In the News – Page 18

Still, Life

December 21, 2012 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Snow Face, Straight On” (2011): Gus, the Labradoodle, in a wintry photo
by Janet Nezon at her Lessons from Gus blog]

From whiskey river:

…It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it… I know that sounds a little pious.

(David Foster Wallace [source]

…and:

Motto

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

(Bertolt Brecht [source])

…and:

Pleasures

First look from morning’s window
The rediscovered book
Fascinated faces
Snow, the change of the seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Showering, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Comprehension
New music
Writing, planting
Traveling
Singing
Being friendly.

(Bertolt Brecht [source])

[Read more…]

[Image: excerpt from a 1941 adventure of Mandrake the Magician, “The Adventure of the Striped Orchid.” Click to enlarge; if you’d like to read the whole thing, find it at the ilovecomix archive (free registration required).]

You don’t have to be particularly old to know of the Mandrake the Magician character and comic strip — which is still being published daily, although it first appeared in 1934. (Mandrake himself is widely regarded as the first costumed superhero.)

Mandrake is indeed a “magician,” in a loose sense of the term. More precisely, he’s an illusionist. For instance, in the above series, he didn’t actually make the “Uncle” character swell up like that; as the caption for the fourth panel says, Uncle just seemed to inflate. A key element of Mandrake’s mythology can be found in the word “gesture,” often modified with a form of the word “hypnotic.” Mandrake gestures hypnotically. Mandrake’s hypnotic gesture. And so on. The hypnotic spell takes effect immediately, presumably just because Mandrake knows exactly how to waggle his fingers and flip his wrist. Furthermore, the spell strikes only his selected targets and does not, well, explode omnidirectionally, like an anti-personnel weapon. As you can see here, the strip’s art at such a key moment takes the point of view of Mandrake’s hapless victim.

Oddly, though, Mandrake’s spells sometimes affect inanimate objects as well as people. Over there on the right, we have a cover from one of the Mandrake comic books (click to enlarge it); clearly, he has just gestured hypnotically in the direction of the jewel thieves — as a result of which, the thieves imagine themselves disoriented, spinning in mid-air.

…but the bag containing the jewelry is itself in mid-air, and it has sprung open, and the jewels themselves are spilling out.

What’s going on here? Has he hypnotized the jewels? Or has he somehow included an illusion of the open sack and the spilling jewels as part of the overall illusion? Either way, you have to admit, that’s a hell of a gesture.

While researching this post, I noticed something else a little off — namely, that Mandrake himself either gets caught up in the illusion (in the way that a woman wearing cologne can actually get a whiff of herself) or, again, somehow includes himself in the illusion just to make it complete.

At right, for example, another of the comic book covers highlights a moment when Mandrake has hypnotized a cowboy (or has he?) to picture himself, mounted on a horse, galloping across the roof of a house. But Mandrake (and his faithful companion Lothar) is looking up into the air. If the cowboy has simply been hypnotized, and is not actually galloping overhead, then what is Mandrake (and Lothar) looking up at?

(The horse, too, seems awfully panicky.)

Finally, if you really want to get picky: in order to hypnotize someone, Mandrake must be looking into his or her eyes. (Earlier in the “Striped Orchid” series, he must fight off a drugged Lothar — who has attacked him from behind and caught him in a death grip. Until Lothar releases one hand for a moment, allowing Mandrake to turn and look back at him… and pierce the druggy fog with a hypnotic gaze.) How has he hypnotized the cowboy in this case? the horse? Lothar? himself?

Thinking about the holes in Mandrake’s universe has been one small result of my having read a post over at Froog’s place, way back in October. I’ve been pondering that post ever since.

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Midweek Music Break: Joni Mitchell, “All I Want”

November 7, 2012 by John 4 Comments

Although I’d been aware of Joni Mitchell for some time, I didn’t really plug into her music (so to speak) until 1971, when she released the Blue album.* The first track is the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break.

Mitchell, as I thought I knew at the time, was quote-unquote just a folk singer-songwriter. I mean, you just had to glimpse her to “know” that — the slight build, the straight blonde hair, the long, plain flowered dresses… she looked like Mary Travers’s younger and rather anemic sister. And her voice was strange, too: idiosyncratically flute-like, ethereal.

So then why did I first latch onto Blue? Easy (and perhaps not so surprising): it came at the recommendation of a girl with whom I’d been “friends” for far too long — and who had mysteriously, stubbornly resisted my awkward charms as I tried to move nonexistent “us” to a nonexistent “next level.” That girl had suggested that I attend to the poetry of the lyrics, which (she assured me) were almost as unbearably heartbreaking as they were simply epic.

