“A high school teacher finds out that he has terminal cancer and decides to cook meth in order to make money for his family.” Twenty years ago that would have sounded like an insane premise for a television show. Ten years ago that show actually premiered. Almost five years ago it ended its both widely watched and critically acclaimed five-season run. Breaking Bad could only have emerged at a certain point in television history, when the high-quality, cinematic drama became a viable prospect even for a basic-cable network like AMC. But it never would have got anywhere without an impressive pilot, the first episode of a series that provides a sense of what the whole thing will be like.
A pilot, for its part, can never get anywhere without an impressive screenplay. Here, YouTube video essay channel Lessons from the Screenplay breaks down the reasons the screenplay for Breaking Bad’s pilot works so well, not least because it perfectly executes the conventions of the form. First, it grabs the viewer’s attention with the image of a man barreling through the desert in a Winnebago, wearing only a underpants and a gas mask. This opening sequence, the “teaser,” quickly intensifies and ends with a feeling of life-and-death stakes. Then, when the episode properly begins, it introduces the man in the Winnebago, a chemistry teacher named Walt, by taking us through an earlier day in his highly unsatisfactory life: disrespectful students, financial woes, a passionless marriage.
Soon the screenplay addresses the implicit question, “What is missing in Walt’s life?” The scenes the pilot shows us illustrate that “he is someone who longs for control and purpose, but lacks both.” Then it delivers the “inciting incident for the show”: his collapse on the job and subsequent cancer diagnosis. Such an incident conventionally turns the protagonist’s life upside down, as this one turns Walt’s life upside down, and motivate that protagonist to take some kind of action, as it motivates Walt to team up with a former student to start a meth-cooking operation. Shortly after that, the now fearless Walt gets his first taste of power in a fight at a clothing store, beginning his transformation from the meek, put-upon Walt into the steely drug kingpin Walter White — a transformation that transfixed Breaking Bad’s audience.
“Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows go on for years or even decades,” says creator Vince Gilligan. “When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?” In this way, Breaking Bad furthered the revolution in cinematic television not just with its look and feel or even its content, but with its commitment to the idea that a character must come out of the story as a different person than he was when he entered it. The pilot manages to do in its own self-contained story while also establishing expectations for the rest of the series. Breaking Bad, most critics will agree, met those expectations and then some, but without a pilot as well-written as this, it almost certainly wouldn’t have had the chance to try.
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.
First of all, happy belated birthday to Evan Puschak, the man behind Nerdwriter and some of the best video essays on the web that we often feature here on Open Culture. He recently turned 30, and if you’re in your 20s that’s some elder statesman business. If you’re older, well, remember how you felt when you turned 30? Wouldn’t you want that youthful anxiety back?
Anyway, Evan’s gift to us is this appreciation of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” the breakaway hit from his 1979 album Off the Wall, the one that began Jackson’s rise into the stratosphere, a journey that would end with an isolated man chasing the dragon’s tail of success. But that was far off in the future, and though Thriller was the blockbuster album, Off the Wall has so much more joy, sexuality, and heart than what was to come. “Rock with You” and the title track are smooth, soulful numbers, but as Puschak says, “Don’t Stop” is *the* single off that album, a song that still sounds fresh today, a cross-over pop hit par excellence, despite being overplayed at every wedding reception since the ‘80s. (Even when watching the video for this piece, I found myself clapping along, something I rarely do. But it’s just so. damn. catchy.)
So why is that? How does this song work?
Puschak makes a few salient points.
One is that the song comes heavily indebted to disco, yet it is not a disco song. The rhythm structure is closer to funk than disco–it’s really just a vamp on two chords–and the verse-chorus structure is from rock music. It’s “pure dance music,” as Puschak says, quoting writer Ann Danielson.
Another point is that the rhythm mix is all about syncopation, with bass, shakers, strings, horns, and even a Coke bottle (played by Jackson himself) filling in the spaces between the beat. (Those that find, say, house music boring can put a lot of it down to the lack of syncopation).
And finally, there’s Jackson’s vocals, the top of each verse being two notes in a tritone interval. The tritone has been called the “devil’s interval”–there’s a nice video essay here on its history–but there’s nothing devilish about Jackson’s falsetto. As Puschak says, quoting Ethan Hein, “the relationship between these notes is somewhat off kilter, and your mind notices that. And that infuses the song with an urgency that it wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Interestingly, the lyrics are not discussed. And probably for good reason–apart from the song’s title in the chorus, Jackson’s lyrics are sung so high they are inscrutable. Be honest, until you read the lyric sheet, did you know what he was singing? My point would be–it doesn’t matter. The point is in the title; the meaning is in the mood.
