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Two days ago, Ferrebeekeeper wrote about Earth’s magnetic field, an underappreciated invisible force-field which keeps the planet habitable by preventing solar wind from blowing away our atmosphere and oceans (we need those!). Long ago, Venus and Mars seemingly had liquid oceans and nice atmospheres, but something went wrong (?) with their magnetic fields a billion or so years ago, and just look at them now (tuts censoriously). But maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to judge our neighbors…Five hundred and sixty-five million years ago, the Earth underwent a magnetic crisis too.
Geologists have been studying fragments of plagioclase and clinopyroxene from the ancient continental shield of Canada to learn about the state of the planet’s magnetic fields in the ancient past. As they form, these crystals trap tiny magnetized iron fragments in place like the needles of little compasses. Scientists can thus study the deep history of the magnetosphere. As they studied magnetic crystals that were formed 565 million years ago, they found some troubling things: half a billion years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field was over 10 times weaker than what it is today. Additionally the poles were rapidly fluctuating between north and south at an unexpected rate.
A closer reading of all of this suggests that 550 million years ago the Earth’s magnetic field nearly collapsed! (for a look at what that means, just walk around Mars). Life was saved because the solid nickel iron core of Earth nucleated from the molten core at that time. Instead of a field collapse, our magnetic field became much stronger as the spinning solid inner core and the convection cycles of the molten outer core worked together to form a super geodynamo. Coincidentally, 541 million years ago is familiar to paleontologists as the inception of the Cambrian explosion, when multitudinous animal life forms appeared on Earth. It is such an important point that it divides the Phanerozoic (filled with mushrooms, megafauna, liverworts, and Roman centurions) from the Proterozoic (billions of years of bacterial soup). Just a coincidence?
Gosh, we have looked at a lot of crowns, haven’t we? You would think that, after all of these posts, we would have started to run out of royal headwear, but we haven’t even remotely begun to get to the back of history’s vast royal treasury. Nothing seems to interest humans quite so much as status, and nothing says status like a gold hat which proclaims “I am better than than those around me”. Today’s crown however is not meant for a human head: it is a votive crown which is devoted to the idea that there are aspects of status which fundamentally transcend even our sad status-driven lives. This idea is maybe at the heart of religion–which is an even more naked manifestation of the human need for hierarchical status and tribal belonging than politics and kingship (although they are all knit together in a disturbing way).
Enough philosophizing…above is the crown of of Saint Oswald made of gold, silver, pearls, shell, and gemstones. It seems to date from the late 12th century AD but may be of earlier construction. Elements of the crown, such as the Roman cameo and the intaglios are definitely ancient pieces which have been repurposed into the saint’s crown (the whole piece may have been donated by a king or prince as a devotional act, but the history is unclear). The crown is kept at Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany on top of a reliquary statue of Saint Oswald made of gilded wood with disturbing niello eyes.
Oswald is a good illustration of the fungible nature of political and religious power. He was a 7th century Saxon king who converted to Christianity and annealed the thrones of Bernicia and Deira together into the powerful Kingdom of Northumbria which was a high point in England’s dark age history (this business of putting kingdoms together out of disparate preexisting elements is reflected somewhat in the bricolage nature of this saint’s crown from 500 years later). Oswald was a warlord who died in battle, yet he was also a uniter, a spiritual leader, and a saintly king (at least in Bede’s estimation). He became the focus of a particular cult later in the Middle Ages and there are at least 4 skulls attributed to him in continental Europe alone.
In 2016 the Japanese Space Agency launched a quarter-of-a-billion dollar x-ray observatory named Hitomi into Earth orbit. The craft’s mission was to study extremely energetic processes at the far reaches of the universe. It was hoped that the data Hitomi provided would allow astronomers to understand how the large scale structures of the universe came into being (how galactic superclusters form, for example). The satellite initially worked perfectly, but, within 38 Earth days, the spacecraft was lost: a failure of attitude control sent it into an uncontrolled spin which caused critical structural elements to break apart.
The full story of what destroyed Hitomi is perhaps of greater immediate interest to living beings on Earth than how the meta-structures the universe came into being. When everything went wrong for the ill-fated space observatory it was passing over the southern part of the Atlantic ocean. For spacefarers, this region of the Van Allen Belt is analogous to what the Bermuda Triangle or the Namib Skeleton Coast is for sailors: it is a haunted and dangerous stretch of space. Astronauts who travel through it report strange phantasmagorical dots and streaks in their vision, even when they close their eyes. The Hubble Space Telescope does not make observations when it passes over the south Atlantic. Controllers turn off its delicate systems. The region is known to the world’s space agencies as “the South Atlantic Anomaly.” Hitomi was not its first victim–it is surmised that the South Atlantic Anomaly was responsible for the failures of the Globalstar network satellites way back in aught seven.
