[I enjoyed putting together “Theater Odds & Ends,” posted on Rick On Theater on 23 January, so much that I decided to do another compilation of short pieces from various sources. This time, I’ve avoided theater articles and gone with a gallimaufry of “vintage” articles of curiosity value.]
“THE RECYCLERS: FROM TRASH COMES
TRIUMPH”Reported by Bob Simon
[The transcript below is from “The Recyclers” which aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes on 17 November 2013 (and re-broadcast on 18 May 2014). The producer was Michael Gavshon.]
Ever heard of a town built on a garbage dump? We hadn’t until earlier this year when we visited a community on the outskirts of Asuncion, the capital of the tiny, impoverished South American country of Paraguay. It’s called Cateura and there is trash everywhere – in its streets, its rivers, in people’s backyards – but we decided to take you to Cateura tonight, not because of the poverty or the filth, but because of the incredible imagination and ingenuity of the people who live there. Our story is also a reminder that, ultimately, music will triumph everywhere and anywhere.
Garbage is the only crop in Cateura and the harvest lasts 12 months a year. It is Cateura’s curse, its livelihood and the only reason people live here, providing hundreds of jobs to peasant farmers who were kicked off their plots by large land owners. They are the Trash Pickers. It is their profession. They sift through the stench 24 hours a day, scrounging for anything they can sell – 10 cents for a pound of plastic, five cents for a pound of cardboard [equivalent to 14¢ and 7¢ in 2025].
You’ll be amazed at what else people here are doing with this trash . . . just look and listen.
This is the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura [Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura]. The violins are fashioned from oven trays, the cellos from oil barrels. Even the strings are recycled.
The saxophones and trumpets are made from old drain pipes, the keys were once coins and bottle caps. This drum skin used to be an X-ray plate, the guitar from dessert tins.
The idea came from environmental technician Favio Chavez. When he came to Cateura and saw the kids working and playing on this miserable hill, he came up with the idea of starting a music school to lift the kids’ lives out of the trash.
From the start, Favio realized that even if he could raise the money, new instruments were out of the question. A factory-made violin would cost more than a house here and would almost certainly get stolen. But these fiddles aren’t worth a dime.
They are the handiwork of trash worker and carpenter Don Colá Gomez – three days a week he goes to the dump to find the raw materials.
Then, in his tiny workshop at the edge of the dump, he goes to work. Favio first asked him to make a violin. But this Stradivarius of South America had never seen one or heard one. [Italian craftsman of string instruments Antonio Stradivari (c. 1644-1737) made superb and highly prized instruments that now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to several million.]
BOB SIMON: But do you realize how unusual it is?
DON COLÁ GOMEZ: Yes, that’s the way it is. When you need something, you need to do whatever it takes to survive.
He was soon making three violins a week, then cellos and finally guitars, drums and double basses . . . out of trash.
Take a look and listen to what Colá has created. Fifteen-year-old Ada Rios has been playing for three years now. Today, she is the orchestra’s first violinist.
BOB SIMON: The first time you went and saw the orchestra you saw all these instruments with all these different colors. Were you surprised when you learned that they were made from trash?
ADA RIOS: Yes. I was very surprised because I had thought that trash was useless. But thanks to the orchestra I now realize that there are so many different things that can be done with the stuff.
Cateura didn’t exist before Paraguay’s capital Asuncion started dumping its trash here [1984]. The town grew up around the garbage and became one of the poorest places in South America.
Twenty-five hundred families live here now. There is hardly any electricity or plumbing. The drinking water is contaminated. Many of the children move from broken homes to crime and drugs.
But Ada and her younger sister Noelia, who plays the cello, say that music has become their salvation, the centerpiece of their lives. And who do they have to thank for that? Their grandmother, Mirian.
She is a garbage worker, collects bottles in the streets of Asuncion, carries them back to Cateura to sell. Ten cents a pound. Three years ago, Mirian saw a notice advertising free music lessons for children. That’s how it all began.
BOB SIMON: Why did you want them to learn music?
