If you are a copyright owner and believe that your copyrighted works have been used in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, here is our DMCA Notice.
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a physical sensation characterized by a pleasurable tingling that typically begins in the head and scalp, and often moves down the spine and through the limbs.
Most ASMR episodes begin by an external or internal trigger, and are so divided for classification. Type A episodes are elicited by the experiencer using no external stimuli, and are typically achieved by specific thought patterns unique to the individual. Type B episodes are triggered involuntarily by an external trigger, via one or more senses, and may also involve specific thought patterns associated with the triggering event. Both types of triggers vary between individuals, but many are common to a large portion of ASMR enjoyers.
Common external triggers:
Exposure to slow, accented, or unique speech patterns
Viewing educational or instructive videos or lectures
Experiencing a high empathetic or sympathetic reaction to an event
Enjoying a piece of art or music
Watching another person complete a task, often in a diligent, attentive manner - examples would be filling out a form, writing a check, going through a purse or bag, inspecting an item closely, etc.
Close, personal attention from another person
Haircuts, or other touch from another on head or back
My pal Mark Houston stumbled across an assortment of clips meant to induce this state of mind, and we couldn't stop watching them. I posted it to a friend in Australia who used to be driven mad by things like people who chew cereal loudly, and even she was oddly lulled.
1 cruise ship, 4 days, 42 bands, 2,000 fans! Yes, I had to do it again! 70,000 Tons of Metal, 2012! I had such a great time last year that I had to go for a reprise and see what would happen! I've got a photo album here with many more photos, and this entry is the companion to my radio show, airing Thursday Feb 2nd at noon. When the archive is posted, it will be linked here.
It's true, I had a lot of prior experience, so I had already been on the same ship, Royal Caribbean's Majesty of the Seas, and knew my way around. The weather I was leaving was not nearly as horrendous as it was last year, but I was still looking forward to punishing my ears and my body for a possible 84 sets of music in 4 days. I arrived in Miami a day early to trek up to Ft. Lauderdale with one of my partners in crime for a Cannibal Corpse show, and to also pick up another partner in crime to head back to Miami. Why not get an early start on bludgeoning my senses? I have to admit we did find time to view a certain sporting event involving a NY team that day also. On to the cruise! Last year I never noticed how much was loaded onto the boat via crane; the pool stage was composed mostly of large items, let alone all the rigging, backline, etc. I watched the crane pluck pieces off the ground and onto Deck 11 for hours on Monday morning.
December 23, 1979, Germs play the Masque Christmas Ball at Whisky-Au-Go-Go, performing what would be dubbed on-stage "art" by singer Darby Crash, self-proclaimed "Manimal" and possessor of "television and supervision," who read "every Bible story," and was educated in mind-control by public school Scientologists, an A+ hustler whose world-famous catchphrase was "buy me a beer" and whose demands for "beer and damage" do not go unheeded this night. Watch as Darby, spolight directly in his eyes, eats a lit book of matches, transforms into a panther, demands each audience member "hit the person next to you," sets fire to his (A+) lyrics (balls-on-fire-great teenage Blake) all before guitarist Pat Smear kicks a bouncer in the head (several times+) for crossing number one invisible line in rock n roll: the artists own the stage.
The spare beauty and narrative economy of the film work of Charles & Ray Eames should really come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the couple's design work. Their fabric patterns, chairs, buildings...everything they did was approached with an eye for combining simplicity, functionality, and beauty.
Applying those principles to films is a much trickier prospect than one might realize. Just take a look at any Hollywood creation from the last 15 years and you'll see what I'm talking about. In comparison, the Eames films are almost meditative to watch. They unfold slowly and patiently, getting the subject matter across using simple narrations and augmenting it all with a bouncy jazz score. It is impressively easy to drink in and absorb everything they are trying to accomplish and, yes, communicate.
