The quick backstory: “Dean Potter walks a highline at Cathedral Peak as the sun sets and the moon rises. Shot from over 1 mile away with a Canon 800mm and 2X by Mikey Schaefer. This shot was part of a bigger project for National Geographic called The Man Who Can Fly. ”
Yesterday we featured a piano-roll recording of the French composer Claude Debussy playing his “La soirée dans Grenade” in 1913. Today we bring you a lyrical and melancholy work recorded in 1922 on a similar device by Debussy’s younger friend and rival, Maurice Ravel. It’s called “Oiseaux tristes,” or “Sad Birds.”
The impetus for composing the piece came in 1904, when Ravel heard a second-hand account of something Debussy had said. According to Alexis Roland-Manuel, Ravel’s friend and biographer, Debussy had told the pianist Ricardo Viñes that when writing his experimental piece, “D’un cahier d’esquisses,” he had been “dreaming of a kind of music whose form was so free that it would sound improvised, of works which would seem to have been torn out of a sketchbook.”
Viñes recounted Debussy’s statement at a meeting of “Les Apaches,” a group of radical writers, artists and musicians, of which Ravel was a member. Ravel responded by saying that he was ready to put Debussy’s dream into action. He drew his inspiration from an experience he had one morning in the forest at Fontainbleau. Ravel’s friend and former music school classmate Émile Vuillermoz remembered:
He was staying with friends and one morning he heard a blackbird whistling a tune and was enchanted by its elegant, melancholy arabesque. He had merely to transcribe this tune accurately, without changing a note, to produce the limpid, poetic piece which spiritualises the nostalgic call of this French brother of the Forest Bird in Siegfried.
After the meeting, Ravel set to work on the E Flat Minor “Oiseaux tristes,” which he dedicated to Viñes and included in his five-piece suite, Miroirs. “Oiseaux tristes is the most typical of my way of thinking,” Ravel wrote in his 1928 autobiographical sketch. “It evokes birds lost in the oppressiveness of a very dark forest during the hottest hours of summer.”
Ravel recorded “Oiseaux tristes” and four other pieces in London on June 30, 1922, using a Duo-Art reproducing piano. Unlike the Welte-Mignon machine used by Debussy in 1913 (Ravel also made a pair of recordings on the Welte-Mignon at about the same time as Debussy) the Duo-Art system did not automatically record the dynamics of the performance. So when Ravel played “Oiseaux tristes” at the studio in London, there was an engineer seated next to him at a console, turning dials to capture the dynamic modulations in his playing. Afterward, Ravel listened to a playback on a pianola and, satisfied with the results, signed his name on the original roll.
In 2001, none other than Sir Mick Jagger bought the rights to a novel by Robert Harris called Enigma. The novel, a fictionalized account of WWII British codebreakers, then became a feature film, written by Tom Stoppard, produced by Sir Mick, and starring Mr. Dougray Scott and Ms. Kate Winslett as derring-do Bletchley Park mathematicians and cryptanalysts employed in a race against time and the Nazis to break the fabled Enigma code before all hell breaks loose. It all sounds very dramatic (and I’ve heard the film is entertaining), but things didn’t happen quite like that. Reality is never so formulaic or so good-looking. But the Enigma code was broken, and the story of the code machine and its eventual decryption is fascinating on its own terms. As University of Cambridge “Enigma Project Officer” Dr. James Grime says–in the series of videos above and below–it’s a story of “how mathematicians can save lives.” Still with me?
Okay, so in the first video above, Dr. Grime gives us a thorough tour of the Enigma machine (Sir Mick owns one, by the way… but back to the history…). Developed by the Germans, it’s a marvelous encryption method set into a small box that when opened resembles little more than a fancy WWII-era typewriter. Oh, but it’s clever, you see, because the Enigma machine (the one above belongs to science writer Simon Singh) translates ordinary messages into code through an ingenious method by which no letter in the code ever repeats, making it almost impossible to decode in the ordinary ways. The machine was quite complicated for its time; it works by sending the characters typed by the keys through a series of circuits—first through three rotors like those on a combination bike lock, but each with 26 places instead of ten.
