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Life with Lenny

July 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Dinner with LennyFor nearly all of his professional life, journalist Jonathan Cott has written for Rolling Stone magazine. In 1988, he pitched the idea of an interview with Leonard Bernstein to the editors, and a year later, Cott and Bernstein spent twelve hours together at Lenny’s home in Fairfield, Connecticut. They drank vodka (to better enjoy Lenny’s recording of a Sibelius symphony), ate chicken pot pie (Lenny to vegetarian Cott: “Vell, it vouldn’t hoit!,”referring to the old story…)

You don’t know the story? It really happened in the great days of Yiddish theater when the leading actor collapsed onstage during a performance. And a doctor rushed up to help him, but the actor was already dead. And out of the audience came a woman’s voice: “so gif him a little chicken soup!” And the doctor announced that the actor had died…and the woman called back to him, “Vell, it vouldn’t hoit”

For Lenny, it’s all about passion, the great story, the phenomenal breadth and joy of life. That’s the abiding theme of the whole conversation, one that spans, in book form (“Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein,” written by Jonathan Cott and published by Oxford University Press). Here, he speaks of Alma Mahler–the famous composer’s wife. Cott begins with a question: “I’ve heard that Mahler had to talk to Freud about that problem…”, then Lenny answers:

“You know, Mahler made four appointments with Freud, and three times he broke them because he was scared to find out why he was impotent. His wife, Alma, was then ***ing everybody was was coming by–Gropius, Kokoschka, Werfel, and Bruno Walter, among others–sent him to see Freud. He was twenty years older than she, and she was the prettiest girl in Vienna,–rich, cultured, seductive… She tried to get me to bed. Many years ago, she was staying at the Hotel Pierre in New York–she had attended some of my New York Philharmonic rehearsals–and she invited me for “tea”–which turned out to be “aquavit”–then suggested we go to look at some “memorabilia” of her composer husband in her bedroom. [Laughing] She was generations older than I. And she had her hair frizzed up and was flirting like mad… She really was like a wonderful Viennese operetta. She must have been a great turn-on in her youth. But anyway, Mahler didn’t pay enough attention to her–she needed a lot of satisfying and he was busy writing his Sixth Symphony in his little wood hut all night…”

Cott is a long-time Bernstein fan. The infatuation began when Cott, then eleven years old, on November 14, 1954, watched Bernstein explain Beethoven’s  Fifth Symphony. The the first page of the score had been painted on the studio floor. Musicians, with their instruments, were standing on each stave. Bernstein explained Beethoven’s creative process by dismissing specific instruments from the score–here’s how it sounded with and without this woodwind, that brass instrument–and then, Bernstein conducted the first movement as Beethoven wrote it. Cott “made sure to watch Bernstein’s other Omnibus programs, such as “The World of Jazz,” “The Art of Conducting,” and “What Makes Opera Grand?” At age 15, Cott took Beth (his first “real” date) to see Bernstein’s Broadway smash, “West Side Story.” He became a lifelong fan.

After listening to the solo clarinet that begins his own Columbia LP recording of Sibelius’s first symphony, listening, with Cott, to the clarinet solo that begins the piece, Bernstein announces that the president of Finland had appointed him “Commander of the Order of the Lion,” then “started to sing–humming, crooning, moaning, shouting-out gospel style–as he conducted and danced along to the four movements of the symphony…All the while he added recitative-like interpolations, explanations, words of approval and disapproval, and assorted comments for my benefit about this impassioned, mercurial, wildly inventive work. ‘Listen, child!’ the maestro announced to me. ‘Here’s the Jewish rabbi theme…There’s Beethoven…There’s Tchaikovsky–it’s Swan Lake–and just wait for some Borodin and Mussorgsky later on…Some Grieg (but better than Grieg)…And now comes Sibelius. [L.B. sang and quickly wrote out for me on an old envelope the distinctively Sibelian rhythmic cell we’d just heard…] Now a wind…sighing…And now a pop song…”

So that’s a taste of it. Twelve hours of conversation with one of the 20th century’s iconic figures in music, free-associating with a compadre who was smart enough to keep the conversation going and catch just about all of the references (in fact, Cott called Bernstein for a followup just to make sure he understand everything that Bernstein had said). Lenny is a larger-than-life character in every decade. He was the boy wonder who leaped at the opportunity to first conduct the New York Philharmonic, on national radio, with far less than a full night’s sleep and a reasonably serious hangover. He was the teacher who brought classical music to the baby boomer generation through the clever use of the new TV medium. He was the conductor who performed Beethoven’s Ninth on both sides of what was, moments before, the Berlin Wall. He was the conductor who led the Israel Philharmonic as a celebration of the glory of a new Jewish homeland. He was deeply committed to  Civil Rights and the movement to stop the Vietnam War, despised Nixon, and, as an intellectual, still struggles to understand what happened and why:

That was a very bad time. There was nothing positive about that time. We were living under the thumb of Richard (****ing) Nixon, one of the greatest crooks of all time. But the point I want to make is that anybody who grows up–as those of my generation did not–taking the possibility of immediate destruction of the planet for granted is going to gravitate all the more toward instant gratification–you push the TV button, you drop the acid, you snort the coke, you do the needle. It doesn’t matter that it makes you impotent… Anything of a serious nature isn’t “instant”–you can’t “do” the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God’s sake?”

Cott answers, patiently, “I do.”

