Louis Armstrong’s beloved trumpet sits in the Smithsonian–a relic of a grand tradition of American music. When it first became a museum piece, the brass-and-gold instrument, made in Paris after World War II, wasn’t in working condition. Dwandalyn Reece, the culture curator at The Smithsonian, notes: “It wasn’t playable when it got here… There was a lacquer coating on it to help prevent tarnish. We looked to see if there were any spots where the lacquer impacted the valves. There were areas where the valves were a little sticky so we wanted to make sure they would flow freely.” Once restored, they put the instrument in the right hands. Above, watch Wynton Marsalis, the nine-time Grammy winner, playing Satchmo’s Selmer trumpet last fall.
Marsalis later commented, “It sounded better than I thought it would sound.” Apparently, it’s the first time an historic instrument from the Smithsonian’s collection has been put back into real service.
I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but meditation may have saved my life. During a particularly challenging time of overwork, underpay, and serious family distress, I found myself at dangerous, near-stroke levels of high cholesterol and blood pressure, and the beginnings of near-crippling early-onset arthritis. My doctors were alarmed. Something had to change. Unable to make stressful outer circumstances disappear, I had to find constructive ways to manage my responses to them instead. Yoga and meditation made the difference.
I’m hardly alone in this journey. The leading cause of death in the U.S. is heart disease, followed closely by stroke, diabetes, and depression leading to suicide—all conditions exacerbated by high levels of stress and anxiety. In my own case, a changed diet and daily exercise played a crucial role in my physical recovery, but those disciplines would not even have been possible to adopt were it not for the calming, centering effects of a daily meditation practice.
Anecdotes, however, are not evidence. We are bombarded with claims about the miracle magic of “mindfulness,” a word that comes from Buddhism and describes a kind of meditation that focuses on the breath and body sensations as anchors for present-moment awareness. Some form of “mindfulness based stress reduction” has entered nearly every kind of therapy, rehabilitation, corporate training, and pain management, and the word has been a marketing totem for at least a solid decade now. No one ever needs to mention the B‑word in all this meditation talk. As one meditation teacher tells his beginner students, “Buddhism cannot exist without mindfulness, but mindfulness can exist perfectly well without Buddhism.”
So, no need to believe in reincarnation, renunciation, or higher states of consciousness, fine. But does meditation really change your brain? Yes. Academic researchers have conducted dozens of studies on how the practice works, and have nearly all concluded that it does. “There’s more than an article a day on the subject in peer-reviewed journals,” says University of Toronto psychiatrist Steven Selchen, “The research is vast now.” One research team at Harvard, led by Harvard Medical School psychology instructor Sara Lazar, published a study in 2011 that shows how mindfulness meditation results in physical changes to the brain.
The paper details the results of MRI scans from 16 subjects “before and after they took part in the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness,” reports the Harvard Gazette. Each of the participants spent “an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises.” After the program, they reported significant stress reduction on a questionnaire, and analysis of their MRIs “found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.”
The Harvard Business Review points to a another survey study in which scientists from the University of British Columbia and the Chemnitz University of Technology “were able to pool data from more than 20 studies to determine which areas of the brain are consistently affected. They identified at least eight different regions.” Highlighting two areas “of particular concern to business professionals,” the HBR describes changes to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the frontal lobe associated with self-regulation, learning, and decision-making. The ACC “may be particularly important in the face of uncertain and fast-changing conditions.” Like Lazar’s Harvard study, the researchers also identified “increased amounts of gray matter” in the hippocampus, an area highly subject to damage from chronic stress.
These studies and many others bring mindfulness together with another current psychological buzzword that has proven to be true: neuroplasticity, the idea that we can change our brains for the better—that we are not “hardwired” to repeat patterns of behavior despite our best efforts. In the TEDx Cambridge talk at the top of the post, Lazar explains her results, and connects them with her own experiences with meditation. She is, you’ll see right away, a skeptic, not inclined to accept medical claims proffered by yoga and meditation teachers. But she found that those practices worked in her own life, and also had “scientifically validated benefits” in reducing stress, depression, anxiety, and physical pain. In other words, they work.
