Anna-Maria Hefele, a musician based in Munich, has an unusual talent. She can sing two notes at once. In the music world, it’s known as polyphonic overtone singing, and it’s believed that the practice originated and still endures in Mongolia. Above, Hefele offers a pretty captivating five-minute display of her technique. On her YouTube channel, you can also find a series of lessons (seven so far) where Ann-Maria teaches you the basics of polyphonic overtone singing here. Find the lessons here. Enjoy!
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He’s referring to the revival of his early 1990s cult classic show, Twin Peaks, on Showtime in 2016.
Showtime’s Youtube Channel adds this detail:
The groundbreaking television phenomenon, Golden Globe® and Peabody Award-winner TWIN PEAKS will return as a new limited series on SHOWTIME in 2016. Series creators and executive producers David Lynch and Mark Frost will write and produce all nine episodes of the limited series, and Lynch will direct every episode. Set in the present day, TWIN PEAKS will continue the lore of the original series, providing long-awaited answers and a satisfying conclusion for the series’ passionate fan base.
According to the fan site WelcometoTwinPeaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost are “trying to bring back as much of the original cast as possible, with Kyle MacLachlan definitely on board reprising his role as Special Agent Dale Cooper. Composer Angelo Badalamenti and Emmy Award-winning editor Duwayne Dunham will likely be involved as well.” You can rest assured that WelcometoTwinPeaks will keep you posted on new details as they come to light.
As you might expect from a vicious political movement fronted by a frustrated illustrator, the Nazi party had a complicatedly disdainful yet aspirational — and needless to say, unceasingly fascinating — relationship with art. We previously featured their philistine grudge against modernism that led to the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937, their mega-budget propaganda film on the Titanic disaster that turned into a disaster itself, and their control-freak list of rules for dance orchestras. The Nazis, as you might expect, didn’t much care for jazz, or at least saw some political capital in openly denouncing it. Yet it seems they also saw some in embracing it, turning the quintessentially free art form toward, as always, their own propagandistic purposes. What if they could come up with their own popular jazz band and, using long-distance short- and medium-wave broadcast signals, turn the Allies’ own music against them? Enter, in 1940, Charlie and His Orchestra. Another Joseph Goebbels creation.
“The idea behind the Nazis’ Charlie campaign,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Will Friedwald, “was that they could undermine Allied morale through musical propaganda, with a specially devised orchestra broadcasting messages in English to British and American troops.” The groups’ featured singer, “Charlie” himself (real name: Karl Schwedler), would sing not just “irresistible” jazz standards but versions with anti-British, ‑American, and ‑Semitic lyrics. You can hear much of their catalog in the clips here, including what Friedwald cites as their “weirdest recordings”: “Irving Berlin’s ‘Slumming on Park Avenue,’ in which Schwedler, portraying a British pilot with a mock-English accent, sings ‘Let’s go bombing!’ ” and “So You Left Me for the Leader of a Swing Band” refashioned as “So You Left Me for the Leader of the Soviets.” Ultimately, not only did the outside world prove to have better taste than the Nazis, their own fighters did too: “Not only did the Charlie project fail to convert any Allies to the other side, but even Germany’s own troops couldn’t bring themselves to take Nazi swing seriously.” It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, I suppose — and Charlie and his Orchestra definitely didn’t have it. More audio samples can be heard over at WFMU.
When the Republican party struggles to determine its future direction, it often looks back to its intellectual and political leaders of decades past. And while we often hear about novel ways to think of those figures, we rarely hear much about what they thought of each other. Such inquiries can show us the historical fault lines visible in current debates between libertarian, small-government types and so-called “values voters,” conflicts that reach back at least to Barry Goldwater, who had no sympathy for the religious right in his heyday. Even in his old age, the conservative senator from Arizona was, for example, “pretty secure in feeling that discriminating against gays is constitutionally wrong.” In a 1994 interview, Goldwater resisted what he called the “radical right […] fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it.” “If that ever happens,” Goldwater said, “kiss politics goodbye.”
