Elwyn Chamberlain: Christian in the Slough of Despond II (1961) via the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Friday, April 6, 2012
The Father of Loud: Jim Marshall (1923 - 2012)
It was the physical embodiment of rock's power and majesty — a wall of black, vinyl-clad cabinets, one atop the other, crowned with a rectangular box containing the innovative circuitry that revolutionized the music.
This was the famed Marshall stack, the amplification gear that has dominated rock stages since its introduction in the early 1960s, bestowing on guitarists the ability to achieve unprecedented volume and controlled distortion.
From the Who, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s on through Peter Frampton, Van Halen, AC/DC, Motley Crue, Guns N' Roses and Nirvana in succeeding decades, the cursive "Marshall" emblazoned on the speakers has served as an inescapable backdrop signature.
The Marshall stack was so much larger than life that it lent itself to excess as well. The famous amp in the mockumentary "Spinal Tap" with a unique setting of 11 on the dial was a Marshall, and no rock image was more over-the-top than that of KISS' four members performing in front of some 40 Marshall cabinets.
Of course, they didn't need that many.
"Hendrix used three 100-watt amps and three stacks," their inventor Jim Marshall once said. "KISS go a lot further, but most of the cabinets and amps you see on stage are dummies. We once built 80 dummy cabinets for Bon Jovi. They all do it — it's just backdrop.
"It would be stupid to use more than three 100-watt amps, wherever and whoever you are."
Marshall died Thursday at 88 in an English hospice after suffering from cancer and several severe strokes, his son Terry Marshall told the Associated Press. Musicians, competitors and fans were quick to salute Marshall, who had retained an active role at Marshall Amplification well into his 80s.
by Richard Cromelin, LA Times | Read more:
Photo: Robert Knight Archive / Redferns / Getty Images / April 6, 2012 )
Neil Young Trademarks New Audio Format
They might sound like great song titles, but "21st Century Record Player," "Earth Storage" and "Thanks for Listening" aren't new Neil Young tunes. They're trademarks that the rocker recently filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Rolling Stone has found, and they indicate that Young is developing a high-resolution audio alternative to the MP3 format.
According to the filed documents, Young applied for six trademarks last June: Ivanhoe, 21st Century Record Player, Earth Storage, Storage Shed, Thanks for Listening and SQS (Studio Quality Sound). Included in the filing is a description of the trademarks: "Online and retail store services featuring music and artistic performances; high resolution music downloadable from the internet; high resolutions discs featuring music and video; audio and video recording storage and playback." The address on file corresponds to that of Vapor Records, Young's label. (Young's representatives declined Rolling Stone's request for comment.)
Young faces about a year of paperwork before the government will register his trademarks. Last week, they were approved for publication in a public journal for 30 days, a step that allows competitors to challenge Young if they find his registration harmful. The journal is set to be published later this month; if the trademarks face no opposition or snags, Young must then file documents detailing how he intends to use the trademarks, which the government could register as early as the holidays, according to the filing schedule.
A press release issued last September by Penguin Group imprint Blue Rider Press, which is publishing Young's upcoming memoir, may have revealed the working title of Young's entire project. In addition to the memoir, says the release, "Young is also personally spearheading the development of Pono, a revolutionary new audio music system presenting the highest digital resolution possible, the studio quality sound that artists and producers heard when they created their original recordings. Young wants consumers to be able to take full advantage of Pono's cloud-based libraries of recordings by their favorite artists and, with Pono, enjoy a convenient music listening experience that is superior in sound quality to anything ever presented."
by Patrick Flanary, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Photo: Christopher Polk/WireImage
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Just One More Game ...
In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom. The new product was the Game Boy — a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades.
The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks — over and over and over and over and over and over and over — in order to build the most efficient possible walls. (Well, it was complicated. You were both building walls and not building walls; if you built them right, the walls disappeared, thereby ceasing to be walls.) This turned out to be a perfect symbiosis of game and platform. Tetris’s graphics were simple enough to work on the Game Boy’s small gray-scale screen; its motion was slow enough not to blur; its action was a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation. The pairing went on to sell more than 70 million copies, spreading the freedom of compulsive wall-building into every breakfast nook and bank line in the country.
And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.
Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”
Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.
In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. The game involves launching peevish birds at green pigs hiding inside flimsy structures. Its basic mechanism — using your index finger to pull back a slingshot, over and over and over and over and over and over and over — was the perfect use of the new technology of the touch screen: simple enough to lure a suddenly immense new market of casual gamers, satisfying enough to hook them.
