Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a surprise — to learn that that song is an outtake, recorded but never quite completed in the studio and available for years only in bootleg form. “Blind Willie McTell” was a product of the sessions for what would become Infidels. Released in 1983, that album was received as something of a return to form after the Christian-themed trilogy of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love that Dylan put out after being born again.
Of the material officially included on Infidels, the greatest impact was probably made by the album’s opener “Jokerman,” at least in the punk rendition Dylan performed on Late Night with David Letterman. Not that every Dylanologist is a fan of that song: in the Daily Maverick, Drew Forrest calls it “random and incoherent,” drawing an unfavorable comparison with “Blind Willie McTell,” which is “sure to be remembered as one of Dylan’s most perfect creations.”
The sources of that perfection are many, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the new, nearly 50-minute long Polyphonic video above on this “unreleased masterpiece,” whose origin and afterlife underscore how thoroughly Dylan inhabits the musical traditions from which he draws.
Like most major Dylan songs, “Blind Willie McTell” exists in several versions, but the one most listeners know (officially released in 1991, eight years after its recording) features Mark Knopfler on twelve-string guitar and Dylan himself on piano. Melodically based on the jazz standard “St. James Infirmary Blues” and named after a real, prolific musician from Georgia, its sparse music and lyrics manage to evoke a panoramic view encompassing the blues, the Bible, the ways of the old South, and indeed, the very history of American music and slavery. Though Dylan himself considered the song unfinished, he came around to see its value after hearing The Band work it into their show, and has by now performed it live himself more than 200 times — none, in adherence to the protean character of blues, folk, and jazz, quite the same as the last.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Crayolas and pages of mandalas or outlines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of gratitude to the McLoughlin Brothers and illustrator Kate Greenaway.
Their Little Folks’ Painting Book burst onto the scene in around 1879 with such fun-to-color outline engravings as “The Owl’s Advice,” “A Flower Fairy,” and “Little Miss Pride,” each accompanied by nursery rhymes and stories. The abundance of mob caps, pinafores, and breeches is of a piece with Greenaway’s enduring takes on nursery rhymes, though grown-up manual dexterity seems almost mandatory given the tiny patterns and other details.
Seeing as how there was no precedent, the publishers of the world’s first coloring book went ahead and filled in the frontispiece so that those tackling the other hundred drawings would know what to do. (Hint: Stay inside the lines and don’t get too creative with skin or hair color.)
Photo courtesy of Washington State University.
It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to observe that we live in an increasingly beige-and-gray world from which all color is being drained. Whether or not that’s really the case, all of us still enjoy easy access to a range of colors that nobody in the ancient world could have imagined, and not just through our screens. Look around you, and your eye will soon fall upon some object or another whose hue alone would have looked impossibly exotic in the civilization of, say, ancient Egypt. My coffee cup offers a simple but vivid example, with its blue-green, and maybe yours does too.
“Most ancient pigments were derived from natural resources — ochre, charcoal, or lime, for example,” writes Ben Seal at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. “In some cases, Egyptians were able to use lapis lazuli, a metamorphic rock that was only found in Afghanistan, to represent the color blue.” But such a “cost-prohibitive and completely impractical” source, as Seal quotes Carnegie Museum of Natural History Egyptologist Lisa Haney describing it, motivated ancient Egyptians to come up with “a process to emulate its intense ultramarine hue. Without a consistent way to represent the beautiful blues of the world around them, they had to get creative.”
Just this past May, Haney and a team of other researchers from CMNH, Washington State University, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute published a paper on their work of re-creating what’s called “Egyptian blue,” the earliest known synthetic pigment. Extant on artifacts and used also, it seems, in ancient Rome, and at least once in the Renaissance (by no less a Renaissance man than Raphael) its original recipe has since been lost to history. Using period materials like “calcium carbonate that could have been drawn from limestone or seashells; quartz sand; and a copper source” heated to around 1,000 degrees Celsius, Seal writes, “the researchers prepared nearly two dozen powdered pigments in a stunning range of blues.”
Photo courtesy of Washington State University.
