four-thirty-three

Happy birthday, Mahatma.

—–

I.

“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.”

(attr. Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1869-1948)

“And this independence is gained, not by means of strife, not by the destruction of existing forms,of life, but only by a change in the interpretation of life. This independence results first from the Christian recognizing the law of love, revealed to him by his teacher, as perfectly sufficient for all human relations, and therefore he regards every use of force as unnecessary and unlawful; and secondly, from the fact that those deprivations and sufferings, or threats of deprivations and sufferings (which reduce the man of the social conception of life to the necessity of obeying) to the Christian from his different conception of life, present themselves merely as the inevitable conditions of existence. And these conditions, without striving against them by force, he patiently endures, like sickness, hunger, and every other hardship, but they cannot serve him as a guide for his actions. The only guide for the Christian’s actions is to be found in the divine principle living within him, which cannot be checked or governed by anything.”

(Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, 1894. Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God was a significant influence on Gandhi as he developed his concept of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance)

Updated to add this: Gandhi and Tolstoy corresponded. Here are a few of those letters (one of which was the last long letter Tolstoy wrote in his life, to anyone), via a facebook comment by plep.

—–

II.

Edward Hicks, "The Peaceable Kingdom" (c. 1834)

—–

III.

“Ye Shall Have a Song” (from the choral work The Peaceable Kingdom by Randall Thompson [1899-1984], which was inspired by Hicks’s painting. Performed by the American Repertory Singers.)

• Overthinking It

Analysis/deconstruction of popcultural objects. Recommended posts: The Real (Symbolic, and Imaginary) Ghostbusters (which analyzes the film in terms of Lacan’s notions of the Real), Bon Jovi: Livin’ on a Prayer and Music Theory, and I Will Always Have Been Back: Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Schwarzenegger.

• The Vigilant Citizen

The problem with conspiracy theory websites: Most of the time they’re totally unreadable, due to shitty Geocities-style site design, terrible writing, or both (Timecube, anyone?).  The world has been waiting for a website that dishes out ruminations on the Illuminati in a reasonably engaging writer’s voice, using a clean Wordpress blog template.  Vigilant Citizen is that website. Recommended post: Transformers 2: NWO Agenda and Occult Symbols.

• Stuff Christian Culture Likes

Modeled after Stuff White People Like, emphasizing the peculiarities of evangelical Christian culture.  I read the blog cover-to-cover with a pal who grew up up in that tradition, and she swears it’s all true.

• Geeky Sex

Don’t read it at work. A thoughtful blog about sexuality and the culture war.

• Texts From Last Night

Does what it says on the tin.  Regularly updated. I like the debauched Schrödinger-ness of this one.

One of my favorite cultural critics is Slavoj Žižek, from Slovenia.  He’s sassy, has an inimitable style and is really witty; kind of like the Oscar Wilde of postmodern Marxist philosophers.  Here’s a Žižek linkdump for everyone.

First of all, he’s on Twitter. Or it may be him, at any rate. It’s not listed as a “verified account,” so who knows?  I asked kaiserin if he was real, and she riposted “What is ‘real’?” in true Žižek-ian fashion.  I had that one coming.

Here’s a cute letter to the journal Politics and Culture (not by Žižek alas), asking Obama to appoint Žižek as the United States’s first-ever Secretary of Culture.

An excellent interview with Žižek appeared in the Guardian a year ago.  This may be worth reading even if you don’t know or care who Žižek is. Hilarious, in kind of a trainwreck-y way.

Finally, here’s Žižek on love:

Apologies in advance: there may not be anything else in this post as good as the title.

_____

I.

There are two musics (or so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic; the same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tremendous if you play him (even badly) - such is Schumann.

–Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica” (from Image, Music, Text, 1988)

_____

II.

The moping, distraught lover portrayed in German song cycles bores me, but this feeling in no way detracts from my enthusiasm for the music of the great song cycles of Beethoven, Schumann and Schubert.

-Arthur Komar, “From Heine’s Poems Into Schumann’s Songs” (essay in the Norton Critical Score of Dichterliebe, 1971)

_____

III.

The best time to start singing Schumann’s songs is somewhere between the ages of 17 and 22. The lyrics are really emo, but it’s OK because most late high-school/undergraduate-aged kids are pretty goddamned emo as well. This isn’t meant to disparage Schumann’s work at all… his song cycle Dichterliebe is a genuine masterpiece, one that I’ve enjoyed singing since first being exposed to it at age 20, my own emo douchebag nadir.

Heinrich Heine published the collection Lyrisches Intermezzo–with the poems that Schumann would include in Dichterliebe–when he was 25 (are you seeing a pattern yet?). Yeah, the poems are a little juvenile, but there’s certainly a place in the culture for overwrought musings about love; if he were born 150 years later, Heine could have made a killing penning pop songs.