None of the research invalidates the Buddhist and Hindu traditions from which yoga and meditation come, but it does show that one needn’t adopt any particular belief system in order to reap the health benefits of the practices. For some secular introductions to meditation, you may wish to try UCLA’s free guided meditation sessions or check out the Meditation 101 animated beginner’s guide above. If you’re not too put off by the occasional Buddhist reference, I would also highly recommend the Insight Meditation Center’s free six-part introduction to mindfulness meditation. Chronic stress is literally killing us. We have it in our power to change the way we respond to circumstances, change the physical structure of our brains, and become happier and healthier as a result.
“I can’t recall an opera in which the villain is a building,” writes Ron Hubbard in a review for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, “but that’s the case with The Shining, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a haunted hotel and a family that winters within it. While ghosts play a prominent role in many operas, the spirits occupying the remote Rocky Mountain hotel in The Shining are servants to one powerful, malevolent master: the building itself.” Hubbard highlights the elaborate design that recreates the forbidding Overlook Hotel with a “stately set,” “swirling, spooky projections,” and building elements that “roll in and out behind screens swirling with patterns, creating an unsettling, kaleidoscopic effect.”
As every opera enthusiast soon finds out, no production can survive by design alone. But The Shining, according to Hubbard, earns full marks in other areas as well, including but not limited to its “score full of discomfiting themes that clash and collide to strongly sung and disarmingly believable portrayals of characters alive and otherwise.” He also emphasizes that the source material comes not from Kubrick’s film, but King’s novel: “Stanley Kubrick took great liberties with the story, going so far as to change how the conflict plays out and resolves. I actually found this operatic version considerably creepier, in large part because we get to know the ghosts better.”
“The novel and the movie are vastly different,” says librettist Mark Campbell in the video above, though they and they opera all tell “the story of Jack Torrance, who, because of economic reasons, accepts a job as the winter caretaker for a hotel in remote western Colorado.” And before long, as we know whether we’ve read the book or seen the movie, Jack “submits to a number of his demons” before the eyes of his terrified and increasingly endangered family. But it remains, Campbell says, “the story of a man who wants to do good — he just didn’t choose the right job, and ended up in a situation that did everything it could to tear him apart.”
The Shining the opera comes commissioned by Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative, “designed to invigorate the operatic art form with an infusion of contemporary works.” Given its completely sold-out success in St. Paul, where it premiered, we can safely say that this production has accomplished the mission of drawing vigor from a perhaps unexpected source, and even that it stands a chance of bringing its chilling artistry (not to mention its promisingly warned-about “strong language, gunshots, simulated nudity, theatrical haze, and strobe lighting”) to a city near you, preferably in the dead of winter to best suit the story — a time that, in Minnesota, already counts as forbidding enough.
What does Kafka mean to you? To me he has always represented the triumph of smallness, which is no slight; the exemplary figure of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called “a minor literature.” Kafka made minutiae and triviality compelling, invested the petty struggles of everyday life with a dramatic intensity and metaphysical aura that linger for days after reading him. Kafka’s letters show him caught in the grip of a crippling, yet deeply funny, intellectual ambivalence; his stories and novels equally trade in absurdist humor and philosophical seriousness. Kafka haunts the small domestic spaces and tedium of office life, imbuing secular modernity with a tragicomic strangeness. He trembles at the continued power of a dethroned religious authority, perplexed by its emptiness, rewriting the inwardness and self-negation of religious asceticism in parables absent of any god.
Seeking the source of authority, Kafka’s heroes find instead unsolvable riddles and mysterious vacancies. Which is why it seems odd to me that Kafka should himself be memorialized as a gigantic head in statuary—an 11 meter, 45 ton stainless steel head, with 42 motorized layers that move independently, rearranging and “metamorphosing” the author’s face.
Called “K on Sun” and created by Czech artist David Černý, the shimmering, monumental work, installed in 2014, sits near the office building where Kafka worked as a clerk at an insurance company and across from the Prague City Hall. The “enormous mirrored bust” writes Christopher Jobson at This is Colossal, “brilliantly reveals Kafka’s tortured personality and unrelenting self-doubt.” Perhaps. Jacob Shamsian at Business Insider has another interpretation: “It’s meant to distract people from the frustrations of dealing with government employees.”
