Wednesday, May 27, 2009

HOW TO THINK INSIDE THE PYRAMID REDUX


For those readers who have been following the continuing, late breaking story from Old Kingdom Ancient Egypt of nearly 5000 years ago, I was recently graced and flattered by an email from the man who solved the great mystery of how the Great Pyramid was built:

Hi Kevin,

I'm Jean-Pierre Houdin and I'm very pleased with what you wrote about my theory...
HOW TO THINK INSIDE THE PYRAMID
Thank you...

I don't know if you had the opportunity to watch the NatGeo USA documentary about my work?

You should watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=3442C0E0D8EA2A33

Or you have the BBC2 Timewatch version:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0E083435887644B5&search_query=pyramid+houdin

A French documentary was also edited last year and was broadcast in many European countries.

The Japanese television NHK will broadcast their own documentary in Japan in the coming months.

I've received hundreds and hundreds of e-mails from all over the world, all very positives and most of them with these remarks I picked up from your blog:

"The jury may still be out in terms of how traditional Egyptologists have reacted to Houdin's theory, but to me, the idea makes logical, if not just plain common sense".
.../...

"The logic of Jean-Pierre’s theory is transparent and struck me as a breakthrough. It just made sense".

Egyptians were rationalists...The way they built the large smooth pyramids of the 4th Dynasty...makes sense (their "know-how")...
And they were as smart as we pretend we are...45 centuries ago...
The question : "How the pyramids were built" is our problem, not their...They built the pyramids...Period.
But since 200 years, all the guys willing to explain the construction started from a unique wrong idea: OUTSIDE...
Their answers are wrong from line one because the base of the studies is wrong...
How can you explain something when you start wrong?

I didn't invented anything, I just understood HOW THEY BUILT THE PYRAMIDS...I'm an architect...and that helps...a little...

The guys who deserve something are our Egyptian Ancestors...

What impressive work they did...

You should have a look at:

www.3ds.com/khufu

and

www.construire-la-grande-pyramide.fr

If you want more information, feel free to ask.

Best regards

Jean-Pierre Houdin

Sunday, May 24, 2009

MY FIRST RECORD


Do you remember the first record you ever bought? Well, I guess that I’m already dating myself here by referencing vinyl—in this case, 45 rpm recordings. But, I was given solace recently on a field trip with my son to a restored Victorian home nearby. We were touring with a couple of other families with children about his age who were around 8 or 9, when we entered what in the 1890s was called the “salon” and what we know today as the living room. Inside, the importance of music and conversation were in clear evidence with numerous chairs, settees, a large couch, a Steinway square grand piano that had made it by boat from New York and around the tip of South America, and an Edison Wax Cylinder Phonograph.

When the docent started explaining how this device was used, one of the kids who was inspecting its parts rather intensely asked with a shrug, “Where does the CD go?” It made me smile, but also feel better because he hadn’t asked where you would click to get downloads. The technology and instruments that humans have developed to capture sound and its organized form that we know as "music" may change, but whatever the manner in which we first hear and understand its existence is only matched by the musical entity who introduces it to us. And in a way, that primary experience can say a lot about us as individuals as well as initiate a trajectory for our musical futures. The extra step that we take when we actually consume music as a purchaser—whether on vinyl or digital format—may also serve as a sort of musical version of carbon dating, since music is distinguished as an art that lives by and in time.

In my case, my first acquisition as a consumer was at the age of seven and was Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”, released in 1960. I don’t remember where I bought it or what led me to buy it in the first place—though, when in doubt about my early music history, I usually blame an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. But, I still remember that it was on Cameo Parkway Records and that the red and black label had an actual gold lined, cameo image of a refined lady in profile on it. This visual element is one that I grew to associate with music—and 45 labels were nothing once I graduated to albums, which arguably had already become an art form—if often a kitschy one—in their own right during the 1950s.

