SOUNDTRACK: mafmadmaf–“Rapture” (SXSW Online 2021).
I never intend to go to SXSW–I find the whole thing a bit much. But I also appreciate it for the way it gives unknown bands a place to showcase themselves. NPR featured a half dozen artists online this year with this note:
This year, the South by Southwest music festival that takes over Austin, Texas every spring happened online. Couch By Couchwest, as I like to call it, was an on-screen festival, with 289 acts performing roughly 15-minute pre-recorded sets across five days in March.
This list was curated by Bob Boilen. He also notes:
I didn’t enjoy hearing loud, brash music while sitting on a couch the way I would in a club filled with people and volume, so I found myself engaging in more reflective music instead.
I’m going in reverse order, so mafmadmaf is next.
mafmadmaf is a Chinese modular synthesizer artist. I’m not sure I ever saw his face onscreen, but it didn’t matter: This seductive and spellbinding set was perfect in my living room. Seeing his modular synthesizer and its many patch cables set up in a beautiful garden was more entertaining than simply watching some knob-turning on its own. Artfully done.
Anyone who knows Bob knows he loves modular synths. I really have no sense of how they work, so this is all a mystery to me. But I agree that the setting is wonderful. And the music is very cool.
This piece is 13 minutes long and while it is mostly washes of synth sounds, there’s some melodies (synthesized sounds of water drops and chimes).
The song morphs in interesting ways, especially after 4 and a half minutes when the musicians enters the screen and you start to see him do something to his setup. This adds new sounds and even a pulsing almost-beat.
At around ten minutes things slow way down.
[READ: July 15, 2021] Naturalist
I saw this book in the library and grabbed it because I love Jim Ottaviani’s work. He has written and illustrated a number of non-fiction graphic novels and they have all been terrific. I love his drawing style–very clean lines and excellent detail. I also love his ability to compact big ideas into small digestible chunks.
But I had never heard of Edward O. Wilson, which, after reading this, surprises me. He is not only a Pulitzer prize winning author, an innovator in the field of biology and a writer of a massive book about ants, he is also controversial (as we see later on) and a devoted environmentalist.
The book opens with a young Wilson growing up in Alabama. From when he was little he was obsessed with ants. There were lots of fire ants where he grew up and there are few things more fascinating than fire ants (the book is chock full of all of the scientific names for all of these ants).
When he was still young, playing around in nature, he went fishing and when he pulled a fish out of the water its spines poked him in the eye giving him a traumatic cataract–he wound up with full sight in one eye only. But this seemed to get him to focus more minutely on smaller things–ants.
Staring in fourth grade his father was shuffled around the country a lot so Edward made his home in many places around the south, eventually settling in Florida.
There he met a friend who was obsessed with butterflies–they were two budding entomologists.
Hey joined boy scouts and became a young instructor in reptiles and insects. He went around catching and keeping animals. A hilarious moment comes when he shows his mother a giant snake that he caught she calmly says
It is now 8:10 PM. Sunset is when?
9:30?
Very good. So you will walk 40 minutes in whatever direction you choose at which point you will release that snake. Then you will walk back.
He was very religious as a young boy But he soon discovered science and that became the new light and the way.
Eventually he went to school and became an excellent stiudent–going on many biological expeditions. He got his bachelors of science in three years. In 1951, he went to Harvard.
Since he was one of the few people interested in ants, he was able to do a lot of exploration on the school’s budget.
Harvard also exposed him to lots of other thinkers. He met a nobel prize winning physicist who was pleased with atomic testing “these explosions are good. Radiation increases the rate of mutation which can speed evolution. This is a good thing, is it not?”
Wilson says, “I was not completely sure if he was serious.”
Eventually he was able to travel the word. He went to Ciba and observed previously unnoticed species of ants (workers that glistened golden in the sunlight). He went to South America to Mayan cities.
But he wasn’t always sensible. He talks about trying to climb a volcanic mountain by himself. Fortunately, there were people in the area there to save him when he was lost,
Then he met a woman and fell in love.
But then he was sent to New Guinea for a year. He was thrilled and he kept in good touch with her while they were apart. He travelled all over the southern hemisphere–an intrepid and fearless explorer.
Eventually Harvard offered him an assistant professorship–non-tenure track. He wanted more permanence and when other schools came calling he seriously considered the offers. But then he realized it must be Harvard’s way to see if their young professors were being lured away before they offered then what they actually wanted. So he styed in Massachusetts.
The Harvard section is quite fascinating for the biology departmental warfare that happens. When a new young hotshot came into the department he wanted to get biology to be more molecular. He tried to get rid of the ecologists (of which Wilson was one). They department became molecular biologist and evolutionary biologists. So Wilson migrated to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he was finally fully in his element.
Later, with his new colleagues, he tried a new way of understanding extinction rates. They decide to investigate the status of insects at Krakatoa–essentially a new world with an origin date (August 28, 1883). But was there a way to recreate their own situation that wiped out every living creature?
Not really.
Except that maybe they could. Off the coast of the Florida there were a lot of very small islands. They got permits, met with a reputable exterminator and proceeded to kill everything on a little island.
Within weeks the recolonization of the island was under way. Winged ant queens landed and started colonies. Spiders used “ballooning” to float from nearby islands. Within 250 days nearly all of the fauna was returned.
Wilson’s controversy arrived with his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
He talked about the social lives of all animals and included homo sapiens. He believes that if he had stopped before humanity, his book would have been well regarded and appreciated. But by including humanity, it caused all kinds of controversy and, worse, overshadowed all of the information about the other animals species. Wilson posited that genes could affect aggression altruism and other behaviors–a position of heredity importance.
But academia was against this attitude that made class, race and gender differences seem unavoidable–basically charged him with sexism and racism. He was boycotted and deemed counterrevolutionary. He even had water dumped on his head at an AAAS conference by protestors. His main critic was Stephen Jay Gould. I haven’t read enough to comment on the controversy or how much Wilson embraced of the sexist attitude.
The final (very short) chapter is about his work with environmentalism. He is passionate and devoted to the cause and was even the editor at Biodiversity. (Although he says he did not come up with that name which (at the time) he thought was too cutesy).
One of the more fascinating things (in a book full of fascinating things) was this observation.
In a study, people were asked their ideal habitats if given a chance. Consistently people said
- near a lake, ocean, etc.,
- on a hill or bluff.
- in a park-like environment close to ground
- with small or finely divided leaves
It happens that this archetype fits a tropical savanna of the kind prevailing in Africa where humanity evolved for several millions of years.
This was a very cool book.
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