(A) Man on the Moon

On August 25, the world lost one of its titans, Neil Armstrong - a man singular in his defining accomplishment, as well as his refusal to live his life on anyone else's terms. His stark refusal to be caught in the spotlight for most of the last three decades of his life seems especially striking in an era of internet-driven overexposure of erstwhile celebrities. (It should be noted that refusing to take credit for his feats in space hardly set him apart as an astronaut: one would be hard pressed to find one who doesn't automatically credit his accomplishments primarily to countless engineers, mission control, and the other members of his crew.) Yet to call his list of accomplishments staggering would, if anything, be an understatement. Needless to say, he was the first man to set foot on the moon, and his deeply touching (if erratically delivered) "one small step for (a) man" quotation was heard live by 450 million people - more than 12% of the population of a world that was still widely devoid of radios and television sets. Often forgotten following what he did once on the moon, though, was his manual landing of the module on a site he had deemed safe on the spot while flying with less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the tank. His legendary eight days aboard Apollo 11 also overshadowed a career in which he logged nearly 2500 hours in experimental aircraft for the Air Force and flew in both the Gemini 8 and 11 missions to space.

More recently, two years nearly to the day before his death, Armstrong made a rare decision to broadcast his feelings when he criticized the Obama administration for its decision to surrender the forefront of American space exploration to private firms. Speaking before the Senate, he described the contemporary state of NASA funding as one that "presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere." It is curious that spaceflight has been so thoroughly neglected over the past (precisely) forty years. For a government so long committed to profligate spending - the best record of any American president over the last 70 years in providing balanced budgets was Dwight Eisenhower, at 3 years out of 8 - what was once perceived as a tenet of national (and indeed, earthly) pride has been reduced to only 0.5% of our larger-than-ever national budget. I hope that Neil Armstrong's greatest legacy may one day be his having taken part in the resumption of American predominance in manned space exploration. For now, as a small tribute to a man I admire as much for his few, well-chosen words as his grace under fire, I have digitized the long out-of-print CBS LP Man on the Moon, which was narrated by Walter Cronkite and documents the history and journey of Apollo 11. It's a beautiful reminder of man's all-too-fleeting capacity for genuine, transcendent accomplishment. You can download it here.

In Memoriam: Jack Bennett

My dear friend Jack Bennett was killed on the afternoon of June 24 in a boating accident on Stillwater River, just south of Columbus, Montana. He was 31 years old. He died attempting to help others on the river whose raft had become wrapped around a bridge pylon.

Few of the handful who regularly read this blog will have known Jack, nor are many from among his family and friends likely to ever find this post. Instead, I'm throwing these words out into the void of the internet just so that they'll be there, and so that I'll have at least said them. Jack was a kindhearted man with a tremendous sense of humor: a pleasure to shoot the shit with, a capable conversational partner in discussing the heavier aspects of life, and a willing and talented participant in countless gif wars on Facebook. I bonded with him over movies, music, beer, and the joys of the internet. We helped each other through our postbac science marathon, and he was one of the few whose natural grasp of physics (in particular) positively dwarfed my own. He returned the infinite love of his delightful dog with an affection that came as close to a matched level as surely any owner could muster. Though I was just under seven years his junior, he treated me with the respect of a peer in both science and life - an honor, it was clear, that he was much more sure I had earned than I was. I'd always been looking forward to another beer with him, and now it seems there can never be one. I wish I'd gotten to know him further, but I'm very grateful for the time we did spend together. I'll leave this video here for him: a song we'd discussed before as one we both held dear, and one whose bittersweet sentiment seems to perfectly capture both the terrible waste of his death and the celebration of a life that was truly well - if all-too-briefly - lived.

