Today I read that it turns out Mark Twain had willed that his autobiography (a manuscript of 5,000 pages, by the way) not be published until 100 years after his death, and then you can do whatever you want. Generally, those 100 years expired in 2010 and three volumes of the autobiography were published.
I also discovered that Kafka had intended for “The Trial” to be destroyed, but it was published anyway. That’s the one where the guy goes to court, and suddenly they start trying him there.
An intriguing artist — Emanuele Attadia (Italy, b. 1986). A fusion of the ancient and modern. There’s realism, yet it’s imbued with an unusual tenderness. I’m particularly fond of his use of color and his selection of motifs.
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A KGB officer came to check the symphony orchestra before their trip abroad. He watched the rehearsal. Sharing his impressions:
– Overall, not bad, you can feel the team spirit, especially those with the bows. But there are some shortcomings: that guy at the back, during the whole rehearsal, only hit with his stick about three times – he was mostly slacking off…
– Well, that’s our drummer, that’s his part…
– Don’t give me that, there’s only one Party for us, and he needs to hit more often! (C)
Anna Artamonova, this relates to your question about how we work 🙂
Nadya says, write about contemporary composers, not just about contemporary artists. Well, of course, she means classical, not pop music ones.
Here’s a good one for today – Mexican composer Arturo Márquez with his piece Danzon No. 2. Director Guillermo Ortiz Pichardo made a small short film about it, slightly nonsensical, but very much in tune with the music. By the way, the composer himself appears at 5:19.
In the comments, I’ve left a piano rendition of a segment performed by Yuja Wang. It might even be worth listening to these three minutes first. A really cool performance.
Recently, I was surprised to discover that gold leaf is edible, and when you see golden flakes on a quality cake, it’s actually real gold, not just some props. Here’s a kebab from Arkadiy Novikov and Jihan Deniz costing 23,550 rubles.
Another revelation was that such gold is quite affordable. A single sheet of purest 99.8% gold, palm-sized, sells for just 4 bucks. It’s sold in very thin sheets—about 100-500 nanometers thick (depending on the manufacturer). 100 nanometers is 0.0001 millimeters. To compare, the thickness of writing paper is 130,000 nanometers, and a human hair is about 60,000 nanometers thick, while a gold leaf is only 100-500. If calculated, a sheet is approximately 600 atoms thick. Edible gold also comes in powder and flakes.
Turns out, this gold has its own E-number, E175 (while E174 is edible silver). Gold is not absorbed by the body at all; it passes through unchanged, so logically, it offers no benefits. However, sellers of edible gold claim its benefits are sky-high and it cures almost all ailments. Studies conducted in 1975 and 2016 showed, however, that there are indeed no health benefits.
The only benefit here is to show off your wealth and brag to your friends that you are, literally, pooping gold (remember, it’s not digested). Whether you should sift through your toilet matters looking for gold is up to you…
Interestingly, even anciently, gold sheets were somehow made to be 500 times thinner than a human hair.
The production of gold leaf started around the end of the third millennium BC when craftsmen learned how to purify the metal and hammer it into thin sheets. Traditionally, during the Middle Ages, gold leaf was prepared by rolling or hammering gold ducats (trade coins used in Medieval Europe) into approximately the thickness of foil. As the metal became thinner, it became more challenging to prevent the foil from sticking to nearby moist or greasy surfaces. To prevent this, “gold beaters would lay a small square of thin metal in the middle of a paper or parchment square and other metal squares on top of it in sequence, until a decent stack was formed; then they skillfully hammered it until the small squares of metal spread to the edges of the parchment.” Then these squares were cut into smaller squares, and the process was repeated. For the final stage of beating, when the gold reached its thinnest point, a special type of parchment called “goldbeaters’ skin” (made from the inner lining of calf’s intestine) was placed between the layers of foil. According to Cennino Cennini, about 145 sheets could be made from one ducat, and a Venetian ducat weighed about 54 troy grains. However, Cennini preferred his gold leaf to be thicker and recommended producing only 100 sheets from one ducat.
Two and a half years ago, I printed this phone holder on an SLA printer, a holder of my own design. And then my cat broke it with its paw. I started to glue it together with superglue, and realized that this plastic does not bond very well (but it still bonded after sanding). I began to investigate why, and found a lot of interesting information about superglue.
How does superglue work? Inside the tube, it remains liquid and consists of molecules of ethyl cyanoacrylate monomers. When the glue is applied to a surface, it fills the pores and cracks, which must be present for the glue to work—hence the importance of roughly sanding the surface. The polymerization reaction begins due to contact with water (including moisture in the air). Therefore, you should not wash off the glue with water, as it will set even faster. Acetone can be used—unless the glue is in the eyes. And it does get into the eyes, often because it is packaged in a container that resembles eye drops. The molecules begin to connect with each other, forming long polymeric chains, transforming from a liquid to a solid state.
