Matthew Might, a computer science professor at the University of Utah, writes: “Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It’s hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures.” In his Illustrated Guide to the PhD, Professor Might creates a visual narrative that puts the daunting degree into perspective. Anyone who has already pursued a Ph.D. will see the wisdom in it. (Or at least I did.) And young, aspiring academics would be wise to pay it heed.
You can see a condensed version of the the illustrated guide above. Or follow it in a larger format below.
Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:
By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little:
By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more:
With a bachelor’s degree, you gain a specialty:
A master’s degree deepens that specialty:
Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:
Once you’re at the boundary, you focus:
You push at the boundary for a few years:
Until one day, the boundary gives way:
And, that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.:
Of course, the world looks different to you now:
It would have scandalized many an American filmgoer of the mid-twentieth century to learn that the movies they watched — even the most wholesome Hollywood fare of the era — made extensive use of a Soviet invention. What’s more, that invention came out of the very revolution that put the Communists in power, after which the Soviet government “took a strong interest in film, because it recognized cinema for what it was — a powerful tool for social and political influence.” So says Craig Benzine, host of Crash Course Film History, in the series’ eighth self-contained episode, “Soviet Montage,” which tells the story of that cinema-changing editing technique.
The government understood, in other words, the power of cinema as propaganda, and swiftly centralized the film industry. But after the Russian Revolution, which put an end to the importation of film stock, Russian filmmakers couldn’t shoot a frame. So while the nation built up the industrial capacity to produce film stock domestically, these filmmakers — much like the video essayists on the internet today — studied existing films, breaking them down, reassembling them, and figuring out how they worked.
In this way, filmmaker Lev Kuleshov defined the “Kuleshov effect,” explained by Benzine as the phenomenon whereby “viewers draw more meaning from two shots cut together than either shot on its own,” and different combinations of shots produce vastly different intellectual and emotional effects in those viewers.
When they finally got some film stock, Soviet montage filmmakers, who had come to believe that “for film to reach its true potential, the cuts themselves should be visible, the audience should be aware of them, the illusion should be obviously constructed and not hidden,” got to work making movies that demonstrated their ideas. They saw themselves as engineers, “joining shots the way a bricklayer builds a wall or a factory worker assembles a vehicle,“and Benzine examines sequences from two of the best-known fruits of these labors, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera (both of which you can watch free online by following those links).
Benzine also looks to more recent examples of Soviet montage theory in practice in everything from Dumbledore’s death in the Harry Potter movies to the shower scene in Psycho (a film by an avowed fan of the Kuleshov effect) to the final standoff in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. For more on the mechanics of Soviet montage, have a look at the fifteen-minute explainer from Filmmaker IQ above — or pay close attention to most any movie or television show or music video made over the past eighty years. The ideological climate that gave rise to Soviet montage theory may have changed, but the artistic principles its filmmakers discovered will, for the foreseeable future, hold true, underscoring the reliable effectiveness and surprising power of the simple cut.
One of my favorite music-themed comedy sketches of recent years features a support group of Radiohead fans flummoxed and disappointed by the band’s post-Ok Computer output. The scenario trades on the perplexity that met Radiohead’s abrupt change of musical direction with the revolutionary Kid A as well as on the fact that Radiohead fans tend toward, well… if not PTSD or severe mood disorders, at least a heightened propensity for generalized depression.
Now, purely subjectively, I’d place “How to Disappear Completely” in the top spot, followed closely by Amnesia’s “Pyramid Song.” But my own associations with these songs are personal and perhaps somewhat arbitrary. I might make a case for them based on lyrical interpretations, musical arrangement, and instrumentation. But the argument would still largely depend on matters of taste and acculturation.
Thompson, on the other hand, believes in “quantifying sentiment.” To that end, he created a “gloom index,” which he used to measure each song in the band’s catalog. Rather than listening to them all, one after another, he relied on data from two online services, first pulling “detailed audio statistics” from Spotify’s Web API. One metric in particular, called “valence,” measures a song’s “positivity.” These scores provide an index “of how sad a song sounds from a musical perspective.” (It’s not entirely clear what the criteria are for these scores).