Filed Under: Books & Print, Creative, International, Learning, Music

From the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day

July 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In connection with a large project that I’m developing, my office has been pleasantly cluttered with history books. In particular, I’ve been attempting to understand the broad sweep, which is, we all know, a fool’s mission. Stumbling from Mesopotamia to The American Dream has been great fun, far better than I remembered from anything I did in school, and, because of the latest cluster of colorful history books, a fun trip every step of the way.

Appropriately entitled History: From the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day, the 612-page tour of the human story is presented with the full DK Publishing treatment: lots of images, interesting sidebars, full layouts about expected and some unexpected topics (The American Dream, Leonardo DaVinci, Queen Victoria, Science vs. God, The Ming Dynasty, many more). You know the visual style from so many children’s books, Eyewitness Travel guidebooks, and more. Two examples below; in both cases, the links take you to the Amazon “see inside” sequence of selected pages from the book:

DK-First-Harvest-layout

DK-History-Layout

At first, I picked up this book in hopes of finding lots of illustrated timelines. Instead, I found myself browsing a kind of magazine about world history with articles about topics that I figured I should know more about. (In fact, there are timelines, but the type is small, the layout is idiosyncratic, and, candidly, there are better historical timeline books than this one, including the publisher’s own Smithsonian Timelines of History: The Ultimate Visual Guide to the Events that Shaped the World, described below).

This book excels in by telling well-chosen stories in simple, illustrated form, always offering enough depth of information to satisfy the curious. So here’s a two-page spread about Mesopotamia that begins by placing it in the area that now includes Iraq, southwest Iran, east Syria, and southeast Turkey. The name is derived from the Greek, “between two rivers,” which explains the site’s early evolution, noting that similar sites developed in the Indus Valley, and later, in China. Unlike the city-states, Mesopotamia was more like a nation that included several large cities whose names were, in 3,000 BCE, impressive: Uruk, Kish, Akkad, and Ur among them. The society was hierarchical: even in this era, inequality was the norm. There was music; there is a picture of a lyre from the era decorated with the bull’s head that was popular at the time. And there was a mathematical system based upon the number 60. You know the Mesopotamian system: it is the basis for our circle (360 degrees) and the number of minutes per hour (60).

Many pages ahead, there’s a four-page layout on City Life as it transformed normalcy in just 100 years, from 18oo to 1900. By 1819, the city of London was, well, here’s what the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote as early as 1819:

Hell is a city much like London…”

Creative Commons - Thierry Bézecourt

Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. Creative Commons – photo by Thierry Bézecourt

In 18oo, the largest city was Beijing (then, Peking) with not more than 1 million people. A century later, London was home to six times as many people, largely without the benefit of an extended period of growth and time to figure things out. Chicago’s population tripled in just fifty years. To move people around, the cities devised underground railroad systems, cable cars, and trolleys. In the 1850s, Napoleon III hired George Haussman to completely remodel the city, who “replaced entire medieval districts of narrow, cramped streets with wide boulevards…for which the city is now famous.”

Pages ahead, and it’s the Vietnam War, Raising the Iron Curtain, Superpower China, and Climate Change. A very comprehensive story, a terrific browse, a useful addition to the family or classroom library, as much fun as the old World Book Encyclopedia used to be, at least for those of us with a lot of time on our hands on rainy days after school.

The Smithsonian timetables book is more of a coffee table adventure, lavishly put together with artful two-page spreads about, for example, the Qing Dynasty, the Pacific Theater in WWII, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and, Edo Period, a personal favorite because it pictures a large picture of the Hannya mask (Hannya being a female Noh character turned into a demon by jealousy and anger). Mostly, though, this is a book with an extensive timeline that runs on the bottom fifth of most spreads for more than 450 pages. Explanations appear, in shorter story form, above the timeline. Right now, the book is open to 1780-1784. There’s an engraving, a color picture of a Montgolfier hot air balloon with seven passengers aboard, making their way across Lyons. In 1781, William Herschel, an astronomer, discovered Uranus (on March 13, in case you’re curious). On the following spread, Britain is doing what it can to eliminate the slave trade, including (and I didn’t know this) establishing Sierra Leone as a place for freed slaves (similar to our Liberia, years later). Skipping past the two page spread about steam power, we’re now in 1789, when, within months of one another, we find George Washington becoming the first U.S. President (February 4) and Fletcher Christian leading the mutiny on the HMS Bounty (April 28). The Bastille was stormed that summer (July 14, which you probably knew), and the U.S. Congress proposed the Bill of Rights (September 28).

This book is filled with interesting tidbits: Marie Antoinette was 14 years old when she married Louis XVI; tiny Portugal’s empire was 4.6 million square miles; 2,000 bathers could simultaneously splash around in the Roman Baths of Caracalla; and, for what it’s worth, the number of eunuchs employed by the Ming Dynasty exceeded 100,000. Or, if you prefer, the number of diamonds in King George’s crown: 6,000.

