Yellow Vests Emerge on the French Political Landscape

Los Angeles-based Mark Paskewitz guides clinical operations at the National Institute of Clinical Research as vice president, with oversight for geographically distinct clinical research teams. An avid reader, Mark Paskewitz regularly peruses French magazines, with a focus on understanding politics and current events in France. 

One event that unfurled in France starting in November 2018 centered on the emergence of the "Yellow Vests" in the wake of an unpopular increase in gas taxes. Not tied to a political platform, this populist movement takes its name from the brightly colored safety vests that all French motorists are required to keep in their trunk in case of breakdown. 

The basic message of the Yellow Vests calls for higher salaries and lower taxes within an austerity government led by President Emmanuel Macron. The beleaguered president has instituted corporate tax reforms designed to boost outside investment at a time when economic inequalities among average citizens are increasing. A particular fracture is between the provinces and the capital city, with the demonstrations bringing Yellow Vests to the center of Paris’ luxury shopping districts.

Da Vinci May Have Benefited from Being Cross-Eyed

Based in Southern California, Mark Paskewitz is a respected pharmaceutical development director who has assisted in managing clinical trials that produced novel medicines. Passionate about art through the centuries, Mark Paskewitz has a particular interest in the works of Renaissance masters such as El Greco and Leonardo da Vinci.

As reported in Live Science, researchers at the City University of London's Division of Optometry and Visual Sciences recently completed a study that postulates that da Vinci’s art was aided by his eye condition, strabismus, or crossed eyes. 

A condition in which both eyes cannot focus on the same point simultaneously, strabismus is often compensated for by the brain's suppression of vision in the "wandering" eye. What this results in is 2D "monocular" vision, which can amplify the ability of an artist to capture three dimensionality on a flat canvas. 

Associated with many visual artists from Pablo Picasso to Rembrandt van Rijn (based on self-portrait analysis), strabismus has been difficult to assess for da Vinci, as there are only a handful of confirmed self-portraits of the artist. By analyzing the pupil positions in other works of portraiture that may have used elements of the artist’s likeness, researchers discovered that the works seem to depict exotropia, the form of the condition in which one or both of the eyes are turned outwardly. The advantage of this condition for a painter would have been that the actual person or place depicted could have been continuously monitored while the other eye focused on the canvas.

Arcangelo Corelli and the Concerto Grosso

An accomplished clinical operations executive, Dr. Mark Paskewitz draws upon more than two decades of experience in his position as a vice president of clinical operations for a clinical research firm in Los Angeles. Outside of his professional life, Dr. Mark Paskewitz pursues a diverse range of hobbies that includes reading about politics, visiting art galleries, and listening to classical music. He is especially interested in the Baroque period and composers such as Arcangelo Corelli.

A Baroque composer born near Bologna, Italy, in 1653, Corelli’s childhood remains a mystery to scholars. By the 1680s, he had established himself as a well-known violinist and music teacher in Rome who had built his reputation through performances for Sweden’s Queen Christina and other notable figures of the period. In addition to being a popularizer of the violin, which was a fairly new instrument at the time, Corelli became indelibly linked with a type of orchestral music known as the concerto grosso.

The Baroque era saw the rise of a new form of orchestral music, the concerto. Though all concerti involved small groups of individual musicians playing with a full orchestra, the rules of the new compositional form were fluid in its early days. While some concerti featured a single soloist playing alongside a full orchestra (generally known as a solo concerto), Corelli and others began experimenting with writing concertos for multiple soloists playing with an orchestra, known as a concerto grosso.

Though scholars don’t credit Corelli with inventing the concerto grosso, his enormous reputation in European music circles helped it become an accepted form, and throughout the first half of the 18th century composers such as Handel wrote some of their greatest works by employing the concerto grosso form. Though the form had lost favor to the solo concerto by the 1750s, composers such as Leonard Bernstein returned to the concerto grosso during the 20th century.