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[ed. Ben Gazarra  from Tales of Ordinary Madness (1970), directed by Marco Ferreri.]

Las Vegas: The Last Honest Place on Earth

I once knew a girl who had grown up in a small town on the North Island of New Zealand. The town was populated by descendants of Scottish Protestants, who had established a place of sober, hard-working respectability. On Friday and Saturday nights, the young people would go to a barn outside the town limits, where there would be music and dancing and the young men would get drunk and fight each other. None of this spilled over back into the town: no one would say anything about the bruises on the butcher boy’s face; and if a couple had found an intimacy at a dance, that wouldn’t alter the formality of their relations during the rest of the week.

This is how Protestant countries work. Civic spaces are designed for polite, hard-working respectability, and young people let off steam and the sinners do their sinning in self-contained places outside town limits. The US is a very Protestant country, and Las Vegas is its barn.

Actually it’s two barns, a couple of miles away from each other. The original one, Fremont Street, Downtown, is a ramshackle place. Apart from the slickly remodelled Golden Nugget, the one-time Glitter Gulch is a couple of shabby blocks of casinos and bars and souvenir shops covered by a canopy and blasted at night with music and air-conditioning and lights (“The Fabulous Fremont Street Experience!”), surrounded by slums and bail bondsmen storefronts. The other, the Strip, is the gaudy place of postcards and movies and the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign, where high-rise casino-resorts stretch out along Las Vegas Boulevard. (...)

In July, I’d driven in from LA in the company of two old friends. We followed Interstate 15 through the Mojave Desert shimmer of heat, truck stops and Joshua trees and the occasional sun-blasted forsaken town. Both of my companions are Londoners who have been living in Los Angeles for about 15 years. One has made it big in Hollywood as a writer and producer of network television shows. The other is a professor of the history of science at California State University.

The Money and I had planned this trip some months ago. The Professor had joined us at short notice, leaving his wife and two small children behind. The Professor’s wife had been unresisting, maybe even encouraging. Because this is America, it is understood that men need to get together, to drive through the desert, that men need to drink cocktails and argue about politics in the Bellagio bar. But I wasn’t here to let off steam. I’d come to Vegas for a meeting of the board of the UK Poker Federation, and to take part in the World Series of Poker (WSOP). (...)

The journalist Marc Cooper published a very good book about the city nearly ten years ago that was called The Last Honest Place in America. Its thesis was that Las Vegas is brutal but self-evident: it’s all about money. Anyone can wander into the high-end casino-resorts, and people do, streams and streams of them, looking for bars and nightclubs and adrenalin adventure, drinking luminous cocktails from giant glasses, girls in tiny skirts and high heels, boys trying to act like high rollers, the prostitutes waiting in the casino bars, with the looks they send out that manage to be both candid and modest, You’re a discerning and attractive gentleman. You and I maybe could . . . ? and the disabled people rolling slowly through the aisles between slot machines in wheelchairs and mobility scooters – because, as the recession deepens, the proportion of disabled people in Vegas has risen noticeably: Mammon has finally found its Lourdes. And, if you’ve got a dollar in your pocket, you’re entitled to play. But Cooper’s book was published when Vegas was indisputably the gambling capital of the world. It’s lost some of its swagger recently. It has become more expensive. Profits from the casinos of Macau now exceed those of Las Vegas, which need to protect their income stream from the likes of Dolores Smith.

Nonetheless, I still love Vegas, its calculated gaudiness, its relentlessness, the haven it has made for smokers and gamblers and pleasure-seekers. In other contexts, I might find it decadent rather than magnificent that a resort in the desert has more championship golf courses than anywhere else in the world. The water comes from the Hoover Dam and, I’m sure, is also diverted from helplessly thirsty towns in southern California. As the journalist and president of the International Federation of Poker, Anthony Holden, says, “I love its nerve and its boldness and that every year something new happens.”

