Remixed Messages
From top: www.KeepCalmandCarryOn.com; Matt Jones and 20×200.com; Olly Moss; Jenny Heid and Aaron Neiradka/Everyday is a Holiday.
A blunt slogan and a simple image: these basic elements of persuasion, protest, propaganda or making a point have been used in tandem and to great effect for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. Presumably, these messages have always been received in a variety of ways. But these days, it seems, when a slogan and an image reach a significant audience, that’s not the end of the process. In fact it’s just the beginning.
For example, when red posters bearing the sans-serif slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” underneath a simple crown icon started catching on in Britain a few years back, Bex Lewis knew their provenance. Now an associate lecturer in history and media studies at the University of Winchester, Lewis wrote her Ph.D. thesis on British propaganda posters devised for the home front during World War II. The “Keep Calm” poster, meant to be distributed in the event of a German invasion, was extremely obscure for many decades. So she was interested, she recalls, to see it turning into “sort of a consumer item.”
That process began with a fluke: in 2000, Stuart and Mary Manley, owners of a shop called Barter Books in north England, found one of the original posters folded up in the bottom of a box of old books and framed it. Customers liked it, and eventually the Manleys decided to sell reproductions. “Part of it is that it does have this sort of intrinsic British feel about it,” Mary Manley says, adding that the poster evokes a “nostalgia for a certain British character, an outlook.”
On a less romantic note, the design is in the public domain, meaning it can be remade and sold by anybody. A British freelance television-production manager named Mark Coop, for one, decided it “would be a brilliant idea to put it on a T-shirt.” In 2006, he bought the domain name keepcalmandcarryon.com, and offers the slogan and design on a variety of goods, including cuff links and duffel bags. Around the same time, Victoria Smith, a San Francisco Bay Area design blogger and photographer, bought one of the Barter Books posters secondhand and ended up producing her own silk-screen “Keep Calm” prints in a variety of color variations that she sells on Etsy.com. Barter Books has added mugs and mouse pads to its lineup. (Relations among these sellers are not particularly friendly; each complains of copycats selling low-quality versions.)
It turned out that the “Keep Calm” merchandise resonated all over the world. “Germany’s really big on it, oddly enough,” Coop observes. The banking crisis, Smith adds, brought a wave of orders from people working for American financial firms (and, more recently, advertising agencies). In fact, the travails of the global economy seem to have given the slogan fresh relevance to many — as reassurance for some but as creative fodder for others. For instance, one T-shirt design tips the crown upside down and reads “Now Panic and Freak Out.”
Possibly the best-known response graphic was created by Matt Jones, a product designer with the British-based firm Schulze & Webb. He was “in a grumpy mood” when he happened to read an article in The Guardian about the “Keep Calm” trend. “It was full of this sort of British fatalism,” he recalls. Being of the mind-set that “we have to invent our way out of trouble,” he started sketching. His design — the slogan “Get Excited and Make Things” under a crown that includes wrenches — became a Web hit, leading to a T-shirt from Howies, a Welsh clothing brand, and a set of prints sold on 20×200.com; Mule Design in San Francisco is bringing out a version of the shirt in the U.S. (Jones has given his chunk of the proceeds to nonprofit groups.)
By now the iterations online and off are legion: “Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake” (substituting the pastry for the crown); “Don’t Panic and Fake a British Accent ”; “Keep Spending and Carry On Shopping,” etc. Each increases the distance from the original and simultaneously underscores its importance as a reference point, albeit an abstract one. As Bex Lewis points out, even those attracted to the poster’s past may be more revisionist than they realize. “People talk about it — Americans in particular I’m afraid — being the poster that kept the British going through the war,” she says.
In fact, few saw the poster back then. Not many were distributed, and the land invasion never came. Another poster with a similar style did generate “a huge fuss” at the time, she adds, but much of it involved criticism of the condescending, authoritarian tone. Government posters that followed abandoned the stark look and the suggestion of the crown talking down to the masses and were “a lot more colorful and a lot more people-focused,” Lewis says. Nowadays, of course, nobody waits around for the authorities to adjust the meaning of their slogans and images. We just do it ourselves.
