James Frey's Blog, page 17
July 7, 2024
First Draw
The cave painting in Indonesia is also the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art, according to an international team of researchers who used a new dating technique.
A 51,000-year-old artwork that was found in a cave on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island in 2017 in an image Australia’s Griffith University released Wednesday.Griffith University / AFP – Getty ImagesA cave painting in Indonesia is the oldest such artwork in the world, dating back at least 51,200 years, according to an international team of researchers who say its narrative scene also makes it the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art.
While it is unclear exactly what the painting depicts, it most likely shows three small human-bird hybrids surrounding a massive wild pig, “which they were probably hunting,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, a co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
It’s that storytelling that has captivated scientists.
“That is something new, something very important, something that happened much older than we thought,” said Joannes-Boyau, who is also a professor at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia.
July 6, 2024
L’Excalibur est parti!
By Patrick Reilly
Roland holding the pass of Roncesvalles, where he was slain (during Charlemagne’s wars against the Saracens in Spain).Mary Evans via ZUMA PressAn ancient sword known as the French version of King Arthur’s legendary “Excalibur” has mysteriously vanished from the town where, according to local lore, it had remained lodged in a rock for 1,300 years.
The Durandal sword appears to have been taken by a thief from its stone in the tiny medieval town of Rocamadour, where it was one of the town’s main attractions, The Telegraph reported.
For centuries it’s been believed the sword once belonged to Roland, a semi-legendary knight who bravely fought for Charlemagne in the eighth century.
Officials in Rocamadour have launched an investigation into the disappearance of the sword, which was yanked from its spot in a cliff wall some 100 feet off the ground.
July 5, 2024
The Joy Of Shifting
Manual transmissions are increasingly rare in America, foiling teenage carjackers and frustrating valet parking lots
Mary Sampietro got the scare of her life five years ago. It left her disappointed in America’s young people.
The mental health professional was in her stick-shift 2016 Jeep Patriot in a rough neighborhood in her native Houston when she rolled down the window to smoke a cigarette. Suddenly, a teenager stuck a gun in her face, ordering her out of the car. He got in but only made it to the next traffic light before stalling the engine and running away.
“I was like ‘How can you be a carjacker and not know how to drive a manual?’”
For Sampietro, who learned to row her own gears in a 1970s Datsun pickup truck with no power steering, the skill’s increasing rarity is a frequent source of annoyance. Her husband’s career requires her to attend events with mandatory valet parking. The job often attracts college students. One particularly bad experience convinced her that they often lie about being able to handle the odd stick shift like hers.
“This young man ground my gears in a way that made me want to throw up,” she says. “I turned around and parked way down the street and walked. I did not tip.”
July 4, 2024
July 3, 2024
New Manu!
Latin alt and reggae musician Manu Chao is releasing his first studio album in 17 years. The French-Spanish singer-songwriter is following 2007’s La Radiolina with Viva Tu, out this fall. Following the release of “Viva Tu,” he dropped another single from the LP, “São Paulo Motoboy.”
Though Manu Chao’s sound is upbeat and beachy, he uses this single to bring awareness to couriers in cities like São Paulo and the dangers they face daily, from traffic to the weather. Chao himself was a courier in Paris for a time. In a translated statement, Chao said, “São Paulo is a living monster. And the couriers are the blood which comes and goes through its veins, allowing the city to function.”
Viva Tu drops September 20th and will include collaborations with Willie Nelson and French R&B singer Laeti. Watch the video for “São Paulo Motoboy” below.
July 2, 2024
Robert Towne Gone
Robert Towne, who won an Oscar for his Chinatown original screenplay and was nominated for his The Last Detail, Shampoo and Greystoke scripts, died Monday at his home. He was 89.
Towne also earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and WGA awards for Chinatown, the L.A.-set 1974 thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It was one of three Writers Guild Awards he won during his career, along with Shampoo and the drama series Mad Men. He also was nominated for The Last Detail (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1985). He was honored with teh guild’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1997.
July 1, 2024
Centenarian Sun Ra
Marshall Allen, the musical collective’s sax-playing leader, is celebrating with a deep-spacey video installation during the Venice Biennale.
