The voice dies

Don LaFontaine passed away, at the age of 68. As a kid, I often wondered how different the world -or at least the cinema- would be without him.

He was 'the narrator guy in all the movie trailers'. Here's a great youtube clip.

Your eyes, your hands, your back

Visual artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg analyzed over 10,000 songs to find out which parts of the human body were mentioned the most and broke down the resulting data by genre. The result: An interactive graphic work called "Listen" that correlates musical genres with the body parts they mention the most, as part of their ongoing Fleshmap project.

As for the genre that talks about body parts the most, hip hop takes the honors with more references than any other genre. Meanwhile, gospel refers to the body the least.

I really like this, definitely worth clicking through. Here's heavy metal, as hip hop might have disturbed readers of this family blog:
Hat tip MR.

Could you be, the most beautiful church in the world

Informally known as Ronchamp, the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (French: Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp), France completed in 1954 is considered one of the finest examples of architecture by the late French/Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier at first refused the commission, not wanting, he said, to be associated with a 'dead institution'.

What a poorer place the world would have been!



More pictures here, the Wikipedia entry with yet more eye-candy is here.

For economists and everyone that hates them, David Galenson takes a look at the greatest architects of the 20th century. You can find the paper at the NBER website - for some reason I can't access it right now. Find out who was the - objectively measured, naturally - greatest architect of the 20th century, the greatest building, as well as what Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright have in common with Howard Roark, the most amusingly one-sided character in all of fiction.

More Galenson here and here.

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

This is Ernest Hemingway's 6-word novel. Apparently, 'rumor has it that Hemingway regarded it as his greatest work'.

Here's more writers undertaking the same venture; comments are of course open if you would like to have a go.

The Ultimate Machine

This is brilliant:


[embedded video]

About 7 years ago I was reading an article on Claude Shannon and came across one of the funniest ideas I had ever heard. Claude, you see, was one of these incredibly brilliant engineers with an obviously great sense of humor. As I understand it, he, along with Marvin Minsky came up with an idea they called the "Ultimate Machine". Basically a plain box with a switch on the top. When you flip the switch, a hand comes out of the box and flips the switch off. Thats it.

Well, after reading the article, and laughing out loud, I decided that I HAD to build one of these boxes.

How America banned marijuana

I'm watching Ron Mann's 1999 Grass, narrated by Woody Harrelson. Some of the propaganda films depicted are astonishing - did people really believe that stuff? I don't want to hear anyone ever say again that modern America is an immature society.

And here is something I didn't know - the artful way in which marijuana possession was made a federal crime:

The Marijuana Tax Act was signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1937. The act prohibited possession of marijuana anywhere in the United States without a special tax stamp from the Treasury Department, and the Treasury Department didn't give out any stamps, effectively making marijuana illegal.

Genius. It is also telling how that such an elaborate arrangement had to be dreamt up to achieve criminalisation of marijuana: the power to ban a product was a new-found one.

Niloufar

From Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

A girl argues with God

This is from the superb Persepolisby the Iranian Marjane Satrapi. If you read one thing this year, this should be it.

I will be posting a couple more excerpts from the book and commentary in the following days.

A boy named Sue

My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn't leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

Well, he must o' thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a' lots of folk,
It seems I had to fight my whole life through.
Some gal would giggle and I'd get red
And some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named "Sue."

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame.
But I made a vow to the moon and stars
That I'd search the honky-tonks and bars
And kill that man who gave me that awful name.

Well, it was Gatlinburg in mid-July
And I just hit town and my throat was dry,
I thought I'd stop and have myself a brew.
At an old saloon on a street of mud,
There at a table, dealing stud,
Sat the dirty, mangy dog that named me "Sue."

Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad
From a worn-out picture that my mother'd had,
And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye.
He was big and bent and gray and old,
And I looked at him and my blood ran cold
And I said: "My name is 'Sue!' How do you do!
Now your gonna die!!"

Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes
And he went down, but to my surprise,
He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear.
But I busted a chair right across his teeth
And we crashed through the wall and into the street
Kicking and a' gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.