The conversations with cab drivers here are better than any you’ll find anywhere else, such as when the ex-marine explained to me the difference between gay and straight couples travelling in the back of his cab: “They want to give each other blow jobs? The straight couples ask you first. The gays just do it.”

And I love that you can play poker here all of the time, with many hundreds of games to choose from at any moment in the day. Every cash table, it seems, has at least one of the following: a cocky young man wearing enormous headphones, an implacable white-haired gentleman, an American Oriental who’s a dangerous opponent and a ferocious old lady with dyed red hair who bets aggressively, and whose ancient hands are covered with heavy jewellery and raised veins.

This is what I was here to do. In a fog of jet lag, I set about trying to raise my stake for the Main Event. I spent my days and nights in Vegas, as the Money and the Professor sampled cocktails and swimming pools and Vegas steaks, playing poker tournaments.

by David Flusfeder, The New Statesman |  Read more:

Photo: Getty Images

Harnessing the Power of Waves

Portland, Ore. About 15 years ago, this environmentally conscious state with a fir tree on its license plates began pushing the idea of making renewable energy from the ocean waves that bob and swell on the Pacific horizon. But then one of the first test-buoy generators, launched with great fanfare, promptly sank. It was not a good start.

But time and technology turned the page, and now the first commercially licensed grid-connected wave-energy device in the nation, designed by a New Jersey company, Ocean Power Technologies, is in its final weeks of testing before a planned launch in October. The federal permit for up to 10 generators came last month, enough, the company says, to power about 1,000 homes. When engineers are satisfied that everything is ready, a barge will carry the 260-ton pioneer to its anchoring spot about two and a half miles offshore near the city of Reedsport, on the central coast.

“All eyes are on the O.P.T. buoy,” said Jason Busch, the executive director of the Oregon Wave Energy Trust, a nonprofit state-financed group that has spent $10 million in the last six years on scientific wave-energy research and grants, including more than $430,000 to Ocean Power Technologies alone. Making lots of electricity on the buoy and getting it to shore to turn on lights would be great, Mr. Busch said. Riding out the storm-tossed seas through winter? Priceless. “It has to survive,” he said.

Adding to the breath-holding nature of the moment, energy experts and state officials said, is that Oregon is also in the final stages of a long-term coastal mapping and planning project that is aiming to produce, by late this year or early next, a blueprint for where wave energy could be encouraged or discouraged based on potential conflicts with fishing, crabbing and other marine uses.

The project’s leader, Paul Klarin, said wave technology is so new, compared to, say, wind energy, that the designs are like a curiosity shop — all over the place in creative thinking about how to get the energy contained in a wave into a wire in a way that is cost-effective and efficient.

“Some are on the seabed on the ocean floor, some are in the water column, some are sitting on the surface, some project up from the surface into the atmosphere, like wind — many different sizes, many different forms, many different footprints,” said Mr. Klarin, the marine program coordinator at the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. “There’s no one-size-fits-all kind of plan.”

Energy development groups around the world are closely watching what happens here, because success or failure with the first United States commercial license could affect the flow of private investment by bigger companies that have mostly stayed on the shore while smaller entrepreneurs struggled in the surf. Ocean Power Technologies also will be seeking money to build more generators.

by Kirk Johnson, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Thomas Patterson

JustinGuitar.com

[ed. For both the aspiring and established guitar player, JustinGuitar.com is the best learning resource on the net (imho). And it's free! Take the time to check it out, especially the extensive lessons index.]

There are many hundreds of free guitar lessons here, most with video and audio, and as you can imagine it's taken quite a lot of work for me to put it together. It's important to me to help everyone that wants to learn to play the guitar, not just those with money to spend on tuition, so I run it on an "honour system".

It relies on the honesty of it's users to make a donation if they can afford to. Donations allow me to keep it free, so if you like what I'm doing here then please support the site, don't leave it for "everyone else": make a donation or buy some products Thanks for your support!

