Hat tip to Push the Movement.

He calls them Strandbeests, “beach animals.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Here is an intriguing plot line for an alternative history series along the lines of the Eric Flint’s 1632 , in which the contemporary American town of Grantville, West Virginia (3000 inhabitants) is transported to the Holy Roman Empire in April 1631 in the midst of the Thirty Years War; or Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade , which runs an imaginative reverse version of the scenario in which an advanced alien flying saucer arrives in Medieval England bent on invasion, but its crew is suddenly overwhelmed in hand-to-hand combat and some English knights and men-at-arms wind up colonizing the aliens’ empire.

Prufrock451 took us somewhat cursorily through the first week of the 35th MEU’s adventures in Ancient Rome. He has a series franchise here if he continues.

The Marines aren’t going to have any problems dealing with local military forces, as long as they still have ammunition and fuel. But when they inevitably run out of cartridges, what then? One detail I’d suggest to assist in plotting is to be sure to bring along a Navy support ship with an on-board machine shop.
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Wikipedia tells us that a typical Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU, pronounced “Myuu”) has approximately 2,200 Marines and sailors. It is equipped with:

Ground
4 M1A1 main battle tank
7 to 16 Light Armored Vehicle
15 Amphibious Assault Vehicle
6 155mm howitzer: M198 or M777
8 M252 81mm mortar
8 BGM-71 Tube Launched, Optically Tracked, Wire Guided (TOW) missile weapon system
8 FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile

Aviation
4 to 6 AH-1W SuperCobra attack helicopters
3 UH-1N Twin Huey utility helicopter
12 CH-46E Sea Knight medium lift assault helicopter
4 CH-53E Super Stallion heavy lift assault helicopter
6 AV-8B Harrier jet
2 KC-130 Hercules re-fueler/transport aircraft
Note: usually maintained in the continental United States

Logistics
2 Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit
1 LMT 3000 water purification unit
4 Tractor, Rubber Tire, Articulated Steering
2 TX51-19M Rough Terrain Forklift
3 D7 bulldozer
1 Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement dump truck
4 Mk48 Logistics Vehicle System

Multiple
7 500 gallon water containers
63 Humvee
30 Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement trucks

A Marine Infantry Battalion constitutes essentially the ground portion of an MEU, and may contain 2–5 companies, with a total of 500 to 1,200 Marines in the battalion.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Jim Geraghty in his morning email informs us that Gary Lucas has not learned to leave well enough alone.

If you were thinking, “Well, at least George Lucas has stopped messing around with the one work of film he got right the first time, and that he could never ruin through gratuitous edits and silly changes,” well, you were wrong.

Lord!

Variety has some good news.

The classical recording industry is managing to experience sales growth despite the recession, and capitalist enterprise is gradually excavating the enormously valuable recorded repertoire lost to contemporary humanity in the cataclysmic media transition which eliminated the long-playing record.

Nielsen SoundScan’s report for the first half of 2011 indicates that classical music had the biggest gain in sales of all genres, 13%, over the first half of 2010, for a total of 3.8 million albums.

Granted, that’s still a small percentage of the total market (about 2.4%), but it shows that classical is holding its own and then some, with other genres up slightly or slipping.

Moreover, the majors are being supplanted by a swarm of activity from other, smaller, nimbler sources.

Many orchestras increasingly take matters into their own hands, no longer relying on the majors for exposure. The Chicago Symphony has its own label, CSO Resound, so do the Boston and St. Louis symphonies, as well as the London Symphony, London Philharmonic and several other foreign orchestras. With Telarc reduced to a shell of its former self after the takeover by Concord, its two once-regular orchestras, the Cincinnati and Atlanta symphonies, have just formed their own labels.

Probably the most successful and luxuriously packaged inhouse orchestra label is the San Francisco Symphony’s SFS Media, which in 2010 completed its decade-long Mahler project on 17 SACDs and just issued a capstone documentary, “Keeping Score: Mahler,” on DVD and Blu-ray. SFS Media claims to have sold more than 130,000 Mahler CDs worldwide at premium prices—a roaring success for a classical series.

Likewise, individual artists and small ensembles now routinely bypass the majors and minors alike in favor of their own boutique CD labels—like New York new music collective Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe, pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel’s ArtistLed, plus composer Philip Glass’ Orange Mountain Music.