Maybe the key to understanding “K on Sun” is by comparison with an earlier piece by Černý called Metalmorphosis, which as you can see above, uses the same monumental, stainless steel design to create an enormous, gleaming, constantly rearranging head. This one sits at the Whitehall Technology Park in Charlotte, North Carolina, the kind of bland, homogenized corporate office campus that might have driven Kafka mad. “Černý,” writes Atlas Obscura, “notes the Metalmorphosis as something of a self-portrait of his own psyche,” saying “This is how I feel; it is a mental self-portrait.” Can we regard “Kafka in Sun” as also something of a portrait of Černý as well, imagining himself as Kafka? Perhaps.
The artist is a trickster character, known for frustrating and infuriating patrons and audiences, “a rebellious mix of Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst,” The Guardian opines, “as controversial as he is amusing.” One work, “Piss,” features just that, “two gyrating, mechanical men urinating on a map of the Czech Republic.” Their urine spells out famous sayings from Prague residents. Located right next to the Franz Kafka museum, the sculpture mocks the idea of art as a cultural enterprise devoted to the national interest. “Kafka in Sun” presents us with a much more imposingly serious piece than so many of Černý’s other, more whimsical, works. But it’s hard to imagine the satirical artist had a more serious, straightforward intention. In imagining Kafka as a huge, shiny sunlit head, he inverts the author’s small, private, self-contained world, turning Kafka into a strangely looming, public, authoritative presence resembling an enormous metal god.
The Ballets Russes, founded in 1909 by art critic and impresario Sergei Diaghilev, staged some truly revolutionary productions on the very edge of aesthetic newness. Diaghilev’s ballets coordinated set designs by artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Giorgio de Chirico, choreography by such masters as George Balanchine and Vaslav Nijinsky, and scores by such modern composers as Sergei Prokofiev and Erik Satie. But of course, when we think of Diaghilev’s Russian ballets, we surely think foremost of Igor Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring was so radical it famously incited a riot at its 1913 Parisian premiere and “would go on,” writes The Verge, “to leave an indelible mark on jazz, minimalism, and other contemporary movements.”
Just three years earlier, however, Stravinsky was mostly unknown. Still working under the shadow of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, he was given his first big break by Diaghilev only after several other composers refused the job. That commission turned out to be one of the works for which Stravinsky is best known—the score for The Firebird, a ballet based on a Russian folk tale about a prince who frees a magical bird held captive by a sorcerer. Fittingly, given the monstrous nature of the story’s antagonists, Stravinsky’s score turns on a very sinister-sounding musical interval, the tritone, whose dissonance caused earlier composers to dub it “the Devil’s Interval” and to avoid it entirely in religious music. Just above, you can see Stravinsky himself, at age 82, conduct “The Lullaby Suite” from the ballet.
Stravinsky’s score built on Claude Debussy’s use of the tritone twenty years earlier in the eerie Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun, and the net effect of the interval in these two pieces lead to its dark, moody sound becoming “the center of modern music.” So says Carnegie Hall’s Jeffrey Geffen in the short video introduction to Stravinsky’s Firebird. Geffen goes on to tell us that Debussy and Stravinsky “looked to what was considered the most dissonant interval of the past 200 years and turned it into into something that becomes exotic and perfumed.” Although The Firebird’s story and many of its musical themes are distinctly Russian in origin (as you can see in the Khan Academy video below), the music “would not have been possible,” says Carnegie Hall’s David Robertson, “without the influence of Debussy and that of his friend Maurice Ravel.”
Stravinsky’s music proved polarizing even before the riots of Rite of Spring. When legendary dancer Anna Pavlova heard the Firebird score, she declared it “noise” and refused to dance to it, forcing Diaghilev to cast Tamara Karsavina in the title role. But the producer believed in his new composer, remarking to Karsavina on the ballet’s premiere that Stravinsky was “a man on the eve of celebrity.” Even the forward-looking Diaghilev couldn’t have predicted how much influence Stravinsky would have on the next 100 years of modern music. Since its first incarnation in 1910, The Firebird has been restaged and rearranged several times. The suite Stravinsky conducts at the top of the post comes from the 1945 arrangement. Two years after this filmed performance, Stravinsky conducted his very last recording for Columbia Records. He again chose to return, for the last time, to the ballet that first made him famous, The Firebird.