Thirteen years earlier, in 1981, another figure much-revered on the political right felt similarly about the rise of the “moral majority” after the election of Ronald Reagan. Asked what she thought of Reagan, Ayn Rand replied, “I don’t think of him. And the more I see, the less I think of him.” For Rand, “the appalling part of his administration was his connection with the so-called ‘Moral Majority’ and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling, apparently with his approval, to take us back to the Middle Ages via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.” Rand’s primary concern, it seems, is that this “unconstitutional union” represented a “threat to capitalism.” While she admired Reagan’s appeal to an “inspirational element” in American politics, “he will not find it,” remarked Rand, “in the God, family, tradition swamp.” Instead, she proclaims, we should be inspired by “the most typical American group… the businessmen.”
Rand made these remarks in her last public lecture, delivered in 1981 at the National Committee for Monetary Reform conference in New Orleans. You can see excerpts at the top of the post and the full speech above. She clarifies her position on the moral majority in the second clip in the top video, claiming that the lobbying groups and voting blocks of the religious right were seeking to impose their “religious ideas on other people by force.” Rand also supported abortion rights, stating unequivocally that a politician who opposes the right to an abortion is “not a defender of rights and not a defender of capitalism.” It’s not entirely clear how Rand saw religious legislation as a threat to capitalism, but there can be no doubt that she did. And though—as NPR political blogger Frank James writes—many people think that a good deal of “cherrypicking of her ideas has to be done to claim her as a modern conservative hero,” there are also obviously plenty of religious conservatives who can admire Rand without denying or excusing her hostility to their faith. Yet, as the applause she received for her forceful rejection of the religious right suggests, there may have been—at least in 1981—no small number of conservatives who agreed with her.
Did she read them all? I don’t know. Have you read every single title on your shelves? (There’s a Japanese word for those books. It’s Tsundoku.)
Feminist biographer Oline Eaton has a great rant on her Finding Jackie blog about the phrase “Marilyn Monroe reading,” and the 5,610,000 search engine results it yields when typed into Google:
There is, within Monroe’s image, a deeply rooted assumption that she was an idiot, a vulnerable and kind and loving and terribly sweet idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. That is the assumption in which ‘Marilyn Monroe reading’ is entangled.
The power of the phrase Marilyn Monroe reading’ lies in its application to Monroe and in our assumption that she wouldn’t know how.
Would that everyone searching that phrase did so in the belief that her passion for the printed word rivaled their own. Imagine legions of geeks loving her for her brain, bypassing Sam Shaw’s iconic subway grate photo in favor of home printed pin ups depicting her with book in hand.
See below, dear readers. Apologies that we’re not set up to keep track of your score for you, but please let us know in the comments section if you’d heartily second any of Marilyn’s titles, particularly those that are lesser known or have faded from the public view.
1) Let’s Make Love by Matthew Andrews (novelization of the movie)
2) How To Travel Incognito by Ludwig Bemelmans
3) To The One I Love Best by Ludwig Bemelmans
4) Thurber Country by James Thurber
5) The Fall by Albert Camus
6) Marilyn Monroe by George Carpozi
7) Camille by Alexander Dumas
8) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
9) The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt-Farmer
10) The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
11) From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
12) The Art Of Loving by Erich Fromm
13) The Prophet by Kahlil Gilbran
14) Ulysses by James Joyce
15) Stoned Like A Statue: A Complete Survey Of Drinking Cliches, Primitive, Classical & Modern by Howard Kandel & Don Safran, with an intro by Dean Martin (a man who knew how to drink!)
16) The Last Temptation Of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
17) On The Road by Jack Kerouac
18) Selected Poems by DH Lawrence
19 and 20) Sons And Lovers by DH Lawrence (2 editions)
Cambridge University Press has just published a new book called The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi (Assistant Professor, Brown University) and David Armitage (Chair of Harvard’s History Department). In a nutshell, the book argues that historians have lost their public relevance by writing histories of the “short term” — essentially “micro-scale” histories — when they could be writing bigger, deeper histories, covering longer periods of time, that help readers put our world into perspective. What Guldi and Armitage are calling for is a return to long, meaningful narratives and big-picture thinking — the kind of thinking that could perhaps pull the historical profession out of crisis. As someone who got his PhD in History during the “micro-scale” era, all I can say is — amen to that.
Print editions of The History Manifesto will come out in November. But you can already read the entire work online in both html and PDF formats. The book has been released under a Creative Commons license.
