The First Animation That Hayao Miyazaki Directed on His Own: Watch Footage from the Pilot of Yuki’s Sun (1972)

in Animation, Art | July 30th, 2024

Hayao Miyazaki began his career as an animator in 1963, getting in the door at Toei Animation not long before the company ceased to hire regularly. Miyazaki’s equally retirement-resistant contemporary Tetsuya Chiba, already well on his way to fame as a mangaka, or comic artist, published the series Yuki no Taiyou, or Yuki’s Sun, that same year. But the paths of their work wouldn’t cross until 1972, when Yuki no Taiyou was adapted into a pilot for a prospective animated series, the very first project Miyazaki — who had by that point amassed a good deal of experience as not just a key animator and collaborator with Studio Ghibli co-founder-to-be Isao Takahata, but also as a mangaka himself — directed solo.

Despite having been orphaned as an infant, the titular Yuki grows into a high-spirited tomboy so cheerful as to have developed the odd habit of physically striking other people when she gets too happy.

And as with so many parentless protagonists in children’s fiction, she has not just a distinctive personality but also a story-driving desire to discover the truth about her origins — which, it’s intimated, may not be ordinary, and may indeed be special. Her search for her mother sends her on a quest through mountain, valley, wood, and, given the setting of Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, a great deal of snow (the Japanese word for which is a homophone of Yuki’s name).

Alas, this is a quest television audiences would never see, since the plot for Yuki no Taiyou, footage from which you can see in the five-minute teaser above, didn’t draw a network order for a full series. In some respects, it seems conceptually similar to Sasurai no Shoujo Nell, or Wandering Girl Nell, a voluminously loose adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop that aired in Japan at the end of the seventies. By that time, Miyazaki had completed work on his first animated feature as director, The Castle of Cagliostro. A few years thereafter, he would adapt his own manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind into a motion picture now widely considered the debut of the lavish, captivating Studio Ghibli style — and whose eponymous protagonist has more than a little in common with the adventurous, nature-loving Yuki.

The Philosophy of Hayao Miyazaki: A Video Essay on How the Traditional Japanese Religion Shinto Suffuses Miyazaki’s Films

Hayao Miyazaki, The Mind of a Master: A Thoughtful Video Essay Reveals the Driving Forces Behind the Animator’s Incredible Body of Work

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki Celebrated in a Glorious Concert Arranged by Film Composer Joe Hisaishi

Hayao Miyazaki’s Universe Recreated in a Wonderful CGI Tribute

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

in Art, Books, History, Nature | July 29th, 2024

When Konrad von Megenberg published his Buch der Natur in the mid-fourteenth century, he won the distinction of having assembled the very first natural history in German. More than half a millennium later, the book still fascinates — not least for its depictions of cats, previously featured here on Open Culture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuterbuch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavaria’s personal physician Johannes Hartlieb adapts a section of the Buch der Natur with its own full complement of 160 illustrations.

“Hartlieb’s subject is plants, mostly herbs, and their medical uses,” says the Library of Congress, on whose site you can view and download the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch special is the side-by-side presentation of text and images. The high cost of such a richly decorated book makes it unlikely that it was actually used by doctors or pharmacists of the time.”

But even if they lack a certain scientific practicality, these botanical presentations have a bright, simple boldness that, in some respect, suits our visual aesthetics here in the early twenty-first century; you could call it a renaissance equivalent of flat design.

“Each chapter of the Kräuterbuch follows a traditional system of botanical classification derived from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Public Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illustrations. “Animals are portrayed as pharmacologically knowledgeable, such as in an account of deer rubbing themselves on pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium) to remove hunters’ arrows”; another section holds that “deadly carrots (Thapsia) aid beggars in their deceptions — rubbed on the face, they will produce signs of leprosy, which can also be cured with vinegar.” Discussing the poisonous mandrake (see image immediately above), Hartlieb carries forward von Megenberg’s suggestion “that its magical properties should be kept secret from commoners,” who, naturally, would never be in possession of such a lavish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuterbuch — and most of us know that we’d be better off not messing around with mandrake at all.

via the Public Domain Review

Hortus Eystettensis: The Beautifully Illustrated Book of Plants That Changed Botanical Art Overnight (1613)

A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

Behold a 15th-Century Italian Manuscript Featuring Medicinal Plants with Fantastical Human Faces

The Surprising Map of Plants: A New Animation Shows How All the Different Plants Relate to Each Other

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Page That Changed Comics Forever: Discover the Innovative 1950s Comic Book That Almost Went Unpublished

in Art, Comics/Cartoons | July 22nd, 2024

If you grew up reading American comic books during the second half of the twentieth century, you’ll be familiar with the seal of the Comics Code Authority. I remember seeing it stamped onto the upper-right corner of issues of titles from The Amazing Spider-Man to reprints of Carl Barks’ Scrooge McDuck stories to Jughead Double Digest, but I can’t say I paid it much mind at the time. This was in the nineteen-nineties, by which time the Comics Code itself has lost much of its force. But back when it was created, in 1954, it had as much restrictive power over the content of comic books as the “Hays Code” once had over motion pictures.

