Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson) calculates orbital insertion trajectories for the Mercury program using Euler’s method in this scene from the movie Hidden Figures. Credit: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
AL HARRISON:
You think we can get to the moon?[Katherine nods, with all the certainty in the world:]
KATHERINE:
We’re already there, sir.
— Hidden Figures (2016)
Frank T. Merrill, “Hercules frees Prometheus from the rock” (1904)
Meanwhile, during the first flush of success and before the release of “Fantastic,” we’d decided that Wham!’s creative reins should rest solely with George if we were to achieve the scale of success we believed was in our reach. I had long recognized his ability… The decision still smarted a little, but it was the right one: George was so clearly developing into a writer of rare ability; indeed it was the desire to realize the potential of that gift which drove him to become a solo artist, free of our band’s constraints…
— Andrew Ridgeley, “Wham!, George Michael and Me: A Memoir”
photograph by Josh Hild via Unsplash
Then the king in his great-heartedness unclasped
The collar of gold from his neck and gave it
To the young thane, telling him to use
It and the war shirt and the gilded helmet well.
— Beowulf (Tr. Seamus Heaney)
Before leaving Saint-Rémy, he wrote to Émile Bernard:
“…And yet, once again I let myself go reaching for stars that are too big —
a new failure — and I have had enough of it.”
Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress), Thomas Edison (between 1870 and 1880)
Neglect not the gift that is in thee…
—Timothy 4:14 King James Version
I was saddened to read recently of the passing of Allan Holdsworth. This is a transcription I did a long time ago of his “In The Dead Of Night” solo. I saw him in the fall of 1983 and remember how much he inspired me.
“Hats off, gentlemen—a genius!”
—Robert Schumann, Review of Chopin’s variations on Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano,” Op. 2 In “Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung”, Vol. 33, no. 49 (December 7, 1831)
cf. Cincinnati Magazine, 1985
The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
—Mignon McLaughlin
“You do something not because you want to — you do something because you have to. And I don’t mean you have to because you’re being told but there’s a compulsion within you, there’s an obsession…”
—Paul Stanley, Paul Stanley on Rock and Roll – YouTube
Alfred Stieglitz, From the Back Window – 291 (1915)
Dorothea Lange, Young family, penniless, hitchhiking… (1936)
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be…
–Robert Frost, Birches
Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch and oak,
It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill
That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake
And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch,
And there a clump of houses with a church.
—Robert Frost, The Onset
Before leaving Saint-Rémy, he wrote to Émile Bernard:
“…And yet, once again I let myself go reaching for stars that are too big —
a new failure — and I have had enough of it.”
John Sapiro 