Lights Dim / Gallery Six – “Sea of Tranquility”
Moon EP
This short ambient album was put out to commemorate the 43rd anniversary of the moon landing. It’s very reminiscent of the Fennesz/Sakamoto collaboration, Cendre, but a bit noisier. Only 21 hard copies were made (and sold), but you can pay what you like to get it at their Bandcamp page or download it for free at Archive.org.
“Through the Green Fuse” – electrified flowers by Robert Buelteman
Benoit Mandelbrot
You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men the same way, — and the fools know it.
Lightning at 7207 frames per second (Tom Warner)
Appian Way – Piranesi (1756)
A truly enormous version that shows its many, many details can be found at Wikipedia.
Gregorio Allegri – “Miserere mei, Deus”
No day like today to reflect on the enormities of mankind, the number and scope of which have, incredibly, survived centuries of prayer. The piece itself (I have learned) was forbidden to be performed outside the Vatican or transcribed, on pain of excommunication. It was only after a 14-year-old Mozart memorized it during attendance and copied it out from memory that it escaped the confines of the Sistine Chapel; the Pope himself praised Mozart and the music was released for general performance.
Jack Rose – “Dusty Grass”
The Black Dirt Sessions
A bit like a minor-key “Rappahanock River Rag” at the beginning, but morphing into something more complex and urgent once it departs from its initial jangly theme. This EP is host to a number of excellent tracks, including an extended “Cross the North Fork” and a melancholy pair of tracks closing out the B side. Certainly worth a listen for fans of Jack Rose (RIP) and acoustic guitar in general. (insound)
Midway through Dracula, Stoker makes the following references in regards to extraordinary vigor and longevity:
There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr’ one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she lived one more day, we could save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps?“
The biblical story doesn’t really warrant investigation, and Thomas Parr is established cryptoanthropology, but I was curious about the spider anecdote. A little research turned up the following in the "Literary and Scientific Intelligence” section of an 1821 number of the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany:
Spiders.—The sexton of the church of St Eustace, at Paris, amazed to find frequently a particular lamp extinct early, and yet the oil consumed only, sat up several nights to perceive the cause. At length he discovered that a spider of surprising size came down the cord to drink the oil. A still more extraordinary instance of the same kind occurred during the year 1751, in the Cathedral of Milan. A vast spider was observed there, which fed on the oil of the lamps. M. Morland, of the Academy of Sciences, has described this spider, and furnished a drawing of it. It weighed four pounds, and was sent to the Emperor of Austria, and is now in the Imperial Museum at Vienna.“
It appears Dr. Van Helsing was exaggerating the length of the spider’s life somewhat, but the anecdote is at least based on what appear to be real events.
The drawing appears to be lost, unfortunately, though here is an image (Prout, 1839) of the cathedral in question, which appears capable of housing such an animal:
Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.
The library at Malmaison, Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine (1812)
If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?
Grounded airships
A creature of good humour and bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal almost to generosity, talkative almost to eloquence, bold almost to effrontery; the best possible devil’s-pie; with fool-hardy waistcoats and scarlet opinions.
The Willowz – “Cons and Tricks”
Talk in Circles
Just some straight-up noisy garage rock. Love the “busy” tone about 2/3rds through. Apparently this was on Jersey Shore? Doesn’t matter, great song.
Like most Neal Stephenson books, Reamde is unsatisfying. But unlike Anathem, which was unsatisfying because it just barely missed following through on a powerful and fascinating premise, Reamde is unsatisfying because it aims so low. It is a surprisingly unambitious and overstuffed series of procedurals that has you waiting for a payoff that never comes. Page by page it is enjoyable, but around 900 of the 1040 pages are enjoyable in more or less the same way, and you reach saturation long before they run out; the remaining 140 pages are essentially irrelevant navel-gazing.
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