Polymath Garage

[Deandra Uleman]

Doall the things is now her credo. Along with her drawing, video, poetry, photography, songwriting and T-shirt-printing pursuits, Joshi plays drums in tender-hearted garage-rock outfits Hoop and Sick Sad World and collaborates with video production group Woedette and homespun theatre company Marvelous Good Fortune. Her many projects are unified by an earnest approach that consistently produces emotive, vulnerable work.

Here's the thing- Becoming a polymath is all about balance and relativity. Figuring out the exact best path for yourself is a journey that only you yourself can undertake. Pursue too many things at one time and you'll spread yourself too thin, only developing a cursory knowledge of subjects. Focus too narrowly and you'll lack the breadth of knowledge that is so characteristic of the renaissance person.

2008's Ironman blew me away in its depiction of the swaggering, quippy, and casually genius protagonist Tony Stark, played to perfection by Robert Downey Jr. After the lackluster comic book movies of the 90s and early oughts, I didn't really expect much, but Tony Stark turned out to be a man of science who made everything about physics and engineering seem like the coolest thing you could possibly do. The film inspired in me, as it did for many, an intense curiosity about tech and a desire to understand the world at large. In short, to learn as much as possible.

Maybe you've always wanted to be creative. Perhaps you've felt like someone standing on the outside looking in, wishing you were a "creative person." Or maybe you've done something creative in the past, but you've gotten busy or distracted and you've put those old projects and skills on the back burner. If you find yourself resonating with either one of these scenarios then this post is for YOU.

David Epstein's book is solidly grounded in the non-fantastical real world. It makes the case that people who have experience in a number of different areas (generalists) have some advantage(s) over those with deep expertise in a single field (specialists). This is the case even as many career fields insist that their professionals get ever more and more hyper-specialized. This can cause those specialists to miss new ideas or connections to other fields which would have been beneficial.

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That drive defines Orville Bateman Neeley III, Austin garage-punk polymath and one of the scene's most gifted songwriters/multi-instrumentalists/recording engineers/producers. His major unit remains the OBN IIIs, which he fronts, vocalizes, and guitars. Their twisted punk take on Thin Lizzy-esque hard rock, Worth a Lot of Money, came out this week on indie magus Gerard Cosloy's local imprint, 12XU Records.

Neeley also plays in the Bad Sports, James Arthur's Manhunt, and technically Blaxxx, whose psych/noise freak-out EP For No Apparent Reason was born of a drunk South by Southwest-timed jam session with OBN IIIs guitarist Tom Triplett, Obnox's Bim Thomas, and a four-track machine. Until last year, he was A Giant Dog's powerhouse drummer.

Resembling Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, Neeley makes ready presently for a tour after the band's CD release at End of an Ear last week. Stopping by his cramped practice/workspace in an anonymous office park to mix down a song on a multitrack tape machine, he finds James Arthur's Manhunt breaking in a stand-in drummer who'll play Memphis' annual Goner Fest while Neeley's on the road promoting his new album. He settles for telling his life story between sips of Topo Chico and drags on a cigarette at a nearby coffee shop.

"I grew up in a really privileged environment," says the 29-year-old born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "My parents have also always been pretty supportive of my music. Before I went to college, I'm lucky they let me have band practice at our house and stuff."

Welcome to the Houston suburb of Spring, where the Neeleys relocated when their second of four children, Orville, was 4. Both parents wore white collars while primarily working in the oil and gas industry. Life was good, middle class.

Eventually, Kiss, AC/DC, and the Cars joined Green Day in Neeley's budding tape collection, followed by Metallica, Motrhead, and Black Sabbath in eighth grade. That year, he wrote his first song on guitar, while two years' worth of savings from washing cars and mowing lawns bought his first teenage drum kit. ("It had the worst cymbals I had in my life! They broke within the first month I had them!") A ticket to the Warped Tour in 2000 finally tipped him over into punk, even if most of its bands hardly appear in his recent musical diet.

