Newsweek
SPONSORED BY:
Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too)
I'm not opposed to 3-D as an option. I'm opposed to it as a way of life.
By Roger Ebert | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 29, 2010
From the magazine issue dated May 10, 2010
3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.
That's my position. I know it's heresy to the biz side of show business. After all, 3-D has not only given Hollywood its biggest payday ($2.7 billion and counting for Avatar), but a slew of other hits. The year's top three films—Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—were all projected in 3-D, and they're only the beginning. The very notion of Jackass in 3-D may induce a wave of hysterical blindness, to avoid seeing Steve-O's you-know-what in that way. But many directors, editors, and cinematographers agree with me about the shortcomings of 3-D. So do many movie lovers—even executives who feel stampeded by another Hollywood infatuation with a technology that was already pointless when their grandfathers played with stereoscopes. The heretics' case, point by point:
Read the entire article HERE.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Saturday, May 01, 2010
Reggie Watts' Rap Parody (NSFW)
And FYE, here is some of Reggie's sweet work using a delay unit to sequence his voice in real time into a variety of grooves:
Thursday, April 29, 2010
DJ Spooky on copyright law: Open Source, Open Culture
Big Think
....
Question: Should digital content be free?
DJ Spooky: I’m a big pro-open source, pro-creative commons kind of artist. I think that it’s important to realize that copyright law as it is written relates mainly to the 18th century’s relationship to physical goods. And as things move more and more to a digital media, hyper-connected world we need to transform the models of how we think of ownership. Copyright law is something I respect, but the way the law is written versus the way we live in this rip, mix, burn kind of scenario, you know... It’s all about I think thinking of digital music as the kind of new folk culture where everyone should share, and by sharing they create a more rich and robust, you know, narrative.
......
Check out the interview on video HERE.
....
Question: Should digital content be free?
DJ Spooky: I’m a big pro-open source, pro-creative commons kind of artist. I think that it’s important to realize that copyright law as it is written relates mainly to the 18th century’s relationship to physical goods. And as things move more and more to a digital media, hyper-connected world we need to transform the models of how we think of ownership. Copyright law is something I respect, but the way the law is written versus the way we live in this rip, mix, burn kind of scenario, you know... It’s all about I think thinking of digital music as the kind of new folk culture where everyone should share, and by sharing they create a more rich and robust, you know, narrative.
......
Check out the interview on video HERE.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Church Bells, Prayer Calls, and American Public Space
In Media Res
Attending to Attention: Church Bells, Prayer Calls, and American Public Space
by Isaac Weiner — Georgia State University
April 13, 2010 – 00:03
Curator's Note
This CBS News clip from 2004 describes an (at the time) ongoing dispute about the Islamic call to prayer, or azan, in Hamtramck, Michigan. For six months in 2004, controversy raged in Hamtramck, receiving national attention, as residents debated a proposed amendment that would exempt the azan from the local noise ordinance. The call to prayer functioned as a flashpoint in disputes about the integration of Muslims into this historically Polish-Catholic dominated urban enclave. No one openly contested Muslims’ right to worship in their mosques, but some neighbors resisted and regarded as inappropriate this public pronouncement of Islamic presence that audibly intruded upon public space.
Christian and Muslim communities have long used auditory announcements, such as church bells and prayer calls, to mark social and geographic boundaries. The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer even described parishes as “acoustic communities,” constituted by those within auditory range of its church bells, its boundaries mapped aurally rather than visually. But such an understanding assumes a homogenous listening community, a uniform audience of willing hearers who interpret the meaning of these public pronouncements in similar ways. In the pluralistic public spaces of American life, these sounds reach multiple, heterogeneous audiences—both intended and unintended, willing and unwilling—who hear and respond to them in different ways. These public sounds mediate contact among diverse religious communities.
Critics of the azan described it as “noise” and argued that they should not “have to” listen to it. Proponents, in turn, argued that the azan was no different from church bells, and moreover, that religious sounds could not possibly constitute noise.
“Noise” is a funny thing. On the one hand, it refers simply to loud sounds. But more typically, it refers to sounds that are unwanted – or, in the words of Peter Bailey, to sounds that sound “out of place.” Sounds are not inherently noisy. Instead, for sounds to become noise, one must take note of them.
....
Read the post, comments, and see the 2004 news video mentioned above HERE.
Attending to Attention: Church Bells, Prayer Calls, and American Public Space
by Isaac Weiner — Georgia State University
April 13, 2010 – 00:03
Curator's Note
This CBS News clip from 2004 describes an (at the time) ongoing dispute about the Islamic call to prayer, or azan, in Hamtramck, Michigan. For six months in 2004, controversy raged in Hamtramck, receiving national attention, as residents debated a proposed amendment that would exempt the azan from the local noise ordinance. The call to prayer functioned as a flashpoint in disputes about the integration of Muslims into this historically Polish-Catholic dominated urban enclave. No one openly contested Muslims’ right to worship in their mosques, but some neighbors resisted and regarded as inappropriate this public pronouncement of Islamic presence that audibly intruded upon public space.
Christian and Muslim communities have long used auditory announcements, such as church bells and prayer calls, to mark social and geographic boundaries. The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer even described parishes as “acoustic communities,” constituted by those within auditory range of its church bells, its boundaries mapped aurally rather than visually. But such an understanding assumes a homogenous listening community, a uniform audience of willing hearers who interpret the meaning of these public pronouncements in similar ways. In the pluralistic public spaces of American life, these sounds reach multiple, heterogeneous audiences—both intended and unintended, willing and unwilling—who hear and respond to them in different ways. These public sounds mediate contact among diverse religious communities.
Critics of the azan described it as “noise” and argued that they should not “have to” listen to it. Proponents, in turn, argued that the azan was no different from church bells, and moreover, that religious sounds could not possibly constitute noise.
