“Every day a word surprises me,” famed neurologist Oliver Sacks once told Bill Hayes, with whom he spent the final six years of his life. The comment came “apropos of nothing other than that a word had suddenly popped into his head,” writes Hayes in a recent New York Times piece on Sacks’ love of language. “Often this happened while swimming — ‘ideas and paragraphs’ would develop as he backstroked, after which he’d rush to the dock or pool’s edge to get the words down on paper — as Dempsey Rice has captured in an enchanting forthcoming film, The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks.” You can get a glimpse of that film, and its portrayal of Sacks’ habit of getting ideas while swimming, in the trailer above.
“In 1982 I wrote a section of A Leg to Stand On” — his memoir of his experience recovering from a mountaineering accident that left him without awareness of his left leg — “by a lake.” We watch his animated form making its way across the water in cap and speedo, a wake of words trailing behind them.
After the swim, “dripping, I would write.” We then see James Silberman, then president and editor at Summit Books, reading Sacks’ handwritten, still-soggy manuscript. The sogginess might be artistic license, but the handwritten-ness wasn’t: Silberman “wrote me back saying, did I think this was the 19th century? No one has sent him a manuscript for thirty years. And besides, this one looked like it had been dropped in the bath.”
So maybe the animators didn’t get quite as creative drawing those pages as it might seem, but they still must have had to get creative indeed to keep up with Sacks himself, a decade of whose conversations with Rice provide the film’s narration. “Oliver saw his patients as whole people, rather than isolated disorders,” she says by way of explaining what made Sacks’ books, like Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and many more besides, so resonant with readers the world over. “He wasn’t afraid to openly inquire of the patient with autism or amnesia, ‘What is it like to be you?’ ” The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks finished a successful Kickstarter campaign in July, but you can still donate and keep up with release details at its official site. As a viewing experience, it should confirm what readers have long suspected: though they come for a look into the unusual minds of Oliver Sacks’ patients, they stay to inhabit the even more unusual mind of Oliver Sacks.
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.
Alejandro Jodorowsky may never have made his film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, but plenty came out of the attempt — including, one might well argue, Blade Runner. Making that still hugely influential adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott and his collaborators looked to a few key visual sources, one of them a two-part short story in comic form called “The Long Tomorrow.”
Illustrated by none other than French artist Mœbius, one of the richest visual imaginations of our time, it tells the futuristic hard-boiled story of a private detective in a dense, vertical underground city filled with androids, rowdy bars, assassins, and flying cars. “I’m a confidential nose,” says the protagonist by way of introduction. “My office is on the 97th level. Club’s the name, Pete Club.”
Then comes the fateful piece of narration that begins any detective story worth its salt: “It started out a day like any other day.” But by the end of that day, Club has taken a job from a classic dame in need, fended off both a four-armed thug and a hired assassin, slain an alien monster with whom he finds himself in bed, and recovered the president’s missing brain.
The story was written written by Dan O’Bannon, then known mainly for the film Dark Star, a science-fiction comedy he’d made with his University of Southern California classmate John Carpenter. On the strength of that, Jodorowsky had brought him onto Dune to work on its special effects, just as he’d brought Mœbius on to create its storyboards and concept art. With nothing to do before shooting began — which it never did — O’Bannon first drew “The Long Tomorrow” himself as a way of keeping busy. Mœbius took one look at it and immediately saw its promise.
The French may have coined the term film noir, but this early work of future noir benefited from having an American writer. “When Europeans try this kind of parody, it is never entirely satisfactory,” Mœbius writes in the introduction to the book version of “The Long Tomorrow.” “The French are too French, the Italians are too Italian … so, under my nose was a pastiche that was more original than the originals.” It also, with Mœbius’ art, laid the visual groundwork for generations of sci-fi stories to come.
“The way Neuromancer-the-novel ‘looks’ was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal,” said William Gibson, referring to the English version of Métal hurlant, the magazine that popularized Mœbius’ work. (O’Bannon also worked on the animated Heavy Metal anthology film, released in 1981.) But perhaps Ridley Scott, who started working with the artist on 1979’s O’Bannon-scripted Alien, described the influence of Mœbius’ art on our visions of the future best: “You see it everywhere, it runs through so much you can’t get away from it.” In a cultural sense, all of us live in Pete Club’s city now.
