Haroldo Sánchez

Around the year 1500, medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch painted a person with sheet music written on their butt being tortured in hell. 500 years later, someone decided to transcribe and play the song. Now, you can hear it too.

I watched the BBC documentary last night about Paul McCartneys lost bass. As a Beatles fan (and Wings) and as a Bass player myself I loved every minute of it. It’s a fascinating story. Catch it if you can. Well worth the watch. bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…

In January 1899, Monet made a long journey to visit a dying friend. He stayed one day. Then went home to Giverny — to his water garden, his household staff, his fame. The dying man had none of these things. They had started out together, in the same studio, in 1862. A thread about Alfred Sisley🧵

A biologist once figured out part of this mystery by accident, during a nap. In 1982, Jack Putz lay down under a group of mangrove trees in Costa Rica, looked up, and watched the wind slam their top branches into each other over and over. Every gust snapped off leaves and twigs. So Putz had a theory. When two trees grow close together, they sway in storms and their branches beat each other up. Over years, that beating trims back the treetops where they meet. That wear and tear carves out the gap. A 2015 study backed him up. Researchers checked the branches along these gaps and found that at least half of them had been broken in just the previous six years. Trees are getting slapped around constantly up there. But the theory falls apart in some forests. Alan Rebertus, a scientist who studied a cloud forest where winds hit over 100 kilometers an hour, compared it to sheltered forests. He expected the windy ones to have bigger gaps. They didn't. The gaps looked the same. The Malaysian camphor tree doesn't show any sign of rubbing either. It grows as tall as a 25-story building, and researchers looked carefully where the branches stopped. They found nothing. Whatever was keeping those branches apart, it wasn't physical contact. So there's a second theory, and this one is the part I love. Trees might actually sense each other. Their leaves carry a protein called phytochrome that acts like a little light meter. It notices a kind of light called far-red, which healthy leaves bounce off instead of absorbing. So if a tree's growing tip is suddenly drowning in far-red light, it knows another tree's leaves are right there. The tip stops growing in that direction. The gap forms on its own. Plants even do this politely toward relatives. Next to kin, they back off. But put them next to a stranger and they grow right up in the neighbor's face. The honest answer to what we're looking at in the sky is: we don't fully know. Probably wind in some species, light sensing in others. Plenty of trees do both at the same time. A hundred years of science and nobody has cracked it.

En vivo.

One of the best documentaries I have every watched. I strongly recommend it to all who love and appreciate Bach and beautiful music in general. youtube.com/watch?v=WVeYL-…

Recordé al autodidacta, de La Náusea, de Sartre, que leía los libros más discímbolos. El protagonista no entendía esa lógica hasta que se percató de algo: leía en orden alfabético. Me quedo con la idea de la lectura como acto gozoso. Borges decía: lean lo que quieran, pero lean.

Sting talking about the evolution of listening music, from vinyls to streaming platforms.

🔥 Sade Adu dancing might be the smoothest thing you’ll see all day! That effortless grace, those hypnotic moves, and pure elegance in every step — she doesn’t just dance, she glides like silk on the breeze. Absolute queen energy ❤️‍🔥

Leí un chiste: Mozart muere y va al cielo. Dios lo recibe y le dice: hijo, quiero que te hagas cargo del coro celestial. Mozart, turbado, le contesta: Señor, qué honor, pero ¿y Bach? Entonces Dios le responde: yo soy Bach. Feliz cumpleaños al más grande.

"Bertrand Russell llamando al Reino Unido a deponer las armas frente a Hitler; Martin Heidegger y Carl Schmitt abrazando el nazismo; Simone de Beauvoir celebrando el maoísmo; Sartre y Foucault fascinados con la Revolución Islámica en Irán… ¿Cómo personas particularmente agudas, ilustradas e informadas han podido, en el siglo XX y en lo que va de éste, ser tan ciegas ante la barbarie totalitaria pese a tener las evidencias frente a sus narices?"

Alcanzar esos registros a los 84 años es tremendo.

Han existido miles de generaciones de humanos. Guerras. Imperios. Caídas. Y a ti te tocó estar vivo para ver esto. Después de viajar 9 años y cubrir 3 mil millones de millas, la nave espacial New Horizons de la NASA tomó estas imagenes. "Las montañas heladas de Plutón" ¿te das cuenta del momento histórico que estamos viviendo… o ya lo normalizamos todo?

“If anyone was the fifth Beatle it was him” ~ Paul McCartney #GeorgeMartin #TheBeatles

Es sorprendente cómo en 1967, los conceptos de #MarshallMcLuhan de "medio electrónico" y "aldea global" son enteramente nuestro actual internet y las redes sociales. Es un discurso de hace casi 60 años y parece que esté hablando de lo que vivimos hoy en día 🤔

Los "latinos" sólo existen en EEUU, utilizar la expresión para el resto del continente es adoptar la mirada estadounidense.

@LeonKrauze ¿De qué va a hablar un chico de veintitantos? Paul McCartney tenía 22 años cuando compuso Yesterday.

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

Encontramos este video en el que Borges critica con nombre y apellido a varios escritores latinoamericanos (y algunos de ellos, la verdad, nos gustan un montón). Vamos con un hilo de los odiados por Borges, con sus críticas incluidas:

No Ordinary Love - Sade (1992) 🔥🔥 Produced by Sade & Mike Pela

Caviar para paladares exquisitos.