#flautists unite

[wutherwaves]

hello! may i ask for advice how to build calcharo and aalto? tysm!

ofc! as always a lot of this is STC, subjective, and i'm always open to editing in any differing information from others

this one'll be a bit long so i'll put the whole thing under a read more ^^

additionally, let me know if i should create a tag for these posts? or if i should be putting them in the main tags (wuwa tags and char tags)?

sources used:

wuthering.gg (most info) | prydwen.gg (echo set effects)

CALCHARO

BASIC NOTION - calcharo is a main DPS (eating up a lot of field time). his kit largely revolves around comboing his skill and heavy attacks (HA), though his resonance liberation also buffs his basic attacks (BA)

as a DPS, calcharo will want attack, both crits, electro damage bonus, and potentially a little energy regen

TEAMMATES - he pairs well with yinlin, whose outro skill will buff electro DMG for the next resonator by +20% for 14 sec or until swapping again

(she also buffs resonance lib. dmg but this only affects his initial burst on lib.)

he can also pair well with mortefi, as his outro buffs heavy attack damage by +38% for the same above conditional duration

-

WEAPON CHOICES

5* - Verdant Summit [CRIT DMG]. (limited - Jiyan's signature) resonance DMG (skill + lib.) up by +12%. when either is cast, HA DMG is increased by +24% up to 2x, for up to 14 seconds.

4* - choose what applies best for you out of Autumntrace [CRIT RATE] and Helios Cleaver [ATK%] -> the former buffs ATK by 10% after BA or HA, up to 3x, for up to 10 sec -> the latter buffs ATK by 3% every 2 sec over 12 sec (6x) up to 4x.

3* - Guardian Broadblade [ATK%]. BA and HA DMG is buffed by +12%

-

ECHO CHOICES

SET – 5-piece Electro (Electro DMG +10% + after HA or Resonance Skill, Electro DMG +15% x2 temporarily) (peak of +40% Electro DMG)

EVENT RECOMMENDATION – Violet-Feathered Heron [3] (see echo summon event post)

at maximum terminal level, 12 cost points can be invested into echoes over 5 slots. your ideal setup may be:

4-cost – Tempest Mephis (not to be confused with Thundering Mephis; Tempest buffs HA DMG after use)

3-costs (2) – Violet-Feathered Heron and Flautist

1-costs (2) – this one is a mixed bag, but i would personally choose Vanguard Junrock, Electro Predator, and Fission Junrock

feel free to also check out sidneymar's guide for calcharo for other opinions! (reddit with image | video)

AALTO

BASIC NOTION - aalto is a DPS (likely sub DPS) that largely utilizes creating mist on certain basic attacks (BA's) and skill. when this mist is shot through, it deals extra DMG

as a DPS, aalto wants attack, both crits, and aero DMG. however, if you desire to play him as a main DPS, you will likely need to invest in energy regen as his resonance liberation has a higher energy cost than most other characters (150 vs 125)

TEAMMATES - he may benefit from taoqi, whose outro skill buffs skill DMG +38% for 14 seconds or until swap. otherwise, he works great as a buffer for other aero characters, being the one to give an aero buff on outro!

-

WEAPON CHOICES

5* - Static Mist [CRIT RATE]. (only 5* pistol as of 1.0) this buffs his utility as a sub DPS for other units, as using an outro skill will buff the ATK of the party by 10% for a short while. also comes with 12.8% energy regen

4* - all have their perks! choose what suits you best out of Cadenza [ENERGY REGEN], Undying Flame [ATK%], Novaburst [ATK%], and Thunderbolt [ATK%].

3* - choose from Guardian Pistols [ATK%] or Pistols of Night [ATK%]

-

ECHO CHOICES

SET – 5-piece Aero (Aero DMG +10% + after Intro Skill, Aero DMG +30% temporarily) (peak of +40% Aero DMG)

note that, if attempting to make him largely stay on the field / main DPS, 2pc Aero / 2 pc Attack is fine, but not covered here

EVENT RECOMMENDATION – Chaserazor (may be called Carapace) [3] (see echo summon event post)

at maximum terminal level, 12 cost points can be invested into echoes over 5 slots. your ideal setup may be:

4-cost – Feilian Beringal

3-costs (2) – choose from Cyan-Feathered Heron, Hoochief, and Chaserazor (Carapace)

1-costs (2) – Whiff Whaff, Hooscamp Flinger, and Chirpuff

[projazznet]

Herbie Mann – Herbie Mann’s African Suite

Herbie Mann’s African Suite (also released as St. Thomas) is an album by American jazz flautist Herbie Mann recorded in 1959 and first released on the United Artists label. The album was originally released under Johnny Rae’s leadership due to Mann’s contractual relationship with Verve Records.

Herbie Mann – flute, bass clarinet Johnny Rae – vibraphone Bob Corwin – piano Jack Six – bass Philly Joe Jones – drums (tracks 1-3) Carlos “Patato” Valdes, Victor Pantoja – congas José Mangual – bongos

[arte-rock]

Kounellis’ performance at the La Salita gallery in Rome, 1973. The artist sits in the centre of the frame with a mask of Apollo on his face. In front of him, on a table, we see fragments of a classical sculpture that appear to be the dismembered body of the god. A stuffed crow perches on the torso. To the left of Kounellis a flute player plays music by Mozart and to his right there is an open window. In this apparition, too, tension is created by the interweaving of opposites. The hieratic presence of Apollo’s face contrasts with the image of death suggested by the broken sculpture and the crow whose form imitates life but is devoid of it, and yet at the same time unites with the living body of Kounellis who perpetuates the god by assuming his features.

This cycle of death and rebirth is counterpointed on either side by the presence of the flautist and the window; perhaps images of two different breaths of life and two different spaces that intermingle: the one inside, inhabited by art and the god, resounding with music, and the one outside, beyond the sacred recital, immersed in everyday life.  (VideotecaGAM)

[opera-ghosts]

 Here a portrait of Florence Austral, from 1929.