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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05FOB-consumed-t.html?ref=magazine
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A Swing and A Hit for Violinist
Musician Plays Instrument Crafted From Baseball Bat
The NSO’s Glenn Donnellan, with his unusual violin, has drawn attention on YouTube.
“I just decided, ‘Well, let’s see if I can make one,’ ” says Glenn Donnellan, a violinist with the National Symphony Orchestra. “I thought it would be cool to say to the kids, ‘Hey, you can make your own.’ “
The object in question is an electric violin made out of a baseball bat. And the answer is, Yes, he could.
Just in time for the Fourth of July, Donnellan posted to YouTube a video of himself playing the national anthem on his electric baseball-bat-violin. He didn’t necessarily mean the clip for wide circulation. He put it up because a friend with contacts in the Washington Nationals front office wanted to show it to his bosses and ask about having Donnellan play the national anthem for a game. But there are no secrets on YouTube. By Friday, the video had racked up a respectable 1,600-plus views, and some enthusiastic comments. “Totally bat-ass!” one viewer wrote.
Donnellan made his bat-violin when the orchestra was preparing to go to Arkansas this spring for the 19th of its annual American residencies, which offer concerts and outreach programs in areas of the country that may not be well served with classical music. He was looking for an instrument to use in a children’s concert; he had done the same program in D.C. with more standard electric fiddles, but he had only borrowed those instruments and couldn’t take them on tour.
Not everyone might have come up with his solution, which required hours backstage at the Kennedy Center, using the stagehands’ drill press to make holes in a baseball bat. “It’s tricky to drill a hole in the handle,” he observes. “If you use a small enough bit, it wants to drift.” He adds, “You’ll see how [the bat-violin] is kind of crude at the bottom.”
On the contrary, the video is downright elegant — both for the instrument, narrow and compact, and for the playing, executed with cool aplomb. It’s certainly not your typical classical-music approach to the national anthem. There are overtones of Jimi Hendrix in the reverberant electronic sound, though the arrangement is actually Donnellan’s own. (The video appears on YouTube as a “video response” to Hendrix, but Donnellan says that was an accident; new to the site, he randomly clicked a lot of different links when his post first went up.)
Donnellan has been with the NSO since 1997; his violinist wife, Jan Chung, frequently plays with the orchestra, too. (They have two children: Adrian, 8, and Katherine, 6.) On his own time, Donnellan tries his hand at fiddling and experimenting with jazz. “Jamming with a guitarist on ‘Hotel California’ at the California Congressional offices on the Hill, and with kids playing the Blues in Mississippi were some of the most fun and memorable musical experiences I’ve had,” he writes in a follow-up e-mail. “In terms of playing outside the classical box, I think that if you can feel it, you can play it.”
The instrument had immediate resonance in Arkansas. Iván Fischer, the NSO’s principal conductor, happened to see Donnellan playing it backstage and immediately had to try it out. Now, Fischer wants one of his own. “I just haven’t had time to make one,” says Donnellan.
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YouTube: National Anthem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9LXHrzOVYA
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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/03/AR2009070302342.html?hpid=moreheadlines
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From the Teeth of the Lion to the Dandelion
The stories behind the names of flowers.
This weekend, weather permitting, we will celebrate our nation’s independence at outdoor parties across the country. While savoring the barbecue, we should not forget to consider the flowers blooming all around us.
Throughout history and in cultures around the world, mankind has held a deep connection with flowers. From the smallest blossoms emerging from the melting snow, marking the end of winter, to elaborate bouquets given as gestures of love, flowers are unmatched in their ability to please the senses and delight the soul.
They have also been infused with symbolism that transcends their colorful blooms. A poetic regard for flowers is evident even in Neanderthal culture with the discovery of burial sites containing Hollyhocks — an indication that the Neanderthals too considered it as “holy”‘ as its name also suggests today.
The names we give to flowers reflect a loftier esteem than the ones we give to, say, vegetables. Broccoli, for example, derives its unappetizing moniker from the Italian brocco, meaning simply a shoot or stalk — in line with the opinions of countless picky eaters. But the names given to flowers often denote their benefit to the spirit.