The existence of the South Atlantic Anomaly was known long before that. It was discovered in 1958 by Explorer 1, the first American satellite (which was equipped with a Geiger counter). Perhaps the Soviets would have discovered the anomaly by means of Sputnik, but, because the Cold War made scientific cooperation difficult, Australia did not hand over Sputnik data to the Soviets until later. Suffice to say, the South Atlantic Anomaly is an anomaly in the Van Allen Belt, the torus-shaped field of charged particles which are held in place by the magnetic field of Earth. Earth’s magnetosphere is important. Billions of years ago, Mars and Venus seem to have been exceedingly Earthlike, with water oceans and convivial atmospheres. But neither Mars nor Venus has a magnetosphere and their oceans have perished and their atmospheres have changed into monstrous things….although we don’t know exactly what happened on either of our neighboring planets (and the present priorities here on Earth are to make Michel Dell and Howard Schultz as rich as possible at everyone else’s expense, not, you know, to understand what planetary scale forces could make worlds uninhabitable).
Um, at any rate, the magnetic field of Earth is created by the mysterious processes beneath our feet at the center of the planet. The Earth’s inner core is believed to have two layers: an outer core of molten iron and heavy metals and an inner core of solid iron nickel alloy. The inner core is about 70% of the volume of the moon and it is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun with an estimated temperature of (5,430 °C) or 9806 °F, but the molten outer core is only as hot as the surface of an orange star (2,730–4,230 °C; 4,940–7,640 °F). Within the outer core, eddy currents form in the superheated metal. The complex relationship between these currents, the spinning planet, and the two core layers creates a geodynamo which produces the planet’s magnetosphere which in turn captures the particles which make up the Van Allen Belts. However, the eddy currents cause the magnetic poles to invert every few hundred thousand years (we are currently overdue for such a flip). The South Atlantic Anomaly is a manifestation of the “weather” in the molten outer core of Earth–a prelude to the magnetic polar flip. First generation spacecraft used solid state components and had big ungainly robust circuitry. Additionally they were hardened against radiation. Some of today’s craft make use of delicate & elaborate microcircuitry which is prone to failure when struck by esoteric radiation particles. This is how what happens far beneath our feet influences what happens to craft in outer space.
Shaanxi is one of the ancient cradles of Chinese civilization: indeed at various points of Chinese history it has been the center of China. The former Chinese capitals Fenghao and Chang’an were both in Shaanxi. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to be an archaeologist in a place with such a long rich cultural heritage? Well, in our era of instant news, you don’t have to imagine! Archaeologists of the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology just finished excavating a cluster of 12 ancient tombs discovered beneath a village in the province. The tombs date back to the Sixteen Kingdoms period of Chinese history (304-439 AD), a chaotic time of collapse when small kingdoms fought each other in endless internecine wars. Some of these kingdom were led by (gasp!) non-Han peoples of proto-Mongolian and Turkic ethnicity and cultural artifacts from the era often betray a curious mix of Chinese and steppe characteristics.
To quote archaeologynewsnetwork, “The tombs are laid out in two rows, and each tomb consists of a tomb passage, a door and a path leading to the coffin chamber, according to Liu Daiyun, a researcher with the academy.” The whole complex is thought to belong to a single family, but the exact relationships between the ancient bodies therein interred will not be known until DNA analysis is complete.
The photos in this blog show earthenware pieces which were found within the tombs. The little sculptures bring to life a world of farm and family from 1500 years ago (such sculptures were meant to bring the most important aspects of life to eternity with the departed…and in a way they have worked. Keep that little earthenware pig in your mind! He will be important the very near future.
A quarter of a billion years ago a shallow sea covered what is now Hubei, China (the parts of the world that are today Manchuria, South China, and Southeast Asia were large archipelagos in this shallow sea). The warm water was perhaps a meter or so deep–a child could stand in it, and it was filled with proliferating shrimp, worms, and mollusks. The early Triassic was a strange time for life on Earth: the world’s greatest mass-extinction (thus far) had just swept traditional Paleozoic players off the world stage, but the famous stars of the Mesozoic–the dinosaurs–had not yet taken over the land. Peculiar creatures were fast evolving to fill empty ecological niches once filled by now extinct animals.