“Noise” is a funny thing. On the one hand, it refers simply to loud sounds. But more typically, it refers to sounds that are unwanted – or, in the words of Peter Bailey, to sounds that sound “out of place.” Sounds are not inherently noisy. Instead, for sounds to become noise, one must take note of them.
....
Read the post, comments, and see the 2004 news video mentioned above HERE.
Music lessons build brainpower
LAT
Music lessons build brainpower
School districts cutting arts programs should first consider that playing an instrument activates neuro-pathways to facilitate learning.
Steve Lopez
April 25, 2010
......
All of which takes me back to April 14, when David Robertson, a Santa Monica High alum (1976), returned to campus, made a pitch for Measure A and was treated like a returning hero.
Robertson, one of the brightest conductors in the world of classical music, was in town to lead his St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a Disney Hall performance that night. But he stopped by SaMo High first to hang with members of the school's premier orchestra and hear them play Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 and Bernstein's Overture to "Candide."
Robertson was impressed, but not surprised. He told the students that in all his worldly travels, he's never seen a public music program as good as the one in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, where he sang in first grade, began studying trumpet in fourth grade and played in an orchestra by 6th grade.
"No other program compares," Robertson said.
In the audience, teachers and parents told me about students of all income levels who have prospered in the program and gone on to great universities, some studying music and some not. Also in the audience was a friend of mine, L.A. Philharmonic violinist Robert Gupta, a New Yorker, who, amazingly, joined the orchestra in 2007 at the age of 19. And here's where the brainpower angle comes in.
High school music instruction isn't threatened in Santa Monica just yet, but the elementary school program could take a big hit, which reminded me of Gupta's theory on how studying music at an early age can develop the brain.And by the way, he's no slouch on the subject. Gupta graduated from college with a pre-med biology degree at 17 and two years later also had a master's in music.
"The corpus callosum is enlarged" when you study music, he explained to me at Santa Monica High, saying the expansion of that pathway increases communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.
We were backstage by then and Robertson chimed in, saying the visual, audio and motor skills learned in music build brainpower.
"Any time you learn, what you're doing is building a network that will fire automatically," said the conductor, explaining how a musician travels along a C-major scale without rethinking every step in the process.
This kind of development is particularly helpful at an early age, said Gupta, because a child's brain has many more neurons and is far more active than an adult's. That's why it's easier to learn music, or language, as a kid, particularly if the brain gets lots of exercise.
.....
Read the full post HERE.
Music lessons build brainpower
School districts cutting arts programs should first consider that playing an instrument activates neuro-pathways to facilitate learning.
Steve Lopez
April 25, 2010
......
All of which takes me back to April 14, when David Robertson, a Santa Monica High alum (1976), returned to campus, made a pitch for Measure A and was treated like a returning hero.
Robertson, one of the brightest conductors in the world of classical music, was in town to lead his St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a Disney Hall performance that night. But he stopped by SaMo High first to hang with members of the school's premier orchestra and hear them play Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 and Bernstein's Overture to "Candide."
Robertson was impressed, but not surprised. He told the students that in all his worldly travels, he's never seen a public music program as good as the one in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, where he sang in first grade, began studying trumpet in fourth grade and played in an orchestra by 6th grade.
"No other program compares," Robertson said.
In the audience, teachers and parents told me about students of all income levels who have prospered in the program and gone on to great universities, some studying music and some not. Also in the audience was a friend of mine, L.A. Philharmonic violinist Robert Gupta, a New Yorker, who, amazingly, joined the orchestra in 2007 at the age of 19. And here's where the brainpower angle comes in.
High school music instruction isn't threatened in Santa Monica just yet, but the elementary school program could take a big hit, which reminded me of Gupta's theory on how studying music at an early age can develop the brain.And by the way, he's no slouch on the subject. Gupta graduated from college with a pre-med biology degree at 17 and two years later also had a master's in music.
"The corpus callosum is enlarged" when you study music, he explained to me at Santa Monica High, saying the expansion of that pathway increases communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.
We were backstage by then and Robertson chimed in, saying the visual, audio and motor skills learned in music build brainpower.
"Any time you learn, what you're doing is building a network that will fire automatically," said the conductor, explaining how a musician travels along a C-major scale without rethinking every step in the process.
This kind of development is particularly helpful at an early age, said Gupta, because a child's brain has many more neurons and is far more active than an adult's. That's why it's easier to learn music, or language, as a kid, particularly if the brain gets lots of exercise.
.....
Read the full post HERE.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Against Yoga's Expense and Star System
New York Times has a story on Yoga's New Wave:
April 23, 2010
A Yoga Manifesto
By MARY BILLARD
ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40 initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.
You can even combine yoga with a vacation in the Caribbean, but it will cost you: in August, the luxurious Parrot Cay resort in Turks and Caicos has a six-night retreat with classes taught by the “yoga rock stars” (in the words of the press release) Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman. The cost? A cool $6,077. (In August!)
And is it surprising that yoga, like so much else in this age of celebrity, now has something of a star system, with yoga teachers now almost as recognizable as Oscar winners? The flowing locks of Rodney Yee. The do-rag bandanna worn by Baron Baptiste. The hyper perpetual calm exhibited by David Life and Sharon Gannon, who taught Sting, Madonna and Russell Simmons. The contortions (and Rolls-Royces) of Bikram Choudhury.
Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to 15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7 billion.
“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.”
Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that. There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee structure. The manifesto is on the opening page of its Web site, yogatothepeople.com: “There will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers ... No ego no script no pedestals.”
One more thing: There are no “glorified” teachers or star yogis. You can’t even find out who is teaching which class when, or reserve a spot with a specific instructor. And that’s exactly the way that Greg Gumucio wants it.
Read the full story HERE.
April 23, 2010
A Yoga Manifesto
By MARY BILLARD
ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40 initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.