Dan Gelbart, a Vancouver-based electrical engineer, helped create a company called Creo, which Kodak bought in 2005 for roughly $1 billion. If you read Gelbart’s short autobiography here, you can learn about the arc of his career: About how, during his early years, he started working for a tech company that produced high-speed film recorders. And about how Gelbart told the company that he could build a better film recorder, at a cheaper price. And he could do it in the basement of his home. He explains:
After a crash course in optics, I changed the design [of the recorder], but surprisingly managed to deliver a shippable prototype in 12 months with only one person working with me. I had a small metalworking workshop at home, many of the machines home-built, and this allowed me to fabricate most of the parts for the prototype myself.
I now have a wonderful CNC machine shop at home, but I don’t have the boundless enthusiasm of those days. However, I still build all my prototypes myself, finding it to be faster than sending out drawings and waiting for parts.
Above, you can watch what Gelbart calls “A Short Course on How to Build Stuff,” a series of 18 videos designed for students and scientists who want to build prototypes very quickly, using machines that are easy to master. Writes Make magazine, the “series begins by demonstrating how to use and modify his favorite shop tools, and reveals all kinds of enlightening shortcuts that make complicated assemblies trivial to produce. There is a true art to uncomplicating things, a rarity for some engineers.”
We know Anthony Burgess for having written A Clockwork Orange, but in total, according to Shaun Usher’s More Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience(a book based on the well-known blog), he “published 33 novels, 25 nonfiction titles, produced poetry, short stories and screenplays, composed three symphonies, wrote hundreds of musical pieces, and spoke nine languages fluently.” Yet even such a “prolific, versatile, and highly intelligent” man of letters faces writer’s block now and again.
Take the Rolling Stone thinkpiece Burgess couldn’t manage to write in 1973. Conceding defeat — “things are hell here,” he wrote of his life in Rome at the time — he offered the magazine “a 50,000-word novella I’ve just finished, all about the condition humaine, etc.” in its place. Surely his editor would understand? Alas, unluckily for Burgess, his editor turned out to be one Hunter S. Thompson, who fired back the characteristically blunt but eloquently vitriolic reply you see here:
Dear Mr. Burgess,
Herr Wenner has forwarded your useless letter from Rome to the National Affairs Desk for my examination and/or reply.
Unfortunately, we have no International Gibberish Desk, or it would have ended up there.
What kind of lame, half-mad bullshit are you trying to sneak over on us? When Rolling Stone asks for “a thinkpiece”, goddamnit, we want a fucking Thinkpiece… and don’t try to weasel out with any of your limey bullshit about a “50,000 word novella about the condition humaine, etc…”
Do you take us for a gang of brainless lizards? Rich hoodlums? Dilettante thugs?
You lazy cocksucker. I want that Thinkpiece on my desk by Labor Day. And I want it ready for press. The time has come & gone when cheapjack scum like you can get away with the kind of scams you got rich from in the past.
Get your worthless ass out of the piazza and back to the typewriter. Your type is a dime a dozen around here, Burgess, and I’m fucked if I’m going to stand for it any longer.
Sincerely,
Hunter S Thompson
“The desired thinkpiece never appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone,” writes the International Anthony Burgess Foundation’s Graham Foster, “but the essay referred to in these letters, ‘The Clockwork Condition’, was eventually published in the New Yorker in 2012.” In it, Burgess recalls the origins of his best-known novel and considers the causes of the societal conformity he took as one of his themes, arriving at the Orwellian notion that “the burden of making one’s own choices is, for many people, intolerable. To be tied to the necessity of deciding for oneself is to be a slave to one’s will.”
That goes for “where to eat, whom to vote for, what to wear” — and, of course, for what to write a thinkpiece about as well as how to write it. “It is easier to be told,” Burgess writes. “Smoke Hale — ninety per cent less tar; read this novel, seventy-five weeks on the best-seller list; don’t see that movie, it’s artsy-shmartsy.” He even remembers, with a certain fondness, his time in the army: “At first I resented the discipline, the removal of even minimal liberty,” but “soon my reduction to a piece of clockwork began to please me, soothe me.” Fair to say, though, that no matter how demanding the officers above him, the experience didn’t prepare Burgess for a superior like Thompson.
