Category: Uncategorized

If, in a twist on the Snow White fairytale, Snow were to carry a gun, I imagine it would be something like one of these singing bird pistols made by Frères (French for brothers) Rochat in the early 1800s – beautiful, harmless, and adorned by a singing bird.

Despite appearances, these two pistols are actually music boxes that move and play music thanks to an extremely intricate mechanism. When the pistols are “fired,” rather than a deadly bullet, a small bird, adorned with real feathers, “shoots” out and rests on top of the pistol’s barrel.  Click here to watch a video of the pistols in action.

The singing bird pistols, though heavily decorated, are made to look and function very similarly to real pistols. Like regular pistols, to “fire,” each singing bird pistol must be”cocked” and the trigger pulled. Unlike regular pistols, however, they must be wound up first, much like an old fashioned clock. The music box mechanism is based on old watch-making techniques, and contains several hundred small parts.

The brothers Rochat were famous for their intricate singing bird music boxes, particularly their snuff boxes. Each creation had a small realistic mechanical bird that could sing on command hidden out of sight. For more information on Frères Rochat, click here.

High-end collectors treasure the surviving Rochat music boxes. These singing bird pistols, which are the only known set in existence, sold for around $5.8 million at auction. Very few other singing bird pistols have survived, and the four other known pistols are currently housed in museum collections.

As far back as art historians seem to be able to go, art has always existed as a means of resistance, a catalyst to revolution, and a construct for exposing societal and political flaws.  With the continual privatization of the art market all over the world, guiding it out of the hands of restricting state and religious direction and patronage, artists are freer than ever to combine their own dissatisfactions with the existing power structure, stereotypes, preconceptions, etc. with forms of art that are more experimental and avant-garde.   Increasingly, the once European and U.S. dominated art market has shifted considerably.  Though cities like London and New York are still the major sellers of art, and Paris may always be the prime location for exhibition, some of the highest selling and most talked about art is coming out of places like Beijing and Dubai.   Themes that are common are usually similar to the same values coming out of Western contemporary art like feminism, war, and consumerism.  Aesthetically, the two hemispheres have been producing vey similar looking art as well.  Some point to this as an achievement in the universality and pervasiveness of art, though the point has also been made by some scholars that European art has had its own form of ‘colonialism,’ and Middle Eastern art (and for that matter, African and Asian) has been overly influenced by Eurocentrism, to the point where the unique Middle Eastern artistic tradition has been overshadowed and replaced with art that is a product of European art history.  If this is the case, the Middle East seems to be beating the West at their own game.  In 2008, Farhad Moshiri became the first Middle Eastern artist to sell an artwork at auction for over $1 million (specifically $1.05 million), and the numbers have only been growing since, with the Dubai Art Faire attracting some of the most elite in the art world, to the point where they have been the ones donating to the Louvre.

In a post-9/11 world, it seems as though anything related to the Middle East is translated through the lens of terrorism, whether it is pro or anti war.  It is not uncommon for news stories or interviews with Middle Easterners to solely focus on how the war has affected them, their opinions on it, the racism that has been engendered by the event, etc.   Though these things can’t be undermined, it is important to realize that there are other issues at stake in the Middle East, and there is a lot of art that reflects this.  They also have their genres of landscape painting, illustration, political cartoons, splatter painting, and so forth.

Though European and American connoisseurs of art seem to be receptive to contemporary art coming out of the Middle East, for many this is still fairly new territory.  U.S. museums usually have much less Middle Eastern art in comparison to their European collections, and after the controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad there was a considerable backlash in some prominent museums (most notably the Met), where many ancient works of Middle Eastern art were put into storage out of fear of reprisal.  Even U of M, as progressive as it may be, added for this Fall its first course on Middle Eastern art in years.  However, it does seem as though there has been a significant integration in the recent past of the Middle East into the global art market, and it only shows signs of increasing popularity.

“Blue and Yellow, Blue and Yellow, Blue and Yellow…” As I walked into Hill Auditorium last night to see Pusha T and Chiddy Bang perform, I was bombarded with the Ann Arbor native rapper P.L.’s mix of Wiz Khalifa’s classic single. The chant ushered me into a unique atmosphere I had no anticipation of seeing. Having been in Hill Auditorium for the Lupe Fiasco concert last year, I expected a rambunctious and excited mob of students. Instead, I casually walked in between small groups of friends, mostly sitting patiently and waiting for the actual show to begin. Both the mezzanine and balcony sections were closed off, and still hordes of seats remained empty throughout the show. This reduced audience effected the show in both positive and negative ways: it created an intimate section that thrived during Chiddy’s performance, allowing the duo to interact easily with the crowd, but it significantly hurt Pusha T’s portion.

