Napoleon’s Kindle: Discover the Miniaturized Traveling Library That the Emperor Took on Military Campaigns

Every piece of technology has a precedent. Most have several different types of precedents. You’ve probably used (and may well own) an eBook reader, for instance, but what would have afforded you a selection of reading material two or three centuries ago? If you were a Jacobean Englishman of means, you might have used the kind of traveling library we featured in 2017, a handsome portable case custom-made for your books. (If you’re Tom Stoppard in the 21st century, you still do.) If you were Napoleon, who seemed to love books as much as he loved military power — he didn’t just amass a vast collection of them, but kept a personal librarian to oversee it — you’d take it a big step further.

“Many of Napoleon’s biographers have incidentally mentioned that he […] used to carry about a certain number of favorite books wherever he went, whether traveling or camping,” says an 1885 Sacramento Daily Union article posted by Austin Kleon, “but it is not generally known that he made several plans for the construction of portable libraries which were to form part of his baggage.” The piece’s main source, a Louvre librarian who grew up as the son of one of Napoleon’s librarians, recalls from his father’s stories that “for a long time Napoleon used to carry about the books he required in several boxes holding about sixty volumes each,” each box first made of mahogany and later of more solid leather-covered oak. “The inside was lined with green leather or velvet, and the books were bound in morocco,” an even softer leather most often used for bookbinding.

To use this early traveling library, Napoleon had his attendants consult “a catalogue for each case, with a corresponding number upon every volume, so that there was never a moment’s delay in picking out any book that was wanted.” This worked well enough for a while, but eventually “Napoleon found that many books which he wanted to consult were not included in the collection,” for obvious reasons of space. And so, on July 8, 1803, he sent his librarian these orders:

The Emperor wishes you to form a traveling library of one thousand volumes in small 12mo and printed in handsome type. It is his Majesty’s intention to have these works printed for his special use, and in order to economize space there is to be no margin to them. They should contain from five hundred to six hundred pages, and be bound in covers as flexible as possible and with spring backs. There should be forty works on religion, forty dramatic works, forty volumes of epic and sixty of other poetry, one hundred novels and sixty volumes of history, the remainder being historical memoirs of every period.

In sum: not only did Napoleon possess a traveling library, but when that traveling library proved too cumbersome for his many and varied literary demands, he had a whole new set of not just portable book cases but even more portable books made for him. (You can see how they looked packed away in the image tweeted by Cork County Library above.) This prefigured in a highly analog manner the digital-age concept of recreating books in another format specifically for compactness and convenience — the kind of compactness and convenience now increasingly available to all of us today, and to a degree Napoleon never could have imagined, let alone demanded. It may be good to be the Emperor, but in many ways, it’s better to be a reader in the 21st century.

Note: This post was originally published in 2017. Given that Napoleon is back in the news, with the new Ridley Scott film, we’re bringing it back.

Related Content:

Discover the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Precursor to the Kindle

Napoleon’s English Lessons: How the Military Leader Studied English to Escape the Boredom of Life in Exile

Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waistcoat?: The Origins of This Distinctive Pose Explained

Napoleon’s Disastrous Invasion of Russia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visualization: It’s Been Called “the Best Statistical Graphic Ever Drawn”

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renaissance Invention Created to Make Books Portable & Help Scholars Study (1588)

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

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The Surprisingly Long History of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Processing Technology Music Critics Love to Hate

In the fall of 1998, pop music changed forever — or at least it seems that way today, a quarter-century later. The epochal event in question was the release of Cher’s comeback hit “Believe,” of whose jaggedly fractured vocal glissando no listener had heard the likes of before. “The glow-and-flutter of Cher’s voice at key points in the song announced its own technological artifice,” writes critic Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork, “a blend of posthuman perfection and angelic transcendence ideal for the vague religiosity of the chorus.” As for how that effect had been achieved, only the tech-savviest studio professionals would have suspected a creative misuse of Auto-Tune, a popular digital audio processing tool brought to market the year before.

As its name suggests, Auto-Tune was designed to keep a musical performance in tune automatically. This capability owes to the efforts of one Andy Hildebrand, a classical flute virtuoso turned oil-extraction engineer turned music-technology entrepreneur. Employing the same mathematical acumen he’d used to assist the likes of Exxon in determining the location of prime drilling sites from processed sonar data, he figured out a vast simplification of the calculations theoretically required for an algorithm to put a real vocal recording into a particular key.

