Medieval Cats Behaving Badly: Kitties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Century Manuscripts
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
–Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–90)
When Emir O. Filipovic, a medievalist at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, visited the State Archives of Dubrovnik, he stumbled upon something that will hardly surprise anyone who lives with cats today: a 15th-century manuscript with inky paw prints casually tracked across it.
And here’s another purrpetrator. The Historisches Archiv in Cologne, Germany houses a manuscript with an interesting history. According to the blog MedievalFragments, “a Deventer scribe, writing around 1420, found his manuscript ruined by a urine stain left there by a cat the night before. He was forced to leave the rest of the page empty, drew a picture of a cat, and cursed the creature with the following words:”
Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem ubi cattie venire possunt.
Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.
What I would sincerely love to know is whether, almost 600 years later, the urine smell has left the page. Cat owners, you’ll know what I mean.
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Read More...Why Medieval Bologna Was Full of Tall Towers, and What Happened to Them
Image by Toni Pecoraro, via Wikimedia Commons
Go to practically any major city today, and you’ll notice that the buildings in certain areas are much taller than in others. That may sound trivially true, but what’s less obvious is that the height of those buildings tends to correspond to the value of the land on which they stand, which itself reflects the potential economic productivity to be realized by using as much vertical space as possible. To put it crudely, the taller the buildings in a part of town, the greater the wealth being generated (or, at times, destroyed). This is a modern phenomenon, but it also held true, in a different way, in the Bologna of 800 years ago.
There exists a work of art, much circulated online, that depicts what looks like the capital of Emilia-Romagna in the twelfth or thirteenth century. But the city bristles with what look like skyscrapers, creating an incongruous but enchanting medieval Blade Runner effect. Bologna really does have towers like that, but only about 22 of them still stand today. Whether it ever had the nearly 180 depicted in this particular image, and what happened to them if it did, is the question Jochem Boodt investigates in the Present Past video below.
In the era these towers were built, Bologna had become “one of the largest cities in Europe. It’s a time of huge, ambitious projects. Cities built cathedrals, town halls, and public squares — and some people built towers.” Those people included noble families who held to aristocratic traditions, not least violent feuding. Given that “the city is no place to build castles,” they instead inhabited urban complexes whose townhouses surrounded towers, which were “more like panic rooms” than actual living spaces. References to these prominent structures appear in subsequent works of art and literature: Dante, for instance, wrote of a leaning “tower called Garisenda.”
The etching that set Boodt on this journey to Bologna in the first place turns out to be the relatively recent work of an Italian artist called Toni Pecoraro, who heightened — in every sense — images of a 1917 model of the city by the shoemaker and “strange self-taught artist-scientist” Angelo Finelli. Finelli, in turn, drew his inspiration from a study by the nineteenth-century archaeologist Giovanni Gozzadini, himself a scion of one of those very families who competed to have the tallest tower, then got bored and pursued other status symbols instead. Perhaps Bologna is no longer the center of aristocratic and mercantile intrigue it used to be, judging by the sparseness of its current skyline, but then, there’s something to be said for not needing a fortified tower in which to hide at a moment’s notice.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Online Education in 1988–and It’s Now Coming True
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Though that line probably originated with a Canadian novelist called Grant Allen, it’s long been popularly attributed to his more colorful nineteenth-century contemporary Mark Twain. It isn’t hard to understand why it now has so much traction as a social media-ready quote, though during much of the period between Allen’s day and our own, many must have found it practically unintelligible. The industrialized world of the twentieth century attempted to make education and schooling synonymous, an ambition sufficiently wrongheaded that, by the nineteen-eighties, no less powerful a mind than Isaac Asimov was lamenting it on national television.
“In the old days you used to have tutors for children,” Asimov tells Bill Moyers in a 1988 World of Ideas interview. “But how many people could afford to hire a pedagogue? Most children went uneducated. Then we reached the point where it was absolutely necessary to educate everybody. The only way we could do it is to have one teacher for a great many students and, in order to organize the situation properly, we gave them a curriculum to teach from.” And yet “the number of teachers is far greater than the number of good teachers.” The ideal solution, personal tutors for all, would be made possible by personal computers, “each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers.”
At the time, this wasn’t an obvious future for non-science-fiction-visionaries to imagine. “Well, what if I want to learn only about baseball?” asks a faintly skeptical Moyers. “You learn all you want about baseball,” Asimov replies, “because the more you learn about baseball the more you might grow interested in mathematics to try to figure out what they mean by those earned run averages and the batting averages and so on. You might, in the end, become more interested in math than baseball if you follow your own bent.” And indeed, similarly equipped with a personal-computer-as-tutor, “someone who is interested in mathematics may suddenly find himself very enticed by the problem of how you throw a curve ball.”
The trouble was how to get every household a computer, which was still seen by many in 1988 as an extravagant, not necessarily useful purchase. Three and a half decades later, you see a computer in the hand of nearly every man, woman, and child in the developed countries (and many developing ones as well). This is the technological reality that gave rise to Khan Academy, which offers free online education in math, sciences, literature, history, and much else besides. In the interview clip above, its founder Sal Khan remembers how, when his internet-tutoring project was first gaining momentum, it occurred to him that “maybe we’re in the right moment in history that something like this could become what Isaac Asimov envisioned.”