Wishing you love, peace and happiness (and many years of guitar fun!)

Justin

----

Justinguitar.com went first live in July 2003 as a small web site offering a few lessons as a sample to promote private lessons. It grew steadily over it's first few years, with Justin often adding content to keep himself occupied while on tour, much of it done on a laptop in hotel rooms around the globe.

After seeing the popularity of YouTube Justin began making instructional guitar videos in December 2006, initially filmed and edited by his friend Jedi. In September 2011 his YouTube instructional videos have been watched over 100,000,000 (yep that's 100 million) times and the web site receives well over 20,000 unique visitors a day!

It has received many accolades in both the traditional press and new media as well as radio and tv shows. By keeping quality guitar instruction free for those that cannot afford or get to private lessons has given the site a huge user base right around the world. Helping the poor, the shy and those just too busy to make regular lessons.

The approach is patient. Learn one thing well and be able to use it before you learn more. The method works, and many hundreds of thousands of people around the world have benefited from the lessons on the site.

The Independent newspaper said that he is "One of the most influential guitar teachers in history".

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The Art of Nature

[ed. I don't necessarily agree with this but it's an interesting argument. The author's main assertion - that human tinkering with Nature is natural - seems to imply that even if we happen to wipe ourselves out by some unanticipated mistake the response would be, well that's just Nature re-balancing itself. I'd like to think we have a little more skin in the game than that. And, I don't accept the concept of restoration as a legitimate alternative to conservation, particularly when trade-offs for real benefits are negotiated away for some indeterminate future return. Anyone involved in environmental restoration will tell you - Nature is much more complex and costly to restore than most people can imagine, and success by no means certain. Protecting and conserving natural environments is always the cheapest alternative, and should always be the first priority.]  

When European settlers first moved from the East Coast out into the great hinterland of North America, they believed that what they saw was nature. Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt painted their grand mystical visions of a landscape unsullied by mankind, and it is that pristine picture which has stuck ever since.

Of course, the settlers were wrong. It was in fact a landscape that had already been tailored by Indian nations to fit very specific lifestyles and satisfy religious needs. Like bees scattering pollen, the Indians had carried seed across the continent and bred wild teosinte into tender corn. If the first humans had not crossed the Bering land bridge over ten thousand years ago then much, perhaps most, of the prairie would have been deciduous oak and beech forests. Thoreau, on the other hand, who puttered about Walden for long enough to see what was under the surface, knew well that the “wilderness” in which he lived had been farmed and dwelt upon by earlier peoples. What he probably did not know was the reason they were no longer around: as many as nine-tenths of the natives had been wiped out by European diseases brought over by the Spanish nearly four hundred years before.

The point here is not another postcolonial rant about the crimes of the West, but rather what we mean by nature and what our conception of ourselves as humans in relation to it really is. If we define natural as that which is not human, denying that our species emerged as the result of a naturally occurring process, then we resemble the creationists who want school boards to ban even the teaching of human evolution. We did not suddenly supervene upon this planet by divine intervention. It is far more miraculous that we emerged, and are still emerging, from the matter, energy, and information of the world. We owe our humanity to our power of speech just as the elk derives his identity from his antlers, each species responding to the peculiar demands of their environments. Man himself grew up out of the earth. After all, “Adam” means “red clay.” If we do decide to define man as natural but classify our social and cultural creations as artificial, then we subscribe to the idea that humans are only natural in isolation. This is a theory that all the human sciences—anthropology, psychology, paleoanthropology, linguistics, ethnology—emphatically reject.

As the great bacteriologist Lynn Margulis has pointed out, we are part of an immense web of earthly life. We are ourselves made up of a collection of ancient bacteria, protists, and viruses that have been consolidated mostly—but not entirely—into our genes, expressed as organelles and ingenious chemical machinery, and still freely exchanging snippets of DNA and RNA with other organisms. Then again, if we say that everything is natural, including anthropogenic global warming, modernist art, and Hiroshima, then what becomes of our tendency to value the natural and revere nature? And if the word refers to everything, is it any use at all?