Rapidly adopted throughout the music industry, Hildebrand’s invention soon became a generic trademark, like Kleenex, Jell-O, or Google. Even if a studio wasn’t using Auto-Tune, it was almost certainly auto-tuning, and with such subtlety that listeners never noticed.

The producers of “Believe,” for their part, turned the subtlety (or, technically, the “smoothness”) down to zero. In an attempt to keep that discovery a secret, they claimed at first to have used a vocoder, a synthesizer that converts the human voice into manipulable analog or digital signals. Some would also have suspected the even more venerable talkbox, which had been made well-known in the seventies and eighties by Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, and Roger Troutman of Zapp. Though the “Cher effect,” as it was known for a time, could plausibly be regarded as an aesthetic descendant of those devices, it had an entirely different technological basis. A few years after that basis became widely understood, conspicuous Auto-Tune became ubiquitous, not just in dance music but also in hip-hop, whose artists (not least Rappa Ternt Sanga T-Pain) used Auto-Tune to steer their genre straight into the currents of mainstream pop, if not always to high critical acclaim.

Used as intended, Auto-Tune constituted a godsend for music producers working with any singer less freakishly skilled than, say, Freddie Mercury. Producer-Youtuber Rick Beato admits as much in the video just above, though given his classic rock- and jazz-oriented tastes, it doesn’t come as a surprise also to hear him lament the technology’s overuse. But for those willing to take it to ever-further extremes, Auto-Tune has given rise to previously unimagined subgenres, bringing (as emphasized in a recent Arte documentary) the universal language of melody into the linguistically fragmented arena of global hip-hop. As a means of generating “digital soul, for digital beings, leading digital lives,” in Reynolds’ words, Auto-Tune does reflect our time, for better or for worse. Its detractors can at least take some consolation in the fact that recent releases have come with something called a “humanize knob.”

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Brian Eno on the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music

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

Generative AI for Everyone: A Free Course from AI Pioneer Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng–an AI pioneer and Stanford computer science professor–has released a new course called Generative AI for Everyone. Designed for a non-technical audience, the course will “guide you through how generative AI works and what it can (and can’t) do. It includes hands-on exercises where you’ll learn to use generative AI to help in day-to-day work.”  The course also explains “how to think through the lifecycle of a generative AI project, from conception to launch, including how to build effective prompts,” and it discusses “the potential opportunities and risks that generative AI technologies present to individuals, businesses, and society.” Given the coming prevalence of AI, it’s worth spending six hours with this course (the estimated time needed to complete it). You can audit Generative AI for Everyone for free, and watch all of the lectures at no cost. If you would like to take the course and earn a certificate, it will cost $49.

Generative AI for Everyone will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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The New York Public Library Presents an Archive of 860,000 Historical Images: Download Medieval Manuscripts, Japanese Prints, William Blake Illustrations & More

Back when we last featured the New York Public Library’s digital collections in 2016, they contained about 160,000 high-resolution images from various historical periods. This seemed like a fairly vast archive at the time, but in the years since, that number has grown to more than 860,000. If it was difficult to know where to begin exploring it seven years ago — when it already contained such digitized treasures as the Depression-era Farm Security Administration photographs taken by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks, Walt Whitman’s handwritten preface to Specimen Days, Thomas Jefferson’s list of books for a private library, and sixteenth-century illustrations for The Tale of Genji — it can hardly be easier now.

Or rather, it can hardly be easier unless you start with the NYPL digital collections’ public domain picks, a section of the site that, as of this writing, organizes thousands and thousands of its holdings into thirteen browsable and intriguing categories.

These include the FSA photos, but also book illustrations by William Blake, editions of The Negro Traveler’s Green Book (as previously featured here on Open Culture), the music and lyrics for American popular songs, the papers of Walt Whitman, and the more than 42,000 stereoscopic prints of the Robert N. Dennis collection, which capture an early form of 3D views of a fast-developing (and, often, now-unrecognizable) American continent.

Enthusiasts of New York City itself will no doubt make straight for sections like “changing New York,” “photographs of Ellis Island, 1902-1913,” and “album de la construction de la Statue de la Liberté.” Soon after after its dedication in 1886, the Statue of Liberty came to symbolize not just a city, and not just a country, but the very concept of American civilization and the grand cultural exchange it had already begun to conduct with the rest of the world. 137 years later, you can spend a little time in the NYPL’s digital collections and turn up everything from illuminated manuscripts from medieval and Renaissance Europe to Japanese woodblock prints to color drawings of Indian life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — and you don’t have to be anywhere near New York to do so. Enter the NYPL digital collections here.

