America at War: Infographic Reveals How the U.S. Military Is Operating in 40% of the World’s Nations

in Current Affairs, Maps, Politics | January 16th, 2019

Ear­li­er this month, NBC reporter and ana­lyst William Arkin end­ed a 30-year career as a jour­nal­ist, announc­ing in a “scathing let­ter,” Democ­ra­cy Now! reports, that “he would be leav­ing the net­work. Arkin accus­es “the media of war­mon­ger­ing while ignor­ing the, quote, ‘creep­ing fas­cism of home­land secu­ri­ty.’” He does not equiv­o­cate in a fol­low-up inter­view with Amy Good­man. “The gen­er­als and the nation­al secu­ri­ty lead­er­ship” are also now, he says, “the com­men­ta­tors and the ana­lysts who pop­u­late the news media” (Arkin him­self is a for­mer Army intel­li­gence offi­cer).

The prob­lem isn’t only NBC, in his esti­ma­tion, and it isn’t only sup­posed jour­nal­ists cheer­lead­ing for war. Most of the con­flicts the coun­try is cur­rent­ly engaged in are un- or under-report­ed in major sources. His let­ter “applies to all of the main­stream net­works, applies to CNN and Fox, as well…. We’ve just become so shal­low that we’re not real­ly able even to see the truth, which is that we’re at war right now in nine coun­tries around the world where we’re bomb­ing, and we hard­ly report any of it on a day-to-day basis.”

This isn’t the case with inde­pen­dent media orga­ni­za­tions like Democ­ra­cy Now!, The Inter­cept, or Air­wars. Sec­u­lar and reli­gious refugee relief orga­ni­za­tions like the Inter­na­tion­al Res­cue Com­mit­tee, World Relief, or Mus­lim Glob­al Relief are pay­ing atten­tion. Many of these orga­ni­za­tions are non‑U.S.-based or con­nect­ed to the “civil­ian experts” Arkin says once appeared reg­u­lar­ly in the nation­al media and rep­re­sent­ed oppos­ing views, “peo­ple who might be uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors or activists… or experts who were asso­ci­at­ed with think tanks.”

Air­wars, affil­i­at­ed with the Depart­ment of Media and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Gold­smiths, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, has mon­i­tored con­flicts around the world since 2014, with exten­sive cov­er­age and records of alleged civil­ian deaths, mil­i­tary reports, and the names of vic­tims. For a com­pa­ra­ble U.S.-focused deep dive, see the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Wat­son Insti­tute of Inter­na­tion­al & Pub­lic Affairs. The project’s web­site not only tracks the enor­mous eco­nom­ic costs of wars in the Mid­dle East and Africa since 9/11; it also tracks “the human toll,” as you can see in the video below.

At the top of the post, see a map (view in a larg­er for­mat here) from the Cost of War Project’s Stephanie Savell, 5W Info­graph­ics, and the Smith­son­ian of all the regions where the U.S. is “com­bat­ting ter­ror­ism.” While most of the media orgs and non-prof­its men­tioned above would prob­a­bly dis­pute the use of that term in some or all of the con­flict zones, Savell sticks with the offi­cial lan­guage to describe the situation—one in which the nation “is now oper­at­ing in 40 per­cent of the world’s nations,” as she writes at Smithsonian.com.

Maybe no one needs an edi­to­r­i­al to imag­ine the enor­mous toll this lev­el of mil­i­tary engage­ment has tak­en over the course of 17 years since the incep­tion of the “Glob­al War on Ter­ror.” The map cov­ers the past two, illus­trat­ing “80 coun­tries, engaged through 40 U.S. mil­i­tary bases,” and con­duct­ing train­ing, exer­cis­es, active com­bat, and air and drone strikes on six con­ti­nents. The selec­tions, writes Savell, are “con­ser­v­a­tive,” and sourced from both inde­pen­dent and main­stream media out­lets and inter­na­tion­al gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary sources.

