Fetuses yawn repeatedly in the womb, a new study finds. The reasons are as yet unknown. Are they losing sleep? Are they stressed or overworked? Do they find their limited entertainment options insufficiently stimulating? The researchers suggest that the yawning is linked to brain development, but also admit it’s still a mystery why anyone yawns, before or after birth. It’s safe to say, however, that contagious yawning — something humans share with dogs and chimpanzees — is not a factor in the womb.
Almost all vertebrates yawn, including fish. If the James–Lange theory of emotion is to be credited, yawning reinforces bodily consciousness. Or so suggests the author of a 2006 article in the journal Medical Hypotheses.
Yawning can be seen as a proprioceptive performance awareness which inwardly provides a pre-reflective sense of one’s body and a reappraisal of the body schema. The behavioral consequences of adopting specific regulatory strategies and the neural systems involved act upon attention and cognitive changes. Thus, it is proposed that yawning is a part of interoceptiveness by its capacity to increase arousal and self-awareness.
I’ve been kind of shy about posting any home-made music to the blog lately, but Rachel forced my hand. The bamboo jaw harp known as the kubing may be from the Philippines, but it goes great with Appalachian music. Here are a couple of examples, inexpertly rendered under the influence of a couple bottles of homebrew. These were recorded live over the internet, so the video doesn’t quite keep up with the audio due to my slow connection.
Belgian filmmaker and composer Swoon (a.k.a. Marc Neys) has made another film in response to one of the pieces in my Manual series, using the audio I included with the original post. This one recycles footage (with permission) from a YouTube user, “Ephemeral Rift.” As Marc explains in a blog post,
He’s a very inspirational guy who makes videos to induce ASMR.
Check him out if you are into that or would like to learn about ‘the tinglesmiths.’
I like his videos ’cause he’s not only paying attention to the ASMR-sounds but has a great visual touch. I wondered if his images would stand out without the sounds they’re made for, and they do.
This is the fifth film in Swoon’s “Manual” collection, following an eight-month hiatus in production. There’s some continuity with the others, but also a new element of the grotesque that I particularly appreciated. Needless to say, I am pleased and deeply honored to have an artist of Swoon’s calibre building upon my texts in this manner.
Late last night I finished compiling this second (and probably last) series of videos. If you haven’t watched the first one yet, I’d recommend doing that first, since it includes a higher proportion of big-name acts — though I have plenty of those in this one, too. Gems like the opening and closing videos are kind of hidden in plain sight on YouTube, since it’s often impossible to tell what’s a real film and what isn’t until you play it. (I think music fans tend to assume the music can speak for itself. At least I imagine that’s why they’re not too good about annotating their uploads.)
This one’s longer. The first playlist was a mere 3 1/2 hours long; this one clocks in at 4:17:47. That’s because I’ve included more multi-song videos, such as the first part of a concert by Mance Lipscomb, as well as a wonderful short documentary by blues scholar David Evans on the fife-and-drum tradition of Gravel Springs, Mississippi, complete with footage of Otha Turner cutting cane and making a cane flute. There are also more long guitar jams — though not nearly as many as I could’ve included if I were a more typical blues fan. (More about that below.)
I’ve included more younger performers, more Texas blues and more jazz-blues than in the first playlist. I’m obviously far from a blues purist, but remain conservative about including performers from outside the African-American community, favoring those who, like Doc Watson, made the music their own, rather than slavish imitators like Eric Clapton… but see Buddy Guy’s passionate speech about the importance of the “British invasion” (and the band Cream specifically) in #21. As collectors, promoters, appreciators, and (since the 1970s) audiences, white people on both sides of the Atlantic have been essential to the survival of the blues. It’s great to see a younger coterie of players, black and white, taking the blues in new directions. The next to last video, for example, is from a young Serbian guitarist, Ana Popovic, who clearly isn’t afraid to use the blues to address the intense ethnic tensions in her own country.
I discovered a couple of new-to-me artists in the process of putting this playlist together, for which I’m mainly indebted to John Hayes’ Any Woman’s Blues series of portraits of female blues guitarists at the excellent, multi-author music and poetry blog Robert Frost’s Banjo. I remain personally more interested in blues as a vocal art-form, but as I said on Facebook last night, there’s always something powerful about a woman with a guitar. I think my favorite discovery was Barbara Lynn, whose career exemplifies the familiar woman’s trajectory of taking a couple decades off to raise a family. But it also exemplifies something that I love about the blues: there’s always been a strong place for older performers. Like jazz, and unlike rock, blues is music for grownups.
