It’s been a while since I put anything up on here, so I thought I’d break the silence with a little compendium of excellence. There is nothing as inspiring as seeing people at the top of their game doing what they do best. Here, then, is a series of clips of excellent people doing excellent things excellently. Enjoy…
A card trick to start. Ricky Jay is the world’s foremost sleight-of-hand man. This brief trick is about as good as card tricks get…
It’s impossible to talk about excellence without mentioning Bach very early on. Here Glenn Gould plays the Aria from the Goldberg Variations in a 1981 recording…
Aaron Sorkin writes the best dialogue I’ve ever heard. This clip is the “cold open” or pre-credits sequence from an episode of the West Wing. Sorkin writes it fast and layered and manages to take a few side-swipes at bad writing along the way before wrapping the whole thing up in a little bow before the credits…
Al Pacino once said that Mark Rylance makes Shakespeare sound as if it was written that afternoon with him in mind. This is a clip of Rylance playing Richard II at the Globe Theatre. I don’t know anyone who can make Shakespeare sound so organic or who can find new interpretations of well known speeches such that you feel you’ve never heard them before…
Countless books and movies have charted the course of human relationships. In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles gives us ten years of marriage in two minutes and provides a masterclass in screenwriting…
That’s today’s little collection. I hope these clips inspire something. I’d love any recommendations people may have for the next set.