The abiding favorite tidbit is a quote from the President of the United States, then Rutherford B. Hayes, who watched Alexander Graham Bell demonstrate the telephone in 1876 and then said,

That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”

Filed Under: Books & Print, International, Learning, Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Storytelling through Maps and Timelines

July 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Creative Commons license: Nicholas Kenrick

Bagan today. Creative Commons license: Nicholas Kenrick

In the year 1100, the largest city, by far, was Kaifeng, which was twice the size of its nearest competitor, Constantinople, three times the size of the third city on the top five list, Marrakech, which was, at the time, about the size of Kalyan and Cairo. Never heard of Kaifeng or Kalyan? If today’s Kaifeng was located in today’s United States, it would be the nation’s second largest city; in China, where it has been a significant city for a very long while, it would be in the top forty or fifty cities. Kalyan is now part of Mumbai. A hundred years later, Bagan makes the list–it’s no longer an active city, but the site is as popular in Cambodia as Angkor Wat. Add another 100 years and the first of the European cities makes the top five list: Paris. By 1492, just as Europe is waking up to the possibility of its role as a global power, there are no European cities on the list. Instead, it’s Beijing with over a half-million people in the number slot followed by Vijayanagara, Cairo, Hangzhou, and from the Americas, Tenochtitlán.

In 1492, the world map is a fascinating place filled with vaguely familiar names. A large swath of what is now Russia was then the Khanate of Siber; the Mongols are firmly in control of the large area that is now Mongolia; the only people in Australia are Aborigines; and the Caribbean and much of South America are under the control of the Arawak people (who will be killed, in large numbers, by European invaders and their diseases, the first of whom is Columbus). You’ve probably heard of Catherine of Aragon, a Henry VIII wife (remember “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived?”–Catherine’s the one who Henry divorced, setting up a major tiff with the Pope). Anyway…Aragon occupies the eastern half of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. The Inca are all along the Pacific side of what becomes South America, and the Mayas and the Aztecs are all over what becomes Central America and Mexico. Japan is Japan, Korea is Korea, and remarkably, Poland is a large country–actually a kind of joint project, so the place is called Poland Lithuania.

How do I know all of this? Because I’m having a blast browsing through a new combination of world atlas and history book. It’s called The New Atlas of World History: Global Events at a Glance and it’s been put together by research fellow at England’s Lancaster University named John Haywood.

NewAtlas World HistoryQuite sensibly, Mr. Haywood has produced a book whose broad horizontal pages alternate between an atlas view of the world at various intervals, and a timeline of significant events that describe that time in greater detail.

His story begins around 100,000 when ice sheets covered much of today’s Canada, all of today’s United Kingdom, and the rest of northern Europe. From the ancestral starting place in eastern Africa, homo sapiens migrate first into Asia and China, then across two land bridges, one to what becomes North America and the other (who knew?) across present-day Indonesia and the Indian Ocean across to Australia (which is how the place become populated with Aboriginal peoples). In fact, Europe was settled, or, at least, visited in large numbers, about 5,000 years after Australia. It took even longer for the people who took the now-Alaska land bridge to make their way all the down through the current United States and Mexico, eventually finding themselves in what is now South America.

Looking way ahead to, say, 1900, it’s again a fascinating map and story: there is no Poland, for example, because it has been obscured by the giant Russian Empire, and also, if I’m reading the map correctly, by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, too. On that map, Africa is a collection of colonies belonging to Belgium, Holland, Germany and other countries whose international colonization efforts were ended by a pair of wars that provided plenty of good reason to focus on life at home.

So here’s a rough look at the 1492 map of the world (click on it to see a full-screen PDF with far better detail):
Atlas_Map_Smaller

And, to accompany that layout, here’s a look at the adjacent page, this time providing a timeline view of events that mattered at the time (same story, click to see a PDF that’s easier to read):

Timeline

Of course, the book offers more than just these two layouts. One of my favorites shows the migration routes to the United States, mostly from Europe, circa 1900. The same map contains the sobering stories of indentured servants leaving India for British colonies in Africa. Subsequently, a young attorney and activist named Mohandas Gandhi will understand his power by correcting the situation in South Africa (then, the Cape Colony) before returning to his native India.

So: here’s the history of the world in just over 200 pages, full-color, filled with fascinating stories told in some text, but mainly, through descriptive maps and pictures. It’s a thoroughly modern way to tell our story, and, as you might imagine, it has become a favorite. You’ll get some flavor of the work’s value by clicking on some the links on the book’s catalog page, but there’s really nothing quite like having the whole of it in front of you on a hot Sunday afternoon in the cool shade, preferably with an equally cool drink from some far-off land close at hand.

Filed Under: Books & Print, International, Learning, Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Big History

July 2, 2013 by 1 Comment

After admitting that we cannot yet answer the  obvious–and seemingly unanswerable–question about how and why everything   began, University of Sydney Professor David Christian begins with the creation of the universe about 13 billion years ago. It’s not every historian who would admit, simply:

About the beginning, we can say nothing with any certainty except that something happened.”

He continues explaining this madness: “We do not know why or how it appeared. We cannot say whether anything existed before. We cannot even say that there was a ‘before’ or a ‘space’ for anything to exist in (in an argument anticipated by St. Augustine in the fifth century CE) time and spare may have been created at the same time as matter and energy.”

After that, the big news is not so much the Big Bang Theory (explained here in detail that can be easily understood), but the shift to a neutral electrical charge, enabling the creation of atoms, first simply (mostly, hydrogen and helium atoms), then, in increasingly complicated ways. I like this quote:

Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.”

Leaping ahead, the sun and the planets show up around 4.56 billion years ago, and, helpfully, Professor Christian helps us to understand an earth bombarded by small planetesimals (excellent word, new to me) and without much atmosphere.

The early earth would indeed have seemed like a hellish place to humans.”

As the mix of gases shifted from methane and hydrogen sulfide to carbon dioxide, the early atmosphere would have appeared red–that is, the sky would have seemed to be red, not blue. The blue sky came about because the new oceans–made possible by a drop in temperatures below 100 degrees celsius–allowed oceans to form, and those oceans absorbed much of the CO2.