Jackson would try to catch lighting in a bottle again on Thriller with “You Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” a pretty blatant rewrite. It’s still a great single, but that song, along with “Beat It” started Jackson along the path of lryics about aggression and posturing. (A few years later, we’d have “Bad,” “Smooth Criminal,” and more.)
Hence my point about the magic of Off the Wall–before the fame, before the insanity, before the “King of Pop” business, Jackson was a sensual, androgynous angel sent down to bring love to the dance floor, or your bedroom, and all spaces in between. It didn’t last long, but it’s a beautiful single, a beautiful album, and a beautiful moment in pop.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Maybe we read some celebrated literary works the way we eat kale or quinoa—you don’t exactly love it but they say it’s, like, a superfood. Not so Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. When I first started reading the novel, I couldn’t stop. Twelve hours and a couple pots of coffee later, I wanted to read it again right away. It’s a page-turner—not something one often says of literary fiction beloved by highbrow critics and academics—but I mean it as the highest possible compliment.
The book has every feature of a binge-worthy soap opera: characters we love and love to hate, doomed affairs, sex, violence, endless family squabbling, tragedy, intrigue, melodrama…. Again, this is no criticism; Marquez loved telenovelas and even wrote a script for one. He wanted his work to reach as many people as possible, to thrill and entertain. But he didn’t withhold any literary nutrients either.
The novel’s poetic language, historical scope, and thematic and symbolic complexity has led critics like William Kennedy to compare it to the book of Genesis, and led no small number of readers to wildly prefer it to the Bible or any other ancient book of mythology.
If you’re one of the two or three people who hasn’t read the novel, and you don’t find all this praise fully convincing, consider the case made by Francisco Díez-Buzo in the TED-Ed animated video above.
The story, we learn, arrived as an epiphany Marquez had while he and his family were on the road to a vacation destination. He turned the car around, abandoned the trip, and started writing immediately—an example of the total commitment many writers promise themselves they’ll one day get around to maybe working on. Eighteen months and many pots of coffee later, One Hundred Years of Solitudeappeared, introducing a worldwide readership to Marquez, magical realism, and Latin American literature, politics, and history.
Most every reader now has a volume of Octavio Paz or Pablo Neruda on the shelf, and novels by Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, or Isabelle Allende. Before Cien años de soledad arrived, however, this was rarely so outside of Spanish-speaking countries. The novel created a global appetite for rich Latin American traditions of storytelling and lyrical poetry. New translations from the region began appearing everywhere.
Like Faulkner’s entire corpus compressed into one volume, the epic tale of seven generations of Buendías in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo is vast and sprawling. It “is not an easy book to read,” says Díez-Buzo. Here, as you might expect, I disagree. It is harder not to read it once you’ve picked it up. But you will need to read it again, and again, and again.
So packed is the book with detail, allusion, historical reference, and narrative that you could read it for the rest of your life and never exhaust its layers of meaning. As Harold Bloom put it, “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb… There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it.” Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes”—the founding text of Spanish-language literature and, indeed, of the novel form itself.
The supernatural and the surreal suffuse each page, raising even mundane encounters to a mythic dimension, staging history as timeless drama, played out over and over again through each generation. In each repetition, fantastic and fatal changes also “produce a sense of history,” says Díez-Buzo, “as a downward spiral the characters seem powerless to escape.”
It is this history that Marquez described, when he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1982, as “a boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend.” Marquez’s own family history, full of “haunted men and historic women,” served as a model for his succession of fictional ancestors. Latin Americans, he said, “have not had a moment’s rest,” yet in the face of colonialist brutality, civil war, dictatorships, “oppression, plundering and abandonment,” he declared, “we respond with life.” By some strange act of magic, Marquez contained all of that life in one extraordinary novel.
Today we know what no previous generation knew: the history of the universe and of the unfolding of life on Earth. Through the astonishing achievements of natural scientists worldwide, we now have a detailed account of how galaxies and stars, planets and living organisms, human beings and human consciousness came to be.
With this knowledge, the question of what role we play in the 14-billion-year history of the universe imposes itself with greater poignancy than ever before. In asking ourselves how we will tell the story of Earth to our children, we must inevitably consider the role of humanity in its history, and how we connect with the intricate web of life on Earth.
In Journey of the Universe–a multimedia educational project that features a book, film and free online courses–evolutionary philosopher Brian Thomas Swimme and historian of religions Mary Evelyn Tucker provide an elegant, science-based narrative to tell this epic story, leading up to the challenges of our present moment. The authors describe the origins of humans on Earth, how we developed a symbolic consciousness, and how our ability to communicate using symbols make humans a “planetary presence.”
