Burning of the Jews during the Black Death, Liber Chronicarum, 1493
Two Jewish treasures discovered in Colmar, Alsace region of France in the 19th century and recently in 1990s in Erfurt (former Eastern Germany) are on display in London at the Wallace Collection. The exhibition will be on the permanent display in the Old Synagogue of Erfurt, one of the oldest synagogues in Europe. Both treasures were hidden during the flight from the towns by the Jewish families. Guardian has a video review of the exhibition. Amazing jewelry and memory.
The Erfurt wedding ring with a bell inside. Many photographs show just the crown of this ring while the most unusual detail are the two folded hands on the bottom of the ring. The tops of the widow decorations are slightly bent inwards so a beautiful bride wouldn’t scratch herself. The stars form what appears to be a three-dimensional Star of David. I feel it is possible to imagine and bring to life the bride that was wearing the ring, bring back her flowing robes and her fleeting dreams. Hes sense of doubt and her generous acceptance. The fragrance and the love.
The image above is part of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
by Ben Atlas on 01.14.2010.10:05am
Letters of Note blog is dedicated to the lost art of handwritten correspondence. This one is from Monica Lewinsky to William Jefferson Clinton written on June 29, 1997 (anyone knows why the LA girl Monica writes a European 7 with the line and dates the letter in the European fashion with month after the date?), transcript follows. ►►►read more
I like this “The Next Small Thing” illustration by Adrian Tomine. This reminds me about the quote I just seen on Seth’s blog: “Big ideas…are little ideas that no one killed too soon.”
I don’t think there are big or small ideas. They all start the same, with a dream. There is an hour long podcast with Paul Graham by Russ Roberts. Paul says that when looking for an invention or a startup team, they go completely blind, experience taught them that they have no any idea what will take off. There is only one remedy or solution, you have to keep on trying, keep nurturing the process.
But back to the illustration. It’s so New Yorkish, looks like the East Village. The all dark windows on the second and third floors make the building look brighter, as if reflecting the street lights and still contrast with the glow of the storefront windows. The understated iconic objects: a fire hydrant, a metal basement hatch, a bicycle rack, a garbage can, a ladder, a green tree. The black street and the black outline of the city frame the stage. Indeed there is nothing bigger than our vantage point on the world and it’s biggest mystery.
Dan Ariely posts:
“…cognitive dissonance suggests that if you really want a guy, you have to create a dissonance for him, so that he will say, “Wow, if I put in all this effort for the woman – I must love her.” This means that instead of putting out early, you have George pursue you. Instead of splitting the check, you let him pick up the entire tab. Instead of calling him up and suggesting dates, you leave the calling and planning up to him. In other words, make him work, and he will rationalize it by deciding he loves you.”
This is an interesting take, Dan is saying that “hard to get” makes the other hassle to get you, he or she puts in the effort, this effort makes the reward more valuable, more valuable than the abstraction of the reward itself! This has broad implications about all kinds of investments people make in their lives. Say someone invested emotionally and financially in God (and as we know God never picks up his check), than he will be like head over heals…
Turns out there is an urban legend amongst dentists that redheads need more anesthesia not to feel pain. The researches decided to see if there is any basis and the conclusion is that redheads indeed feel more pain. There is a NYT Bogs post – The Pain of Being a Redhead:
“Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.
The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body’s sensitivity to pain.”
The article is not clear but one is to assume that this mutation is only in females? If readheads feel more pain shouldn’t they by definition feel more pleasure? I guess another urban legend is true as well…
via mindhacks
Royal Academy Diploma Work given by Sir Frank Brangwyn, The Market Stall, 1919
Hugh MacLeod tweeted yesterday: “Three things worth doing in life: Breeding, loving and learning. Everything else is filler…” I will take this aphorism for a spin.
- Breeding – Offspring and fertility. A woman’s life long obsession with being attractive, the confidence of being able to arouse a man. A man’s sense of self worth depending on his ability to meet the challenge.
- Loving – the intoxication and the yearning. The “loving” is never complete if unrequited. “Speed” Levitch said it must be reciprocal. Love is about being loved, about validation of what you are. Loving includes being respected, the accolades and appreciation. If you love a man or a god and they don’t love you back, you can’t put a check mark here.
- Learning – Trying to understand your place in the universe, an opportunity to satisfy the natural thirst, an opening to quench the curiosity. The desire to travel and see the world. By no means is this a textual manipulation.
I have never met a person who had all three in the bag. If you imagine the world as a puzzle and the goal of the game to line up all three, the jackpot is theoretical. The vast majority of people manage only one of the three life essentials. There are a small number of the lucky bastards who lined up two of those. But the fascinating human condition is that even if a single goal is at bay out of the three, humans are in a state of constant agony, like a chronic plain, the realization that a defining component of life is missing. They constantly think about it and if you are a friend you have the privilege of always hearing about it. Perhaps the wisdom is the recognition of the bargain, and if you managed to score two of the three, acceptance of your luck. Just like at the end of his remarkable speech Alain de Botton says that “every vision of success has to admit what it is loosing out on”.