You can even combine yoga with a vacation in the Caribbean, but it will cost you: in August, the luxurious Parrot Cay resort in Turks and Caicos has a six-night retreat with classes taught by the “yoga rock stars” (in the words of the press release) Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman. The cost? A cool $6,077. (In August!)
And is it surprising that yoga, like so much else in this age of celebrity, now has something of a star system, with yoga teachers now almost as recognizable as Oscar winners? The flowing locks of Rodney Yee. The do-rag bandanna worn by Baron Baptiste. The hyper perpetual calm exhibited by David Life and Sharon Gannon, who taught Sting, Madonna and Russell Simmons. The contortions (and Rolls-Royces) of Bikram Choudhury.
Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to 15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7 billion.
“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.”
Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that. There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee structure. The manifesto is on the opening page of its Web site, yogatothepeople.com: “There will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers ... No ego no script no pedestals.”
One more thing: There are no “glorified” teachers or star yogis. You can’t even find out who is teaching which class when, or reserve a spot with a specific instructor. And that’s exactly the way that Greg Gumucio wants it.
Read the full story HERE.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Composer Jennifer Higdon's Huge Year
Jennifer Higdon's huge year (and really it has only been four months). She's won a Grammy for one classical composition and a Pulitzer for another. She's in high demand, people enjoy her music, and actually want to hear it. As you can tell by the story, there is a little defensive posture about this accessibility. The NYT has a profile:
April 22, 2010
Despite Anxiety and Naysayers, Composer Wins Her Pulitzer
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
PHILADELPHIA — Jennifer Higdon wishes there were a 12-step program on how to deal with all the various stages of composing anxiety, she said, laughing, on Sunday in the spacious apartment here that she shares with her partner, Cheryl Lawson.
“Starting a piece is the worst,” she said, “and that can stretch from one day to three weeks of agony. The cats run and hide.”
Despite the angst, Ms. Higdon, 47, comes across as friendly, down to earth and upbeat. And her creative struggles have paid off. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize this month for her Violin Concerto, which she wrote for the young soloist Hilary Hahn. The Pulitzer committee praised the work, which received its premiere in February 2009 with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as “a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.”
Those are qualities integral to many of Ms. Higdon’s scores. Her large catalog also includes a piano concerto (which was given its premiere in December by Yuja Wang), a saxophone concerto and numerous chamber and orchestral works. “The Singing Rooms,” for chorus, orchestra and solo violin, recently had its premiere with Jennifer Koh as soloist. The San Francisco Opera has commissioned an opera for fall 2013.
Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has conducted and recorded several of Ms. Higdon’s works, including the lively Percussion Concerto. She described her music as American in its immediacy, vitality and sense of optimism. Echoes of American composers like Aaron Copland can be heard in works like “Blue Cathedral,” the most frequently performed piece in the 2007-8 season of those composed during the past 25 years, according to the League of American Orchestras. Another of Ms. Higdon’s most popular works is the bluegrass-inspired “Concerto 4-3.”
Her scores are “very strong rhythmically,” Ms. Alsop said, “with real scope and shape and architecture. She knows how to bring out the best of the various instrumental colors in the orchestra.” She added that Ms. Higdon’s music is “very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.”
“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”
Ms. Higdon got experimental urges out of her system at a young age. Her parents were hippies, she said, and she and her younger brother were fed a steady diet of avant-garde film, art and theater in Atlanta, where her father, Kenny Higdon, worked as a freelance artist for advertising agencies. A huge black-and-white abstract painting by Mr. Higdon hangs in his daughter’s living room.
When Ms. Higdon was 11, the family moved to Seymour, a tiny town in Eastern Tennessee, where she and Ms. Lawson met in high school.
Ms. Higdon, who still speaks with a lilting Southern accent, had almost no exposure to classical music growing up, but taught herself to play the flute at 15 and entered Bowling Green State University at 18 as a flute major. After catching up on theory classes she began composing at 21. She received an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she now teaches composition, before studying at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I was kind of the black sheep of the family going into classical music,” said Ms. Higdon, laughing, but said her parents were fully supportive of her choice. At Bowling Green she took a conducting class with Robert Spano, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He describes her music as “expressive and beautiful and communicative and fresh and inventive.”
She is “very representative of something that’s happened in American music with composers of her generation,” Mr. Spano said, “a palpable aesthetic shift from the generation before them that I find very powerful.”
Ms. Higdon, who studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania (where she received master’s and doctoral degrees), does use some experimental touches in her scores. The Violin Concerto (which Ms. Hahn has recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon disc to be released in September) begins with percussionists using knitting needles on crotales, or small cymbals, and glockenspiel. In her piano and string duo “String Poetic” Ms. Higdon makes imaginative use of the strange texture of stopped piano strings (a sound created when the pianist damps the strings inside the instrument with one hand and plays the keys with the other).
But any avant-garde touches are mostly incorporated into traditional structures and sound worlds. In the first movement of the violin concerto, after a spare introduction, the violin soars with propulsive vigor over a rich orchestral fabric, with introverted passages alternating with fiery outbursts. A jaw-dropping cadenza concludes the movement.
One of Ms. Higdon’s biggest obstacles has been her own success.
.....
Read the entire post HERE.
April 22, 2010
Despite Anxiety and Naysayers, Composer Wins Her Pulitzer
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
PHILADELPHIA — Jennifer Higdon wishes there were a 12-step program on how to deal with all the various stages of composing anxiety, she said, laughing, on Sunday in the spacious apartment here that she shares with her partner, Cheryl Lawson.
“Starting a piece is the worst,” she said, “and that can stretch from one day to three weeks of agony. The cats run and hide.”
