Ergonomics Experts Explain How to Set Up Your Desk
Ergonomics aren’t a joke, Jim. — Dwight Schrute, The Office
Technological innovations are snowballing faster than ever in the third decade of the 21st-century. A home office set-up that would have been cause for pride in 2019 seems woefully inadequate now.
Just ask anyone whose desk job pivoted to virtual in March of 2020.
So, perhaps don’t take physical therapist’s Jon Cinkay’s nearly three year old advice in the above Wall Street Journal video as gospel, but rather as a chance to check in with your carpal tunnels, your aching neck and back, and your favorite refurbished office furniture outlet.
Cinkay assumes that your desk is a standard 29 — 30” tall, which is not the case here, but okay…
Our bodies’ unique dimensions mean that no desk can be a one-size-fits-all proposition, and Cinkay makes a robust case for making modifications:
1. Adjust your desk chair
Cinkay recommends adjusting the seat height until your elbows are bent at a 90-degree angle when your fingers are on the keyboard. (As of this writing, keyboards have not yet become obsolete.)
In a 2020 article for the Hospital of Special Surgery, he also recommends making sure your chair’s armrests can fit under your desk to avoid postural compromises when reaching for your keyboard or mouse.
He also wisely advises looking for a chair with a minimum 30-day warranty so you don’t get stuck with an expensive mistake.
2. Consider a footstool
If cranking your desk chair to the perfect height leaves your feet dangling, you’ll need a footstool to help your knees maintain a proper 90-degree bend. If you can’t invest in a high tech adjustable footstool, a ream of paper will do in a pinch.
Tech expert David Zhang, who we’ll hear from soon below, rests his cute striped socks on a yoga mat.
Who among us does not have dozens of things that could be pressed into service as a footstool?
I am left to ponder the fate of the decorative needlepointed footstools my late grandmother and her sisters scattered around their living rooms.
Can an actual footstool be considered a footstool hack?
3. Adjust the height of your monitor
To avoid neck pain, use a monitor stand to position the top of the screen level with your eyes. If you’re working with a laptop, you’ll need a stand, a separate keyboard and and a mouse.
Cinkay’s monitor stand hack is — you guessed it — a ream of paper.
Mine is 5000 Years of the Art of India which is about the same thickness as a ream of paper and was in easy reach at the library where I work.
To judge by some of the comments on Cinkay’s Wall Street Journal video, his keyboard dates to the Stone Age.
Whatever his keyboard vintage, the aforementioned article did suggest gel wrist rests to relieve pressure on the sensitive carpal tunnel area, but watch out! Zhang is not a fan!
4. Get a Headset
Leaving aside the fact that the phone in question appears to be a landline, a headset allows you to keep your head on straight, thus minimizing neck and shoulder pain.
5. Remember that you’re not chained to your desk
Of all the ergonomic advice offered above, this seems likeliest to remain evergreen.
Take a snack break, a water break, a bathroom break, and while you’re at it toss in a couple of the stretches Cinkay recommends.
(The Mayo Clinic has more, including our favorite shoulder stretch.)
Zhang’s desk-centric video was uploaded in 2017, when keyboard trays were already becoming a relic of a bygone era.
As mentioned, he’s anti-wrist rest. If your wrists are in need of support, and they are, get a palm rest!
Zhang’s also critical of drawers and — unusual for 2017 — standing desks though like Cirkay, he’s a big fan of standing up and moving around.
His video description includes some common sense, ass-covering encouragement for viewers with irregular symptoms or pain to seek professional help. We think this means medical professional, though unsurprisingly, ergonomic assessment is a fast growing field. It’s expensive but possibly costs less in the long run than rushing out to buy whatever a stranger on the internet tells you to.
To that end, we appreciate Zhang’s transparency regarding his channel’s participation in the Amazon Services LLC Associates affiliate advertising program.
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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Make Your Own Medieval Memes with a New Tool from the Dutch National Library
As much joy as internet memes have given you over the years, you may have struggled to explain them to those unfamiliar with the concept. But if you’ve found it a tall order to articulate the power of found images crudely overlaid with text to, say, your parents, imagine attempting to do the same to an ancestor from the fourteenth century. Introducing memes to a medieval person, the best strategy would presumably be to begin not with sardonic Willy Wonka, the guy distracted by another girl, or The Most Interesting Man in the World, but memes with familiar medieval imagery. Thanks to KB, the national library of the Netherlands, you can now make some of you own with ease.