Next, Thompson used the Genius Lyrics API to examine “lyrical density,” specifically the concentration of “sad words” in any given song. To combine these two measures, he leaned on an analysis by a fellow data scientist and blogger, Myles Harrison. You can see his resulting formula for the “Gloom Index” above, and if you understand the programing language R, you can see examples of his analysis at his blog, RCharlie. (Read a less data-laden summary of Thompson’s study at the analytics blog Revolutions.) Thompson also plotted sadness by album, in the interactive graph further up.
So, which song rated highest on the “Gloom Scale”? Well, it’s “True Love Waits” from their most recent album A Moon Shaped Pool (hear a live acoustic version up above.). It’s a damned sad song, I’ll grant, as are the nine runners-up, all of which you can hear in the YouTube and Spotify playlists above). “Pyramid Song” appears at number 5, but “How to Disappear Completely” doesn’t even rank in the top ten. From a purely subjective standpoint, this makes me suspicious of the whole operation. But you tell us, readers, what do you think of Thompson’s experiment in “quantifying sentiment” in music?
Here’s the top 10:
1. True Love Waits
2. Give Up The Ghost
3. Motion Picture Soundtrack
4. Let Down
5. Pyramid Song
6. Exit Music (For a Film)
7. Dollars & Cents
8. High And Dry
9. Tinker Tailor Soldier …
10. Videotape
The influence of modern jazz on classic rock extends far beyond too-cool poses and too many drugs. In the 1960s, writes Jeff Fitzgerald at All About Jazz, “a few players were venturing beyond the sacred three-chord trinity and developing some serious chops.” John Coltrane’s “extended improvisations on his unlikely top-forty hit version of ‘My Favorite Things’” gets credit for inspiring “not only long-form rock hits like The Doors’ seven-minute ‘Light My Fire’ and CCR’s eleven-minute “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ but later jam bands from the Grateful Dead to Phish.” But of course, the “breakthrough moment for Rock-Jazz relations” arrived when Miles Davis “developed a Jazz/Rock hybrid called Fusion.”
Davis’ Bitches Brew had much crossover appeal, especially to one of those aforementioned jam bands, the Dead, who—a month after the album’s release—invited Davis and his electric band to open for them at the Fillmore West. (Read about, and listen to, that unique eventhere.)
The pairing made sense not only because Davis’ long-form grooves hit many of the same psychedelic musical receptors as the Dead’s extended free-form sessions, but also because Jerry Garcia was something of a jazz-head. Especially when it came to free jazz pioneer and inventor of “Harmolodics,” Ornette Coleman.
“The guitarist had been a long time devotee” of Coleman, writes Ben Djarum at Ultimate Classic Rock, and contributed his distinctive playing to three tracks on Coleman’s 1988 album Virgin Beauty (hear them together on “Desert Players” above). Garcia’s devotion marks him as a true rock connoisseur of avant-garde jazz. (Perhaps the only other Coleman fans in the rock world as indebted to his influence are the also-legendarily-drug-fueled indie experimentalists Royal Trux.) It turns out the appreciation was mutual. “Coleman himself was aware of musical similarities between the Dead and his own group, Prime Time,” which also had two drummers.
“Each emphasizes both melody and look-Ma-no-limits improvisation,” wrote David Fricke in a 1989 Rolling Stone article about “jazz’s eternal iconoclast finding a new audience” through his association with Garcia and company. Upon witnessing the Dead play Madison Square Garden in 1987, and awed by the fans’ ultimate dedication, Coleman found himself thinking, “’Well, we could be friends here.’ Because if these people here could be into this, they could dig what we’re doing.” It would take six more years, but Coleman finally played with the Dead in 1993 at their annual Mardi Gras celebration at the Oakland Coliseum. Where the Davis/Dead match-up 26 years earlier had been a diptych, showcasing the strengths of each artist by contrast with the other, the Coleman/Dead pairing was a true collaboration.
Not only did Coleman’s Prime Time open the show, but the saxophonist joined the Dead onstage during their second set—in the midst of an open jam called “Space” (see in playlist below). His horn became a prominently integrated feature of what one fan remembered as “singularly the most intense thing I ever witnessed.” Such exaggeration from Deadheads seems routine, and sadly we have no video, nor could it ever replicate the experience. But some pretty spectacular live recordings of the entire Dead set may bear out the extremely high praise. “The Other One,” at the top of the post, first stretches out into very Coleman-like territory, and the band keeps up beautifully. After the verse kicks in halfway through, the song soon erupts into “walls of sound, screams, meltdowns, explosions….”
