Tag: Excellence

Oh, I get it.

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A superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room.

~ Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying (The New Yorker, December 16, 2019)

Notes:

Silience (135 sec)

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silience:

n. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.

Oh, of course we are.

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above-average

Source: The New York Times Magazine

Meryl Streep: A League of Her Own

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meryl-streep

While Streep, 67, who has racked up a record 19 Academy Award acting nominations, receives such praise with grace, when she says she is merely happy to be acting she is not simply being modest. “On a certain level you don’t have any choice—you’re unhappy if you’re not doing it, so you’re compelled in a certain way. And if you’re lucky you can keep working,” she says. “But everybody has troughs and dismal times—every single person…Those anxieties help explain why Streep is pleased to be as prolific as at any time in her nearly 40-year film career.

[…]

Streep eventually realized that, despite having a lovely voice, she wasn’t good enough to be a professional diva. And though she sang plenty, Streep left her dreams of singing opera behind. Until Florence Foster Jenkins. “Yeah, there were moments when you’d say, ‘Sing worse,’ ” Streep says to Frears. “You were quite close,” Frears responds, referring to Jenkins’s idiosyncratic intonation.

As Streep pauses in appreciation, I’m reminded of a moment late in the film. Stripped of her wildly outlandish attire, Jenkins delivers a line that resounds like a credo: “They may say I can’t sing, but they can never say I didn’t sing.” This may be true for Streep, who like Jenkins is striving with all her heart, though she holds herself to a higher standard: her own.

“At the end, I sort of thought, Well, that was good,” Streep says, nodding. “I thought I’d done well, sounded good.” She pauses and adds with a laugh: “I also thought I looked good. Someone should have told me!”

~ Alex Bhattacharji, Meryl Streep: A League of Her Own

Notes:

 

“What’s going on next to me is just ridiculous”

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katie-ledecky

Here are a handful of excerpts from an awe-inspiring, MUST READ article by Michael Sokolove on Katie Ledecky:

  • The most dominant swimmer in the pool this summer is 19 year-old Katie Ledecky. The question isn’t whether she’ll win, but by how much…
  • She is now the world’s top female swimmer in the 200, 400, 800 and 1,500 freestyles. She is among the best Americans in the 100 free. No swimmer has conquered this combination of distances in nearly half a century, and to many in the sport, her achievement is hard to fathom — it would be like the Jamaican star sprinter Usain Bolt taking up and winning mile races.
  • No other woman has ever come within seven seconds of her top time in the 800 freestyle; in the 1,500, the gap is a ridiculous 13 seconds. At the Olympic trials, Leah Smith, an emerging middle-distance swimmer, came within two seconds of her in the 400. She said she was excited because, in her races against Ledecky, “I had never been able to see her feet before.”
  • In the starting blocks before a race, Ledecky does not stroke her biceps or pound her fists against her own body, as some male swimmers do…She just stretches her neck a bit and shakes her arms out, then dives in the pool and wins.
  • She has only three real training partners, all of them male, because they are the only ones with the ability to keep up with her. They swim either in the same lane or in an adjoining lane to Ledecky…It’s not unusual for men and women swimmers to train together, but being in the pool with Ledecky is something that many men can’t handle. In April, Conor Dwyer, a 6-foot-5, 27-year-old American swimmer who won a gold medal in the 4-by-200 freestyle relay in London, gave a revealing interview posted online by USA Swimming. In it, he talked about male swimmers being “broken” by Ledecky when they practiced together at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.
  • I saw a couple of guys have to get yanked out of workout because they got beat by her.” When I asked Ledecky about this, she claimed not to have noticed. “I was probably just concentrating on doing my own work,” she said.
  • “I’m not gonna lie, it can be annoying when she beats you,” Hirschberger told me. Even if the person getting the best of him is a reigning world-record holder in three events? “You’re just not used to getting beat by a girl,” he said…”What’s going on next to me is just ridiculous. It’s unreal. (Andrew Gemmell, a Ledecky training partner)

Don’t miss the full story here: NY Times Magazine –  The Phenom