MTV added motion video to music, which to my mind often held the artist and audience hostage to a music video director and record label marketing department’s “vision” and “interpretation”. In the world of the download, we’ve now gone full circle. Once upon a time, it was the packaging that made opening a new record “album” like Christmas every time you went to the record store—even though you couldn't always judge a record by its cover. Now that has all but disappeared. More important, packaging was not only a marketing come-on, but also influenced music discovery.

I remember haunting my local record store as a teenager and seeing certain album covers that lured—and even frightened me into buying them. When a friend told me in 1967 that there was this band from England that were louder than The Mothers of Invention, I went and asked for “Are You Experienced”. When I saw the cover, adorned by a leering trio splashed in psychedelic finery, beckoning out of a fisheye lens with a look that dared me to enter—I had to think twice, but am forever glad that I didn’t hesitate too long. The first several bars of the opening song actually flicked a navigational switch on in my brain that has been setting a course for the heart of the sun ever since. It was also a record that was to rear its surrealistic head in a book I did with rock critic, Dave Marsh, who I collaborated with on the long out-of-print, The Book of Rock Lists published by Dell and Rolling Stone in 1981.

Part of the book included a year-by-year breakdown called “Top of the Pops” which codified our own version of the Top Forty Hits in Rock and Roll from 1955 to 1979 and we described as, “For the authors, one of the great incentives in a project like The Book of Rock Lists is the opportunity to inflict on the unsuspecting reader personal opinions about the greatest and most essential records of all time.”

Another series of lists set about codifying the greatest “Top 40 Chartmakers” or forty albums from each year (beginning in 1963) that made Billboard’s Top 100 Chart. There were many conversations about ranking these records. But, when we came to the seminal year of 1967, we had a lot to consider with The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, The Mothers of Invention “Absolutely Free”, “Otis Redding “Live In Europe”, “Fresh Cream”, The Doors’ debut album…and “Are You Experienced?” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Ultimately, Jimi won out, though in retrospect, “Sgt. Pepper” would seem the logical winner over time as classical rock music. No matter—it was all meant to provoke friendly debate just as Dave and I had experienced in its creation. And rock and roll doesn’t suffer academic treatment very well. I always cringe when I see it offered on some over-reaching college syllabus. It seems like the last nail in its coffin (see my earlier post, The Vampire Theory of Rock and Roll) to stuff Rock Music like some taxidermy object to gaze and wonder at, if not dissect for hidden meaning.

Another record that I saw on and off for months at my local record shop was Dr. John’s first record, “Gris Gris”. I was actually scared by the cover, which dripped with Voodoo talismans and trimmings and an image of a somewhat diabolical looking madman in shocks of red and green like some New Orleans Halloween hallucination. Somehow, I knew that if I bought that record, that my ears would never be the same. When I finally put my money down and listened to the spooky likes of “Croker Courtbullion” and “I Walk On Gilded Splinters”, this wasn’t just music—it was theater of the mind—and it was also introducing me not only to mojo roots, but to Mac Rebennack’s musical roots and opened up a lexicon from Huey Piano Smith and Duke Ellington to the weird, ethnographic swamp soup of Voodoo chants and Afro/Yoruba trance dance. Again, I’d never heard anything like it and my brain was imprinted with coordinates for future navigation to the Mississippi Delta and points east across the Atlantic and beyond to the so-called genre of “World Music.” It’s a journey I’ve been on ever since.

The other thing that Dr. John’s album came with was liner notes, a sub species of the album as an art or non-art form that is now all but disappeared with virtual music consumption. I’ve delighted in showing my daughter the liner notes from Bob Dylan’s many early albums written in his e.e.cummings mirror style of lower case, West 4th Street stream of consciousness. Dr. John’s liner notes were also written with a voice that echoed and added detail to the musical phantasmagoria within.