Thanks to rapid polymerization, the glue sets in 10–30 seconds.
The glue also poorly bonds hydrophobic surfaces, such as polyethylene, polypropylene, Teflon. They lack free electrons for the glue to interact with and do not absorb moisture, which is necessary to initiate the reaction.
Impacts and shearing—superglue works excellently under tension, but is very brittle under impacts and shearing. This is its weak spot.
– Cyanoacrylate was discovered accidentally by the photo company Eastman Kodak (specifically by Harry Coover), who was trying to create a transparent plastic for gun sights.
– Unlike most plastics, which deteriorate after being recycled, superglue can be heated to 210°C and decomposed back into monomers. These monomers can then be reassembled to create a new, durable material. This allows for the recycling of plastic without loss of quality.
– The properties of the glue caught the interest of the US Army, particularly during the height of the Vietnam War. Transportation of the wounded took just minutes, but many soldiers died from uncontrollable bleeding. Therefore, in 1966, the US Army sent a special surgical brigade to South Vietnam, armed with aerosol sprays of cyanoacrylate. Although this method was used in a limited number of cases, out of 30 documented cases of using the glue to stop bleeding, it was successful in 26. A safer surgical glue was invented in 1998.
And the green sphere at the bottom is also an interesting object, I also printed it. It is a spherical section of a gyroid. A gyroid is a continuous (without self-intersections) infinitely repeating structure in three dimensions without any reflection symmetries. It is, incidentally, the only such structure known to science. Overall, it’s a way to create elements with minimum weight and maximum strength. Inside, essentially, it consists of sinusoids along three coordinates.
“Mom, Dad, meet my new friend Alesha.”
“Aaa! Holy cow! A dead moose!!!!”
“Let’s go, Alesha, we are not welcome here…”
Today, I was reading about dissonances and decided to see if there are any compositions where dissonances are deliberately used as the main material. And I stumbled upon György Ligeti’s Atmosphères.
Listen, it’s very unusual and hardly resembles music at all. He used something called micropolyphony, creating dense webs of chromatic notes moving at different speeds and at various distances from each other.
If you feel like you don’t understand such music and don’t find this assembly of sounds beautiful, imagine instead of an orchestra playing it with solemn faces, a Stanley Kubrick film, for example. Suddenly, everything falls into place.
About a week ago, when I watched The Shining, the first thing I texted a friend was, “Notice that there’s no music in the film,” to which he replied that there is, but it’s so well made and integrated that you don’t notice it. Actually, The Shining has a very cool soundtrack, very well-selected.
So, specifically, this composition Atmosphères (as well as parts of Lux Aeterna, Requiem, and Aventures) was used by Kubrick in his 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another piece, Lontano, was used in The Shining. And Musica ricercata was used in Eyes Wide Shut. By the way, Musica ricercata is quite good; I’ll drop a link in the comments.
I’ve closed another gestalt with the iconic Hitchcock noir—watched the movie “Vertigo” (Vertigo) by Alfred Hitchcock from 1958.
Initially, this film did not inspire much enthusiasm among either viewers or critics. It didn’t become the director’s highest-grossing or most famous film and at the Oscars, it only received two nominations in technical categories—for best sound and best art direction. However, over time its influence and significance greatly increased, and the film itself gained a multitude of interpretations—from Freudian to postmodern. Eventually, it sort of came to be considered the best film of all time and the best detective movie.
Here, Hitchcock flips expectations by killing the main heroine in the first half of the movie and the detective reveal is not at the end, but in the middle—in Madeleine’s letter. The producers argued with Hitchcock over this, but he insisted: the audience needs to know more than Scottie. It’s necessary to create suspense.
Last week, I finally got around to watching Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980). Turns out, I hadn’t watched it back then either. So, I’m catching up!
If, like me, you’ve missed out on either of these two—make sure you find the time!
John Falter’s father once told his son that he would never become an artist until he published a cover for The Saturday Evening Post. John Falter did it 122 times.
For me, the difference between an illustration and a full-fledged painting is like the difference between a TV series and a film. Think about how such illustrations were created in the first half of the 20th century. Just imagine: all these works were done in just a couple of weeks, maybe three. There wasn’t much more time—after all, they were illustrating current events. He would create a large drawing, around 30×40 inches, which was then photographed and converted to CMYK. The artist had to understand well what would inevitably be lost in this process and what, on the contrary, might “pop”—primarily in terms of color and contrast. There was no post-correction on a computer because computers simply didn’t exist. In short, working as a magazine illustrator was a unique profession.
And these weren’t just illustrations for stories—they were also illustrations as stories. An artist can convey a lot through details, the style of the drawing—essentially, through what’s “between the lines.” If you look closely, his paintings are full of such messages.
Similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes” section, you can find all 143 (unlike Facebook, which forgets—or rather, ignores—almost half of them).
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 