Despite the angst, Ms. Higdon, 47, comes across as friendly, down to earth and upbeat. And her creative struggles have paid off. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize this month for her Violin Concerto, which she wrote for the young soloist Hilary Hahn. The Pulitzer committee praised the work, which received its premiere in February 2009 with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as “a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.”
Those are qualities integral to many of Ms. Higdon’s scores. Her large catalog also includes a piano concerto (which was given its premiere in December by Yuja Wang), a saxophone concerto and numerous chamber and orchestral works. “The Singing Rooms,” for chorus, orchestra and solo violin, recently had its premiere with Jennifer Koh as soloist. The San Francisco Opera has commissioned an opera for fall 2013.
Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has conducted and recorded several of Ms. Higdon’s works, including the lively Percussion Concerto. She described her music as American in its immediacy, vitality and sense of optimism. Echoes of American composers like Aaron Copland can be heard in works like “Blue Cathedral,” the most frequently performed piece in the 2007-8 season of those composed during the past 25 years, according to the League of American Orchestras. Another of Ms. Higdon’s most popular works is the bluegrass-inspired “Concerto 4-3.”
Her scores are “very strong rhythmically,” Ms. Alsop said, “with real scope and shape and architecture. She knows how to bring out the best of the various instrumental colors in the orchestra.” She added that Ms. Higdon’s music is “very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.”
“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”
Ms. Higdon got experimental urges out of her system at a young age. Her parents were hippies, she said, and she and her younger brother were fed a steady diet of avant-garde film, art and theater in Atlanta, where her father, Kenny Higdon, worked as a freelance artist for advertising agencies. A huge black-and-white abstract painting by Mr. Higdon hangs in his daughter’s living room.
When Ms. Higdon was 11, the family moved to Seymour, a tiny town in Eastern Tennessee, where she and Ms. Lawson met in high school.
Ms. Higdon, who still speaks with a lilting Southern accent, had almost no exposure to classical music growing up, but taught herself to play the flute at 15 and entered Bowling Green State University at 18 as a flute major. After catching up on theory classes she began composing at 21. She received an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she now teaches composition, before studying at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I was kind of the black sheep of the family going into classical music,” said Ms. Higdon, laughing, but said her parents were fully supportive of her choice. At Bowling Green she took a conducting class with Robert Spano, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He describes her music as “expressive and beautiful and communicative and fresh and inventive.”
She is “very representative of something that’s happened in American music with composers of her generation,” Mr. Spano said, “a palpable aesthetic shift from the generation before them that I find very powerful.”
Ms. Higdon, who studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania (where she received master’s and doctoral degrees), does use some experimental touches in her scores. The Violin Concerto (which Ms. Hahn has recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon disc to be released in September) begins with percussionists using knitting needles on crotales, or small cymbals, and glockenspiel. In her piano and string duo “String Poetic” Ms. Higdon makes imaginative use of the strange texture of stopped piano strings (a sound created when the pianist damps the strings inside the instrument with one hand and plays the keys with the other).
But any avant-garde touches are mostly incorporated into traditional structures and sound worlds. In the first movement of the violin concerto, after a spare introduction, the violin soars with propulsive vigor over a rich orchestral fabric, with introverted passages alternating with fiery outbursts. A jaw-dropping cadenza concludes the movement.
One of Ms. Higdon’s biggest obstacles has been her own success.
.....
Read the entire post HERE.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Equal Temperment Tuning; The Wolf at Our Heels
SLATE
The Wolf at Our Heels: The centuries-old struggle to play in tune.
By Jan SwaffordPosted Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at 10:08 AM ET
You are about to enter the Twilight Zone. I submit for your consideration an oddly named book lying on an ordinary desk: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by professor Ross W. Duffin. This book was written by a madman. Or is he? You should understand: If Duffin is mad, he's not alone. And the spaces between the lines of his book are filled with the silent laughter of the gods.
The gods are laughing at their little joke on musicians. When it comes to the tuning of instruments, especially keyboards and fretted instruments, nature drops a giant hairball in our path. Here's a short course on the arcana of tuning. It will take us to the meaning of a celebrated collection of keyboard pieces: J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, humankind's greatest musical riposte to the laughter of the gods.
In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. The basic science of intervals was laid out in ancient Greece, perhaps first by the mathematician Pythagoras. The first notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, and G. The note E is the third note up from C, so the interval C-E is a third. The note G is five notes up, so C-G is a fifth. So musical intervals run second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. (Some intervals can be major, like F to A, or minor, like F to A flat.)
OK? Now, as Pythagoras discovered, intervals are also mathematical ratios. If you take an open guitar string sounding E, stop it with your finger in the middle and pluck, you get E an octave above. The octave ratio, then, is 2:1. If you stop the string in the ratio 3:2, you get a fifth higher than the open string, the note B. The other intervals have progressive ratios; 4:3 is a fourth, and so on.
So far, all very tidy. But this is where things get hilarious. As Pythagoras also realized in mathematical terms, if you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of 12 perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature's math doesn't add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn't end at a perfect interval from where you started. If you tune three perfect 5:4 major thirds, it should logically add up to an octave, but it doesn't; the result is egregiously flat. It is this innate irreconcilability of pitch that, through the centuries, has driven men mad. Professor Duffin is a living representative of a long line of obsessives. Personal and institutional battles have been fought over the issue of tuning, fame won and lost. It was ever thus, wrestling with the gods.
What all this means in practice is that in tuning keyboards and fretted instruments, you have to screw around with the intervals in order to fit the necessary notes into an octave. In other words, as we say, you have to temper pure intervals, nudge them up or down a hair in some systematic way. Otherwise, you get chaos. So there's the second word you need to remember: The business of adapting tuning to nature's messy math is called temperament. And now we're halfway to understanding The Well-Tempered Clavier: It has to do with the art and science of keyboard tuning. We'll get to the wellness in a minute.