Within months, Angry Birds became the most popular game on the iPhone, then spread across every other available platform. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times. It has also inspired a disturbingly robust merchandising empire: films, T-shirts, novelty slippers, even plans for Angry Birds “activity parks” featuring play equipment for kids. For months, a sign outside my local auto-repair shop promised, “Free Angry Birds pen with service.” The game’s latest iteration, Angry Birds Space, appeared a couple weeks ago with a promotional push from Wal-Mart, T-Mobile, National Geographic Books, MTV and NASA. (There was an announcement on the International Space Station.) Angry Birds, it seems, is our Tetris: the string of digital prayer beads that our entire culture can twiddle in moments of rapture or anxiety — economic, political or existential.
by Sam Anderson, NY Times | Read more:
Image via:
The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks — over and over and over and over and over and over and over — in order to build the most efficient possible walls. (Well, it was complicated. You were both building walls and not building walls; if you built them right, the walls disappeared, thereby ceasing to be walls.) This turned out to be a perfect symbiosis of game and platform. Tetris’s graphics were simple enough to work on the Game Boy’s small gray-scale screen; its motion was slow enough not to blur; its action was a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation. The pairing went on to sell more than 70 million copies, spreading the freedom of compulsive wall-building into every breakfast nook and bank line in the country. And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.
Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”
Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.
In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. The game involves launching peevish birds at green pigs hiding inside flimsy structures. Its basic mechanism — using your index finger to pull back a slingshot, over and over and over and over and over and over and over — was the perfect use of the new technology of the touch screen: simple enough to lure a suddenly immense new market of casual gamers, satisfying enough to hook them.
Within months, Angry Birds became the most popular game on the iPhone, then spread across every other available platform. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times. It has also inspired a disturbingly robust merchandising empire: films, T-shirts, novelty slippers, even plans for Angry Birds “activity parks” featuring play equipment for kids. For months, a sign outside my local auto-repair shop promised, “Free Angry Birds pen with service.” The game’s latest iteration, Angry Birds Space, appeared a couple weeks ago with a promotional push from Wal-Mart, T-Mobile, National Geographic Books, MTV and NASA. (There was an announcement on the International Space Station.) Angry Birds, it seems, is our Tetris: the string of digital prayer beads that our entire culture can twiddle in moments of rapture or anxiety — economic, political or existential.
by Sam Anderson, NY Times | Read more:
Image via:
Native Tongues
The scene is a mysterious one, beguiling, thrilling, and, if you didn’t know better, perhaps even a bit menacing. According to the time-enhanced version of the story, it opens on an afternoon in the late fall of 1965, when without warning, a number of identical dark-green vans suddenly appear and sweep out from a parking lot in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. One by one they drive swiftly out onto the city streets. At first they huddle together as a convoy. It takes them only a scant few minutes to reach the outskirts—Madison in the sixties was not very big, a bureaucratic and academic omnium-gatherum of a Midwestern city about half the size of today. There is then a brief halt, some cursory consultation of maps, and the cars begin to part ways.
All of this first group of cars head off to the south. As they part, the riders wave their farewells, whereupon each member of this curious small squadron officially commences his long outbound adventure—toward a clutch of carefully selected small towns, some of them hundreds and even thousands of miles away. These first few cars are bound to cities situated in the more obscure corners of Florida, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Other cars that would follow later then went off to yet more cities and towns scattered evenly across every corner of every mainland state in America. The scene as the cars leave Madison is dreamy and tinted with romance, especially seen at the remove of nearly fifty years. Certainly nothing about it would seem to have anything remotely to do with the thankless drudgery of lexicography.
But it had everything to do with the business, not of illicit love, interstate crime, or the secret movement of monies, but of dictionary making. For the cars, which would become briefly famous, at least in the somewhat fame-starved world of lexicography, were the University of Wisconsin Word Wagons. All were customized 1966 Dodge A100 Sportsman models, purchased en masse with government grant money. Equipped for long-haul journeying, they were powered by the legendarily indestructible Chrysler Slant-Six 170-horsepower engine and appointed with modest domestic fixings that included a camp bed, sink, and stove. Each also had two cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorders and a large number of tape spools.
The drivers and passengers who manned the wagons were volunteers bent to one overarching task: that of collecting America’s other language. They were being sent to more than a thousand cities, towns, villages, and hamlets to discover and record, before it became too late and everyone started to speak like everybody else, the oral evidence of exactly what words and phrases Americans in those places spoke, heard, and read, out in the boondocks and across the prairies, down in the hollows and up on the ranges, clear across the great beyond and in the not very long ago.