“The Other One,” was “a wise choice,” writes Oliver Trager in his The American Book of the Dead, “as its rhythm-based power allowed Coleman to continue his broad brush strokes.” After a “languorous” rendition of “Stella Blue,” the penultimate tune, “Turn on Your Love Light,” above, “provided Coleman with the perfect show-ending raveup to let loose in the fashion of an oldtime, down-home Texas horn honker.” In an interview later that same year, Garcia called Coleman “a wonderful model for a guy who’s done what we did, in the sense of creating his own reality of what music is and how you survive within it. He’s a high-integrity kind of person and just a wonderful man.” As for the night itself, Garcia remarked:
It was such a hoot to hear him play totally Ornette and totally Grateful Dead without compromising either one of them. Pretty incredible. Good musicians don’t do that kind of characterizing music. like this is this kind of music and that is that kind of thing.
Coleman should be remembered as one of the most refined examples of such a musician for his championing what he called “Harmolodic Democracy.” You can hear the full Grateful Dead set from that February, 1993 Mardi Gras concert at Archive.org. The night went so well, notes Trager, that “the musicians repeated the formula with similar results in December 1993 running through a nearly identical song list at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles.” One can only imagine the audience was equally mesmerized.
Would you believe that David Bowie, era-transcending pop star, actor, and avid reader, found not just the time to build a formidable art collection (auctioned off for $41 million last year at Sotheby’s), but to do quite a few paintings of his own? Even Bowie fans who know only his music will have seen one of those paintings, a self-portrait which made the cover of his 1995 album Outside. That same year he had his first show as a painter, “New Afro/Pagan and Work: 1975–1995,” at The Gallery, Cork Street.
“David Bowie paintings show a knowledgeable approach to art, influenced by Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, Francis Bacon, Francis Picabia…” says Very Private Gallery in a post on 25 of those works of art, adding that his style “also shows a touch of post-modernism, more precisely neo-expressionism movement.”
Comprising canvases painted between 1976 and 1996, the selections include not just Bowie’s self-portraits but depictions of such friends and associates as Iggy Pop, painted in Berlin in 1978 just above, and pianist Mike Garson.
Bowieologists recognize his “Berlin era” in the late 1970s, which produced the albums Low, Lodger, and “Heroes” (all to varying degrees involving the collaboration of Brian Eno) as an especially fruitful period of his musical career. But the galleries and museums of the German capital also witnessed Bowie’s first immersion into the world of visual art, both as an enthusiast and as a creator. The city even found its way into some of his paintings, such as 1977’s Child in Berlin above. “Heroes”, the final album of Bowie’s “Berlin trilogy,” even inspired a bit of Bowie artwork, the self-portrait sketch below modeled on the record’s famous cover photo by Masayoshi Sukita, itself inspired by Erich Heckel’s 1917 painting Roquairol.
But just as Bowie the musician and performer couldn’t stop seeking out and incorporating new influences, so did Bowie the painter’s attention continually turn to new subject matter, including the mythology of the tribes inhabiting present-day South Africa. At Very Private Gallery you can see not just more of his finished work but more of his sketches, including studies of Hunger City, the thematic setting of his elaborate Diamond Dogs tour as well as for a film planned, but never actually shot, in the mid-1970s. Despite the considerable difference in medium between music and images, Bowie’s visual work still comes across clearly as Bowie’s work — especially a face drawn, true to elegantly nostalgic form, on a pack of Gitanes.
Likely, in a moment of quiet downtime, you’ve wondered: Just what would happen if a star, burning bright in the sky, wandered by a black hole? What would that meeting look like? What kinds of cosmic things would go down?
Now, thanks to an artistic rendering made available by NASA, you don’t have to leave much to imagination. Above, watch a star stray a little too close to a black hole and get shredded apart by “tidal disruptions,” causing some stellar debris to get “flung outward at high speed while the rest falls toward the black hole.”
This rendering isn’t theoretical. It’s based on observations gleaned from “an optical search by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) in November 2014.” The “tidal disruptions” witnessed above, writes NASA, “occurred near a supermassive black hole estimated to weigh a few million times the mass of the sun in the center of PGC 043234, a galaxy that lies about 290 million light-years away.” It’s a sight to behold.