One of the world’s great Wagnerian sopranos was born Florence Mary Wilson in the humble Melbourne suburb of Richmond on 16 April 1892. From 1903, when her mother remarried, she took the name Florence Fawaz. After some basic voice training she won several prizes in the 1913 Ballarat South Street competitions and was accepted as a pupil of the respected Elise Wiedermann, first at Fritz Hart’s Albert Street Conservatorium, and later at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium. By 1919 she was ready to undertake further studies in New York, but not before she had been engaged by J.C. Williamson Filmsto sing between silent movie presentations at the Paramount Theatre in Bourke Street. Her associate artist was New Zealand born flautist John Amadio.

New York proved professionally disappointing, so the young soprano tried her luck among the many Australian singers in London. There, in September 1920, she made her professional debut singing at a fashionable restaurant. Adopting the stage name ‘Florence Austral’ in tribute to her homeland, she made her operatic debut as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre with the British National Opera Company at Covent Garden on 16 May 1922. Later in the season she also sang Brünnhilde in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. She made the first of her many recordings in September, and then toured Britain with the BNOC, singing the Wagner repertoire and the title role in Aida. She sang in concerts and continued her studies at the London School of Opera.

Parts of her performance in Siegfried at Covent Garden on 11 January 1923, conducted by Eugene Goossens, were broadcast ‘live’ by the BBC. On 20 January she shared the stage with Melba in a gala finale to the BNOC’s season and in June she sang Tristan and Isolde for the first time.

In 1925 Austral sang in the United States, but her auditions for the Metropolitan Opera were unsuccessful, probably because of her increasing weight. She returned to London, where she and John Amadio married. During their honeymoon in the USA, Austral made her New York debut at Carnegie Hall on 2 January 1926.

She visited America again in 1927, 1928 and 1929, singing in concert and in Aida, Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung with the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company. She joined tenor Richard Crooks in an all-Wagner concert at the Metropolitan Opera House on 27 January 1929. Back in London she sang another Walküre at Covent Garden. In 1930 she and Amadio made a triumphant ‘homecoming’ concert tour of Australia under the management of E.J. Carroll. That year she also toured South Africa, sang Wagner with the Städtische Opera in Berlin – an engagement that was curtailed because of her imperfect German – and commenced another American tour. In 1932 she sang in the Netherlands and returned to Covent Garden in Tristan and Isolde. In New York in January 1933 she was one of 1,800 performers in a bizarre presentation of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony in the vastness of Madison Square Garden.

In 1934 Austral and Amadio returned to Australia for a concert tour under the direction of a budding local entrepreneur, A.D.M. ‘Archy’ Longden. His advance manager, Madeleine Clarke, was said to be ‘the only female concert manager operating in the Commonwealth’. The beautifully designed and printed souvenir programmes were available with a range of coloured covers to harmonise with lady patrons’ gowns, and were bound with transparent glassine wrappers ‘to prevent any damage to white evening gloves.’

Austral, Amadio and their pianist, Raymond Lambert, attracted publicity wherever they went. Unfortunately their visit to Albury coincided with the grisly discovery of the mutilated corpse of a young woman. This was the start of the notorious ‘Pyjama Girl’ mystery, and flights of fancy tried to link the Austral party to the crime, even suggesting that Longden or Lambert may have been the murderer.

Austral then took her place as the star of Sir Benjamin Fuller’s noblest venture, his Royal Grand Opera Company, which was designed to complement the excitement generated by Melbourne’s centenary. The company debuted at the refurbished Apollo Theatre in Bourke Street on 29 September 1934 with Austral in the title role of Aida – her first appearance in opera in her homeland. Over the next months, in Sydney and Melbourne, she sang in Walküre, Tristan and Isolde and, for the first time, Tosca, The Flying Dutchman and The Pearl Fishers (its Australian premiere). Austral later undertook a series of recitals and opera broadcasts for the ABC. In 1936-37 she made her final United States tour.

Austral returned to Britain, but the musical landscape had altered: broadcasting had eroded concert audiences, and other dramatic sopranos had usurped her place at Covent Garden. Her voice had also lost much of its lustre and her technique had started to deteriorate. In 1938 she sang in Walküre and Cavalleria Rusticana for Sadler’s Wells and Il Trovatore and Der Freischutz for the Dublin Operatic Society at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. She sang Lohengrin there in 1939; it was her last appearance in opera. British concert engagements dwindled alarmingly; in 1945 she and Amadio returned to Australia.

When Austral sang at the 1946 Carols by Candlelight concert in Melbourne, her performance revealed the sorry state of her voice. She did not sing in public again. She taught at the University of Melbourne and helped with Gertrude Johnson’s 1948 National Theatre Opera seasons. In 1952 she accepted Eugene Goossens’ offer of a position at the new Newcastle Conservatorium. She resigned in 1959 and taught privately for a while, but by then she was in straightened circumstances and suffering from multiple sclerosis. Friends such as actor Max Oldaker rallied round and EMI reissued some of her greatest recordings. She died in virtual obscurity on 15 May 1968. Her husband, from whom she was estranged, had died in 1964 during rehearsals for a Melbourne concert.

The Newcastle Conservatorium has awarded an annual Florence Austral Memorial Scholarship since 1970.

[nagimayo]

8, 12, 20 for the enstars ask game !!