All societies, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss tells us, distinguish between nature and culture, the raw and the cooked. The philosophical, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of the distinction, however, differ profoundly from one society to another. Indeed, one might almost categorize societies in a way that would nicely cut across the usual economic, technological, and historical divides solely by the content of their nature/culture distinction. Are emotions natural or cultural? Is nature “good” and culture “bad,” or vice versa? Is nature dynamic and culture static, or the other way around? Is nature self-aware and culture innocent? Is nature personal and culture collective? Different societies emphasize different distinctions, and the conflicts within all cultures consist to a large extent of a struggle over the strategic definition of these words.

by Frederick Turner, Lapham's Quarterly (2008) |  Read more:

Beauty Through Bamboo

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Leaving Home, but None of Its Comforts

I don't remember everything I took with me when I went to college, but do I know it all fit easily into the back seat of our family car. The twin-size sheets were new; nearly everything else (pillow, stereo, ugly green rug) had been scavenged from home or a thrift store.

As for electronics, that summer my well-meaning parents went to a garage sale and were talked into buying an Apple Macintosh with a drive that accepted only large floppy disks. My suspicion that it was embarrassingly out of date, even by 1994 standards, was confirmed by my roommate’s look of disbelief when I tried to boot up.

Altogether, furnishing my dorm room cost maybe $50.

These memories came back as I stood inside a Target store in South Philadelphia one night last week at midnight, watching 1,200 students from Temple University swarming the aisles like amped-up contestants on a shopping-spree game show.

Target had bused the students from campus and rearranged the store for the after-hours event. A D.J. played dance music in what was normally the baby department; mini-fridges and cases of Red Bull were stacked along a central corridor. Students’ carts were filling with hanging mirrors, garbage cans in bright colors, shower caddies and bed-in-a-bag sheet sets.

Gina D’Annunzio, director of student activities at Temple, said she had resisted Target’s previous overtures to host an after-hours event. But this year the timing had worked out, and Ms. D’Annunzio remembered that as a little girl she had dreamed of getting “locked in a mall” — a common fantasy, judging by the scene at Target.

Jordyn Richman, an 18-year-old freshman, had come for a mattress pad, a body pillow, a night light and push pins. Before arriving at Temple, Ms. Richman had already spent $300 on dorm décor at Target and Ikea stores near her home in Boca Raton, Fla. The additional items she was buying would “round out” her room, she said.

In recent years, the Target run — or a shopping trip to a similar big-box store — has become a new college tradition, right up there with spring break and sleeping through class. This time of year it’s common to see students and parents roaming the aisles, checking off items from an ever-growing list of essentials. The goal, it seems, is to turn the dorm room into a plush home away from home.

Derek Jackson, director of housing and dining services at Kansas State, is among those who have observed a growing influx of comforts like coffee makers and the rise of color-coordinated rooms.

“We get requests saying, ‘Can you give us dimensions for the windows, because we want to hang curtains?’ ” he said. “Back in the old days, students were just trying to make their rooms purposeful.”

And of the 72-inch TVs he has lately been seeing students lug into residence halls, Mr. Jackson said, “If they can fit it into their room: that’s the mind-set.”

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Dan Gill

Elizabeth Bunsen. infinite 3
http://elizabethbunsen.typepad.com/be_dream_play/
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Let's Be Friends

Regardless of Bill Clinton’s personal feelings about Obama, it didn’t take him long to see the advantages of an Obama Presidency. More than anyone, he pushed Hillary to take the job of Secretary of State. “President Clinton was a big supporter of the idea,” an intimate of the Clintons told me. “He advocated very strongly for it and arguably was the tie-breaking reason she took the job.” For one thing, having his spouse in that position didn’t hurt his work at the Clinton Global Initiative. He invites foreign leaders to the initiative’s annual meeting, and her prominence in the Administration can be an asset in attracting foreign donors. “Bill Clinton’s been able to continue to be the Bill Clinton we know, in large part because of his relationship with the White House and because his wife is the Secretary of State,” the Clinton associate continued. “It worked out very well for him. That may be a very cynical way to look at it, but that’s a fact. A lot of the stuff he’s doing internationally is aided by his level of access.”