When people say “money is not important” they mean it isn’t amongst the three essential goals of life but no one ever argued that money indeed can facilitate all three. Or on a more nuanced level the traditional “bazaar” is treated in the Middle Eastern cultures as an elaborate ruse to cover up the transactions in the intangibles, the ritual of pretending to trade in physical objects. Pay respect to haggling, a breeding dance with love and knowledge.
P.S. I was thinking where creativity fits into the scheme. I have to say that creativity is a part of learning. People dance, paint, write code, do scientific research, play ball, all in order to think. These are the rosary beads of learning. As McLuhan said an artist confronts “present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life.” This is the process of learning and occasionally there is a byproduct, a breakthrough of discovery.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Bernardino Luini, Girls Bathing, 1520-23. Fresco transferred to canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
On Monday, right after I came back from Manhattan, I got a craving for a smoothie. I headed to the Taste Coffee House in Newton. Smoothies made by the owner Nick are the natural goodness of ice, yogurt and fruit with no thickeners or sugar to spoil the authentic experience of the long and tall glass. In the coffee house was Tova Mervis, typing away on her Mac, this time for the Tu B’Av post in the Tablet Magazine. Tova’s article raises the obligatory Tu B’Av question on how we lost the dancing in the fields mating ritual or as Tova deftly puts it – “is the hardening of divisions within the Orthodox world making dating impossible?” Tova referrers to the “legend” of Tu B’Av, actually this is a Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:8) and people prefer to sweep under the artificial turf the second part of that Mishnah:
“Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel stated, “Israel had no holidays as joyous as Tu B’Av and Yom HaKippurim, when the young women of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards…”
Turns out the mating dance was not only on Tu B’Av but also, gasp, on Yom Kippur. Suddenly the challenge to Tu B’Av becomes a much more interesting inquiry on how did we lose the dance rave of Yom Kippur? To the orthodox ear this seems such a shocking and incomprehensible Yom Kippur custom. But actually if we trace the loss of that spirit, we would much better understand the tragic predicament of a boy meets a girl on the corner of Amsterdam and 73rd.
Contrary to 2000 years of the puritan casuistic, the joy of Yom Kippur mirrors every mythology, the purification, the new frontiers, the renewal is appropriately inseparable from the conquest of the virgin white territory, complete with the vineyards as a universal metaphor for the Dionysian intoxication of love. The hint of that spirit survived to this day in the Jewish wedding, seen as Simchas Torah and Yom Kippur all at once. The central impasse is not who took Tu B’Av out of Tu B’Av but rather who took Tu B’Av out of Yom Kippur? I suspect the answer to the traditional lamentations on full moon day in august is in the latter question.
I spoke about the same on the full moon day of the spring – What would Rabbi Akiva do?
Image published with permission of the Web Gallery of Art
I know this is a big title by the recommendation is pretty simple, it’s all about people. A story, I have a neighbor, she actually lives in London, but comes every summer to Boston for a seasonal theater production. So I run into her on the street, your classic yenta with a fancy accent, and she immediately gives me a stack (two dozens) of promotional prints for the play. I asked her to look me up online, so she can send me an email, and have a cup of tea, etc. She did look me up online and promptly forwarded to me an ad about her darn play without any introduction, etc.
Look, I don’t care for a play that is staged on the other side of the harbor in some abandoned waterfront industrial area. But I might care for the play if I care for the person who is part of it. You want to make a sale; you would have to know me first. And the funny thing is that I could have helped the play with publicity.
This reminds me of a friend whom I hooked on Twitter. In his first week on Twitter he forwarded, I kid you not, hundreds of links to his web site. When I told him he was crazy he argued that the people do click. Yes people click once to see who the new fish in the pond is but then you go to the blind spot exile. The blind spot is our coping mechanism to deal with the overflow; it is tuned to ignore everyone with whom we don’t have a personal connection. That huge virtual geographical region is the matter of online survival. Guy is right, it’s all about people.
So you want to be clicked and followed, take time to make real connections, there is no other way. The love you take really equals to the love you make.
Mindhacks – Love and the Terror Management Theory:
“The theory suggests we have various ways of keeping the fear of death out of our conscious mind, and of understanding what makes our life meaningful.
Traditionally, researchers have focused on the effect of a social element – how we feel we fit in to our culture’s ideas about what makes a meaningful life, and a personal element – how we feel about ourselves, but more recently psychologists have been focusing on love as one of the most important ways of managing our existential fears.
Love beyond life is a constant poetic theme, and yet these are not simply poetic theories, they have been drawn from empirical research.
Never afraid to strip the poetry from the profound, cognitive scientists have labelled their most important existential paradigm “mortality salience”.
I already published Professor’s Louis Levy immortal speech on love in Crimes and Misdemeanors. In the concluding scene of the movie Professor Louis Levy speaks more directly about the fear. ►►►read more
I have been looking at the illustrations by 