Liner notes were long established in the world of classical music and jazz, where the “seriousness” of the exercise inspired, no doubt, the necessity of anatomical dissection and explication. But, rock and roll was a late comer—I mean, what can you possibly dissect about “The Who Sell Out”, Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols” or even “Sgt. Pepper” for that matter—but as the music developed a history and became more popular and recognized, the addition of liner notes made more sense depending on whether a musician could actually write or if an eager rock critic was available. A rare few, like “Freak Out” , provided a bonus map of an artist’s musical DNA. By citing his artistic influences at some length, Frank Zappa added to my future discoveries and not all were restricted to music.

How do digital music consumers discover new sounds today? The retail store has gone the way of the dinosaurs with the large chains going under from lack of relevance, but thankfully, with hearty, last of the independents like Amoeba Records flourishing as beacons in the wilderness. But, downloads and ringtones now have overtaken the brick and mortar market. According to Techcrunch, in 2006, music downloads were increasing at a pace of over 50% a year, while CD sales declined in that year 20%. More recent stats would certainly reflect this trend.

Collaborative filters like the iTunes Genius Bar are only as good as artificial intelligence can be in making associations between individual personal taste and similarities of potential interest. Peer-to-peer sharing of music is still a huge factor, even in the post-Napster universe, with Limewire and others still booming. Sharing lists of favorites on social media networks allows another view into personal taste that speaks to music as first and foremost a community of specialized interests. Music may have actually been the impulse behind the first human communities when their members invariably gathered around a campfire on the African savannah to sing for the hunt to go well and rain to abound—but that’s another story. The affording of samples on services like CD Now and Amazon are likewise helpful, but all of the above tactics still miss some of the mystery for me that exists when you enter a place like Amoeba in LA.

Usually, I am looking for something specific, like a digitized version of an old record—yesterday, for example, I was searching out a copy of The Rolling Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request”—their characteristically dark answer to “Sgt. Pepper”. But, what I usually come out with is anything but what I originally thought I’d be buying. My friend, Jeff Elmassian, a brilliant composer and virtuoso in his own right and CEO of Endless Noise, a premiere music design firm for commercials spoke of an interesting experience while taking his teenage daughters on a pilgrimage to Amoeba.

On finding a certain record she was looking for, one of them told her father that she only wanted one song on the album and didn’t want to buy the whole thing in order to enjoy it. I remember the feeling many times myself when I had to fork up the dough for an entire album in order to claim the one song I liked. Not all albums were created equal and quite often, the hit single was a teaser that was the loss leader for an album that disappointed. We’ve come a long way in the universe of the singular download and shuffle mode mentality.

Singles were another method of music discovery back in the day when they were often pre-releases for albums by new artists as well as established ones like The Beatles, who would lead off with a taste of what was to come. Sometimes, singles had added value when they didn't appear on a follow-up record or when they did, only on a record several years later. The world of digital downloads has put the model of releasing singles on steroids—but now, the consumer has a choice to not buy an entire “album” and very often, there isn’t even a long form version to follow suit. My daughter was telling me last week about a new band whose “album” of four tracks she really liked. I crankily responded that we called a record with so few songs on it an “EP” in my day, and that it didn’t really qualify for the designation of “album” at all.

I forgot how polarizing and magnetic music is until a recent post which elicited a great response of emails and comments for which I am grateful. One such comment came from Kevin Henry, who inspired this present post. He described buying his first single, The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, “a simple song at best and not earth-shattering my any means”, as he describes it, but one with the inherent power to inspire him remembering “clearly my father yelling to turn that crap off.” He goes on to say: “Today, when I look in the mirror, I wonder who that old guy is and I always sing a little to myself…’hope I die before I get old’...feeling a little sorry for myself and then a magical thing happen the other morning...my 17 year old daughter picked up my iPod by accident on her way out the door and when she walked in that evening she said with a smile...’who are these guys...this stuff is incredible’...and at that moment a connection took place between us as told her the story of my youth and realized that the revolution lives on.”

