music
Still fidelity
.
Not heard coming
The cartoon is about something that was on a lot of front pages in September 1903: “the problem of aerial navigation.” Just below the picture, a little story about the impending voyage of Samuel Pierpont Langley’s flying machine Aerodrome is to be read as a footnote in advance.
Pedagogically, it teaches us that on October 7 and again on December 8, the Aerodrome and its pilot catapulted themselves into the air from a boat moored in the Potomac River but then nosed down and sank. Langley’s attempt at powered flight had been supported by the resources and publicity apparatus of the Smithsonian Institution, but when the ripples closed above them, the problem of aerial navigation remained unsolved.
It was to be solved on December 17 by Orville Wright, but even during the moment of the immediately post-Langley nobody at the Indianapolis Star was in position to see that coming. Elsewhere in its front-page layout for September 28 the Star had offered its subscribers opportunities to read about several murders, a gallows confession, an accidental electrocution, and a horse-show scandal. All those readings, however, were rooted in the still earth of September 1903. The problem of aerial navigation remained as unsolved as ever. Column 1’s long article about a train falling from a trestle could treat only the idea of descent from ground to ground.
But the Wright Brothers solved the falling-body problem, and over the following years the solution became known. By 1924 the body at the foot of the trestle could be imagined on the rise. According to Wikipedia, this record of the change was the first country song to sell a million copies.
https://archive.org/details/wreck-of-the-old-97_202102
Listen to its cheerful whistlings. Fast mail train no. 97 had taken on feathered flesh. Now it could fly on to heaven, leaving its wood and metal mortalities in death-filled earth.
Listen in
From the binary stars a whisper
The singer James Joyce, author of a short story about a man who heard distant music, shelved this concert review in Leopold Bloom’s library.
Observing a bewhiskered black body in morning sun, Mr. Bloom remembered nights before and thought, “They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips.” The hungry black body moved toward him, was captured by his field, and became a satellite. Two desiring bodies making a little island group, his cat and he were seen by a storyteller to be orbiting each other in harmony.
Color shock: in the morgue, the drop of red
The article about the Rorschach inkblot test and its surprise late-sequence transition from black to color is online at http://captainmnemo.se/ro/hhrotex/rotexcolour.pdf. The undated, unattributed photograph of Wilhelm Furtwängler is in the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, https://vzg-easydb.gbv.de/object/30eaad07-8e97-4875-a003-f3a5dbddd5b1. I’ve reversed some of its color decay.
For coloring in your own emotions, you might try this tool. It was made in a factory under the auspices of Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude), the Third Reich’s recreational and community-building arm. Under what auspices, do you think, could one of these black-and-white faces be retooled into yours?
Wreck, topple, scald, gash. Then sing, play
Toward a theory of art:
Recital
From deep inside soft warmth,
shy glance outward and daring intimate pressure on the instrument that opens her to memory. It serves her as a speculum.
George Eastman, whose Eastman Kodak atelier fashioned the speculum for the hands of mezzo-soprano Ina Bourskaya, was born in 1854. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. Because portraiture is an art of revealing the body, a new way of portraying will equip the eye with new, bodily ways of experiencing. Wielded a century ago under Eastman’s influence, this cable release was a newly seductive unbuttoner.
Eastman’s original advertising slogan was this. Consider it sung by Don Giovanni.
They that carried us away captive required of us a song