These volunteers were charged with their duties by someone who might at first blush seem utterly unsuitable for the task of examining American speech: a Briton, born in Kingston, of a Canadian father and a Jamaican mother: Frederic Gomes Cassidy, a man whose reputation—he died twelve years ago, aged ninety-two—is now about to be consolidated as one of the greatest lexicographers this country has ever known. Cassidy’s standing—he is now widely regarded as this continent’s answer to James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; Cassidy was a longtime English professor at the University of Wisconsin, while Murray’s chops were earned at Oxford—rests on one magnificent achievement: his creation of a monumental dictionary of American dialect speech, conceived roughly half a century ago, and over which he presided for most of his professional life.
The five-thousand-page, five-volume book, known formally as the Dictionary of American Regional English and colloquially just as DARE, is now at last fully complete. The first volume appeared in 1985: it listed tens of thousands of geographically specific dialect words, from tall flowering plants known in the South as “Aaron’s Rod,” to a kind of soup much favored in Wisconsin, made from duck’s blood, known as “czarina.” The next two volumes appeared in the 1990s, the fourth after 2000, so assiduously planned and organized by Cassidy as to be uninterrupted by his passing. The fifth and final volume, the culminating triumph of this extraordinary project, is being published this March—it offers up regionalisms running alphabetically from “slab highway” (as concrete-covered roads are apparently still known in Indiana and Missouri) to “zydeco,” not the music itself, but a kind of raucous and high-energy musical party that is held in a long swathe of villages arcing from Galveston to Baton Rouge.
“Aaron’s rod” to “zydeco”—between these two verbal bookends lies an immense and largely hidden American vocabulary, one that surely, more than perhaps any other aspect of society, reveals the wonderfully chaotic pluribus out of which two centuries of commerce and convention have forged the duller reality of the unum. Which was precisely what Cassidy and his fellow editors sought to do—to capture, before it faded away, the linguistic coat of many colors of this immigrant-made country, and to preserve it in snapshot, in part for strictly academic purposes, in part for the good of history, and in part, maybe, on the off chance that the best of the lexicon might one day be revived.
by Simon Winchester, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Fred Cassidy and fieldworkers Reino Maki and Ben Crane standing in front of one of DARE's "Word Wagons." (UW-Madison Archives)
The Serious Eats Guide to Bourbon
After wading in barrels of the Scotch and Irish drams, it's time to turn our attention homeward, to that quintessential American spirit: good old bourbon whiskey. We'll look today at what makes bourbon unique, how it's made, and how it came to be.
What Is Bourbon?
In brief, bourbon is a whiskey, made predominantly from corn and aged in charred oak barrels. But if you've been reading this column for a while, you know that I'll probably hit you with a formal, legal definition of bourbon that complicates things. Indeed, here it is.
According to the United States government, bourbon sold in the United States must meet these requirements:
- Made from a grain mixture that is at least 51% corn. (Other grains in the mix may include wheat, rye, malted rye, and malted barley, in any combination.)
- Aged in new charred-oak barrels.
- Distilled to no more than 160 proof, or 80% alcohol by volume (ABV). In practice, most bourbon is distilled out at a lower proof than this.
- Entered into the barrel for aging at a proof no higher than 125 (62.5% ABV).
- Bottled at no less than 80 proof (40% ABV).
When we looked at the legal regulations about the manufacture of Scotch and Irish whiskies, we saw some language in them about the origins of the enzymes and yeasts used in fermentation. Bourbon has no such restrictions, so bourbon makers may use added enzymes to break down the grain mash.
We've already talked a lot about barrel aging in this space, but it's worth mentioning again. Bourbon requires the use of new, charred-oak barrels. This allows the barrel to impart more of its own flavors of oak, caramel, and vanilla into the whiskey than you get with Scotch, which generally uses second-hand barrels. We'll talk more about aging in a minute.
by Michael Dietsch, Serious Eats | Read more:
To Accept What Cannot Be Helped
“Your hands are so wrinkly. Are you going to die?” my nephew asked my mother when he was about three. “Yes I am,” she answered, pausing to stick a knitting needle behind her ear and take his small, smooth hand in hers as they sat on the couch more than 15 years ago. “And you never know when it might happen.” Here she resumed work on the row of whatever it was she was knitting and added, “I’m an old toad, you know.” Daniel looked stricken. Telling this story, my sister rolls her eyes, knowing the rest of the family won’t be surprised by it. “Promise me you’ll pull the plug when my time comes” is a refrain we’d been hearing from my mother for ages.