MIRIAN RIOS: Because I always wanted to be a musician-- or play an instrument. Actually I wanted to be a singer. Sometimes our dreams do come true. Maybe not in our lives, but through people that we love very much.
ADA RIOS: When I play the violin I feel like I am somewhere else. I imagine that I’m alone in my own world and forget about everything else around me and I feel transported to a beautiful place.
BOB SIMON: Can you describe that beautiful place?
ADA RIOS: Yes. I’m transported to a place that is completely different to where I am now. It has clear skies, open fields and I see lots of green. It’s clean with no trash. There is no contamination where we live. It’s just me alone playing my violin.
Every Saturday, this drab school yard is transformed into a multi-colored oasis of music. The kids flock here to learn and to play.
Cateura is a long way from Juilliard, but these music students are just as dedicated as those prodigies in New York . . . and they don’t get rained on like the kids here. Paraguay is in the tropics and you are reminded of that all the time. But the band plays on.
The veterans –15-year-olds – are teaching the novices. Many are barely big enough to hold a violin. The music can’t compete with the downpour but there is refuge in a classroom.
Favio Chavez says that music teaches the kids respect and responsibility, not common commodities in the gang-ridden streets of Cateura.
FAVIO CHAVEZ: These values are completely different to those of gangs. If these kids love being part of the orchestra – they are absolutely going to hate being part of a gang.
For the first time, the children are getting out of Cateura, performing around the country and to Chavez, the Pied Piper of Paraguay, that’s the most important thing. They are being seen. They are being heard.
FAVIO CHAVEZ: These are children that were hidden, nobody even knew they existed. We have put them on a stage and now everybody looks at them and everybody knows they exist.
That’s mainly because of a documentary that’s being made about the orchestra called “Landfill Harmonic.” Last November, the producers put their trailer up on YouTube [Landfill Harmonic - the "Recycled Orchestra"]. It went viral . . . the orchestra began getting bookings world-wide. It is such stuff as dreams are made on.
The film which follows their remarkable journey through concert halls in Europe and America will only be released next year but already instruments are being donated and that’s not all – the kids are getting help.
Paraguay’s most famous musician, Berta Rojas [classical guitarist; b. 1966 in Asuncion; with over a dozen albums, she has performed all over the world alone and with renowned international musicians and had received many awards and honors from many countries], flies down regularly from her home in Maryland to offer master classes.
Remember Noelia, Ada’s sister, the cellist? Berta is teaching her how to play the guitar.
BERTA ROJAS: This is – an – a story that is filling my heart and my soul with so much inspiration.
BOB SIMON: When you first heard them play, what went through your mind?
BERTA ROJAS: I couldn’t believe that you could make music with trash. I couldn’t believe it. And I thought, “Oh my God, this is the best thing that had happened in Paraguay in so many years.”
And when you talk to the parents, you hear what you hear from poor people everywhere. They want their kids to have a better life than they’ve had.
Jorge Rios is Ada and Noelia’s father . . .
BOB SIMON: If Ada becomes a professional musician, she’d probably be leaving town. How would you react to that?
JORGE RIOS: Yes, the truth is if you asked that question to every parent here they would say they would leave this place if they could. I, of course, would like her to have a better life than the one I’ve had. And if she leaves I hope she takes me with her!
What’s hard to believe is that most of the parents and the people of Cateura had never heard the children play. That was about to change. A concert was finally scheduled. There were banners in the streets, the local radio station was ready to broadcast. The church was transformed into a concert hall.
The children wore their finest. This was, after all, opening night. It could have been New York.
All the students were on stage for the finale. Some of the musicians were performing after just one rehearsal.
The parents were proud, of course. But just listen to the girls’ grandma Mirian.
MIRIAN RIOS: I would say it’s a blessing from God. People used to humiliate us and call us “trash pickers.” Today they are more civilized, they call us the “recyclers.” So I feel that this is a reward from God. That our children who come from this place . . . can play beautiful music in this way.