Bill Clinton’s international diplomacy also has benefitted Obama, although the White House has been careful to control the spotlight. One rough moment occurred in 2009, when Clinton flew to North Korea to negotiate the release of two captive journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Ling’s sister Lisa had worked closely with Clinton and with the Obama Administration to obtain the women’s release. In the sisters’ subsequent memoir about the ordeal, “Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home,” they expressed surprise that Clinton wouldn’t be stepping off the plane with Lee and Ling as they greeted their families in front of reporters; the White House had asked him to remain on board. “We feel strongly about this decision,” Lisa was told in a conference call with a White House official. Once the plane was on the ground, however, a State Department aide assured her that Clinton would leave the plane with the former captives, and he did. Obama called Clinton a few minutes afterward and thanked him for the mission. It was the first time the two Presidents had spoken in quite a while, Lisa was told.

Throughout 2008 and 2009, Obama rarely contacted Clinton, a decision that the Clinton circle attributes to Obama’s loner personality. A Democrat deeply familiar with the relationship complained that the press has often made it seem that Clinton harbored “lingering resentments” from the primary battle: “It’s always sort of implied that it’s Clinton’s fault.” The truth, he added, “is that Obama doesn’t really like very many people.” He ticked off the names of some of Obama’s longtime friends: the Whitakers, the Nesbitts, Valerie Jarrett. “And he likes to talk about sports. But other than that he just doesn’t like very many people. Unfortunately, it extends to people who used to have his job.”

by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration: Andy Friedman

Kitty Sabatier
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Say Hello!

[ed. Sometimes on sunny evenings I'll walk down to a nearby park and watch the boats motor around the bay. I have a favorite bench on a high outlook that I like. The other day I had been sitting there for several minutes when I noticed a small rock sitting next to me. At first I was surprised that I hadn't seen it sooner; then I wondered about it's message. Say hello to who (or is it whom)? Or maybe...say, hello!, how are you doing (and, don't I have nice handwriting)? As I pondered this mystery and wondered whether I might be experiencing some kind of LA Story type of moment, a small, slender woman with a very large dog suddenly appeared walking up the trail...]

McKinley Thumps La Salle 43-22

The McKinley Tigers put on a dazzling second-half display as they dismantled La Salle high school's vaunted defense in a pre-season football exhibition in Corvallis, Oregon last Friday. Traveling all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii the Tigers went up against Oregon's 2011 4A football champions, the La Salle Falcons, on a clear blue sunny afternoon at Crescent Valley H.S. Field. It was a pitched battle through the first half with each team trading touchdowns, and McKinley led by just a single point, 23-22, going into the break. But as the second half got underway the Tigers kicked in the afterburners following a traditional 'haka' warrior dance and the Falcons never recovered. Stand out performances were recorded by wide-receiver Tyrell Tuiasosopo and running back Mathias Tuitele-Iafeta. Asked after the game how he felt, head coach Joe Cho said he was "satisfied" but also "very tired", as the match had required over a year's planning, logistics and fund-raising to accomplish. Plus, Kahuku is now on deck for next week's game, and Farrington the week after. Still, it was worth it. This was the first McKinley H.S. football team to travel to the mainland in over 40 years, back when coach Cho was still playing for the Tigers. And, there were several other members of that long-ago team in the stands watching the game as well, which drew Tiger fans from around the Corvallis area and several other states. Go Black and Gold!