Two years ago this coming June my mother—“an 80-year-old in a 60-year-old’s body,” the pulmonologist told her—was ambushed by a diagnosis of Stage IV adenocarcinoma of the lungs. It had already spread to her spine and left hip. Barely two weeks earlier, she’d gone out west for another grandchild’s college graduation and hiked along a cliff on the Oregon coast. Could she really have inoperable lung cancer? The pulmonologist, to whom she was referred by a GP alarmed at what he saw on her chest x-ray, needed a CT scan to be convinced. In the windowless examining room at the hospital in Brooklyn, my mother said sadly yet matter of factly, “Well, I guess that’s pretty much what I’ve been expecting to hear. We’ve all got to go somehow, don’t we?”
We all do, of course. But I don’t think there are many bustling, nonbelieving souls like my mother who are ready to face that fact when rudely confronted with it. In her case, facing it meant ruling out treatment—the chemotherapy and radiation that the pulmonologist urged to ease pain and eke out a few more months. “If geezers like me have lots of tests and treatments,” she told the doctor, “there isn’t going to be enough money to spend on the other end. This health-care mess isn’t going to be fixed if we aren’t ready to get out of the way.” Nonplussed on his little stool, he shook his head and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve heard that view before, but never from someone in your situation. People generally change their tune when it suddenly applies to them.”
Actually, I think my mother delivered her pronouncement so she wouldn’t cry. As she sat there, suddenly told she would soon be gone, I imagine it helped a little to take aim at the Medicare cliché. With the nation’s health-care debate heating up in the summer of 2009, those words were at the ready: she could voice the non-interventionist, parsimonious, yet also generous sentiments long lodged in her now “moth-eaten” (the doctor’s words) bones. For she was a rarity—a grandmother in favor of having the plug pulled and ready to live, or rather die, by that all-but-taboo vision of the end of things. But right then, in that airless room, she needed most of all to rise above an abyss. Look at me, a very lucky old lady who has made it to 80; tell me it makes any sense to rack up huge bills trying to add on an extra couple of months (at best) to a life that isn’t likely to last out the year. It was her way of rallying, and relieving us of the awful weight of the moment. My father looked stricken.
Over a late dinner one evening three months after that day in the doctor’s office, I asked her if I might write something, sometime, about her end. An owl had just hooted as we sat at the table on the screened-in porch of my parents’ country place in a tiny Massachusetts town. She nodded, though almost imperceptibly in the candle-lit darkness, and waved away the notion that there was anything particularly notable in her approach to her last months (if only she knew how many). Yet as those numbered days passed at a curious pace, so slow and so swift, the experience of taking no extraordinary measures felt, well, extraordinary. The owls hooted, answering questions with questions. We listened and gazed at the coneflower in the bud vase, picked the first day my mother had arrived up there from New York, two months earlier. She’d had to trim its weakening stem, and the neck of the vase now offered crucial support, but the petals drooped only slightly and the yellow was still vibrant. (“O’Henry,” she had named it.) She savored the last bite of what little had been on her plate and looked at me: “Could I really be dying?”
My mother, who died six months after she was diagnosed, was acutely grateful to be supported at almost every turn in her quest to end life on her own terms—which is not to say that “letting go” came at all naturally to her. Even for someone thoroughly out of step with our more-care-is-better medical ethos, it proved anything but easy to relinquish control. For her, resisting the doctors’ edicts was not so hard; that was her way of taking charge. Yet then what? To embrace ordinary, loving care, knowing the burden it put on others, was a struggle. But her odyssey—our odyssey—allowed us to feel our way toward those feats together, with few regrets and many rewards alongside the inevitable fear and pain. In a culture of Promethean aspirations, and in busy hospital corridors, it is rare to get that chance.
by Ann Hulbert, American Scholar | Read more:
Two years ago this coming June my mother—“an 80-year-old in a 60-year-old’s body,” the pulmonologist told her—was ambushed by a diagnosis of Stage IV adenocarcinoma of the lungs. It had already spread to her spine and left hip. Barely two weeks earlier, she’d gone out west for another grandchild’s college graduation and hiked along a cliff on the Oregon coast. Could she really have inoperable lung cancer? The pulmonologist, to whom she was referred by a GP alarmed at what he saw on her chest x-ray, needed a CT scan to be convinced. In the windowless examining room at the hospital in Brooklyn, my mother said sadly yet matter of factly, “Well, I guess that’s pretty much what I’ve been expecting to hear. We’ve all got to go somehow, don’t we?”