And here’s a final note from the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. Go on, send us your garbage, we’ll send it back to you . . . as music.
[Since this segment was aired, the orchestra has toured South Africa with the heavy metal band Metallica. They’ve since performed internationally with Stevie Wonder and the American heavy-metal bands Metallica and Megadeth.
[They were hoping to raise enough money to build a music school for their community on the edge of the dump. In 2015, construction of the building was begun and the school opened in 2016, just before Landfill Harmonic was released.
[The documentary Landfill Harmonic (2013) was produced by Juliana Penaranda-Loftus and directed by Graham Townsley; executive producers were Alejandra Amarilla and Rodolfo Madero.
[Bob Simon (1941-2015) covered most major overseas conflicts and news stories from the late ’60s to his death in a car accident. He contributed to 60 Minutes since 1996.]
* * * *“AN EXPLANATION FOR HICCUPS? DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH”by Meeri
Kim
[This article was originally published in the “Health & Science” section of the Washington Post on 3 June 2014.]
It happens in the blink of an eye: Your breathing muscles contract, your vocal cords clamp shut, and out comes that unmistakable sound.
“Hic.”
We all get hiccups from time to time. So do cats, rats and human fetuses. Perhaps you ate too quickly, got too excited or drank something carbonated. Or you are coming out of anesthesia after an operation. But often there’s no clear trigger. Doctors don’t know what purpose they serve, nor do they know how to make them go away.
In other words, the humble hiccup remains largely a mystery. And just as theories abound on causes and cures, so do home remedies.
“People have very interesting interventions: Scare me, hurt me, tickle me, drink for 90 seconds, drink upside down for 90 seconds,” said internist Tyler Cymet. “But these aren’t based in science.”
Cymet, head of medical education at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, performed a five-year study involving 54 hospital patients with hiccups. Beginning in 1995, he tried a wide range of treatments, including breath holding and strong medications, but he ended up with a null result: None of the techniques proved effective in ridding patients of their hiccup spells.
[Osteopathic medicine in the United States is a form of scientific medicine which today scientifically and legally overlaps with non-osteopathic (allopathic) medical science and practice. Before the 20th century, osteopathic medicine emphasized the patient’s health and treatment by manipulation of the musculoskeletal system and on the diagnostic significance of patient lifestyle and environment. Some osteopathic physicians (OD’s) still include such treatments alongside allopathic medical treatment for a few of their patients, but their training and practices today are indistinguishable from those of allopathic physicians (MD’s).]
“I think the jury is in that nothing works: It starts and stops on its own, and that’s about it,” he said.
But why do we do it in the first place? Some researchers propose it is a fetal digestive reflex that guards against breathing in amniotic fluid while in the womb. Or an early way to train respiratory muscles for breathing after birth.
Another theory posits that hiccups date all the way back to our amphibian ancestors. The classic pattern of breathing in followed by an abrupt closing of the glottis is seen particularly in tadpoles when they use their gills rather than their lungs to breathe. The tadpole’s brainstem tells a flap to close the glottis upon inspiration to prevent water from entering the lungs. This allows the water to pass through the gills. The hiccup reflex may have persisted up the tree of life even though it no longer serves any purpose.
What is agreed upon and well known, however, is the mechanism of a hiccup. Referred to in medicine as singultus, it is defined by a sudden contraction of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles — located within the spacing between the ribs — followed by snapping shut of the glottis, the space between the vocal folds within the larynx. The quick spasm of inhalation colliding with the closed larynx causes the characteristic sound and bodily jerk.
The peanut butter fix
Most experts also agree that hiccups involve a neuronal circuit starting with the phrenic and vagus nerves. The vagus nerve extends from the brainstem to the abdomen, while the phrenic nerves send signals from the brain to the diaphragm.
While hiccups are little more than a temporary annoyance for most of us, they can become all-consuming. Coleen O’Lear, a home page editor at The Washington Post, hiccups nearly every day — sometimes just occasionally, other times in fits.
