The way air conditioning feels when it’s late on a summer’s night and you are wearing pants, and you’re almost but not-quite sweating and then your toes get a little chill.
A really clean room.
Walking down a quiet suburban street in the middle of a hot day and hearing a mourning dove’s call.
Driving.
When you open your eyes, in the well-rested haze that just follows a late morning dream, and you suddenly think you have school work to do… and then you realize it’s summer break.
Go listen to Greg Laswell’s song called The One I Love. His album, “Three Flights from Alto Nido” feels like what Joshua Radin’s sophomore attempt should have been.
Very, very good song. (And as usual, don’t watch the crap that the YouTube uploader put on the video — just enjoy the music without watching the video!)
To the upper class-people of the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry, us incoming D1s must have looked like cows queueing up for the slaughter — doe-eyed and well-rested as we were. After this week is over, I’d finally call us seasoned professional school students. What a break-in.
All Boarded Up - How Cleveland is Dealing With Mass Foreclosure - NYTimes.com — draw your own conclusions, though you might be able to pick from this grab-bag: government is ineffective, government is effective, the economy is on the upswing, the economy is on the downswing, home ownership is great, homeownership is terrible. Etcetera. An interesting quote (emphasis mine):
In other instances, mortgage brokers would cruise
neighborhoods, looking for houses with old windows or a
leaning porch, something that needed fixing. They would
then offer to arrange financing to pay for repairs. Many
of those deals were too good to be true, and interest
rates ballooned after a short period of low payments.
Suddenly burdened with debt, people began to lose homes
they had owned free and clear.
And one more good quote about the insanity of recent home valuation:
The two-story house has a long rap sheet of bad deals. Since 2001, it has been foreclosed twice and sold four times, for prices ranging from $87,000 to $1,500. Jimenez bought it for $4,000.
Yes, you read that correctly. $4000.
Banks are now selling properties at such low prices — many below what they sold for in the 1920s — you have to wonder why they bother to foreclose at all. (The F.D.I.C. estimates that each foreclosure costs a bank on average $50,000, more than if they were to do a loan modification.)
One of my recurring themes here at tumbledry is the stunning, underutilized power of corporate/industrial money to subsidize fine works of art. Here, I continue to crystallize and extend this idea.
The GE Building (also known as the namesake of the show 30 Rock) houses, among many other things, NBC studio 8H. If you think carefully, you’re sure to recognize 8H as the studio from which Saturday Night Live goes out. If your grandparents think carefully, however, they’ll likely have a rather different memory.
This space didn’t always contain television studios: NBC Studio 8H is the former home of the largest radio studio in the world. It was over 10,000 square feet with 30 foot high ceilings… and, when it opened, was widely considered an “acoustical disaster.” While my left brain is distracted by the shortcomings of sound engineering, my right brain is quite intrigued by a group called the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
For 17 years, from 1937 to 1954, the orchestra performed first in studio 8H, then in Carnegie Hall under the direction of the legendary Arturo Toscanini. It wasn’t just an orchestra. It was the orchestra. The group produced fantastic, sometimes definitive, recordings of a huge variety of classical artists. How did this happen? How did an orchestra command weekly studio time to put out a network show featuring… classical music?
There is speculation, as outlined in the Wikipedia article, that the orchestra was assembled to “deflect a Congressional inquiry into broadcasting standards.” This may be true. I highly doubt, however, that NBC dedicated 17 years to dodging broadcast standards. Something about this Symphony program seized the public’s attention.
I think audiences are drawn to simplification: a limited scope, brilliantly executed. What’s that? You don’t like classical music? What if one of the best orchestras in the world went out live to you, for free, on a weekly basis? Would you listen? Would you care?
In the past, the answer to those questions was “yes.” Has the status quo shifted?
