July 2013 – Page 58

A Composed Cup Of Joe

Andrew Webster describes the short video seen above:

There are many small pleasures that come with making a cup of coffee, from the warm mug in your hands to that first sip. But one thing you might not think about is the sound. Thankfully, composer and sound designer Diego Stocco — who has worked on the most recent Sherlock Holmes films as well as games in the Assassin’s Creed series — decided to make a video that highlights this oft-forgotten aspect of coffee making. Using some custom built waterproof microphones, along with other gear, he was able to capture everything from the shake of a sugar packet to the pouring of the brew itself — and the results sound surprisingly epic.

For an epic supercut of all the coffee (and pie) scenes from Twin Peaks, check out the video after the jump:

Speaking On The Sly

Security specialist Bruce Schneier points to an old passage about the utility of secret languages:

The klezmer-loshn spoken by Jewish musicians allowed them to talk about the families and wedding guests without being overheard. Germanía and Grypsera are prison languages designed to keep information from guards — the first in sixteenth-century Spain, the second in today’s Polish jails. The same logic shows how a secret language need not be the tongue of a minority or an oppressed group: given the right circumstances, even a national language can turn cryptolect.

In 1680, as Moroccan troops besieged the short-lived British city of Tangier, Irish soldiers manning the walls resorted to speaking as Gaeilge, in Irish, for fear of being understood by English-born renegades in the Sultan’s armies. To this day, the Irish abroad use the same tactic in discussing what should go unheard, whether bargaining tactics or conversations about taxi-drivers’ haircuts.

The same logic lay behind North African slave-masters’ insistence that their charges use the Lingua Franca (a pidgin based on Italian and Spanish and used by traders and slaves in the early modern Mediterranean) so that plots of escape or revolt would not go unheard. A Flemish captive, Emanuel d’Aranda, said that on one slave-galley alone, he heard “the Turkish, the Arabian, Lingua Franca, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English.” On his arrival at Algiers, his closest companion was an Icelander. In such a multilingual environment, the Lingua Franca didn’t just serve for giving orders, but as a means of restricting chatter and intrigue between slaves. If the key element of the secret language is that it obscures the understandings of outsiders, a national tongue can serve just as well as an argot.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Do elephants have souls? If you doubt it, read and watch here. The three essential types of prayer? Here. When Christians were evangelical , stoned and sweet, here. On NSFW Saturday, we explored the first erotic novel, and a damning, revelatory film about the ugly side of the Rolling Stones.

My single favorite post was a quote from Carl Sagan, that stoner mystic and sage. This portrait of a cat will not give you LOLs.

For the first time ever, a poem, The Peace Of Wild Things, was the most popular post of the day, which gives me an opportunity to thank our amazing poetry editor, Alice Quinn, for the way she’s helped us bring poetry into the recipe for dishness. Poetry may change nothing, but it can make everything bearable. It even beat out this revealing discussion of the propaganda techniques of Fox News.

I’m still grieving Norma, but I know she’d be loving Bear Week in Ptown, which just kicked off. With thousands of beefy, big, hairy bearded dudes all around, I feel like a puppy in a barrel of squirrels.

See you in the morning.

(Photo by Flickr user blinkingidiot.)

The Tragedy Of Trayvon

I wish I could have some sharp response to the Martin verdict except profound sadness. I can see two things clearly: when there are no witnesses but the two individuals involved in a fight, and the victim is dead, and you live in a state that provides “stand your ground” immunity for self-defense, then proving a murder beyond a reasonable doubt is hard. I’m not going to second-guess the jurors, except to say the obvious: if that were a jury of Trayvon’s peers, then I’m a heterosexual.

Equally, I found the way in which many elements on the right brandished their relish at seeing Zimmerman vindicated was more repellent than the identity politics faction that politicized the case. A young black man was dead, after he was clearly racially profiled, followed and challenged. Those facts alone should, in my view, lead to nothing but sadness, not a gleeful turn on the racial merry-go-round.

I didn’t follow the trial that closely largely because of that. There’s no way any of us can know precisely what happened in that violent interaction, except that Zimmerman clearly made a decision that led directly to it. But when an all-white jury in America finds a “white” man innocent of killing an unarmed black man, the resonances are simply undeniable.

The “stand-your-ground” law – when it interacts with race – can come perilously close to a return to the right to lynch black men in America – just for being be in the wrong place at the wrong time, for doing nothing wrong, except wearing a hoodie and carrying some Skittles. Perhaps the best way to react now is to raise awareness about these laws that all but sanction murder because in a one-on-one conflict, in which there are no reliable witnesses and in which one of the individuals is dead, reasonable doubt is a very hard hurdle to overcome. This verdict may give some racist vigilantes encouragement to single out and murder black men with a sense of impunity. That is simply unacceptable, to put it mildly. It is a terrifying reminder of how the past can become present again.

We must respect the jury’s decision. But we need not respect that law. And, unless we are to return to the era of lynching, it needs to be repealed.