“When I get them rapid-fire, they are pretty high-pitched and sound ridiculous,” O’Lear said. “It is physically uncomfortable.”
The 29-year-old has had hiccup spells for as long as she can remember; doctors say they may be linked to acid reflux disease, which she has had since she was a baby. She has tried every home remedy she has heard of: spoonfuls of sugar, holding her breath, deep breaths, drinking upside down, sucking on lemons. Some may work temporarily; most fail completely.
But one thing does work: eating a spoonful of creamy peanut butter very slowly. O’Lear thinks it has something to do with coating her esophagus, but Cymet believes it has more of a mental calming effect.
“The peanut butter is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy, where you’re controlling your breathing and thinking about what you’re doing instead of getting anxious,” he said.
Although her newsroom colleagues are entirely accustomed to them, O’Lear still finds the hiccups frustrating.
“People don’t know how to react to it,” she said. “Most of the time, they bless me.”
The chronic hiccuper who stepped into psychologist Duane Hurst’s office two years ago got so fed up with her five-year-run of daily hiccup spells that she initially requested an invasive procedure to crush the phrenic nerve, effectively paralyzing her diaphragm. Hurst, of the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., thought such a procedure was far too extreme and instead offered to try a technique called heart rate variability biofeedback.
Flipping back and forth
Our nervous system controls involuntary bodily functions, such as heartbeat and blood vessel contraction, via two complementary branches. One branch stimulates responses related to our fight-or-flight instinct — increased heart rate, dilated pupils, sweat secretion — while the other initiates the rest-and-restore mode.
Some people are oversensitive to stress stimuli and flip too easily back and forth between the two — perhaps a beneficial trait when man was a target of predators, but not as helpful in today’s world, where it can lead to unwanted anxiety. A quick fight-or-flight response that once saved man from cave bears and saber-toothed cats can kick in at inopportune moments, such as at a meeting with the boss or while merging on the highway.
By measuring the interval between heartbeats, doctors can track the interplay between the two branches and the extent to which they are battling each other: One ups the heart rate, while the other slows it down.
For the woman who had considered having her phrenic nerve crushed, Hurst used an electrocardiogram to detect variability in her heart rate and instructed her to take carefully measured breaths. The idea was to help her find a respiration rate that would activate her rest-and-restore mode, rebalance the nervous system and ease stress.
“Not many people are aware that they can use their breathing in a systematic way,” Hurst said. “Each one of us individuals has a breathing sweet spot.”
Once she started paced respiration, she began to calm down — and then, suddenly, no more hiccups. One biofeedback session was all she needed.
“Her hiccups literally stopped when she was in the chair,” Hurst said. “She is going on two years of being symptom-free.”
This was the first hiccups case for Hurst, who typically uses heart rate variability biofeedback to treat migraines, tension headaches, fibromyalgia [a condition characterized by chronic pain, stiffness, and tenderness of the muscles, tendons, and joints], anxiety disorders and irritable bowel syndrome. Similarly, Cymet has used breathing exercises, cognitive behavioral therapy and even yoga or Pilates for the hundreds of hiccupers he has seen over the years. Overall, he estimates a 20 to 25 percent success rate.
But he says most people don’t need to worry unless the hiccups interfere with respiration or eating.
“Everybody gets them, but we don’t know why — we don’t know if [in terms of evolution] it’s adaptive or maladaptive,” Cymet said. “We’re still in the dark ages of understanding hiccups.”
[In evolution, an adaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more helpful than harmful, in contrast with a maladaptation, which is more harmful than helpful.]
[This article caught my eye because, when I was a schoolboy—I remember it mostly in middle school—I had a . . . well, a hiccup problem. I didn’t get them as frequently as Coleen O’Lear, but when I got the hiccups in class, it was disturbing to the teacher and my classmates, and embarrassing to me. Once they started, they wouldn’t stop, and I’d sit there hiccupping while doing my work.
[The teacher would sneak up on me from behind and smack my desk with a ruler to try to scare the hiccups out of me. It never worked. I tried holding my breath and at home, Mom would get me to drink water slowly or upside down, but none of that worked.