How about the question of the beginning of life on earth? Again, Christian offers a coherent answer:

Living organisms are constructed, for the most part, from compounds of hydrogen and carbon. Carbon is critical because of its astonishing flexibility. Add hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur, and we can account for 99 percent of the dry weight of all organisms. It turns out that when conditions are right and these chemicals are abundant, it is easy to construct simple organic molecules, including amino acids (the building blocks of proteins, the basic structural material of all organisms) and nucleotides (the building blocks of genetic code).”

Of course, it’s one thing to assemble the building blocks and another to assemble these parts into a wooly mammoth, or even an amoeba. Christian admits that this is the tricky part: complexity is the appropriate term that causes contemporary scientists to scratch their heads and wonder. The pieces seem to be there, but the complexity of their union and the spark of life may not be so simple.

Maps of Time

Book: Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History by David Christian

Sure, multi-cell animals are interesting footnotes, but really, isn’t history all about us? Not exactly, not according to the good professor. Turns out, we are just one of many species, and in the scheme of big history, humans are a kind of, well, a kind of weed. We just keep growing, taking everything over, killing off other species, treating the whole earth as our own private amusement park. Within our lifetimes, there will be 10 billion humans on earth, an astonishing increase given that there were, in 1800, just a billion of us. Every dozen or so years, we add another billion or so.

As humans began to migrate into Europe and Asia from their original home in Africa, large animals became extinct because we hunted them down, ate them, used their hides for clothing, used their bones for tools. Giant sloths in the Americas, giant wombats and kangaroos in Australia, mammoths in Siberia. We killed them faster than they could reproduce, and so, they’re gone.

So what makes us so special? Is it really all about thumbs? Sure, thumbs make a difference, but it’s something else entirely. Professor Christian uses the term “collective learning” to describe our “pooling and sharing of knowledge…the types of knowledge that, over time, have given humans their unique power to manipulate the material world. Two factors stand out: the volume and variety of information being pooled, and the efficiency and speed with which information is shared.” Here, he’s not referring to the digital age, but the era before we developed any meaningful form of writing, drawing, or communicating with anything resembling a modern language.

By now, we’re about halfway through the book. Next will come the domestication of animals–in which humans figure out that an animal that is killed for its meat is useful only in the short-term, but an animal that is kept alive for its milk is useful in the long-term. This concept of domestication applies not only to meat/milk animals, but to others whose wool, or other production, can be used not only to satisfy basics needs, but also for exchange to other humans. In time, it’s the idea of exchange that becomes the driver, resulting first in local trade between tiny settlements, then trade routes as fewer people are tied to subsistence farming or hunting/gathering and more are available (typically, more men are available) for pursuits involving trade, travel, and, in time, the accumulation of wealth.

Along the way, humans attempt to understand how and why their world works. Since the ground, the soil, the earth provides the food we eat, we begin to explain the world in terms of an earth spirit. Similarly, the sky seems to contain the origins, the mystical, the unknowable, and so, this, too, becomes a kind of spirit. In time–and mostly within a period of just a few thousand years, mostly in southwestern Asia–we gather these beliefs in the form of religions.

As we, as contemporary, educated humans with every conceivable benefit, attempt to understand our world, and its big history (now a common term combining history and science, by the way), Professor Christian readily admits to what he has done. He has wrapped our beliefs, our knowledge, our stories into what calls “a modern creation myth.”

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College Through the Looking Glass

June 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

About a hundred years ago, Oxford professor John Alexander Smith addressed the first session of his moral philosophy class as follows: “Gentlemen, nothing that you will learn in the course of yours studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life [that is, after college, not after death–HB], save only this: that is you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to deter when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”

j9651Inevitably, author Andrew Delbanco continues: “Americans tend to prefer a two-syllable synonym…for the Angicism, rot–and so we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning…” Okay, you get the idea. (Odd that I am  reluctant to spell out B.S. given that the quote comes from a book published by Princeton University. Anyway…)

The book is called College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, and it’s actually fun to read, not stuffy at all, rather like a good lecture about the dubious history, dubious purpose, and dubious results of a college education, or, if you prefer, as I do and the author does, to consider the dubious and to celebrate the remarkable. Both are present, and have been since the very start. Early in the book, Abigail Adams can be found complaining about the current state of students, professors and education in general–that’s in 1776, but the complaints and criticisms date back to Greek and Roman times, long before our current institutions were a thought in anybody’s mind.


Today, there are about four thousand colleges in the United States. The author has visited about 100 of them, so I respect what he has to say, particularly as he discusses the liberal arts education that would provide, at least in part, the mechanism for the bullshit detector (there, I wrote it!) that is, in part, the reason for going to college in the first place. For a very long while, well, this is best said by Ohio State economics professor Richard Vedder:

with the possible exception of prostitution, teaching is the only profession that has had absolutely no productivity advance in the 2400 years since Socrates.”

A quote from former Johns Hopkins president William Brody is a nice addition:

if you went to a [college] class circa 1900 and you went today, it would look exactly the same, while you went to an automobile plant in 1900 and today, you wouldn’t recognize the place.”

The author is a college professor, and although he’s critical of the industry he clearly adores, he is quite clear on the statistics, and the reasons why college makes sense, worts and all.