There have been some 150 tuning systems put forth over the centuries, none of them pure. There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can't be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune. Medieval tunings voted for pure fifths. By the late Renaissance the tuning systems favored better thirds. The latter were various kinds of meantone temperament. In meantone, most of the accumulated fudges were dumped onto two notes, usually G# (aka A flat) and E flat. The shivery effect of those two notes played together in meantone temperaments earned it the name "wolf," which, like its namesake, was regarded with a certain holy fear.
By and large, in composing music for meantone keyboards you avoided the wolf, so never, for example, wrote in the key of A flat. In fact, those temperaments left only a few keys that were well-enough in tune to be usable: the keys between two flats and three sharps. Between the 16th and 18th centuries a lot of splendid music was written in meantone tuning, within that range of a dozen major and minor keys. But the inability to write in all 24 possible keys ate at composers' guts. More and more, there was a demand for a tuning system that would render all keys usable—and escape the wolf.
One of those tunings was already known to the ancients: equal temperament. Here the poison is distributed equally through the system: The distance between each interval is mathematically the same, so each interval is equally in, and slightly out of, tune. Nothing is perfect; nothing is terrible. So now it's all fixed, yes? The laughter of the gods has been stilled, right? Are you kidding? You fools: The gods never lose.
For centuries, equal temperament didn't catch on because musicians tended not to like it. Even when fretted instruments were invented and lutes and guitars were mostly tuned in equal temperament, they still didn't like it. Most especially, musicians didn't like the fat major thirds of equal temperament, which are way out of tune with nature. They preferred the sweet thirds of meantone temperaments, with all their limitations. For another thing, in meantone each key had an audible personality, from, say, the almost-pure and upstanding C major, suitable to moods of equanimity and celebration, to shadowy C minor, suitable for doubt and despair. Equal temperament leaves every key with exactly the same personality, which was widely felt to be boring. Musicians still preferred, then, the old varieties of what is generically called unequal temperament.
In the late 17th century, tuning geeks came up with a new idea: Let's hair-split all over the keyboard, tweaking this and that in minuscule ways, letting, say, a third be a bit larger in one spot and a bit smaller in another. These kinds of flexible temperaments accomplished several things at once: 1) They made all keys usable; 2) yet they preserved the individual character of keys, because each still had its distinctive collection of intervals; 3) and they tamed the big bad wolf.
Hey, said adherents of this more sophisticated unequal system, this really works well! So they called it well-temperament. One of those adherents was J. S. Bach. He wanted, he said somewhat testily, to write in any damn key he felt like, and he tuned his harpsichord himself to make that possible. When a famous organ tuner who did meantone tuning showed up, Bach would play an A flat major chord on one of his organs with its howling wolf, just to torture the old man.
Bach wrote the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier (clavier meaning any kind of keyboard instrument) not only to show off this improved system but to help make well-temperament mandatory by writing irreplaceable pieces in every key. Anybody who wanted to play from the WTC was pressured to use well-temperament, because many of the pieces sounded sour in any other tuning. (However, heh-heh, there's no precise record of which well-tempered system Bach used.)
.......
The various kinds of meantone and well-temperament help explain why, in the 18th into 19th centuries, keys had particular emotional associations. Key descriptions of the time sound outlandish, and indeed some were on the loony side, but they were founded on the reality that in unequal temperaments each key had its distinctive color and personality. "Is something gay, brilliant, or martial needed?" wrote one theorist. "Take C, D, E [majors]." Another: "D major … the key of triumph, of Hallelujahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing." All those keys were relatively well in tune on the keyboard. Minor keys were innately less in tune, so darker in sound and import: G minor, for example, is "suited to frenzy, despair, agitation. ... The lament of a noble matron who no longer has her youthful beauty." You want a pretty pastoral piece? You want a relaxing key like F major—the key of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony:
Two of Beethoven's favorite keys tell us a lot about him. The most famous is C minor, described by one writer of the time as "a tragic key … fit to express grand misadventures, deaths of heroes, and grand but mournful, ominous, and lugubrious actions."
.......
On the other hand, in the prevailing unequal temperaments there was still the presence, or at least the ghost, of the old wolf. Thus, croaked one theorist concerning that key, "Death, grave, putrefaction, judgment, eternity lie in its radius." Beethoven studied the theorists carefully, then did what he wanted. As for the putrefaction of A flat major: baloney. For Beethoven, that key, with its complex and distinctive coloration, suggested feelings in the direction of nobility, devotion, and resignation, as in the second movement of the Pathètique, again by Andras Schiff:
When composers stretched for more harmonic variety and tension in the first decades of the 19th century, as a practical matter the once-despised equal temperament won out over unequal tunings, which withered away during the century. But as professor Duffin exemplifies in How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, many tuning geeks today still find that temperament loathsome. Actually, Duffin's book is less rabid than its title sounds, amounting to a plea for playing keyboard music through the early 19th century in period tunings, especially in one called "sixth-comma meantone," which Duffin believes is the tuning Bach had in mind for the Well-Tempered Clavier. His reasoning is of Glenn Beckian deviousness. Some claim to find a cabalistic clue to Bach's intended tuning, close to sixth-comma, in the curlicues at the top of his title page for the WTC:
That idea may be nuts, or not. Bach was into puzzles, numerology, and all kinds of musical cabala, so the nuttiest idea of all about his tuning might well be right. It would figure. Listen to Watchorn in the curlicue tuning—or rather a theory about it—in the C# Major Prelude, one of the world's most happy-making pieces. This is another key out of the pale in older temperaments:
How do the travails of keyboard temperament apply to instruments without fixed tuning, like violins, trombones, flugelhorns, and the human voice? They don't apply at all. Most of the time violinists, et al., tune by ear, on the fly, note by note, and chord by chord. That's why a string quartet or an a cappella choir can be better in tune with nature than a guitar or a piano can. As a high-school trombonist playing with a piano for the first time, I found adjusting to keyboard tuning a pain in the neck—without knowing why. String recitalists know that pain intimately. Meanwhile, an orchestra is made of a bunch of instruments, some of which tune naturally by ear—strings, woodwinds, brass—but also instruments in fixed, equal temperament: harp, marimbas and xylophones, harpsichord and piano, etc. What do orchestras do to harmonize all those conflicting demands? They do the best they can and try not to think about it too much. It can make you crazy.