More pictures after the fold:

‘Thriller’ and the Lessons of the Mega-Super-Album

[ed. Rob Hoerburger on how Thriller (and Hall and Oates) saved Pop music 30 years ago.]

How Hall and Oates Saved Pop

Of course, in the end, “Thriller” had several money tracks. There were four solid cornerposts: a blistering rock song (“Beat It”); a sublime ballad (“Human Nature”); an R&B dance sizzler (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”); and a video-friendly story song (“Thriller”). And at the center of it all, connecting the entire work and providing access routes to its outer regions, was a song whose musical basis came from the lone bastion of hope on pop radio in those dark days, Daryl Hall and John Oates. Their solid amalgams of pop, soul, rock and even light electronica had been breaking through the dross for a few years. In January, their “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” logged a week at No. 1 between Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band. Jackson liked “I Can’t Go for That” and heard in it the basis for his own album’s elusive unifier. He lifted its bass line for a song that made him want to dance. (And no wonder; that bass line was itself an echo of ’60s soul.) He could hear it. He could see it. That track was “Billie Jean.” It was one of the last songs completed for “Thriller” — it was reportedly mixed 91 times — and even though Quincy Jones fought Jackson about its inclusion, Jackson insisted. By early November, he was finally satisfied, and the album was rush-released into stores at the end of the month.

Not My Lover

Few blockbusters are sleeper hits. They usually start strong and then keep lapping the pack — think Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” or U2’s “Joshua Tree.” But “Thriller” didn’t get out of the gate as fast as everyone expected. The first single, a pallid duet with Paul McCartney called “The Girl Is Mine,” was a hit but failed to ignite a frenzy for the album, which had only nine tracks. More than two months after its release, “Thriller” still hadn’t reached No. 1. I was a D.J. at the time at a small rock-oriented bar on Long Island, and I started playing “Beat It,” with its surprising guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, but at that early point the song was less a phenomenon than a curiosity. It wasn’t until “Billie Jean” was released as a single in early 1983 that “Thriller” really took off. It had that long, sinuous bass-line intro, paranoiac synth warnings, a hiccupping vocal; it was the ultimate crossover dream, a song both timely and out of its time. And it had a first-rate video in which Jackson came off like a musical James Bond, sexy, sly and licensed to dance. The song climbed to No. 1, stormed the ramparts at MTV and, buoyed even further by Jackson’s dazzling performance on the “Motown 25” TV special that May, led the way for the album’s other hits and for other black artists. By the end of 1983, “Thriller” had become a nine-track stimulus package for the entire music business.

And yet: just nine songs, four of which don’t merit any substantial discussion now. So what made “Thriller” such a big hit? Some schools of thought contend that it wasn’t even the best album of Jackson’s career. “Off the Wall” was, in many ways, more sophisticated musically, and almost all of its songs are still memorable. A conductor/arranger friend of mine, who is classically trained but appreciates a good pop tune, says he never cared much about “Thriller” but still perks up whenever he hears the upper-level harmony on “Rock With You,” the biggest hit from “Off the Wall.” I like “Off the Wall” more than “Thriller,” too, maybe because it’s a happier and a sweatier album, the last blast of the smiley-face pop-and-soul ’60s and ’70s.

And maybe “Thriller” wasn’t even the best album of 1982. A good number of critics would probably tell you that Prince’s “1999,” a double album released a few weeks before “Thriller,” was much more ambitious and that its pioneering electro-sex-funk was what kept the music business churning through the mid- and late ’80s. A similar dynamic existed between Carole King’s “Tapestry” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” bellwethers of the singer-songwriter era that were released within a few months of each other in 1971. King’s album sold millions and is generally considered the first true blockbuster of the rock era; Mitchell’s sold about a tenth as much but has aged better critically and is regarded the more erudite and influential album (though part of that could be because rock critics still seem to relate best to lyrics, Mitchell’s greatest strength, while King’s poetry has always been in her melodies).