“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?” –Dorothea Lange
The idea sounds counterintuitive given the violence we read about daily, but it is perhaps possible that human societies are slowly outgrowing xenophobia and war, as Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has argued extensively. It’s also possible that Pinker’s view is an “article of faith” rather than fact. In any case, we can at least be heartened by one thing: If we do become better at learning from the past than repeating it, the primary documents will not have disappeared into a memory hole. The very same technologies that spread fear, bigotry, and disinformation across the globe also enable us to unearth humanity’s long history of bad decision-making and preserve the evidence in widely-accessible online archives.
One such archive, the Densho Digital Repository, contains “historic photographs, documents, newspapers, letters and other primary source materials” from the history of the Japanese in America—including, of course, a particularly regrettable historical episode, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, a grim political expedient that offers lessons today to those who choose to learn them. Prominent among the archives’ many documents from the period is the Dorothea Lange Collection, almost 500 images taken by the famous photographer of “the many different stages of mass removal and incarceration” of Japanese Americans in California. The photographs (recently highlighted on Kottke.org) feature original captions written by Lange that contextualize the subjects and sometimes provide their names and a few biographical details.
The lives of Japanese internees were in fact documented by not one, but two famous American photographers, Lange and Ansel Adams. However, Adams—whose photographic series we featured in a previous post—gained access to an internment camp in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas on his own, through a friendship with the camp’s warden. Lange, on the other hand, snapped several hundred photographs while on official assignment with the War Relocation Authority. In 1942, the government hired her to document the removal and imprisonment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans in camps across the state.
Lange’s photographs, writes Densho’s blog, have helped shape “the collective memory of Japanese American removal.” Despite the restrictions placed on her by the authorities—Lange could not shoot images of barbed wire, bayonets, or guard towers—“she managed to produce a body of work that at once captured the inhumane actions of the U.S. government and the humanity of the individuals being forced to leave their lives behind for the ‘crime’ of Japanese ancestry.”
Her photographs are “seemingly unstaged and unlighted,” writes Dinitia Smith in a New York Times review of Impounded, a book featuring many of the close to 800 photographs Lange took, most of which were only recently discovered at the National Archives, “where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.” Best known for her photos of Dust Bowl farm workers, Lange, writes scholar Megan Asaka at Densho, “was an odd choice, given her leftist politics and strong sympathy for victims of racial discrimination.” She was “appalled by the forced exile” and “confided to a Quaker protester that she was guilt stricken to be working for a federal government that could treat its citizens so unjustly.” She took on the assignment “to accurately record what the Japanese Americans were undergoing,” but apart from “a few photos that reached the public,” most of her work didn’t see the light of day for decades.
“What the military wanted from her,” explains historian Linda Gordon in a PBS documentary on Lange’s assignment, “was a set of photographs to illustrate that they weren’t persecuting or torturing these people who they evacuated.” Gordon, who co-edited Impounded, notes in the book that the photos “tell us that conditions in the camps were much worse than most people think.” It’s hard not to be reminded of another, more harrowing, forced removal happening a continent away as we see Lange’s images of Japanese American families forced to abandon their homes and stores, fill out registration paperwork, gather their belongings in suitcases, and board trains and buses en masse with numbered tags around their necks.
What awaited the internees at the camps were military-style barracks, libraries, rudimentary schools, and “tar-paper shacks where they endured brutal heat and bitter cold, filth, dust and open sewers,” writes Smith. Some internees were housed in former horse stalls and many endured cavity searches and other humiliating indignities, as well as daily fear and anxiety about their eventual fates. Lange’s photographs, however, “powerfully contest the government propaganda and hateful rhetoric aimed at vilifying Japanese Americans,” writes Densho: “Often shot from a low angle, Lange places her subjects on a visual pedestal. She restores some dignity in a moment when, many admit, they felt they had none.”
Unlike Ansel Adams’ fascinating photos, which are restricted to the confines of one camp, Lange’s document the internees entire journey from freedom to imprisonment, as well as the responses of many Japanese Americans to their new status as internal enemies of the state. One shop owner, “a University of California graduate of Japanese descent,” Lange noted, placed the sign you see above on his closed storefront.
All of the photographs in the Densho archive are now in the public domain and can be freely used for any purpose. Lange, I imagine, would hope they force us to reflect on the futile insanity of demonizing entire populations and turning on fellow citizens in times of war, xenophobic fervor and political opportunism.
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