The key was to replicate cuprorivaite, “the mineral that gave Egyptian blue such resonance,” and one of those experimental powders turned out to be 50 percent cuprorivaite by volume. The resulting pigment, as Artnet’s Brian Boucher writes, is of more than historical interest, with potential modern uses “due to its optical, magnetic, and biological properties. It emits light in the near-infrared part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which people can’t see. For that reason, it could be used in applications like dusting for fingerprints and formulating counterfeit-proof inks.” Here in the twenty-first century, we may have all the blues we need, but as in the ancient world, the job of staying one step ahead of counterfeiters is never done.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The story of coffee goes back to the 13th century, when it came out of Ethiopia, then spread to Egypt and Yemen. It reached the Middle East, Turkey, and Persia during the 16th century, and then Europe during the early 17th, though not without controversy. In Venice, some called it the ‘bitter invention of Satan,’ but the Pope, upon tasting it, gave it his blessing. By 1652, the first café in London had opened its doors on St. Michael’s Alley, bringing coffee to England—all thanks to a Sicilian immigrant, Pasqua Rosée.
Today, the British Museum houses a handbill that may well be the first advertisement for coffee in England. It proves remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, the ad introduced Brits to what’s now a staple of the Western diet, and eventually they’d bring it to North America. And, what’s more, you can see another instance of the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Advertising is advertising. Then, as now, beverages were sold on their taste and health properties. And, of course, you were encouraged to consume the product not once, but twice a day. You can find a transcription of the text below.
Text:
THE Grain or Berry called Coffee, groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia.
It is brought from thence, and drunk generally throughout all the Grand Seigniors Dominions.
It is a simple innocent thing, composed into a drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up with Spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk, fasting an hour before and not Eating an hour after, and to be taken as hot as possibly can be endured; the which will never fetch the skin off the mouth, or raise any Blisters, by reason of that Heat.
The Turks drink at meals and other times, is usually Water, and their Dyet consists much of Fruit, the Crudities whereof are very much corrected by this Drink.
The quality of this Drink is cold and Dry; and though it be a Dryer, yet it neither heats, nor inflames more than hot Posset.
It forcloseth the Orifice of the Stomack, and fortifies the heat with- [missing text] its very good to help digestion, and therefore of great use to be [missing text] bout 3 or 4 a Clock afternoon, as well as in the morning.
[missing text] quickens the Spirits, and makes the Heart Lightsome.
[missing text]is good against sore Eys, and the better if you hold your Head o’er it, and take in the Steem that way.
It supresseth Fumes exceedingly, and therefore good against the Head-ach, and will very much stop any Defluxion of Rheumas, that distil from the Head upon the Stomach, and so prevent and help Consumptionsand the Cough of the Lungs.
It is excellent to prevent and cure the Dropsy, Gout, and Scurvy.
It is known by experience to be better then any other Drying Drink for People in years, or Children that have any running humors upon them, as the Kings Evil. &c.
It is very good to prevent Mis-carryings in Child-bearing Women.
It is a most excellent Remedy against the Spleen, Hypocondriack Winds, or the like.
It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for Busines, if one have occasion to Watch, and therefore you are not to drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.
It is observed that in Turkey, where this is generally drunk, that they are not troubled with the Stone, Gout, Dropsie, or Scurvy, and that their Skins are exceeding cleer and white.
It is neither Laxative nor Restringent.
Made and Sold in St. Michaels Alley in Cornhill, by Pasqua Rosee, at the Signe of his own Head.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.
We tend to imagine old paintings as having a muted, yellow-brown cast, and not without reason. Many of the examples we’ve seen in life really do look that way, though usually not because the artist intended it. As Julian Baumgartner of Chicago’s Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration explains in the video above, these paintings’ colors have changed over the decades, or in any case appeared to change, because of the layer of resin on top of them. When that kind of coating is first applied, it actually makes the hues underneath look richer. As time passes, alas, chemical changes and the accumulation of dirt and grime can result in a dull, even sickly appearance.
“A lot of people say that the varnish should never be removed, “that that’s a patina that is on the surface of the painting and that it adds to the painting’s quality: it makes the painting look better, it makes it look more serious,” says Baumgartner.
