Note: With the passing of Jeff Beck, we’re bringing back a vintage post from our archive featuring the early years of the legendary guitarist. You can read his obituary here.

Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soulmates of a kind, with many an acclaimed director turning to musicians as actors, commissioning rock stars as soundtrack artists, and filming scenes with bands. Before Nicolas Roeg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and other rock-loving auteurs did all of the above, there was Michelangelo Antonioni, who barreled into the English-language market, under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a trilogy of films steeped in the sights and sounds of sixties counterculture.

Blowup, the first and by far the best of these, though scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, prominently featured the Yardbirds—with both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. In the memorable scene above, Beck smashes his guitar to bits after his amp goes on the fritz. The Italian director “envisioned a scene similar to that of Pete Townshend’s famous ritual of smashing his guitar on stage,” notes […]

The Chrysler Building was once the tallest structure in the world — a heyday that ended up lasting less than a year. The loss of that glorious title owed to the completion of the Empire State Building, twelve blocks away, in 1931. But it was all in the spirit of the game, the Chrysler Building having itself one-upped its close competitor 40 Wall Street (then called the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building) by installing a non-functional spire atop its signature crown at the last moment. But however much of a triumph it represented, that moment was poorly timed: the very next day would bring the Wall Street Crash of 1929, harbinger of the Great Depression. The subsequent decade would inspire little public favor for extravagant monuments in the Big Apple.

Yet compared to the life of a tower, economic cycles are short indeed. By now the Chrysler Building has seen the United States of America through a fair few ups and downs, only gaining appreciation all the while. Removed from its immediate historical context, we can more keenly appreciate architect William […]

Images courtesy of University of Tuebingen

That people wore clothes back in the Stone Age will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who grew up watching The Flintstones. That show, never wholly reliant on established archaeological fact, didn’t get too specific about its time period. But it turns out, based on recently published discoveries by a team of researchers from the University of Tübingen, the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, and Leiden University, that Stone Agers were dressing themselves as early as 300,000 years ago — over one hundred millennia earlier than previously thought.

“This is suggested by cut marks on the metatarsal and phalanx of a cave bear discovered at the Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany,” says the University of Tübingen’s site. The location of such marks indicate that the bear was not simply butchered but carefully skinned.

A cave bear’s winter coat “consists of both long outer hairs that form an airy protective layer and short, dense hairs that provide particularly good insulation” — making […]

Robert van Embricqs, a designer based in Amsterdam, has created The Flow Wall Desk–a wooden decoration that “transforms from a piece of art on the wall into a functional desk by showing off its unique aesthetic.” On his site, he writes:

The Flow Wall Desk acknowledges the potential how to combine functionality with art. This results in creating a desk inside one’s indoor environment. And only with one twist, it becomes a true joy to have a separate working area when needed. It can be subscribed as a piece of functional art that builds on the design track record of transformations in space. However, this one offers a part of the interior that shifts with time: a cozy workspace during the day becomes a compact wall hanging after being used.

Inspired by recent global events and the longer-term trends that precede them, to devise a statement piece that lends dignity to the digital workspace through craft, warm textures, and durably engineered fastenings. The Flow Wall Desk is adaptable and with the contemporary design elements, it can be used throughout homes, […]

Image by Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority

I don’t recall any of my elementary-school classmates looking forward to head-lice inspection day. But had archaeological progress been a few decades more advanced at the time, the teachers might have turned it into a major history lesson. For it was on a comb, designed to remove head lice, that researchers in southern Israel recently found the oldest known sentence written in an alphabet. Invented around 1800 BC, that Canaanite alphabet “was standardized by the Phoenicians in ancient Lebanon,” writes the Guardian‘s Ian Sample, later becoming “the foundation for ancient Greek, Latin and most modern languages in Europe today.”

The comb itself, dated to around 1700 BC, bears a simple Canaanite message: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” As Sample notes, “ancient combs were made from wood, bone and ivory, but the latter would have been expensive, imported luxuries. There were no elephants in Canaan at the time.”

Despite its small size, then, this comb must have been […]