Some pieces of art are so iconic and powerful it is difficult to imagine any interpretation or alteration that wouldn’t result in angry outcries. (The cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceilings is a case in point.) The piece below, created by Greek artist Petros Vrellis successfully balances reverence and imagination.
Music
MOMA Celebrates Bollywood
Click the image above to see the schedule of MOMA’s programming. The image is from Shree 420 (1955), directed by Raj Kapoor and the image belongs to the Indian International Film Academy. Continue reading
License To Obsess
If your life has a certain soundtrack and you read American literary fiction, you may have already encountered the novels of Michael Chabon. Click the image above for a snapshot interview with him. When he announced at the beginning of this year that he was working on a new novel, it was seen by many in a blog post split over two days. A turn of phrase in the middle of the second post resonates with the small group of people who form Raxa Collective:
…thanks to Wax Poetics, one unexpected but maybe not unforeseeable result of the decision to have some characters own a shop together selling battered old things that are beautiful and valuable only to a small number of randomly assorted Geeko-Americans has been the joyful return to my life of hip-hop…
Things that are beautiful and valuable only to a small number: those are the things we are focused on here. See all of Salim’s recent posts for examples. Milo’s too. Chabon’s new novel may focus on the culture of hip-hop, which you will not likely encounter on our pages, but the underlying idea has both profound and light-hearted implications. Continue reading
The Meditative Power of Blue
Color theories have abounded since the time of the Greek philosophers. Whether through the use of adjectives (cool, warm, soothing, exciting), metaphor (green with envy) or similes (green as grass) different parts of the spectrum have been awarded a range of emotional and descriptive attributes. Continue reading
In the Spirit of Halloween…
Synchronous Symmetry
Music of the Spheres
Changing Water – Gulf of Maine, 2011, Nathalie Miebach
Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes —Ludwig van Beethoven
Boston artist Nathalie Miebach found the seemingly unlikely intersection between astronomy, meteorology, ecology and basket weaving, essentially translating data into 3 dimensions… then she adds the plane of music. For her work, Miebach was selected as a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow.
Initially focusing her woven sculptures on data from the stars, her work was rerouted by a call from two weather scientists at Tufts University. Intrigued by her work and it’s possible applications, they asked her to collect weather data on Cape Cod. From that point on, winds, temperature, barometric pressures, and rainfall became part of the raw material for her artistic work. Continue reading
Good Vibrations
Sticky Sonics
Science Notes
Is It Science?
One Minute Of Your Time
Urbanscape
Vimeo is one of the many slippery slopes on the mountainous terrain aka the internets. The creativity unleashed there can knock you head over heels. Nonetheless, we must risk those slopes. And give credit where it is due. Just two hours ago Moritz Oberholzer commented on this video, and how it was created (including his credit where due): Continue reading
Wordsmithing: Respect
This post from a few days ago brought the phrase “respect your elders” to the fore, because the man presenting those ideas commands respect. Not in the Napoleonic sense of command, but in the gentle, humble sense. Not to mention the witty sense. So, if there are variations on how to command, are there also variations on respect? Of course. And they are just as surprising as some previous wordsmithing investigations have discovered for other well-worn words.
If you are musically inclined, you might go with Aretha’s definition. It probably gets at the common usage definition that most North Americans of a certain age carry around with them. But in OED territory “giving propers” can be seen in a different light with the first two entries for respect:
1. n. regard, gaze; visual attention.
2. v. to postpone, to suspend; to relieve temporarily.
Neither form of the word, especially the verb form, matches what we thought if we had Aretha’s (or Napoleon’s) definition in mind. Nor is either a definition we had ever even heard of. Yet when we gaze at those water-collecting and storage devices of old in the desert, we regard them in awe; and they do, temporarily, relieve us of our belief that innovation is only forward-looking.
Desert Blues
Last year, during the summer prior to starting college, I worked at Feynan in Jordan teaching English to the children of the local Bedouin community.
The hybrid of Berber, Arab, Western and black African music styles of the Malian group Tinariwen serves as a sound track to his experience. I had the pleasure of hearing some members of the group in a small venue last year, and that sound of desert yearning, or “asuf”, was almost palpable. Take a listen to the embedded songs in the multimedia files in both of the above links and tell me if you agree.
…soon it will once again be time for Tinariwen — which operates as a collective, with anywhere from five to nine members, depending on factors like who has herds to tend or whose wife is pregnant — to move out of its cultural space and into ours. And with that, the feeling of asuf will return, feeding a yearning for the desert even as it powers the music.
Lomax Legacies
Creative effort always deserves credit, and on occasion deserves valorization. The fellow that drew this chart definitely deserves credit:
He has done his homework, both musically and legally, to deliver a punchy sermon with good graphic and multi-media accompaniment. His moral question for us to wrestle with:
grateful as I am to Alan Lomax for recording and disseminating so much great folk music, I remain baffled as to why he was allowed to copyright it. Our creative heritage deserves better stewardship than our current laws provide.
Music To Travel With
Speaking of Wim Wenders and good music, one of the great musical entrepreneurs that Wenders has collaborated with more than once–see Paris, Texas (1984) and Buena Vista Social Club (1999)–is Ry Cooder. If you daydream of traveling to Cuba, and there is a soundtrack to that daydream, it is very likely due to Cooder’s work starting in 1996 with a group of Cuban musicians that led to some performances, then several albums, and eventually that documentary film by Wenders.
If slide guitar evokes the southwest United States for you, that too is likely Cooder’s doing. Bringing it closer to home (geographically but not in any other way) for those of us in Kerala, his cover of The Coast of Malabar, recorded with The Chieftains on their album The Long Black Veil is a melancholy ballad. Do not listen to it unless you are in romantic wallow mode.
Instead, if you want to travel a bit more with music listen and kick your heels up at the same time, listen to the last track on that album. The Rocky Road to Dublin, a collaboration between The Chieftains and The Rolling Stones will send you off with a smile. Back to Ry Cooder, thanks are due to Alec Wilkinson for his reverential post (not really a review) about this new release.
And In Other News…
One day shy of a fourth opportunity to have a bit more fun with Michael’s mysterious invisibility, foiled. He is back, so we do not need to make reference to other young men of letters who stopped writing and made us all wish otherwise. And thankfully there was no resemblance to the story of Yuri Andropov after all, either. Nor to the even less humorous, or more humorless, current event question that Amy Davidson asks in her most recent blog post.
Let’s change the subject. Earthquake. No humor in that either. But for a rare short-form piece by John McPhee, take a look here, to help put such events in perspective. Amie, Milo and Adrien were all in the location McPhee describes, at the time when that piece first appeared. The folks who manage that ever-improving site where it was first posted perform a great service of recycling archival material when news brings an old piece to new relevance. Yesterday’s mention of Pete Seeger makes this worthy of recycling. It is, itself, a recycling of personal history along with a moving observation of the good guy’s aura:
His voice is a little shaky now (he talks the songs as much as sings them), his banjo picking is a little uncertain, and he required the help of his grandson, a powerful singer and guitarist with a perfect sixties name: Tao Rodríguez-Seeger. But he gave a lovely performance, and when he reappeared at the end, to sing “Down by the Riverside (Ain’t Gonna Study War No More)” with Ani and her band, there was nothing but love in that room.
Organikos 