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“Records can be a bad trip. The audience can play your mistakes over and over. In a television special they see you once and you work hard to make sure they’re seeing you at your best.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone blessed with Mama Cass’ golden pipes being embarrassed by a recorded performance. A live gig, yes, though, celebrities of her era were subjected to far fewer witnesses.
The Internet was an undreamable little dream in 1969, when the sole episode of The Mama Cass Television Show aired. The former singer of the Mamas and the Papas died five years later, presumably unaware that future generations would have knowledge of, let alone access to, her failed pilot.
She may have described her variety show as “low key” to the Fremont, California Argus, but the guest list was padded with high wattage friends, including comedian Buddy Hackett, and singers Mary Travers and John Sebastian. Joni Mitchell, above, delivered an above-reproach performance of “Both Sides Now.”
Later, Mitchell and Travers joined their hostess for the heartfelt rendition of “I Shall Be Released” below, a performance that is only slightly marred by Elliot’s insane costume and an unnecessarily syrupy backing arrangement of strings and reeds.
Those who can’t live without seeing the complete show can purchase DVDs online.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll is appearing onstage in New York City through June 26 in Paul David Young’s political satire, Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
We might assume that philosophy is an ivory tower discipline that has little effect on the unlovely operations of government, driven as they are by the concerns of middle class wallets, upper class stock portfolios, and the ever-present problem of poverty. But we would be wrong. In times when presidents, cabinet members, or senators have been thoughtful and well-read, the ideas of thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, Leo Strauss, Jurgen Habermas, and John Rawls—a favorite of the previous president—have exercised considerable sway. Few philosophers have been as historically influential as the German thinker Carl Schmitt, though in a thoroughly destructive way. Then there’s John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Aristotle… even Socrates, who made himself a thorn in the side of the powerful.
But when it comes to the mostly French school of thinkers we associate with postmodernism—Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, the Jacques Lacan and Derrida, and many others—such influence is far less direct. The work of these writers has been often dismissed as frivolous and inconsequential, speaking a language no one understands to out of touch coastal elites on the left edge of the spectrum. Perhaps this is so in the United States, where power is often theorized but rarely radically critiqued in mainstream publications. But it has not been so in France. At least not according to the CIA, who closely monitored the effects of French philosophy on the country’s domestic and foreign policy during their long-running culture war against Communism and “anti-Americanism,” and who, in 1985, compiled a research paper to document their investigations. (See a sample page above.)
…the undercover cultural warriors applaud what they see as a double movement that has contributed to the intelligentsia shifting its critical focus away from the US and toward the USSR. On the left, there was a gradual intellectual disaffection with Stalinism and Marxism, a progressive withdrawal of radical intellectuals from public debate, and a theoretical move away from socialism and the socialist party. Further to the right, the ideological opportunists referred to as the New Philosophers and the New Right intellectuals launched a high-profile media smear campaign against Marxism.
The “spirit of anti-Marxism and anti-Sovietism,” write the agents in their report, “will make it difficult for anyone to mobilize significant intellectual opposition to US policies.” The influence of “New Left intellectuals” over French culture and government was such, they surmised, that “President [Francois] Mitterrand’s notable coolness toward Moscow derives, at least in part, from this pervasive attitude.”
These observations stand in contrast to the previous generation of “left-leaning intellectuals of the immediate postwar period,” writes Rockhill, who “had been openly critical of US imperialism” and actively worked against the machinations of American operatives. Jean-Paul Sartre even played a role in “blowing the cover of the CIA station officer in Paris and dozens of undercover operatives,” and as a result was “closely monitored by the Agency and considered a very serious problem.” By the mid-eighties, the Agency stated, triumphantly, “there are no more Sartres, no more Gides.” The “last clique of Communist savants,” they write, “came under fire from their former proteges, but none had any stomach for fighting a rearguard defense of Marxism.” As such, the late Cold War period saw a “broader retreat from ideology among intellectuals of all political colors.”
A certain weariness had taken hold, brought about by the indefensible totalitarian abuses of the “cult of Stalinism” and the seeming inescapability of the Washington Consensus and the multinational corporatism engendered by it. By the time of Communism’s collapse, U.S. philosophers waxed apocalyptic, even as they celebrated the triumph of what Francis Fukuyama called “liberal democracy” over socialism. Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man made its startling thesis plain in the title. There would be no more revolutions. Harvard thinker Samuel Huntington declared it the era of “endism,” amidst a rash of hyperbolic arguments about “the end of art,” the “end of nature,” and so on. And, in France, in the years just prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, the previously vigorous philosophical left, the CIA believed, had “succumbed to a kind of listlessness.”