I’ve had similar cross-generational experiences with my teenage daughter who has embraced a lot of music I grew up with, some of it out of curiosity, some out of enforced listening, and some organically out of her own path of discovery. It’s inspired conversations over the years with younger co-workers at various places I've worked about how great it must have been to experience the 60s and whether “my music is better than your music.” I never quite got that line of attack. If, as Kiki Dee once sung, "I've got the music in me," then what we don't like may result from the fact that the music hasn't connected to where it plays to a harmony inside us.

To me, it’s all a continuum as Kevin Henry's anecdote above reflects so well. But, our first records put a stake in the ground, a tent pole like a clef which affixes music in our memory as the soundtrack to our lives that sets up thematic mileposts made up of sound. They have a way of intersecting our life stories at critical points where music can speak to us as if it were written just for us. Certain records entered my life in this way almost as if they were chapter titles—“Meet The Beatles”, “Absolutely Free”, “Muddy Waters: The Real Folk Blues”, John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, Miles Davis “Kind of Blue”, several classical music albums…and the list goes on.

It’s interesting to me that my very first record was a dance song. I had no idea at the time what a cover record was and that Chubby Checker was experiencing success with a number that was originally written and recorded by Hank Ballard. I also had no real idea what sex was at the age of seven either—“To make (beautiful) music with someone or to ‘have sexual intercourse’ is cited by the Online Etymology Dictionary as arriving on the scene in that “seminal” year of 1967. The more recent euphemism of “The Mystery Dance”, may be the more useful expression here.

But, on a primeval level, I guess we're all genetically wired to understand sound as rhythm first, whether it’s the pulse of our blood that steps up with excitement of different kinds, the rhythm of language before we know what words mean, the different kind off beats in the cries that a baby makes depending on her hunger, pain or want of company, the consuming, inspirational sounds of the natural world, the clickety-clack made by toy trains, the delight of tapping out rhythms with a pencil on our school desk to annoy the teacher—or as discoveries in what quantum mechanics has verified in what the Vedantas and the mantra tradition have known for thousands of years—it’s all vibration, man.

Bassist Victor L. Wooten describes it succinctly in his book, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music: “A-440 means that a note vibrates four hundred and forty times per second…if you keep cutting that number in half, 440, 220, 110, 55, etc., you will eventually get beats per minute. At that point, it’s called rhythm.” The oldest musical instrument that has been documented in the archeological record may be a bone flute from the Upper Paleolithic, but my money would bet that percussion was the original featured instrument of our furry, low browed ancestors. Click sticks like those used by the Aborigines in Australia most likely have forty or fifty thousand years of use. Banging on so-called “ring rocks” or using stones hit against each other seem like another natural movement.

What is music and where does it come from? Wooten refers to its unique origin as a word comprised of an ancient term for “mother” which is “Mu” and “sic” which he attributes as an abbreviation of “science”. Traditional etymology would cite the word's origin as a tribute to the Greek goddesses known as the Muses who are known to have served up a variety of artistic elements for humans to play with. Regardless of its meaning, music is unique in existing in both space (in memory and physical vibration) and time. Its very existence points us to the place that Dizzy Gillespie so eloquently describes as “place between the notes” and as memorialized in John Cage’s famous piece, “4’33”. It is the place where we literally catch our breath, our heartbeat, and where music is created out of the void, out of the great expanive silence, out of that Big Bang of Original Compressed Sound where the first note of song reverberated the original vibration as the Music of the Spheres and frequency that we all carry with us regardless of our preferred musical tastes. Or as the great classical composer of the 20th century, maestro Frank Zappa once said, “Music is the Best”.

I am very interested in readers sharing stories of how their first records impacted their lives and welcome all submissions to the comment section below.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

HOW TO THINK INSIDE THE PYRAMID



When you are sitting inside the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, there are many thoughts that come to you. The sweep of Ancient Egypt and its mysteries are still very present despite their distance of thousands of years from the present. They are also literally quite close just outside the Pyramid where the great Nile flows by, the world’s longest river and arguably still its most mysterious. Inside, just as outside in Egypt, too, the confluence of the sacred meets the profane—the odor of cold limestone is mixed with the faint acrid smell of urine, whether from bats or humans one cannot be sure.