“The most com­pre­hen­sive depic­tion in civil­ian cir­cles of U.S. mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment antiter­ror­ist actions over­seas,” the Amer­i­ca at War map pro­vides infor­ma­tion we don’t often get in our daily—or hourly, or by-the-minute—diet of news. “Con­trary to what most Amer­i­cans believe, the war on ter­ror is not wind­ing down.” It is expand­ing. Giv­en the country’s his­to­ry of sus­tained mass move­ments against legal­ly sus­pect, gross­ly expen­sive wars with high civil­ian casu­al­ties, dis­ease epi­demics, star­va­tion, and refugee crises, one would think that a siz­able seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion would want to know what their coun­try’s mil­i­tary and civil­ian defense con­trac­tors are doing around the world.

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the U.S. Civ­il War Visu­al­ized Month by Month and State by State, in an Info­graph­ic from 1897

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

It’s the End of the World as We Know It: The Apoc­a­lypse Gets Visu­al­ized in an Inven­tive Map from 1486

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Stephen Fry Narrates Two Animated Videos Explaining How Fear, Loathing & Misinformation Drove the Brexit Campaign

in Current Affairs, Politics | January 16th, 2019

For mil­lions watch­ing in the UK and around the world, antic­i­pat­ing the loom­ing Brex­it dead­line over the past two years has been like watch­ing the slow­est train wreck in his­to­ry. But for those not fol­low­ing the cov­er­age dai­ly, the impend­ing UK seces­sion from the Euro­pean Union is mys­ti­fy­ing. Just how many trains are there, and where are they com­ing from, and how fast, exact­ly, are they going?

From the future of food and drug imports, to the sta­tus of the “cur­rent­ly invis­i­ble” bor­der between North­ern Ire­land and the Repub­lic of Ire­land, to all of the legal minu­ti­ae no one men­tioned dur­ing the cam­paign, the con­se­quences of the recent fail­ure of a Brex­it deal could be dis­as­trous. Were “leave” cam­paign­ers hon­est in their sale of Brex­it to the vot­ers? Did they have any idea how such a thing would work? Ample evi­dence shows the answer to both ques­tions is an unqual­i­fied No.

The Vote Leave cam­paign direc­tor now describes the ref­er­en­dum as a “dumb idea.” Wealthy UK res­i­dents, includ­ing many a Brex­it politi­cian, are fast mov­ing their assets out of the coun­try. So how did Brex­it get sold to vot­ers if it’s such a poten­tial cat­a­stro­phe? The usu­al meth­ods worked quite well, Stephen Fry explains in the video above.

By stok­ing xeno­pho­bic fears over migrants and refugees, Brex­i­teers, he says, cre­at­ed “false assump­tions about the EU, some very dark, and some com­i­cal.” They were assist­ed in con­jur­ing a “myth­i­cal EU drag­on” by tabloid jour­nal­ists who called migrants “cock­roach­es” and “fer­al humans.” Rhetoric indis­tin­guish­able from Nazi pro­pa­gan­da drove a spike in hate crimes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Despite the insis­tence of many vot­ers that their choice was not dri­ven by racial ani­mus, the Brex­it cam­paign, like the Trump cam­paign, Fry says above, unde­ni­ably was. The con­se­quences of these votes for migrant work­ers and refugees speak for them­selves. In the UK, There­sa May’s “hos­tile envi­ron­ment” poli­cies have deprived British cit­i­zens from migrant fam­i­lies of liveli­hoods and safe­ty. Some have faced threats of depor­ta­tion, a sit­u­a­tion sim­i­lar to that fac­ing the chil­dren of Viet­nam War refugees in the US.

Fry calls for iden­ti­fy­ing a “new ene­my” of the peo­ple: mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion like the false claim that the NHS would save 350 mil­lion pounds a week after Brex­it and the repeat­ed lies in the U.S. about undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, crime, and ter­ror­ism. “Per­cep­tion of crime lev­els,” he says, “has become com­plete­ly detached from real­i­ty,” espe­cial­ly since the biggest secu­ri­ty threats come from hate crimes and right-wing vio­lence, a sit­u­a­tion report­ed on, warned about, and ignored, for sev­er­al years.