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 better-safe-than-sorry approach to musicians pretending to play on TV while viewers hear a pre-recorded track seems like the antithesis of rock and roll. Yet since the earliest days of The Ed Sullivan Show, audiences have accepted the convention without complaint. When the fakery unintentionally fails, reactions tend toward mockery, not outrage. Critics rail, the UK’s Musician’s Union has often balked, but bands and fans play along, everyone operating under the presumption that the banal charade is harmless.
Leave it to those spoilsports Nirvana to refuse this pleasant fiction on their Top of the Pops appearance in 1991.
Like American counterparts from American Bandstand to Soul Train, Britain’s Top of the Pops had a long tradition: “For over 40 years,” writes Rolling Stone, “everyone from the Rolling Stones to Madonna to Beyoncé stopped by… to perform their latest single as either a lip-sync or sing along with a prerecorded backing track.” All musicians were expected to mime playing their instruments, a comical sight, for instance, in appearances by The Smiths, in which viewers hear Johnny Marr’s multiple overdubbed guitars but see him playing unaccompanied.
The Smiths approached their Top of the Pops appearances with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. At their 1983 debut performance, Morrissey mimed “This Charming Man” using a fern as a microphone. Still, the band gamely pretended to play, like everyone else did. But when Nirvana hit the TOTP stage, with Cobain singing to a backing track of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” they wouldn’t observe any of the niceties. YouTube channel That Time Punk Rocked writes:
Cobain opts for slow, exaggerated strums during the few times he touches his guitar, sings an octave lower (he later confirmed he was imitating Morrisey from The Smiths), and attempts to eat his microphone at one point. He also changes some of the lyrics, exchanging the opening line “load up on guns, bring your friends,” for “load up on drugs, kill your friends.” Dave Grohl hits cymbals and skins at random, doing more dancing than drumming. Krist Novoselic even swings his bass above his head. And despite these ridiculous antics, the crowd goes absolutely insane.
Maybe the crowd went wild because of those ridiculous antics, or maybe no one even noticed, as when a crowd of thousands in Argentina hardly seemed to notice when Nirvana openly mocked them after the audience abused their opening act. This may be one burden of stardom Cobain came to know too well—protests register as performance and sticking it the man onstage just makes the man more money. But the video remains “one of the greatest middle fingers” to musical miming captured on camera—recommended viewing for every salty young band preparing for their first TV gig.
The truth young idealistic lovers learn: relationships are messy and complicated—filled with disappointments, misunderstandings, betrayals great and small. They fall apart and sometimes cannot be put back together. It’s easy to grow cynical and bitter. Yet, as James Baldwin famously wrote, “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” You read, that is, the life stories and letters of writers and artists who have experienced outsized romantic bliss and torment, and who somehow became more passionately alive the more they suffered.
When it comes to personal suffering, Frida Kahlo’s biography offers more than one person could seem to bear. Already disabled by polio at a young age, she found her life forever changed at 18 when a bus accident sent an iron rod through her body, fracturing multiple bones, including three vertebrae, piercing her stomach and uterus. Recalling the old Gregorian hymn, Kahlo’s friend Mexican writer Andrés Henestrosa remarked that she “lived dying”—in near constant pain, enduring surgery after surgery and frequent hospitalizations.
In the midst of this pain, she found love with her mentor and husband Diego Rivera—and, it must be said, with many others. Kahlo, writes Alexxa Gotthardt at Artsy, “was a prolific lover: Her list of romances stretched across decades, continents, and sexes. She was said to have been intimately involved with, among others, Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, dancer Josephine Baker, and photographer Nickolas Muray. However, it was her obsessive, abiding relationship with fellow painter Diego Rivera—for whom she’d harbored a passionate crush since she laid eyes on him at age 15—that affected Kahlo most powerfully.”
Her letters to Rivera—himself a prolific extra-marital lover—stretch “across the twenty-seven-year span of their relationship,” writes Maria Popova; they “bespeak the profound and abiding connection the two shared, brimming with the seething cauldron of emotion with which all fully inhabited love is filled: elation, anguish, devotion, desire, longing, joy.”
Diego.
Truth is, so great, that I wouldn’t like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart. All this madness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only confusion. I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.
So begins the letter pictured at the top. In another, equally passionate and poetic letter, pictured further up, she writes:
Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.