The King’s Chamber lies at the heart of the Great Pyramid and is actually rather small room with dimensions of about 20 by 34 feet—still, it is daunting in its structure with its massive lintel ceiling of 19 feet high. Electric lighting now diminishes the mystery somewhat with several vertical lights framing the empty, lidless sarcophagus carved out of solid granite that is chipped away on one side from years of souvenir hunting as well as from the original intruders who probably used force to open it in the hope of retrieving any of Pharaoh Khufu’s mummified remains. More than anything, the Egyptian impulse is about monumentality and the Great Pyramid is a testament to this factor written characteristically in architectural form.

From the moment you see the Great Pyramid, you are entering a world of epic stone. You are also faced with another key feature of the Ancient Egyptian Mind—the Egyptians ascribed ultimate importance to the way that mathematics and what has come to be known as "sacred geometry" informed original and ongoing creation—and true to form, it’s all a numbers game with the Pyramid as well. The monument is made up of two million limestone blocks averaging two-and-a-half tons and three feet high, with some granite blocks (like those in the ceiling of the King’s Chamber), between 30 and 60 tons each. Experts have estimated that it took 25,000 workers some two decades to build it with tons of stone transported both from local quarries and ones as far as 500 hundred miles away.

Certain parts of the structure seem to defy logic and even gravity—the so-called Grand Gallery which leads you up to the King’s Chamber is one. It truly lives up to its namesake—you enter it from a passageway of about three-and-a-half feet high where you have to duck—into an sprawling expanse that is 157 feet long and 28 feet high. Even as it opens up widely, it’s not really a relief from claustrophobia that gets to you as much as wondering about the stone mass that surrounds you. It seems natural, if not a survival instinct, to consider how this immense weight is distributed and what is holding it all up. It is somehow reassuring that it has apparently done so without shifting since it was constructed.

Despite any misgivings, the overall sense one has is simply wonder and burning questions about its purpose and how it was actually built. Most amazing is not how it was built, perhaps, but that it was built at all and over 5000 years ago. Hollywood movies have memorialized one of the theories with the familiar scenes of thousands of slaves pulling massive blocks under the cruel lashes of overseers’ whips and the monomaniacal eyes of the Pharaoh looking out over the Gizeh plateau and at the ramp extending from the river to scale the emerging manmade mountain. The truth appears far less dramatic. It is clear from recent discoveries by Mark Lehner, in particular, of the village where the workers lived, that they were not slaves, but well treated and fed though accommodations were certainly barracks style without amenities.

A second theory proposes that the ramp did not lead up to the structure as it was built, but rather wrapped around it like a snake until the apex was finally reached and the capstone laid. For decades, these were the only theories besides those that call for alien intervention and levitation. A recent theory has set tradition on its head and has something to teach us about how to think “outside of the box” by considering the inside of the Pyramid.

A new book that is one of the first to actually merit its familiar title, “The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery” by Bob Brier and Jean-Pierre Houdin, describes the journey of a French architect’s search for an answer as to how it was built. Houdin’s interest in solving the mystery was inspired by his engineer father. After watching a documentary in 1999 about the construction of the Pyramid, his father told him that the show’s presentation was all wrong. His idea of how the stones were raised to the top was novel if not revolutionary.

A PhD in engineering from Paris prestigious Ecole des Art et Metiers, Henri influenced his son, to create sophisticated 3-D models of the conventional theories to see if they held water, so to speak. His work easily discredited the single ramp theory. In order to deliver the stones to the rising Pyramid, the ramp would have had to have been extended over time as the courses of blocks rose. The basic problem is that the gentle slope that is necessary for workers to haul the blocks would have required the ramp to extend to over a mile long. In other words, “if the Pyramid were being built on the site of New York’s Empire State Building, the ramp would extend all the way into Central Park, about twenty-five city blocks.” Such a ramp would have taken a separate body of thousands of workers many years to construct. Also, it would have produced a tremendous amount of debris, which has never been accounted for in any nearby rubble heaps. Finally, the topography of the plateau just does not avail itself to the creation of such a ramp. It’s too small an area.