And yet while King/Jackson may have been relatively prosaic compared with Mitchell/Prince, you can feel in their multiplatinum opuses a conscious effort to raise craft to art, to regain the multipartisan musical platforms that had slipped away in their respective eras (for King, post-Beatles; for Jackson, post-disco), to be both smart and simple enough to reach the greatest common denominator. They were musical populists and were building from the bottom up. What you can hear in their landmark albums most of all is the need to be heard.

Which brings us to Adele.

by Rob Hoerburger, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration by Tom Gauld

Beyond a Joke: The Truth About Why We Laugh

Consider the bizarre events of the 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). What began as an isolated fit of laughter in a group of 12-to 18-year-old schoolgirls rapidly rose to epidemic proportions. Contagious laughter propagated from one individual to the next, eventually infecting adjacent communities. Like an influenza outbreak, the laughter epidemic was so severe that it required the closing of at least 14 schools and afflicted about 1,000 people. Fluctuating in intensity, it lasted for around two and a half years. A psychogenic, hysterical origin of the epidemic was established after excluding alternatives such as toxic reaction and encephalitis.

Laughter epidemics, big and small, are universal. Contagious laughter in some Pentecostal and related charismatic Christian churches is a kind of speaking in tongues (glossolalia), a sign that worshippers have been filled with the Holy Spirit. Before looking askance at this practice, consider that it was present at the historic Cane Ridge revival of 1801, in Kentucky, and part of an exuberant religious tradition in which the Shakers actually shook and the Quakers quaked. Even John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, did some of his own quaking and shaking. Those experiencing the blessing of holy laughter spread it back to their home congregations, creating a national and international wave of contagious laughter. Contrast, now, the similarity between the propagation of such religious anointings and what was called the "laughing malady puzzle in Africa". They are strikingly similar, tap the same social trait, and are an extreme form of the commonplace, not pathology. (...)

The use of laughter to evoke laughter is familiar to viewers of television sitcoms. Laugh tracks (dubbed-in sounds of laughter) have accompanied many sitcoms since 9 September 1950. On that evening, The Hank McCune Show – a comedy about "a likable blunderer, a devilish fellow who tries to cut corners only to find himself the sucker" – first used a laugh track to compensate for the absence of a live studio audience. Although the show was short-lived, the television industry discovered the power of canned laughter to evoke audience laughter. (...)

Psychology researchers jumped on the new phenomenon of "canned" laughter, confirming that laugh tracks do indeed increase audience laughter and the audience's rating of the humorousness of the comedy material, attributing the effect to sometimes baroque mechanisms (deindividuation; release restraint mediated by imitation; social facilitation; emergence of social norms, etc). Decades later, we learned that the naked sound of laughter itself can evoke laughter – that you don't need a joke. (...)

In our politically correct, feel-good, be-happy time we are shielded from – and underestimate – the dark side of laughter that was better known to the ancients. If you think laughter is benign, be aware that laughter is present during the worst atrocities, from murder, rape and pillage in antiquity to the present. Laughter has been present at the entertainments of public executions and torture. On street corners around the world, laughing at the wrong person or at the wrong time can get you killed. The publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad by a Danish newspaper triggered calls for the death of the cartoonists and a worldwide murderous rampage that left many dead and injured. Although radical Islam is most in the news, all monotheistic religions ruthlessly suppress humorous challenges to their spiritual franchise. The killers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, were laughing as they strolled through classrooms murdering their classmates. Laughter accompanies ethnic violence and insult, from Kosovo to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Laughing with brings the pleasure of acceptance, in-group feeling, and bonding. But laughing at is jeering and ridicule, targeting outsiders who look or act differently, pounding down the nail that sticks up, shaping them up, or driving them away. Being laughed at can be a very serious, even dangerous business.

by Robert Provine, The Guardian |  Read more:

Music of the Unquiet Mind

In 1944 the avant-garde composer John Cage wrote “Four Walls,” a 70-minute work using only the white keys of the piano. It was the music for a “dance play” in two acts by the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would later become Cage’s lifelong partner. I rediscovered “Four Walls,” virtually forgotten for four decades, in the 1980s. It has since become one of the most personal works in my repertoire. Its repetitive, insistent nature struck a deep chord within me. It was as if someone had entered the innermost rooms of my mind and translated their contents into sound.

