It's theatrical music, ceremoniously staged in Kronos' moving, carnal performance, as the quartet shouts, bows water glasses and hits gongs to convey Crumb's "voyage of the soul".
In the haunting "God-music," for example, three musicians bow water-filled glasses to produce eerie harmonics over which unfolds a melancholy cello soliloquy, a spellbinding moment here.
Trees bowed to water, which bowed to stone.
The resistance is particularly high when the wave system created by the bow, where water is pushed aside, reinforces the wave system created by the "anti-source" at the stern, where the water closes in again.
Bringing Pee-wee back is an act of courage in defiance of the media's puritanical twittering; it is also a great relief to his legion of fans, who, on the night I saw the show, were whooping it up long before Pee-wee skittered onstage like a bow-tied water bug, his face clenched in its familiar rictus of surprise and delight.
Below the boat's bow, the water glows a deep and translucent blue.
One was mounted in the bow, above water, and the other two were in deck-mounted swivel launchers amidships.
The ships were also equipped with five 18-inch torpedo tubes, one in the bow above water and four submerged tubes, two on each broadside.
"When the ship hit the lock, it suffered a hole in its bow and water started coming in," Coast Guard spokeswoman Lauren Laughlin told The Huffington Post.
A swift boat fitted with a torpedo on a pole projecting from its bow under water, it could be used to surprise an enemy vessel and impale it underneath the water line.
The result of a series of towing tests begun in 1910, this bow reduced water resistance by an average of six percent at high speeds, supported the forecastle and reduced bending stress on the hull.