The second theory of a ramp that corkscrewed around the ascending Pyramid as it was built did not fare any better. The fatal flaw, it turns out, was that the Pyramid “has four corners, and as the Pyramid grew, the architects had to constantly sight along those corners to make sure the edges were straight and thus ensure that they would meet at a perfect point at the top. But a ramp corkscrewing up the outside would have obscured these sight lines.” So, it would seem impossible for the Ancient Egyptians to accomplish the construction of raising millions of blocks using a stone road that wound up the growing sides of the Pharaoh’s mountain.

Jean-Pierre Houdin spent years computer modeling how the building of the Pyramid progressed over the decades and was able to support his father’s theory through his findings. Interestingly, his father led Jean-Pierre not to look at the outside of the Pyramid for the answer. After years of research, Jean-Pierre proposed that a mile-long ramp corkscrewing to the top was to be discovered inside the Great Pyramid. In other words, it was built from the inside out. Subsequent research and scientific survey on site has been favorable and are outlined in detail in the book.

Take for example, just one aspect of its construction, the Great Pyramid's fabled outside layer. The Pyramid was once covered with flat "facing stones" that provided it with a smooth milky-white shining veneer. It was said that at one time the Pyramid shone hundreds of miles out in the desert like a great beacon.Only the Pyramid of Mycerinus (one of the other pyramids that make up the fabled trio at Gizeh), still has remains of its outside layer if you look toward its top. Unfortunately, the prized outer stones from all three Gizeh pyramids were mostly removed and repurposed at various historical times in the construction of the expanding metropolis of Cairo--including its Great Mosque where some of these original facing stones can be seen today.

Yet, if an outer ramp had been used to lay these precious, smooth faced stones, wouldn't the process have caused damage to their surfaces? If, however, the inside ramp theory is valid, then it would have made far more sense to lay the outer stones first and build in from them laying down the inner blocks, shafts, passageways, and two main chambers. The jury may still be out in terms of how traditional Egyptologists have reacted to Houdin's theory, but to me, the idea makes logical, if not just plain common sense.

Sometimes, we overcomplicate our search for answers by being too influenced by tradition—not only in terms of so-called conventional wisdom or intellectual inheritance—but our sensory bias. More often than not, I find that the art of the strategist is laying out the obvious or what makes common sense, when a client has lost his way in the scaling of his own mountain of business objectives. The requirements of building a business can often immerse the insider in details that distract and sometimes obscure the original essence of why it was created in the first place. Many times, the answer to a business problem is staring us right in the face and is not a matter of creating some nifty theory, body of evidence, and supporting tactics, but relying on our gut and what at first may seem illogical in the face of history or accepted facts.

In looking for our own answers—whether in business or in life—we may have to use less finesse and more brute force in our thinking. We may have to be more like the Arab intruder, Al-Mamoun, who in 820 AD found the original entrance on the Great Pyramid’s north side sealed from within and set about with his men carving out his own entrance. It’s not a pretty sight today, but Al-Mamoun burrowed until he hit one of the monument’s passages and was in like flint. The logic of Jean-Pierre’s theory is transparent and struck me as a breakthrough. It just made sense. So, next time you are trying to “think outside of the box”, maybe it would help to first think about turning it inside out.

There is a reason that the origin of the word “Pyramid” is based on the Ancient Greek words “pyra” and “mesos” literally meaning “fire in the middle.” Maybe the name, itself, is a clue for us to find that creative fire, that so-called “spark” which lights when we discover our own center, to quote the Zuni people. Perhaps the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians were able to identify this as a place in space and time where all the stones of being are connected to the infinite horizon as described by the “original mound” which, in turn, inspired the Pyramid’s divine form. Or as the wondrous English fabulist, Jeanette Winterson said, "Stones are always true. It's the facts that mislead."