Although not completely consistent with importance of a liberal arts education, or a college education generally, a college degree, even a Bachelor’s Degree, is a very good investment: those with a B.A. earn about 60 percent more than those whose resume lacks the degree. This fact leads to another one, and here, we begin to get at the real story of college in America:

if you are a child of a family making more than $90,000 per year, your odds of getting a B.A. by age twenty-four are roughly one in two; if your family’s income is between $60,000 and $90,000, your odds are roughly one in four; if your parents make less than $35,000, your odds are one in seventeen.”

It’s wrong to think about these patterns in isolation. Upscale students attend more selective colleges whose prestigious graduates are funneled into leadership roles in business, law and government. It’s a self-perpetuating system, the engine of social mobility in the United States even in the 21st century.

So that’s one argument in favor of college: economic success. The other argument demands a well-educated citizenry, what Professor Delbanco calls “the incubation of citizenship” as he defends the small group discussion in the above video. Strangely, this is not the argument that legislators focus upon–instead, they tend toward the more practical, and, in the long run, perhaps less significant, concern about the need for a population that understands ideas and makes wise decisions. College has always struggled with that role; those in law school and the like receive these messages and tend to think about these issues, but as for the rest of college students (and the rest of us, including those who have been through a more generalized college experience), not so much.

So here we are with a realist, a professor who seems to understand the arguments from multiple perspectives, stressing “a community of learning” on the one hand and recognizing, when considering a New York Times article, “for every one of those college-bound cars, there are scores of families whose children will be staying home to attend a commuter school without anything resembling traditional college life. Moreover, millions of college-age Americans never get to college in the first place.”

By the time they reach age twenty-six, “fewer than two-thirds of white high school graduates have enrolled in college.” The number is half for blacks, and slightly less for Hispanics. Among students who do enroll, more than a third never finish their degree.

There are so many issues, and often, it’s difficult for the average person to gain traction with many of them. This is precisely the place where a good college professor can make all the difference. And if you can’t afford or can’t quite make it to Princeton this month or this year, well, you (and I) now more fully understand the reason why many universities publish their professors’ best work in book form. Turns out, the book, which is also undergoing attack from every possible direction, remains a darned good idea for a hot sunny afternoon. I now know some things I didn’t know this morning, and I’m thinking about them hours later. Not quite the same as being in the presence of the man, but spending three hours reading about 200 pages of his well-written, well-edited ideas for just $17.95 (less if you buy online) is, simply, a good old-fashioned idea.

Filed Under: Books & Print, Learning Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Literacy in the Era of the Image

June 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The word literacy finds its roots in the eighteenth-century word literatus, which quite literally means ?one who knows the letters. But it has come to refer to much more than the ability to read an alphabet or other script. We think of literacy today as meaning “proficiency”–or more broadly, the ability to comprehend and to express or articulate.”

That’s the just the beginning of an interesting book by Stephen Apkon entitled The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens. As the title suggests, and as the introduction by director Martin Scorsese illustrates, there is more to 21st century literacy than comfort with the printed word. Apkon directs the Jacob Burns Center for Film and the Media Arts Lab, and so, he spends a fair amount of time thinking about the ways we exchange stories, ideas, and, of course, images.

ageoftheimage_255pxTrying to understand multimedia literacy by reading a book is, of course, absurd, but Apkon does the best he can within the limitations of the printed word. This adventure is made more complicated because of the necessary stops along the way: in order to understand moving images, one must first understand still images, and so, there is the obligatory tour through Civil War-era photography, and so on. I’m geeky on these subjects, so I found these chapters interesting, but the book doesn’t really take off until we get to the chapter about the brain’s responses to visual images, the one that’s called “The Brain Sees Pictures First.” The bottom line message: context is king. Individual images without connection to a story are filtered by the brain and rarely provoke any long-term impact. They may capture attention (the brain is constantly on the lookout for potential danger), but they are quickly and efficiently filtered out and almost always forgotten. Showing portions of Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” to an audience, researchers found that “…when you connect images in a fashion that creates a narrative story in a literate way, you elicit powerful responses.”

Apkon further illuminates and magnifies his arguments through extensive conversations with researchers, discussions about the latest MRIs and their ability to measure brain impulses, and considers our image culture from many perspectives. And yet, so much of what he writes, I think we already know from daily experience. We ignore most of the images that we see, but we recall memorable stories. With digital technology, we are as much the creator as the consumer.

Yesterday, at a wedding, I was struck by the number of photographers, and their interaction with the one professional in the room. The pro would set up a shot–a crowd shot of all of the bride and groom’s college alums–and then, he would step back so that twenty other people could take the same picture using their phone/cameras. I’ve become a fan of watching the images that people capture, in real time, on their phones. Often, the results are excellent–the technology takes care of itself so there is no focus or exposure issue (most of the time). Instead, there is only composition, and because everyone see so many images, the composition is often strikingly good.

The interesting theories explored in the first half of the book fade into a discussion of production in the second half. I suppose this is inevitable because, these days, we are all producers, directors, and cinematographers.

That’s the hard part, of course. Here, it’s expressed in book form, but we’re facing the same issue in every classroom, and with every book we read. We’ve become literate consumers, and literate creators. I read a book and then I write about it. I think about what I’ve read, and then I generate additional media. You read what I write, and perhaps, what Stephen Apkon writes, and pass it along to friends where these ideas may take on a life of their own. Memes (old usage) floating around in internet space. Some are images, some are just ideas not yet captured in visual form. Which is the relevant impetus for literacy? Is it the words I wrote so easily by punching buttons on a keyboard without leaving my chair, or is the images that I create by lifting my phone to my eye, pressing just one button to shoot and another to send it to the world? Or is the new proficiency of literacy the ability to discern whether any of this babble is worth even a nanosecond of your time and attention?

