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Mastering a musical instrument is a challenge to begin with, but when an injury ruins someone’s ability to play, that generally is the end of their career. Fortunately, some great musicians have been able to work beyond their injuries and relearn to play, in some cases, making them even better musicians than they ever were before.
Jazz fans and gypsy music lovers adore Reinhardt, although the name isn’t familiar to many other music fans. Even so, he was a wildly inspirational musician who pioneered his own style of jazz that blended gypsy roots with jazz guitar. His music has since been featured on about a dozen movies, including The Matrix, L.A. Story, Chocolat and more.
Reinhardt started learning to play music as a boy, starting with the violin and then moving to the banjo and the guitar. When he was 18 though, tragedy struck. Django and his wife were living in a caravan where they sold imitation flowers made from celluloid and paper to supplement their meager income. When Reinhardt accidentally knocked down a candle on his way to bed, the caravan burst into flames, destroying all of his property and leaving him with first- and second-degree burns over the entire left side of his body.
As a result of the accident, his right leg and the 3rd and 4th fingers on his left hand were completely paralyzed. Doctors said he would have to get his leg amputated and that he would never play a string instrument again. But Reinhardt refused to get the surgery and within a year, he was able to walk with the use of a cane. While his fingers never recovered, the doctors were wrong about his music career as well.
As it happens, learning to play guitar again may have saved his life. Reinhardt ended up getting stuck in France during WWII and it was said that and handful of jazz-loving Nazis ensured his safety despite the fact that thousands of Gypsies were murdered under Nazi-occupied territories. To help protect himself further, he also developed a distinctively non-jazz sound to please the Nazis who, like the majority of their party, were adamantly against jazz.
Interestingly, Django wasn’t just influential when it came to jazz musicians, he also played a major role in the creation of heavy metal. You might be asking yourself how in the world a gypsy jazz musician helped create one of the darkest genres around, but the answer isn’t in his sound, it’s in his story.
You see, guitarist Tony Iommi was talented, but he came from a poor, working-class family so he was forced to work at a sheet metal factory as a youngster, rather than chase his dreams of rock n’ roll stardom. Unfortunately, industrial factories aren’t the safest place for the hands of budding musicians. On his last day of work, Iommi severed the tips of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand. As a leftie, this meant his fretting hand was destroyed. Unsurprisingly, the teen was heart-broken and convinced this would be the end of his musical aspirations. However, his boss from the factory inspired Iommi to stick with his craft by bringing him a Django Reinhardt album and telling him about the jazz musician’s injury.
The inspiration worked like a charm and soon enough, Iommi was trying to remaster the guitar. At first he tried learning to play right-handed, but when that didn’t work, Iommi instead developed a few prosthetic fingertips using plastic covered in leather. Because his prosthetic fingers weren’t as tough as the real thing, Iommi started using lighter strings and detuning the strings so the tension would be lowered. To match Iommi’s sound, Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler did the same, and suddenly, the dark, deep sound of heavy metal was born solely as a technique to work around an injury.
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Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the need for more skilled blue-collar workers.
In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of “higher education” to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled “alternative.” Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as “vocational consolation prizes,” best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of “shovel ready” jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.
In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber – if you can find one – is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.
His purpose was to encourage support for industrial education through programs Rowe participates in, such as Go Build Alabama, I Make America, Discover Your Skills, and mikeroweWORKS. Read his entire testimony at the Discovery Channel site. Link -via reddit
The Art of Manliness has a step-by-step guide on “How to Swim, Dive, Climb, and Swing Like the Lord of the Apes.” It’s very detailed.
In the movies, Tarzan always uses the front crawl stroke (what we often call the freestyle). And with good reason. The front crawl (aka the forward, American or Australian crawl) is the fastest and most efficient of all the swim strokes. Swimming is such an essential Tarzan skill that the movie producers back in the 1930s brought in Johnny Weissmuller, a five-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming, to play the role of Tarzan.
The technique for the Tarzan front crawl is pretty basic. Float face down in the water with both arms stretched out in front of you. This is the starting position. Flutter your legs alternately in short, up and down thrashes. The arms move in alternating sweeping strokes. The arm movement can be broken down into three parts: pull, push, and recovery.
There’s even a bonus section on how to emulate Tarzan’s (or, specifically, Johnny Weismuller’s) distinctive yell. Link -via Gorilla Mask
Artist Liz McGrath is selling personalized painted butcher knives just in time for Valentine’s Day. There are two designs, the one shown and one with a cute little mouse on the blade. Each cleaver comes with its own box. They’re only $25 and the perfect way to tell that special someone “till death do us part.”
Link Via BoingBoing
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This crochet coral reef is amazing. It’s actually an attempted replica of the Great Barrier Reef. The variety of textures and colors is as full as those in the reef itself. It took years to make, which can be easily recognized just by the look of it.
“Vast in scale, collective in construction, exquisitely detailed, the Crochet Reef is an unprecedented, hybridic, handicraft invocation of a natural wonder that has become, in itself, a new kind of wonder spawned from tens of thousands of hours of labor.”
Link Via Boing Boing
If you need to send someone a message, sometimes the only thing that will get through to them a bloody horse head. If you’re like me though, that sawing through bone of a prized race horse is just too messy and requires too much elbow grease. So here’s a vegan-friendly option for all you aspiring mobsters, knit your own decapitated horse head with this lovely pattern.
You may have seen Alex’s crocheted bunny body suit, but I’ll see that handiwork and raise you Urban Knitting. Trees, street signs, statues and gas stations, nothing is safe from these rebels of the wool.
