Good thing Austin-based designer Michael Yates studied abroad. Three months spent in the vicinity of Kyoto as a Texas A&M electrical engineering student ultimately inspired him to abandon the profession for which he had trained, in order to pursue woodworking. “…the sacredness of the process and attention to detail resonated with me in a way that nothing had before,” he recalls in an Apartment Therapy profile. “I’ve since learned in practice what I saw evidence of in the temples—that completely focusing on where you are will get you the best product at the end. Every step of the process is precious.”
Had he not changed horses in midstream, his grandmother would have likely stuck to the plan too, departing for the afterlife in a standard-issue coffin or urn, rather than asking Yates to build her something special. In his mind, it was a collaboration, a process documented above, at the behest of Whole Foods’ online magazine,Dark Rye.(Indicating, perhaps, that artisanal, upcycled coffins will soon be available for purchase beside bamboo cutting boards and locally sourced, grass-fed, beef jerky?)
Yate’s grandma placed her request pre-need, in the industry lingo, a move that afforded him plenty of time to study—and reject—the overly ornate vessels that have become a cultural norm. Luxurious details have no place, he feels, when the user can derive no enjoyment from them. (Guess he and Grandma weren’t considering going with the off-the-wall Ghana approach.)
The coffin is the most meaningful piece he’s ever created, even before it could be beta tested. It caused him to think deeply about our relationship with death and each other. The soundtrack hints that something very sad is about to happen, as do the photos of his grandmother as a vibrant, younger woman. (Such shots have become de rigeur for anyone mourning an older relative on Facebook.) Yates mentions that his grandmother, healthy when she hatched this scheme, has been diagnosed with cancer. I think we can assume where this is going, right?
At the risk of a spoiler, I’d like to commend the filmmakers for allowing some key scenes to occur off-camera. Yates remarks that after all that went into making the coffin, it would be “a terrible miss” if his grandmother did not get a chance to see it. He’s filmed loading it into his truck, but viewers are not privy to its delivery. Some things, it would seem, are still personal.
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annual question to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2014 edition asks the question, “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” The question came prefaced by this thought:
Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?
A theory of merit states that Neil Young reinvents himself every 10 years or so, but the work in-between isn’t always pretty. Yet for an artist with a somewhat limited range, he remains one of the most interesting singers and songwriters in rock and roll well over four decades after his start. Young once played guitar in a garage band with Rick James in 1965 called the Mynah Birds; released a surprisingly listenable electro album in 1982 complete with Giorgio Morodor-like synths and vocoders; and last year, recorded a collection of folk standards like “Oh, Susanna” and “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” in the style of 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps (an album, Paul Nelson wrote at the time, that “burns [rock & roll] to the ground”). In-between the stylistic leaps and innovations are some painfully mediocre albums and some that define, or rather redefine, genres. One of the latter, Young’s 1972 Harvest picked up and refined the folk-rock of his first band Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled 1966 debut—an album widely credited with the creation of folk-rock.
Harvest—by any account one of Young’s best albums and the highest-selling of ’72—produced “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man,” and, indirectly led to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” (written in response to Harvest’s anti-segregation rocker, “Alabama”). It’s a surprisingly quiet album for the impact it’s had, and it set the standard for later folk-acoustic Young albums like 1992’s Harvest Moon and 2000’s Silver & Gold. And as much as Young can destroy a venue with a full-on electric attack (even now!), he can mesmerize an audience with just an acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica, and casual banter, even while playing a suite of songs they’d never heard before. See him do so above in a 1971 concert live at the BBC’s Shepherds Bush Empire Theatre. Young plays four songs that would appear on Harvest: “Out on the Weekend,” “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” and “A Man Needs a Maid.” He also does “Journey Through the Past” and “Love in Mind,” which would appear two years later on the bleak 1973 Time Fades Away, and “Don’t Let it Bring You Down,” a song from 1970’s brilliant After the Gold Rush. Young performed the last song, “Dance Dance Dance,” with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but it went unreleased in a studio version until the 2009 box set The Archives, Volume 1: 1963–1972.
Some further evidence of Young’s continued relevance: just last week, he performed a series of shows at Carnegie Hall, and audience members took video of several songs, including the title track to Harvest (above). It’s a song Young almost never played live until 2007. Onstage, alone, with acoustic and harp, he is still, forty-three years later, a mesmerizing presence.
Last year, we brought you a description of Hunter S. Thompson’s daily drug and alcohol regimen, consisting of frightening amounts of cocaine and liquor, supplanted by the occasional cup of coffee or acid tab. While the story may be apocryphal, Thompson was no dilettante when it came to psychoactive substances. The father of gonzo journalism burnished his image as a formidable substance user in the opening lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas(1971):
The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy—five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high—powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi—colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high—speed driving all over Los Angeles County—from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
It’s safe to say that if you were to consult anyone about a hangover fix, Thompson would be a good candidate for counsel. Luckily, the author left us with a guide. In 2011, Playboy released a compendium of its 1960s and 1970s correspondences with Thompson. Most were disappointingly prosaic, but among the dross was a hurriedly scribbled note on the topic of hangover cures:
P.S. — inre: Oui’s request for “my hangover cure” — it’s 12 amyl nitrites (one box), in conjunction with as many beers as necessary.