We are now faced with a new dynamic—one where the survival of the species and entire ecosystems depend primarily on human activity, and the choices humans make.
Weaving together the findings of modern science together with enduring wisdom found in the humanistic traditions of the West, Asia, and indigenous peoples, the authors explore cosmic evolution as a profoundly wondrous process based on creativity, connection, and interdependence, and they envision an unprecedented opportunity for the world’s people to address the daunting ecological and social challenges of our times.
Developed over several decades, and inspired by the authors’ long collaboration with Thomas Berry, Journey of the Universe boasts an impressive roster of science advisors including Ursula Goodenough, Craig Kochel, and Terry Deacon.
Journey of the Universe is a multimedia educational project that includes:
1.) The Journey of the Universe: A Story for Our Time Specialization available on Coursera, created by Yale. This is a collection of three Massive Online Open Courses that take students through the scientific and cultural cosmology found throughout Journey of the Universe, as well as deep into its lineage with cultural historian and cosmologist Thomas Berry:
2) The Journey of the Universe Film, winner of the 2012 San Francisco/Northern California Emmy® Award for best documentary. You can watch the trailer for the film above
3) The Journey of the Universe Book, published by Yale University Press. Translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian.
4) The Journey of the Universe Conversation Series, a twenty-part educational series integrates the perspectives of the sciences and the humanities into a retelling of our 13.7 billion year story. In a series of one-on-one interviews, scientists, historians, and environmentalists explore the unfolding story of the universe and Earth and the role of the human in responding to our present challenges.
Devin O’Dea lives in San Francisco where he serves as the manager of the Journey of the Universe project: a collaborative, multimedia conversation that draws together scientific discoveries with humanistic insights concerning the nature of the universe. Devin welcomes all interests and feedback to Journey materials at devin@journeyoftheuniverse.org.
Have you looked up Charles Mingus lately? You should. Mingus, who died in 1979, has a “lost” album coming out—live recordings made in ‘73, aired on the radio once, then disappeared into obscurity until now. Seems there’s always something new to learn about our favorite jazz musicians—and our favorite jazz poets. Newly-discovered poems from Langston Hughes, for example, appeared a few years back, written in “depths of the crisis” of the Great Depression.
These poems are dark and bitter, “some of the harshest political verse ever penned by an American,” writes Hughes scholar Arnold Rampersad. They are not the celebratory Hughes we read in school. While angry conservatives and McCarthyism may have forced this side of him into hiding, in Hughes’ view, poetry, like jazz, had room for everything, whether it be love or rage.
“Jazz is a great big sea,” he wrote in his 1956 essay “Jazz as Communication.” The music “washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.” His task, in poems like “The Weary Blues” had been to put “jazz into words,” with all of its wild mood swings, lovers’ quarrels, rapid-fire conversations, and heated arguments.
Throughout his career, Mingus had been moving in the other direction, taking storms of ideas—angry, melancholy, joyful, etc.—and turning them into sounds. But his music, always “supremely vocal,” notes The Nation’s Adam Shatz, spoke in one way or another. Mingus “collaborated with poets in East Village Coffeehouses” and won his only Grammy for a piece of writing, the liner notes for his 1971 album Let My Children Hear Music.
For Mingus, critic Whitney Balliett remarked, jazz “was another way of talking.” For another composer, pianist and journalist Leonard Feather, language and music played equal roles. Feather, notes Jason Ankeny, was known both as “the acknowledged dean of American jazz critics” and author of “perennial” standards “Evil Gal Blues,” “Blowtop Blues,” and “How Blue Can You Get?”
Two years after Hughes read “Jazz as Communication” at the Newport Jazz Festival, he collaborated with Feather’s All-Star Sextet and Mingus and the Horace Parlan Quintet on an album first released as The Weary Blues. It has recently been re-released by Fingertips as Harlem in Vogue—22 tracks of Hughes reading poems like “The Weary Blues,” “Blues at Dawn,” and “Same in Blues/Comment on Curb” (top) over original compositions by Feather and Mingus, with six additional tracks of Hughes reading solo and two original songs by Bob Dorough with the Bob Dorough Quintet. (Mingus plays bass on tracks 11–18.)
You can stream the album in full above (and buy ithere). Here, listen to the Poetry Foundation’s Curtis Fox, jazz musician Charley Gerard, and poet Holly Bass discuss the record and Hughes’ relationship to jazz and blues. Hughes’ poems, notes Gerard, are “structured just like blues,” their meters, rhymes, and rhythms always invoking the sounds of Harlem’s musical scene. In these recordings, Feather and Mingus transpose Hughes’ language into music, just as he had turned jazz into words.
“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.
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