According to the video from Youtuber matttt above, the Comics Code was implemented in response to one publisher above all: EC Comics, whose grim and graphic titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror made both a big impact on popular culture and a dent in the reputation of the comics industry. Closing ranks, that industry formed the Comics Code Authority to enforce a regime of self-censorship, mangling EC in its gears just as it was about to publish one of the most innovative stories in its form: “Master Race,” the tale of an ex-SS officer in modern-day New York, by an artist named Bernard Krigstein.

At its height, EC was a veritable comics factory, with a set of procedures in place that ensured the efficient production of cheap thrills — often at considerable cost to the potential of the medium. Krigstein, who’d always harbored higher artistic aspirations, chafed at these limitations, finding such workarounds as subdividing rigidly defined panel spaces into sets of sequential images, the better to convey movement and action. Nowhere did this technique prove more effective than in “Master Race,” with its practically cinematic tour de force sequence in which the haunted Carl Reissman slips under the wheels of a passing subway train.

Quality takes time, and Krigstein missed the story’s deadline just before the Comics Code went into force. “Master Race” was published a few months later, albeit in one of EC’s new, sanitized, and thus much less popular titles. The methods of visual storytelling he refined have now become standard elements of comic art, but the medium’s enthusiasts can sense how far Krigstein could have gone, if not for the frustration that ultimately caused him to abandon comics for a career as a high-school teacher: “Something tremendous could have been done,” he said, “if only they’d let me do it.” With the Comics Code long since defunct — and now that EC’s most disturbing comics look tame — content has become a free-for-all. But what artist dares to be as bold as Krigstein in pushing forward the form?

1950s Pulp Comic Adaptations of Ray Bradbury Stories Getting Republished

Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influential Comic Strips

How Art Spiegelman Designs Comic Books: A Breakdown of His Masterpiece, Maus

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, Gets Digitized as Early Installments Enter the Public Domain

“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Photo Satirically Mocks Every Vice & Sin Censored by the Hays Movie Censorship Code

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Behold James Sowerby’s Strikingly Illustrated New Elucidation of Colours (1809)

in Art, Books | July 18th, 2024

James Sowerby was an artist dedicated to the natural world. It thus comes as no surprise that he was also enormously interested in color, especially given the era in which he lived. Born in 1757, he made his professional start as a painter of flowers: a viable career path in those days, at least to those with Sowerby’s talent and dedication. It was in 1790 that he began what would end up being the 23-years-in-the-making English Botany, the landmark 36-volume work for which he remains best known today. Its 2,592 images captured the full range of his country’s flora, some of them in hues that readers had never before encountered in real life.

Alas, writes Joyce Dixon at Shaping Colour, “as the years passed, Sowerby watched with dismay as the bright hues of his hand-colored engravings began to fade and decay — the inevitable action of time and chemical instability working away at his watercolor pigments.” This inspired another ambitious artistic-scientific project: “to develop a standard, universal and permanent method of representing natural color.” In 1809, he invented a device he called the “Chromatometer,” which “presented a standard, measurable prismatic spectrum to the user.” Looking through a prism, that user could theoretically “pinpoint specific colors in the spectrum revealed by the prism, offering a standard reference for a specific hue” identified in reality.

The Chromatometer never proved viable, writes Paul Sorene at Flashbak, “because it was too fiddly and botanists often worked at night,” but the work that documented it lives on. A New Elucidation of Colours, Original, Prismatic and Material: Showing Their Concordance in the Three Primitives, Yellow, Red and Blue: and the Means of Producing, Measuring and Mixing Them: with some Observations on the Accuracy of Sir Isaac Newton presents a system of color theory based on red, yellow, and blue (unlike modern systems, not red, green, and blue). At the same time that Sowerby was developing it, his countryman Thomas Young was putting together a scientific theory of his own about how all perception of color arises from the eye combining just three wavelengths — a theory that turned out to be true.