10/27/1981 - 6/24/2012

זכרונו לברכה

May his memory be a blessing

8-Bit Radiohead

There exists a small but devoted world of musicians who produce 8-bit covers of popular music. One of the most well-recognized such projects was 2007's 8-Bit Operators, a major-label, full-length compilation of Kraftwerk covers. Surely, even among the lofty company of Brian Eno and Kraftwerk's krautrock associates, there is no band more synonymous with the rise of electronic music - and so, more deserving of the NES treatment. Yet among contemporary bands, no one has been more singly responsible for pushing electronica towards the forefront of popular music than Radiohead, particularly on their initially controversial 2000 masterpiece Kid A. Appropriately, then, YouTube user QuintonSung has produced full-length 8-bit covers of both Kid A and its equally astounding predecessor, OK Computer. His attention to detail is amazing, and the overall quality of the production is embellished with delightful 8-bit touches, thrown in clearly for good measure, but never gratuitously (witness the particularly ingenious Super Mario coin effect at the end of "The Tourist"). Both the OK Computer and Kid A cover albums have graciously been offered for free download by their creator (available here), and you can listen to them in their entirety below.

My Bloody Valentine - "We Have All the Time in the World"

The first James Bond theme song came in the second outing, From Russia with Love, and it was in part indicative of the series' still-maturing formula. It appears in instrumental form throughout the film and is played properly over the end credits, rather than accompanying a vibrant opening credit sequence, as would later become the pattern. However, the song is a telling, if embryonic, precursor to the theme songs to come: though it doesn't quite match the sheer bombast of the Shirley Bassey themes (among others), instrumentally or vocally, it's nonetheless a sweeping affair that complements the outstanding film nicely. The question of how any given one of the other Bond themes measures up is largely a question of individual taste. "The Living Daylights," for instance, is a quality entry assuming a tolerance for the über-80s stylings of a-ha; by the same token, someone must have enjoyed Madonna's appalling "Die Another Day" for it to have reached the Top 10 on both sides of the Pond.

A rare exception to the debate is "We Have All the Time in the World," a lovely song penned by longtime series composer John Barry and sung by an ailing Louis Armstrong in his final recorded performance. The song accompanies a superb and unfortunately maligned entry in the Bond canon, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The film is, of course, the only outing as 007 for Australian actor George Lazenby, replacing a Sean Connery that producers Saltzman and Broccoli deemed too old to return for a 6th time. OHMSS is nonetheless tautly constructed, and it serves as one of the rare films in the franchise to provide some character development for Bond via the cruel murder of his recent bride - an event whose scars remain with Bond forever after, particularly in the hands of the series' more adept screenwriters. The weight of a love submitted to by an emotionally distant man and subsequently shattered prompted Barry to seek out a vocalist he considered capable of delivering both aspects of his bittersweet theme. Though he was too weak to play his trumpet at the session (leaving a tepid sounding substitute in his place), Armstrong's wistful vocal registers every last note. The result is certainly the most profound piece of music associated with the Bond franchise - and perhaps the best - but also one of the highlights of Armstrong's storied career, and an astounding (if tragically premature, even at age 67) note for him to leave the world on.

24 years later, in the wake of their masterpiece Loveless, My Bloody Valentine released a cover of "We Have All the Time in the World," recorded for Peace Together, a 1993 charity compilation devoted to ending sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The song is, in fact, one of only two new tracks the band has ever released post-1991 (the other being a cover of "Map Ref 41°N 93°W" for a Wire tribute album). It's an odd choice, but a logical one: the ethereal wash that raised songs like "Soon" to such heights is equally appropriate here, though it's decidedly scaled down by comparison. The arrangement is virtually indistinguishable from that of the Armstrong original, striking a particularly strong contrast to the guitar tsunamis with which the group is primarily identified. The song is nonetheless an artistic success, and given the contemporary state of the band's affairs - on the heels of the disintegration of guitarist Kevin Shields' relationship with bandmate Bilinda Butcher, and the release of an album that was, after all, called Loveless - may have served much the same purpose for the artists as had the original. The rest of Peace Together is, as one usually finds on charity albums, pretty middling stuff, featuring a bland cover of "Satellite of Love" by U2 with a croaky-sounding Lou Reed and a fine cover of "Oliver's Army" by Blur. All of the songs are available for download from Peace Together itself, on a site whose awkward Flash design makes them difficult to extract. "We Have All the Time in the World" can be more conveniently accessed here, while both versions of the song can be heard below.