Now at this point, the machine was nothing more than what was available to any bank or business wishing to transmit trade secrets. But the German military machines had an extra layer of encoding: at the front of their machines was a “plugboard,” something like a small switchboard. This allowed the coding coming through the rotors to be resequenced for an extra level of scrambling. In the German military machines, the total number of possible combinations for message encryptions comes to a staggering figure in the quadrillions. (The exact number? 158,962,555,217,826,360,000). There’s a little more to the machine than that, but Dr. Grime can explain it much better than I.
Of course, the Enigma Machine had to have a fatal flaw. Otherwise, no novel, no movie, no drama (and maybe no victory?). What was it, you ask? Amazingly, as you will learn above, the very thing that made the Enigma nearly impossible to break, its ability to encode messages without ever repeating a letter, also made the code decipherable. But first, Alan Turing had to step in. Sadly, Turing is missing from Enigma the film. (More sadly, he was disgraced by the country he served, which put him on trial for his sexuality and humiliated him to the point of suicide). But as Grime shows above, Turing is one of the real heroes of the Enigma code story. Cryptanalysts initially discovered that they could decipher ordinary words and phrases (like “Heil Hitler”) in the Enigma messages by matching them up with strings of random letters that never repeated.
But this was not enough. In order for the Enigma code to work for the Germans, each operator—sender and receiver—had to have exactly the same settings on their rotors and plugboards. (The messages were transmitted over radio via Morse code). Each month had its own settings, printed on code sheets in soluble ink that easily dissolved in water. If the Allied codebreakers deciphered the settings, their decryption would be useless weeks later. Furthermore, the German navy had a more complicated method of encoding than either the army or air force. The Polish had developed a machine called the Bombe, which could decipher army and air force codes, but not navy. What Turing did, along with Gordon Welchman, was develop his own version of the Bombe machine, which allowed him to break any version of the Enigma code in under 20 minutes since it bypassed most of the tedious guesswork and trial and error involved in earlier by-hand methods.
This is all very dramatic stuff, and we haven’t had one celebrity step in to dress it up. While I’m certain that Enigma the film is a treat, I’m grateful to Dr. Grime for his engagement with the actual codebreaking methods and real personalities involved.
A third video of extra footage and outtakes is available here if you’re still hungry for more WWII codebreaking secrets.
via Science Dump
Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.
Fans of Mexican painter and prolific self-portraitist Frida Kahlo have one destination above all others: the Blue House, her 1904 home, easily identifiable by color, at the corner of Londres and Allende in Mexico City’s Coyoacán borough. I myself dropped in a couple years back, impressed at the attention to detail in converting the building and its courtyard into the Frida Kahlo Museum. (It repaid the time spent in a line that, even in the middle of a weekday, stretched down the block.) Other visitors, clearly lovers of Kahlo’s work, walked the grounds trying to sense how much of the artist’s spiritual presence remained. Just above, you can see film of the Blue House in its pre-museum years, featuring the living presences of both Kahlo and her muralist husband Diego Rivera. Though the artists themselves have long gone, the effort to preserve their domicile has clearly succeeded; gift shop aside, these parts of its grounds look much the same today.
“Nobody will ever know how much I love Diego,” says a narrator reading Kahlo’s words as the camera captures her and Rivera together:
I don’t want anything to hurt him, nothing to bother him and rob him of the energy he needs for living — for living as he likes, for painting, seeing, loving, eating, sleeping, being by himself, being with someone. But I’d never want him to be sad. If I had good health, I’d give him all of it. If I had youth, he could take it all.
The footage above was shot by a simultaneously significant man in Kahlo’s life, the photographer Nickolas Muray, who put in a ten-year shift as her man on the side. Yet she preferred Rivera to Muray as husband material, divorcing and re-marrying Rivera even as she spurned Muray’s proposals. But then, bohemian artists have always had their own way of handling married life; I recall one particular framed Mexican newspaper clipping displayed at the Frida Kahlo Museum, a story about how, despite his reputation for ugliness, Rivera never once had to suffer in the female department.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In years past, we’ve shared with you two animations by Cristóbal Vila — first Nature by Numbers, which captured the ways in which mathematical concepts (Fibonacci Sequence, Golden Number, etc.) reveal themselves in nature. And then Inspirations, a short film celebrating the mathematical art of M.C. Escher. Now Vila returns with Lux Aeterna, a 3D study of light. On his web site, Vila describes the essence of the film.
