Honoré de Balzac Writes About “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addiction

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174 years after his death, Hon­oré de Balzac remains an extreme­ly mod­ern-sound­ing wag. Were he alive today, he’d no doubt be pound­ing out his provoca­tive obser­va­tions in a cof­fice, a café whose free wifi, lenient staff, and abun­dant elec­tri­cal out­lets make it a mag­net for writ­ers.

One has a hunch…

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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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…

Behold Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of the Bible (1866)

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One occa­sion­al­ly hears it said that, thanks to the inter­net, all the books tru­ly worth read­ing are free: Shake­speare, Don Quixote, the sto­ries of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Com­e­dy, the Bible. Can it be a coin­ci­dence that all of these works inspired illus­tra­tions by Gus­tave Doré? When…

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pioneering Animated Music Video from 1979

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Tom Waits For No One, above, is sure­ly the only film in his­to­ry to have won an Oscar for Sci­en­tif­ic and Tech­ni­cal Achieve­ment for its cre­ator and a first place award at the Hol­ly­wood Erot­ic Film and Video Fes­ti­val.

Direc­tor John Lamb and his part­ner, Bruce Lyon also deserve recog­ni­tion for their taste in source…

The Internet Archive Rescues MTV News’ Web Site, Making 460,000+ of Its Pages Searchable Again

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Image via Inter­net Archive

Last month, MTV News’ web site went miss­ing. Or at least almost all of it did, includ­ing an archive of sto­ries going back to 1997. To some of us, and espe­cial­ly to those of us old enough to have grown up watch­ing MTV on actu­al tele­vi­sion, that won’t…