“Those are all interesting opinions, but they’re all inaccurate. If the artist wanted to apply a patina to their painting, they could apply a patina and tone down the colors. But most artists, when they apply a varnish, do not envision that that varnish will ever become yellow or brown, or will crack or become cloudy.” The idea is to get the colors back to how the artist would have seen them when the work first attained its finished state.
Therein lies the difference between a painting and, say, a cast-iron skillet. But on some level, the actual labor of cleaning a work of art — as Baumgartner demonstrates, sped-up, in the video — differs less than one might imagine from that of cleaning a kitchen implement. The result, however, can certainly be more striking, especially with a canvas like this one, whose twin-sister subjects provide an ideal means of showing the contrast between colors long covered by varnish and those same colors newly exhumed. Though there now exist formulas that don’t turn yellow in quite the same way, more than a few artists stick to the classic damar varnish, which does have advantages of its own — not least keeping a few more generations of conservators in business.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
You may hear the phrase “electronic music” and think of superstar dubstep DJs in funny helmets at beachside celebrity parties. Alternatively, you may think of the mercurial compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the musique concrete of Pierre Henry, or the otherworldly experimentalism of François Bayle. If you’re in that latter camp of music nerd, then this post may bring you very glad tidings indeed. Ubuweb—that stalwart repository of all things 20th-century avant-garde—now hosts an extraordinary compilation: the 476-song History of Electronic/Electroacoustic Music, originally a 62 CD set. (Hear below Stockhausen’s “Kontact,” Henry’s “Astrologie,” and Bayle’s spare “Theatre d’Ombres” further down.)
Spanning the years 1937–2001, the collection should especially appeal to those with an avant-garde or musicological bent. In fact, the original uploader of this archive of experimental sound, Caio Barros, put these tracks online in 2009 while a student of composition at Brazil’s State University of São Paulo. Barros’ “initiative,” as he writes at Ubuweb, “became some sort of legend” among musicophiles in the know.
And yet, Ubuweb reposts this phenomenal collection with a disclaimer: “It’s a clearly flawed selection,” they write:
There’s few women and almost no one working outside of the Western tradition (where are the Japanese? Chinese? etc.). However, as an effort, it’s admirable and contains a ton of great stuff.
Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection
It’s a fair critique, though Barros points out that the exclusions mostly have to do with “the way our society and the tradition this music represent works” (sic). And yet, as disciplinary boundaries expand all the time, and histories broaden along with them, that description no longer holds. It would be a fascinating exercise, for example, to listen to these tracks alongside the history of women in electronic music, 1938–2014 that we posted recently.
Also, there’s clearly much more to electronic music than either celebrity DJs or obscure avant-garde composers. Many hundreds of popular electronic composers and musicians—like Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Bruce Haack, or Clara Rockmore—fall somewhere in-between the worlds of pop/dance/performance and serious composition, and their contributions deserve representation alongside more experimental or classical artists.
All that said, however, there’s no reason you can’t curate your own playlist of the history of electronic music as you see it—drawing from the astounding wealth of music available free at The History of Electroacoustic Music. Or consider this collection a fully immersive course in “traditional, western avant-garde electronic music” from “the area of Europe-America,” as Barros puts it. As that, it succeeds admirably.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
In the decades after the Second World War, many countries faced the challenge of rebuilding their housing and infrastructure while also having to accommodate a fast-arriving baby boom. The government of the Netherlands got more creative than most, putting money toward experimental housing projects starting in the late nineteen-sixties. Hoping to happen upon the next revolutionary form of dwelling, it ended up funding designs that, for the most part, strayed none too far from established patterns. Still, there were genuine outliers: by far the most daring proposal came from artist and sculptor Dries Kreijkamp: to build a whole neighborhood out of Bolwoningen, or “ball houses.”