[It’s] a look at light from several points of view. On one side it’s a powerful radiation emitted by the most distant stars in the universe, and also by our Sun; light floods everywhere in nature, from the largest things to the smallest, creating interesting and beautiful effects; humans always used light as a symbolic and spiritual element; and it’s an intriguing physical phenomenon deeply studied by science too.
Vila’s site also hosts a series of screenshots that take you into the making of the film. Down the line, the Spanish artist plans to record a series of video tutorials in Spanish fully demonstrating the creative process. If you follow him on Twitter or Facebook, he’ll let you know when they’re ready for viewing. Incidentally, you can catch Open Culture on Twitter and Facebook too. Hope to see you there.
We’ve all heard the phrase “the banality of evil.” Some of us even know which political theorist to attribute it to, and among those, a few have even read it in context. Hannah Arendt most memorably employed it in both the subtitle and closing words of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her book on the trial of Nazi lieutenant-colonel Adolf Eichmann. To Arendt’s mind, Eichmann willingly did his part to organize the Holocaust — and an instrumental part it was — out of neither anti-semitism nor pure malice, but out of a non-ideological, entirely more prosaic combination of careerism and obedience. Readers have argued ever since its publication about this characterization, and those with a special interest in how Arendt arrived there can find in the New Yorker’s online archives the original series of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” articles out of which the book grew: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five. (Click on the images at the bottom of each page to see Arendt’s writing up close. Then click on them again and maneuver your mouse around to peruse the pages.) Given that Hannah Arendt, a new biopic starring Barbara Sukowa, just gained distribution, you may want to read these articles to stay ahead of the next wave of interest in the thinker and her writings.
In today’s magazines, one reads rather fewer five-part intersections of trial reportage and moral inquiry by figures like Arendt. But the New Yorker hasn’t entirely lost its willingness to confront these matters. Shortly after last year’s massacre in Aurora, Colorado, the magazine ran on its site a piece by Rollo Romig in touch with concerns, broadly speaking, similar to Arendt’s. Romig, too, looks at the nature of evil, but in a reflection suited to our time — brief, startlingly timely, and specifically for the web — rather than Eichmann in Jerusalem’s. “The danger of a word like ‘evil’ is that it is absolute,” he writes. “ ‘Evil’ has become the word we apply to perpetrators who we’re both unable and unwilling to do anything to repair, and for whom all of our mechanisms of justice seem unequal: it describes the limits of what malevolence we’re able to bear. In the end, it’s a word that says more about the helplessness of the accuser than it does the transgressor.”
H/T to Christian F. for flagging the New Yorker articles for us.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annual question to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2013 edition asks the question, “What Should We Be Worried About?”. And the replies — 152 in total — feature thoughts by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Daniel Dennett, Sherry Turkle, Lawrence Krauss, and Esther Dyson, plus the ones excerpted below. If you’re willing to go down the rabbit hole, you can access the complete collection of responses here.
What I fear most is that we will lack the will and the foresight to face the world’s problems squarely, but will instead retreat from them into superstition and ignorance. Consider how in 375 AD, after a dream in which he was whipped for being “a Ciceronian” rather than a Christian, Saint Jerome resolved no more to read the classical authors and to restrict himself only to Christian texts, how the Christians of Alexandria murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in 415, and realize that, at least in part, the so-called dark ages were not something imposed from without, a breakdown of civilization due to barbarian invasions, but a choice, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of religious fundamentalism. [Read the rest here.]
–Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Death is what makes this cyclical renewal and steady advance in organisms possible. Discovered by living things millions of years ago, aging and death permit a species to grow and flourish. Because natural selection ensures that the child-who-survives-to-reproduce is better than the parent (albeit infinitesimally so, for that is how evolution works), it is better for many species that the parent step out of the way and allow its (superior) child to succeed in its place.… So important is death that we have, wired into our genes, a self-destruct senescence program that shuts down operations once we have successfully reproduced, so that we eventually die, leaving our children—the fresher, newer, shinier versions of ourselves—to carry on with the best of what we have given them: the best genes, the best art, and the best ideas. Four billion years of death has served us well. Now, all this may be coming to an end, for one of the things we humans, with our evolved intelligence, are working hard at is trying to eradicate death.[Read the rest here.]
–Kate Jeffery, Head, Dept. of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College, London
Most of the smart people I know want nothing to do with politics. We avoid it like the plague… Is this because we feel that politics isn’t where anything significant happens? Or because we’re too taken up with what we’re doing, be it Quantum Physics or Statistical Genomics or Generative Music? Or because we’re too polite to get into arguments with people? … It’s politics that’s bleeding the poorer nations for the debts of their former dictators. It’s politics that allows special interests to run the country. It’s politics that helped the banks wreck the economy. It’s politics that prohibits gay marriage and stem cell research but nurtures Gaza and Guantanamo.… What worries me is that while we’re laissez-ing, someone else is faire-ing. [Read the rest here]
–Brian Eno, Artist, Composer, Producer
You can dive into the full collection at Edge.org. The photo above was taken by Katinka Matson.
I am a child of Beatles fans; we owned nearly every album in original mono vinyl pressings. But somehow there was a hole in our collection—a whale-sized hole, it turned out—because we didn’t have a copy of the White Album. I was introduced to it later by a friend, who shared its secrets with me like one would share the favorite work of a favorite poet—reverently. We delved into the history and learned that recording sessions were notoriously fractious—with Ringo stepping away for a while and Paul stepping in on the drums, and with the others recording solo, sometimes with session players, rarely in the same room together— a situation reflected in the tracking of the record, which feels like a compilation of songs by each Beatle (but Ringo), rather than the usual smooth affair of Lennon/McCartney, and occasional Harrison productions.
That ranginess is what makes the White Album special: it’s feels so familiar, and yet it’s not like anything they’d done before and presages the genius to come in their solo careers. So imagine my surprised delight at stumbling across a bootleg that die-hard completists have surely known about for ages (though it only saw release in 2002): The Beatles: Unplugged is a recording of acoustic songs, most of which would appear on the the White Album, played and sung by John, Paul, and George at George’s house in Esher—hence the bootleg’s subtitle, the Kinfauns-Sessions (Kinfauns was the name of George’s home). Here are the close vocal harmonies that seemed to mark a group of musicians in near-perfect harmony with each other (but without Ringo, again). And here are some of the Beatles’ most poignant, pointed, and vaudevillian songs live and direct, without any studio tricks whatsoever.
Of course these were recorded as demos, and not meant for release of any kind, but even so, they’re fairly high-quality, in a lo-fi kind of way. Listening to the songs in this form makes me think of the folk/psych revivalism of the so-called New Weird America that hearkened back to so much sixties’ trippy playfulness, but mostly eschewed the major label studio sound of sixties’ records and welcomed prominent tape hiss and single-track, bedroom takes. Given the rapid pop-culture recycling that is the hallmark of the early 21st century, The Beatles: Unplugged sounds strangely modern.
The Unplugged session includes a wonderfully airy rendition of “Dear Prudence,” which like so many of these songs, was written during The Beatles’ sojourn in India, about Mia Farrow’s sister (a complete tracklist is here). The compilers of the release have tacked on three additional songs: “Spiritual Regeneration India” (also a birthday tribute to The Beach Boy’s Mike Love), an oddly upbeat studio run-through of “Helter Skelter,” and a free-form acoustic medley of traditional songs called “Rishikesh No. 9” (also called “Spiritual Christmas”). In addition to the slew of White Album songs, the recording session also features McCartney’s “Junk,” which later appeared on his 1970 solo album McCartney and John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” (here called “Child of Nature”), which surfaced on 1971’s Imagine. As Allmusic’s Bruce Eder writes, Unplugged is a bootleg so good, “the folks at Apple and EMI ought to be kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently finished a dissertation on land, landscape, and labor.
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