“On www.medievalmemes.org visitors can use images taken from the Dutch national library’s medieval collection and turn them into memes,” says Medievalists.net. “When using the meme generator, people actively create new contexts for these historic images by adding current captions. The available images are accompanied by explanatory videos, providing viewers with background information and showing them that, much like today, people in the Middle Ages used images to comment on their surroundings and current affairs.” You might repurpose these lively pieces of medieval art for such twenty-first-century topics as clubbing, online shopping, or the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the top of this post appears an image from 1327, originally created for a book of miracles King Charles IV ordered for his queen. As KB explains, it offers “a warning of what can happen if you don’t learn your prayers properly.” Below that is “a sort of Mediaeval cartoon” from 1183 about the techniques involved in properly slaughtering a pig. And just above, we see what happened when “the Kenite Jael lured the leader of the army, Sisera, into her tent. Sisera had been violently oppressing the Kenites for 20 years. While he slept, she whacked a tent peg straight through his head.” Though created for a picture Bible 592 years ago, this picture surely has potential for transposition into commentary on the very different perils of life in the twenty-twenties. But when you deploy it as a meme, you can do so in the knowledge that even your medieval forebears would have known that feel.
Related content:
Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts
Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch Stevie Wonder’s Amazing Drum Solo, and See Why He May Be the “Greatest Drummer of Our Time”
When Prince passed away, many a non-Prince fan suddenly found out that the man was not only a brilliant songwriter, singer, dancer, guitarist, pianist, stylist, and superstar, but that he was also a virtual one-man band in the studio, able to play almost any instrument, in exactly the way he wanted it played. Prince fans knew this, as do fans of the musician who made Songs in the Key of Life — or what Prince called the greatest album ever recorded. And if Prince were here, he would agree: Stevie Wonder deserves more appreciation for his multi-musicianship while he’s still with us.
Yes, of course, we know him for his “staggering songwriting and vocal skills,” writes PC Muñoz at Drum! magazine, for his “prowess as a formidable, inventive keyboardist (and pop music synthesizer pioneer)” and “his virtuoso-level skills on harmonica.”
But do we know Stevie Wonder as a drummer? Well, “newsflash for those who didn’t know,” Muñoz announces: “Stevie Wonder also happens to be one badass drummer.” (In fact, his very first gig, at 8 years old, was on the drums.) Not that he hasn’t received his just due from fellow musicians, far from it.
Eric Clapton called Wonder “the greatest drummer of our time” in 1974 — “hefty praise” (and maybe a bit of a swipe), wrote music journalist Eric Sandler, “coming from a man who played with Ginger Baker.” See a demonstration of Wonder’s formidable feel and groove behind the kit in the drum solo at the top of the post. But, of course, you’ve already heard his drumming — all, or most, of your life perhaps — on his albums, including most every track on Talking Book, Songs in the Key of Life, and Innervisions — songs like “Superstition,” “Higher Ground,” “Living for the City” … all Stevie.
“I grew up practicing to Stevie Wonder’s music,” drummer Eric Carnes tells Muñoz, “but I actually didn’t know he was often the drummer on his own stuff. Until I was in my twenties.” Carnes goes on to describe the hallmarks of Wonder’s style: “very relaxed – not so crisp and not so metronomic. He’s using different parts of the stick at different times, and his hi-hat parts change throughout the song. A lot of times, each chorus in a given song is played slightly differently, too. He escalates a song over a long period of time, really growing the whole piece, instead of topping out early; it gives the music somewhere to go.”
Bill Janovitz of the band Buffalo Tom — in a very thorough paean to Songs in the Key of Life – points to the “innate sense of groove in his drumming.… There is a musical inventiveness that might stem from being a well-rounded multi-instrumentalist, as opposed to someone who strictly defines themselves as a drummer.”