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

Behold Ancient Egyptian, Greek & Roman Sculptures in Their Original Color

There was a time when we imagined that most ancient sculpture never had any color except for that of the stone from which it was hewed. Doubt fell upon that notion as long ago as the eighteenth century, when archaeological digging in Pompeii and Herculaneum brought up statues whose color had been preserved, but only in recent years has it come to be presented as an exploded myth. Though some of the coverage of the false “whiteness” of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculpture has divided along drearily predictable twenty-first-century cultural battle lines, this moment has also presented an opportunity to stage fascinating, even groundbreaking exhibitions.

Take Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, which ran from the summer of last year to the spring of this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can still see some of its displays in the Smarthistory video at the top of the post, in which art historians Elizabeth Macaulay and Beth Harris discuss the “world of Technicolor” that was antiquity, the Renaissance origins of the “idea that ancient sculpture was not painted,” and the modern attempts to reconstruct the sculptural color schemes almost totally lost to time.

Architect Vinzenz Brinkmann goes deeper into these subjects in the video from the Met itself just above, paying special attention to the museum’s bust of Caligula — not the finest emperor Rome ever had, to put it mildly, but one whose face has become a promising canvas for the restoration of color.

You can see much more of Chroma in the Art Trip tour video just above. Its wonders include not just genuine pieces of ancient sculpture, but strikingly colorful reconstructions of a finial in the form of a sphinx, a Pompeiian statue of the goddess Artemis, a battle-depicting side of the Alexander Sarcophagus, and “a marble archer in the costume of a horseman of the peoples to the north and east of Greece,” to name just a few. You may prefer these historically educated colorizations to the austere monochrome figures you grew up seeing in textbooks, or you may appreciate after all the kind of elegance that only centuries of ruin can bestow. Either way, your relationship to the ancient world will never be quite the same.

Related content:

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The Met Digitally Restores the Colors of an Ancient Egyptian Temple, Using Projection Mapping Technology

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Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

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

Behold LEGO Reenactments of Famous Psychology Experiments, as Imagined by Artificial Intelligence

Cognitive scientist Tomer Ullman, head of Harvard’s Computation, Cognition, and Development lab, may have inadvertently blundered into an untapped vein of LEGO Icon inspiration when his interest in AI led him to stage recreations of famous psych experiments.

If you think Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night LEGO playset is a challenge, imagine putting together the AI-generated playset inspired by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1961 obedience studies, above.

Participants in these studies were assigned to play one of two parts – teacher or learner. Partner pairs were seated in separate rooms, accessible to each other by microphones. The teacher read the learner a list of matched words they’d expected to remember shortly thereafter. If the learner flubbed up, the teacher was to administer an electric shock via a series of labelled switches, upping it by 15-volts for each successive error. The microphones ensured that the teacher was privy to the learner’s increasingly distressed reactions – screams, desperate protestation, and – at the highest voltage – radio silence.

Should a teacher hesitate, they’d be reminded that the parameters of the experiment, for which they were earning $4.50, required them to continue. They also received reassurance that the painful shocks caused no permanent tissue damage.

Here’s the thing:

The teachers were innocent as to the experiment’s true nature. They thought the study’s focus was punishment’s effect on learning ability, but in fact, Milgram was studying the limits of obedience to authority.

The learners were all in on the ruse. They received no shocks. Their responses were all feigned.

If our eyes don’t deceive us, the Milgram experiment that the AI imagines is even more extreme than the original. It appears all participants, including those waiting for their turn, are in the same room.

As someone commented on Bluesky, the new social media platform on which Ullman shared his hypothetical playsets, “the subtle details the AI has got wrong here are the stuff of nightmares.”

AI’s take on the Stanford prison experiment seems more benign than the controversial 1971 experiment that recruited 24 student participants for a filmed study of prison life to be staged in Stanford University’s psychology department’s basement, randomly dividing them into prisoners and guards.

AI’s faithful recreation of the LEGO figurines’ physical limitations can’t really capture the faux guards’ brutality – making their prisoners clean out toilets with their bare hands, stripping them naked, and depriving them of food and beds. Their power abuses were so wanton, and the prisoners’ distress so extreme, that the planned duration of two weeks was scrapped six days in.

It’s worth noting that all the student participants came to the study with clean bills of physical and mental health, and no histories of criminal arrest.