You are probably wondering what sort of creatures lived in this vanished ocean–and you are in luck, because the answer is amazing! Paleontologists in China discovered the remains of…a marine reptile (?) with a cartilaginous beak. The creature had a rigid body and tail and 4 stubby little flippers for steering and swimming. It also had bony plates on its back like a stegosaurus and tiny little pinpick eyes. Scientists named the creature Eretmorhipis carrolldongi. The most analagous creature in today’s world is the platypus, and, indeed, Eretmorhipis looked like a crazy platypus (combined with a blind penguin and a stegosaurus). The analogy however is rather misleading since, 250 million years ago the first monotremes were probably evolving in the same addled post-apocalyptic world (monotremes are amazing and bizarre, but, sadly, we don’t have a complete fossil record of them, so we have to base some of what we think about them on genetic paleontology which provides a rough timeline).
Eretmorhipis carrolldongi was a hupehsuchian reptile. It was a relative (or maybe a precursor) to the ichthyosaurs which soon took over the world’s oceans and evolved unique graceful mastery of the planet’s oceans before something went terribly wrong. I want to write more about the icythyosaurs (their story illustrates something exceedingly important about life), but before I do that I wanted to share this stubby ridiculous platypus analog creature with you so you can think about the comic reptile rooting around its ancient ocean at night with its beak hunting shrimp and invertebrates with its sensitive beak in the turbid darkness. The world is a mad grab bag and you never know what is going to be successful. We probably out to talk about the end-Permian mass extinction too, but it is the stuff of ultimate nightmares, so I am going to slow walk that post for now… maybe when (if?) we are feeling stronger.
One of modern age’s great obsessions is the desire for simplicity. You see this concept everywhere—lifestyle gurus sell millions of books about simplifying your life. Hollywood blockbusters are about salt-of-the-earth country boys with a monosyllabic moral code who become action heroes and easily defeat the bad guys. TED talks distill data science into a short anecdote from primary school. The infatuation for simplicity is omnipresent—in fad diets, in investment strategies, in household management, above all else, in politics (boy howdy is the desire to make things simple running rampant in politics!).
This is a shame: for simplicity is a fallacy. Things are not simple at all. Generally, the more one studies a field, the more one realizes how complicated, nuanced, self-contradictory, and messy that field is. A lead ball and a feather fall at the same rate…except in the real world where they fall so differently that thermodynamics and gravity are hidden. History is not one all-important person [Napoleon or Alexander the Great, for example] saying “I will accomplish X”: it is countless millions upon millions of people trying to accomplish innumerable conflicting goals in opposition to each other (all while churches, nation states, guilds, secret societies, kingpriests, banks, and other strange cabals work on their own conflicting agendas). In college I was excited to take cell biology and learn about the simple building blocks that life is made of…until the professor came in and wrote the Krebs cycle on the board as the first thing. That was the first ten minutes! The rest of the class was learning how wrong the “simple” elegant metabolism cycle (below) can go when you start adding new chemicals.
Simplicity is not real except as a concept. And it is a dangerous concept! The purpose of today’s post is not to teach you the Krebs cycle (as if I could) or to encompass all of history. Instead we are pushing back at simplicity by striking at minimalism–the art form which espouses reductive simplicity.
Why am I attacking minimalism instead of other confidence tricks based around the illusion of simplicity? Art is the wellspring that ideas come from. Concepts that bubble up in a font on Mount Parnassus are sanctified by the muses (or I guess these days by Jerry Saltz) and then trickle into other fields. To start to make some headway in this worldwide morass we are in, we need to let go of some of these illusions about simple being better. To start with that we need to go back to minimalism’s aesthetic roots in modern art.
The reason art is so germinal is because it is a place of illusions and magic. The most fantastic imaginings can be real there. Do you not like to walk? You can paint everyone as flying! Are you sad that most of the creatures that ever existed have gone extinct? Just draw them as living together in Super Eden! Do you chafe at the Byzantine organic chemistry level complexity of, well, everything…just draw it as ridiculously simple! And artists have certainly simplified. There are many artists who became influential just painting white canvases: Malevich, Martin, Baer, Albers, Ryman…the list goes on and on.