You can read or download A New Elucidation at the Wellcome Collection or the Internet Archive. These digitized versions include all of Sowerby’s original illustrations, for use with the Chromatometer and otherwise, which remain aesthetically compelling these two centuries later. But as underscored by the copious amounts of text, they reflect a time when humanity was coming into an understanding of not just how to replicate colors reliably and accurately, but of the nature of color itself. Sowerby may not have had the last word on the subject, despite having corrected no less a forebear than Newton, but his investigations can only have helped him look even more closely at the natural kingdoms he meant to capture — including that of minerals, which was also beckoning at the time.

via Flashbak

The Woman Who Theorized Color: An Introduction to Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808)

Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

A Visionary 115-Year-Old Color Theory Manual Returns to Print: Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Color Problems

The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)

The Book of Colour Concepts: A New 800-Page Celebration of Color Theory, Including Works by Newton, Goethe, and Hilma af Klint

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The “Nonsense” Botanical Illustrations of Victorian Artist-Poet Edward Lear (1871–77)

in Art, Biology, Comedy | July 18th, 2024

Since the Victorian era, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” has been, for generation upon generation in the English-speaking world, the kind of poem that one simply knows, whether one remembers actually having read it or not. As with most such works that seep so permanently into the culture, it doesn’t quite represent its author in full. Though more or less of a piece with his celebrated “nonsense” verse (which I myself read in childhood, more than a century after its initial publication), it hints only vaguely at his intense artistic engagement with the natural world, through the observation and lively portrayal of which he made his name as an illustrator.

“Lear was an attentive and informed reader of Darwin; he worked with John Gould, the natural-history entrepreneur who had actually picked apart the varieties of finch that Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, noting that his work evidences a Linnaean obsession “with the power of naming, with sticking a tag on a thing which gives it a place at, and on, the table.” Lear gave Latin names to at least two real species of parrots, but he also fabricated such chimeras as Phattfacia Stupenda, Armchairia Comfortabilis, Tigerlilia Terribilis, examples of which he also illustrates in his Nonsense Botany series of the eighteen-seventies.

Lear’s “penchant for the natural world,” says The Dilettante, shaped his “knack for inventing ridiculous landscapes and anthropomorphizing all kind of creatures and objects. The result is a surreal Learean world of Scroobious Pips, Quangle Wangles, and Great Gromboolian Plains.” His “fanciful re-sculpting of the physical world is brilliantly exemplified” in his Nonsense Botany, with its “sketches and entertaining captions read as a taxonomy of incongruous plant-creatures.” Whether at the Public Domain Review or Project Gutenberg, you can gaze upon them all and experience not just light amusement, but also a kind of astonishment at Lear’s peculiar talent: he doesn’t “find the amazing in the ordinary,” as Gopnik puts it; “he finds the ordinary in the amazing.”

via Public Domain Review

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s Pressed Plants & Flowers Is Now Online

Hortus Eystettensis: The Beautifully Illustrated Book of Plants That Changed Botanical Art Overnight (1613)

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illustrations of the Natural World Free to Download

An Animated Reading of “The Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense Poem That Somehow Manages to Make Sense

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Martin Scorsese Plays Vincent Van Gogh in a Short, Surreal Film by Akira Kurosawa

in Art, Film | July 16th, 2024

The idea of the auteur director has been a controversial one at times given the sheer number of people required at every stage to produce a film. But it hangs together for me when you look at the films of say, Martin Scorsese or Akira Kurosawa, both directors with very distinctive visual languages and ways of moving the camera. Granted, neither director would be who he is without their crack teams of actors, writers, composers, cinematographers, etc. But it is part of their genius to consistently pull those teams together to realize visions that none of the individuals involved could fully see on their own. Though the final product may be the result of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work by hundreds of people, the films of an auteur take shape foremost in the directors’ mind’s eye (and paintings and storyboards) rather than the writer’s script or producer’s conference room.

These directors are driven, like painters, to realize their visions, and in Kurosawa’s case, that drive lasted right up until the end of his life. (It was his wish to die on set, though an accident left him unable to walk and put an end to his directing career three years before the end of his life.) A painter himself, his films have always been colorful and painterly, and his final few projects were intensely so. One of those last films, 1990’s Dreams, the first of his films for which he alone wrote the screenplay, not only originated fully in Kurosawa’s mind, but in his unconscious. A departure from his typically epic narratives, the film follows various Kurosawa surrogates through eight vignettes, based on eight recurring dreams, each one unfolding with a surreal logic all of its own. In the fifth short episode, “Crows,” Kurosawa casts Scorsese, his fellow auteur and his equal as a visual stylist, as Vincent Van Gogh.