.........
Read the full article and its accompanying sound file examples HERE.
The Wolf at Our Heels: The centuries-old struggle to play in tune.
By Jan SwaffordPosted Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at 10:08 AM ET
You are about to enter the Twilight Zone. I submit for your consideration an oddly named book lying on an ordinary desk: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by professor Ross W. Duffin. This book was written by a madman. Or is he? You should understand: If Duffin is mad, he's not alone. And the spaces between the lines of his book are filled with the silent laughter of the gods.
The gods are laughing at their little joke on musicians. When it comes to the tuning of instruments, especially keyboards and fretted instruments, nature drops a giant hairball in our path. Here's a short course on the arcana of tuning. It will take us to the meaning of a celebrated collection of keyboard pieces: J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, humankind's greatest musical riposte to the laughter of the gods.
In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. The basic science of intervals was laid out in ancient Greece, perhaps first by the mathematician Pythagoras. The first notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, and G. The note E is the third note up from C, so the interval C-E is a third. The note G is five notes up, so C-G is a fifth. So musical intervals run second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. (Some intervals can be major, like F to A, or minor, like F to A flat.)
OK? Now, as Pythagoras discovered, intervals are also mathematical ratios. If you take an open guitar string sounding E, stop it with your finger in the middle and pluck, you get E an octave above. The octave ratio, then, is 2:1. If you stop the string in the ratio 3:2, you get a fifth higher than the open string, the note B. The other intervals have progressive ratios; 4:3 is a fourth, and so on.
So far, all very tidy. But this is where things get hilarious. As Pythagoras also realized in mathematical terms, if you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of 12 perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature's math doesn't add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn't end at a perfect interval from where you started. If you tune three perfect 5:4 major thirds, it should logically add up to an octave, but it doesn't; the result is egregiously flat. It is this innate irreconcilability of pitch that, through the centuries, has driven men mad. Professor Duffin is a living representative of a long line of obsessives. Personal and institutional battles have been fought over the issue of tuning, fame won and lost. It was ever thus, wrestling with the gods.
What all this means in practice is that in tuning keyboards and fretted instruments, you have to screw around with the intervals in order to fit the necessary notes into an octave. In other words, as we say, you have to temper pure intervals, nudge them up or down a hair in some systematic way. Otherwise, you get chaos. So there's the second word you need to remember: The business of adapting tuning to nature's messy math is called temperament. And now we're halfway to understanding The Well-Tempered Clavier: It has to do with the art and science of keyboard tuning. We'll get to the wellness in a minute.
There have been some 150 tuning systems put forth over the centuries, none of them pure. There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can't be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune. Medieval tunings voted for pure fifths. By the late Renaissance the tuning systems favored better thirds. The latter were various kinds of meantone temperament. In meantone, most of the accumulated fudges were dumped onto two notes, usually G# (aka A flat) and E flat. The shivery effect of those two notes played together in meantone temperaments earned it the name "wolf," which, like its namesake, was regarded with a certain holy fear.
By and large, in composing music for meantone keyboards you avoided the wolf, so never, for example, wrote in the key of A flat. In fact, those temperaments left only a few keys that were well-enough in tune to be usable: the keys between two flats and three sharps. Between the 16th and 18th centuries a lot of splendid music was written in meantone tuning, within that range of a dozen major and minor keys. But the inability to write in all 24 possible keys ate at composers' guts. More and more, there was a demand for a tuning system that would render all keys usable—and escape the wolf.
One of those tunings was already known to the ancients: equal temperament. Here the poison is distributed equally through the system: The distance between each interval is mathematically the same, so each interval is equally in, and slightly out of, tune. Nothing is perfect; nothing is terrible. So now it's all fixed, yes? The laughter of the gods has been stilled, right? Are you kidding? You fools: The gods never lose.
For centuries, equal temperament didn't catch on because musicians tended not to like it. Even when fretted instruments were invented and lutes and guitars were mostly tuned in equal temperament, they still didn't like it. Most especially, musicians didn't like the fat major thirds of equal temperament, which are way out of tune with nature. They preferred the sweet thirds of meantone temperaments, with all their limitations. For another thing, in meantone each key had an audible personality, from, say, the almost-pure and upstanding C major, suitable to moods of equanimity and celebration, to shadowy C minor, suitable for doubt and despair. Equal temperament leaves every key with exactly the same personality, which was widely felt to be boring. Musicians still preferred, then, the old varieties of what is generically called unequal temperament.
In the late 17th century, tuning geeks came up with a new idea: Let's hair-split all over the keyboard, tweaking this and that in minuscule ways, letting, say, a third be a bit larger in one spot and a bit smaller in another. These kinds of flexible temperaments accomplished several things at once: 1) They made all keys usable; 2) yet they preserved the individual character of keys, because each still had its distinctive collection of intervals; 3) and they tamed the big bad wolf.
Hey, said adherents of this more sophisticated unequal system, this really works well! So they called it well-temperament. One of those adherents was J. S. Bach. He wanted, he said somewhat testily, to write in any damn key he felt like, and he tuned his harpsichord himself to make that possible. When a famous organ tuner who did meantone tuning showed up, Bach would play an A flat major chord on one of his organs with its howling wolf, just to torture the old man.