In his appreciation of Wonder’s drumming at Slate, Seth Stevenson also highlights Wonder’s “expressiveness.… No two measures sound the same.” He offers a mini best-of roundup of Wonder’s recorded drumming moments:
My favorite Wonder drum track comes on ‘Too High,’ the first song on Innervisions. Subtle snare rolls, sudden tom-tom tumbles, jazzy ride-cymbal swings – they’re all scrumptious and all in the greater service of the song. This is not the approach of a hired drummer attempting to carve out his own terrain. It’s the work of a multi-instrumentalist composer who fits his vision for each part into an interlocking whole.
Stevenson and Janovitz speak to a thread in so many discussions of “virtuoso” musicians: composers who are also musical prodigies have ways of playing instruments in an idiom only they can understand. One imagines that if we had recordings of Mozart or Bach – both prodigious multi-instrumentalists from very young ages – we would hear classical instruments played in ways we’ve never heard them played before. The magic of recording — and Stevie Wonder’s recordings especially — means we can hear the drums on his songs exactly as he heard, and played, them, and exactly as he wanted them played.
Related Content:
Catch Stevie Wonder, Ages 12–16, in His Earliest TV Performances
See Stevie Wonder Play “Superstition” and Banter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...If Fritz Lang’s Iconic Film Metropolis Had a Kraftwerk Soundtrack
The case of the copyright history of Fritz Lang’s influential sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis is as convoluted as the history of its film print. Lang’s vision, and his original almost-three-hour cut was doomed to censorship right from the start. The Nazis took out its more socialist scenes. It’s been edited, colorized, put back together and restored. Wikipedia currently lists nine different versions. Similarly, who owns the film had shifted from distributors back to public domain, then *out* of public domain the more original footage was rediscovered. And then comes 2023, where Metropolis will once again land in the public domain, at least in America. Will we see as many legal battles as we will see new remixes and re-scores? Probably a bit of both.
Its original orchestral score is available, but many fans also seek out a score more befitting its futurist origins. Something more electronic.
In fact, the four-minute clip above is YouTuber “KarmaGermany’s” 2009 fan-made edit using the music of Kraftwerk. If any band of the late 20th century was born to be paired with Lang’s technological vision, it’s the Fab Four from Düsseldorf. Their icy romantic melodies strike the right balance between Metropolis’ battle, then synthesis, of machinery and the human heart. And, look Kraftwerk even created a song called “Metropolis,” which becomes the actual score above.
Like watching the Wizard of Oz while Dark Side of the Moon plays, Kraftwerk’s “Metropolis” seems written for the film, with its opening fanfare over the shots of the future city waking up, then how it switches to its motorik beat as the workers begin their alienating factory day. (We haven’t done a side-by-side of the extant cut of the film, so there very well may be some editing at play here.)
Now, while this is just a fan’s very well made use of the band’s full catalog (it dives back into the band’s spacier early work for the films more tender moment), others have gone a more official route. Kraftwerk contemporary and member of Cluster, Dieter Moebius recorded a four-part, 40-minute suite Musik für Metropolis. It was released posthumously in 2015, and it is one of his spookier works.
Prior to that, techno DJ and composer Jeff Mills (no relation) composed an hour-long score in 2000 that also had its own accompanying edit, and married his career in both ambient and futuristic electronic beats.
If the Kraftwerk re-edit whets your techno whistle, that clip was just the opening scene of the 90-minute fan edit from John McWilliam. His notes: “Originally two and a half hours long it has been reduced down to one hour 23 minutes to pace it up including removing the subtitle cards between shots and placing them over [the] picture instead.”
The last instruction from McWilliam could apply to whatever score you choose, as long as it’s for Metropolis: “Best watched on a big-ass TV hooked up to a big-booty sound system.”
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...How Did Roman Aqueducts Work?: The Most Impressive Achievement of Ancient Rome’s Infrastructure, Explained
At its peak, ancient Rome enjoyed a variety of comforts that, once lost, would take centuries to recover. This process, of course, constitutes much of the story of Western civilization. Though some knowledge didn’t survive in any useful form, some of it remained lastingly embodied. The mighty ruins of Roman aqueducts, for example, continued to stand all across the former Empire. Together they once constituted a vast water-delivery system, one of whose construction and operation it took humanity quite some time to regain a functional understanding. Today, you can learn about both in the video from ancient-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan just above.