I tell ya, I've fought tougher men
But I really can't remember when,
He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.
I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss,
He went for his gun and I pulled mine first,
He stood there lookin' at me and I saw him smile.

And he said: "Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you "Sue.'"

I got all choked up and I threw down my gun
And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,
And I came away with a different point of view.
And I think about him, now and then,
Every time I try and every time I win,
And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him
Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!

Stranger than fiction

What a beautiful film. In the best tradition of American movie-making, the story is incredibly good and the casting inspired. It even gets brownie points for being chick-friendly.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

A well written and well made movie, based on an extraordinary true story:

At the age of 43, on December 8, 1995, Bauby, editor of ELLE magazine, suffered a stroke. When he woke up twenty days later, he found he was almost entirely speechless; he could only move his mouth a little, grunt, and blink his left eyelid.

Despite his condition, he authored the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking when the correct letter was reached by a person slowly reciting the alphabet over and over again. Bauby had to compose and edit the book entirely in his head, and convey it one letter at a time.

The movie reminded me of Mar Adentro, another true story, as well as the classic Johnny Got his Gun (and read the book, even if you disagree with it's politics. You can buy it for a pound here.)

And it might say something about me, but the thought that kept torturing me throughout watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly had to do with the communication system devised by Bauby's speech therapist:

The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid. An amanuensis repeatedly recited a frequency-ordered alphabet (E, L, A, O, I, N, S, D ...), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. This made dictation more efficient. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and each word took approximately two minutes.

Having someone recite a frequency-ordered alphabet is, of course, not efficient at all - unless your sole purpose is to minimise the number of required blinks, a minor consideration in this case.

I can think of a hundred different schemes to arrange letters so as to make the whole process of communicating letters more efficient, ranging from morse code to a mobile-phone style categorisation of letters.

Keep in mind that Bauby's ability to see, hear and think were not at all impaired, and he could easily master any such scheme very quickly.

So, a little more thinking going into this would have allowed Bauby to increase his speed of communication with the outside world and, yes, his quality of life dramatically. As simple, and as sad, as that.

Game theory

For Lucas, the incident, which occurred in "the summer of 1965 or '66," was strategy. Strictly business. Because, as Lucas recalls, "when you're in the kind of work I was in, you've got to be for real. You've got to show what you're willing to do."

"Everyone, Goldfinger Terrell, Willie Abraham, Hollywood Harold, was talking about this big guy, this Tango. About six five, 270 pounds, quick on his feet . . . He killed two or three guys with his hands. Had this big bald head, like Mr. Clean. Wore those Mafia undershirts. Everyone was scared of him. So I figured, Tango, you're my man.

"I went up to him, asked him if he wanted to do something, some business. I gave him $5,000 worth of merchandise. Because I know he was gonna fuck up. That's the kind of guy he was. Two weeks later, I go talk to him. 'Look, man,' I say. 'Hey, man, when you gonna pay me?'

"Then, like I knew he would, he started getting hot, going into one of his gorilla acts. He was one of them silverback gorillas, you know, you seen them in the jungle. A silverback gorilla, that's what he was.

"He started cursing, saying he was going to make me his bitch and he'd do the same to my mama too. Well, as of now, he's dead. No question, a dead man. But I let him talk. A dead man got a right to say what he wants. Now the whole block is there, to see if I'm going to pussy out. He was still yelling. So I said to him, 'When you get through, let me know.' "

"Then the motherfucker broke for me. But he was too late. I shot him. Four times, right through here: bam, bam, bam, bam.

"Yeah, it was right there," says Frank Lucas, 35 years after the shooting, pointing out the car window. "The boy didn't have no head. The whole shit blowed out back there . . . That was my real initiation fee into taking over completely down here. Because I killed the baddest motherfucker. Not just in Harlem but in the world."

"After I killed that boy," Frank Lucas goes on, gesturing toward the corner on the other side of 116th Street, "from that day on, I could take any amount of money, set it on the corner, and put my name on it. FRANK LUCAS. I guarantee you, nobody would touch it."