Sounds for the Moon

George Méliès' classic, pioneering 1902 science fiction film Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) first caught my eye as part of a Bill Nye the Science Guy VHS that I owned as a child, on the subject of the moon. Hardly any of the footage was shown in the episode, but along with the strains of Debussy's Clair de lune played elsewhere in the show, it found a recess in my mind and never left. I first saw the entire 14 minute film in high school, this time on a rented VHS. It wasn't until Air announced that they would be soundtracking a newly restored edition of the film that I found out a color version had ever existed. In fact, Méliès had hand-painted his film, frame by frame, when he had first produced it. The DVD release, remastered from these hand-painted original frames by Lobster Films, proved a remarkable change from every version of the film I'd ever seen. The eccentric (and understandably inconsistent) coloration nicely compliments the film's bizarre imagery, and it adds an added layer of vitality to a piece of art celebrating the 110th anniversary of its release. Air's enjoyable soundtrack also inspired me to try to sequence my own to accompany the new print, with the unauthorized help of musicians more gifted than myself. You can watch the results below; with or without the music, it's a fascinating spectacle.

In Search of 3D

On April 19, 2004 I abruptly lost all vision in my right eye. Among the consequences (which include the name of this blog) was that as the ensuing weeks elapsed, I lost my capacity for depth perception, and my definition of "three dimensional" rapidly became difficult to put into words. I still do perceive shape, particularly in high-light/ strong-shadow conditions, but most shapes carry an outline that makes them look partially flat, at least around the edges. The bottom line is that I am now unable to perceive the world in three true dimensions, as I could growing up. On March 5, the gif file seen below was uploaded to imgur; it was the first time I had seen an image in 3D in almost 8 years.

Presumably, most viewers' experiences looking at this funky drawing won't feel as portentous as my own. However, today I discovered the artist's name, Dain Fagerholm, and a gallery of his Where the Wild Things Are-like work online. As a small token of my thanks for the temporary gift of 3D, I thought I'd throw out a link into the near-infinite void of the internet, and hopefully get him an extra view or two. As an added inducement, here's my favorite so far, "Asylum":

Stormy Applause

Rostislav Dubinsky (1923-1997) was the first violinist, musical director, and a founding member of the Borodin Quartet. The group was one of the few leading lights of Soviet classical music - named, like all the others, by the government and forcibly whittled down to only one full-blooded Jewish member (Dubinsky) before it became a success, but nonetheless talented enough that it toured abroad, both east and west of the Iron Curtain. Dubinsky defected in 1975, and in 1989 published his lamentably out-of-print memoirs, Stormy Applause. The book is a marvel. Dubinsky's English education only began in 1955, yet in the ensuing 44 years he accrued sufficient mastery of the language to write an entire book in charming prose that rarely, if ever, suggests that the author might be a non-native speaker.

Dubinsky's portrait of life under a totalitarian regime is a harrowing one. Certainly, the preconceptions held in the free world regarding Soviet power structure are shown to be true - and the book is a pointed rejoinder to anyone who would suggest that life in the United States, whatever its shortcomings, is not free. Dubinsky provides numerous accounts of the suffering inflicted upon those designated enemies of the state (no matter how arbitrarily), from a vocal Jewish actor who was run down by a government truck and whose entire family was sent to the Gulag, to a Canadian socialism enthusiast who immigrated to the USSR following the Revolution, only to be arrested with his family and shot as a Western spy during the Great Purge. A daughter of the latter man, Olya, was released following Stalin's death and met Dubinsky in Moscow, soon teaching him English and assuming an overarching importance in his life; years of malnutrition suffered in prison left her frail and underdeveloped, however, and she shortly passed away while he was on tour in Siberia. The threat of governmental brutality hung over every aspect of Soviet life, and those who didn't follow the party line were severely punished. For instance, after violinist David Oistrakh refused to sign a letter denying that Israel was a true homeland for Soviet Jewry, agents ransacked his apartment and stole only the least valuable and most  irreplaceable of his personal artifacts. Word of threats like these traveled fast, and was enough to keep the vast majority of public figures in line.