(No good way to end this one. Feel free to write your own ending.)

Filed Under: Books & Print, Creative, Learning, Trends Tagged With: ,

The Crossley ID Guides: Raptors and more!

June 15, 2013 by 1 Comment

hawk

Perched on a fifth floor windowsill in downtown Trenton, New Jersey, a young Cooper’s Hawk stood close enough to peer into his (or her?) eyes. A thick glass window separated the hawk from television producer Rich Renner’s camera. The hawk visited frequently. We were interested, and the bird, no less so.

I know this is a Cooper’s Hawk because the bird matches the pictures and description in a new book called Crossley ID Guide: Raptors. If Rich’s photograph included the tail feathers, I could probably tell you whether we’re looking at a male or a female bird. I know a lot more from the descriptive text: this particular bird is probably under a year old because its coloration changes after its first molt, which occurs around age one. Here in the U.S., Cooper’s Hawk is a very common bird, seem most of the year in most of the states (less so in the Great Plains, where it’s mostly seen in warmer or cooler months).

5-Sharp-Shinned-Hawk

The Crossley ID Guide has become especially popular because the birds are shown (or digitally added to) natural habitats. The birds in flight, above, are Sharp-Shinned Hawks–apparently, the adults are often mistaken for Cooper’s Hawks. Here, the hawks are flying around one of the U.S.’s most popular birding sites (home of the annual World Series of Birding), Cape May, New Jersey.

Birding, and books for birders, are more popular than ever before. This is, in part, due to interest from an aging baby boom population (especially with women), the availability of digital photography and the requisite long lenses (especially among the men), and, generally, a growing awareness of nature. In particular, the work of Richard Crossley, a long-time birder and bird photographer, has gained notice because of the inviting visual approach used in the books. The book is filled with lavish natural spreads, or composites, as above, and also with visual quizzes in which readers are asked to identify birds in flight, as below.

13-Widespread-Common-Raptors-Mystery-Plate

I especially like the Raptors book because the birds themselves are both fascinating and often present in the area where I live. When I spot a raptor flying above, I can’t help but stop and watch the bird in flight, often for quite a long time. They are very special birds, both from afar and close up, and the new ID Guide adds texture and context to their visual appeal.

The book about raptors is runs several hundred pages, but it that’s only about half as long as the weighty volume about Eastern Birds. This is a book that will entertain you all summer long, especially if you enjoy watching backyard birds, or if you’re willing to schlep this volume along on vacation. Here’s a layout of Glossy or White-faced Ibis, beautiful page after page featuring the secrets of owls in their habitats: Short-eared, Long-eared, Barred, Barn, Great Horn, Northern Saw-whet, Eastern Screech, Elf, Burrowing, and more. There are both Red-bellied and Red-headed woodpeckers, each in its own full-page layout. Chickadees, robins, thrush, various warblers, and the wonderful Little Blue Heron who seems to enjoy bathing in a creek just across from my home.

These are the birds you see every day, or sometimes, glimpse while traveling. They come alive in these layouts, making the Eastern Birds book one of the best browses around. The Crossley Raptors book has three things that the Eastern Birds book does not: first, those wonderful visual quiz layouts. the wonderful visual quizzes; second, lengthy descriptions about each individual species; and, third, my favorite part, which goes something like this:

On a frigid winter day, a mass of songbirds anxiously feeds on seed strewn in a grassy area cleared of snow, their bustling chatter discernible through the living room window. At once, they freeze, pinning themselves low to the ground in response to alarm calls from nearby jays. From the center of the yard a blue streak appears, seemingly materializing from thin air, moving swiftly toward the flock. The group scatters as a high-speed chase ensues. The small, compact hawk picks its target. It extends its long legs and talons outward and fans its long tail as it banks sharply and snatches a White-throated Sparrow from midair. The hawk disappears into the brambly thickets without moving a branch; the only evidence of the event is a plume of feathers softly floating to the ground.”

Each description begins that way: with an observer’s sense of the birds living their lives.

Special books, indeed. but don’t take my word for it. Try a free sample!

This link takes you to Princeton University Press’s FREE (yes, completely free) download of the new Crossley ID Guide: Raptors book as a .pdf, and also another free book about garden birds. Download here, then add it to your tablet or smartphone for reference wherever you happen to be.

Filed Under: Books & Print, Creative, Learning Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Balancing Technique and Inspiration

June 2, 2013 by 1 Comment
A new book about pastels from artist Jean Hirons. If you buy it by clicking on the link (instead of buying from a more traditional source, the author earns more money for her self-published effort.)

A new book about pastels from artist Jean Hirons. If you buy it by clicking on the link (instead of buying from a more traditional source, the author earns more money for her self-published effort when you click on the book cover and make the purchase through Author House).

Ten or fifteen years ago, I decided to try my hand at pastels. That is, I bought a box of pastels, some paper, and started making bad art. At the time, there were two useful books available: Bill Creevy’s “The Pastel Book,” and Larry Blovits’s “Pastel for the Serious Beginner.” Both of these books were well-organized, and helpful, but neither provided the complete education that I wanted to pursue.

Over time, I bought more (and more) (and more) pastels, experimented with various types of paper, played with and decided that I pretty much hated fixative, bought a field easel, and started spending weekend afternoons making pastel paintings. To be honest, I didn’t much care whether each painting was worth showing to anybody; most of the paintings were wrapped in glassine (which does not smudge the painting) and placed, ever so carefully, into a box. Mostly, my concern has been learning how to pursue a creative process.