Arguably some of these works were made to express the same concepts I am expressing here. Simplicity is not simple. That infamous white canvas “Bridge” by Robert Ryman (1982, pictured below) has probably engendered more complex philosophical art essays than just about any artwork from the seventies/eighties. Looking at a pure white canvas makes you realize that white can be warm or it can be cold. White can have a variety of textures and microdetails…to say nothing of the dense world of allusions it opens up. Thinking about the nature of white begins to raise troubling questions about cognition, physics, and the psychology behind how we see things.
But sadly these meanings have not translated well as Minimalism the art movement has flowed into minimalism the cultural phenomena (frankly I think the minimalism wing in the art museums might be a bit of a carnival trick too, to get people laughing and talking not to impress them with the sublime).
The minimalist aesthetic has been a growing problem in America for decades. Any New Yorker will instantly recognize the prestige look of the present moment—off-white walls, ugly blocky furniture made of blonde wood and neutral fabric, recess lighting, lots of glass & steel, monochromatic accents, and minimalist artwork. To obtain the image at the top of this paragraph, I went to Google and image searched “beautiful apartment” and the results were hundreds of images of identical white rooms with what seems like the same furniture set. It is like being trapped inside a display refrigerator at Sears (does that place still exist?). Is this beautiful? Obviously not, but it is cheap and simple for developers to craft.
I feel like these rooms are like the GUI of a computer—they are seemingly simple, but they are really designed by vast corporate interests to sell things (and also there are vast worlds of complexity, disorder, and mess crammed into storage, just out of sight). Minimalism look good on screens—it is simple enough to be comprehensible even in a thumbnail so you can sell it online (no need for photoshopping). Also minimalism is like a carnival barker’s trick or an infomercial pitch in another way too. Its simplicity makes it easy to sell.
And here is where we get to the real heart of minimalism. It is commercially successful. That Ryman painting a few paragraphs back sold in 2015 for $20.6 million! We already know how well Kondo’s works about decluttering your life sell. The “clean” diet kills people because it lacks sufficient nutrients for human beings, but people adhere to it with religious fervor even when MDs beg them not to.
Our world is so complicated and baffling that the allure of simplicity is an enticement beyond any other. Yet it is salesman’s con job. Don’t let people convince you that white paintings have a meaning that supersedes all other art or that empty rooms are best. Simple solutions in politics tend to be impossible and dangerous. Simple diets will kill you. I wish I had said my thesis more simply, rather than writing such a winding narrative to say such a straightforward thing. Anything of beguiling simplicity is almost certainly a lie.
I am looking forward to writing the second half of my post about minimalism (which I promised in my angry Marie Kondo post), but first, let’s take some time out to celebrate National Polka Dot Day–which is (evidently) observed on January 22nd. I love polka dots for footwear and neckwear (and I seem to recall a special childhood blanket with beautiful kelly green polka dots on it), but, as we already know, polka dots are not merely for decorative use. Dots occur again and again in nature, where they are critical for mimicry, display, and camouflage. Likewise, art returns again and again to the dot, not merely as a design motif, but as a formative abstract building block. Certain artists did not merely utilize polka dots in their works–they utilized nothing but polka dots, which became the entire focus of illustrious art careers. Here are three polka dot theme paintings to mark the holiday. Let me know if you have other favorite works.
First, at the top of the post is one of Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkin works (Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin (2000), Acrylic on canvas, 53.3 x 65.4 cm). Kusama is the undisputed doyenne of polka dots in this age…and perhaps in all other eras as well. Focusing on the dots has kept her sane and brought her unprecedented international fame. Yet beyond the hype and the relentless obsession, there is a relentless exploration of visual phenomena and ultimately of ontology within Kusama’s artworks. All things can be reduced to dots…or perhaps to atoms (which are after all another even more abstruse sort of dot). Yet, even if it Is made of circles, still the pumpkin exists. And there is an enormous formal beauty in its mysterious gestalt.
Roy Lichtenstein is also famous for making works out of polka dots. His work is less metaphysical in its subject than Kusama’s, but instead addresses the extent to which humans recognize and respond to iconography. The above painting, (detail below), takes a panel from a serial-style cartoon strip and blows it to enormous size. Although the work is instantly familiar from countless anonymous Sunday newspaper strips, it is alien too. The anxious woman is as strange and inhuman as a Byzantine mosaic (and she is likewise made of innumerable tiny unrecognizable pieces). Yet because of a lifetime of habituation she is instantly familiar, as is her melodramatic situation (even if we lack the particulars).