8. what is your favorite song?

ugh that's genuinely so hard bc i am extremely autistic about music and this game has SO many good fucking songs... that being said, it's also my favorite Eden song, Deep Eclipse~ 💜

12. what was your favorite event?

so it hasn't happened in global/engstars yet but i am eagerly anticipating the Numbing Noir Neige event, i am violently obsessed with everything about that shuffle event and unit. song slaps. story slaps. UNIT LINEUP SLAPS!!! concept? gothic death themed song with a french title? it's for me. i am going to get the highest possible score i can and my wallet will cry. january 2024 i am watching you

20. what are your favorite 3* cards?

oooo ok that's really fun, here are some that i like a lot:

and then it's from ! but as a flautist it just makes me happyyy. fingers on the right keys and everything, my king

[202101040caic2223]

That must feel "Good as Hell"

Grammy award-winning music artist, Lizzo, makes history.

If you didn’t know who Lizzo was, you do now!

The 34-year-old beauty and practised flautist, makes history by playing the famous crystal flute at the Library of Congress, previously owned by the 4th President of the United States, James Madison. What a time to be alive, she's crushing it!

James Madison was one of the founders of the Democratic-Republican Party, along with Thomas Jefferson in 1792. Although Madison is known to have been a slaveholder during his presidency, it can be argued that he was taking the family mantle and this, to his dismay, included African-Americans that his family had enslaved throughout his childhood. In a letter to Joseph Jones, Madison encourages the liberation of slaves, 'would it not be as well to liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves as to make them instruments for enlisting white Soldiers?'

Two hundred years post Madison, Lizzo is out there openly expressing her opinions of sexuality, race and body confidence through her songs, becoming an icon to millions of people across the world. The musical icon quoted ‘I am Brown, I am Black, I am curvy, and I am perfect and beautiful’. Definition of an inspiration! She isn't letting the racists hold her back. Right-wing supporter, Matt Walsh took to Twitter in an attempt to ridicule the pop star, 'morbidly obese', 'don't give a flying s**t if it's an honour to HER.' I'm sorry, but what century are you living in, duck?!

[dehalogenase]

thinking about my elderly neighbor at a previous apartment. our area had rent control, she was paying $600/month on a unit that could have gone for $2500 at the time. she was a hoarder, but a very specific kind. i think her vice was paper—in a certain sense—but her vice was also information. she didn’t have enough space to do her morning stretches so i would see her in the apartment hallway letting out the noises of old age as she willed her body around. that labyrinth of paper encroached so severely that you could not see, but perhaps could imagine, what the floorplan was like originally.

we would talk every few days. i’m a bit ashamed to say i would avoid her when i could. she seemed fragile and vulnerable, like the ancient newspapers she was surrounded by. she was clearly lonely. she was old and slowing down.

from what she told me, I could piece together a weak time-line of her life. she was in her 90s, born sometime before 1930 by my best guess. her parents were immigrants from armenia. this was something she spoke of with the detachment of a once-traumatized child mixed with the experience of her long life.

she graduated from UC Berkeley, and so did her sister. her demeanor would always change when she spoke of her professional and academic life. you could feel the heat of her internal fire. she was immensely proud of having gotten her degree. her triumph was always framed dually, a testament to herself and a fuck-you to the men who doubted and shamed her.

sometime in the post-WW2 decade, she moved to europe. she mentioned norway and paris, but i couldn’t place just how long she spent in either location. she worked as an assistant in an engineering firm in norway, perhaps in oil exploration. in paris she continued work as a corporate assistant, and also served as the arm-candy of a flautist (who was later knighted!).

she always stressed the…indignity, of her life under subjugation by various men and male-ran-structures. in this she has become my primary image of the so-called liberated women of the mid-20th century.

the flautist was a terror, she described his temper tantrums and his total inability to take her intellect seriously. the one story she would repeat was of her being told how stupid she was by him.

during her time in norway, she uncovered, or compiled, or bore witness to, all sorts of corporate fraud and governmental meddling. she would speak to me about a number of books (they were huge volumes, in her words) that she tried and failed to find a home for in multiple libraries to immortalize the documentation of these things.

Ruth was many things but she was not stoic and she certainly was not forgiving of the world she was wronged by. there was a bitterness in her, the kind that evolves over time to become potent and concentrated. it seemed to me to be the kind of bitterness that one cultivates as a comfort.

i think of her a lot. i wonder what it’s like to live in a world that has long since passed you by.

here’s to finding out.

[history105rockandrollblog]

Lecture 8: British singer Lulu (real name: Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie) performs her popular hit “To Sir With Love,” featured in a 1967 film of the same name, starring  Sidney Poitier. Lulu’s song was a huge hit in Great Britain and North America, skyrocketing to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. Around the same time, renowned American jazz flautist Herbie Mann (1930-2003) performed an instrumental version of the song that also climbed high on the charts. Lulu – still a teenager at the time “To Sir With Love” was released – remained a star in her native Great Britain, even hosting a popular BBC television show there called Gadzooks! It’s The In-Crowd. While she would not repeat the massive success of “To Sir With Love,” she would go on to enjoy a long and remarkable career, and – as of this writing – is still an active entertainer to this day. 

[mauriacs]

What instrument so u play? Do i smell a fellow pianist?

if u call me a pianist again i'll turn ur bones into a flute and play elgar on them

[beary-brown-eyed-girl-blog]

Random Guy: So what do you do for fun?

Me: I'm in band.

Guy: What do you play?

Me: Flute.

Guy: Skin flute?

Me: *Pointedly raises eyebrow at guy* Flute, not piccolo.

Nearby Band Members: *riot*

[calciopics]

Kylian Mbappé is Born to Run

The France forward grew up in the suburbs of Paris, steeped in the culture of football. At 22, the World Cup-winner is already a global superstar, and only now entering his prime. Will Euro 2020 be the moment when he overtakes Messi and Ronaldo to become recognised as the best player on the planet?

Kylian Mbappé was 18 when he walked into the changing room of the French national team. “It’s very difficult,” he recalls, “because great players don’t want to give you their place. That’s what makes them great players. They especially don’t want to give you their place if you arrive with the label of ‘Future Great Player’.” Within a year, Mbappé and France had won the World Cup in Moscow.

