Your Brain on Art, Teenage Dave Grohl, Tetris, etc.
In which I ponder where the music comes from in musicals, some less trivial things, but also some more trivial things.
🍻 Just a reminder, the Chunky’s apparel sale ends tomorrow at 2pm, EST.
Our friend and local publican Mike Kruger was recently interviewed (as he tends to be quite often), but misidentified as the owner of “Chunky’s Pub.” In the spirit of April Fools’, we are printing Chunky’s apparel, designed by Media Advantage. Crunchy’s, I mean Chunky’s, will be donating proceeds to Haven House of East Lansing, as well as the Spartan Strong Fund.
🦆 I believe RetroDuck truly made it once we could be found in an annotation on Genius.
👕 This is either a reminder to not buy random bootleg shirts from shady websites, or to absolutely role the dice and see what ya get.
🌞 Live from Central Park, it’s the First Warm Day of the Year Arrivals Show, featuring an older man doing an aggressive power walk, a grown man with a drone who’s alone, and a guy with a clipboard who wants to know if you have a second for a good cause.
🎶 Where does the music come from in musicals? Maybe only the audience hears it? Everything about this made me laugh. Somewhat related: this classic SNL sketch starring Norm McDonald.
🥁 Sixteen-year-old Dave Grohl. Camera focuses on him about a minute and a half in. From Sohrab Habibion, whose recordings can be found in the Punk Archive at the DC Public Library.
🧠 New book alert: Your Brain On Art: “Throughout the book’s pages, Magsamen and Ross direct their attention toward the neuroaesthetics of various art forms while also casting unexpected attributes—like awe and humor—through the lens of art. They address our innate hunger for the arts in contrast to the fact that we often need societal permission. They broach the immediacy and affordability of artistic expression while explaining the surprising nuance of it all (for instance, poetry is processed in the same part of our brain as music). Altogether, they affix practical, scientific research to the sensations we feel when we embrace art and what’s happening to our processing structures.”
▂ New York Times “piece” (sorry, not sorry) on Tetris and how it effects the brain, “potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.”
🁢 I’m currently enthralled with these domino effects.
📈 Lego was not the first interlocking, stackable block, but strong innovation and marketing won out.
🐝 I may or may not live in fear of bees, but they are fascinating. “‘Fringe’ research suggests the insects that are essential to agriculture have emotions, dreams and even PTSD.”
😷 What happens when we are sick. “Your brain activates sickness behavior and reorganizes your body’s priorities to defense. The first thing you notice is that your energy level drops and you get sleepy. You feel apathetic, often anxious or down and you lose your appetite. Your sensitivity to pain is heightened and you seek out rest. All of this serves to save your energy and reroute it into your immune response.”
♟The Queen’s Gambit turned the world into chess players. While e-sports continues to struggle, chess.com thrives. “By January 2023, Chess.com reported hitting over 10 million active players in a single day—more than the daily average of World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, and Among Us combined—leading the site’s servers to crash. Its online schedule now features a who’s who of chess grand masters who provide content for users almost 24 hours a day. A new class of chess celebrities, like sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez, who recently surpassed 1 million Twitch subscribers on their joint account, and international master Levy Rozman, who has over 3 million YouTube subscribers, regularly appear on Chess.com.” See also: why teens are suddenly obsessed with chess.
🎬 Michael J. Fox is a remarkable human being. Looking forward to this upcoming documentary.
🐾 I’m legally obligated to share this dog that looks like a real-life Snoopy.
🐘 And also this elephant peeling bananas.
📍Behold, the world’s oldest map. “Using geolocation technology, the researchers established that the territory represented on the slab bears an 80 percent accurate resemblance to an area around a 29-km (18-mi) stretch of the Odet river” which was likely a “small kingdom or principality back in the early Bronze Age, between 2150 BC and 1600 BC.”
🎼 Loved reading about the handwritten manuscript to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, a seminal record and admittedly the only Coltrane I have on vinyl. “And if you actually follow it through, he ends up playing this little “Love Supreme” theme in all 12 possible keys. To me, he’s giving you a message here.”
✍️ The writer is a composer, the reader is the musician. “When you write pretty much anything, you’re essentially asking someone to read a musical score—to hear it in their head. So an attentiveness to sound and rhythm and meter is really useful to your aesthetic as somebody who’s putting words on a page. It’s pretty similar to putting notes on a staff, in its way.”
❤️ That’s all from me this week. Enjoy the weather. Be constructive. Be creative. Stay positive. And always remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