As in the US, so in the UK: relent­less­ly repeat­ed claims about “inva­sions” has cre­at­ed a very hos­tile envi­ron­ment for mil­lions of peo­ple. Are the facts like­ly to sway those vot­ers who were car­ried away by excess­es of hate and fear? Prob­a­bly not. But those who care about the truth should pay atten­tion to Fry’s debunk­ing. The facts about immi­gra­tion and oth­er issues used to sell far right poli­cies and politi­cians, as he out­lines in these videos, are entire­ly dif­fer­ent than what Brex­it lead­ers and their coun­ter­parts in the US want the pub­lic to believe.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Brex­it 101: The UK’s Stun­ning Vote Explained in 4 Min­utes

Yale Pro­fes­sor Jason Stan­ley Iden­ti­fies 3 Essen­tial Fea­tures of Fas­cism: Invok­ing a Myth­ic Past, Sow­ing Divi­sion & Attack­ing Truth

George Orwell Iden­ti­fies the Main Ene­my of the Free Press: It’s the “Intel­lec­tu­al Cow­ardice” of the Press Itself

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Download Vincent van Gogh’s Collection of 500 Japanese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Create “the Art of the Future”

in Art | January 15th, 2019

Vin­cent van Gogh nev­er went to Japan, but he did spend quite a bit of time in Arles, which he con­sid­ered the Japan of France. What made him think of the place that way had to do entire­ly with aes­thet­ics. The Nether­lands-born painter had moved to Paris in 1886, but two years lat­er he set off for the south of France in hopes of find­ing real-life equiv­a­lents of the “clear­ness of the atmos­phere and the gay colour effects” of Japan­ese prints. These days, we’ve all seen at least a few exam­ples of that kind of art and can imag­ine more or less exact­ly what he was talk­ing about. But how did the man who paint­ed Sun­flow­ers and The Star­ry Night come to draw such inspi­ra­tion from what must have felt like such exot­ic art of such dis­tant a prove­nance?

“There was huge admi­ra­tion for all things Japan­ese in the sec­ond half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry,” says the Van Gogh Muse­um’s visu­al essay on the painter’s rela­tion­ship with Japan. “Very few artists in the Nether­lands stud­ied Japan­ese art. In Paris, by con­trast, it was all the rage. So it was there that Vin­cent dis­cov­ered the impact Ori­en­tal art was hav­ing on the West, when he decid­ed to mod­ernise his own art.”

Hav­ing got a deal on about 660 Japan­ese wood­cuts in the win­ter of 1886–87, appar­ent­ly with an intent to trade them, he ulti­mate­ly held on to them, copied them, and even used their ele­ments as back­grounds for his own por­traits.

“My studio’s quite tol­er­a­ble,” he wrote to his broth­er Theo, “main­ly because I’ve pinned a set of Japan­ese prints on the walls that I find very divert­ing. You know, those lit­tle female fig­ures in gar­dens or on the shore, horse­men, flow­ers, gnarled thorn branch­es.” More than a diver­sion, he saw in their rad­i­cal dif­fer­ence from the rig­or­ous­ly real­is­tic, con­ven­tion-bound tra­di­tion­al Euro­pean paint­ing a way toward “the art of the future,” which he was con­vinced “had to be colour­ful and joy­ous, just like Japan­ese print­mak­ing.” As he devel­oped what he called a “Japan­ese eye” while liv­ing in Arles, “his com­po­si­tions became flat­ter, more intense in colour, with clear lines and dec­o­ra­tive pat­terns.”

The Van Gogh Muse­um has dig­i­tized and made avail­able to down­load Van Gogh’s Japan­ese art col­lec­tion, or at least most of them: you can read about the hun­dred or so “miss­ing” works here, and you can view the 500 the muse­um has retained here. Every time you reload the front page, the selec­tion it presents reshuf­fles; oth­er­wise, you can browse the col­lec­tion by sub­ject, per­son and insti­tu­tion, tech­nique, object type, and style. Some of the best-rep­re­sent­ed cat­e­gories include land­scape, actor print, spring, and female beau­ty. Whether the Japan-inspired Van Gogh (or col­leagues who shared his inter­est, chiefly Paul Gau­guin) suc­ceed­ed in cre­at­ing the art of the future is up to art his­to­ri­ans to debate, but no one who sees his col­lec­tion of Japan­ese art will ever be able to unsee its influ­ence on his own work. Not that Van Gogh did­n’t admit it him­self: “All my work,” he wrote in a lat­er let­ter to Theo, “is based to some extent on Japan­ese art.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