Because for as much as scholars like to point to their 1968 documentary Powers of Ten as being their
Up through May 6th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an exhibit entitled"Storytelling In Japanese Art" with a main focus on the Emaki, or Emakimono hand scrolls; some dating as far back as the 12th century. What's interesting about these pieces is that they are physically lengthy, so only certain portions of the scrolls are available for viewing at a time. The scrolls will be advanced during the length of the exhibition, so if you visit more than once, chances are you'll see different sections of the scrolls, which contain illustrations as well as japanese character text. Some are faded and reflective of their age, and some are in phenomenal shape considering the fragility of the medium. The exhibition also includes full views of some of the handscrolls on iPad displays in the beautifully crafted reading room. The current of the presentation of the pieces is very fluid - literally, with a fountain by Isamu Noguchi in the center of the route and a study/bamboo mat room.
When visiting the exhibition, we learn narrative was not only told on the medium of the scroll; visitors will see illustrations on screens, fans, cards, hanging banners, books, kimonos and porcelain as well. Some are showing one or two ideas as a story, and other pieces have multiple scenes and many utilize the stylized cloud formations to separate panels or sections of the stories that is present in Japanese art through the years. Take a look at some of the details of this show in the photos after the jump and see if it doesn't pique your interest!
We are all the same, but in different words, In different bodies, and different versions.
These words above (especially the dub-science word, version and the ultimate word, words) called out to me from the media feed of fellow sub sub Jason D. Bigelow, subtitling what seemed to be a still from one of the only 70s/80s Occult Horror Films Starring Moon Eyed Brunette I hadn't seen yet. The web search for the phrase brought only one return, an ancient message board movie-quote stump game for which this phrase proved successful in obscuring its source, the Andrzej Zulawski film, Possession 1981.
Marianne Trench’s 1990 documentary on the world of cyberpunk observes digital outlaws on the forefront of new technologies, fighting for freedom of information. Founded upon the spirit of the first cyberpunk novels by William Gibson, the movement is a networking hub for politically-concerned technophiles who poke around inside protected digital databases and occasionally wreak mayhem by inducing malicious software. Sometimes for fun, and sometimes to extract information, the hackers are concerned with increasing access to knowledge and generally throwing a wrench into the system. Often set in dystopic near-futures in which the lower class is dramatically underrepresented, cyberpunk (and sci-fi literature in general) helped develop the context in which we discuss the arrival of new technologies: with a guarded interest, and sometimes fear that they might eventually wreak similarly undesirable results.
Unfortunately, this cyberpunk prescience is starting to look less and less like fantasy. Gibson once described his fictional futures as “social Darwinism designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button,” where the ones calling the shots cut corners at the expense of the
I went to St Louis for the Old School Tattoo Expo, where world renowned tattooer Lyle Tuttle celebrated his 80th birthday; here's a photo of his cake (it's the Frisco Flyer tattoo machine that he made and made famous). The highlight of the weekend, aside from reconnecting with Lyle and other great friends in the business for me- was the visit a few of us made to the 10 story City Museum there. A cross between the works of Antoni Gaudi and Mad Max, it's an amazing playground created for the most part, from junk! There was a ferris wheel on the roof, alongside the praying mantis dome, and on the same level was a schoolbus that was perched precariously with 2 wheels hanging off the roof for patrons to explore. There were slides on every floor; nope, not visual slides; the kind you plant your ass on and tumble down! One was a 10 story spiral slide, not unlike the style that comes to mind when referring to water parks. All types of sculpture and found object placement that was delightful, including an area with discarded architectural features - lions and gargoyles and lampposts, oh my! There is a section called the Enchanted Caves, which looked just like it sounded. Part of the museum had an aquarium within it; stocked with turtles and catfish, completely accessible if you wanted to pluck a turtle out of the water and walk around with him, you could! The aquarium (pictured left) was part of the maze of walk through/get lost in sculpture that made up the majority of the ground floor. I may not be describing it accurately, mostly because that's a difficult task; The City Museum defies categorization, which is a breath of fresh air this day and age. There's also a couple of bars, a smoothie joint and a thrift store within the museum's expanse, not to mention the fuselage of an airplane, a series of monkey bars that stretches countless yards, animal sculptures made of gears, a castle turret and more.
No words can really convey what goes on there; the photos featured after the jump will do some of the inventiveness and beauty of it justice, and the real experience can only be yours if you visit. Yes. It's an experiential kind of place. Show up in sneakers!
