Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage’s enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk’s more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music. Kirk plays three saxes at once, switches to flute, incorporates tapes of birds played backwards, and finally hands out whistles to his audience and encourages them to accompany him, “in the key of W, if you please.” Cage, on the other hand, is preparing a work for musical bicycle with David Tudor and Merce Cunningham at the Seville Theatre in London. Cage meets Rahsaan’s music in an echo chamber, and he ends his search for the sound of silence in his favorite spot — the anechoic chamber — where it turns out to be the uproar of “your nervous system in operation.” — Martin Williams, JAZZ TIMES
Among the inspirations for Mary Shelley’s gothic classic ‘Frankenstein’ from 1818 were the (in)famous experiments carried out in public by the physicist Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1803.
Aldini was the nephew of the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani who experimented with frog legs in the late 18th century and noted that the muscles contracted with the passage of an electrical current (he thought he had discovered a unique ‘animal electricity’). Provoking muscle contraction by applying electricity came to be known as galvansim [and galvanize or galvanise came to have a wider meaning: stimulate into activity]. Aldini assisted with his uncle’s work and later promoted the principle in his own experiments and publications. Read the rest of this entry »
The owl of Minerva is the owl that accompanies Minerva in Roman myths, seen as a symbol of wisdom. It was used by the nineteenth-century idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel to mean philosopher. Hegel noted that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” — meaning that philosophy comes to understand a way of life just as it passes away. Philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it understands only in hindsight. He had in mind the transition from eighteenth-century feudalism to nineteenth-century commercialism and democracy.
What does it feel like to drown? If you’re decapitated, how long do you remain conscious? New Scientist has a fascinating feature on how it feels to die from a variety of causes. Electrocution, fire, heart attack… what goes on in your body as you shuffle off this mortal coil? From New Scientist:
Beheading, if somewhat gruesome, can be one of the quickest and least painful ways to die - so long as the executioner is skilled, his blade sharp, and the condemned sits still.
The height of decapitation technology is, of course, the guillotine. Officially adopted by the French government in 1792, it was seen as more humane than other methods of execution. When the guillotine was first used in public, onlookers were reportedly aghast at the speed of death.
Quick it may be, but consciousness is nevertheless believed to continue after the spinal chord is severed. A study in rats in 1991 found that it takes 2.7 seconds for the brain to consume the oxygen from the blood in the head; the equivalent figure for humans has been calculated at 7 seconds. Some macabre historical reports from post-revolutionary France cited movements of the eyes and mouth for 15 to 30 seconds after the blade struck, although these may have been post-mortem twitches and reflexes.
Read the article
A Beginning
The term “magical realism” was coined by a German art critic, Franz Roh, in the late 1920s for painters trying to show reality in a new way. A Venezuelan literary critic, Uslar Pietri, first applied to it to Latin American literature, but it was when Miguel Angel Asturias used it to describe his novels when he won the Nobel Prize that it really caught on, and then it was “used and abused in the 1960s by just everyone in Latin America” (according to Marcial Souto).
(Someone else notes that in 1926 Massimo Bontempelli used the Italian term “realismo magico” reagrding his book SEPARATIONS. It is unclear [to me] if Roh preceded Bontempelli or vice versa.)
Roh described it as a form in which “our real world re-emerges before our eyes, bathed in the clarity of a new day” (according to Brian Evenson in “Magical Realism,” New York Review of Science Fiction, March 1998).
Note: The terms “magical realism” and “magic realism” are used interchangeably here–and just about everywhere else.