We all do, of course. But I don’t think there are many bustling, nonbelieving souls like my mother who are ready to face that fact when rudely confronted with it. In her case, facing it meant ruling out treatment—the chemotherapy and radiation that the pulmonologist urged to ease pain and eke out a few more months. “If geezers like me have lots of tests and treatments,” she told the doctor, “there isn’t going to be enough money to spend on the other end. This health-care mess isn’t going to be fixed if we aren’t ready to get out of the way.” Nonplussed on his little stool, he shook his head and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve heard that view before, but never from someone in your situation. People generally change their tune when it suddenly applies to them.”
Actually, I think my mother delivered her pronouncement so she wouldn’t cry. As she sat there, suddenly told she would soon be gone, I imagine it helped a little to take aim at the Medicare cliché. With the nation’s health-care debate heating up in the summer of 2009, those words were at the ready: she could voice the non-interventionist, parsimonious, yet also generous sentiments long lodged in her now “moth-eaten” (the doctor’s words) bones. For she was a rarity—a grandmother in favor of having the plug pulled and ready to live, or rather die, by that all-but-taboo vision of the end of things. But right then, in that airless room, she needed most of all to rise above an abyss. Look at me, a very lucky old lady who has made it to 80; tell me it makes any sense to rack up huge bills trying to add on an extra couple of months (at best) to a life that isn’t likely to last out the year. It was her way of rallying, and relieving us of the awful weight of the moment. My father looked stricken.
Over a late dinner one evening three months after that day in the doctor’s office, I asked her if I might write something, sometime, about her end. An owl had just hooted as we sat at the table on the screened-in porch of my parents’ country place in a tiny Massachusetts town. She nodded, though almost imperceptibly in the candle-lit darkness, and waved away the notion that there was anything particularly notable in her approach to her last months (if only she knew how many). Yet as those numbered days passed at a curious pace, so slow and so swift, the experience of taking no extraordinary measures felt, well, extraordinary. The owls hooted, answering questions with questions. We listened and gazed at the coneflower in the bud vase, picked the first day my mother had arrived up there from New York, two months earlier. She’d had to trim its weakening stem, and the neck of the vase now offered crucial support, but the petals drooped only slightly and the yellow was still vibrant. (“O’Henry,” she had named it.) She savored the last bite of what little had been on her plate and looked at me: “Could I really be dying?”
My mother, who died six months after she was diagnosed, was acutely grateful to be supported at almost every turn in her quest to end life on her own terms—which is not to say that “letting go” came at all naturally to her. Even for someone thoroughly out of step with our more-care-is-better medical ethos, it proved anything but easy to relinquish control. For her, resisting the doctors’ edicts was not so hard; that was her way of taking charge. Yet then what? To embrace ordinary, loving care, knowing the burden it put on others, was a struggle. But her odyssey—our odyssey—allowed us to feel our way toward those feats together, with few regrets and many rewards alongside the inevitable fear and pain. In a culture of Promethean aspirations, and in busy hospital corridors, it is rare to get that chance.
by Ann Hulbert, American Scholar | Read more:
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Twila Paris
[ed. A note to readers: I'll be attending to a family emergency for a while. Here's a favorite song of my Mom's (and my grandfather)].
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Swimming On The Hot Side
I first heard about nuclear diving while I was getting my hair cut in downtown Manhattan. My stylist seemed out of place in an East Village salon, so I asked her where she lived. Brooklyn? Queens? Uptown?
“Upstate,” she answered. “I commute two hours each way a few times a week.”
I asked her why, and she stopped cutting.
“Well, my husband has kind of a weird job,” she said. “He’d rather not live around other people.”
I sat up in the chair. “What does he do?”
“He’s a nuclear diver.”
“A what?”
“A diver who works in radiated water at nuclear power plants.”
I turned around to look at her. “Near the reactors?”
“The reactors, fuel pools, pretty much anywhere he’s needed.”
“And is he . . . OK? I mean . . .”
“Is it safe? Well, he says it is. They monitor his dosage levels and all that. Sometimes they’re too high, and he’s not allowed to dive. That’s why we live out in the middle of nowhere. Obviously, I’d rather he didn’t do it. Who wants a glowing husband?” She laughed, a bit sadly.
