to write an article which connects all three in the title of the blog. I've been writing this article part by part for few days now, but I don't know how those two things above connect to a particular story about music. May be I can talk about George Gershwin. I think the first CD I bought is Rhapsody in Blue by Fazil Say. I don't know if it's common to buy this kind of CD as the first CD you ever buy (and I remember I was like 10 or something), but yeah. So I have a lot of memories about Gershwin, and it was the thing that introduced me into the world of music beyond classical (I mean I remember listening to pop songs too but the memory of the things I was listening to at those times other than Rhapsody in blue is bizarre). Beyond classical is like blues and jazz (in fact I was playing piano in Jazz club in high school in US, good times). Unlike any other instruments piano is a bit hard thing to move around and buy so although I have been "playing" piano, the relationship between a piano and I is not as serious as other people who really play them (I wish though, I really wish I do...). Not to make a same mistake again, I will buy a legit legit piano (not a keyboard) this time. Anyways, I like his idea of squashing together Jazz and classical music to make a new sound really got my soul I guess (or may be just the coolness coming from a 16min of non-stop piano with orchestra with a fancy sound got my childish soul haha). Anyways, Fazil Say is such a great guy. I also have his other album where he plays the lite of spring, an another magical piece where he plays everything with piano (it's really mysterious but insightful).

I guess I feel empathy to the aspect of Stravinsky and Gershwin as a composer who challenged to make new sounds from known genres of the music with a very long history, and Fazil Say as a performer who has bulled the best out of them using only a piano (well, its a lie, he had an orchestra in his back for the performance of Rhapsody in Blue). I think those are analogous to many revolutionary discoveries in physics like Einstein's relativity from a long known maths and newly known mysterious property of a black body and Landau who solved everything elegantly with squiggly lines and sophisticated equations in the times when there was no personal computers. I think this concludes the first post on my thoughts about science-art-music. In short, they are all magical and mysterious enough for me to keep me from getting bored of life.

Ooo, speaking of Gershwin, you should watch An American in Paris it's on Amazon prime (Unfortunately I haven't watched Porgy and Bess I think that's on my watch list now, well I love the song I got plenty of nothing though)!