My favorite mad scientist and theoretician of electronic music, Goodiepal, has a new rant up for download. I'd also recommend checking out this BOTB post from several years ago with an amazing video lecture - this was actually what initially hipped yours truly to that which is the Gaeoudjiparl. It can take a while to digest his sometimes absurd theories, but I really do believe there's a lot of substantial and helpful thoughts on artmaking contained within that nutty brain.
A number of weeks ago, I was contacted by my friend Roderic, who plays in the Hydra Head band KNUT, for a quote about how different NYC is since 9/11 from an artist's point of view. He works for Swiss publication Le Courrier, and I thought it would be interesting to contribute to foreign language media. Here is the article for anyone curious. This past Friday, the issue came up again, but in a different way. I ran into good friend and local maniac Zenametal; curator of Zena Metal Wants to Conquer the World blog among other things. It was lunchtime on a crowded corner of Canal St., and we both were happy at the turn of events that led us to almost literally bump into each other. She works nearby and was donning fashionable duds for the office, and I wasn't looking too shabby myself. We talked for about 25 minutes, and in that time, the same gentleman approached us several times to vend what I thought he termed "dime bags". At some point I made a comment to her, since we were both looking so damn sophisticated I couldn't imagine he couldn't find anyone else in the throngs of people on a sunny Friday more suited to vend "dime bags" to. Zena, working near that section of Canal St., set me straight. In a quick debriefing, I realized that I heard "dime bag" - an old, almost expected way I had of listening to people mumbling towards me on the street. She let me in on the real words he was uttering: "diamonds, bags!" Oh! Well that sort of elevates us to tourist trash looking for a cheap but expensive looking bargain! I hadn't even noticed it was bootleg bag and bling central there. And I thought he thought we were scum! Still not buying, but a little less confused, I then saw that she was in fact, not toting a pocketbook on her lunch break, which was probably a good reason we were being hounded, not because we looked like we wanted to get stoned. So I'm really comparing from a much earlier time than 9/11; but it is interesting to notice that the things being whispered about on streetcorners are handbags, not dime bags any longer.
Long term listeners of WFMU may remember Dorian's long-running interview shows The Speakeasy or The Green Room. These days Dorian is running The Secret Science Club, which is a science lecture, arts and performance series based in Brooklyn. They host live science events for the public, featuring subjects ranging from Black Holes and Dinosaurs to Human Evolution and the Human Brain. Every month, leading scientists give talks on discoveries in their fields and unleash their research on an inquisitive audience.
The Secret Science Club has a Kickstarter underway to help expand in their fifth season. Pledge and find more info here! Find Secret Science Club's homepage here.
Being human is tough business. From the moment we’re born, expectations are hung heavily around our necks. Parents dream of what their children might amount to and years of anxious hand-wringing begins. The pressures don’t get any easier as we grow older, either. Perhaps there’s a peak as we enter whatever one might consider life’s “twilight,” but up until that point societal pressures of finding success, starting a healthy and wholesome family, and generally being an impressive human being poke at us constantly like little needles breaching our skin. There are constant reminders too, like the people around us that seem to be more successful or happier or put together. Shit is hard, man.
But, what we often forget is that so much of our lives are wildly out of our control. You may be gunning for a promotion, busting your ass staying late at the office, taking on extra tasks but the CEO may have always had his nephew in mind. You might have the most astonishing singing voice anyone’s ever heard but the agent you audition for is more interested in finding a hot piece of ass that can only sing okay but will look amazing sprawled out on a velvet couch for a Maxim photoshoot. You can only do so much, it turns out.
That isn’t to say that hard work gets you nothing; of course it does. But, when it comes down to it, we humans have very little control on how our lives might turn out. We can make decisions, sure, and steer ourselves down certain “paths,” but what happens along those paths might surprise the hell out of us.