[To make matters worse, if I got the hiccups once, I’d invariably get them again, sometimes twice more sometime during the day. It was a given.
[One day, I had a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon and while I was in the doctor’s office, I started hiccupping. When the usual folk remedies failed, as usual, the doc said he had something that would help. He gave me a large, white pill that I was to chew up and swallow—it was slightly chalky but didn’t taste too bad—and I did as he instructed. Seconds later, the hiccups stopped and stayed “off” the rest of the appointment—and never returned that day.
[Whenever I was in his office and the hiccups started, he gave me one of the pills, and they’d stop. I never asked him what the pills were, and to this day, I don’t know. I suspect now that it was a placebo and that the relief came from the placebo effect because he was the doctor and he told me the pill would help—so I believed him and it worked.
[Years later, I discovered that the pills looked and tasted almost exactly like antacid tablets. I imagine that’s what they were—and maybe there was some actual medical application to the relief from the hiccups from a dose of antacid.
[For whatever reason, the hiccup attacks stopped a few years later. I didn’t get them in high school or college, and certainly not in the army. I still get hiccups occasionally, like anybody else, but not often, and they go away on their own. And they don’t come back again a few hours later like they did when I was a ’tween.
[But what I’d like to hear is why some people spell it hiccough? Never mind why we do it—someone explain that to me!
[Meeri Kim is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia. She has a PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and has contributed to the Washington Post since 2013.]
* * * *“MATTER: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON WRITING”by Carl
Zimmer
[This article was originally published in the “Science Times” section of the New York Times on 24 June 2014.]
A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.
That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used f.M.R.I. [functional magnetic resonance imaging] scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down—or, in this case, lay down—to turn out a piece of fiction.
The researchers, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, observed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories. But there were notable differences between the two groups of subjects. The inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch, the scientists argue, showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.
The research is drawing strong reactions. Some experts praise it as an important advance in understanding writing and creativity, while others criticize the research as too crude to reveal anything meaningful about the mysteries of literature or inspiration.
Dr. Lotze has long been intrigued by artistic expression. In previous studies, he has observed the brains of piano players and opera singers, using f.M.R.I. scanners to pinpoint regions that become unusually active in the brain.
Needless to say, that can be challenging when a subject is singing an aria. Scanners are a lot like 19th-century cameras: They can take very sharp pictures, if their subject remains still. To get accurate data, Dr. Lotze has developed software that can take into account fluctuations caused by breathing or head movements. For creative writing, he faced a similar challenge. In previous studies, scientists had observed people doing only small tasks like thinking up a plot in their heads.
Dr. Lotze wanted to scan people while they were actually writing. But he couldn’t give his subjects a keyboard to write with, because the magnetic field generated by the scanner would have hurled it across the room.
So Dr. Lotze ended up making a custom-built writing desk, clipping a piece of paper to a wedge-shaped block as his subjects reclined. They could rest their writing arm on the desk and scribble on the page. A system of mirrors let them see what they were writing while their head remained cocooned inside the scanner.
To begin, Dr. Lotze asked 28 volunteers to simply copy some text, giving him a baseline reading of their brain activity during writing.
Next, he showed his volunteers a few lines from a short story and asked them to continue it in their own words. The volunteers could brainstorm for a minute, and then write creatively for a little over two minutes.
Some regions of the brain became active only during the creative process, but not while copying, the researchers found. During the brainstorming sessions, some vision-processing regions of volunteers became active. It’s possible that they were, in effect, seeing the scenes they wanted to write.
Other regions became active when the volunteers started jotting down their stories. Dr. Lotze suspects that one of them, the hippocampus, was retrieving factual information that the volunteers could use.
One region near the front of the brain, known to be crucial for holding several pieces of information in mind at once, became active as well. Juggling several characters and plot lines may put special demands on it.
But Dr. Lotze also recognized a big limit of the study: His subjects had no previous experience in creative writing. Would the brains of full-time writers respond differently?