Bach wrote the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier (clavier meaning any kind of keyboard instrument) not only to show off this improved system but to help make well-temperament mandatory by writing irreplaceable pieces in every key. Anybody who wanted to play from the WTC was pressured to use well-temperament, because many of the pieces sounded sour in any other tuning. (However, heh-heh, there's no precise record of which well-tempered system Bach used.)
.......
The various kinds of meantone and well-temperament help explain why, in the 18th into 19th centuries, keys had particular emotional associations. Key descriptions of the time sound outlandish, and indeed some were on the loony side, but they were founded on the reality that in unequal temperaments each key had its distinctive color and personality. "Is something gay, brilliant, or martial needed?" wrote one theorist. "Take C, D, E [majors]." Another: "D major … the key of triumph, of Hallelujahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing." All those keys were relatively well in tune on the keyboard. Minor keys were innately less in tune, so darker in sound and import: G minor, for example, is "suited to frenzy, despair, agitation. ... The lament of a noble matron who no longer has her youthful beauty." You want a pretty pastoral piece? You want a relaxing key like F major—the key of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony:
Two of Beethoven's favorite keys tell us a lot about him. The most famous is C minor, described by one writer of the time as "a tragic key … fit to express grand misadventures, deaths of heroes, and grand but mournful, ominous, and lugubrious actions."
.......
On the other hand, in the prevailing unequal temperaments there was still the presence, or at least the ghost, of the old wolf. Thus, croaked one theorist concerning that key, "Death, grave, putrefaction, judgment, eternity lie in its radius." Beethoven studied the theorists carefully, then did what he wanted. As for the putrefaction of A flat major: baloney. For Beethoven, that key, with its complex and distinctive coloration, suggested feelings in the direction of nobility, devotion, and resignation, as in the second movement of the Pathètique, again by Andras Schiff:
When composers stretched for more harmonic variety and tension in the first decades of the 19th century, as a practical matter the once-despised equal temperament won out over unequal tunings, which withered away during the century. But as professor Duffin exemplifies in How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, many tuning geeks today still find that temperament loathsome. Actually, Duffin's book is less rabid than its title sounds, amounting to a plea for playing keyboard music through the early 19th century in period tunings, especially in one called "sixth-comma meantone," which Duffin believes is the tuning Bach had in mind for the Well-Tempered Clavier. His reasoning is of Glenn Beckian deviousness. Some claim to find a cabalistic clue to Bach's intended tuning, close to sixth-comma, in the curlicues at the top of his title page for the WTC:
That idea may be nuts, or not. Bach was into puzzles, numerology, and all kinds of musical cabala, so the nuttiest idea of all about his tuning might well be right. It would figure. Listen to Watchorn in the curlicue tuning—or rather a theory about it—in the C# Major Prelude, one of the world's most happy-making pieces. This is another key out of the pale in older temperaments:
How do the travails of keyboard temperament apply to instruments without fixed tuning, like violins, trombones, flugelhorns, and the human voice? They don't apply at all. Most of the time violinists, et al., tune by ear, on the fly, note by note, and chord by chord. That's why a string quartet or an a cappella choir can be better in tune with nature than a guitar or a piano can. As a high-school trombonist playing with a piano for the first time, I found adjusting to keyboard tuning a pain in the neck—without knowing why. String recitalists know that pain intimately. Meanwhile, an orchestra is made of a bunch of instruments, some of which tune naturally by ear—strings, woodwinds, brass—but also instruments in fixed, equal temperament: harp, marimbas and xylophones, harpsichord and piano, etc. What do orchestras do to harmonize all those conflicting demands? They do the best they can and try not to think about it too much. It can make you crazy.
.........
Read the full article and its accompanying sound file examples HERE.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Gary Giddins on the Future of Jazz
another great interview clip from Bigthink.com
What's Next for jazz?
Gary Giddins: Well, nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Fusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going.
But I would say this. I don't think we're going to be seeing those kinds of distinct and discrete movements like Swing, Bop, and Fusion. I think now, it's a question of individuals—one thing that is important to remember is that in the early years of jazz, a lot of major musicians, like Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman, had college educations and degrees and all of that.
But a lot of the great figures, like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, did not. I mean, Armstrong didn't even go through high school. Hundreds, if not thousands, of major figures learned on the bandstand, that was their apprenticeship.
Today, the apprenticeship of musicians is in the college orchestra. I mean, you're just not going to meet a musician who hasn't got a least a BA and probably an MA, and hasn’t been to a music school and hasn't had “Giant Steps” and a homework assignment. So, it's very different.
So, because they have this historical perspective, they aren't necessarily just coming out of whatever their generation is into, and also because they are growing up and they don't have the same prejudices against pop music that certain generations had, they can use that.
So, today's musicians, who maybe grew up with hip-hop, may use hip-hop beats in a way that if you're not looking for them, then you won't even hear it. But it's there, it's informing the way they think of rhythm.
And they may use things that they picked up from Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie that isn't particularly obvious, it's not a homage, it's not a matter of playing “Conna Homa” or “Sophisticated Lady,” it's just voicings or it's some idea that they picked up.
......
Read the full transcript or watch the video HERE at Bigthink.
What's Next for jazz?
Gary Giddins: Well, nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Fusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going.
But I would say this. I don't think we're going to be seeing those kinds of distinct and discrete movements like Swing, Bop, and Fusion. I think now, it's a question of individuals—one thing that is important to remember is that in the early years of jazz, a lot of major musicians, like Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman, had college educations and degrees and all of that.
But a lot of the great figures, like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, did not. I mean, Armstrong didn't even go through high school. Hundreds, if not thousands, of major figures learned on the bandstand, that was their apprenticeship.
Today, the apprenticeship of musicians is in the college orchestra. I mean, you're just not going to meet a musician who hasn't got a least a BA and probably an MA, and hasn’t been to a music school and hasn't had “Giant Steps” and a homework assignment. So, it's very different.