Jack Kevorkian believed in this. You might know him as Dr. Death, the man who helped upwards of 130
Buckle up tight, pull the skin on your face back and hang on because we're going by rocket to the moon and our conductor is none other than that audio astronaut extraordinaire, Raymond Scott, and his crew the Quintet. Actually, we'll be going on the voyage twice; once on the 10 - inch kid's record from the Children's Record Guild ( a division of the American Recording Society ), out of Toronto, Ontario, and narrarated by Ralph Comargo. The project features five 'educational' songs with music by Scott (no author is credited for the records dialogue and lyrics) and sung by the Jean Lowell Chorus. The songs aside - the real star here is the multi-part composition "Dedicatory Piece to the Crew and Passengers of the First Experimental Rocket Express to the Moon", which has a lot of arrangement packed into a little package (and one of the longer song titles anywhere). The full album art can be found here.
Scott had released this cut on one of his series of Audivox records (AL -5000) in 1950 and the kiddie version dates from the same year. That rocket has some pretty big wings on it - ! Riding that solar breeze, I suppose. This charming ep is similar to many other 'space education' records from the next decade, except for the intricate, high-energy Raymond Scott touch, always distinctive. We also have the original Audivox-label instrumental version on the launch pad for your perusal (From the Basta cd release Ectoplasm), which seems to be the same recording, different mix. I had been curious for some time to place the two versions side by side, and so here we have two space journeys, Raymond Scott-style.
“It makes no sense. I mean, how can people just vanish off the face of the Earth in this day and age?”
In 1977, a conspiracy was hatched involving writers, actors, politicians, scientists, and Brian Eno. The British television series Science Report was about to be cancelled, and its scheduled April 1 finale gave the creators an opportunity to prank those who believed everything they saw on television, and those so skeptical of everything as to see conspiracies all over the place. The resulting program, Alternative 3, is a classic in fake news programming; The War Of The Worlds by way of the BBC’s 1957 spaghetti harvest hoax.
Alternative 3 is presented as an investigation, with an aborted episode of Science Report as the frame. Twenty-four people interviewed for a Science Report episode on Britain’s “brain drain” have gone missing, including three profiled before the introduction. Over the next hour, further pieces of the puzzle are put into place, connecting the disappearances to the death of a prestigious astronomer, the drunk ravings of a former astronaut, and the theories of an early proponent of the climate change hypothesis, Dr. Carl Gerstein. Contemporary news events, such as the Tangshan earthquake and United Kingdom heatwave and drought in 1976, and the North American mega-blizzard of early 1977, hint at a more destructive event than even the producers of The Day After Tomorrow could have imagined.
Moog gets all the credit. The iconic American company is pretty much synonymous with the synthesizer and the genesis of electronic music as we know it today (despite the fact that few people even know how to pronounce “Moog” correctly). The name pops up fifteen times in the Wikipedia article for "electronic music". But Moog is not the only synthesizer game in town. In fact, all over the Western world, scores of composers and inventors had begun experimenting with electronic music even before the production of the first computer-generated sound in 1957. Perhaps the most important of these composers and inventors were three Englishmen; three unsung heroes whose names pop up exactly zero times in the aforementioned Wikipedia article but whose influence on music, electronic or otherwise, cannot be understated: Dr. Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell, the founders of the London-based Electronic Music Studios (EMS) and inventors of the VCS3 synthesizer.
What the Future Sounded Like is the first of several documentary shorts directed by Matthew Bate. Today, when electronic flourishes from auto-tune to synthesized beats grace the majority of popular music, he has done us a great service by sharing his look at the groundbreaking work of EMS. The engaging interviews are complemented by impressive archival footage, photographs, trippy video montages, and the fascinating electronic musical selections.
After World War II, Britain, along with the rest of the world, was ready for a change -- and a young man named Tristram Cary was no exception. Cary entered the war with dreams of being a classical composer. While serving as a radar operator, Cary had his first experiences with German tape recording equipment and became infatuated. He began to experiment with the alteration of tape in his compositions. This young style of composition was known as musique concrète and is an important precursor to electronic musici. Despite the fact that musique concrète was largely avant-garde, Cary's career as a composer began to take off as he began to incorporate more and more electronic elements into his compositions. Cary's score for the Doctor Who series provided many households' first exposure to electronic music.