Free of the old restrictions, these labels can offer as many choices to their fans as their markets will bear. In the prolific Glass’ case, Orange Mountain Music has issued at least 75 releases since its launch in 2003, and the Music@Menlo festival in Silicon Valley exhaustively documents its concerts in massive annual boxed sets.

Naxos, the budget label that upended the classical record industry in the 1990s with its no-frills, high-quality recordings, has turned itself into a big distributor of small labels, with 148 of them (mostly classical) now under its umbrella. Harmonia Mundi, once and still a specialist in early music, also distributes a long string of small labels.

If the majors don’t want to keep their rich classical catalogs in print, others are happy to step into the breach. The online retailer ArchivMusic, now owned by piano manufacturer Steinway, has been making deals with the majors that allow it to press custom copies of out-of-print classical CDs and sell them on its website (the titles now number well in the thousands).

Hat tip to Adam Krims.

photo: Madolan

Riverside, Iowa.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Maurice Ravel composed his Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess) in 1899 when he was studying composition at the Conservatoire de Paris under Gabriel Fauré. The composition was intended as “an evocation” of a pavane (a slow processional dance) that a little princess might, in the 16th or 17th century, have danced at the Spanish court. Originally written for solo piano, a version arranged for orchestra, awarding the lead melody to a hand horn in G, was produced by the composer in 1910.

Ravel was expressing a curious personal nostalgia for the culture and sensibilities of Antique Spain, but his Pavanne mysteriously also seems to go nicely with the melancholy image of this 1869 Hudson River School painting of Lake George by John Frederick Kensett.

Hat tip to Michel Grebert.

Wait until you see whom they compared to Keith Richards. link

Alfred Munnings, A Huntsman on a Grey in a Landscape, Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum, Dedham
click on the image for larger version – The huntsman has paused and is having a nip from his saddle flask.

The BBC has uploaded nearly 63,000 images of paintings in British collections. They are planning to get to 200,000, and they are inviting volunteers to assist in tagging the images to assist future searchers, which as a pastime to fiddle with on one’s PC may even beat Freecell.

Michelangelo?, Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John And Two Mourning Angels, 16th century, currently, Ashmolean Museum

The British Province of the Society of Jesus must be gearing up for a major weekend in Las Vegas. They just sold the oldest intact surviving European book, the Stonyhust Gospel, to the British Library for £9m ($14.3m). Now, they’re getting ready to put up the spout a painting identified by an Italian art historian as a Michelangelo which could conceivably fetch $100m or more at auction.

Campion Hall, one of six Permanent Private Halls (essentially small-scale divinity schools, operated by different religious denominations or religious orders thereof) at Oxford University, owns a painting purchased by a previous master at a Sotheby’s auction in 1930.

It was scientifically-examined using infrared photography by Antonio Forcellino, an art historian who has written several books on Michelangelo (including the just-published The Lost Michelangelos), who found that the painting was based upon a cartoon in hand of Michelangelo himself.

The painting was previously believed to have been executed by Marcello Venusti, a Mannerist painter who sometimes worked from Michelangelo’s designs. But Forcellino was convinced that the painting was really the work of the master’s own hand, and he was able to associate the painting with a close friend of the famous artist, Tommaso Cavalieri, by the presence of 18 seals of the Cavalieri family coat of arms still present on the edge of the panel.

Art Info story

Daily Mail

IOL scitech

BBC radio interviews Campion Hall Master Brendan Callaghan 2:13 audio

St. Cuthbert’s Gospel

The British Province of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) is clearly determined to raise a great deal of money. The Jesuits have arranged to sell to the British Library for £9m ($14.3m) the oldest surviving European book, the Stonyhurst Gospel, St. Cuthbert’s own copy of the Gospel of St. John, a 7th century manuscript originally buried with the saint on the island of Lindisfarne in 687.

Lindisfarne was depopulated of its monks when the Danes sacked the island in 875. The saint’s relics were carried away and moved from one location in the north of England to another over the course of the next century. St. Cuthbert was finally reburied in the “White Church” built in 995 as the predecessor to Durham Cathedral.

The manuscript was discovered in 1104 when St. Cuthbert’s coffin was opened in the course of transporting his remains to a shrine behind the altar of the newly built cathedral.