Back in 1991, Bradley Denton published Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede. The next year, it won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Writes Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede “is the great American comic science fiction novel, a book about the quest to exhume Buddy Holly’s corpse from Lubbock, TX to prove that he can’t possibly be broadcasting an all-powerful jamming signal from a hermetically sealed bubble on a distant, airless moon.”
Taking advantage of new innovations (new since 1991), Denton has made the novel available for free download on his website, publishing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. You can access the text in four parts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
If you become a fan, keep an eye out for a film adaptation of the novel starring Jon Heder. It’s been in development for some time, but you can watch a trailer online.
When Frank Norris plays a guitar made by Wallace Detroit Guitars, he says it “feels like home.” And maybe that’s because Wallace Detroit Guitars are made with reclaimed wood from abandoned Detroit homes.
Following the financial crisis of 2008, perhaps no American city fared worse than Detroit. The city found itself with 10,000 vacant homes. And eventually the city purchased entire blocks and razed the houses to the ground. According to the Detroit web site Model D, a lot of the wood [from these structures] hasn’t gone to waste. The wood can be found, they write, in “trendy coffee houses, in table tops, even in the frames of sunglasses.” And now high-end electric guitars.
Wallace Detroit Guitars just launched its new web site two days ago, and its first guitars, made of century-old wood, can now be yours.
If you like playing guitars made of found objects, you might also want to check out another new company — Bohemian Guitars. They’ve started building electric guitars made of vintage oil cans, taking inspiration from South African musicians who turn used materials into playable instruments.
Why is Western philosophy so difficult, so abstruse, and so damned wordy? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of job security. It’s generally well-known, after all, that some of the most taciturn philosophers were also some of the poorest—Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was independently wealthy, notwithstanding. But if you follow the format Alain de Botton lays out in the philosophy department of his video series, “The Big Ideas,” you can pick up some Heidegger, a little Stoic thought, and the ideas of Epicurus each in under ten minutes of lighthearted commentary, accompanied by quirky animation from a studio called Mad Adam (who favor a very Terry Gilliam-like approach to their art). There are those critics who think de Botton glib and shallow, a “self-help guru to the British middle-class—a life coach.” In a certain sense, I suppose he’d have to agree with that assessment, given that his “cultural enterprise,” The School of Life, has as its tagline “good ideas for everyday life.” Do the dead European philosophers of ages past have helpful tips for our mundane 21st century existence, and do de Botton’s videos do any justice to the quality of their thought?
As to the first question, I suppose we’d have to answer, yes. As for the second—I leave it to the philosophers to weigh in. At the top of the post, we have Martin Heidegger—“the most incomprehensible German philosopher that ever lived”—in just over five minutes. It turns out that “beneath the jargon, Heidegger tells us simple, even at times homespun truths” about things like meaning and freedom. Once a ranking member of the Nazi party, Heidegger, de Botton says, “saw the error of his ways,” a claim people often repeat without a great deal of evidence. But Heidegger’s Nazi past aside, his thought, de Botton says, helps us get back in touch with the mystery of existence, what the philosopher called das sein, or “Being.” This term more or less sums up the core of Heidegger’s entire project, and I confess I never really grasped what he means by it. Maybe you will after taking de Botton’s very short course.
Next up, we have the Stoics, not a specific movement or group as such, but an entire school of thought that “flourished for 480 years in ancient Greece and Rome.” Stoicism offered a narrow range of responses to the ancient problem de Botton defines as “Life is very difficult,” and it appealed to commoners and aristocrats alike because of its universal concern with suffering. De Botton gives us the gist by referring to the way we typically use the word “stoic” these days, as a synonym for “brave.” He says a bit more, of course, about Stoicism’s answers to life’s challenges, listen above.
Finally, we have Greek philosopher Epicurus, who “helps us think about money, capitalism, and our runaway consumer society.” This despite the fact that Epicurus predates capitalism and consumer society by well over two-thousand years. Nonetheless, his thought is eternally relevant, given that its primary concern, “What makes people happy?” is a problem unlikely to be solved in anyone’s lifetime. But Epicurus had some answers, and he purveyed them—like de Botton—by founding his own school. He and his disciples, Epicureans, were rumored to be debauched and wicked libertines steeped in excessive food, drink, and sex. In fact, the opposite was true: Epicurus was an austere and sober man, who urged restraint in matters sexual and fiscal, making him, in a way, a genuine conservative.