The idea may bring to mind Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which enjoyed a degree of utopian vogue in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Like Fuller and most other visionaries, Kreijkamp labored under a certain monomania. His had to do with globes, “the most organic and natural shape possible. After all, roundness is everywhere: we live on a globe, and we’re born from a globe. The globe combines the biggest possible volume with the smallest possible surface area, so you need minimum material for it.” The 50 Bolwoningen built in ‘s‑Hertogenbosch, better known as Den Bosch, were quickly fabricated on-site out of glass fiber reinforced concrete. It wasn’t the polyester Kreijkamp had at first specified, but then, polyester wouldn’t have lasted 40 years.
Since they were put up in 1984, the Bolwoningen have been continuously inhabited. In the video at the top of the post, Youtuber Tom Scott pays a visit to one of them, whose occupant seems reasonably satisfied. (It seems they’re “cozy” in the wintertime.)
Like geodesic domes, their round walls make it difficult to use their theoretically generous interior space efficiently, at least without commissioning custom-made furniture; leaking windows are also a perennial problem. While each Bolwoning can comfortably house one or even two simple-living people, only the most utopia-minded would attempt to raise a family in one of them. As with other round or circular home designs, expansion would be physically impractical even if it were legally possible.
Used as social housing by the local government, the Bolwoningen now enjoy a protected historic status. (As well they might, given their connection with the art and industry of Dutch glassblowing: it was while working in a glass factory that Kreijkamp first began proselytizing for spheres.) And unlike most aesthetically radical housing developments, they haven’t gone to seed, but rather received the necessary maintenance over the decades. The result is an appealing neighborhood for those whose lifestyles are suited to its unusual structures and its contained bucolic setting, of which you can get an idea in the walking video tour just above. By the time Kreijkamp died in 2014, he perhaps felt a certain degree of regret that mass-produced globular homes didn’t prove to be the next big thing. But he did live to see the emergence of the “tiny house” movement, which should retroactively adopt him as one of its leading lights.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1976 and 1977 an inspired music teacher in the small school district of Langley Township, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, recorded his elementary school students singing popular songs in a school gym. Two vinyl records were produced over the two years, and families were invited to pay $7 for a copy. The recordings were largely forgotten — just another personal memento stored away in a few homes in Western Canada — until a record collector stumbled across a copy in a thrift store in 2000.
Enthralled by what he heard, the collector sent a sample to a disc jockey at WFMU, an eclectic, listener-supported radio station in New Jersey. The station began playing some of the songs over the airwaves. Listeners were touched by the haunting, ethereal quality of the performances. In 2001, a small record company released a compilation called The Langley Township Music Project: Innocence & Despair.
The record became an underground hit. The Washington Post called it “an album that seems to capture nothing less than the sound of falling in love with music.” Spin said the album “seems to sum up all the reasons music is holy.” And Dwight Gamer of The New York Times wrote that the music was “magic: a kind of celestial pep rally.” Listeners were moved by the ingenuousness of the young voices, the strange authenticity of performances by children too young to understand all of the adult themes in the lyrics. As Hans Fenger, the music teacher who made the recordings, writes in the liner notes:
The kids had a grasp of what they liked: emotion, drama, and making music as a group. Whether the results were good, bad, in tune or out was no big deal — they had élan. This was not the way music was traditionally taught. But then I never liked conventional “children’s music,” which is condescending and ignores the reality of children’s lives, which can be dark and scary. These children hated “cute.” They cherished songs that evoked loneliness and sadness.
You can learn the story of Fenger’s extraordinary music project in the 2002 VH1 documentary above, which includes interviews and a reunion with some of the students. And listen below for a few samples of that touching quality of loneliness and sadness Fenger and others have been talking about.
David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’:
One of the most widely praised songs from Innocence & Despair is the 1976 recording of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” In a 2001 interview with Mike Appelstein for Scram magazine, Fenger explained the sound effects in the recording. “When I first taught ‘Space Oddity,’ ” he said, “the first part I taught after the song was the kids counting down. They loved that: they’d go ‘TEN!’ They couldn’t say it loud enough; the countdown in the song was the big winner. But as soon as they got to zero, nothing happened. So I brought this old steel guitar. Well, one of the little guys whose name I’ve forgot, I put him on this thing and said, ‘Now listen, when they get to zero, you’re the rocket. So make a lot of noise on this. He’s fooling around with this steel guitar, and I didn’t even think of this, but he intuitively took out a Coke bottle from his lunch and started doing this (imitates a bottle running up and down the fretboard). I just cranked up the volume and turned down the master volume so it was really distorted. And that was the ‘Space Oddity’ sound effect.”