While the agency credited the diffidence of post-structuralist philosophers with swaying popular opinion away from socialism and “hardening public attitudes toward Marxism and the Soviet Union,” it also wrote that “their influence appears to be waning, and they are unlikely to have much direct impact on political affairs any time soon.” Is this true? If we take seriously critics of so-called “Identity Politics,” the answer is a resounding No. As those who closely identify postmodern philosophy with several recent waves of leftist thought and activism might argue, the CIA was shortsighted in its conclusions. Perhaps, bound to a Manichean view fostered by decades of Cold War maneuvering, they could not conceive of a politics that opposed both American and Soviet empire at once.
And yet, the retreat from ideology was hardly a retreat from politics. We might say, over thirty years since this curious research essay circulated among intelligence gatherers, that concepts like Foucault’s biopower or Derrida’s skeptical interrogations of identity have more currency and relevance than ever, even if we don’t always understand, or read, their work. But while the agency may not have foreseen the pervasive impact of postmodern thought, they never dismissed it as obscurantist or inconsequential sophistry. Their newly-released report, writes Rockhill, “should be a cogent reminder that if some presume that intellectuals are powerless, and that our political orientations do not matter, the organization that has been one of the most potent power brokers in contemporary world politics does not agree.”
Here’s a fascinating glimpse of the very first Bloomsday celebration, filmed in Dublin in 1954.
The footage shows the great Irish comedic writer Brian O’Nolan, better known by his pen name Flann O’Brien, appearing very drunk as he sets off with two other renowned post-war Irish writers, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin, and a cousin of James Joyce, a dentist named Tom Joyce, on a pilgrimage to visit the sites in James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses.
The footage was taken by John Ryan, an artist, publisher and pub owner who organized the event. The idea was to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom and other characters from the novel, but as Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp explain in this humorous passage from their book, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography, things began to go awry right from the start:
The date was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morning, Brian O’Nolan was already drunk.
This day was the fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immortalised in Ulysses.
To mark this occasion a small group of Dublin literati had gathered at the Sandycove home of Michael Scott, a well-known architect, just below the Martello tower in which the opening scene of Joyce’s novel is set. They planned to travel round the city through the day, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown.
Sadly, no-one expected O’Nolan to be sober. By reputation, if not by sight, everyone in Dublin knew Brian O’Nolan, otherwise Myles na Gopaleen, the writer of the Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. A few knew that under the name of Flann O’Brien, he had written in his youth a now nearly forgotten novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. Seeing him about the city, many must have wondered how a man with such extreme drinking habits, even for the city of Dublin, could have sustained a career as a writer.
As was his custom, he had been drinking that morning in the pubs around the Cattle Market, where customers, supposedly about their lawful business, would be served from 7:30 in the morning. Now retired from the Civil Service, on grounds of “ill-health”, he was earning his living as a free-lance journalist, writing not only for the Irish Times, but for other papers and magazines under several pen-names. He needed to write for money as his pension was a tiny one. But this left little time for more creative work. In fact, O’Nolan no longer felt the urge to write other novels.
The rest of the party, that first Bloomsday, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young critic Anthony Cronin, a dentist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin represented the family interest, and John Ryan, the painter and businessman who owned and edited the literary magazine Envoy. The idea of the Bloomsday celebration had been Ryan’s, growing naturally out of a special Joyce issue of his magazine, for which O’Nolan had been guest editor.
Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs, of the old fashioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends drive to poor Paddy Dignam’s funeral. The party were assigned roles from the novel. Cronin stood in for Stephen Dedalus, O’Nolan for his father, Simon Dedalus, John Ryan for the journalist Martin Cunningham, and A.J. Leventhal, the Registrar of Trinity College, being Jewish, was recruited to fill (unkown to himself according to John Ryan) the role of Leopold Bloom.
Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by deciding they must climb up to the Martello tower itself, which stood on a granite shoulder behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoisted himself up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fearful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet’s enormous farmer’s boot, the others hastened to rescue and restrain the rivals.