Illustration by João FazendaThe Sun Ra Arkestra, the musical collective founded in Chicago in the mid-fifties, moved out of the Lower East Side in 1968, and wound up in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, on a very green side street along the edge of a hill that feels a million miles from anywhere. An old row house became the Sun Ra Arkestral Institute, a place to practice at all hours, in order to be ready. “One day it will happen,” Sun Ra said at the time. “It could be happening now—that a voice from another dimension will speak to earth. You might as well practice and be prepared for it.” The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel. Sun Ra died in 1993, and his saxophone players replaced him as director—first John Gilmore, and then Marshall Allen, who last month turned a hundred.
Allen bounded down the stairs to greet a visitor the other day, in between birthday celebrations near and far—near being Philadelphia, where a public performance of the Arkestra was followed by a party for family and friends at a club called Solar Myth, named for a Sun Ra-ism. Across the Atlantic Ocean, during the Venice Biennale, a celebration occurred in the form of a site-specific video installation in an abandoned sixteenth-century church and hospital; it is directed by Ari Benjamin Meyers, a Berlin-based composer, who met Allen in person in 2022, in Philadelphia, and was, like a lot of people, “blown away.”
June 30, 2024
AI Michaels Born
The network will use an artificial clone of the legendary broadcaster’s voice to narrate its daily recaps of the summer event. “It was not only close,” he says of the technology, “it was almost 2% off perfect.”
BY TOM KLUDT
GEORGE GOJKOVICH / GETTY IMAGESew voices in American life are more recognizable than the one belonging to Al Michaels—play-by-play announcer for nearly a dozen Super Bowls and the source of perhaps the most famous line in sports history.
For generations of sports fans, Michaels has been a near-constant presence, providing the soundtrack of last-second field goals, ninth-inning walk-offs, and fourth-quarter buzzer-beaters. He was the voice of Monday Night Football for 20 years, then Sunday Night Football for 16. When the 1989 World Series was disrupted by an earthquake, Michaels’s voice was the one viewers heard just as the broadcast went static. And when a plucky United States hockey team pulled off an upset for the ages against the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics, Michaels channeled the prevailing sense of disbelief with a call as iconic as the game itself. (“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”)
June 29, 2024
Skinbots
by Jaures Yip
Researchers created a 3D facial mold and a 2D robot covered with lab-grown living skin. The University of Tokyo© The University of TokyoIt’s not just nuts and bolts keeping robots together — now they can be made with living skin. Skin that can be made to smile.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo revealed on Tuesday a rather unsettling humanoid robot covered with lab-grown skin. The team said it was able to mimic human skin ligaments by bonding skin tissue to perforated 3D facial molds and 2D robots.
A press release said the team hoped the advancement would be “useful in the cosmetics industry and to help train plastic surgeons.”
While the development could prove helpful, some people online reacted to the robot’s fleshy skin and facial movements with jokes or said they found it disturbing. One person on X wrote, “You will live to see man-made made horrors beyond your comprehension.” Another said: “We don’t want this. Nobody wants this. Stop it.”
The researchers said that, unlike other materials, biological skin granted these robots self-healing capabilities without requiring triggers such as heat or pressure.
June 28, 2024
Kinky Friedman Gone
The satirical country and western iconoclast ran for governor of Texas in 2006 with campaign slogans like “My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy.”
By Variety
Kinky Friedman in 2022. Michael Loccisano / Getty Images fileKinky Friedman, the satirical and often provocative musician, author and one-time politician, has died at the age of 79.
“Kinky Friedman stepped on a rainbow at his beloved Echo Hill surrounded by family & friends,” read a post on his social media. “Kinkster endured tremendous pain & unthinkable loss in recent years but he never lost his fighting spirit and quick wit. Kinky will live on as his books are read and his songs are sung.”
Throughout his career, Richard Samet “Kinky” Friedman developed a cult following for his unique, quirky approach to country and Western music. The self-proclaimed “governor of the heart of Texas” released a robust number of albums starting with 1973’s “Sold American,” often considered his foundational record, and in addition to touring with Bob Dylan on his “Rolling Thunder Revue,” he became the “first full-blooded Jew” to appear at the Grand Ole Opry.
Outside of his music career, Friedman was a prolific writer, penning detective novels and serving as a columnist for Texas Monthly. He dabbled in politics, running for Governor of Texas in 2006 with campaign slogans like “My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy.” In the end, he received 12.6 percent of the votes among six candidates.
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