The Beach Boys’ ‘In My Room’:
The children recorded “In My Room” by the Beach Boys in 1977. Fenger told Appelstein it was the ultimate children’s song. “It’s the perfect introspective song for a nine-year-old,” he said, “just as ‘Dust in the Wind’ is the perfect philosophy song for a nine-year-old. Adults may think it’s dumb, but for a child, it’s a very heavy, profound thought. To think that there is nothing, and it’s expressed in such a simple way.”
The Eagles’ ‘Desperado’:
Several of the recordings feature soloists. A young girl named Sheila Behman sang the Eagles’ “Desperado” in 1977. “With ‘Desperado,’ ” said Fenger, “you can see it as a cowboy romantic story, but that’s not the way Sheila heard it. She couldn’t articulate metaphorically what the song was about, but in that sense, I think it was purer because it was unaffected. It’s not as if the kids were trying to be somebody else. They were just trying to be who they were, and they’re doing this music and falling in love with it.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and instruction. However, that line seems to move closer to one pole or another depending on the prevailing cultural sentiments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hardly published at all before the early 18th century tells us a lot about when and how modern ideas of childhood as a separate category of existence began.
“By the end of the 18th century,” writes Newcastle University professor M.O. Grenby, “children’s literature was a flourishing, separate and secure part of the publishing industry in Britain.” The trend accelerated rapidly and has never ceased—children’s and young adult books now drive sales in publishing (with 80% of YA books bought by grown-ups for themselves).
Grenby notes that “the reasons for this sudden rise of children’s literature” and its rapid expansion into a booming market by the early 1800s “have never been fully explained.” We are free to speculate about the social and pedagogical winds that pushed this historical change.
Or we might do so, at least, by examining the children’s literature of the Victorian era, perhaps the most innovative and diverse period for children’s literature thus far by the standards of the time. And we can do so most thoroughly by surveying the thousands of mid- to late 19th century titles at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Their digitized collectioncurrently holds over 10,000 books free to read online from cover to cover, allowing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. wanted children to know and believe.
Several genres flourished at the time: religious instruction, naturally, but also language and spelling books, fairy tales, codes of conduct, and, especially, adventure stories—pre-Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew examples of what we would call young adult fiction, these published principally for boys. Adventure stories offered a (very colonialist) view of the wide world; in series like the Boston-published Zig Zag and English books like Afloat with Nelson, both from the 1890s, fact mingled with fiction, natural history and science with battle and travel accounts. But there is another distinctive strain in the children’s literature of the time, one which to us—but not necessarily to the Victorians—would seem contrary to the imperialist young adult novel.
For most Victorian students and readers, poetry was a daily part of life, and it was a central instructional and storytelling form in children’s lit. The A.L.O.E.’s Bible Picture Book from 1871, above, presents “Stories from the Life of Our Lord in Verse,” written “simply for the Lord’s lambs, rhymes more readily than prose attracting the attention of children, and fastening themselves on their memories.” Children and adults regularly memorized poetry, after all. Yet after the explosion in children’s publishing the former readers were often given inferior examples of it. The author of the Bible Picture Book admits as much, begging the indulgence of older readers in the preface for “defects in my work,” given that “the verses were made for the pictures, not the pictures for the verses.”
This is not an author, or perhaps a type of literature, one might suspect, that thinks highly of children’s aesthetic sensibilities. We find precisely the opposite to be the case in the wonderful Elfin Rhymes from 1900, written by the mysterious “Norman” with “40 drawings by Carton Moorepark.” Whoever “Norman” may be (or why his one-word name appears in quotation marks), he gives his readers poems that might be mistaken at first glance for unpublished Christina Rossetti verses; and Mr. Moorepark’s illustrations rival those of the finest book illustrators of the time, presaging the high quality of Caldecott Medal-winning books of later decades. Elfin Rhymes seems like a rare oddity, likely published in a small print run; the care and attention of its layout and design shows a very high opinion of its readers’ imaginative capabilities.