Far less upsetting are the cognitive science experiment playsets depicting the delayed gratification of the Stanford Marshmallow Test and the selective attention of the Invisible Gorilla Test (both right above).

Ullman also steered AI toward LEGO tributes to B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning chamber and Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness research (below).

No word on whether he has plans to continue experimenting with AI-engineered LEGO playset proposals featuring historic experiments of psychology and cognitive science.

Follow on Bluesky if you’re curious. You’ll need to register for a free account and apply for an invite code, if you haven’t already… wait, are we setting ourselves up to be unwitting participants in another psych experiment?

Hmmm…

Via Kottke

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Discover the Mikiphone, the World’s First Portable Record Player: “Fits a Jacket Pocket; Goes into a Lady’s Handbag” (1924)

The iPod shuffle recently enjoyed a bit of a comeback on TikTok.

Can the Mikiphone be far behind?

The invention of siblings Miklós and Étienne Vadász, the world’s first pocket record player caused a stir when it was introduced a century ago, nabbing first prize at an international music exhibition and finding favor with modernist architect Le Corbusier, who hailed it for embodying the “essence of the esprit nouveau.”

Unlike more recent portable audio innovations, some assembly was required.

It’s fair to assume that the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound staffer deftly unpacking antique Mikiphone components from its cunning Sony Discman-sized case, above, has more practice putting the thing together than a nervous young fella eager to woo his gal al fresco with his just purchased, cutting edge 1924 technology.

A period advertisement extols the Mikiphone’s portability …

Fits in a jacket pocket

Goes in a lady’s handbag

Will hang on a cycle frame

Goes in a car door pocket

Ideal for picnics, car jaunts, river trips

…but fails to mention that in order to enjoy it, you’d also have to schlep along a fair amount of 78 RPM records, whose 10-inch diameters aren’t nearly so pocket and purse-compatible.

Maison Paillard produced approximately 180,000 of these hand-cranked wonders over the course of three years. When sales dropped in 1927, the remaining stock was sold off at a discount or given away to contest winners.

These days, an authentic Mikphone can fetch $500 and upward at auction. (Beware of Mikiphonies!)

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

 

 

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stirring Letter About ChatGPT and Human Creativity: “We Are Fighting for the Very Soul of the World”

Observers have expressed a variety of reactions to the organizational drama unfolding even now at OpenAI, the non-profit behind the enormously popular ChatGPT. Some have already written speculative laments in case of OpenAI’s total dissolution, mourning the great strides in artificial intelligence that would thus be forsaken. It’s safe to say that Nick Cave will not do the same: having used his newsletter The Red Hand Files to cast doubt on AI’s ability to write a great song — and to condemn a set of ChatGPT-generated lyrics in his own style — he more recently told a fan exactly “what’s wrong with making things faster and easier” through AI.

“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavors animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning,” Cave writes. “It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.”

In “fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanizing the imagination,” it works toward eliminating “the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself.” But the creative impulse “must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil,” we should fight the forces set against it “tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

These are strong words, and they sound even stronger when read aloud in the Letters Live video above by Stephen Fry. One may sense a certain irony here, given Fry’s well-known technophilia, but he and Cave have made common cause before, whether calling for government support of the arts or turning up for the coronation of King Charles III. “Fry refers to Cave’s Murder Ballads album in his book The Ode Less Travelled,” adds one Youtube commenter, “while Fry is rumored to be the person with ‘an enormous and encyclopedic brain’ in Cave’s song ‘We Call Upon the Author.'” ChatGPT could well be described as encyclopedic, but in no ordinary sense does it have a brain — the very thing of which authors are now called upon to make the fullest possible use.

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

A Deep, Track-by-Track Analysis of The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s Musical Journey Through the Stresses & Anxieties of Modern Existence

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon turned 50 earlier this year, which perhaps makes it seem easy to dismiss as an artifact of a bygone era. It belongs to a period in popular music history when musicians and bands were approaching their albums with ever-greater aesthetic and intellectual ambitions — what I’ve come to call the medium’s “heroic age” — whose products can strike twenty-first-century listeners as excessive, pretentious, and even unhinged. But in spite of the ambience of dorm-room THC haze that has long hung around it, The Dark Side of the Moon remains relevant today, dealing as it does with such eternal themes as youth, choice, mortality, and madness — to say nothing of time and money.