And that leads to the last point I want to make today. Unlike most white guys in my generation, I didn’t come to blues from a classic rock background. I listened to a lot of folk music growing up, including my brother Steve’s clawhammer banjo, and more than anything I think it was that latter sound that prepared me to love the haunting, droning style of traditional Mississippi blues when a college roommate with a great record collection first exposed me to guys like Robert Johnson, Elmore James and Muddy Waters. I remain fondest of the country blues in general, because I think it’s more musically diverse and much more interesting lyrically than the more commercial stuff.
When I did get into rock music in my early 20s, I found myself gravitating toward genres where the role of the lead guitar solo was minimalized, and the emphasis was on killer riffs — mainly thrash metal and punk. So to balance what I said above about the importance of white fans in keeping blues alive, I think this may have also retarded its development quite a bit, because so many fans are in it for the electric guitar leads, and prefer blues that sounds like classic rock. Where are the great blues pianists and saxophonists these days? Playing jazz for Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater, apparently.
I will say, however, that much as I share Buddy Guy’s oft-expressed impatience for contemporary blues fans’ adulation of Stevie Ray Vaughan, specifically, making this playlist reminded me that he did have a unique and soulful sound — especially compared to some of his contemporaries. I couldn’t leave him out. Ditto with Albert Collins and some of the other axemen and -women in the playlist. Perhaps it’s time to revisit my indifference to screaming guitar solos. But mostly, I’ve found that compiling these playlists has reminded me why I love the blues so much in the first place: its bittersweetness speaks to me. It makes we want to get up and get down, and the years drop away. Also, I still think I might be able to dance like Cab Calloway if I just concentrate a little harder…
I’ve been working on this off and on since last Friday: a YouTube playlist designed as a comprehensive introduction to the blues, restricted solely to live footage. Music on YouTube is of course dominated by uploads of songs accompanied by still images, so simply sorting through and identifying live videos was time-consuming in itself. Musically speaking, I’ve cast my net widely, including some songs by performers usually associated with other genres (old-time Appalachian music, gospel, R&B, Sahelian guitar, Mississippi fife-and-drum, etc.) and some pieces by performers usually classed as bluesmen which are not, strictly speaking, blues songs. I wanted to suggest something of the broader context from which the music emerged; I even included a snippet of a lecture (illustrated with music) by multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons from the African-American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops.
My focus has been on the “greats,” but I’ve also included some fairly obscure artists and a few younger folks as well. I tried to balance the playlist geographically and by gender, style, featured instrument, etc., but unavoidably there are still more guys with guitars playing in the Clarksdale/Chicago style than anything else. I’ve tried to squeeze in as many performers as possible, so very few singers appear more than once, and I didn’t stop till I got to 50 videos. Rather than trying to watch the above embed in one sitting, it might be a better idea to bookmark the page on YouTube and browse at your leisure.
Don’t wait too long, though, because videos are always being removed from YouTube for one reason or another. Just in the past week that I’ve been working on this, one of the videos I’d originally selected has already gone missing. It was a good one, too! It’s almost enough to give a guy the blues…
I had fun watching and filming a woolly bear caterpillar this morning. The text of the haiku occurred to me as I was filming. The word “frass” may be slighty obscure, but I hope it’s obvious from the context what it means. Caterpillar droppings are hard and dry — not at all the image that “shit” or “excrement” conjure up (though my mother does have a t-shirt with a drawing of a caterpillar and the message “frass happens”).
As with other videohaiku I’ve done, I find that, in contrast to regular videopoetry, a straightforward, “naive” relationship between footage and text can succeed as long as the text is saved for afterwards. The effect, I hope, is to reproduce something of the process by which a haiku is born: close observation yielding a sudden insight (though in this case, arguably, my insight was not especially profound). This is the first time I’ve added music to the soundtrack of a videohaiku; usually I just use the ambient sound, but that was marred this time by the camera scraping against the concrete.
The time equation might be of interest. In all, it took me three hours to make the video and an hour and fifteen minutes to upload it. Of that time, only about three minutes were spent polishing the text of the poem. So the filmmaking took about 60 times longer than the writing. (And then I spent some 25 minutes adjusting the settings on Vimeo and composing this post. Sure would’ve been easier just to post the damn haiku!)
This entry is part 24 of 34 in the series Small World
This may be too literal and/or droll a video for the poem, but I couldn’t resist. Rachel encouraged me to make a shot list this time, so I did. It looked like this:
Location: yard / Shot description: asters / Framing: whatever looks good / Action: whatever happens / Actors: whatever flies past
I used the Extract effect in Adobe Premiere to make it look vaguely like an animation.
Yeah, so “Love after 40” got upgraded by a decade and envideoed. The 1912 vaudeville clip is in the public domain, and comes courtesy of the Prelinger Archive of ephemeral film. The music by Mick Kelley (A.K.A. Ecklecticmick) is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence. It’s a revamped “electroswing” version of an Ella Fitzgerald tune, “When I Get Low I Get High.” Rachel Rawlins kindly agreed to do the reading. It must be said that neither she nor I have yet to dress and act quite like the characters in the film, though I suspect that that’s kind of what some young people see when they catch sight of our graying hair and deeply uncool mannerisms.