Kahlo and Rivera fell in love in 1928, when she asked him to look at her paintings. Over her mother’s objections, they married the following year. After ten tumultuous years, they divorced in 1939, then remarried in 1940 and stayed partnered until her death in 1954. Over these years, she poured out her emotions in letters, many, like those above, first written in her illustrated diary. Letters to and from her many lovers have also just emerged in a trove of personal artifacts, recently liberated from a bathroom at Casa Azul where they had been kept under lock and key at Rivera’s behest.
Both artists’ many affairs caused tremendous pain and “created rifts between them personally,” notes Katy Fallon at Broadly, although “their relationship has been mythologized past recognition,” in the way of so many other famous couples. In the most egregious betrayal, Rivera even slept with Kahlo’s younger sister Cristina, his favorite model, an act that inspired Frida’s 1937 painting Memory, the Heart, a self-portrait in which she stands with a metal rod piercing her chest, her hands seemingly amputated, face expressionless. We learn the wrong lessons from romanticizing “everything” about Frida and Diego’s life, Patti Smith suggests in her tribute to Kahlo’s love letters. But there is also danger in passing judgment.
“I don’t look at these two as models of behavior,” Smith says, but “the most important lesson… isn’t their indiscretions and love affairs but their devotion. Their identities were magnified by the other. They went through their ups and downs, parted, came back together, to the end of their lives.” In a 1935 letter to Rivera, read by pianist Mona Golabek above, Kahlo forgives his affairs, calling them “only flirtations…. At bottom, you and I love each other dearly, and thus go through adventures without numbers, beatings on doors, imprecations, insults, international claims. Yet, we will always love each other…. All the ranges I have gone through have served only to make me understand in the end that I love you more than my own skin.”
To restate what should be obvious from the second, if not first glance, none of Alcott’s titles are real. His aesthetically convincing mock-ups pay tribute to favorite songs by favorite artists: David Bowie, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Elvis Costello…
The start of the school year finds him in a Dylan mood, rendering some of his best known hits in a variety of pulp genre formats:
Bob Dylan is the perfect subject for this project, because his work has always been all about quotation and repurposing. From the very beginning, he took old songs, changed the lyrics and called them his own…. And it’s not just the melodies, he’s also not shy about lifting phrases and whole lines from other sources. One of the fun things about being a Bob Dylan fan is being able to spot the influences. It’s not just lifting lines from classic blues songs, where we don’t really know who “wrote” the originals, it’s real, identifiable, copyright-protected material. And you never know where it’s going to come from, a book about the Yakuza from Japan, a cookbook, an old Time Magazine article, or 1940s noir pictures.
I was watching a classic Robert Mitchum noir, Out of the Past, and Mitchum is talking to someone, and they mention San Francisco, and Mitchum says “I always liked San Francisco, I was there for a party once.”
And I was like “Wait, what?” Because that’s a line from a really obscure Dylan song, “Maybe Someday,” off his album Knocked-Out Loaded.
I was like “Wait, why did that line stick in Dylan’s mind? Why did he decide to quote that? Is it just the way Mitchum says it? What happened there?” And suddenly a song I hadn’t thought about much became a lot more interesting.
So for my Dylan covers, I try to carry on that tradition of taking quotes and repurposing them. So “Just Like a Woman” becomes a story in a science-fiction pulp, and “Like a Rolling Stone” becomes an expose on juvenile delinquency, and “Rainy Day Women” becomes a post-apocalyptic adventure story.
In a way, it’s what this project is all about, taking discarded pieces of culture and sticking them back together with new references to make them breathe again.
From a design standpoint, it’s a great illustration of the heavy lifting a single well-chosen punctuation change can do.
The magazine’s title is an extra gift to Dylan fans.
The Blonde-on-Blonde Chroniclescontinue with Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Does it matter that the breast-plated, and for all practical purposes bottomless warriors are raven tressed?
It’s not the fallout rain. It isn’t that at all. The hard rain’s gonna fall is in the last verse…That means all the lies, you know, that people get told on their radios and in newspapers. All you have to think for a minute, you know. Trying to take people’s brains away, you know. Which maybe has been done already. I hate to think it’s been done. All the lies, which I consider poison.
This writer can think of another reason citizens might find themselves fighting for their lives in a rowboat level with the very tippy top of the Empire State Building. So, I suspect, can Alcott.
Or maybe we’re wrong and climate change is nothing but fake news.
Alcott gets some mileage out of another rain-based lyric on Maggie’s Farm, a steamy rural romp whose creased cover is also part and parcel of the genre.