Finally, we close out the post with the oldest painting of the three (below). This is Georges Seurat’s masterful “Parade de Cirque” completed in 1887-1888. Like Kusama, Seurat composed his entire world of dots, but he seeks a realistic figurative impression in a way which she does not. The figures of the circus midway indeed seem real: they wriggle and shimmer like people seen in the footlights during a misty evening. The subject—a carnival sideshow—has ancient roots which snake back into medieval history. Yet, like Lichtenstein’s woman they are instantly familiar to everyone. The cultural touchstone asks pointed questions about reality and our enjoyment of it. The carnival folk and musicians are not wizards or celebrities, they are humble performers. Yet through the magic of art they have an otherworldly mystery and presence which captivate the bourgeoisie crowd ). This illusion exists on other levels as well: after all the artist is a member of the troupe– another illusionist who has made entertainment and mystery out of dabs of paint and showmanship. These long-vanished Parisian performers are made of thousands of individual spots of paint, agonizingly applied. Indeed this whole post is just dots on your computer screen and we are just little dots too. Maybe EVERY day is National Polka Dot Day…
America loves Marie Kondo, a self-help author and lifestyle guru who has exploited people’s insecurities (and our culture’s dark codependent relationship with disposable consumer goods) in order to become enormously rich. If you have somehow missed the fuss about Kondo, she wrote a book called “The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing”, which is typical cultish self-help waffle about how you should throw all of your things away, paint your walls white, and fold your few remaining textiles with chilling robotic precision. Kondo has leveraged her success into a “brand” and now appears on Netflix, going through people’s lives and discarding everything that does not “spark joy.” In one recent episode, she caused great anxiety to intellectuals and bibliophiles when she applied her methodology to book collections. In her worldview, unread books should be discarded, as should books which you wish to read again, but are not presently reading. Kondo said that her ideal library was, at most, thirty books. If there are parts of a book you love, you should cut out the relevant pages and throw away the rest (although it seems this may have been an experimental Kondo methodology which didn’t work out even for her).
As you can imagine, these ridiculous & harmful ideas have caused book-lovers (and idea-lovers) to become apoplectic. The history of people who destroy books or encourage their elimination is not very splendid or happy. It is hard not to elide Kondo’s claptrap with some of these sad episodes. Fortunately for Kondo, there are few intellectuals and booklovers in contemporary society, but there are legions of people who are angry in one way or another about identity politics. To the eyes of these Kondo apologists, the scholars and bibliophiles spluttering indignantly about the importance of books or whatever are racists who are lashing out at a successful Asian-American woman because of her wealth and influence. As with everything in America in 2019, the entire episode has made everyone furious and left all parties looking bad.
In Kondo’s defense, I can sympathize with how difficult it is to create new material every day. If you are forced to continuously churn stuff out, sometimes your material is not always terribly good. It is all too easy to say or do stupid things. That is one of the reasons we throw things away. Indeed, I haven’t watched the offending episode, but have only read about it. Maybe she was tossing out shelves of Dilbert cartoon books, Ayn Rand novels, or 1850s books about the glories of colonialism and slavery. Since the show is about people appealing to her for help, she might have been throwing away hundreds of tendentious self-help books!
Also to her credit, Kondo identifies the information inside the book as the important part, and admonishes us not to idolatrously love unread books for their own sake or use them as props.
But, and this is the critical part: it is unclear how one would ever extract this knowledge if they discarded the book before reading it. The things that “spark joy” in my life right now are different from the ones that will spark joy in my life a year from now. When I was growing up, my parents had mysterious and compelling shelves of books from their college days. Every day I walked past the diseased eye on the cover of Camus’ “The Plague” and wondered what was going on in that book. Looking at the troubling dissection on “Gray’s Anatomy”, the dandy on “Vanity Fair”, the strange Van der Weyden portrait on “Masterpieces of the National Gallery” and the magnificent sperm whale on “Moby Dick” made me curious about the contents of those books too. Sometimes I would pick them up and try to understand them. Eventually I picked them up and read them. If my parents had thrown those books away, maybe I would have found them later and read them on my own, or maybe not. Maybe I never would have become as interested in reading to begin with.
Also, books are our cultural heritage. “Moby Dick” was universally unloved when it first came out in 1851. It took 70 years before it found success. What if 1890s Marie Kondo (I am sure there was an analogous busybody) had come along and thrown away the copy that caused a critic to love it and rescue it from obscurity. Books are not knick-knacks or ill-used toiletries, they are bigger and have bigger meanings which are not immediately evident. Kondo seemingly fails to understand or acknowledge this. Also I love books! Imagine if some third party went into Marie Kondo’s life and started throwing away the things she cares about most (dollars & followers) until she only had thirty of each left: I bet she would be pretty dissatisfied.