I asked Cage, whom I first met in 1981, about this compelling musical essay in inquietude. He told me that “Four Walls” was about the disturbed mind, a subject of fascination for Cunningham and himself during the mid-1940s. Two years after the completion of “Four Walls,” Cage seriously considered giving up composing to undergo psychoanalysis; he turned instead to Asian philosophy and Zen Buddhism.

The music in “Four Walls” is of a non-narrative nature. Its many silences and static repetitions do, however, contribute to an atmosphere of growing entrapment, inviting the listener to probe the deep recesses of his psyche. Each person brings to the experience what he wishes or, rather, what he is. (...)

I have lived with obsessive compulsive disorder for as long as I can remember. When I was a child it manifested itself in a spectrum of behavioral quirks ranging from an adamant insistence that the bow in my hair be perfectly straight to a perpetual need for reassurance to allay my many fears, largely imagined but painfully real to me. A few years ago I came across the perfect depiction of O.C.D.: an image of a child trapped in a merry-go-round cage while his parents looked on helplessly.

My own parents did not know what to make of it all and did their best to cope with my idiosyncrasies. Fortunately for them I insisted on having piano lessons when I was 6, and this became a creative channel for my obsessive energies. One of the classic manifestations of O.C.D. is compulsive counting. Till this day I count the number of steps when climbing a flight of stairs or the number of times I rinse after brushing my teeth. These counting rituals permeating my daily life serve no particular purpose other than to satisfy the need to perform them. That is the nature of O.C.D. Enter music and rhythm: you can imagine how delighted I was to be actually required to count the beats in a piece of music. I could now count to my heart’s content in a totally creative fashion! (...)

Through Cage and his take on Zen philosophy, I have made a truce with my O.C.D. I recognize that it is integral to who I am and have come to accept myself, warts and all. Obsessive-compulsives are, not surprisingly, perfectionists. Yet, I have learned to relinquish the grand illusion of the goal and relish, instead, the unfolding of the process. Cage’s highly forgiving definition of error, as “simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality,” has helped temper my self-judgmental parameters of right and wrong, all or nothing. 

by Margaret Leng Tan, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Karen Barbour

This.  Konstantinos Papamichalopoulos
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Insane, True Energy Fact of the Day

Exit signs are so ubiquitous that they're almost invisible. Every public building has them. In fact, they are so common that, taken together, these little signs consume a surprisingly large amount of energy.

Each one uses relatively little electricity, but they are on all the time. And we have a lot of them in our schools, factories, and office buildings. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there are more than 100 million exit signs in use today in the U.S., consuming 30–35 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually. 

That’s the output of five or six 1,000 MW power plants, and it costs us $2-3 billion per year. Individual buildings may have thousands of exit signs in operation.

To put this into a bigger context: This is just one small part of what makes buildings, in general, incredibly energy intense. In the United States, we use more energy powering our buildings—from the lights, to the heating, to the stuff we plug into the walls—than we use to do anything else. Because of that (and because of the fact that electricity is mostly made by burning coal or natural gas) buildings produce more greenhouse gas emissions than cars.

Read more about the energy consumption of exit signs and how we can use less energy, while still getting the same services, at Green Building Advisor

Take a look at some stats on energy use in buildings at the Architecture 2030 website

by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing |  Read here:
Image: Exit Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mtellin's photostream

Rotterdam skyline by kwikzilver on Flickr
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Iris, Denne 1871~1940
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