Three years on, we are talking in a room of his mansion in the leafy, old-money streets of Neuilly, just outside Paris. It isn’t even his home; he bought it to house his foundation, which offers after-school activities to rich and poor children alike. In conversation, Mbappé resembles a veteran TV presenter more than a young footballer. He makes short speeches in complete sentences, as precise in his footing as he is on the field. He sits as straight-backed as he runs. His expressive face keeps breaking into smiles: he likes talking, and is almost unburdened by the usual footballer’s fear of saying the wrong thing.

His burly father Wilfried sits beside us, but only once during the interview will he feel impelled to intervene. Meeting Mbappé, you come to understand how he hit football seemingly already fully formed. At 22, he has achieved more than most great players ever do. Can he take one more step and become the world’s best footballer?

His story starts 10 miles and a universe away from where we’re sitting today. His hometown, Bondy, is a multicultural suburb just northeast of Paris that looks as if someone plonked a Soviet town on top of an ancient French village. The old church is surrounded by fast-food joints and fading 1960s’ apartment blocks, one of them now adorned with a giant mural of Mbappé.

His parents grew up in Bondy: Wilfried, of Cameroonian origin, and Mbappé’s mother Fayza, of Algerian descent. Mixed marriages are common in the Parisian suburbs, the banlieues, but the couple did have to defy some local disapproval.

If a wannabe footballer had to choose the ideal place on earth to grow up, it might have been the Mbappé home in Bondy. Mbappé’s father and uncle were both football coaches, and Fayza, who ran after-school activities, played handball in the French first division. His parents had adopted an older boy, Jirès Kembo Ekoko, who went on to make a long career as a journeyman professional footballer. “I didn’t bring a new passion into the family,” Mbappé says with understatement.

He grew up practically inside the local football club, AS Bondy. “In the Parisian suburbs there are football fields everywhere,” he enthuses. “People here live for football. I was born with the sports ground facing my window.” It’s no wonder, he adds, that Paris’s suburbs are perhaps the deepest talent pool in global football, producing players such as Paul Pogba, Blaise Matuidi, N’Golo Kanté and Riyad Mahrez.

As a non-white kid from the suburbs, did Mbappé always feel accepted as French before he became a French icon? “I’ve always felt French. I don’t renounce my origins, because they are part of who I am, but I’ve made my whole life in France, and never at any moment was I made to feel I wasn’t at home here.” In the banlieues, he says, “We have a love of France because France has given to us and we try to give back to it.”

Mbappé’s parents made him take school seriously, and he was also a not-very-talented flautist at Bondy’s conservatory, but football came first. At AS Bondy, he says, “My father was my coach for 10 years. He helped construct the style of player I wanted to become. But I never felt the pressure of, ‘You have to become a footballer.’ Above all, it was a passion.”

Tagging along with his dad and uncle on their coaching jobs, the child acquired an unusual gift: he became a footballer who thinks like a coach. “Very young, I was always in the changing rooms, listening to the tactical talks and the different points of view, because football is made up of different viewpoints. I learned to have this tolerance, and I think it helped me, because being a coach is putting yourself in somebody else’s place. I think I have the gift of doing that. It helps in football, because if you’re a player, generally you think about yourself, about your own career. I can see, for instance, when something in a game is frustrating a team-mate. I can put him at ease.”

When you’re in the World Cup final, you’re convinced you’re going to win. You walk onto the field, the trophy is there, and you tell yourself it is impossible the other team will take it

Mbappé turned out to be that perfect sporting combination: a natural who is coachable. “He assimilates advice quickly. You ask him something once, and the second time he does it,” Antonio Riccardi, his former youth coach at AS Bondy, told me. Even as a child, Mbappé was an efficient footballer: decisive, never just decorative.

By adolescence, he was being courted by the big European clubs, which all keep close tabs on the Paris region. He visited Chelsea, and celebrated his 14th birthday at Real Madrid, which cannily found him the perfect babysitter: the club’s then assistant coach Zinedine Zidane, the greatest French footballer. When Zidane offered Mbappé a lift in his fabulous car, the overawed child offered to take his shoes off first.

The Mbappés sifted the countless offers and chose Monaco, where the route to the first team looked shortest. Mbappé arrived there, he says, “with my [footballing] baggage well filled.”

Kids in performance-sports families learn that they never arrive. Each step up is just another learning opportunity. In Monaco’s first team, the teenaged Mbappé encountered the veteran Colombian striker Radamel Falcao, freshly returned from unhappy loan spells with Manchester United and Chelsea.

“He was a star,” says Mbappé, “but he had a desire to transmit. He was like a teacher to me. He’s someone who always wants to score, but he left me the space to express myself. He’s very cool in front of goal, calm in his game, and he transmitted this serenity that I didn’t have, because I was young, excited and wanted to go at 2,000 kilometres an hour.”

The kid who didn’t yet have a driving licence scored 15 league goals in his first professional season to help Monaco win the French title in 2017. He added six more in the Champions League knockout rounds. He also passed his baccalauréat, France’s equivalent of A-levels.

Mbappé marvelled at the tension on the faces of other professionals, because he didn’t feel it himself. Everything came easily to him, without great sacrifice, he has said. When I ask about stress in a profession of hypercompetitive men, he shrugs: “Daily life is easy.”

His vertical ascent didn’t surprise him; it just happened a bit quicker than he’d expected. But others were stunned. Here was something new: an 18-year-old complete forward. Built like an Olympic sprinter, Mbappé ran upright, looking around him. He could dribble, cross and shoot. He was more advanced than Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo had been at 18.