Yet Stormy Applause isn't the story of a political regime that "corrodes people the way rust eats into iron," so much as one of those people who lived under it. Inevitably, the paranoiac pressures enforced from above took their toll on all Soviet citizenry, leading to a world in which in addition to one's affairs being in order, one's neighbors' affairs also had to be bad, for the sake of "complete happiness." Following in a grand Russian tradition, the strains of day-to-day living were magnified for Jews, for whom anti-Semitism was so much a fact of life that its manifestations had an astoundingly casual air about them. In the midst of an internal passport check - an inconvenience by no means restricted to Jews alone - policemen would regularly pause at the "Nationality" line (decided by the government) and offer "curious expressions, as if they were wondering, What are you doing in the Soviet Union?" Even among the more socially progressive friends a Jew could make in the Soviet Union, in all likelihood it would only be a matter of time - or in the case of Dubinsky's musician friend Andrei Gorbatov, one heated game of chess - before "strangle [the king]" became "Strangle the Jews."

The emotional release of Stormy Applause comes in the form of music. Dubinsky spent twenty-nine years in the Borodin Quartet, encompassing 3000 concerts, dozens of hours rehearsing for each one spent performing, and very nearly as much time grappling with Soviet bureaucracy over which music he would be allowed to play in public. For composers were subject to the same governmental whims as ordinary citizens, and could, at any time and for any reason, find themselves classified among the Untouchables. Certainly, foreign composers (and especially modern ones) were perennially on thin ice, and such names as "Schönberg, Bern, and Webern were unmentionable words." The stakes were much higher, however, for Soviet composers, for whom official condemnation engendered devastating personal consequences. Dubinsky renders the terror of this kind of life particularly vividly in recounting the life of legendary composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he knew personally. Though Shostakovich twice survived ideologically-oriented "civil executions," Dubinsky noted that the "expectation of violent death... became the main theme in [his] music and was stamped forever on his face." Viewed in context, Shostakovich's music was not merely a scathing criticism of totalitarianism, but a very specific outcry against the effects of the Soviet Union on the minds of its citizens - "the destruction of Russian thought and culture, their gradual ruin, which Stalin began and Hitler only wanted to complete." For Dubinsky, to perform Shostakovich was to "[unmask] evil and hypocrisy," to "risk your life for the truth." In writing about his performances, Dubinsky manages to voice these eternal truths as movingly as the composer whose work he so admired. One performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet (a Borodin studio recording of which can be heard below) proved to be one of the most meaningful experiences of his life:

When we sat down, we began playing at once, as if it were the most natural act in the world. We performed the Borodin Quartet No. 2 in D-major, with the unrestrained music-making it required. In Shostakovich's fourth quartet we didn't hold back our emotions. It was surprising that our conversation [with a chauffeur, Helmut, about what took place in concentration camps] had taken place today, because Shostakovich's music was about that very subject - the so-called right of some people to destroy others. With Helmut we had spoken about Hitler's Germany, but now we were playing a piece about Stalin's Russia. By allowing Shostakovich's music to be played, the Soviet authorities had significantly complicated their lives, because the truth about the Soviet regime, concealed so carefully, began to reach the hearts of people all over the world. Judging by the silent hall, it was clear that his tale about twentieth-century tyranny was heard and understood. We ended the concert with Schubert, who, after the Shostakovich, acquired a special philosophical depth: as if regimes and rulers may come and go but another life, pure and elevated, remains undamaged.