It still took me a while to warm to the lyrics (even though Mitchell had printed them on the album cover — a primitive form of closed-captioning I always appreciated). But jeez, the music…

The album is stripped down instrumentally; aside from Mitchell’s acoustic guitar, most everything else just sort of pulses in the background. It feels like it’s just her and the guitar (even though she had several other backing musicians). More than the acoustic properties or the lyrics, though, what moved me from the start about “All I Want” was the rhythm. It’s complex, almost like the rhythm of a Trinidadian street-corner steel-drums musician. It rolls and stutters, lunges forward and back and stops cold for a split-second here and there, beautifully.

Eventually, of course, the lyrics penetrated the fog (of various kinds) I’d been listening in. Just for starters, it does that thing — whatever the term — which I’ve always loved encountering in a song: it overstuffs the lines with verbiage, in a way which almost makes it impossible to believe that it all fits.

And what a great song in general: a flirtatious tribute to the joy of joy, y’know?

[Lyrics]

Today’s Joni Mitchell’s 69th birthday. I’m so honestly happy to have “met” her, and hope she has a great day.

______________________________

* I knew she’d written Judy Collins’s Top 40 hit, “Clouds.” But I think my first exposure was actually the summer of 1969, at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, which preceded Woodstock by a couple of weeks. As the Wikipedia article says, JM came onstage following a performance by a blues-rock band named Mother Earth who’d completely energized the audience. Few people seemed to be paying attention to the considerably more mellow, fragile blonde beauty trilling — ye gods — was it folk music?!? After trying gamely for a few minutes in the face of all that discourtesy, she just broke down and more or less fled the stage. Even though I didn’t (as I say) know much if anything about her, I do recall feeling mildly ashamed of us all.

“Wipe Your Wheels Before You Come In — You’ll Get Sand All Over!”

November 4, 2012 by John 4 Comments

Whoa: now that just might be (as Bad Astronomy blogger Dr. Phil Plait calls it) “the single greatest vacation picture ever taken.” The setting: somewhere in Gale Crater, on the surface of Mars. The subject: the Mars Curiosity rover… in a self-portrait. My first thought: the rover must have set up a camera on a tripod, and backed up a bit before triggering the shutter remotely. (Hey, if an engineering team can plan and execute a landing like this one, such a shot would seem to be small potatoes.) But no: the camera which took this photo is actually mounted on a mast arm which can be held out away from the rover’s body and aimed in any old direction — including back at itself.

So where is the mast arm in the photo? It’s there, all right: 55 times. That’s the number of separate images combined into one final shot; the mast has simply been cropped or otherwise edited out of the images wherever it appeared.

(A blogger at the Planetary Society also notes that if you view the full-sized image, you can see reflections of the mast arm camera in a couple of spots — essentially making this one of those classic “this is me, taking a photo of a camera taking a photo of me” gimmick shots.)

You can view or download a larger version of the photo here (1280 x 1780, 599KB) here, or the full-sized monster (5463 x 7595, 7.7MB) here. Either of those will allow you to see much more detail in small areas.

People, people: how cool is it to be alive at a time when we can see such stuff?

J.K. Rowling Visits ‘The Daily Show’

October 16, 2012 by John 9 Comments

Like other Potter groupies, I think, I loved this. In most interviews I’ve seen or read, she’s been very reserved and formal. She (somewhat literally) lets her hair down here.

Part I:

[The Daily Show with Jon Stewart]

Part II:

[The Daily Show with Jon Stewart]

Midweek Music Break: The Musical Sister

October 3, 2012 by John 4 Comments

I’ve always admired — been in awe of — families with a history of hands-on musical skills. I’m not talking here about famous musical families like the von Trapps, the Partridges, the various Hank Williamses, and so on. And I don’t mean simple (or involved) appreciation of the art.

No, I mean the families with casual stories like, well… Stories about taking violin lessons while growing up in Brooklyn, from a little old lady on the corner who lived next door to a little old man who gave trumpet and accordion lessons, etc. Or about singing in a church choir as a kid, and going on to a successful career in music.

Among the four of us kids (as we still think of ourselves, a half-century-plus later), none of us has ever shown much inclination to participate in music. My brother and I can rightly be considered fans of music, but — except for monkeying around with harmonicas — have pretty much held the practice of it at arm’s length. The Elder Sister? I honestly must say I know almost nothing about her musical tastes or interests. (In the car, she’s likely listening to a talk show or an audiobook.) It’s not hard to imagine her favorite musical sound takes the form of a fanfare heralding her entrance into a room. (He said, grinning-ducking-and-running.)

As for The Younger Sister: ah yes. In her case, maybe the appropriate title isn’t “the musical sister,” but rather “the musicals sister.” Because from the time she was only yay high (as we used to say), she has loved musical theater.