De Botton’s “Big Ideas” curriculum currently includes two other videos that function as general defenses of the humanities: “What is Art for?” and “What is Literature for?” Both questions might sound meaningless to some refined aesthetes, but for a great many people getting on with the painful, sometimes dreary, and often harried business of daily life, questions about utility are sensible enough. New big ideas videos are on the way—in the meanwhile, visit de Botton’s School of Life Youtube channel for video shorts on “Mood,” “Relationships,” and more.
What gives old books that ever-so-distinctive smell? Andy Brunning, a chemistry teacher in the UK, gives us all a quick primer with this infographic posted on his web site, Compound Interest. The visual comes accompanied by this textual explanation. Writes Brunning:
Generally, it is the chemical breakdown of compounds within paper that leads to the production of ‘old book smell’. Paper contains, amongst other chemicals, cellulose, and smaller amounts of lignin – much less in more modern books than in books from more than one hundred years ago. Both of these originate from the trees the paper is made from; finer papers will contain much less lignin than, for example, newsprint. In trees, lignin helps bind cellulose fibres together, keeping the wood stiff; it’s also responsible for old paper’s yellowing with age, as oxidation reactions cause it to break down into acids, which then help break down cellulose.
‘Old book smell’ is derived from this chemical degradation. Modern, high quality papers will undergo chemical processing to remove lignin, but breakdown of cellulose in the paper can still occur (albeit at a much slower rate) due to the presence of acids in the surroundings. These reactions, referred to generally as ‘acid hydrolysis’, produce a wide range of volatile organic compounds, many of which are likely to contribute to the smell of old books. A selected number of compounds have had their contributions pinpointed: benzaldehyde adds an almond-like scent; vanillin adds a vanilla-like scent; ethyl benzene and toluene impart sweet odours; and 2‑ethyl hexanol has a ‘slightly floral’ contribution. Other aldehydes and alcohols produced by these reactions have low odour thresholds and also contribute.
The Aroma of Books infographic can be viewed in a larger format here. And because it has been released under a Creative Commons license, it can be downloaded for free. For another explanation of this phenomenon — this one in video — see this previous post in our archive: The Birth and Decline of a Book: Two Videos for Bibliophiles
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You’ve heard it before. A power ballad from the 1970s or 1980s is playing and there, smack in the middle, is a face-melting guitar solo that seems to go all over the place before blowing your mind with sheer awesomeness. Think Jimi Hendrix. Think Eric Clapton. And especially think Eddie Van Halen. Unlike the piano, which can only play discrete notes, the guitar can, in the hands of someone like Sir Eddie, bend notes. It’s a quality that recalls the human voice, and it’s most likely what has made the electric guitar the go-to instrument for popular music over the past 50 years.
Enter Dr. David Grimes of Oxford University. While by day he might be working out mathematical models of oxygen distribution to help improve cancer treatment, by night he, too, likes to shred on his electric guitar. So, at some point along the line, he decided to apply a little scientific rigor to the instrument he loves. “I wanted to understand what it was about these guitar techniques that allows you to manipulate pitch,” he said in an interview.
In the name of science, Grimes was forced to make some pretty brutal sacrifices. “I took one of my oldest guitars down to the engineering lab at Dublin City University to one of the people I knew there and explained that I wanted to strip it down to do this experiment. We had to accurately bend the strings to different extents and measure the frequency produced. He was a musician too and looked at me with abject horror. But we both knew it needed to be done – We put some nails into my guitar for science.’
Grimes ended up writing an academic paper on the topic called “String Theory — The Physics of String-Bending and Other Electric Guitar Techniques.” “It turns out it’s actually reasonably straightforward,’ said Grimes. “It’s an experiment a decent physics undergraduate could do, and a cool way of studying some basic physics principles. It’s also potentially useful to string manufacturers and digital instrument modellers.”
You can read Grime’s paper here or, if your idea of fun does not include wading through a lot of complex equations, you can watch the brief video presentation above on his research. And below is a ridiculously sweet guitar solo from Van Halen. While you watch ponder the totally awesome physics involved.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily. The Veeptopus store is here.
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