Who’s that young punk on the cover of Like a Rolling Stone? Beats me, but the girl’s a dead ringer for Warhol superstar, Edie Sedgwick, the purported inspiration for the song that shares the novel’s name. Ms. Sedgwick’s real life figure was much less voluptuous, but if the genre covers that sparked this project demonstrate anything, it’s that sex sells.
Visions of Johanna is positively understated in comparison. While many pulp authors toiled in obscurity, let us pretend that Nobel Prize winner and (faux) pulp-novelist Dylan wouldn’t have. Especially if he had a series like the pseudonymous Brett Halliday’s popular Mike Shayne mysteries. At that level, the cover wouldn’t really need quotes.
Though what harm would there be? There’s plenty of negative space here. Readers, which line would you splash across the cover if you were this prankster, Alcott?
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “D” train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it’s him or them that’s really insane
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze
I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him
Sayin’, “Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”
But like Louise always says
“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
You can see more of Todd Alcott’s Mid-Century Pulp Fiction Cover project, and pick up archival quality prints from his Etsy shop.
People lose their religion all the time. It happens in all sorts of ways. And R.E.M.’s 1991 song “Losing My Religion” has spoken to so many in the midst of these experiences that we might wonder if singer/songwriter Michael Stipe had a similar life change when he wrote those lyrics. Not so much, he says above in an interview with Dutch station Top 2000 a gogo. “What the song is about has nothing to with religion,” he says.
The lyric comes from an old Southern colloquialism meaning that something so upsetting has happened “that you might lose your religion.” Stipe used that old-time notion as a metaphor for unrequited love, a different kind of faith, one he describes in painfully tentative terms: “holding back, then reaching forward, then pulling back again, then reaching forward again.”
He explains another of the song’s ambiguities hidden within the elliptical lyrics: “You don’t ever really know if the person that I’m reaching out for is aware of me, if they even know that I exist.” It’s the heady turmoil of a romantic crush raised to the heights of saintly suffering. A brooding, alt-rock version of love songs like “Earth Angel.” Given the role of devotion in so much religious practice, there’s no reason the song can’t still be about losing one’s religion for listeners, but now we know what Stipe himself had in mind.
Some other fun facts we learn about this huge hit: Stipe recorded the song almost naked and kind of pissed-off—he had pushed to deliver his vocals in one emotional take, but the studio engineer seemed half-asleep. And his awkward, angular dance in the oh-so-90s video directed by Tarsem Singh, above? He pulled his inspiration from Sinead O’Connor’s St. Vitus dance in 1990s’ “The Emperor’s New Clothes” video and—no surprise—from David Byrne’s “riveting” herky-jerky moves.
While the record company saw the song’s mass appeal, bassist Mike Mills expresses his initial surprise at their choice of “Losing My Religion” as Out of Time’s first single: “That’s a great idea. It makes no sense at all, it’s 5 minutes long, it has no chorus, and a mandolin is the lead instrument. It’s perfect for R.E.M. because it flouts all the rules.” This period saw the band further developing its moody downbeat folk side, yet the album that produced this song also gave us “Shiny Happy People,” the poppiest, most upbeat song R.E.M.—and maybe any band—had ever recorded, a true testament to their emotional range.
The following year, Automatic for the People came out, drawing on material written during the Out of Time sessions and again featuring two singles that vastly contrasted in tone, maudlin tearjerker “Everybody Hurts” and the celebratory Andy Kaufman tribute “Man on the Moon.” Another song from that album that didn’t get as much attention, “Try Not to Breath,” hearkens back to a much earlier R.E.M. folk song, the Civil War-themed “Swan Swan H” from Life’s Rich Pageant.
As we hear the band explain above in an episode of Song Exploder, the song began its life on a Civil War-era instrument, the dulcimer. Then its sonic influences expanded to include two of Peter Buck’s favorite musical genres, surf rock and spaghetti western. The episode contains many more fascinating insider insights from R.E.M. about “Try Not to Breathe,” which may be one of the saddest songs they’ve ever written, a song about choosing to die rather than suffer.
Hear the song’s original demo and references to Blade Runner, get a glimpse into Stipe’s visual songwriting process, and learn the very personal inspiration from his family history for lyrics like “baby don’t shiver now, why do you shiver now?” Unlike “Losing My Religion,” this song does, in some ways, pull musically and emotionally from Stipe’s religious background.