Cary teamed up with fellow electronic music enthusiasts Cockerell, a brilliant engineer, and Zinovieff, a who had built his own studio in a shed behind his house. Zinovieff is the real star of the show. It is a mystery as to why he is rarely mentioned in the same breath as other electronic music pioneers. The hardware that Zinovieff and company used was probably the most powerful in the country outside of an academic or military settingii. In fact, one of his primary goals in founding EMS in 1969 was to find a way to pay for it all. One interviewee credits him with “using computers in a way that would become commonplace in the mid-eighties, and he was doing it twenty years earlier with equipment that was large, unwieldy, and not designed for the purpose.” Entire genres of music owe a huge debt to his ambition and vision. In crediting him with creating the first sampler, Cockerell unwittingly points out that even hip-hop owes a great deal to Zinovieff.
What EMS accomplished is all the more impressive considering the musical environment of the time. The sounds they were interested in producing were completely at odds with popular and classical music. There was, of course, no corner of the Internet in which they could hide and build a cult following, as they might today. Rock and roll was king, and the music that their equipment was capable of producing was very far from rock and roll. Despite Cary's success as a composer, the odds seemed to be stacked against them. As you watch the footage of Zinovieff's 1967 computer concert, it is useful to keep in mind that Beatlemania was rampant and Woodstock was only two years away -- that'll help you recognize just how unconventional that performance must have been.
Luckily, EMS struck gold with its design of the first portable synthesizer. It became extremely popular with rock and roll artists, especially those of the progressive persuasion. Known as the VCS3 (short for Voltage Controlled Studio with 3 oscillators), it was employed to great and famous effect on songs such as The Who's “Won't Get Fooled Again” and Pink Floyd's “On the Run.” Among the other artists who used the VCS3 are Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and Hawkwind (that's Lemmy's first band, metal fans). Lord knows, if Kraftwerk is using your stuff, you've had quite an impact on the world of electronic music. EMS would go on to create many different synthesizer models in its ten year run. However, the VCS3 would remain its most popular model (and still goes for many thousands of dollars on ebayiii.)
From their post-war experimentation to the full-on embrace of synthesizers as musical instruments in the sixties and beyond, the three men of EMS have been able to watch electronic music grow from bleeps and bloops to a full-blown scene, complete with obsessive fans, designer drugs, and a seemingly infinite number of sub-genres. More often than not, EMS is unfairly reduced to a footnote along the lines of “See: Dark Side of the Moon.” Perhaps the short life of the company is to blame for this. Maybe it's just because some other filmmakers got around to making the Moog documentary three years earlier. But make no mistake: Without the three men behind EMS, their unusual ideas, and innovative equipment, electronic music would not be the same.
JA: Yes, many. I’ll tell you about one, which is interesting. Orwell’s dictum, “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future,” was never truer than it is now. With digital archives, with these digital repositories of our intellectual record, control over the present allows one to perform an absolutely untraceable removal of the past. More than ever before, the past can be made to completely, utterly, and irrevocably disappear in an undetectable way.Orwell’s dictum came about as result of what happened in 1953 to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. That year, Stalin died and Beria fell out of favor. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia had a page and a half on Beria from before he fell out of favor, and it was decided that the positive description of Beria had to go. So, an addendum page was made and sent to all registered holders of this encyclopedia with instructions specifying that the previous page should be pasted over with the new page, which was an expanded section on the Bering Straight. However, users of the encyclopedia would later see that the page had been pasted over or ripped out—everyone became aware of the replacement or omission, and so we know about it today. That’s what Orwell was getting at. In 2008, one of the richest men in the UK, Nadhmi Auchi—an Iraqi who grew rich under one of Saddam Husain’s oil ministries and left to settle in the UK in the early 1980s—engaged in a series of libel threats against newspapers and blogs. He had been convicted of corruption in France in 2003 by the then magistrate Eva Joly in relation to the Elf Aquitaine scandal.
Recently I went to The Netherlands for the Roadburn Festival. Thanks to Duane Harriot for running the Fun Machine for a week and not wrecking the gears! Last weeks episode was a full three hours of music and photos from the most enjoyable fest I have ever been to, and if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it (not because it's my program, mind you - it is my taste, but it was really programmed by those who put Roadburn together- thank them, not me)!