To find out, he and his colleagues went to another German university, the University of Hildesheim, which runs a highly competitive creative writing program. The scientists recruited 20 writers there (their average age was 25). Dr. Lotze and his colleagues had them take the same tests and then compared their performance with the novices’.
As the scientists report in a new study in the journal NeuroImage, the brains of expert writers appeared to work differently, even before they set pen to paper. During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech.
“I think both groups are using different strategies,” Dr. Lotze said. It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice.
When the two groups started to write, another set of differences emerged. Deep inside the brains of expert writers, a region called the caudate nucleus became active. In the novices, the caudate nucleus was quiet.
The caudate nucleus is a familiar part of the brain for scientists like Dr. Lotze who study expertise. It plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like board games.
When we first start learning a skill—be it playing a piano or playing basketball—we use a lot of conscious effort. With practice, those actions become more automatic. The caudate nucleus and nearby regions start to coordinate the brain’s activity as this shift happens.
“I was really happy to see this,” said Ronald T. Kellogg, a psychologist who studies writing at Saint Louis University. “You don’t want to see this as an analog to what James Joyce was doing in Dublin. But to see that they were able to get clean results with this, I think that’s a major step right there.”
But Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, was skeptical that the experiments could provide a clear picture of creativity. “It’s a messy comparison,” he said.
Dr. Pinker pointed out that the activity that Dr. Lotze saw during creative writing could be common to writing in general—or perhaps to any kind of thinking that requires more focus than copying. A better comparison would have been between writing a fictional story and writing an essay about some factual information.
Even the best-designed scanning experiments might miss signs of creativity, Dr. Pinker warned. The very nature of creativity can make it different from one person to the next, and so it can be hard to see what different writers have in common. Dr. Pinker speculated that Marcel Proust might have activated the taste-perceiving regions of his brain when he recalled the flavor of a cookie. But another writer might rely more on sounds to evoke a time and place.
“Creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study,” he said.
[One paragraph here really struck me. Dr. Martin Lotze remarked after one examination of the brain activity, specifically in the caudate nucleus, of the two groups of writers:
When we first start learning a skill—be it playing a piano or playing basketball—we use a lot of conscious effort. With practice, those actions become more automatic. The caudate nucleus and nearby regions start to coordinate the brain’s activity as this shift happens.
[When I was working on my acting MFA, I had the good fortune to have as my acting teacher an actress, Carol Rosenfeld, with whom I’d already been studying for a couple of years before I followed her to Rutgers for the MFA program. She knew me and my work very well by this time.
[Carol, of course, came to see all of her students’ performances in the many university productions---and we grad students were is great demand, so we acted a lot over those two years. (I had an additional attribute that made me a utility player at Rutgers: I was older than most of my classmates, so when an “old” man was needed, I was at the top of every director’s mind.)
[Carol was always careful not to instruct us or coach us or direct us while we were in production, but she would give us a critique after the show closed if we wished. After one role, I went to her and explained a new feeling I had while working on that part—something I thought was a small break-through. Something that used to cause me great angst wasn’t bothering me anymore.
[What Carol explained to me was this: I’d reached a point in my artistic development where I no longer needed to make conscious decisions regarding my “technique”—the external decisions and adjustments I made to particularize a role. My personal working method now included technique as an integral aspect. I’d become more relaxed and comfortable with my work, making choices, whether physical or emotional, organically and naturally.
[What used to be affectation was now habitual behavior. There’s no doubt that this new-found ease had come directly from a conscientious study of acting technique and several years of conscious practice in performance; but it was now part of me and operated automatically as I prepared a role.
[I think that, in acting terms, is what Lotze was talking about with the writers he was examining. When I read that section of Zimmer’s article, I said, “Hey, that’s me. That’s what happened to me in The Wood Demon and what Carol told me was the result of my work.” Good ol’ caudate nucleus!
[Carl Zimmer (born 1966) is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity. The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as the New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He’s a fellow at Yale University’s Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio’s Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.]