Rand Paul’s Biggest Selling Point

Stuart Reid thinks it’s Paul’s foreign policy:

After [George H.W.] Bush lost his reelection, the realists never could transcend technocracy to achieve real political influence, and never could offer a message that competed with that of the neoconservatives. Today, Republican realists face the added disadvantage of having a president from the opposite party who, generally speaking, has adopted just the type of limited foreign policy they prescribe. Agreeing with the incumbent Democrat gets you nowhere in the Republican Party.

And so the non-neoconservative Republicans are left with Paul, who, in the words of the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “can sometimes sound like a libertarian purist, sometimes like a realist in the Brent Scowcroft mode and sometimes like—well, like a man who was an ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Ky., just a few short years ago.” Paul’s perceived extremism has prevented the old-school realists from claiming him as their own. As one former official who identifies as a realist told me, “While some (but not all, to say the least) of what Rand Paul says makes sense, he is much too outside the mainstream on all sorts of economic, domestic, and foreign policy questions to be the heir to Bush 41, Ford, Nixon, Eisenhower, etc.”

When anyone describes anyone in Washington “outside the mainstream” without any substantive argument as to why he is wrong, my hackles rise. Those in Washington who were “out of the mainstream” in 2003 opposed the Iraq War. In 1993, “outside the mainstream” folks backed gay marriage. In 1980, “out of the mainstream” Ronald Reagan changed the country.

I have lots of qualms about both Pauls. But I can see how sincere he is in believing America’s interests would be better served by a lighter global footprint than our current one, and I agree with him. He’s too libertarian-purist for my taste or, in my view, the country’s cohesion. But knowing how tough it can be to shift Washington’s vast and connected military industrial complex away from seeking reasons to justify its expansion and expense, his rigidity, though an obvious flaw in a politician, may be necessary to get to a post-hegemonic America. And he has definitely helped change the debate:

The brashest of Paul’s positions—the immediate cutting off of aid, the major downsizing of military bases, the imposition of significant congressional authority—will likely never become U.S. foreign policy. But his effect on the rhetorical landscape could prove more lasting. Paul, George Will said, has “expanded the range of what is discussable.” The challenge he poses to advocates of military intervention is particularly potent, and particularly useful at a time when Washington is debating our intervention in Syria.

Drezner admits that “Paul is taking positions that are forcing more hawkish GOP foreign policy activists to, at a minimum, hone and defend their arguments better than they have in the past.” But he isn’t entirely sold:

[O]ne of the points I was trying to make in my Foreign Affairs essay was that the GOP needed to take the topic seriously as a substantive policy issue — not just as an opportunity to posture for domestic interests. Based on Reid’s article, it’s not entirely clear to me that Paul is doing that. Rather, he just seems to be playing to a different base — the Alex Jones-listening, UN-black-helicopter, the-amero-is-coming conspiracy theorists.

As often, Dan separates the Paulite wheat from its large amount of chaff.

(Photo: Getty Images.)

One More Reason To Hate Hitler

He ruined German music, according to Terry Teachout’s review of Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis:

The extent to which Hitler and his cultural commissars sought to control and shape European musical life has been chronicled in detail. But most of these books have dealt primarily or exclusively with German-speaking performers and those performing artists from other countries, France in particular, who collaborated with the Nazis. Yet the unswerving determination of the Nazis to rid Europe of what they called entartete musik (degenerate music) may well have had an even more far-reaching effect on postwar European musical culture. After all, many well-known Jewish classical performers—Fritz Kreisler, Artur Schnabel and Bruno Walter among them—managed to emigrate to America and other countries where they continued their careers without significant interruption. Not so the Jewish composers whose music was banned by the Nazis. Some of them were killed in the Holocaust, and none of those who survived succeeded in fully reconstituting their professional lives after the war.

One of the reasons why? It turns out the Fürhrer was a devotee of Wagner, in more than one sense of the word:

It is in no way surprising that Hitler should have paid close attention to Germany’s musical establishment, since he was an aesthete manqué with a passion for classical music. His ideas, moreover, about music and musicians had been shaped by Richard Wagner. “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” he declared. Hitler read Wagner’s writings closely and took them seriously, declaring Wagner to be his favorite “political” writer and describing him as one of “the great reformers” in Mein Kampf. “Beside Frederick the Great we have such men as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.”

Wagner’s pathological anti-Semitism was the insane root of the Third Reich’s suppression of Jewish composers. But one of the most striking aspects of this policy was the fact that even though Hitler promulgated a staunchly anti-modernist doctrine, it was not absolute in practice. Except for Hitler himself, Nazi leaders were comparatively indifferent to whether a given composer was a traditionalist or a modernist, so long as he played ball with them. What mattered to them—and to Hitler—was blood. If you were Jewish, it was irrelevant whether you were assimilated or observant, much less whether you were an atonal modernist or a Brahmsian conservative: Either way, you threatened the racial purity of German culture.