That’s how Polyphonic creator Noah Lefevre frames it in the video above, an hour-long track-by-track analysis of the Floyd’s best-known album. It’s actually a compilation of all eight episodes of a series originally released in 2020, which, much like The Dark Side of the Moon Itself, benefits from being experienced not in parts but as a whole.

Lefevre describes the album as “about the stresses and struggles that make human existence what it is. It’s about all the noise that constantly surrounds us, and about trying to cut through that noise to find truth, beauty, and meaning.” He also quotes Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters ascribing to it the statement that “all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them.”

The Dark Side of the Moon has endured not just by dealing with those themes, but also by doing so with a cinematic sonic richness. That owes much to the work of Alan Parsons, who engineered the recording, but most of the album’s long conception happened outside the studio. “It started out with a few weeks in a rehearsal space during which Pink Floyd wrote a rough outline for the piece,” says Lefevre. “Then the band took that on tour, even though it was far from completion. They performed sixteen dates in the UK, playing the album in full each night”; all the while, they “worked through the album, fine-tuning it and developing it.” This explains why the result — which, like all of Pink Floyd’s albums, you can hear free on Youtube — sounds painstakingly produced yet organic. Give The Dark Side of the Moon another listen today, and you’ll understand why it’s persisted like the condition of modern life itself.

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

Watch Prince Bust Some Eye-Popping Moves in Rehearsal Footage from 1984

Dance was as much a baked-in part of Prince’s allure, as his suggestive lyrics and mastery of multiple instruments.

The public got its first taste of his affinity for the form at a John Hay elementary school talent show to which he contributed a tap routine, and again at a James Brown concert at the Minneapolis Armory, when the 10-year-old  briefly hopped onstage to mash potato, an incident he recalled in a 1985 interview with MTV.

He received formal training at the Minnesota Dance Theatre, as a teenaged participant in the city’s Urban Arts Program, and rehearsed obsessively.

Choreographer Cat Glover, a frequent collaborator, told Mpls. St. Paul Magazine:

He would push himself to the limit all the time. He made it look easy, but everything that looked easy was three months’ rehearsal. It was never easy.

The above rehearsal footage from the summer of 1984 doesn’t show the sweat, but the choreography is obviously demanding. Prince leaps, squats, pirouettes, throws himself into James Brown splits, and executes a flurry of precision dance moves –  in wicked high heeled boots.

“He ruined his hips on those damn high heels he used to wear” according to Minneapolis-area choreographer, John Command, who worked with Prince and the cast of Purple Rain, for nearly a year before shooting began:

We would do Broadway stuff, Bob Fosse, Jerry Robbins who did West Side Story. A lot of that is very difficult stuff and he loved it.

Glover recalled how Prince would visit dance clubs to check partygoers’ response to his music:

For one of his songs to get recorded it had to come with everything. If your feet aren’t tapping, if your feet aren’t bopping, it’s not good enough. If you can’t dance with music then it’s no good.

In 1989, when he opened his Glam Slam nightclub, he insisted on a resident dance troupe, and made them a priority. Its choreographer, Kat Carroll remembered how dancers were held to the same exacting standards Prince set for himself:

We worked very hard, and he treated us very well and he paid us very well. But he also expected us to be on top of things, just like his musicians. We worked long hours, many times during the week.

Prince kept up with the professional dance world, offering to write a piece for Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and waiving his royalties when they performed to it, a move that lifted the company from financial disaster in the 90s and increased their audience base.

He recruited ballerina Misty Copeland to tour with him beginning in 2009, six years before she made history as the first Black principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater, another company to which he donated generously.

He was a fan of avant-garde choreographer Moses Pendleton, founder of MOMIX and co-founder of Pilobolus Dance Theater, but also the dance stylings of Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens.

As Copeland reminisced to GQ  shortly after Prince’s death:

There was one Pee-wee Herman movie that he was obsessed with. It was silly, like him, and funny, and quirky—watching Pee-wee Herman dance he just thought was the funniest thing.

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For those wondering about the soundtrack to the rehearsal footage at the top of the page, it’s Prince’s original studio version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” recorded in that same room, that same summer. Six years later, Sinead O’Connor’s cover became a global hit.

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Read Prince’s First Interview, Printed in His High School Newspaper (1976)

Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto.  Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”: Watch Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving Counterculture Classic

Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”

We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who plans to celebrate the holiday today.

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Related Content:

The Story Behind “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie’s Song That’s Now a Thanksgiving Tradition

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