St. Cuthbert’s shrine was destroyed in the time of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and the gospel manuscript at that point passed into private hands. George Lee, the third Earl of Lichfield (d. 1772) is the first recorded modern owner. Lichfield gave the manuscript to Reverend Thomas Phillips (d. 1774) who donated it to the English Jesuit College at Liège on 20 June 1769. The manuscript has been owned since 1769 by the Society of Jesus (British Province) and was formerly in the library of Stonyhurst College. The manuscript has been on loan to the British Library since the 1970s.

Christie’s negotiated the sale, as a result of which the manuscript will continue to be displayed half the time at the British Library and the other half at Durham Cathedral, referred to in the news articles as (God help us!) a UNESCO world heritage site in Durham.

BBC story and 1:22 video.

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Twelfth century painting of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral.

St. Cuthbert (feast day: March 20) is the patron saint of the North of England and was England’s most popular saint in the period before the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in 1170. His banner was carried into battle against the Scots up to the time of the Reformation, and in the Middle Ages the inhabitants of the Palatinate of Durham were referred to as haliwerfolc “the saint’s people.”

Arnold Böcklin, Im Spiel der Wellen [At Play in the Waves], 1883, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Munich, Neue Pinakothek

It’s a good idea to look in from time to time at the Polish art blog Spod pędzla (pronounced “Spod pendzla,” and meaning “from the brush”). “Estees” comes up with some very amusing items, like this Symbolist painting of mermaids in the process of being sexually harassed by two male mythological beings by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 1901).

The German history & images source GHDI supplies some information and context:

In 1899, when the craze for Arnold Böcklin’s work was in full swing, the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt (the brother of Böcklin’s Berlin dealer Fritz Gurlitt) wrote that the German public regarded this painting as “one of the greatest achievements of our century.” When it was painted in 1883, art critics had been less sure. Enthusiasm for the painting had grown, however, by the time of its showing at the Third Munich International in 1888. Offering his interpretation of the work, Ferdinand Avenarius of Der Kunstwart declared that the worried mermaid being pursued by the laughing triton personified the ocean itself and the natural forces of water and sky. Actually, a rather ordinary episode in the artist’s life appears to have provided the immediate inspiration for this composition. Böcklin had been swimming in Italy with the family of Anton Dohrn, the zoologist who commissioned Hans von Marées’s Oarsmen. Dohrn dove into the waves, swam some distance underwater, and suddenly resurfaced near the women in the bathing party. The ladies’ surprise caught Böcklin’s fancy, and he decided to portray a similar scene drawn from the world of mythical underwater creatures. His compostion thrusts the viewer into the rising and falling waves, which are shown without the slightest hint of land in the distance. Dohrn’s features can actually be seen in the face of the triton, whose freely expressed and ribald intentions make this the most playful of Böcklin’s works. In the early years of the twentieth-century, when overzealous members of the moral purity movement were subject to ridicule and denouncement, In the Play of the Waves offered ample basis for caricature – moral zealots, complete with fig leaves, were shown swimming into the frame of the painting in order to arrest the mermaids.

It is clearly a centaur puffing and paddling vigorously after two mermaids in the rear, while a more relaxed, and more completely submerged, lustful triton is leering lasciviously as he closes upon the person of a far-more-refined and delicate mermaid, who looks decidedly dismayed by his clearly inescapable advances.

The Codex Calixtinus, reported stolen last Wednesday, is a 12th century manuscript, the earliest known version of a text constituting a guide and reference book for pilgrims to the Cathedral of the Apostle St. James the Great . The book, known also as Liber Sancti Jacobi, or the Book of Saint James, contains sermons, accounts of miracles, liturgical texts connected with devotions to Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, and some very important pieces of polyphonic music. The pilgrim’s guide contains descriptions of the route, advice on sights to be seen along the way, and descriptions of local customs.

The manuscript is believed to have been taken by professional thieves from a safe in the cathedral’s archives the previous Sunday (July 3) night.

Reuters report.

Guardian story.
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Congaudeant catholici [Rejoice together, Catholics], the first known polyphonic chant for three voices, composed by Magister Albertus Parisiensis [Albert of Paris, cantor of Notre Dame Cathedral, in the 12th century, from the missing Codex Calixtinus.

A print by Marc Johns

Hat tip to this isn’t happiness. via Fred Lapides.