It makes me sad that the visceral thrill of live television is sequestered within the testosterone-driven box of the action packed (and golf). Viewing something live, knowing that others are simultaneously watching and, somewhere, the event is taking place right now, should be possible for more events. Unfortunately, classical music programming is relegated to the quasi-obscurity of prerecorded public broadcasts (not to disparage public broadcasting — I love PBS/NPR — but I’m looking for corporate-sponsored cultural touchstones here). If networks are supposed to tell people what to like, why don’t they tell people to dare to try something (anything!) different? “It wouldn’t sell,” they’d say. Really? Seemed to work pretty well before. Perhaps it wouldn’t sell because any attempt at replicating the success of the NBC Symphony Orchestra would be a sad caricature of music: tanned 20-somethings would appear on an overlit, chilled, cramped soundstage somewhere on the west coast, competing to play in “America’s Top Orchestra.”
Nobody would watch that.
Sure, that reality format sometimes works and it is entertaining. But I don’t understand why content is so imbalanced — must we all be constantly bombarded by the lowest common denominator? Why can’t the banal and transient subsidize the sophisticated and enduring?
Television averages a cut every 7 seconds. I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing, but I do know that you can’t air an orchestra with a cut every 7 seconds. I think the vast majority of arts, humanities, logic, and reason have fled television, beaten out by smooth skin and sound bites. The internet is our next, best hope for bringing people together around the bright bonfire of artistic expression.
Though he didn’t sing a single melody, the driver on the 16 this morning had a truly operatic voice — he sounded not like an aspiring amateur, but a world-famous singer. “On top of that, he could easily sit in for James Earl Jones” I thought, as we bumped down University Avenue. Now, perhaps the driver leads a church choir during his evenings and weekends, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many gifts we possess of which we are not aware.
What if the hotel maid riding the bus to work, catching a few minutes of sleep, could be the best painter since Rembrandt? What if the construction worker, savoring a few minutes to rest his back while sitting down, has the timeless gifts of a sculptor? What if we only completely fulfill our potential when we transcend this coil for another?
The spark of creativity is one of the most singularly electrifying experiences of the human condition. To bring something, no matter how small, out of nothing — a clever turn of phrase, a pleasant melody, an arrangement of paints on a canvas — is a powerful experience. In dental school, I miss the creative spark intensely. The longing for time to write a melody on the piano or a poem in a notebook makes me wonder: would I feel the opposite way were I in music school? That is to say: after countless assignments to “compose a melody in this time and this key signature,” would I crave a list of facts to memorize, a test in which the subjective was eliminated and I could objectively, predictably achieve success?
I don’t know. I think, though, that it’s easy to get tired of too much structure. Every life needs some breathing room. Anyhow, if you would like to hear more about creativity, consider listening to Elizabeth Gilbert (the author of Eat, Pray, Love) give a wonderful talk at TED 2009. (Via kottke.)
Have 3 minutes and 30 seconds? Why not take some time out of your day to watch a rather surreal and well-produced video featuring remote control car drifting. When I first saw this, I thought the big cars in the background at the beginning were a billboard! They weren’t. They were just regular-sized cars.
“This is a horror show we’re watching,” said Lawrence
Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a
left-of-center economic research organization in
Washington. “By every measure available-loss of
employment and hours, rise of unemployment, shrinkage of
the employment to population rate- this recession is
steeper than any recession of the last forty years,
including the harsh recession of the early 1980s.”
I hope all the readers of tumbledry are able to remain employed throughout this unbelievably tough time. Makes my test studying at hand seem even more urgent — I’ve just got to get through this. Hope everyone’s Friday is happy, despite the news.
This Southwest Airlines Commercial entitled “Deposit” illustrates why following instructions is important. And here’s the thing about those drive-through bank teller set-ups: should I be trying to make eye contact with the lady on the other side? I mean, they can see and hear me, and I can hear them… yet, isn’t there kind of a void there? I raise the question because I think there is at least one person in tumbledry’s audience who can provide advice.
Now I am off to study for my physical evaluation test, wherein I learn the techniques used to accurately obtain a holistic picture of the health of one’s patients. Really, it’s the first class that tries to answer the dental question “to drill, or not to drill?”
I think I’ll have my patients just call me “Alex.” Is the “Doctor” prefix really necessary? I think, in most situations, it isn’t. Our bench dentist said his father, a physician, only used the “doctor” prefix when making dinner reservations. Interesting.