Beyond these obvious and cursory points about the nature of writing and thinking, Kondo’s insistence on shoveling this tripe into our face right now so she can become richer and more important speaks to the nature of now (when every business is busy making shortsighted decisions in order to maximize profits and our leaders are clinging to power even if it causes the republic to founder.). Her unwise advice also increases our country’s dangerous love affair with anti-intellectualism, a perennial scourge, which, in the Trump era, is becoming a threat to the continued existence of the nation.
I have been meaning to write about Kondo as part of a larger polemic against minimalism (an undying aesthetic movement from the 21st century which is not just ugly, but which is morally injuring us). However, the fact that Marie Kondo is apparently openly attacking knowledge itself, temporarily derailed my anti-minimalist essay. We need to defend literature and the accumulated knowledge of humankind against the ridiculous menace of the gentle Japanese art of throwing everything away (or whatever this crap is called). Don’t worry though, I haven’t forgotten my original point and we will get to minimalism and oversimplification tomorrow some time next week. Events on the ground complicated my plans (because the world is complicated and not simple).
I completely ran out of time today, so here is a picture of a sculpture which I made at the end of last year. It is a Romanesque Flounder with strange Babylonian parasites embedded in the various arched niches. The fish is made of wood and the smaller sculptures within are sculpted of sculpey polymer. As you can see, my “studio assistant” Sumi Cat is reviewing it carefully to see if there is anything which needs to be altered by being clawed off and knocked into a forgotten corner.
It is a bit harder to say what this sculpture represents, but the flatfish is my avatar of Earth life (and a sometimes a sort of psychopomp/spirit guide sent by the dark gods below). The dark tree is a cruel parody of the tree of life and the parasites are clearly beings of pure appetite (albeit with a certain ecclesiastic flair). This must be a sculpture about the appetites which religion is meant to satisfy…but what the nature of those appetites is and how we can avoid being controlled by them is a question which resists facile answers.
My roommate works at King’s Theater, a movie palace in Flatbush, Brooklyn which opened in 1929 and closed in 1977 (neither of those were very good years for New York City). The theater stood empty for decades as vandals and the weather destroyed the lavish faux-baroque opulence within, yet nobody had the heart to raze the grand edifice and the city wisely held onto the property waiting for the right moment…which finally arrived in the two-thousand-teens when a private organization spent a near 9 figure sum to renovate the palace to its glory (albeit as a real theater now, rather than a lavish movie house). All sorts of strange mid-tier international acts have poured through since and I always look forward to hearing from my roommate about David Blaine (who vomited live frogs all over the place), the Hip-Hop Nutcracker, the Snoop Dogg morality play “Redemption of a Dogg” etc. etc.
Anyway, last Monday was the office party, and he graciously invited me to look around inside the theater (I am familiar with the façade, pictured at the top of the post, but I never checked out live boxing or the Allman Brothers, and thus never passed the main door). The theater was even more grand inside than outside (as you can see by the house photos immediately above), and walking around on the stage and looking at the stage machinery behind the curtain was a huge thrill.
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One of the miniature sagas of the long decline and unexpected resurrection of the theater is the story of the house organ (although sadly, it does not have the same happy ending). The original organ was a Robert Morton company super organ known as “the Wonder Morton” which was played to the delight of the house between shows and during silent films. The organ was taken down in 1974–with good intentions for later installation at a working theater—but alas, the pieces were lost, except for the console which went to a private home. When the theater was restored, the console returned from exile (although sadly with electronic guts). I took pictures of the Wonder Morton console because it fits one of my artistic/musical obsessions: vanished music that plays only in the imagination.
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I love the lyres of classical Greek art, and the pigs playing bagpipes in ruined medieval abbeys and the vanished symphonic orchestras of ancient Rome, not just because of their visual dynamism, but because looking at them evokes a whole lost world. The sad disengaged cockpit/console of the Wonder Morton touched these same levers in my heart. Staring at it, I could almost hear the bygone music. Plus, just look at the names of the settings! I can almost hear the golden beauty of the chrysoglott, the pastoral serenity of the subharp, or the awesome majesty of tuba mirabilis.
Ah…the days that are no more. I will be sure to include some more silent symphony posts about musical instruments which we can never hear–although, come to think of it–I hear there is a theater in Jersey that has one of these organs in working condition….
ferrebeekeeper 