(I think Heine tapped into some latent emo-ness that already existed in European culture; a generation before, Goethe wrote the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which actually inspired young men throughout Europe to dress like the novel’s protagonist–blue coat, yellow vest–and also to occasionally commit suicide in emulation of their love-tortured idol. If the revised version of Werther were first published in 1987 rather than 1787, there would no doubt have been Congressional hearings and a public outcry led by Tipper Gore.)

Robert Schumann, who was primarily a composer of piano music at the beginning of his career, wrote 168 songs in the year 1840. The sixteen songs that make up Dichterliebe were among them, and were written in about a week.  Schumann had a long and difficult courtship with concert pianist Clara Wieck (daddy didn’t approve) and they were finally able to wed just a few months after Dichterliebe was composed.  Schumann could no doubt identify with the pathos (and occasional bathos) of Heine’s poetry.

Below the cut: a few recordings from Dichterliebe (by tenor Fritz Wunderlich, one of my favorite singers ever… if he hadn’t died relatively young, he’d have had a Pavarotti-level career), with English translations and commentary. Each poem is given an “emo rating” from 1-10.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Onion: New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most

Yes, I realize that it’s been a month since I’ve posted. No, I don’t find it acceptable either. More soon; it’s not as though I don’t have ideas for posts or anything.

I’ve been geeking out on Coltrane a little bit this week… particularly “Giant Steps.” This post is basically a linkdump of any Coltrane site/video I may ever want to look at again, but hopefully someone else may like these.

If you’re passing through quickly and only have time to follow one of these links, I’d recommend this video which shows the sheet music for Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” solo passing by as he plays:

The motherfucker could play, huh?

The chord changes for “Giant Steps” are notoriously difficult to play, and nearly impossible to improvise over (notice the piano solo in “Giant Steps”; Tommy Flanagan, normally amazing, kind of stumbles through it as a result of not having played the song prior to the recording session). There’s a wikipedia article on Coltrane’s approach to harmony (warning: music theory wankery), and a lovely visualization of the chord progression can be found here.

I did a Metafilter post a while back about a second grade class in Queens, NY falling in love with Coltrane’s music, and raising money to restore the nearby house where he wrote A Love Supreme. I’m lazy and suffering from tendonitis so I’m not too keen on relinking all of the stuff I put in that post, but you’ll find links to news articles about the class project as well as a Youtube-ized A Love Supreme if you head over to MeFi.

Here’s “Giant Steps” as played by a robot… it’s both awesome and depressing.

And finally, an oldie-but goodie: an animation of “Giant Steps” that just might blow your mind.

Interesting fact: The last words attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the prominent German man of letters) are often said to be “More light!” This is usually taken to be a spiritual proclamation… but, alas, it’s ripped from the real context. According to J. A. Froude, this statement was not only made three days before Goethe’s death, but was actually part of a request to a servant: Macht die Fensterladen auf, damit ich mehr Licht bekomme (literally, “open the window shutters so that I can have more light”).

____________________

I.

Rabo Karabekian (fictional), "The Temptation of St. Anthony" (1973), attribution in comments

“The painting did not exist until I made it,” Karabekian went on. “Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

“I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

“I just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well - let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let that five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.”

Ecstasy bloomed on the barbaric face of Rabo Karabekian. “Citizens of Midland City, I salute you,” he said. “You have given a home to a masterpiece!”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions [1973]

____________________

II.

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world.  The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals.  Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness.  But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.  Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness.  As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.  It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

– C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections [1962]

____________________

III.

“O Nata Lux” for a cappella chorus, by Morton Lauridsen (from the choral song cycle Lux Aeterna, 1997)

Photos via fhashemi, mousavi1388, and LAist.

____________________

____________________

____________________

I.

“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he [Kilgore Trout] said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.
“I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn’t matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don’t twinkle. they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites.”
I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was. For all I knew, it was Puke, Trout’s star the size of a BB.
“Do they twinkle?” he said.
“Yes they do,” I said.
“Promise?” he said.
“Cross my heart,” I said.
“Excellent! Ting-a-ling!” he said. “Now then: Whatever two bodies those two glints of light represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other”
“OK,” I said, “I did it.”
“It took a second, do you think?” he said.
“No more,” I said.
“Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.”
“What was it?” I said.
“Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.
All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it a soul.” He paused.
“Ting-a-ling?” he said.

–Kurt Vonnegut, from Timequake [1996]

____________________

II.

Spruce Street, Berkeley
[by Naomi Shahib Nye, found here]

If a street is named for a tree,
it is right that flowers
bloom purple and feel like cats,
that people are leaves drifting
downhill in morning fog.

Everyone came outside to see
the moon setting like a perfect
orange mouth tipped up to heaven.

Now the cars sleep against curbs.
If I write a letter,
how will I make it long enough?

There is a place to stand
where you can see so many lights
you forget you are one of them.

____________________

III.

A time-lapse video of the galactic center of the Milky Way, taken over several hours, as it passes over the Texas Star Party in May 2009.