“Greek engineers began building aqueducts as early as the sixth century BC,” says Ryan. “A stone-line channel carried spring water to archaic Athens, and Samos was served by an aqueduct that plunged through a tunnel more than one kilometer long.”
These systems developed throughout the Hellenistic era, and their Roman successors made use of “arches and hydraulic concrete, but above all it was the sheer number and scale that set them apart.” Most Roman cities had “networks of wells and cisterns” to supply drinking water; aqueducts, in large part, came as “luxuries, designed to supply baths, ornate fountains, and the houses of the élite.” Man’s taste for luxury has inspired no few of his great works.
The task of building Rome’s aqueducts was, in essence, the task of building “an artificial river flowing downhill from source to city” — over great distances using no power but gravity, and thus on a descending slope of about five to ten feet per mile. This precision engineering was made possible by the use of tools like the dioptra and chorobates, as well as an enormous amount of manpower. Roman aqueducts ran mostly underground, but more impressively in the elevated channels that have become landmarks today. “The most spectacular example is undoubtedly the Pont du Gard, located just outside Nîmes,” says Ryan, and TV traveler Rick Steves visits it in the clip above. What once served as infrastructure for the well-watered mansions of the wealthy and connected now makes for a fine picnicking spot.
Related content:
Roman Architecture: A Free Online Course from Yale University
A Huge Scale Model Showing Ancient Rome at Its Architectural Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)
The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...“Europe’s Big Lie About Ukraine,” According to Stephen Fry
“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective.”
–Kurt Vonnegut
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West responded with sanctions, arms shipments, and lots of moral support. But then it drew a line. Europe (particularly Germany) stills buys Russian gas and oil in vast quantities, effectively bankrolling Putin’s bloody military campaign. It shows no inclination to make hard sacrifices, including cutting fuel consumption or potentially putting jobs at risk. And forget about a No-Fly zone. All of this leaves some wondering about Europe’s real motivations and calculations. Above, writer and actor Stephen Fry lays out his skeptical take in a 14-minute video.
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How Ukraine’s Works of Art Are Being Saved in Wartime–Using the Lessons of World War II
Read More...Why Algorithms Are Called Algorithms, and How It All Goes Back to the Medieval Persian Mathematician Muhammad al-Khwarizmi
In recent decades, a medieval Persian word has come to prominence in English and other major world languages. Many of use it on a daily basis, often while regarding the concept to which it refers as essentially mysterious. The word is algorithm, whose roots go back to the ninth century in modern-day Greater Iran. There lived a polymath by the name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whom we now remember for his achievements in geography, astronomy, and mathematics. In that last field, he was the first to define the principles of “reducing” and “balancing” equations, a subject all of us came to know in school as algebra (a name itself descended from the Arabic al-jabr, or “completion”).
Today, a good few of us have come to resent algorithms even more than algebra. This is perhaps because algorithms are most popularly associated with the deep, unseen workings of the internet, a system with ever increasing influence over the things we do, the information we receive, and even the people with whom we associate.
Provided sufficient data about us and the lives we lead, so we’re given to understand, these algorithms can make better decisions for us than we can make for ourselves. But what exactly are they? You can get one answer from “Why Algorithms Are Called Algorithms,” the BBC Ideas video at the top of the post.
For Western civilization, al-Khwarizmi’s most important book was Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning, which was translated into Latin three centuries after its composition. Al-Khwarizmi’s Latinized name “Algoritmi” gave rise to the word algorismus, which at first referred to the decimal number system and much later came to mean “a set of step-by-step rules for solving a problem.” It was Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing who “worked out how, in theory, a machine could follow algorithmic instructions and solve complex mathematics. This was the birth of the computer age.” Now, much further into the computer age, algorithms “are helping us to get from A to B, driving internet searches, making recommendations of things for us to buy, watch, or share.”