With some difficulty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the others. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city.
In pubs along the way an enormous amount of alcohol was consumed, so much so that on Sandymount Strand they had to relieve themselves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses. Tom Joyce and Cronin sang the sentimental songs of Tom Moore which Joyce had loved, such as Silent, O Moyle. They stopped in Irishtown to listen to the running of the Ascot Gold Cup on a radio in a betting shop, but eventually they arrived in Duke Street in the city centre, and the Bailey, which John Ryan then ran as a literary pub.
They went no further. Once there, another drink seemed more attractive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long vanished pleasures of Nighttown.
Celebrants of the first Bloomsday pause for a photo in Sandymount, Dublin on the morning of June 16, 1954. From left are John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Brian O’Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O’Brien), Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce, cousin of James Joyce.
Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2013–likely before many of you started to frequent our site. So it’s time to bring it back.
Leonardo da Vinci, the most accomplished example of the polymathic, artist-engineer “Renaissance man,” came up with an astonishing number of inventions great and small in the late 15th and early 16th century, from the helicopter to the musical viola organista, the tank to the automated bobbin winder. Even the devices he was born too late to invent, he improved: humans had crossed the humble bridge, for instance, for countless centuries, but then Leonardo created a new, self-supporting variety whose design, as followed by a kid and his dad in the video above, still impresses today.
“With a series of wooden poles and beams, ‘Stick-Boy’ shows his Dad how to build Leonardo da Vinci‘s self-supporting arch bridge, also known as the emergency bridge,” say the description by Rion Nakaya at The Kid Should See This. “No nails, screws, rope, glues, notches, or other fasteners are holding the bridge in place… just friction and gravity.”
Clearly it works, but how? According to a post at the blog ArchiScriptor on self-supporting structures, all such bridges, from Leonardo’s on down, really do rely on only those two forces. “Notches in the members make it easier to construct, but strictly speaking aren’t necessary as long as there is some friction. Gravity will do the rest.”
Leonardo, the post continues, “explored two forms of the structure – a bridge and a dome. His work was commissioned by the Borgia family, with the mandate to design light and strong structures which could be built and taken down quickly. This was to aid them in their constant struggle for power with the Medici family in Renaissance Italy.” The site of the Leonardo3 Museum adds, “we do not know whether this bridge was ever put to practical use, but it is not hard to believe that such a modular construction, extremely easy to transport and to assemble, must have met with great favor from the Renaissance lords who were always on the lookout for new technologies to put to military use.”
Leonardo himself called this “the bridge of safety,” and it counts as only one of the ingenious bridges he designed in his lifetime. For the Duke Sforza he also invented several others including a revolving bridge which, according to Leonardo da Vinci Inventions, “could be quickly packed up and transported for use by armies on the move to pass over bodies of water,” could “swing across a stream or moat and set down on the other side so that soldiers could pass with little trouble,” and “incorporated a rope-and-pulley system for both quick employment and easy transport.” All useful tools indeed for those who once sought military dominance in Italy, but even more beneficial as inspiration for the Renaissance boys and girls of the 21st century.
Composer and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, above, feels music profoundly. For her, there is no question that listening should be a whole body experience:
Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body’s sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb ‘sentire’ means to hear and the same verb in the reflexive form ‘sentirsi’ means to feel.
It’s a philosophy born of necessity—her hearing began to deteriorate when she was 8, and by the age of 12, she was profoundly deaf. Music lessons at that time included touching the wall of the practice room to feel the vibrations as her teacher played.
While she acknowledges that her disability is a publicity hook, it’s not her preferred lede, a conundrum she explores in her “Hearing Essay.” Rather than be celebrated as a deaf musician, she’d like to be known as the musician who is teaching the world to listen.
In her TED Talk, How To Truly Listen, she differentiates between the ability to translate notations on a musical score and the subtler, more soulful skill of interpretation. This involves connecting to the instrument with every part of her physical being. Others may listen with ears alone. Dame Evelyn encourages everyone to listen with fingers, arms, stomach, heart, cheekbones… a phenomenon many teenagers experience organically, no matter what their earbuds are plugging.
And while the vibrations may be subtler, her philosophy could cause us to listen more attentively to both our loved ones and our adversaries, by staying attuned to visual and emotional pitches, as well as slight variations in volume and tone.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll is appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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