How does he describe his style? “The modern attacker who can play anywhere,” he replies. He explains that forwards used to be specialists: “There’d be a number nine, or number 11, or number seven.” Mbappé, though, is the all-in-one. “I think my CV can speak for me. I’ve played alone up front, I’ve played on the left and the right. In all humility, I don’t think it’s given to everyone to change position like that every year and keep a certain standard of performance at the highest level. That didn’t fall from heaven. If I speak of the baggage given me in my teens, it’s all there.”

In one regard he has always been unequalled: the counterattack at speed. He says, “I’ve managed to work on my weak points but above all to perfect my strong points, because I was always told that it’s through your strong points that you’ll exist.”

In March 2017, Mbappé became the youngest player in 62 years to debut for France. Five months later, his hometown club Paris Saint-Germain agreed to sign him for a fee of £166m. He drew on his childhood experiences to navigate two alpha-male changing-rooms. At PSG, his good English and Spanish helped him deal with foreign team-mates. With Les Bleus, France’s assistant coach Guy Stéphan told Mbappé’s biographer Arnaud Hermant: “He knows the codes of the changing room. At table or in the bus, he doesn’t just sit somewhere randomly. For a youngster, he isn’t timid or introverted. He expresses himself.”

By summer 2018, picked for the World Cup in Russia, Mbappé was comfortable enough to claim the blue number 10 shirt — previously worn by Zidane and Michel Platini — and to say in public that he was gunning for the trophy.

“I went to play the matches calmly like I always have. I didn’t want to change just because it was the World Cup,” he says. “We were lucky to have a young squad. We were totally carefree, just a band of mates.”

Hang on, surely a football team isn’t really a band of mates? “No,” he acknowledges. “Just like the baker doesn’t get on with all bakers. You don’t have to eat with your team-mates every evening to win.”

In the World Cup round of 16, his two goals and a 37kmph gallop through Argentina’s defence made his global name. The night before the final against Croatia, he admits, “I was a bit stressed. I didn’t manage to sleep much. But the nearer the match came, the less stressed I was.” Before kick-off he was joking in the changing room. Stéphan recalls: “He experienced the final as if it were a PSG-Dijon game.”

Mbappé says, “When you’re in the World Cup final, you’re convinced that you’re going to win. Even the Croats were convinced they were going to win. You walk onto the field and the trophy is there, between the two teams, and you tell yourself it’s impossible that the other team will take it. That’s why there’s such disappointment afterwards if you don’t win.”

Half of Bondy gathered in front of a giant screen to cheer on the commune’s own “Kylian national”. Scoring in France’s 4–2 victory, he seemed to have reached his career apogee aged 19. He didn’t see it like that. Interviewed the night of the final, he described winning the World Cup as “already good” but only a start.

The next day, as the Bleus’ bus edged along a packed, ecstatic Champs-Élysées, writes Hermant, the ice-cold kid mused to the French Football Federation’s president Noël Le Graët: “Was all this really necessary?”

Mbappé explains now: “For me, it wasn’t an outcome, a finality. I don’t think of that trophy now at all. I don’t look at pictures of the World Cup before going to sleep. Honestly, it’s people on the street who come up and say, ‘You’re world champion, merci, merci.’”

He understood that his early triumph had upset football’s all-important hierarchies. Returning to PSG, he immediately reassured Paris’s Brazilian star Neymar: “I’m not going to walk on your flowerbeds. I’ll be a candidate for the Ballon d’Or [the award for world’s best footballer] this year because you won’t be, but I promise I don’t want to take your place.”

Soon after, he took the World Cup trophy to Bondy, where thousands came out to greet him. “It was a way to say, ‘Thank you.’ I’ve never forgotten which soup I have eaten. So it was important for me to return there after my first World Cup and first international title.” (Note that word, “first”.)

France’s coach, Didier Deschamps, recalls falling into “physical and moral apathy” the season after he lifted the World Cup as a player in 1998. Did Mbappé experience a hangover? He grins: “I finished as best player in the league, highest scorer, best young player, I was chosen in the team of the season, and we won the league.”

Winning the World Cup made Mbappé a national hero. Does he consider himself a star? “I think so. If your face is everywhere in the city, everywhere in the world, that’s for sure. Being a star is a status, but it doesn’t make me a better person than others.”

He lives like a luxury prisoner, who cannot leave home without being mobbed. “It takes an organisation just to go out,” he says. He has joked that when his future children ask him about his youthful adventures, he won’t have any.

“A fan gives you enormous love,” says Mbappé carefully, “but sometimes maybe an excess of love, and he might not respect your intimacy. We give our lives to the people, because we give them pleasure every three days, and we give them our time. It’s impossible to hope for a normal life, but just a little respect for one’s private life isn’t too much to ask for, I think.”

As a young man of non-white origins, he has a particular vulnerability with the French public, one-third of whom voted for the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the run-off of the presidential elections in 2017. Even so, he has begun to speak out against police violence.

“I took time to start talking about it, because I wasn’t ready,” he admits. “I had a lot of things to digest: my change of status, my new life. But I have always opposed all types of violence.”

When I note that French police violence is disproportionately directed against people of non-white origins from suburbs like Bondy, his father stirs from his silence: “We’re not answering that. You’re orienting it as if the violence were only against people from the banlieues, which is false.”

In high-level football, nobody will make a place for you. Ego, self-love, isn’t just the caprice of stars. It’s also the will to give the best of yourself

French fans like their stars humble. Mbappé has explained “the French mentality” to Neymar, who favours a bling-bling, poker-playing party lifestyle. Mbappé says, “In Brazil, they are more festive, in France more serious. Here it’s not considered good to display your passions. People will think he’s neglecting PSG because he plays poker. I think he has begun to understand that. At first it was hard for him because he experienced it as an affront. When he arrived, they put his face on the Eiffel Tower, and six months later they’re asking him why he’s playing poker. In France, people know what you have but they don’t want to see it. They just want to see you playing football, smiling.”