The algorithm giveth, but the algorithm also taketh away — or so it sometimes feels as we make our way deeper into the twenty-first century. In the other BBC Ideas video just above, Jon Stroud makes an investigation into both the nature and the current uses of this mathematical concept. The essential job of an algorithm, as the experts explain to him, is that of processing data, these days often in large quantities and of various kinds, and increasingly with the aid of sophisticated machine-learning processes. In making or influencing choices humans would once have handled themselves, algorithms do present a risk of “de-skilling” as we come to rely on their services. We all occasionally feel gratitude for the blessings those services send our way, just as we all occasionally blame them for our dissatisfactions — making the algorithm, in other words, into a thoroughly modern deity.
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Advanced Algorithms: A Free Course from Harvard University
The Problem with Facebook: “It’s Keeping Things From You”
The Complex Geometry of Islamic Art & Design: A Short Introduction
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...How Ukraine’s Works of Art Are Being Saved in Wartime–Using the Lessons of World War II
Much in Ukraine has been lost since the Russian invasion commenced this past February. But efforts to minimize the damage have been responding on all fronts, and not just geographical ones. The preservation of Ukrainian culture has become the top priority for some groups, in response to Russian forces’ seeming intent to destroy it. “Cultural heritage is not only impacted, but in many ways it’s implicated in and central to armed conflict,” says Hayden Bassett, director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History’s Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab, in the Vox explainer above. “These are things that people point to that are unifying factors for their society. They are tangible reflections of their society.”
This very quality made them a sadly appealing target for Russian attacks. As the video’s narrator puts it, Vladimir Putin “has made it clear that identity is at the ideological center of Russia’s invasion,” ostensibly an effort to reunify two lands of a common civilization. For Ukraine, the strategy to protect its own cultural heritage during wartime involves two phases of work.
First, “identify what needs protecting,” already a requirement of the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (known as the “Hague Convention). In Ukraine’s case, the list includes no fewer than seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Step two is to secure these cultural treasures, whether they be paintings, sculptures, buildings, or anything else besides. This requires the collaboration of “government agencies, militaries, NGOs, academics, museum institutions,” says Bassett, as well as of volunteers on the ground physically safeguarding the artifacts. This often involves hiding them whenever possible, and “if history is any indication,” says the narrator, “collections have moved underground or outside of major cities, or outside the country entirely.” So it was in Europe under the marauding of Nazi Germany, including, as seen in the France 24 segment above, with holdings of the Louvre up to and including the Mona Lisa. The state of world geopolitics today may have us wondering if we’ve truly learned the lessons of the Second World War, but at least the fight to save Ukrainian culture reminds that we haven’t forgotten them all.
Related content:
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Why Russia Invaded Ukraine: A Useful Primer
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Mark Knopfler Shows How to Play His Fingerpicking Guitar Style
So, you want to play guitar like Mark Knopfler? I mean, who wouldn’t, right? His style has been “legendary in the guitar community for decades,” notes Ultimate Guitar. Seems everyone who’s picked up the instrument has harbored a secret or not-so-secret desire to knock out “Sultans of Swing,” flawlessly, no matter what kind of music they play.
According to the Internet, it’s easy. There are How-to guides, promising 5 Ways to play like Knopfler. At least one lesson admits, “imitating Mark Knopfler’s playing style is much easier said than done.” I’ve seen it done convincingly once, by a guitar prodigy, raised by musicians, who toured with Buddy Guy. Otherwise, I’m here to inform you that you cannot learn to play like Mark Knopfler in Five Minutes.
For one thing, it took Knopfler himself decades to hone his style, tone, and technique — years and years of listening to old records, learning Blind Willie Johnson, Chet Atkins, and everything in-between. “Even when I would be about 20 or so,” he says, “I was already steeped in a lot of early country blues and everything.” Then there were the “years of living hand to mouth as a gigging guitarist,” Jamie Dickson writes at Music Radar.
Knopfler also admits, modestly, to being a bit of a prodigy. “I could do Elmore James-style steel from the very, very beginning when I was just a kid. After I heard it, I could just kind of do it.” When Dire Straits released their huge-selling fifth album Brothers in Arms in 1985, it seemed like blues guitar was the last thing anyone wanted. The era was all about showing off. Synthpop, new wave, metal, and rap ruled. Dire Straits played clean, laid-back tunes with tasty, tasteful American licks.