The Van Gogh of Microsoft Excel: How a Japan­ese Retiree Makes Intri­cate Land­scape Paint­ings with Spread­sheet Soft­ware

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

Simon Schama Presents Van Gogh and the Begin­ning of Mod­ern Art

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Complex Math Made Simple With Engaging Animations: Fourier Transform, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Neural Networks & More

in Animation, Math | January 15th, 2019

In many an audio engi­neer­ing course, I’ve come across the Fouri­er Trans­form, an idea so fun­da­men­tal in sound pro­duc­tion that it seems essen­tial for every­one to know it. My lim­it­ed under­stand­ing was, you might say, func­tion­al. It’s some kind of math­e­mat­i­cal reverse engi­neer­ing machine that turns wave­forms into fre­quen­cies, right? Yes, but it’s much more than that. The idea can seem over­whelm­ing to the non-math­e­mat­i­cal­ly-inclined among us.

The Fouri­er Trans­form, named for French math­e­mati­cian and physi­cist Jean-Bap­tiste Joseph Fouri­er, “decom­pos­es” any wave form into fre­quen­cies, and “vir­tu­al­ly every­thing in the world can be described via a wave­form,” writes one intro­duc­tion to the the­o­ry. That includes not only sounds but “elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields, the ele­va­tion of a hill ver­sus loca­tion… the price of  your favorite stock ver­sus time,” the sig­nals of an MRI scan­ner.

The con­cept “extends well beyond sound and fre­quen­cy into many dis­parate areas of math and even physics. It is crazy just how ubiq­ui­tous this idea is,” notes the 3Blue1Brown video above, one of dozens of ani­mat­ed explo­rations of math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts. I know far more than I did yes­ter­day thanks to this com­pre­hen­sive ani­mat­ed lec­ture. Even if it all seems old hat to you, “there is some­thing fun and enrich­ing,” the video assures us, “about see­ing what all of its com­po­nents look like.”

Things get com­pli­cat­ed rather quick­ly when we get into the dense equa­tions, but the video illus­trates every for­mu­la with graphs that trans­form the num­bers into mean­ing­ful mov­ing images.

3Blue1Brown, a project of for­mer Khan Acad­e­my fel­low Grant Sander­son, has done the same for dozens of STEM con­cepts, includ­ing such sub­jects as high­er dimen­sions, cryp­tocur­ren­cies, machine learn­ing, and neur­al net­works and essen­tials of cal­cu­lus and lin­ear alge­bra like the deriv­a­tive para­dox and “Vec­tors, what even are they?”

In short­er lessons, you can learn to count to 1000 on two hands, or, just below, learn what it feels like to invent math. (It feels weird at first.)

Sander­son­’s short cours­es “tend to fall into one of two cat­e­gories,” he writes: top­ics “peo­ple might be seek­ing out,” like many of those men­tioned above, and “prob­lems in math which many peo­ple may not have heard of, and which seem real­ly hard at first, but where some shift in per­spec­tive makes it both doable and beau­ti­ful.” These puz­zles with ele­gant­ly clever solu­tions can be found here. Whether you’re a hard­core math-head or not, you’ll find Sanderson’s series of 3Blue1Brown ani­ma­tions illu­mi­nat­ing. Find them all here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Cit­i­zen Maths: A Free Online Course That Teach­es Adults the Math They Missed in High School

Free Math Text­books 

Math Mag­ic

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Making Sense of White Paintings: A Short Art History Lesson on Minimalism and the All-White Painting

in Art | January 15th, 2019

“I could do that” goes the refrain of philistines at mod­ern art gal­leries, some­times fol­lowed by a “Hell, my dog/cat/baby/elephant could do that!” Sophis­ti­cates smirk know­ing smirks. Oh no, sir or madam, they most cer­tain­ly could not. But maybe every­one, at some lev­el, comes across Agnes Martin’s White Stone or Jo Baer’s Unti­tled (White Square Laven­der) and thinks it looks like some­one “just took a tube of white paint and spread it on a can­vas.”

It’s tempt­ing to imag­ine, notes Vox in the explain­er video above, but “it’s not actu­al­ly that easy.”