The camera begins in a gallery, moving restlessly before several Van Gogh paintings and behind an art student—identifiable as a Kurosawa stand-in by the floppy white hat he puts on in the next scene, when he wanders into the French countryside of the paintings. The fields, bridge, and barns are rendered in Van Gogh’s brilliant colors and skewed lines—and the student journeys further in to meet the artist himself: Scorsese in red beard and bandaged ear. This is the only episode in the film not in Japanese; the student speaks French to a group of women, and Van Gogh speaks Scorsese’s New York-accented English, giving a lesson on “natural beauty” (the video above adds Spanish subtitles). It is not the most convincing performance from Scorsese, but that hardly seems to be the point. This is not so much Scorsese as Van Gogh, but rather Van Gogh as Scorsese, and Kurosawa dreams himself as a younger acolyte of his American counterpart.

“Crows,” writes Vincent Canby, is the “least characteristic segment ” of Dreams—the others manifest much more familiar, more Japanese, scenes and themes. But it is for that reason that “Crows” is perhaps the most revealing of Kurosawa’s statements on his status as an auteur and his relationship with his peers. He approaches Van Gogh/Scorsese not as a rival or even an equal, but as a student, filled with questions and a desire to understand the artist’s methods and motives. The short segment speaks to the way Kurosawa eagerly learned much from Western artists even as he mastered his own cinematic language with distinctly Japanese stories. In this way, he manifested yet another quality of the auteur: a truly international approach to film that transcends barriers of language and culture.

You can purchase a copy of Kurosawa’s complete film here.

Related Content:

The Paintings of Akira Kurosawa

Revisit Martin Scorsese’s Hand-Drawn Storyboards for Taxi Driver

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Eno: The New “Generative Documentary” on Brian Eno That’s Never the Same Movie Twice

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | July 15th, 2024

Brian Eno once wrote that “it’s possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say, ‘You mean you used to listen to to exactly the same thing over and over again?’ ” That speculation comes from an essay on what he calls “generative music,” which is automatically produced by digital systems in accordance with human-set rules and preferences: “like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations.” These words were first published nearly 30 years ago, in his book A Year with Swollen Appendices. Today, he has at least one grandchild, whose handwriting figures in one of the music videos from his latest solo album. That particular work may be non-generative, but his interest in the concept of the generative in art endures.

This year, Eno even stars in a generative documentary about his life as an artist, music producer, and “sonic landscaper” directed by Gary Hustwit, best known for Helvetica and other non-fiction films on design. The New York Times’ Rob Tannenbaum writes that Eno “is unlike any other portrait of a musician. It’s not even a portrait, because it isn’t fixed or static. Instead, Hustwit used a proprietary software program that reconfigures the length, structure and contents of the movie.” This suited both Eno’s professional philosophy and his antipathy to the conventional documentary form. “Our lives are stories we write and rewrite,” Tannenbaum quotes him as writing in an e‑mail. ‘There is no single reliable narrative of a life.”

In fact, there are about 52 quintillion different narratives, to go by the estimate of possible permutations of Eno Hustwit has given in interviews. “We could make a 10-hour series about Brian, and we still wouldn’t be scratching the surface of everything he’s done,” he told The Verge. “I just added a bunch of footage this past week that’s going into the Film Forum week two runs, which has never been in the system before.” Not only do “we get to keep digging into the footage and bringing new things into it, but we also get to keep changing the software. And I don’t know, in a year from now, what the film will look like or what the streaming versions of it will be.”

What Eno didn’t have to clarify in 1996, but Hustwit has to clarify in 2024, is that this kind of generative film isn’t generated by artificial intelligence. Emphasizing that “the data set is all our material,” including 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of conventionally shot film, Hustwit frames his enterprise’s custom software, acronymically called Brain One, “as more like gardening.” That metaphor could have come straight from Eno himself, who’s spoken about “changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds.” Eventually, “you stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together.”

Watch Brian Eno’s “Video Paintings,” Where 1980s TV Technology Meets Visual Art

Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989)

How David Byrne and Brian Eno Make Music Together: A Short Documentary

Watch Another Green World, a Hypnotic Portrait of Brian Eno (2010)

Watch Brian Eno’s Experimental Film “The Ship,” Made with Artificial Intelligence

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Andy Warhol Hosts Frank Zappa on His Cable TV Show, and Later Recalls, “I Hated Him More Than Ever” After the Show

in Art, Music | July 9th, 2024

Had Andy Warhol lived to see the internet–especially social networking–he would have loved it, though it may not have loved him. Though Warhol did see the very beginnings of the PC revolution, and made computer art near the end of his life on a Commodore Amiga 1000, he was mostly enamored, unsurprisingly, of TV. “I love television,” he once remarked, “It is the medium I’d most like to shine in. I’m really jealous of everybody who’s got their own show on television. I want a show of my own.”

