Not the Red Owl

The Airplane & the Guest House

The Wikipedia article on Jefferson Airplane is good, better than the Airplane's own website.  From either of those sites and numerous others, you can find out that Rabbi Marshak leaves out two members of the group when he names Grace Slick, Paul Kanter, Marty Balin, and Jorma "...Somebody" (Danny whispers "Kaukonen").  That's the Airplane minus its rhythm section:  Spencer Dryden on drums and Jack Casady on bass.

For some reason I was not a big enough fan of theirs to buy any of their albums (y'all might need reminding here that I was Danny Gopnick's age in 1967) until I saw a review of Volunteers in Circus magazine in 1970 and bought that album (cassette, that is).  However, strangely enough, in the remodeled garage/servant's quarters that my family called the "Guest House" (it's about 600 square feet and has no kitchen--not really a house) there was a Jefferson Airplane poster, not quite a psychedelic one, but it did have a woman's bare breasts on the nose of the falling-apart wooden blimp-like airplane at the center of the poster. This was a drawing/painting, and the way the group's name was written was the only psychedelic thing about the poster. It was hard to tell at first that the words even said "Jefferson Airplane."

The remodeling took place in '65 or '66, and my mother decorated the Guest House partly with moddish posters, including a Beatles poster, a Los Angeles Zoo poster (drawing not photo), and others (from the John Simmons shop in Little Rock).  But the Jefferson Airplane poster was the best of the bunch, although I didn't even know what it was and consequently didn't like it until I was in high school.  Starting in '67, the Guest House is where played my drums.  That's probably also when I started losing some of my high frequency hearing, since the Guest House was basically one big room with wood paneled walls and a brick floor, with maybe a small rug or two.  Quite reverberant, acoustically speaking, which mainly made the snare drum and cymbals louder.  Oop!

Some online reviews/etc of A Serious Man that I like are the Slate review by Dana Stevens, Some Thoughts from The American Scene, and Filmwell "Questions for Further Study".

Veiled quotes

“In the grouping of phenomena it is the similarities established in the impersonal world that are regarded as of particular significance; the more obvious similarities detected by our unaided senses are held to be of minor importance.  For this reason the physicist claims that visible light and invisible ultraviolet light are kindred in nature, for both are electromagnetic vibrations.  The accidental circumstance that the human eye detects the first kind of radiation, and not the second, is viewed as unimportant.  Indeed we need no appeal to theoretical physics to find illustrations of the same tendency.  Thus if we are judging from our immediate sensations, we should presumably claim that sugar and saccharin exhibited a striking similarity, for both are white crystals and have a sweet taste.  On this basis we should be tempted to class the two substances into one family.  Yet insofar as the chemist is concerned, sugar and saccharine are entirely different:  sugar is a carbohydrate containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen; saccharine, though sweet to the taste, has the chemical characteristics of an acid, and its molecule contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and also nitrogen and sulfur.  Likewise, the botanist places in the same family the potato and tomato plants, or the yellow buttercup and the hooded blue aconite.  No obvious similarities can justify such a classification.  These examples and many others that could be mentioned bring out the important point that it is not the obvious that is necessarily credited with any deep significance in science.  It is the veiled.”

--A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics, Volume One (of two), pages 15-16, Dover edition 1951.  Originally published in 1939.

“Inscrutable upon a sunlit day,

Her veil will Nature never let you steal,

And what she will not to your mind reveal,

You will not wrest from her with levers and screws.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, lines 672-675, published in 1808.

Bethe and Oppenheimer photos?

During the scenes where Arlen is standing in the door of Larry's office, there are two photos on the outer office wall, near where the secretary sits.  The photos are visibile when Arlen steps out of the way.  I looked at these using 4x magnification once before and couldn't identify them.  But in watching the movie again recently, I thought I recognized them. The one on the left appears to be Hans Bethe, and the other one appears to be J. Robert Oppenheimer.  I didn't find photos resembling either of these in searching on the web, but I think I've seen them before in books.

Why these two physicists?  Bethe received the Nobel physics prize in 1967, and Oppenheimer died in 1967 (as all you followers of this blog already know, ho ho). They were friends and also worked together at Los Alamos during WWII.  Bethe died in 2005.  He was interviewed, along with numerous other physicists and some common folk, in 1979 for The Day After Trinity, Jon Else's documentary film about Oppenheimer.  It was written by David and Janet Peoples, narrated by Paul Freeh, released in 1980, nominated for an Oscar, and is highly recommended by me.

Two things to keep in mind if you watch it:  Hiroshima was not destroyed in only "9 seconds" and it wasn't just "Hahn & Strassmann in 1938" who discovered nuclear fission.

Most of the destruction in Hiroshima--the complete devastation seen in photographs--was accomplished by the bomb's shock wave knocking over buildings (killing or trapping many people in the process), then, as John Hersey notes in Hiroshima, "ordinary cooking fires" and live electrical wires caused a conflagration, starting in the rubble of the homes and offices, that consumed the city--and it took a lot longer than nine seconds.  Here's the general idea:  The fireball of a nuclear explosion is certainly a horror, but the resulting shock wave kills and injures more people than the fireball.  That's why "Duck & Cover" is no joke. It also applies if a powerful conventional explosive is detonated near a building with windows enabling you to see the bright flash, which is caused by the air near ground zero becoming incandescent. The flash is a warning that a shock wave is on its way. Just the fact that you see the flash (rather than your immediately being consumed in it) means you may be far enough away to survive--but not if you're lacerated by flying glass.  Since there is no time to think about the meaning of the flash, the Duck & Cover drills actually did make sense. And another thing: An asteroid striking Earth would produce an extremely bright flash and huge shock wave also. It's not a bad idea to be prepared, at least mentally.

The study of the uranium nucleus for which Hahn and Strassmann too often receive sole credit was initiated by and led by the female nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew who had to flee Germany (she'd worked in Berlin for 30 years) after its annexation of Austria in March 1938, so she deserves most of the credit for the discovery, not least because of the fact that she and her physicist nephew, Otto Frisch, correctly interpreted what was happening to the uranium nucleus in the neutron bombardment experiments Hahn & Strassman continued doing (and wrote to Meitner about) after Meitner illegally left Germany for a refugee's life in Sweden. Meitner's side of the story had not been emphasized until after The Day After Trinity came out. Hahn alone won the Nobel physics chemistry prize in 1944 for the discovery, but as I wrote in a 1993 unpublished letter to The New Yorker, he saw the smoking gun of fission but the smoke just got in his eyes until Lise Meitner showed that where there was smoke, there was also fire.

Finally, whether those wall photos really are of Bethe and Oppenheimer is something of an undecidable proposition, at least from my perspective right now.  But I couldn't resist mentioning the possibility, mainly because of the historical connections of both men to the year 1967.