But Mbappé believes humility isn’t enough. He thinks great footballers need big egos. “In high-level football, nobody will make a place for you or tell you that you’re capable of things. It’s up to you to persuade yourself that you are. Ego, self-love, isn’t just a caprice of stars. It’s also the will to surpass yourself, to give the best of yourself.” Every time he walks onto the field, he says, he tells himself, “I’m the best.”

In truth, he knows he isn’t the best — Messi and Ronaldo are better. “It’s not only me who knows that,” he laughs. “Everyone knows it. If you tell yourself that you’ll do better than them, it’s beyond ego or determination — it’s lack of awareness. Those players are incomparable. They have broken all laws of statistics. They have had 10 extraordinary years, 15.”

Still, he admits: “You do always compare yourself with the best in your sport, just as the baker compares himself with the best bakers around him. Who makes the best croissant, the best pain au chocolat? I watch matches of other great players to see what they’re doing. ‘I know how to do this, but can the other guy do it too?’ I think other players watch me, too. I think that pushes players to raise their game, just as Messi was good for Ronaldo and Ronaldo was good for Messi.”

Does Mbappé compare himself with the other great forward of his generation, Borussia Dortmund’s Norwegian Erling Braut Haaland? Mbappé’s reply sounds a touch patronising: “It’s his second year, we’re getting to know him. It’s the start for him. I’m happy for him, for what he’s doing.”

The more you become an important person, the more duties you have. I’m no longer the little kid. I’m Kylian Mbappé

In this elite individual competition, the top spot may be coming free. Messi (34 this month) and Ronaldo (36) are “nearer the end than the beginning”, acknowledges Mbappé. In February, his hat-trick helped PSG thrash Messi’s Barcelona 1–4 at the Camp Nou. “The best match of my career,” Mbappé says, “because it was complete. I helped my team both offensively and defensively, and I succeeded in the creation and finishing of my moves, in one-against-ones. I won 90 per cent of my duels, if that stat is correct. All match, I never had a moment when I felt extinguished.” He then scored two at Bayern Munich, before PSG fell to Manchester City.

Some opposing teams now rearrange their entire tactical systems to combat the Mbappé counterattack. “There are quite a few anti-Kylian plans every match,” he says. “It means I’ve been recognised as a great player. It requires you to have multiple strings to your bow. I like that, because I adore challenges.”

Surely he’s now too big a player for the French league? He umms and aws: “France isn’t the best championship in the world, but it’s my responsibility, as a flagship player, to help the league grow.” Yet he may well leave this summer, to Real Madrid or England. The decision, perhaps the biggest he’ll face in his career, will be made inside his family. Almost uniquely for a star footballer, Mbappé doesn’t have an agent, just lawyers.

At 22, he considers himself an experienced footballer. He says he and Neymar “are now the two natural leaders” of PSG. When he kicks off the delayed Euro 2020 with France in June, it will be with more responsibility than at the World Cup. “The more you become an important personality, the more duties you have. I’m no longer the little kid. I’m Kylian Mbappé.”

Kylian Mbappé’s prime may have already arrived. Fast strikers usually peak between 20 and 24. A Euro and a World Cup within 18 months, while France’s generation of 2018 remains almost intact, may be his best chance to make football history. What are his career ambitions? That smile again: “To win everything.” (Esquire Magazine)

[foreverfitnesspositivity]

Focus are a Dutch rock band formed in Amsterdam in 1969 by keyboardist, vocalist, and flautist Thijs van Leer. The band have undergone numerous formations in its history and they have sold one million RIAA-certified albums in the United States.

[pythonstudies]

[8/100 • 100 Days of Productivity] 6.08.17 Fun times still trying to grind down on this Bach piece

[dustedmagazine]

Carmen Villain — Only Love from Now On (Smalltown Supersound)

Photo by Signe Luksengaad

The latest album from Norwegian-Mexican composer Carmen Hillestad AKA Carmen Villain explores a variety of ambient textures across seven discrete pieces united by a delicacy that conjures resilience as much as fragility. Villain uses shifts in aural perspective in Only Love From Now On to subtly subvert listeners’ expectations while inviting them to engage with detail in her compositions.

On the opening track “Gestures” Arve Henriksen improvises an impressionistic solo, his trumpet pitch shifted to mimic a Shakuhachi flute. Over minimal wooden percussion, the focus is as much on breath as sound. Villain daubs overdubs that can sound like a distant train rumbling across the tundra, creating vast space in which the horn seems stranded but close. “Future Memory” follows a similar trajectory. Birds chirp, woodwinds parp and on the surface, everything seems pastoral and serene. However, the sound of something dragging across the ground and an almost subliminal drone hint at an ominous presence. Brief “Liminal Space,” which follows, would not be out of place on a Pole album with its cracked beat like the drips from an icicle and warm burbles of synth. Flautist Johanna Scheie Orellana lends a plaintive edge to the title track. She alternates between peace and peril on a piece that might have otherwise veered close to anodyne new age. “Subtle Bodies” is aqueous minimal techno, a clicking beat over cavernous echo, a wordless vocal sample and the lap of waves on a stony beach. “Silueta” references a series of works by Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta that explore the relationship between body and earth as a metaphor for women’s contingent visibility. Villain uses acoustic instruments to produce an ever-morphing piece of chamber music, the spine a sawing string motif around which mercurial woodwinds dart and retreat.   

Listening to Only Love From Now On is like snorkeling over a reef, immersed in a world to which you are a visitor, aware of the vastness but alive to the myriad small beauties that flit in and out of view, seemingly oblivious but alert to the potential threat of your presence. Carmen Villain captures these delicate balances in her music and invites the listener to ponder their passivity and question their gaze. 

