Archive for June 2014
“I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark”*…
In 1978, DC Comics published an over-sized 72-page special edition entitled Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, in which the Man of Steel and The Greatest team to stave off an alien invasion.
The issue’s wraparound cover shows a host of late 1970s celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Tony Orlando, Johnny Carson, the cast of Welcome Back Kotter, and The Jackson 5–seated amongst Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, and other DC superheroes, as well as Warner and DC employees. The original draft included Mick Jagger in the lower left corner; he was replaced by promoter Don King. See a list of those depicted here.
[TotH to Retronaut, via almaar kleiner groeien]
* Muhammad Ali, nee Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.
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As we float like butterflies, we might recall that is was on this date in 1948 that Joe Louis, “The Brown Bomber,” successfully defended his Heavyweight Championship against Jersey Joe Walcott. The bout between two African-American athletes was a victory over the prejudices of the time. Louis held his title for three more years before retiring; in all, Louis successfully defended his Heavyweight title 25 times from 1937 to 1948, and was a world champion for 11 years and 10 months. Both are still records in the heavyweight division, the former in any division. Walcott went on to defeat Ezzard Charles for the title on 1951, at age 37, becoming the oldest person to wear the Champion’s belt (until George Foreman won it at 45).
With Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson, Louis is widely regarded as one of the first African American “national heroes” in the United States, and was a focal point of anti-Nazi sentiment leading up to and during World War II. He was instrumental in integrating the game of golf, breaking the sport’s color barrier in America by appearing under a sponsor’s exemption in a PGA event in 1952. Walcott went on to Hollywood (he starred with Humphrey Bogart in The Harder they Fall), then into politics– he was elected sheriff of Camden County, New Jersey in 1971– the first African-American to hold the post.
Joe Louis
Jersey Joe Walcott
“Ah, to think how thin the veil that lies Between the pain of Hell and Paradise”*…
click here for enlargeable and navigable version
From the remarkable Russian periodical, INFOGRAFIKA (see also here), a handy map of Hell. per the title of this post, one just never knows when it might come in handy…
* George William Russell (AE)
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As we bird-dog Beatrice, we might send sardonic birthday greetings to Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. A journalist, editor, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist, Bierce is probably best remembered for his short-story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (which Kurt Vonnegut considered the greatest American short story, a “work of flawless genius”) and, pace Dante, for his scathingly satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary…
- Advice, n. The smallest current coin…
- Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other…
- Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments…
“A desert is a place without expectation”*…
Ed Freeman is a refuge from rock (a road manager on the last Beatle’s tour, a session guitarist, arranger, and producer, perhaps most prominently, of Don MacLean’s “American Pie”) who gave it up for a camera. Among his many continuing photographic projects is a series of pictures captured as he wandered through the small inland towns and deserts of Southern California.
See more of this series (many of which are collected into Freeman’s book, Desert Reality) here.
[TotH to This Isn’t Happiness]
* Nadine Gordimer
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As we keep an eye out for Ozimandias, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that a 16 year-old singer named Tiffany Darwish, who had a major label debut album languishing in record store bins across the nation, ignited her career by playing a concert at the Paramus Park Mall in Paramus, NJ. In a time well before Britney and Hannah, Tiffany’s aim was to supplant Debbie Gibson at the top of the pop heap; but conventional promotion just wasn’t doing it. With Tiffany’s debut album going nowhere on radio or in stores, MCA Records and Tiffany’s personal manager signed on to a radical proposal: having Tiffany join the “Beautiful You: Celebrating the Good Life Shopping Mall Tour ’87″—the kind of promotional tour of American shopping malls then associated only with consumer products like canned soup and hair coloring… The Paramus gig was so successful that Tiffany went on to play malls all across America– and her album went quadruple-platinum.
“Geometry is not true, it is advantageous”*…
The tesseract is a four dimensional cube. It has 16 edge points v=(a,b,c,d), with a,b,c,d either equal to +1 or -1. Two points are connected, if their distance is 2. Given a projection P(x,y,z,w)=(x,y,z) from four dimensional space to three dimensional space, we can visualize the cube as an object in familar space. The effect of a linear transformation like a rotation
| 1 0 0 0 | R(t) = | 0 1 0 0 | | 0 0 cos(t) sin(t) | | 0 0 -sin(t) cos(t) |in 4d space can be visualized in 3D by viewing the points v(t) = P R(t) v in R3.
* Henri Poincare
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As we follow the bouncing ball, we might spare a thought for Felix Klein; he died on this date in 1925. A mathematician of broad gauge, he is best remembered for his work in non-Euclidean geometry, perhaps especially for his work on synthesis of geometry as the study of the properties of a space that are invariant under a given group of transformations, known as the Erlanger Program, which profoundly influenced mathematics. He created the Klein bottle, a one-sided closed surface–a non-orientable surface with no inside and no outside– that cannot be constructed in Euclidean space.
A Klein bottle
“You are the music while the music lasts”*…
A beloved album can turn into a sonic home of sorts, and provide a measure of comfort that trumps an actual living space. Now we have a mash-up of both: In his new illustration series, “Archimusic,” Barcelona-based designer Federico Babina has designed homes that embody the sensibility and tone of 27 musicians and their biggest hits. Among these sonic fortresses–which range from sleekly designed small-scale homes to colorful and funkier buildings that could be apartments, institutional homes, or symphony halls–are Miles Davis’s So What, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, and David Bowie’s Space Oddity…
Babina appears to be no slacker when it comes to hard thinking about the ways in which design and music mesh. “Both music and architecture are generated by an underlying code, an order revealed by mathematics and geometry,” Babina says in his artist statement. He describes the series as an exercise in “listening to architecture,” interpreting its musicality and rhythm, and representing the structural, visual qualities of music. He explored whether “the music is horizontal, vertical or oblique,” whether “sound leans firmly on the ground or if it touches on tiptoe,” and whether “it’s made of contrasting colors or tones that change gradually.”…
See more of his work at his site and here (where one can also buy prints); read more at “27 Musicians And Their Hits Reimagined As Buildings.”
* T.S. Eliot
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As we’re grateful that music can Gimme Shelter, we might recall that it was on this date in 1868, at the Königliches Hof-und National-Theater in Munich, that Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg premiered. At four and a half hours, it’s one of the longest operas performed in modern times; and it is unusual in Wagner’s oeuvre both because it is a comedy (the only one among his mature works) and because it isn’t driven by mythological or supernatural themes. The premiere was sponsored by Ludwig II of Bavaria and conducted Hans von Bülow. Franz Strauss, the father of composer Richard Strauss played the French horn at the premiere– despite his often-expressed dislike of Wagner, who was present at many of the rehearsals.
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