I’ve sometimes mentioned, here at RAMH, her childhood habit of listening over and over and over to the original cast album of My Fair Lady — how I’d learned every word of those songs, long before I ever really “got” the story. To that, though, one would fairly have to add:

Oklahoma! (and any other Rodgers & Hammerstein production)
Fiddler on the Roof
Gigi
West Side Story
anything in which Shirley MacLaine danced (a Juliet Prowse phase also took up part of the timeline)
…and, well, really pretty much any production whose cast members sometimes burst into song and dance.

She visits RAMH fairly regularly, and I will confess to baiting posts occasionally to draw her attention. Mentioning Fred Astaire will do it. Ditto Judy Garland, or Gene Kelly, or… well, you get the idea.

But beyond music in comic (or tragic) scripted contexts, she also has fixated over the years on a handful of recording artists (Barbra Streisand, especially). I thought of this last week when I heard that Andy Williams had died; I’m not sure, but The Younger Sister may have had a distant crush on Williams. (I believe she thought he was cute, and/or had been charmed by his soft, slightly high-pitched laugh — never far away on his TV variety show.) Here’s a mini-playlist, about 10-1/2 minutes long, of some of Williams’s most popular singles:

[Below, click Play button to begin an Andy Williams mini-playlist. While audio is playing,
volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This mini-playlist is 10:24 long.

[audio:emily_andywilliams.mp3, redrosesforabluelady_andywilliams.mp3, daysofwineandroses_andywilliams.mp3, moonriver_andywilliams.mp3 |titles=’An Andy Williams mini-playlist’|artists=Andy Williams]

(Boy — is that old-fashioned or what? The classic mid-1960s “easy listening” arrangements, I mean, complete with strings and backup singers.)

As a bonus, here’s another interpretation of “Moon River” — arguably the first interpretation — by Audrey Hepburn, accompanying herself on guitar, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I believe the tapping noise at the beginning is writer Paul Varjak — played by George Peppard — at his typewriter, about to be distracted, probably for life, by the thin, lilting voice of his neighbor on the fire escape.

[Below, click Play button to begin Moon River (Audrey Hepburn). While audio is playing,
volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:35 long.]

[audio:moonriver_audreyhepburn.mp3|titles=’Moon River’|artists=Audrey Hepburn]

Happy birthday, Sis. It’s not my fault it’s a day late; it’s your fault that your birthday came too early this year to be considered “mid-week”!

The Universes through the Keyhole

September 28, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Not just any old astronomical photograph. (Click to enlarge.) See
the note at the foot of this post for more info.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Fall

Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

(Edward Hirsch [source])

…and:

The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think… The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul.

(David Foster Wallace [source])

[Read more…]

Good Heavens

September 7, 2012 by John 5 Comments

[Video: Rita Wilson discusses why a movie whose emotional peak involves the Empire State
Building is beautiful; Tom Hanks and Vincent Garber prefer a more… prosaic sort of beauty.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

I shrugged my shoulders, muttered “back soon,” and plunged into the darkness. At first I couldn’t see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket’s saw, the star’s blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and:

The Ant

The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet.
The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.
The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion.

Often bears are piled up close to each other.
In their world it’s just one hump after another.
It’s like looking at piles of many melons.

You and I have spent so many hours working.
We have paid dearly for the life we have.
It’s all right if we do nothing tonight.

I am so much in love with mournful music
That I don’t bother to look for violinists.
The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

I love to see the fiddlers tuning up their old fiddles,
And the singer urging the low notes to come.
I saw her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

You and I have worked hard for the life we have.
But we love to remember the way the soul leaps
Over and over into the lonely heavens.

(Robert Bly [source])

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Alternative Seeings

August 24, 2012 by John 1 Comment

[Image: Rembrandt, Portrait of Jan Six (etching, 1647). You can trace this etching’s progress through
several other versions — six, actually — using a little slideshow at the site of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.]

From whiskey river:

Entrance

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

(Dana Gioia (after Rilke), from Interrogations at Noon)

…and:

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

(Elie Wiesel [source])

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I Am Curious… Rock

August 21, 2012 by John 2 Comments

As you probably know, the Mars rover Curiosity includes, among its impressive onboard chemical-analysis instruments, a powerful laser. The idea is to focus in on small pebbles here and there on the Red Planet’s surface; from a distance of a few meters, the laser can zap a spot on a pebble very briefly, but strongly enough that it heats up, emitting gases and tiny particles whose chemical spectra can then be analyzed.

The JPL/NASA team announced early this past weekend that they’d singled out the first target for testing, a tiny little pyramid of basalt at first simply numbered N165… and, shortly, renamed Coronation. The scheduled moment of zapping was Sunday.

Of course, as with any public event, this one brought the Internet wags out in force. Of particular interest at the moment is the Twitter feed of a user named N165 aka Coronation. The first few tweets went up on Saturday (read from the bottom up):

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