Since last year's festival was disrupted by a pesky volcanic eruption, I thought it would be wise to take an extra day ahead of the festival and eliminate the stress factor. I made my ever important sleeping bag connection ahead of time, and decided to head over to the town of 's-Hertogenbosch to check out the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center.
All of Bosch's works are in name museums, so I was not sure what to expect. This town probably would have no one paying attention to it except for their famous, intensely talented son. I'm not going to even go into describing his artwork here; if you are unfamiliar, go check out a link or two and get the scoop on this man.
The Art Center is housed in what had once been a church. It looks like a church, but when you step inside, all your senses tell you nearly right away (there's a large red curtain that separates the entrance from a lot of the exhibit area) that you may have actually stepped into a delightfully quirky version of hell. There is a telltale sculpture outside as well to tip you off, that in most ways, this was not going to be a religious experience, at least of a churchgoing nature.
The helpful women at the desk were concerned with the size of my backpack and could see I was being taxed by it's weight. They took it off my hands immediately although there was no coat room. The entrance fee was laughably cheap and I was given an audio guide to boot. It was when I got to the other side of the curtain that I thought to myself "I'm going to be here for hours and hours"...
Currently there is an exhibit entitled "Guitar Heroes" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It runs through July 4th, and if you have any thought about a music exhibit "fitting in" to the premise of an art museum, think again. The show is put together with the utmost detail, and my accompanying photos are going to focus on that exact thing, in a different way; detail...after all, you all want to visit the MET and behold the show for yourselves- from the craftsmanship of the luthiers of northern Italy years ago right up to the Four Seasons guitars created by John Monteleone, I'd hate to spoil all the up close opulence with some quick pix.
The exhibit is divided into 5 parts: two historical eras; and then focusing on three primary Italian-American craftsmen in New York: John D'Angelico, whose New Yorker guitar model Chet Atkins likened to owning a Rolls Royce; James D'Aquisto, who offered special innovations like sound holes that can be opened and closed to create tonal differences; and John Monteleone, whose varied background in his father's design workshops opened his mind to liquid design sensibilities, as shown here on 2 detail shots of the Sun King guitar.
My Grammy Carlton always said, “You can never have too many books!” and sometimes we owned as many as 20 all at once, including the Bible and a volume called The Library of Universal Knowledge (the Practical Self-Educator). Since I intended to know everything when I grew up, I began working my way through the Great Books on a recommended reading list I found somewhere. It was a good list, in that I read some books I would never have considered, or even known existed—Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars, for instance. It was good to have a plan and a focus, although I didn’t understand that my list wasn’t THE list; I didn’t realize that the list of books considered great would change over time, and that Saint-Exupery might not be the immutable cultural touchstone I assumed he was.
Before I found the List, I went to our little local library to browse and check out any book that interested me. But once I had my Plan I went to the library only to order certain books, or pick up books, or put books on hold. It’s only lately that I’ve rediscovered the joys of random reading. I have three main sources for books nowadays, and have very little, if any, control over what is available to me. I get books from the “new” shelf at our small public library, from the “take-one-leave-one” at the train station café, and from a friend of mine who sends me discarded review copies from her job.
The “new” shelf at our library features recent acquisitions from the county library system. This means that most of the books won’t actually end up in our library, although we’ll be able to order them later, if we want to go to the trouble. I usually don’t. Sometimes the selection seems like a total hodgepodge, and sometimes it’s like the autobiography of one of the librarians. Suddenly there are several books about couples therapy and divorce mediation; after a few months, those are replaced with a bunch of books about menopause and cooking for one. But occasionally there is a book that makes you wonder how it slipped through: I found The History of White People on the New shelf, and was very glad for that. Author Nell Painter is a historian who retired from Princeton, and while she obviously means this book to be an accessible introduction to some concepts from whiteness studies, I suspect the major points I took away are a little too glib. But here’s what I got out of it: The whole concept of “race” was made up by 18th-Century Germans and there’s no science to support it, IQ tests are crap, anarchist beliefs were a sign of racial inferiority, and my ancestors weren’t considered white until fairly recently. Except for the annoying way illustrations are cited in the text, The History of White People is a good read and feeds my confirmation bias pretty well.