This title is representative of an emerging genre of late Victorian children’s literature, which still tended on the whole, as it does now, to fall into the trite and formulaic. Elfin Rhymes sits astride the fantasy boom at the turn of the century, heralded by hugely popular books like Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz series and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. These, the Harry Potters of their day, made millions of young people passionate readers of modern fairy tales, representing a slide even further away from the once quite narrow, “remorselessly instructional… or deeply pious” categories available in early writing for children, as Grenby points out.
Where the boundaries for kids’ literature had once been narrowly fixed by Latin grammar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction like Jules Verne’s, and of popular supernatural tales and poems, prepared the ground for comic books, YA dystopias, magician fiction, and dozens of other children’s literature genres we now take for granted, or—in increasingly large numbers—we buy to read for ourselves. Enter the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the over 10,000+ books in the collection with comfortable reader views.
Note: This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on our site in 2016.
When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his old schoolteachers. “I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart,” the letter begins. “I have just been given far too great an honor, one I neither sought nor solicited. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you.” For it was from this teacher, a certain Louis Germain, that the young, fatherless Camus received the guidance he needed. “Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.”
Camus ends the letter by assuring Monsieur Germain that “your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil.”
In response, Germain recalls his memories of Camus as an unaffected, optimistic pupil. “I think I well know the nice little fellow you were, and very often the child contains the seed of the man he will become,” he writes. Whatever the process of intellectual and artistic evolution over the 30 years or so between leaving the classroom and winning the Nobel, “it gives me very great satisfaction to see that your fame has not gone to your head. You have remained Camus: bravo.”
It isn’t hard to understand why Camus’ letter to his teacher would resonate with the footballer Ian Wright, who reads it aloud in the Letters Live video at the top of the post. A 2005 documentary on his life and career produced the early viral video above, a clip capturing the moment of Wright’s unexpected reunion with his own academic father figure, Sydney Pigden. Coming face to face with his old mentor, who he’d assumed had died, Wright instinctively removes his cap and addresses him as “Mr. Pigden.” In that moment, the student-teacher relationship resumes: “I’m so glad you’ve done so well with yourself,” says Pigden, a sentiment not dissimilar to the one Monsieur Germain expressed to Camus. Most of us, no matter how long we’ve been out of school, have a teacher we hope to do proud; some of us, whether we know it or not, have been that teacher.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that Bob Dylan famously “went electric,” alienating certain adherents to the folk scene through which he’d come up, but also setting a precedent for the kind of quick-change musical adaptation that he’s kept up into his eighties. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, however, all that lay in the future. Yet even then, the young Dylan wasn’t shy of making controversial choices. Take, for example, the choice to play “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song that — however redolent of the mid-nineteen-sixties when heard today — would hardly have been topical enough to meet the expectations of folk fans who regarded the music’s topicality as its main strength.
At the top of the post, you can watch colorized footage of Dylan’s performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man” at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival; the original black-and-white clip appears below. Consider the resonances it could have set off in the minds of his youthful, clean-cut audience: Rimbaud? Fellini? Lord Buckley? Mardi Gras? Confessions of an English Opium-Eater? Dylanologists have suggested all these sources of inspiration and others. It is possible, of course, that — as Dylan himself once said — the lyrics’ central image is that of guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who played on the song as recorded for Bringing It All Back Home, a musician then known for his ownership of a gigantic tambourine.
Despite its lack of references to the issues of the day, “Mr. Tambourine Man” reflects its historical moment with a clarity that few songs ever have. (Some would say that’s even truer of The Byrds’ cover version, a radio hit that came out just a month after Dylan’s original.) Dylan himself must have sensed that it marked not just the peak of an era, but also that of his own compositional and performative efforts in this particular musical style. Though he did attempt to write a follow-up to the song, its failure to cohere showed him the way forward. Dylan still plays it in concert today, and to enthusiastic reception from his audiences, but in such a way as to reinvent it each time — knowing that he both is and is not the same man who took the stage at Newport those sixty years ago, and that “Mr. Tambourine Man” both is and is not the same song.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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