Andrew Forell

[essays-for-breakfast]

A Song to Forget All Trouble

Kiane Week Day Four: Reign/Daily Life

With each sunrise, another problem awaited Diane. Or, for the sake of accuracy, a mountain of problems. Ruling an entire clan was one thing, but the management of two clans who had spent to majority of three millennia with scornful looks and cold shoulders had more in common with a wrestling match against a Tyrant Dragon. With arms tied behind the back. Giants and Fairies alike always found one little annoyance to blow out of proportion and add to the list of matters Diane needed to discuss and solve with the parties involved.

The quarrel for a resting spot on one of the Fairy King’s Forest’s countless clearings took her half a day to settle because both the Giant and the opposing group of Fairies claimed to have arrived there first. Around noon, Diane ordered the squabblers to find other places to sleep and opened the clearing to a horde of Giant children. At the end of their play session, a rugged crater disfigured the landscape, and smashed golem heads roasted in the sun. No one wanted to rest there anymore.

Every trampled flowerbed and every earth-made pillar became a file on Diane’s metaphorical desk. Fairies liked to boast about their inability to understand concepts like possession and greed, but when someone asked them to share their precious forest with outsiders, they crossed their arms and jutted their chins faster than one could turn over a leaf.

Even if their king asked them.

But the Giants didn’t cover themselves in glory with their behavior either. Their daily fighting tournaments, these days held for sport rather than war training, flattened entire areas on a regular basis. And while the Giants toasted to their displays of power, the present Fairies had little to laugh about. To them, a tree was a lifeform in the same way as a deer or a chaffinch. To a Giant, a tree was a resource for weapons and sometimes a javelin in their ego games.

Drole had assured that Diane would make for the ideal queen to their people. If only he had mentioned the massif of hurdles on the road of leadership.

Daylight was fading, and Diane more stumbled than walked towards the Great Tree. She hawked, but the lump in her throat sat on her voice like a fat, ugly toad. The avalanche of irritated ‘what?’ the near-deaf Giant had spat in her direction continued to ring in her ears. He had built a stone damn to turn the southern river into his private bathing lake. The shrubs and flowers he had put underwater by proxy had concerned him no more than a change in the clouds above. Diane had repeated and rerepeated herself in explaining the problem he had created, but more than another ‘what?’ hadn’t come out of him. A wonder the old man still lived – with the philosophy of the Giants in mind, a useless member of the pack went to bed each night in expectation of a slit throat.

Diane rolled her shoulders to shake away these gloomy thoughts. The merger had its upsides too. She just needed to remind herself of them once in a while.

The stench of fire, mingled with the alluring but precarious aromas of roasted boar hit her before the massive shape of the Great Tree came into view. Not again. Diane darted into the bushes, a string of curses she had picked up from Ban on her lips.

In most cases, even the most traditionalist of Fairies looked past the campfires the Giants gathered around to exchange war stories. But when these parties involved hunted wildlife – deer, boars, or the sinfully delicious cranes found in the western lake district of the forest –, a war declaration already waved between the trees by the time King or Diane could intervene.

Along with the cackling of the fire, the sound of laughter and, strangest of all, music reached Diane’s ear as she zigzagged through the pine trunks. The out of place sound almost made her stumble. Had the wind solely carried the beat of drums, she would have continued her race without a second thought. But a small orchestra of pipes and flutes gave the rhythmic pounding a melody unlike anything she had ever heard in Megadoza. If any Giant knew how to craft and play a flute, Matrona had to have hid them in the catacombs underneath the rock city during Diane’s two hundred years of training there.

A final sprint brought Diane to the clearing from where the smell of meat and the sound of music originated. But instead of a pack of drunk and bellowing Giants, the last sunrays reflected from the faces of Fairies and Giants alike. And instead of accusations hurled at the other clan, laughter tied both sides together.

Above the open fire, spits laden with meat turned while a soup happily bubbled in an oversized iron cauldron. A handful of lanterns in the shape of tulips adorned the trees around. While not as golden or luxurious as the festivities Diane had visited in Liones, the clearing showed all the makings of a celebration, complete with a colorful assembly of guests.

King hovered in the middle of the illusive scenery and conversed with Matrona and Ritho, an older Giant whose passion lay with war before any other activity. All three of them were smiling.

Diane maltreated her temple with her knuckles, but the illusion refused to collapse and return to the dust of her imagination. What had happened in her absence that all conflicts between Giants and Fairies had smoothened into a pretty party with a pretty ribbon to complete the present? Had Bartra Liones foreseen the end of the world for tomorrow? Another explanation failed to arise out of the muddle of her thoughts.

She stared, and she stood, unable to move or comprehend what was playing out before her eyes.

King noticed Diane, nodded to Matrona and Ritho, and floated towards her with two minimalistic flaps of his wings.

He lifted the paralyzed fingers of her right hand with visible effort, and beamed at her. “I’m glad you made it. Gerheade was almost on her way to catch you at the Great Tree. I wasn’t sure when you would return, but I guess everything worked out better than expected.”

“I don’t understand. Did I miss something?”

A shade of pink darkened his cheeks. The orange hues of the fire emphasized the effect. “Didn’t I tell you? We want to celebrate the merger between the Fairy and Giant Clan. We got lucky with the weather tonight, otherwise the open fire might have given us some headaches. Oh, and Happy Anniversary!”

Diane blinked. “It’s… been a year already?! I thought… two weeks, a month at most…”

“If Gerheade hadn’t reminded me, I would have said the same, but here we are. A year later. I’m so proud of what we’ve built here. What you started when you told me about your idea with the merger – no one other than you could have even considered to bridge the cleft between our two clans. All because no one sees the good in others like you do.” King inhaled, and his tiny hands increased their grip around Diane’s fingers. “I love you so much. None of this would have been possible without you.”

His touch and the warmth of his smile melted all troubles and anxiousness of the day away. Nothing else mattered, and if Diane had to put up with a thousand near-deaf Giants to earn this one moment with the one she loved, she would jump into the fray without hesitation.