There’s now a larger, HD version of the video I made for Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers…” last year — the one using a Nic S. reading and clips from an old Encyclopedia Brittanica educational film about the American Civil War, which was going on when Dickinson wrote her poem 150 years ago. (Vimeo permits users to swap one file for another, so this will replace the earlier version in all embeds that may be out there. Neat, eh?) The difference in quality may not be all that large, however, due to the limitations of the source file at archive.org. An artists’ collective in Athens requested a projection-quality version for an upcoming festival/exhibition of poetry videos, which intrigues me because of their approach: a number of screens playing videos in different rooms, museum-style, rather than scheduled screenings as in a typical film festival. I find longer videos rather tiresome to watch in a museum gallery, but since most videopoems are quite brief, this approach should work well, I think, and expose any given video to many more viewers. One of the four rooms in this two-day poetry event will be devoted to the work of four master poets: Dickinson, Blake, Plath and Bukowski — some interesting company for the Belle of Amherst! “Void Network thinks that Poetry Nights are a chance to create a vibrant place in the hurt of the Metropolis,” they told me. Well, one can always hope.
Just as the lightness of sleep overtakes me, I hear the phrase, “Death has its own constituency.” I wake to read of the tar sands pipeline potentially delayed by a critically endangered species of carrion beetle, the American burying beetle(Nicrophorus americanus).
With its shiny, black and fiery body and orange-tipped antennae, the American burying beetle is a vibrant beauty of the bug world. The insect’s occupation, though, is a little less glamorous. After sniffing out a freshly dead animal from up to two miles away, the beetle joins a mate in burying the carcass, stripping it of fur or feathers, rolling it into a ball, and covering it in oral and anal fluids to preserve it as a shelter and food source for the pair’s litter of lucky larvae.
A newspaper article reporting on the possible delay prompts the predictable reactions from readers: “Step on them.” “A couple of cans of RAID and the problem is OVER.” “Drill baby drill!” One ignoramus even goes on a rant:
who cares about a beetle really, this is as bad as not growing produce in Calif. because of a little 2 inch fish that died in the aqua duck system..do you think either one is more important then people lives and feeding their young children..NO NO NO the answer will always be NO, even God made insects and animals to eventually die out for what ever reason, so get a grip on it folks this is trash talk to step on you as a person and your rights….
No matter many times I hear this kind of ignorant callousness disguised as piety and concern for human beings, I still turn cold with rage, and before I know it I, too, am harboring violent fantasies…
How ironic that our penchant for unearthing the byproducts of ancient deaths, to the detriment of the planet, endangers a beetle whose role in the ecosystem is to help recycle the dead to the benefit of us all. As the CBD puts it:
The American burying beetle is one of nature’s most efficient recyclers, feeding and sheltering its own brood while simultaneously returning nutrients to the earth to nourish vegetation and keeping ant and fly populations in check.
It seems unusual for a habitat generalist to suffer such precipitous declines in population across its range, but, says the Encylclopedia of Life entry:
[E]vidence points increasingly to a cascade of changes in vertebrate communities resulting from habitat fragmentation and other human-caused disturbances. Loss of the largest mammal predators has resulted in increases of smaller mammal predator-scavengers that are more likely to compete with [the American burying beetle] for carcasses of still smaller mammals or birds.
In other words, our extirpation of top predators across North America, including wolves and cougars, may ultimately be to blame. The beetles themselves have no known predators, and appear to have a symbiotic relationship with a species of mite that helps keep them clean of microbes and fly eggs in return for access to carcasses. Even more remarkable is their habit of caring for their young:
American burying beetles provide care for their young from the time of birth until adolescence. This type of behavior is typically not observed among invertebrates outside of social bees, wasps, and termites.
Prior to birth, both parents regurgitate partially digested food in the nesting chamber, which accumulates as food for the larvae. They continue to do so until larvae are able to feed directly from the carcass. Parents also regularly maintain the carcass by removing fungi and covering the carrion ball with antibacterial secretions.
Let’s see—there’s a phrase for that sort of thing in American political discourse, isn’t there? Oh, yes: family values.
It’s sad how many people who describe themselves as conservative have, in service to corporate agendas, forsaken the most conservative principle of all: First, do no harm. “Because the American burying beetle has a highly vulnerable status in the wild, the two known natural populations (Block Island, Rhode Island and eastern Oklahoma) should be protected and maintained,” says the Encylopedia of Life. In recycling the dead, the American burying beetle helps preserve and extend the cycle of life. In advocating for its elimination, conservatives show themselves to be staunch supporters of what Pope John Paul II labeled the culture of death.