Taking showmanship cues from big stadium acts (what he’s called “jackboot” rock bands), Knopfler adapted the folk blues styles he’d learned on acoustic and National resonator guitars to the red signature Stratocasters he became famous for playing, picking loud, electrified roots rock with his fingers and thumb. “I realized the pick was becoming redundant,” he tells Guitar.
So, if you want to play like Knopfler, you’ll have to lose the pick. Moreover, you might want to consider switching to your non-dominant hand. “I’m left-handed,” he says in his Guitar interview, “but I play right-handed. They tried to teach me violin at school for two or three years — right handed– so by the time I was 15, I was into the habit of playing that way round.” It’s a lot to ask of any guitar student.
But there are plenty of ways to start picking up Knopfler’s basics, then practicing them year after year as he did, and listening to all of his influences. Watch his whole appearance at the top, giving brief fingerpicking demonstrations — from Singing Nun syncopated bass lines to his trademark singing double and triple stops. Learn more about his “finger style finesse” at Premier Guitar and see how his sound developed around his favorite guitars in the short film above.
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Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Masterclass on His Favorite Guitars & Guitar Sounds
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Pink Floyd Releases Its First New Song in 28 Years to Help Support Ukraine
“I rang Nick up and said: ‘listen, I want to do this thing for Ukraine. I’d be really happy if you played on it and I’d also be really happy if you’d agree to us putting it out as Pink Floyd.’ And he was absolutely on for that.
In 2015, David Gilmour was scheduled to play a concert in London with the Ukrainian band BoomBox. As he explained in a recent statement, the band’s lead singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk had trouble with his visa, leaving the rest of the Boombox to back Gilmour on a version of “Wish You Were Here.” That song’s sentiments took on an entirely different kind of urgency last month after Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with BoomBox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense,” said Gilmour. “Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.”
The song Khlyvnyuk sings is “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” a “1914 protest song,” The Guardian reports, “written in honor of the Sich Riflemen who fought both in the first world war and the Ukrainian war of independence.” Gilmour decided to go further and use the “big platform” of Pink Floyd to release a single by the band – their first original song in 28 years. He called drummer Nick Mason and they recorded the track in Gilmour’s barn with bassist Guy Pratt and keyboardist Nitin Sawhney.
Released as “Hey, Hey, Rise Up” – with Khlyvnyuk’s approval (Gilmour says it took some doing to track him down) – the track’s proceeds will be donated to the Ukraine Humanitarian Relief Fund. It’s probably safe to say that this is not a Pink Floyd reunion. Gilmour insisted the band was done when keyboardist Richard Wright died in 2008. “This is the end,” he told the BBC, and there’s little reason to think he’s gearing up for a tour or a new Pink Floyd album now.
Instead, “Hey, Hey, Rise Up” is part of a larger protest by Gilmour, who writes of his Ukrainian daughter-in-law Janina, his grandchildren, and his “extended Ukrainian family” as a very personal connection to the news of the invasion. But he also wants to give young Ukrainians like Khlyvnyuk – who had no idea the world was watching – a larger voice and give voice to the shock and horror felt the world over as civilian deaths and atrocities mount. As he wrote in his statement:
We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world’s major powers… We want to express our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.
Gilmour has pulled all his solo records and Pink Floyd’s catalogue post-1987 from streaming services in Russia. As for speculation that Roger Waters blocked the removal of earlier Pink Floyd material, or controversies over Waters’ statements to Russia Today and other outlets – “Let’s just say I was disappointed and let’s move on,” says Gilmour.
He’s more interested in talking about the war and Khlyvnyuk’s experiences. “He said he had the most hellish day you could imagine,” when Gilmour spoke to him and sent him the song — a day spent “picking up bodies of Ukrainians, Ukrainian children, helping with the clearing up. You know, our little problems become pathetic and tiny,” he says, “in the context of what you see him doing.”
See the English translation of the song just below:
In the meadow a red viburnum has bent down low
Our glorious Ukraine has been troubled so
And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up
And we, our glorious Ukraine shall, hey—hey, rise up—and rejoice!
And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up
And we, our glorious Ukraine shall, hey—hey, rise up and rejoice!
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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