I told her I was a writer and asked if I could meet him. She said probably not. Most divers don’t like talking about their work, and their bosses discourage the ones who do. “I think it all comes down to the radiation,” she said. “It spooks people. It spooks me! Not that the rest of the job is a picnic. The non-contaminated diving they do—around the huge intake pipes that bring water into the plants—is even more dangerous. Sometimes they get sucked in.” Her husband had survived the day-to-day hazards of his job, she said, but I wondered about the long-term effects. “Has he ever gotten sick?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“But you said he won’t talk to me.”
She put her scissors down. “He gets chest pains.”
“From the radiation?”
“He says probably not, but what else could it be from? He’s still young.”
She wrote down her husband’s e-mail address, and I tried over the course of the next few weeks to get him to talk to me. He wrote back eventually, but only to say that he was busy servicing a reactor in California. Maybe he’d get in touch when he had more time. By then I was hooked, though. What kind of person knowingly dives in contaminated water? I spent months sending queries to divers I found online, but none of them would talk either. Then came the Fukushima disaster, which changed the nuclear-energy landscape almost overnight. On a hunch, I started contacting plant operators rather than individual divers. An article about the hazards (and heroics) of nuclear diving might not be a plant manager’s idea of great publicity, but it sure beat images of helicopters dumping seawater on crippled Japanese reactors. Someone at the D.C. Cook nuclear power plant in Bridgman, Michigan, agreed. More than a year after that East Village haircut, I was invited to see a dive in person.
by David Goodwillie, PopSci | Read more:
Photo: David Goodwillie
The Persistence of Memory
The film begins simply. Somewhere in the Japanese countryside, the recently departed arrive at a place that's a bit like a halfway house. Here, they're told they must purge all of their memories save one, which they'll live with forever. They're paired with counselors who help them sift through their emotional filing cabinets and pick a defining moment. It'll then be recreated in a short film that the dead get to direct, star in and watch.Among the newly deceased, there's always that one guy who keeps harping on about sex, only to settle on a modest, intimate memory that usually involves a loved one. Sex is a potent "in the now" experience, but upon reflection, it's everything around it that either gives it meaning or renders it meaningless. And the memory you live with forever has to have meaning.
The film also subtly argues that meaning can't be manufactured. When one teenage girl declares she'd like to reproduce Disney's Splash Mountain, her counselor Shiori points out its conformity. Many young girls choose that ride, it turns out. In the end, the teenager changes her mind and opts for that time when she rested her head on her mother's lap and smelled her perfume.
Most of the memories hardly require any dialogue because they're so personal and introspective. They capture feelings, ambiance, texture, the very thrill of living. One man chooses his daily childhood tram ride on his way to school, with a hot wind blowing through the first-seat window. Another wants to go relive the first time he flew a Cessna and the way the cotton-like clouds brushed past him so quickly. One senile lady is showered with falling cherry blossom flowers, since blooms are the only thing her child's mind delights in. (...)
Meanwhile, the counselors are resolving their own issues in this purgatory, of sorts. They're here because they weren't able to decide on an ultimate memory. Until they can, they're forced to help others pick theirs.
by Olivia Colette, Chicago Sun Times | Read more:
The Brain on Love
All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
Every great love affair begins with a scream. At birth, the brain starts blazing new neural pathways based on its odyssey in an alien world. An infant is steeped in bright, buzzing, bristling sensations, raw emotions and the curious feelings they unleash, weird objects, a flux of faces, shadowy images and dreams — but most of all a powerfully magnetic primary caregiver whose wizardry astounds.
Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime’s behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible.
We used to think this was the end of the story: first heredity, then the brain’s engraving mental maps in childhood, after which you’re pretty much stuck with the final blueprint. But as a wealth of imaging studies highlight, the neural alchemy continues throughout life as we mature and forge friendships, dabble in affairs, succumb to romantic love, choose a soul mate. The body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt, and longs for its adult equivalent.
As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships. Daniel J. Siegel and Allan N. Schore, colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently discussed groundbreaking work in the field at a conference on the school’s campus. It’s not that caregiving changes genes; it influences how the genes express themselves as the child grows. Dr. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist, refers to the indelible sense of “feeling felt” that we learn as infants and seek in romantic love, a reciprocity that remodels the brain’s architecture and functions.
Does it also promote physical well-being? “Scientific studies of longevity, medical and mental health, happiness and even wisdom,” Dr. Siegel says, “point to supportive relationships as the most robust predictor of these positive attributes in our lives across the life span.”
The supportive part is crucial. Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly.
by Diane Ackerman, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Olimpia Zagnoli
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