Even thirty years after his death, Richard Feynman remains one of the most beloved minds in physics in part because of how much attention he paid to things other than physics: drawing and painting, cracking safes, playing the bongos, breaking spaghetti. But a physics enthusiast might object, and reasonably so, that all those activities actually have a great deal to do with physics, given the physical phenomena they all demonstrate and on which they all depend. In recent years, considerable scientific attention has even gone toward spaghetti-breaking, inspiring as it did Feynman — and computer scientist Danny Hillis, who happened to be in the kitchen with him — to pose a long-unanswerable question: How come it always breaks into a million pieces when you snap it?
Maybe spaghetti doesn’t always break into a million pieces, exactly, but it never breaks in two. Discovering the secret to a clean two-part break did require a million of something: a million frames per second, specifically, shot by a camera aimed at a purpose-built spaghetti-breaking device. The results of the research, a project of students Ronald Heisser and Vishal Patil during their time at MIT, came out in a paper co-authored by MIT’s Norbert Stoop and Université Aix Marseille’s Emmanuel Villermaux, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team found, writes MIT News’ Jennifer Chu, “that if a stick [of spaghetti] is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.”
As for why spaghetti breaks into so many pieces without the twist, a question taken on by the Smarter Every Day video just above, French scientists Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch won the Ig Nobel Prize by figuring that out in 2005: “When a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a ‘snap-back’ effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick.” If you twist the stick first, “the snap-back, in which the stick will spring back in the opposite direction from which it was bent, is weakened in the presence of twist. And, the twist-back, where the stick will essentially unwind to its original straightened configuration, releases energy from the rod, preventing additional fractures.”
So now we know. But the fruits of what might strike some as an obsessive and pointless quest could well further the science of fracturing, which Patil describes to the Washington Post as an outwardly “chaotic and random” process. This research could lead, as Chu writes, to a better “understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.” That’s all a long way from the kitchen, certainly, but even the most revolutionary advancements of knowledge grow out of simple curiosity, an impulse felt even in the most mundane or frivolous situations. Richard Feynman understood that better than most, hence subsequent generations of scientists’ desire to pick up whatever piqued his interest — even broken bits of Barilla No. 5.
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.
Do a search on the word “polymath” and you will see an image or reference to Leonardo da Vinci in nearly every result. Many historical figures—not all of them world famous, not all Europeans, men, or from the Italian Renaissance—fit the description. But few such recorded individuals were as feverishly active, restlessly inventive, and astonishingly prolific as Leonardo, who left riddles enough for scholars to solve for many lifetimes.
Leonardo himself, though world-renowned for his talents in the fine arts, spent more of his time conceiving scientific studies and engineering projects. “When he wrote in the early 1480s to Ludovico Sforza, then ruler of Milan, to offer him his services,” remarks Catherine Yvard, Special Collections curator at the Victoria and Albert National Art Library, “he advertised himself as a military engineer, only briefly mentioning his artistic skills at the end of the list.”
But since so few of his projects were, or could be, realized in his lifetime, we can only experience them through his mostly inaccessible, and generally indecipherable, notebooks, which he began keeping after the Duke accepted his application. “None of Leonardo’s predecessors, contemporaries or successors used paper quite like he did,” notes the Victoria and Albert Museum site, “a single sheet contains an unpredictable pattern of ideas and inventions—the workings of both a designer and a scientist.”
Part of the difficulty of piecing his legacy together stems from the fact that his hundreds of pages of notes have been distributed across several institutions and private collections, not all of them accessible to researchers. But ambitious digitization projects are erasing those barriers. We recently featured one, a joint effort of the British Library and Microsoft that brought 570 pages from the Codex Arundel collection to the web. As The Art Newspaper reports, the Victoria and Albert has now launched a similar endeavor, digitizing the Codex Forster notebooks, so named because they came from the private collection of John Forster in 1876.
This collection includes some of Leonardo’s earliest notebooks. Codex Forster I, now online, contains the earliest notebook the V&A holds, dating from about 1487, and the latest, from 1505. “Written in Leonardo’s famous ‘mirror-writing,’” the V&A notes, “the subjects explored within range from hydraulic engineering to a treatise on measuring solids.” Forster II and III should come online soon. “We are planning to make these two other volumes also fully accessible online in 2019 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death,” says Yvard.