The take-one-leave-one (the "tolo”) is a large bookshelf at one of our local coffee shops. You can take any book you see there, and keep it for as long as you like—forever, if you want—as long as you replace it with another book you don’t want. It seems as if a good number of people in our village work in publishing, so there are often some pretty interesting books at the tolo. That’s where I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, an 800-page historical fantasy about Napoleonic-era English magic (or, you know, magicke). I did read the whole thing, and concluded that author Susanna Clarke can write, but she can’t tell a story to save her life. A reader who hangs around for 800 pages wants a well-constructed plot. When I took Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell I replaced it with Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (which I’d bought and read after my latest disfiguring face-cancer surgery). But after I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I put it back on the tolo.
My friend A., who works at a great metropolitan newspaper, has access to the book reviewers’ discards, and often sends me little packages of books. This is not quite random, since she has an idea of the types of things I like to read, but it is actually more random than the New shelf or the tolo since I have no say in the books that she picks for me. Recently she’s sent me The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum. It’s a history of forensic medicine in New York City in the early 20th Century, featuring New York’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, and toxicologist Alexander Gettler. It’s like a true crime-science thriller-history mash-up, and thoroughly enjoyable. Good science, good writing, good story—a good book!
Although I’ve come to prefer getting books for free via random reading, I do sometimes break down and buy something I’m especially interested in. This week I bought and am reading Molecular Gastronomy and The Black Swan. I’m not far enough along to review them yet, but I think I want to marry Nassim Taleb.
Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.
If WFMU reaches our Lift-Off campaign goal this Wednesday and sends Station Manager Ken into space with 25 tanks-worth of helium balloons affixed to his lawn chair, it will be a triumphant moment. Can you picture it? I'm not actually sure what it's going to look like (fortunately there'll be a live video feed) but I can already imagine the feeling of looking up at the sky to see Ken -- a tiny speck burried in a sea of multicolored balloons -- and all of us down in the parking lot here in Jersey City smiling with great pride, just knowing that the station will be able to stay afloat through the frigid dark winter months ahead. Why? Because everybody chipped in -- either by pledging to the station and/or by putting their lives at risk -- to keep freeform radio afloat!
But did you know that our visionary leader would not be the first person to take flight through the power of helium? In fact, there's an entire website devoted to "Cluster Ballooning," and I've been reading up on some of the most famous examples in an online science magazine called the Darwin Awards:
Father Adelir Antonio de Carli (left) was a Brazilian priest who attempted to break the world record for helium-propelled flight back in April 2008. The stunt was meant as a fundraiser for his parish. He set flight from the port city of Paranagua on April 20th 2008, never to return.
In 1982, "Lawn Chair Larry" (right) spent 16 hours on his favorite lawn chair eating sandwiches and drinking beer at 16,000 feet above Los Angeles. "The Federal Aviation Administration was not amused," but he did inspire a whole generation of cluster balloonists.
Both of these stories end in tragedy, but WFMU's story will be different because we are taking some precautions. For example, they didn't think to use a safety harness, or to hire a sniper to take out a few balloons in case the wind picks up and Ken floats into air traffic control space (good idea Rich Hazelton!). Many of us have even gotten a jump start on pledging, since pledge-fuel is the only variable that is not yet fully accounted for. And earlier today, Ken was hovering right outside my window testing the strength of his harness. Hey wait a minute -- he's still out there! And his harness seems to be holding strong despite today's snow flurries and 10-degree wind chill... that is a good omen.
As we prepare for Wednesday morning's launch and figure out a safe place to store these 25 extremely volatile helium tanks, I'd recommend reading more about the history of helium-balloon powered flight and watching a rare video of Father Adelir Antonio de Carli after the jump.
Also, be sure to tune in to this Tuesday's Thunk Tank (7-8p ET). Station Manager Ken joins WFMU's Chief Science Office Bronwyn C. to discuss the aeronautic research behind Wednesday's lawn-chair-and-balloon fundraising launch.