Listen closely as Neeley talks, and a pattern of threes begins to emerge. Foremost among them, until very recently, was employment of three guitarists almost continually since high school and into his college years in Denton. Former OBN IIIs and current Jonly Bonly leader Jason Smith, who dates back to Neeley's first band in junior high, and A Giant Dog's Andy Bauer and Andrew Cashen, who entered the picture freshman year of high school, made up a formidable front line.

Neeley began breaking all sorts of patterns last year, starting with changing guitarists. He also played his final A Giant Dog gig last summer. Then there's the OBN IIIs, the Stooges-cum-Eighties-Australian punk juggernaut initially formed when he was a soundman at Beerland.

Last year's Third Time to Harm shocked many. It begins on an A-side littered with traditional punk bruisers like "No Time for the Blues," but then the flip side opens with the distinctly Blue yster Cult "Beg to Christ" and continues in a similarly KLBJ-friendly vein that caused local garage heads to drop their PBRs in shock. Tracks like "Let the Music" on the new, Mike McCarthy-produced Worth a Lot of Money make you wonder how many Phil Lynott records the bandleader owns.

Jason Smith is no guitar slouch, but Tom Triplett has chops to spare, as does the rhythm section of bassist Michael Andrew Goodwin and monster drummer Marley Jones. With this dream team, Neeley now fashions rifferama like "You Can Let Me Down Now," crossbreeding British blues brutes the Groundhogs with Deep Purple.

The OBN IIIs still perform with the same wired aggression as before. When the singer unstraps his guitar and crowd surfs the audience, it detonates fuck-shit-up action on a nightly basis. Yet, given new LP opener "Trash Heap," is Orville Bateman Neeley III growing weary of surviving as a DIY artist in increasingly megalopolitan Austin?

"It's no Dallas yet," he muses. "It's not Houston yet. But I've been thinking about that lately, like, 'Where would I go?' I'm heavily rooted here. A lot of my work is based in this town. How can I leave, unless I move to somewhere like Manor? It's only gonna be another 10 years before that'll rise up the same way the Eastside is now."

Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov (August 28, 1853 - February 2, 1939) was a Russian engineer-polymath, scientist and architect renowned for his pioneering works on new methods of analysis for structural engineering that led to breakthroughs in industrial design of world's first hyperboloid structures, lattice shell structures, tensile structures, gridshell structures, oil reservoirs, pipelines, boilers, ships and barges.

In 1864 Vladimir entered Saint Petersburg gymnasium from which he graduated with distinction in 1871. During his high school years he showed mathematical talents, once demonstrating to his classmates and teacher an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Shukhov entered the Imperial Moscow Technical School, in which his teachers included Pafnuty Chebyshev, Aleksey Letnikov, and Nikolay Zhukovsky. In 1876 Shukhov graduated from the school with distinction and a Gold Medal. Chebyshev proposed to him a job as a lecturer in mathematics at the Imperial Moscow Technical School, but Shukhov decided to seek a job in the industry instead.

Thereupon Shukhov went to Philadelphia, to work on the Russian pavilion at the World's Fair and to study the inner workings of the American industry. During his stay in the US Shukhov came to know a Russian-American entrepreneur, Alexander Veniaminovich Bari (Aleksandr Veniaminovic Bari) who also worked on the organization of the Fair.

In 1877 Shukhov returned to Russia and joined the drafting office of the Warsaw-Vienna railroad. Within several months, Shukhov's frustration with standard and routine engineering made him abandon the office and join a military-medical academy.

On his coming to Russia in 1877, Bari persuaded Shukhov to give up his medical education and to assume the office of Chief Engineer in a new company specializing in innovative engineering. Shukhov worked with Bari at this company until the October Revolution. Their works revolutionized many areas of civil engineering, ship engineering, and oil industry. The thermal cracking method, the Shukhov cracking process, was patented by Vladimir Shukhov in 1891.

Besides the innovations he brought to the oil industry and the construction of numerous bridges and buildings, Shukhov was the inventor of a new family of doubly-curved structural forms. These forms, based on non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry, are known today as hyperboloids of revolution. Shukhov developed not only many varieties of light-weight hyperboloid towers and roof systems, but also the mathematics for their analysis. Shukhov is particularly reputed for his original designs of hyperboloid towers such as the Shukhov Tower.

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