The most innovative aspect of this particular project is the use of IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), a technology that “has enabled us to present the codex in a new way,” remarks Kati Price, V&A’s head of digital media. “We’ve used deep-zoom functionality… to present some of the most spectacular and detailed items in our collection.” Scholars and laypeople alike can take a very close-up look at the many schematics and technical diagrams in the notebooks and see Leonardo’s mind and hand at work.
But while all of us can marvel at the sight of his engineering genius, when it comes to reading his handwriting, we’ll have to rely on experts. Let’s hope the museum will someday supply translations for nonspecialists. In the meantime, explore the digitized manuscripts here.
Before the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, there were the Modern Lovers, the Boston proto-punk band helmed by lead singer Jonathan Richman. Their sound owed a lot to the Velvet Underground, a band the teenaged Richman idolized, following them to New York City and ingratiating himself to such a degree that their manager allowed him to couch surf for a few weeks.
Their sole album, released two years after they broke up, was cobbled together from two different demo sessions, one of them produced by the Velvets’ John Cale.
By the time it came out, Richman had already embraced the gentler, sunnier persona and sound that’s made him a celebrated solo artist with fans of all ages. He famously remarked that he didn’t want to make music that could hurt a baby’s ears. As former bandmate, bassist Ernie Brooks told punk historian Legs McNeil:
Jonathan started saying his old songs were too negative and dark, and he started writing things like “Hey There Little Insect,” and maybe he was way ahead of us, but we couldn’t follow him—he wanted us to go, “Buzz, buzz, buzz” on stage, but we were too cool!
Richman’s impulse was correct. More than 40 years out from the Modern Lovers, his solo career is going strong. (On later recordings attributed to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, he is the only holdover from the original line up.)
Rolling Stone dubbed it both the 48th best debut album and the 381st greatest album of all time.
And while “Roadrunner” may be its best known track, thanks to a long running campaign to make it the official rock song of Massachusetts (over Richman’s protestations that it’s not good enough to deserve the honor), “Pablo Picasso”‘s memorable chorus cannot be unheard:
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
(Francoise Gilot, Picasso’s model, and mother of two of his children, might say otherwise, according to several YouTube comments elicited by the unattributed short film above.)
In 1980, a writer for the zine Boston Groupie News tried to get Richman to reveal the song’s provenance. He had pursued art as a teenager, taking Saturday morning classes at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. He’d put his phone number on the back of his canvases, conceiving of that as a way to connect with people. So, was Picasso his favorite painter or…?
No, as it turns out:
I read about him when I was 18. I moved to New York and was intimidated by these girls who (I) thought were attractive. I was afraid to approach them. I didn’t have too high a self-image. I was self-conscious and I thought “Well, Pablo Picasso, he’s only 5 foot 3 but he didn’t let things like that bother him.” So I made up this song right after I saw those girls. You can picture it; I had this sad little look on my face and I was thinking ‘Why am I so scared to approach these girls?’ That was a song of courage for me.
Picasso looks pretty chipper in the well selected vintage footage, above. The expression Richman cops to having cultivated sounds gloomier, a deliberate ploy to entice girls into thinking he was a sad and likely soulful artist.
In other words, irresistible. Like a rock star!
The Modern Lovers’ popularity let him drop the self-conscious pose, but his interest in art remained.
He still paints, and recently identified some of the artists who have inspired him in Art News’ Muses column:
There’s a direct line between “Roadrunner” and the loneliness of Edward Hopper’s “Gas.”
And Picasso? That assholedoesn’t even make the list.
Well some people try to pick up girls
And get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Well the girls would turn the color
Of the avocado when he would drive
Down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not like you
Alright
Well he was only 5′3″
But girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not in New York
Oh well be not schmuck, be not obnoxious
Be not bellbottom bummer or asshole
Remember the story of Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Alright this is it
Well
Some people try to pick up girls
And they get called an asshole
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and so
Pablo Picasso was never called…
Want to hear it again? Try the animated take below, by the endearingly modest 7atenine22.
Readers, if you have any intel on the person responsible for the film at the top of the page, please let us know, so we can give credit where credit is due.
Someone in the Office of Sheriff, in Monroe County, New York, has a good sense of humor. And if you’re from the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies generation, you will get a good laugh.
In other news, Warner Bros. just announced that it’s developing an animated Wile E. Coyote movie, some 70 years after he first appeared on the screen. Appropriately the film is called, Coyote vs. Acme. Somehow that pummeled coyote manages to endure.
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