Warhol realized his dream in 1979, though in a venue that may not have lived up to his fantasies: a New York public-access channel called Manhattan Cable, “which showed local sports matches and agreed to sell 30-minute slots to Warhol for around $75 a pop,” notes The Telegraph. Warhol made a total of 42 episodes of his odd interview show. The pop art impresario “wasn’t exactly a natural… when it came to the delicate art of chat-show hosting,” but “he didn’t let that stop him.” By 1983, one might have thought he’d have gotten the hang of it, yet he seems especially awkward when cranky prog genius Frank Zappa appeared on his show that year.

Luckily for Warhol, he is joined by Zappa fan Richard Berlin, who serves as a buffer between the two superstars. (Berlin is probably the son of William Randolph Hearst’s handpicked successor, whose daughter, Brigid, was one of Warhol’s film stars.) At least in the excerpt above, Berlin does all of the work while Warhol looks on, seemingly stupefied. But the truth is that Warhol hated Zappa, and after the interview, he wrote in his Diaries, “I hated Zappa even more than when it started.” Part of what the show’s ostensible host found so objectionable was Zappa’s egomaniacal personality. Though Warhol, like Zappa, controlled his own small independent empire, in temperament, the two couldn’t have been more different.

But there was also some personal history between them that went back to the earliest days of the Velvet Underground. “I remember,” Warhol goes on, “when he was so mean to us when the Mothers of Invention played with the Velvet Underground—I think both at the trip, in L.A., and at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I hated him then and I still don’t like him.” Zappa wasn’t simply rude, however; at a 1967 show in New York, he turned his talent for ridicule into what Kaleidoscope magazine writer Chris Darrow called “one of the greatest pieces of rock’n roll theater that I have ever seen.”

The opening night was very crowded and Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention showed up to show their support. (…) Nico’s delivery of her material was very flat, deadpan, and expressionless, and she played as though all of her songs were dirges. She seemed as though she was trying to resurrect the ennui and decadence of Weimar, pre-Hitler Germany. Her icy, Nordic image also added to the detachment of her delivery. (…) The audience was on her side, as she was in her element and the Warhol contingent was very prominent that night. However, what happened next is what sticks in my mind the most from that night. In between sets, Frank Zappa got up from his seat and walked up on the stage and sat behind the keyboard of Nico’s B‑3 organ. He proceeded to place his hands indiscriminately on the keyboard in a total, atonal fashion and screamed at the top of his lungs, doing a caricature of Nico’s set, the one he had just seen. The words to his impromptu song were the names of vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, asparagus… This “song” kept going for about a minute or so and then suddenly stopped. He walked off the stage and the show moved on.

What Warhol took personally may have just been the irrepressible outgrowth of Zappa’s disdain for virtually everything, which he expresses to Berlin in the interview. Original Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black speculated that he may have hated the Velvet Underground because “they were junkies and Frank just couldn’t tolerate any kind of drugs.” The two bands were also, briefly, competitors at MGM.

But perhaps Zappa just couldn’t tolerate anyone else taking the spotlight, especially a talented female performer. Warhol remembers Zappa’s response to a compliment about his daughter, Moon. “Listen,” he supposedly told Warhol, “I created her. I invented her.… She’s nothing. It’s all me.” In contrast to the “peculiar” reply, Warhol writes “if it were my daughter I would be saying ‘Gee, she’s so smart,’ but he’s taking all the credit.” Zappa may have been a musical genius with a special entrepreneurial flair and incisive critical wit, but the “sexist autocrat… with a scabrous attitude,” as Carlo Wolff describes him, “was not a likeable man.” Certainly the mild-mannered Warhol didn’t think so.

Frank Zappa’s 1980s Appearances on The David Letterman Show

When Andy Warhol Guest-Starred on The Love Boat (1985)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 62 ) |

The First Animation That Hayao Miyazaki Directed on His Own: Watch Footage from the Pilot of Yuki’s Sun (1972)

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

The Page That Changed Comics Forever: Discover the Innovative 1950s Comic Book That Almost Went Unpublished

Behold James Sowerby’s Strikingly Illustrated New Elucidation of Colours (1809)

The “Nonsense” Botanical Illustrations of Victorian Artist-Poet Edward Lear (1871–77)

Martin Scorsese Plays Vincent Van Gogh in a Short, Surreal Film by Akira Kurosawa

Eno: The New “Generative Documentary” on Brian Eno That’s Never the Same Movie Twice

Andy Warhol Hosts Frank Zappa on His Cable TV Show, and Later Recalls, “I Hated Him More Than Ever” After the Show

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