Like many words in our language, many of the names of flowers hold clues about their history and relationship to us. The daisy, for example, known for its small yellow blossoms, is quite common throughout the world. Daisies are unique in that they close their golden petals during the night and keep them shut, as if in sleep, until the morning. This peculiar characteristic earned this little flower the name ‘day’s eye’ from speakers of Old English. Eventually, that name was compounded into the word daisy.
Dandelions also derive their name from their characteristically numerous thick and slender yellow petals. It is not so strange for an imaginative observer to equate the dandelion’s coarse petals to rows of teeth on a well-fanged beast. This comparison explains its French origin dent de lion, or in English “teeth of a lion.”
Some flowers, on the other hand, were named not from their appearance alone, but for their associations with mythology. The iris, a flower which appears in a wide variety of colors, shares its name with the Greek goddess who unified heaven and earth. Aptly, she was personified by the rainbow.
The narcissus flower, too, is said to have sprouted upon the death of its mythological namesake, though there is no evidence that the flower is as self-absorbed. The Virgin Mary also has left her mark on floral taxonomy with the marigold, or Mary’s gold. According to Flemish tradition, the flower sprouted from her tears.
Still, other flowers’ names offer some insight into their utility in the past. The sweet, aromatic lavender was used to add a pleasant scent to recently washed clothes and to perfume bathwater — as evidenced by its association with the Latin lavare, meaning “to wash.” Calluna, the flowering shrub also known as heather, seems to have been appreciated not so much for its beauty as its handiness as a broom. Its name originated from the Greek word meaning “to sweep.”
The Pansy blossom in late summer begins to droop. The flower’s name is derived from the French pensée, or “thought” — the source for the word pensive.
Carnations are also appreciated for their human qualities. Their soft pink petals are likened to the hue of skin, sharing its meaning closely with the word incarnation, “to be made flesh.” There are early writings, though, that refer to this flower as coronation, which some scholars believe is an allusion to its use as a garland in Greek tradition.
Flowers are so universal in their appeal that nearly every culture names their children after them. From Ambuj (Indian for lotus) to Zara (Arabic for a blossom), floral names are timeless in their popularity. While millions of people around the world share their names with flowers, the opposite is also true. The Zinnia and Dahlia flowers, for example, can thank the 18th century botanists Johann Zinn and Anders Dahl, respectively, for their names.
Ultimately, the names assigned to flowers reflect less the flowers themselves than our longstanding relationship of love and esteem for them. A rose by any other name might still smell as sweet — but a flower’s name and the story behind it are deeply meaningful, human stories. They are our contribution to one of nature’s most cherished creations.
Mr. Messenger is a writer and a linguist.
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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657689923189159.html
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Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music’s Mystery
Ancient Instrument Rekindles Speculation That Melody, Which Powerfully Affects the Brain, Was a Prelude to Speech
Professor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009. The thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago and unearthed in a German cave is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archeologists say, and offers the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture. A team led by Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.
The discovery of the world’s oldest musical instrument — a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone — highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm.
Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak.
All told, the researchers have found eight flutes of the same Ice Age vintage at three different caves in the region. “It is becoming completely clear that music was a normal part of life then,” says archaeologist Nicholas Conard at the University of Tubingen, who led the research team. “They must have clapped and danced and sang.”
Parrots dance to the beat. Sex-starved mice sing for love, new research shows. But true music, from rap to Rachmaninoff, is a unique human invention that resonates in us all, striking neural chords of memory, emotion, motor control, timing and meaning — and transforming us in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.
“Music is biologically powerful,” says neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “Every culture ever discovered has music, no matter what else they may lack.”
By any measure, our brain is a music box. Yet no one knows why.
It certainly baffled Charles Darwin. In his landmark tome, “The Descent of Man,” the 19th century author of evolutionary theory wrote that, “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” Nonetheless, Darwin wasn’t immune to its allure. He avidly listened to Mozart, Handel and Beethoven, even though he was partly tone deaf.
Some scientists are convinced that music is only noise, a curious but compelling byproduct of our innate capacity for speech and our penchant for pattern recognition. We hear melodies in the wind, songs in falling water and percussion in the sound of rain drops.
“Music is a way of structuring sound,” says psychologist Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis, who studies the neurobiology of music. “It really gets to this underlying human desire to discover patterns in things.”