From Wreckage To Rhyme

Casey N. Cep navigates an enduring poetic metaphor – the shipwreck:

Shipwrecks have engaged the poetic imagination for centuries. Remnants of several million shipwrecks are estimated to rest on the ocean floor. When sailing was the only way of navigating the world, shipwrecks were fierce, living terrors; even now, as other modes of transportation dominate travel, shipwrecks maintain their prominence in metaphors of isolation and ennui as well as in images of wreckage and destruction. Ships themselves still wreck in poetry, but so, too, do relationships, souls, and states.

Her take on Shelley’s “Adonais,” featured above:

The narrative of Shelley’s life was revised so that all of its features foreshadowed his shipwreck. His early love of sailing, beginning with paper boats made from bank notes, became ominous; his earlier brushes with shipwrecks—most notably in the decade before he died, on the Rhine River with his wife and on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron—ceased to be signs of providence, becoming instead portentous siren songs. Lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest were even taken for his epitaph: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

Shelley’s poetry was not spared this revision. His elegy for John Keats, written a year before his own death, was suddenly taken for prophecy. The final stanza of “Adonais” laments: “My spirit’s bark is driven, / Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given.” Shelley, like Keats, was understood to have been prematurely and tragically “borne darkly, fearfully, afar.” His shipwreck came to symbolize both his life and work, not only his death.

(Video: Mick Jagger reading a passage from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” just days after his former Rolling Stones band mate Brian Jones was found dead floating in a swimming pool.)

Being African In America, Ctd

In an interview, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the novel Americanah, expands on her arguments about race that the Dish first covered here:

[R]ace is something that one has to learn. I had to learn what it meant to be black. When I first came, somebody made a joke about fried chicken, and people said ‘Oh my God!’ And I just thought, ‘Why? What’s the problem? What’s going on?’ If you’re coming from Nigeria, you have no idea what’s going on. When I came to the United States, I hadn’t stayed very long, but I already knew that to be “black” was not a good thing in America, and so I didn’t want to be “black.” I think there are many immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean who feel that way, and will say very clearly ‘I’m not black.’ There’s the overriding desire to do well, to succeed. If it means absorbing the negative stereotypes of a particular group, then that’s fine, they do it. I think also that many black immigrants don’t realize that they’re able to be here and do what they’re doing because of the sacrifices of African Americans. They don’t know the history. I didn’t when I came.

An African American man called me “sister” once, and I was like ‘No, no, no, I’m not your sister, I’m not doing that.’ It took about a year of reading, learning, watching, for me to really come around and realize that there’s a context— you know, I read African American history and I’m just amazed at how recent some of the things that happened were. I’m not talking about slavery, I’m talking about 40 years ago. But when immigrants come here they absorb stories that have no context and no history. So it’s ‘oh, black Americans are very lazy. They all live in the inner city because, you know, they don’t want to work hard.’ Sometimes you’re in a gathering of immigrants, and some of the talk can sound like you’re in Alabama in 1965.

It’s very depressing, because I’ve come to deeply, deeply admire African American history and African American people. Their story is the one I most admire, the one I’m most moved by. But then, there are different ways of being black, there are different blacks. I’ve come to very happily identify as black, and I like to joke about wanting to go back and find that man who called me sister, because I would hug him. But my experience is different. My experience of blackness is different from African Americans, and for me it’s still a learning process, because there are things that I can’t inhabit. Now I know racial subtleties, now I get it. But I don’t have the history, and it’s different.

Face Of The Day

“The Irreversible” is a series and book by Maciek Nabrdalik that documents Holocaust survivors. David Rosenberg explains:

In 2009, concerned that he was living with the last generation of Holocaust survivors, photographer Maciek Nabrdalik began meeting, interviewing and taking portraits of survivors for a series titled “The Irreversible”.

Nabrdalik felt a need to act quickly, noting that some survivors passed away after he made contact with them including the last known gay survivor Gad Beck. He said other survivors felt that while they had moved on with their lives and their recollections were not as vivid as they once were, they could never completely escape the nightmares of the past. That sentiment became the title of the project because “…it is difficult to escape something that lies so deep and returns uninvited in dreams, fears and associations. This, they say, is irreversible.”

(Photo: Zofia Posmysz, KL Auschwitz-Birkenau and KL Ravensbruck survivor, by Maciek Nabrdalik. The Irreversible was published this month.)

Quote For The Day

“We humans are one among millions of separate species who live in a world burgeoning, overflowing with life. And yet, most species that ever were are no more. After flourishing for one hundred fifty million years, the dinosaurs became extinct. Every last one. No species is guaranteed its tenure on this planet. And humans, the first beings to devise the means for their own destruction, have been here for only several million years.

We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. We have an obligation to fight for life on Earth — not just for ourselves but for all those, humans and others, who came before us and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after. There is no cause more urgent than to survive to eliminate on a global basis the growing threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, economic collapse and mass starvation. These problems were created by humans and can only be solved by humans. No social convention, no political system, no economic hypothesis, no religious dogma is more important.

The hard truth seems to be this: We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We would prefer it to be otherwise, of course, but there is no compelling evidence for a cosmic Parent who will care for us and save us from ourselves. It is up to us,” – Carl Sagan.

(Hat tip: Maria Popova)