Along the way, I have bought just about every book about pastels that I could find. I’ve scoured the lists of the top publishers (then, North Light Books and Watson-Guptill, the latter now part of North Light). I’ve been inspired by the beautiful work and eye-opening creative thinking so elegantly presented by Elizabeth Mowry her two best books, “The Pastelist’s Year,” which looks at painting through the seasons) and “The Poetic Landscape,” which examines perception and the psychology of art through pastel painting. Both of Maggie Price’s books have proven very useful: “Painting with Pastels” and the more specialized “Painting Sunlight and Shadows with Pastels.” The out-of-print book that taught me ever so much was Doug Dawson’s “Capturing Light and Color with Pastel.” The more sophisticated, and modestly entitled, “Pastel Pointers” by Richard McKinley, is only part of a larger instructional program that can be pursued online or in the always-excellent Pastel Journal magazine.

Still, I wish I was just starting out today, if only to do so under the guidance of Jean Hirons and her new (self-published) book, “Finding Your Style in Pastel.”

"Antietam Barns" by pastel artist Jean Hirons

“Antietam Barns” by pastel artist Jean Hirons

From the very first image on the very first page, I sensed, I can probably do this. Immediately, my confidence level increased. A brief but substantive review of types (soft, hard) and brands (Sennelier, NuPastel) is followed by a rundown on the many surfaces (papers, mostly) now available (with running commentary on the advantages of each ground), and comments on strokes, blending, layering, and other techniques. I like the way Ms. Hirons keeps the story moving; she makes her points clearly and with the right illustrations, then moves on. (She is my kind of teacher!) There’s a lot of “show me what I need to know,” as with a quartet of small images to explain toning and underpainting (two methods of pre-painting a surface).

By page 63, she’s defining personal styles. This is, of course, what every artist wants to know. Basic techniques are fine, but how do I make my paintings my own? So begins one of the better explorations of composition, value, edges and color theory that I’ve seen in book form. As with the earlier chapters, the author does not linger; the pace remains solid, brisk and professional. Once again, two images from the artist’s online gallery help to make the point about the difference between the works of an artist who pursues a distinctive, personal style:

Carroll County Farm by Jean Hirons

Carroll County Farm by Jean Hirons

"Dandelion Spring" by Jean Hirons

“Dandelion Spring” by Jean Hirons

Same artist, different seasons, different color palettes, varying levels of edge sharpness, atmospheric color, amount of foreground detail, use of line and shape, mood, overall colorcast, color temperature, and so much more.

Hirons rarely insists upon one particular technique or approach. Instead, she runs through available options, the techniques required to achieve the desired effects, and well-chosen images to illustrate each point.

Along the way, she also addresses the questions that lurk in the back of every pastelist’s mind. To what extent do I paint the colors that I observe? How do shadows work: how dark, how much local color, how much should I shift the color temperature? How far should I go with my interpreted color? To what extent, and under which conditions, should I pursue abstraction?

Yes, there are some step-by-step demonstrations, but only a few (I’ve never been a big fan of books filled with step-by-step demos because I tend to lose interest unless I am actually painting at the same time as I am reading). Hirons uses them only in her final problem solving chapter (where they can do the most good).

In one of several appendices, the author recommends books about art, color, composition, landscapes, and, inevitably, pastels. Somehow, her list of recommended titles (which I just found as I was writing this last sentence) matches my list (at the top of this article) just about one-for-one. She adds “Pure Color,” a compendium of excellent pastel work by contemporary artists. To her list of materials sources, I would certainly add the venerable New York Central Art Supply near Greenwich Village.

Over time, self-published books can become hard-to-find (the author depletes the current stock and may or may not decide to continue to be a publisher–an especially challenging decision for an artist who is not, by trade, a publishing mogul). That’s why I always recommend that a self-published book be purchased immediately. In this case, the bound book–a 200-page, full color, very handsome paperback–costs just over $50, but the same book can be purchased for just $3.99 as an eBook. Despite my interest in all things digital, I would opt for the paperbound edition because I like surrounding myself with very good books. And this one fits, very nicely indeed, into that category.

Filed Under: Books & Print, Creative, Learning Tagged With: , , , ,

Welcome to the Connectome

May 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Diffusion spectrum image shows brain wiring in a healthy human adult. The thread-like structures are nerve bundles, each containing hundreds of thousands of nerve fibers. Source: Source: Van J. Wedeen, M.D., MGH/Harvard U. To learn more about the government's new connectome project, click on the brain.

Diffusion spectrum image shows brain wiring in a healthy human adult. The thread-like structures are nerve bundles, each containing hundreds of thousands of nerve fibers.
Source: Source: Van J. Wedeen, M.D., MGH/Harvard U. To learn more about the government’s new connectome project, click on the brain.

You may recall recent coverage of a major White House initiative: mapping the brain. In that statement, there is ambiguity. Do we mean the brain as a body part, or do we mean the brain as the place where the mind resides? Mapping the genome–the sequence of the four types of molecules (nucleotides) that compose your DNA–is so far along that it will soon be possible, for a very reasonable price, to purchase your personal genome pattern.