Others speculate that music evolved from animal calls to convey emotional urgency before our forebears learned to communicate through the spoken word. They detect hints of music’s beginnings in the soothing sing-song syllables of a mother’s lullaby. In this view, harmony and regulated rhythm may have been inspired by the sounds of social life, as early humans worked in unison striking stones to make tools or grinding seeds for food.
“I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now,” says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.” Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. “Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans.”
Indeed, Dr. Conard and his colleagues say that the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. “The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals,” Dr. Conard says.
To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. “It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life,” he says. “It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds.”
There is no denying its power to change our mood — or our brain structure.
Among expert musicians, some brain areas can be up to 5% larger than in those with little or no musical training, research shows. Nerve tissue linking the right and left hemispheres of our brain is up to 15% larger among those who studied music since early childhood. Moreover, the auditory cortex of an expert musician can contain up to 130% more gray matter of neurons and synapses than someone who has never practiced on an instrument.
When we listen to music, our brain responds directly to harmony, brain scanning studies show. Listening to the classical scales and key progressions of Western music actually rewires the synapses of the human cortex, Dr. Janata and his colleagues discovered.
Music orchestrates our inner life, by activating a place in our medial prefrontal cortex region that supports our most personal autobiographical memories. There, our favorite music cues our thoughts of ourselves, the UC Davis researchers reported earlier this year. “The moment we hear a song that is familiar to us, it ramps up the amount of activity in that region,” Dr. Janata says.
Every time a zebra finch hears a new song of its species, the melody triggers a cascade of biological changes in its brain, causing thousands of genes to switch on and off in sequence, developmental cell biologist David Clayton at the University of Illinois reported last month in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.
So far, however, there is no evidence that music has any place in the human genome. “It is tempting to say that music is in our genes,” says Dr. Patel. “But it may be universal because all over the world it has tremendous emotional power.”
Music does move us in mysterious ways. It quickens our pulse, pressing us to stamp our feet, sway or clap our hands in time. Our sense of syncopation, though, is a musical quality that we do share with other species.
Earlier this year, Dr. Patel and his colleagues at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla reported that a parrot can keep time to music, readily high-stepping to a variable beat in the discotheque of its bird brain. The subject of their study — a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball — kept pace with the tempo in a way that dogs, cats and chimpanzees cannot. A video of the cockatoo moving to the beat of The Backstreet Boys has been viewed almost three million times on YouTube.
For the flutists of the cave, music-making was no fluke. When archaeologists made a replica of one small Ice Age flute fashioned from a swan’s wing bone, they discovered they could play four basic notes and three overtones, with a range comparable to some modern flutes.
Across a thousand generations or more, they heard the scale of our beginnings.
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Recommended reading
Recommended Reading
Archaeologists reported on the oldest known musical instrument in “New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany” published in Nature.
Psychologists at the University of California at Davis document how familiar music stirs synapses connected to personal memories in “The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories” published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Music also strikes neural chords of meaning in the brain, just like sentences, the scientists discuss in ‘When Music Tells a Story’ in Nature Neuroscience.
Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute found that a parrot can follow a variable tempo in “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal” published in Current Biology.
University of Reading archaeologist Steven Mithen explores the evolutionary origins of music in “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.”
Neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience in Music, Language, and the Brain.
Oliver Sacks writes about music and unusual brain disorders in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
Record producer and cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitan writes about why music affects us so strongly in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
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What the flute might have sounded like:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/audio/2009/2009-june/090624-flute.mp3
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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124656639970388165.html
Photo: http://www.idahostatesman.com/worldnews/story/812613.html
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See also: Flutes, old and new
Paintings, sculpture and music were all part of the tapestry of early man on this earth. It seems our ancestors had highly sophisticated means of artistic expression, and took this know-how with them as they migrated into Europe.
This past Wednesday, archaeologists in southern Germany dug up the oldest instrument ever: A 35,000-year-old bone flute that was most surely well-loved and played regularly.
It is remarkable how similar this flute looks to its successors from many millenia in the future, though this archetype would have been played vertically.