OK H
If a hair of the dog approach doesn’t quite suit you, or if Thompson’s recipe exceeds your initial consumption, I suggest a bottle of sports drink at the tail end of a big night to replenish electrolytes. Still, according YouTube’s SciShow, which does a fantastic job of elucidating the chemical processes behind all the headaches and room spins, there’s only one foolproof method:
As a PSA to stave off angry comments, a spoiler alert: SciShow’s recommendation is on par with the abstinence model of birth control: just don’t do it, and you’ll be fine.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Quentin Tarantino cares about music, as you can tell from watching any of his films, from his maximally discomfiting use of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” in Reservoir Dogs on out. A Telegraph article on that song’s writer Gerry Rafferty describes it as “written as a parody of Bob Dylan’s paranoia,” “little more than a joke but with a catchy pop arrangement” that unexpectedly sold more than a million copies. If Tarantino has a fascination with Dylan parodies, then he has an even deeper fascination with the real thing, as revealed in a post on his ten favorite records from Uncut’s Michael Bonner. He pulled Tarantino’s selections and comments from an interview he conducted with the director back around the time of Pulp Fiction. Above, you can watch Dylan play “Tangled Up in Blue,” which Tarantino calls his “all-time favorite song,” “one of those songs where the lyrics are ambiguous you can actually write the song yourself.” (Hear the original recording here.)
Just above, we have Freda Payne performing “Band of Gold,” another of Tarantino’s choice cuts, on Soul Train in 1970. “This is just so cool,” he says. “It’s a combination of the way it’s produced, the cool pop/R&B sound, and Freda’s voice. Its kinda kitschy in a way – y’know, it’s got a really up-tempo tune – and, the first few times I heard it, I was, like, totally into the coolness of the song. It was only on the third or fourth listen I realised the lyrics were so fucking heartbreaking.” Below you’ll find a cut from Phil Ochs’ I Ain’t Marching Anymore, which Tarantino calls “one of my favorite protest/folk albums. While Dylan was a poet Ochs was a musical journalist: he was a chronicler of his time, filled with humor and compassion. He’d write songs which would seem very black and white, and then, in the last verse, he’d say something which, like, completely shattered you.” This particular song, “Here’s To The State of Mississippi,” he considers “everything the movie Mississippi Burning should have been.”
Few would argue against the claim that Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of such bywords for literary weightiness as Crime andPunishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, mastered the novel, even by the formidable standards of 19th-century Russia. But if you look into his papers, you’ll find that he also had an intriguing way with pen and ink outside the realm of letters — or, if you like, deep inside the realm of letters, since to see drawings by Dostoevsky, you actually have to look within the manuscripts of his novels.
Above, we have a page from Crime and Punishment into which a pair of solemn faces (not that their mood will surprise enthusiasts of Russian literature) found their way. Just below, you’ll find examples from the same manuscript of his pen turning toward the ornamental and architectural while he “created his fiction step by step as he lived, read, remembered, reprocessed and wrote,” as the exhibition of “Dostoyevsky’s Doodles” at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies put it.
According to the exhibition description, Dostoevsky’s notes to himself “represent that key moment when the accumulated proto-novel crystallized into a text. Like many of us, Dostoevsky doodled hardest when the words came slowest.” Some of Dostoevsky’s character descriptions, argues scholar Konstantin Barsht, “are actually the descriptions of doodled portraits he kept reworking until they were right.” He didn’t just do so during the writing of Crime and Punishment, either; below we have a page of The Devils that combines the human, the architectural, and the calligraphic, apparently the three main avenues through which Dostoevsky pursued the doodler’s art.
Even if you would personally argue against his claim to greatness (and thus side with his countryman, colleague in literature, and fellow part-time artist Vladimir Nabokov, who found him a “mediocre” writer given to “wastelands of literary platitudes”), surely you can enjoy the charge of pure creation you feel from witnessing his textual mind interact with his visual one. Works by Dostoevsky can be found in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.
Here’s a funny little variation on “rickrolling,” a term some of our readers might not be familiar with. So let’s quickly refer you to Wikipedia:
Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a bait and switch; a person provides a hyperlink which is seemingly relevant to the topic at hand, but actually leads to Astley’s video. The link can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. People led to the music video are said to have been rickrolled. Rickrolling has extended beyond web links to playing the video or song disruptively in other situations, including public places, such as a live appearance of Astley himself in the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. The meme helped to revive Astley’s career.
Now, in another sign that rickrolling has gone beyond the web, we have above a snapshot of a quantum physics written by Sairam Gudiseva, a student at (we believe) White Station High School in Tennessee. As the snapshot shows, Gudiseva managed to run the lyrics of “Never Gonna Give You Up” down the left margin of the page … while still keeping his ideas flowing. Well done, young man. You can see a full page of his essay here.
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A little something for the Dead Heads among us. JerryGarcia.com relaunched this past week, and boy does it deliver. Run by Garcia’s family, the new site offers great visual timelines of the singer-songwriter’s life and the 26 bands he played with; a cool look at the many guitars he owned and loved; interactive maps that let you follow 10 Grateful Dead tours from 1970 to 1993. You can also listen to the shows themselves, which have been archived graciously by Archive.org — something we’ve told you about before. In total, the new site will lead you to 5,000 hours of recorded music and 3,450 shows, according to Rolling Stone. It’s a beautiful thing to see Jerry’s life and music being celebrated in such an open way.