A connectome is, in the words of the brilliantly clear writer and MIT scientist, Sebastian Seung, is: “the totality of connections between the neurons in [your] nervous system.” Of course, “unlike your genome, which is fixed from the moment of conception, your connectome changes throughout your life. Neurons adjust…their connections (to one another) by strengthening or weakening them. Neurons reconnect by creating and eliminating synapses, and they rewire by growing and retracting branches. Finally, entirely new neurons are created and existing ones are eliminated, through regeneration.”

In other words, the key to who we are is not located in the genome, but instead, in the connections between our brain cells–and those connections are changing all the time.The brain, and, by extension, the mind, is dynamic, constantly evolving based upon both personal need and stimuli.

Connectome BookWith his new book, the author proposes a new field of science for the study of the connectome, the ways in which the brain behaves, and the ways in which we might change the way it behaves in new ways. It isn’t every day that I read a book in which the author proposes a new field of scientific endeavor, and, to be honest, it isn’t every day that I read a book about anything that draws me back into reading even when my eyes (and mind) are too tired to continue. “Connectome” is one of those books that is so provocative, so inherently interesting, so well-written, that I’ve now recommended it to a great many people (and now, to you as well).

Seung is at his best when exploring the space between brain and mind, the overlap between how the brain works and how thinking is made possible. For example, he describes how the idea of Jennifer Aniston, a job that is done not by one neuron, but by a group of them, each recognizing a specific aspect of what makes Jennifer Jennifer. Blue eyes. Blonde hair. Angular chin. Add enough details and the descriptors point to one specific person. The neurons put the puzzle together and trigger a response in the brain (and the mind). What’s more, you need not see Jennifer Aniston. You need only think about her and the neurons respond. And the connection between these various neurons is strengthened, ready for the next Jennifer thought. The more you think about Jennifer Aniston, the more you think about Jennifer Aniston.

From here, it’s a reasonable jump to the question of memory. As Seung describes the process, it’s a matter of strong neural connections becoming even stronger through additional associations (Jennifer and Brad Pitt, for example), repetition (in all of those tabloids?), and ordering (memory is aided by placing, for example, the letters of the alphabet in order). No big revelations here–that’s how we all thought it worked–but Seung describes the ways in which scientists can now measure the relative power (the “spike”) of the strongest impulses. Much of this comes down to the image resolution finally available to long-suffering scientists who had the theories but not the tools necessary for confirmation or further exploration.

Next stop: learning. Here, Seung focuses on the random impulses first experienced by the neurons, and then, through a combination of repetition of patterns (for example), a bird song emerges. Not quickly, nor easily, but as a result of (in the case of the male zebra finches he describes in an elaborate example) of tens of thousands of attempts, the song emerges and can then be repeated because the neurons are, in essence, properly aligned. Human learning has its rote components, too, but our need for complexity is greater, and so, the connectome and its network of connections is far more sophisticated, and measured in far greater quantities, than those of a zebra finch. In both cases, the concept of a chain of neural responses is the key.

Watch the author deliver his 2010 TED Talk.

Watch the author deliver his 2010 TED Talk.

From here, the book becomes more appealing, perhaps, to fans of certain science fiction genres. Seung becomes fascinated with the implications of cryonics, or the freezing of a brain for later use. Here, he covers some of the territory familiar from Ray Kurzweil’s “How to Create a Mind” (recently, a topic of an article here). The topic of fascination: 0nce we understand the brain and its electrical patterns, is it possible to save those patterns of impulses in some digital device for subsequent sharing and/or retrieval? I found myself less taken with this theoretical exploration than the heart and soul of, well, the brain and mind that Seung explains so well. Still, this is what we’re all wondering: at what point does human brain power and computing brain power converge? And when they do, how much control will we (as opposed to, say Amazon or Google) exert over the future of what we think, what’s important enough to save, and what we hope to accomplish.

Filed Under: Books & Print, Learning, Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

If You Give a Child a Cookie…

April 25, 2013 by 1 Comment

20130425-101009.jpgMiss Bartell (my fourth grade teacher): Would you rather have one cookie or four cookies?

Me: Four! I want four cookies!

(Miss Bartell shows me one enormous cookie and four tiny cookies.)

Me: (sheepishly) Miss Bartell, may I change my answer? I think I want one cookie.

Miss Bartell: Are you sure you want the one big cookie? You may change your mind, but only this once!

Me: Is this a trick?

(Room filled with the chuckles of fourth grade classmates)

Me: Are they both the same cookies? Does the big cookie taste the same as the small cookie?

Miss Bartell: Good question! Why don’t you taste them both and you tell me?

Me: I can try them both?

Miss Bartell: Yes, I will allow that because you asked the right question!

Me: (tasting) Well, the small cookie is sublime, a dense and chewy combination of what seems to be the finest Valrhona Classic Dark Chocolate, notable for its complex and balanced flavors…

Miss Bartell: And the big one?

Me: Tastes like Suzanne’s smelly armpit!

Suzanne: Hey! Be nice!

Me: Okay, okay, sorry. It smells kinda funny. The cookie tastes like it was made in a factory. It’s stale, the chocolate is flavorless, the dough is gummy…

Miss Bartell: Suzanne, please distribute one of the small cookies to each of your classmates.

Suzanne: (sneering at me) Yes, Miss Bartell.

Me: Miss Bartell?

Miss Bartell: Yes?

Me: Thank you for teaching me never to accept the obvious first answer, to always ask the second question, and to seek context for the information I receive from you and others who routinely attempt to control my mind.

Miss Bartell: Don’t talk with you mouth full.

Filed Under: Learning Tagged With: , , , ,
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