She dragged him closer, intoxicated by the flowery scent of his skin, lost in his amber eyes, and cradled by all the compliments he showered her with, too generous to be true, but oh, so earnest. The cleft disappeared, and Diane covered King’s face with a kiss.

Before he could pass out from a lack of oxygen, Diane pulled back. She smiled at his expression, a perfect replica of the dazzled Fairy boy before he had grown his wings.

“I love you too, King. And thank you for the party. It’s perfect. When did you have time to organize all this anyway?”

“Oh, that? I really didn’t do much in terms of setting up the location or preparing the meat. The others deserve all your thanks for the hard work. I just flew around a little to find some special ingredients for the stew.”

Diane laughed. “Still a delivery boy at heart, I see. The Captain must have drilled this chore especially deep into your head.”

“I guess he discovered this hidden talent of mine before even I could see it.”

More and more Giants and Fairies followed the sound of the flutes, and soon the clearing disappeared in a crowd of feet and wings. Bowls of two different sizes wandered through the guests, a stew of turnips and roots and chanterelle. While nothing between Purgatory and the Sky Temple could match Ban’s carrot soup, Diane gulped down three helpings in record time, mesmerized by the earthy taste. And she would have asked for an additional portion, if King hadn’t handed her a spit with her favorite type of roasted pork.

The smell of fat made her mouth watery. “Can I marry you a second time?”

“I would marry you every single day, every single year ahead of us, if I could,” King said.

Diane grinned and for the next few minutes, she was too occupied with chewing to talk. The chatter of the people around her blurred into a pleasant carpet of sound. This was what she had always envisioned: Giants and Fairies united in spite of their stupid differences and their arguments, an exchange of words and food to the soft crackle of a campfire. And her and King in the middle of it all, finally side by side after all this time.

The stars stood high up in the sky, a million more than humans could ever spot in Liones or Camelot. From time to time, they winked as if to congratulate King and Diane on what they had accomplished. He leaned against her knee while she stroked the filigree ornamentations of his wings. A shudder rocked him whenever Diane found a new nerve to stimulate.

Neither of them felt the need to disturb the moment with words.

Then a single flute raised its voice above the conversations, a new tune, almost melancholic at first. A panpipe picked up where its companion had left of and gave the melody a merry spin. The flautist enticed a few more notes out of his instrument, and for a moment it and the panpipe seemed to fight a musical battle for the tone of their sonata. But then they fell into harmony, drums and chimes and a fiddle joined in, and soon the entire orchestra played a tarantella to invite the crowd to a dance.

King jerked up. After he had risen into the air, he bowed and extended a hand towards Diane. Sparks from the campfire reflected in his eyes.  “May I have this dance?”

Diane took his hand with a smile. “You may.”

One with the music and the rhythm of nature, King and Diane spun around the fire. Her feet bopped and arched, and he mimicked her moves midair. One moment she pulled him so close their noses almost touched, the next he guided her into another twirl and their fingers parted to finish a sequence with two claps. Other pairs skipped onto the dance floor; Matrona and Zalpa, Ende and Gerheade, and ever so rarely a Giant and Fairy together.

Although her steps lead her astray sometimes, Diane always found King’s eyes in the crowd. Never more than a pirouette away, still in sync with her. The music chased them in circles, two claps of the hands, and another sequence of hops and taps and spins. The odors of cooking fat and sweat from a multitude of dancers got to Diane’s head. Dizziness hijacked her senses until nothing but the next step filled her mind.

With two final claps, the dance ended. King hovered mere inches away from her, guided there by his own doing or a by a smile of fortune. His chest heaved up and down and the many turns had tousled his hair. But his grin was the incarnation of pure joy, brighter than the fire and the firmament.

Their kiss held more force this time, driven by the passion of the dance and heated by the blood rushing into both their heads. The touch of his skin and the flowery taste of his lips replaced the world around Diane, and they were one.

Yes, the merger caused them trouble every day, and Giants and Fairies alike strained their patience with a hellish desire to convince them to give up.

But King and Diane proved time and time again that beauty lay in the union between their clans. They fought for what they believed in, and they continued to push the boundaries of what Chaos’ creations were meant to achieve.

For moments like this.

[mariacallous]

The trio soon adopted a signature pose for the cameras: Tsepkalo held up a peace sign, Tsikhanouskaya a fist, while Kalesnikava made a heart shape with her hands. “I was stronger because I had strong women beside me,” Tsikhanouskaya said. They united their supporters around a simple three-point platform: the release of political prisoners, amendments to the constitution, and a fair presidential race open to all. “In our part of the world, where normally men are fighting for power, intuitively people started to trust [the] women and especially when they said, ‘We’re not here for power or politics,’” said Valery Tsepkalo, the former presidential candidate. (In September, Kalesnikava tore up her passport at the Ukrainian border as the Belarusian authorities tried to forcibly eject her from the country. She has been imprisoned ever since. She has been charged with plotting to seize power and creating an extremist group and if convicted could face up to 12 years in prison. At the opening of her trial on Wednesday, Kalesnikava was pictured in the defendant’s box dancing and making her signature heart shape with her hands.)

While all three were new to politics, Kalesnikava, a flautist who was prominent in Minsk’s art scene, and Tsepkalo, a business development manager for Microsoft, appeared at ease in the limelight. Tsikhanouskaya did not. “We worked step by step,” said Tsikhanouskaya’s press secretary, Anna Krasulina, as they taught her how to deal with the media and coaxed her to do radio interviews and then television. But if anything, her lack of experience and political ambition only further endeared her to voters.

“She is in a way a metaphoric embodiment of the whole Belarusian uprising,” said Shraibman, the Carnegie scholar. “The circumstances pushed Belarus as well as Sviatlana from their relatively comfortable bubble to the dangerous world of politics, and the society basically matured just as she did.”

-Belarus’s Unlikely New Leader