So, because they have this historical perspective, they aren't necessarily just coming out of whatever their generation is into, and also because they are growing up and they don't have the same prejudices against pop music that certain generations had, they can use that.
So, today's musicians, who maybe grew up with hip-hop, may use hip-hop beats in a way that if you're not looking for them, then you won't even hear it. But it's there, it's informing the way they think of rhythm.
And they may use things that they picked up from Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie that isn't particularly obvious, it's not a homage, it's not a matter of playing “Conna Homa” or “Sophisticated Lady,” it's just voicings or it's some idea that they picked up.
......
Read the full transcript or watch the video HERE at Bigthink.
50 Cent, Fearlessness, and You (author Robert Greene)
An anyone learn to be fearless? Robert Greene (“The 50th Law”) considers a famously unflappable rap star and gives an emphatic answer. From bigthink.com.
Robert Greene: Well I wanted to look at something kind of really underneath it all because The 48 Laws of Power I’m looking at these games that people are playing in this kind of court like atmosphere with all these politics going on and strategies being used and all of that. I wanted to like dig underneath it and go into the mind and the guts of what makes a person powerful or successful. Not just with money, but just in the sense of feeling like you’re a powerful person and I had the chance to work with 50 Cent. He was a fan of The 48 Laws. A lot of rappers are...
.....
... Not only did he manage without a mother or father in his life. He never knew his father. His mother was murdered when he was eight. Not only did he manage to be a hustler, but he managed to get out of the hustling racket. He managed to get into music, but he managed to survive that horrible world of music with the crap political games that go on within. He not only survived, but he was able to become successful, but he kept building on it and building on it. It’s a typical American rags-to-riches story. I wanted to know why. What’s underneath it? What was that quality that maybe we could learn? And in spending time with him I felt like if I could summarize it in one word it’s that this is a man who comes to life without fear. So it’s not just fear of death or bullets. That’s the obviously thing we’re talking about. I’m talking about here is a man who is not afraid of change for instance. If something happens where a situation is new, he has lost a job, he has been cut off of his record contract or something happening he doesn’t get upset or worried. He is calm. He deals with it in a fearless manner. He takes risks, but the risks are controlled, but he is not afraid of failing. He is not afraid of being criticized. He is not afraid of being different from other people. When I thought about that it’s just how powerful you could be in life if are not afraid of the things that happen to you. You’re able to feel balanced and in control and make decisions not based on exaggerating risks etcetera, but on reality. I just thought it was an incredibly powerful way to be in the world...
... When you’re afraid and fearful it’s like your mind close… the aperture of your mind closes up to this and you stop looking at the world around you. You want everything to be comfortable and familiar and the same. You stay in your house. You watch the same TV shows. Everything just… The circle closes up. When you’re not afraid and we’ve experienced it all in our lives. When suddenly you’re in a new country and you just don’t… You’re traveling and you feel open. You’re mind is active and alive. You become creative. Everything changes. This is the key to feeling powerful, but also to being creative in the world, so I wanted to get underneath all of the other things, the power, the seduction, the strategy and see that quality that lay underneath it all...
Read the full transcript or watch the video HERE.
Robert Greene: Well I wanted to look at something kind of really underneath it all because The 48 Laws of Power I’m looking at these games that people are playing in this kind of court like atmosphere with all these politics going on and strategies being used and all of that. I wanted to like dig underneath it and go into the mind and the guts of what makes a person powerful or successful. Not just with money, but just in the sense of feeling like you’re a powerful person and I had the chance to work with 50 Cent. He was a fan of The 48 Laws. A lot of rappers are...
.....
... Not only did he manage without a mother or father in his life. He never knew his father. His mother was murdered when he was eight. Not only did he manage to be a hustler, but he managed to get out of the hustling racket. He managed to get into music, but he managed to survive that horrible world of music with the crap political games that go on within. He not only survived, but he was able to become successful, but he kept building on it and building on it. It’s a typical American rags-to-riches story. I wanted to know why. What’s underneath it? What was that quality that maybe we could learn? And in spending time with him I felt like if I could summarize it in one word it’s that this is a man who comes to life without fear. So it’s not just fear of death or bullets. That’s the obviously thing we’re talking about. I’m talking about here is a man who is not afraid of change for instance. If something happens where a situation is new, he has lost a job, he has been cut off of his record contract or something happening he doesn’t get upset or worried. He is calm. He deals with it in a fearless manner. He takes risks, but the risks are controlled, but he is not afraid of failing. He is not afraid of being criticized. He is not afraid of being different from other people. When I thought about that it’s just how powerful you could be in life if are not afraid of the things that happen to you. You’re able to feel balanced and in control and make decisions not based on exaggerating risks etcetera, but on reality. I just thought it was an incredibly powerful way to be in the world...
... When you’re afraid and fearful it’s like your mind close… the aperture of your mind closes up to this and you stop looking at the world around you. You want everything to be comfortable and familiar and the same. You stay in your house. You watch the same TV shows. Everything just… The circle closes up. When you’re not afraid and we’ve experienced it all in our lives. When suddenly you’re in a new country and you just don’t… You’re traveling and you feel open. You’re mind is active and alive. You become creative. Everything changes. This is the key to feeling powerful, but also to being creative in the world, so I wanted to get underneath all of the other things, the power, the seduction, the strategy and see that quality that lay underneath it all...
Read the full transcript or watch the video HERE.
Did Body Art Predate Cave Paintings?
From Bigthink .com
Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist, says body art predates cave paintings. My one complaint with this interesting video is that he describes places that he has photographed but does not include the images in this video.
h/t Daily Dish
Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist, says body art predates cave paintings. My one complaint with this interesting video is that he describes places that he has photographed but does not include the images in this video.
h/t Daily Dish
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