In spite of that, the mechanics of making music on these two flutes are precisely the same. A player brought the carved lip plate to her mouth and blew across the opening, its sharp edge splitting the airstream and causing the instrument to vibrate.
The lovely, tuneful, bird-like sound that resulted was much louder and in a greater range than the human voice. The five holes could be covered partially or fully by her fingers — to change pitches, trill, slide, quaver and make any number of melodies, ones we can only guess at.
Though hardly as ancient in any anthropological sense, the Dorian Wind Quintet has been around for a good long time, founded in 1961 by five young musicians studying at Tanglewood in eastern Massachusetts.
The Dorian came to St. Paul in the dead of winter to play a recital as part of the Music in the Park Series.
Click the audio links to hear the concert, and listen to the flutist who plays three different instruments — piccolo, alto flute as well as the C-flute.
Audio
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Full article and photo: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/24/dorian_quintet/
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Behind the Facade
Meeting Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s was one of the creepier experiences of my life. I was an editor at The Daily News and had to present him with an award in a large room with just a handful of onlookers and a photographer at Madison Square Garden.
I wasn’t put off by the fact that Jackson, then in his mid-20s, couldn’t make small talk. Lots of people have trouble with that. There was something about his overall behavior that weirded me out. He seemed, even then, to be a person who was trying with all of his being to step outside of reality and leave it behind.
Emmanuel Lewis, the child star of the hit TV series “Webster,” was with Jackson that evening. The undersized Lewis was probably 13 at the time, but he looked much younger, maybe 7 or 8.
Jackson seemed to relate only to Lewis. He made faces at the tiny boy and giggled as Lewis hopped around and climbed over furniture, much to Jackson’s delight. I remember thinking as I left the Garden that Jackson had treated Lewis almost as a pet.
I’ve never heard any suggestion of anything improper about the relationship between Jackson and Lewis. But what I wish I had thought more about in those long-ago days of Michael-mania was the era of extreme immaturity and grotesque irresponsibility that was already well under way in America. The craziness played out on a shockingly broad front and Jackson’s life, among many others, would prove to be a shining and ultimately tragic example.
Ronald Reagan was president, making promises he couldn’t keep about taxes and deficits and allowing the readings of a West Coast astrologer to shape his public schedule. The movie “Wall Street” would soon appear, accurately reflecting the nation’s wholesale acceptance of unrestrained greed and other excesses of the rich and powerful.
In neighborhoods through much of black America, crack was taking a fearful toll. Young criminals were arming themselves with ever more powerful weapons, and prison garb was used to set fashion trends.
Motown was the label that gave us the Jackson 5. But when Michael and his brothers released their first album in 1969, the label had already reached its creative peak and most of the best work — the stunning originality of the Miracles, the Marvelettes, Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, the Temptations, and others — had been done. Hip-hop would soon appear, and then the violence and misogyny of gangsta rap.
All kinds of restraints were coming off. It was almost as if the adults had gone into hiding. The deregulation that we were told would be great for the economy was being applied to the culture as a whole. Women could be treated as sex objects again as misogyny, hardly limited to hip-hop, went mainstream. (Have you looked at network television lately, or listened to the radio?) Astonishing numbers of men abandoned their children with impunity. Most of the nation seemed fine with the idea of going to war without a draft and without raising taxes.
In many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind. Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom. We shipped jobs overseas by the millions without ever thinking seriously about how to replace them. We let New Orleans drown.
Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild. He tried to carve himself up into another person, but, of course, there was the same Michael Jackson underneath — talented but psychologically disabled to the point where he was a danger to himself and others.
Reality is unforgiving. There is no escape. Behind the Jackson facade was the horror of child abuse. Court records and reams of well-documented media accounts contain a stream of serious allegations of child sex abuse and other inappropriate behavior with very young boys. Jackson, a multimillionaire megastar, was excused as an eccentric. Small children were delivered into his company, to spend the night in his bed, often by their parents.
One case of alleged pedophilia against Jackson, the details of which would make your hair stand on end, was settled for a reported $25 million. He beat another case in court.
The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death — not just an appreciation of his music, but a giddy celebration of his life — is yet another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life.
As with so many other things, we don’t want to know.
Bob Herbert, New York Times
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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/opinion/04herbert.html?_r=1