Oh, real­ly? Enlight­en us…. Why exact­ly did Robert Ryman’s all-white paint­ing Bridge sell for $20.6 mil­lion dol­lars? This ques­tion may be answered in anoth­er video. Here, we get a lit­tle bit of art history—on the ori­gins of the all-white paint­ing in the min­i­mal­ism of Kaz­imir Male­vich (he pre­ferred to call it “Supre­ma­tism”) and the devel­op­ment of Min­i­mal­ism, cap­i­tal “M.”

Elis­a­beth Sher­man, assis­tant cura­tor at the Whit­ney Muse­um in New York says that “white isn’t ever a pure thing, white is always tint­ed in some way.” Of course we know this, she acknowl­edges, because we’ve mar­veled at the dozens of shades of white in the paint sec­tion of the hard­ware store. Attend to the sub­tle gra­da­tions of white, from warm to cool, and the range of tex­tures, lines, pat­terns, shapes, and “sub­tle intri­ca­cies,” and the all-white paint­ing begins to reveal itself as an almost liv­ing, breath­ing thing rather than a piece of dec­o­ra­tive dry­wall.

Art his­tor­i­cal­ly, the vari­ety of white paint­ings came about prin­ci­pal­ly in the 50s as a response to Abstract Expressionism’s emo­tion­al excess­es and the out­sized ges­tur­al per­son­al­i­ties of De Koon­ing and Pol­lock. Artists like Bauhaus alum Josef Albers and Min­i­mal­ist purist Frank Stel­la pro­posed that “the art object” should “be as far removed from the author as pos­si­ble.” No greater an attack could be launched on the idea of art as per­son­al expres­sion than the all-white paint­ing.

This ten­den­cy toward total abstraction—reducing art to fields of col­or, non-col­or, and sim­ple shapes—has made a lot of peo­ple very upset. Vox includes sev­er­al clips of “men get­ting angry” at Min­i­mal­ist art. The word “pre­ten­tious” pops up a lot. The all-white paint­ing has even inspired a play, Yas­mi­na Reza’s Art, about “a group of life­long friends who are torn apart when one of them buys an all-white paint­ing for $200,000.”

As for “I could do that”… in near­ly every show she’s worked on in her career as a cura­tor, Sher­man remarks, “some­one has said that.” Well, she says, yes, maybe you could. “But you didn’t.” So there. If look­ing at an all-white paint­ing (or an all-black paint­ing) makes you feel angry, annoyed, or dis­mis­sive, maybe, she says, try and get beyond that first impres­sion and engage with the sub­tleties of the work. And maybe don’t ask how much the muse­um paid for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

Watch At the Muse­um, MoMA’s 8‑Part Doc­u­men­tary on What it Takes to Run a World-Class Muse­um

The Tree of Mod­ern Art: Ele­gant Draw­ing Visu­al­izes the Devel­op­ment of Mod­ern Art from Delacroix to Dalí (1940)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Strange Dancing Plague of 1518: When Hundreds of People in France Could Not Stop Dancing for Months

in History, Psychology, Science | January 14th, 2019

If you find your­self think­ing you aren’t a vic­tim of fash­ion, maybe take anoth­er look. Yes, we can con­scious­ly train our­selves to resist trends through force of habit. We can declare our pref­er­ences and stand on prin­ci­ple. But we aren’t con­scious­ly aware of what’s hap­pen­ing in the hid­den turn­ings of our brains. Maybe what we call the uncon­scious has more con­trol over us than we would like to think.

Inex­plic­a­ble episodes of mass obses­sion and com­pul­sion serve as dis­qui­et­ing exam­ples. Mass pan­ics and delu­sions tend to occur, argues author John Waller, “in peo­ple who are under extreme psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress, and who believe in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of spir­it pos­ses­sion. All of these con­di­tions were sat­is­fied in Stras­bourg in 1518,” the year the Danc­ing Plague came to the town in Alsace—an invol­un­tary com­mu­nal dance fes­ti­val with dead­ly out­comes.

The event began with one per­son, as you’ll learn in the almost jaun­ty ani­mat­ed BBC video below, a woman known as Frau Trof­fea. One day she began danc­ing in the street. Peo­ple came out of their hous­es and gawked, laughed, and clapped. Then she didn’t stop. She “con­tin­ued to dance, with­out rest­ing, morn­ing, after­noon, and night for six whole days.” Then her neigh­bors joined in. With­in a month, 400 peo­ple were “danc­ing relent­less­ly with­out music or song.”