This is from 'The Return of Superfly', a New York magazine story that led to Ridley Scott's 'American Gangster'. The film is OK, though not a must-see. The NY mag story is fantastic, I'm probably quoting its least interesting part. Here is a recent discussion between Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes.

It doesn't get geekier than that

You all of course know about Erdős numbers. You might even be familiar with Bacon numbers.

But Erdős–Bacon numbers? This takes it to a completely different level. There are 23 people for whom the number is defined, including such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan and Natalie Portman.

I wonder if one of those will ever be up for sale...

The 7 wonders of the totalitarian world

Esquire has an interesting list of monuments to megalomania (via Peter Klein). Make sure you check out this abomination from North Korea, easily the ugliest thing I've seen in my entire life.

(but if you a relatively new Bluematter. reader you should also see this video from Arirang in North Korea, a truly daunting exhibition.)

My favourite Capricho

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Text caption from the "Prado" etching version:

"Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."

More here.

Will the iphone blend?

Literally speaking - this is one hell of a blender, watch what happens to Chuck Norris, IT infrastructure, and a video camera.

I love the aesthetic (youtube kitsch?) and, of course, don't breath this!

Art and economics

Long before Andy Warhol, Théodore Duret established the principle that prices provide evidence of artistic success. What is disappointing, however, is how poor the quality of the art world’s economic discourse remains even in the post-Warhol era. It continues to be fashionable among many critics and scholars to claim that art markets are irrational, and that prices have no value as indicators of artistic importance. These claims are both ignorant and foolish. Art scholars must overcome their distaste for economics (emphasis mine), and become more sophisticated in examining how changes in art markets have influenced artists’ attitudes and behavior.

This is from a new NBER paper by David Galenson.

The problem with valuing art is that art is not for sale: it's non-rivarlous and non-excludable. Art relates purely to the idea, not the material. Any half-decent colour printer can churn out an exact copy of the Mona Lisa (let alone the Warhol images), and an exact replica of the Aphrodite of Milos will cost you next to nothing compared to what the Louvre would ask for the original. And I won't even go to Duchamp's urinal.

So what do collectors pay for? Mainly, they pay for symbolism. And symbolism is politics, not art. An object's price is a very weak predictor of its artistic value.

This is not to say that art and economics are orthogonal to each other. Prices dramatically 'influence the attitudes and behaviors of artists' - and thus the art of the present and of the future - and deserve to be taken as seriously by art scholars as by the artists' themselves.

Anti-materialistic art scholars 1, Galenson 1.

A change of seasons

The second album (as I said before, in chronological order) in my list of greatest albums is Dream Theater's 1995 EP 'A Change of Seasons'. Unfortunately, I could only locate a four-part video with the full 23 minutes of the title track on youtube, so here is the first six minutes followed by links to the rest:



And part 2, part 3 and part 4.

In this economist's humble opinion, Dream Theater is the most super of super-groups in the history of rock, and arguably the best band ever to walk the planet. Here's the official website, and what Wikipedia has to say about them.

And check this guy out - simply excellent, never seen anyone more deserving of a real drumkit.

Thick as a brick

A reader asks me to list my favourite music albums of all time. There are three that stand above the rest, and I will post on all of them over the next week in chronological order. Here's the first one, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, from the band's '78 Madison Sq Garden performance:



Here's wikipedia, the lyrics (astounding even without the music) and the LP cover newspaper.

Animator vs Animation

The animator, looking for a challenge, decides to make the stick figure harder to beat. Little does he know exactly how much power he is giving to the little guy. Long live The Chosen One!




Click on the middle of the image to watch, here is the equally good part 1.

Animator vs animation is the creation of 18 year old Wunderkind Alan Becker, more here.

And here is his comment on 'Praying':

This is my last art project I did in high school before graduating. It's part of a contest involving drawings of the hands. The winner gets published in a greeting card that is sent by the company to all its customers. I almost won. I think it was going to be either mine or my fellow classmate Maggie Sather, and they picked hers, to make her the winner two years in a row.

Anyway I like this drawing and I hope to do more in college.