To my extreme chagrin the crowd did not appreciate Pusha T’s opening act. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, Pusha T is a rapper who once belonged to the rap duo Clipse. Formed by Pusha T and his brother Malice, Clipse played an enormous role in the rap industry during the ‘90s and early 2000’s. Pusha T is by far a more accomplished and celebrated rapper than Chiddy bang, yet the crowd last night did little to recognize this. Unfortunately, it was clear after a few songs that Pusha T realized this, and it was downright painful to have to watch him attempt to feed off an energy that was completely absent. Truthfully, it was the wrong audience for a Pusha T show. Predominantly white and all young enough that they may have missed Clipse’s prime, the students in the audience were much more interested in Chiddy Bang. I was sad to see this, as Pusha killed the few songs he performed and deserves much more respect than he was given.

Chiddy Bang, conversely, began their show to an energetic audience. To my satisfaction, after two songs Xaphoon Jones (the brains behind Chiddy’s beats) paid tribute to Pusha T, referencing him as the first rap album he ever purchased and essentially condemning the audience for not supporting him more. Aside from this correction, Chiddy and Xaphoon put on a great show. As Chiddy’s intended audience is the high school through college age, this crowd was appropriate and contributed to the duo’s energy and performance. The highlight of the evening, by far, was Chiddy’s freestyle. Asking the audience for five completely random, non-related topics, Xaphoon presented Chiddy with a paper plate and a microphone, and asked for a rap. Indulging him, Chiddy proceeded to create a two and-a-half minute, spontaneous and brand new freestyle, mentioning each of the subjects. These included the words, “voltron, platypus, and Michigan,” no easy terms with which to rhyme. Yet he succeeded, and secured the audience’s outrageous praise. Overall, the concert was tremendously enjoyable, and even though Pusha T’s contribution went unappreciated, the combination of him and Chiddy Bang allowed for a great concert.

Disregard the quality, just to get a taste of the show:

Planes are monstrous and magnificent things. When you’re buckled in one, idly glancing towards the stewards making the rounds with their carts teeming of individually wrapped pretzels – the stewards whose carefully pressed linen look is asserted with a fresh knotted kerchief, undulating to its owners’ deceptively therapeutic voice — habituation from the utter mundaneness of their motions, their comportment, is but trickery to the mind. The sheer ordinariness instilled by the moderate prevalence of flights in the cultural narrative – this insane ritual that provides a strong sense of order — prevents the conception of what is actually occurring.

And then very steadily, as not to betray my not quite fully realized fear, the eyes move to peer through the double-paned windows, landing on the turbines whose diameters span at the very least two full-grown adults across. As I, with a perfunctory smile, accept the coffee from the attendant, continuing with this exchange of charades, the turbulence can’t help but etch itself on to the surface of the drink, and thoughts, in one fell swoop, latch back on to the very real turbines drowning in their white noise immensity, whisking cloud to cumunolimbic dust. And it’s only then that I let myself become the inconvenient victim of the “intraocular effect”. It hits me. Between the eyes. With the light of a thousand suns.

I have full faith in science: Bill Nye held a significant place in my childhood during my most impressionable years; he was always there, unfailingly adorned with bow tie, to explain what’s happening in a way that a seven-year-old could understand. Nowadays, one can find me in a lab, Feynman’s books in my bags and dotingly following Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter. Hobbies include physics problems. I could diagram the aerodynamic description of lift on an exam. In spite of all this, it just seems impossible for this plane, currently encapsulating my body and a hundred or so others, to be able to do with any ounce of grace or swiftness what paper planes slicing classroom air can do. Under the proper circumstances, I simply don’t care what Bernoulli or Newton say – that moment when the wheels lift from the ground and the wings take over with the roar of the engine knocking every neuron between my ears to the brink of a neurological disaster, my palms invariably get sweaty. It’s all very antithetical. The climb both excites and disturbs me greatly; my autonomic nervous system’s wires are crossed – am I in fight or flight? – I watch the city shrink, as the machine works a geometrically sensible upward arc. The earth falls away to trim and neat Euclidean shapes, almost indistinguishable from a circuit board, copper wires for luminescence. Life on the ground begins to look like an elaborate plaything, toiling away as determinedly as ever, and the moon peeks out from under the swooping wing. I tend to remain seated, my sole focal point centered squarely on the seatbelt light, hands flexing aimlessly, masochistically reminding myself this is indeed a live show and there really are thousands of cubic feet of air beneath me — interrupted perhaps by only, a flock or two of birds — that those really are glaciers and glaciers are truly quite cold and we’re bearing cloud. And it really isn’t until the seatbelt light turns off that the sweat glands in my hands return to default productivity and I can muster up some other facial expression that isn’t tainted with distress.

There are times when I can’t quite feature certain tendencies in human behavior, our endearing follies crystallized by our own devising. It’s egregious to me that global warming or evolution is even a contentious issue. I can’t, with logical might, convince the dogmatic to consider a spectrum of options or alternative views. Reason, no matter how watertight, is dashed to bits by the solidified sediments of fear. With feet cemented to ground, gazing upwards at the plane’s chalk-like traces thrown into sharp relief again the tresses of blue, it’s easy to proclaim without hesitation how formidable modern technology is, that we can outwit our own anatomical limitations, or make some fine and heart-ravishing poetic gestures. But buoyed by thin air, in the culmination of elegant equations into a tangible craft, I look down a narrow vista with bated breath.