We might expect that town lead­ers in this late-Medieval peri­od would have declared it a mass pos­ses­sion event and com­menced with exor­cisms or witch burn­ings. Instead, it was said to be a nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non. Draw­ing on humoral the­o­ry, “local physi­cians blamed it on ‘hot blood,’” History.com’s Evan Andrews writes. They “sug­gest­ed the afflict­ed sim­ply gyrate the fever away. A stage was con­struct­ed and pro­fes­sion­al dancers were brought in. The town even hired a band to pro­vide back­ing music.”

Soon, how­ev­er, bloody and exhaust­ed, peo­ple began dying from strokes and heart attacks. The danc­ing went on for months. It was not a fad. No one was enjoy­ing them­selves. On the con­trary, Waller writes, “con­tem­po­raries were cer­tain that the afflict­ed did not want to dance and the dancers them­selves, when they could, expressed their mis­ery and need for help.” This con­tra­dicts sug­ges­tions they were will­ing mem­bers of a cult, and paints an even dark­er pic­ture of the event.

Cer­tain psy­cho­nauts might see in the 1518 Danc­ing Plague a shared uncon­scious, work­ing some­thing out while drag­ging the poor Stras­bour­gians along behind it. Oth­er, more or less plau­si­ble expla­na­tions have includ­ed ergo­tism, or poi­son­ing “from a psy­chotrop­ic mould that grows on stalks of rye.” How­ev­er, Waller points out, ergot “typ­i­cal­ly cuts off blood sup­ply to the extrem­i­ties mak­ing coor­di­nat­ed move­ment very dif­fi­cult.”

He sug­gests the danc­ing mania came about through the meet­ing of two pri­or con­di­tions: “The city’s poor were suf­fer­ing from severe famine and dis­ease,” and many peo­ple in the region believed they could obtain good health by danc­ing before a stat­ue of Saint Vitus. They also believed, he writes, that “St. Vitus… had the pow­er to take over their minds and inflict a ter­ri­ble, com­pul­sive dance. Once these high­ly vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple began to antic­i­pate the St. Vitus curse they increased the like­li­hood that they’d enter the trance state.”

The mys­tery can­not be defin­i­tive­ly solved, but it does seem that what Waller calls “fer­vent super­nat­u­ral­ism” played a key role, as it has in many mass hys­te­rias, includ­ing “ten such con­ta­gions which had bro­ken out along the Rhine and Moselle rivers since 1374,” as the Pub­lic Domain Review notes. Fur­ther up, see a 1642 engrav­ing based on a 1564 draw­ing by Peter Breughel of anoth­er danc­ing epi­dem­ic which occurred that year in Molen­beek. The 17th cen­tu­ry Ger­man engrav­ing above of a danc­ing epi­dem­ic in a church­yard fea­tures a man hold­ing a sev­ered arm.

We see mass pan­ics and delu­sions around the world, for rea­sons that are rarely clear to schol­ars, psy­chi­a­trists, his­to­ri­ans, anthro­pol­o­gists, and physi­cians dur­ing or after the fact. What is med­ical­ly known as Saint Vitus dance, or Sydenham’s Chorea, has rec­og­nized phys­i­cal caus­es like rheumat­ic fever and occurs in a spe­cif­ic sub­set of the pop­u­la­tion. The his­tor­i­cal Saint Vitus Dance, or Danc­ing Plague, how­ev­er, affect­ed peo­ple indis­crim­i­nate­ly and seems to have been a phe­nom­e­non of mass sug­ges­tion, like many oth­er social-psy­cho­log­i­cal events around the world.

Episodes of epi­dem­ic manias relat­ed to out­mod­ed super­nat­ur­al beliefs can seem espe­cial­ly bizarre, but the mass psy­chol­o­gy of 21st cen­tu­ry west­ern cul­ture includes many episodes of social con­ta­gion and com­pul­sion no less strange, and per­haps no less wide­spread or dead­ly, espe­cial­ly dur­ing times of extreme stress.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

A Free Yale Course on Medieval His­to­ry: 700 Years in 22 Lec­tures

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Musical Instruments in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Horrible”

in Art, Museums, Music | January 14th, 2019

Wel­come to The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.

You’ll find no angel­ic strings here.

Those are reserved for first class cit­i­zens whose vir­tu­ous lives earned them pas­sage to the upper­most heights.

Down below, stringed instru­ments pro­duce the most hell­ish sort of cacoph­o­ny, a fit­ting accom­pa­ni­ment for the horn whose bell is befouled with the arm of a tor­tured soul.

How do we know that’s what they sound­ed like?

A group of musi­col­o­gists, crafts­peo­ple and aca­d­e­mics from the Bate Col­lec­tion of Musi­cal Instru­ments at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, took it upon them­selves to actu­al­ly build the instru­ments depict­ed in Hierony­mus Bosch’s action-packed trip­tych—the hell harp, the vio­lat­ed lute, the gross­ly over­sized hur­dy-gur­dy…

…And then they played them.

Let us hope they stopped shy of shov­ing flutes up their bums. (Such a place­ment might pro­duce a sound, but not from the flute’s gold­en throat).

The Bosch exper­i­ment added ten more instru­ments to the museum’s already impres­sive, over-1000-strong col­lec­tion of wood­winds, per­cus­sion, and brass, many from the stu­dios of esteemed mak­ers, some dat­ing all the way back to the Renais­sance.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the new addi­tions don’t sound very good. “Hor­ri­ble” and “painful” are among the adjec­tives the Bate Col­lec­tion man­ag­er Andrew Lamb uses to describe the aur­al fruits of his team’s months-long labors.

Might we assume Bosch would have want­ed it that way?

Bran­don McWilliams, the wag behind Bosch’s wild­ly enthu­si­as­tic, f‑bomb-laced review of thrash met­al band Slayer’s 1986 Reign in Blood album, would sure­ly say yes, as would
Alden and Cali Hack­mann, North Amer­i­can hur­dy-gur­dy mak­ers, who note that Bosch’s painter­ly des­e­cra­tions were not lim­it­ed to their per­son­al favorite instru­ment:

Bosch and his con­tem­po­raries viewed music as sin­ful, asso­ci­at­ing it with oth­er sins of the flesh and spir­it. A num­ber of oth­er instru­ments are also depict­ed: a harp, a drum, a shawm, a recorder, and the met­al tri­an­gle being played by the woman (a nun, per­haps) who is appar­ent­ly impris­oned in the key­box of the instru­ment. The hur­dy-gur­dy was also asso­ci­at­ed with beg­gars, who were often blind. The man turn­ing the crank is hold­ing a beg­ging bowl in his oth­er hand. Hang­ing from the bowl is a met­al seal on a rib­bon, called a “gaber­lun­zie.” This was a license to beg in a par­tic­u­lar town on a par­tic­u­lar day, grant­ed by the nobil­i­ty. Sol­diers who were blind­ed or maimed in their lord’s ser­vice might be giv­en a gaber­lun­zie in rec­om­pense.

To the best of our knowl­edge, no gaber­fun­zies were grant­ed, nor any sin­ners eter­nal­ly damned, in the Bate Collection’s caper. Accord­ing to man­ag­er Lamb, expand­ing the bound­aries of music edu­ca­tion was rec­om­pense enough, well worth the tem­po­rary affront to ten­der ears.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Hierony­mus Bosch Demon Bird Was Spot­ted Rid­ing the New York City Sub­way the Oth­er Day…

Hierony­mus Bosch Fig­urines: Col­lect Sur­re­al Char­ac­ters from Bosch’s Paint­ings & Put Them on Your Book­shelf

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City tonight as host of The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Fender Stratocaster Made Out of 1200 Colored Pencils

in Music | January 14th, 2019

Alder and Ash. These woods have tra­di­tion­al­ly made up the body of the Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er. Cray­ola col­ored pen­cils? They were nev­er part of the mix … at least until now.

Above, Burls Art gives it a go. In nine min­utes, they take you through the mak­ing and play­ing of the Cray­ola Strat, from start to fin­ish. Afi­ciona­dos, feel free to argue over the tonal qual­i­ties of this new fan­gled cre­ation.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

Repair­ing Willie Nelson’s Trig­ger: A Good Look at How a Luthi­er Gets America’s Most Icon­ic Gui­tar on the Road Again

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