More recently, Khan has been promoting the educational use of a technology at the edge of even Asimov’s vision. Just days ago, he published the book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) and made a video with his teenage son demonstrating how the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — sounding, it must be said, uncannily like Scarlett Johansson in the now-prophetic-seeming Her — can act as a geometry tutor. Not that it works only, or even primarily, for kids in school: “That’s another trouble with education as we now have it,” as Asimov says. “It is for the young, and people think of education as something that they can finish.” We may be as relieved as generations past when our schooling ends, but now we have no excuse ever to finish our education.
Find a transcript of Asimov and Moyers’ conversation here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Hear Leo Tolstoy Read From His Last Major Work in Four Languages, 1909
In years past, we’ve brought you rare recordings of Sigmund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges speaking in English. Today we present a remarkable series of recordings of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy reading a passage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four languages: English, German, French and Russian.
Wise Thoughts For Every Day was Tolstoy’s last major work. It first appeared in 1903 as The Thoughts of Wise Men, and was revised and renamed several times before the author’s death in 1910. Eventually banned by the Soviet regime, the book reappeared in 1995 as a bestseller in Russia. Then, in 1997, the text was translated into English by Peter Sekirin and published as A Calendar of Wisdom. The book is a collection of passages from a diverse group of thinkers, ranging from Laozi to Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I felt that I have been elevated to great spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people whose books I read and whose thoughts I selected for my Circle of Reading,” wrote Tolstoy in his diary.
As an old man (watch video of him shortly before he died) Tolstoy rejected his great works of fiction, believing that it was more important to give moral and spiritual guidance to the common people. “To create a book for the masses, for millions of people,” wrote Tolstoy, “is incomparably more important and fruitful than to compose a novel of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy classes for a short time, and then is forever forgotten.”
Tolstoy arranged his book for the masses as a calendar, with a series of readings for each day of the year. For example under the date, May 9, Tolstoy selects brief passages from Immanuel Kant, Solon, and the Koran. Underneath he writes, “We cannot stop on the way to self-perfection. As soon as you notice that you have a bigger interest in the outer world than in yourself, then you should know that the world moves behind you.”
The audio recordings above were made at the writer’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year later. Tolstoy apparently translated the passage himself. The English version sounds a bit like the King James Bible. The words are hard to make out in the recording, but he says:
That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?
Tolstoy is known to have made several voice recordings in his life, dating back to 1895 when he made two wax cylinder recordings for Julius Block. Russian literary scholar Andrew D. Kaufman has collected three more vintage recordings (all in Russian) including Tolstoy’s lesson to peasant children on his estate, a reading of his fairy tale “The Wolf,” and an excerpt from his essay “I Cannot be Silent.”
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Read More...“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More
According to many historians, the English Enlightenment may never have happened were it not for coffeehouses, the public sphere where poets, critics, philosophers, legal minds, and other intellectual gadflies regularly met to chatter about the pressing concerns of the day. And yet, writes scholar Bonnie Calhoun, “it was not for the taste of coffee that people flocked to these establishments.”
Indeed, one irate pamphleteer defined coffee, which was at this time without cream or sugar and usually watered down, as “puddle-water, and so ugly in colour and taste [sic].”
No syrupy, high-dollar Macchiatos or smooth, creamy lattes kept them coming back. Rather than the beverage, “it was the nature of the institution that caused its popularity to skyrocket during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
How, then, were proprietors to achieve economic growth? Like the owner of the first English coffee-shop did in 1652, London merchant Samuel Price deployed the time-honored tactics of the mountebank, using advertising to make all sorts of claims for coffee’s many “virtues” in order to convince consumers to drink the stuff at home. In the 1690 broadside above, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, Price made a “litany of claims for coffee’s health benefits,” some of which “we’d recognize today and others that seem far-fetched.” In the latter category are assertions that “coffee-drinking populations didn’t get common diseases” like kidney stones or “Scurvey, Gout, Dropsie.” Coffee could also, Price claimed, improve hearing and “swooning” and was “experimentally good to prevent Miscarriage.”
Among these spurious medical benefits is listed a genuine effect of coffee—its relief of “lethargy.” Price’s other beverages—“Chocolette, and Thee or Tea”—receive much less emphasis since they didn’t require a hard sell. No one needs to be convinced of the benefits of coffee these days—indeed many of us can’t function without it. But as we sit in corporate chain cafes, glued to smartphones and laptop screens and mostly ignoring each other, our coffeehouses have become somewhat pale imitations of those vibrant Enlightenment-era establishments where, writes Calhoun, “men [though rarely women] were encouraged to engage in both verbal and written discourse with regard for wit over rank.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More
Read More...RIP David Sanborn: See Him Play Alongside Miles Davis, Randy Newman, Sun Ra, Leonard Cohen and Others on His TV Show Night Music
It’s late in the evening of Saturday, October 28th, 1989. You flip on the television and the saxophonist David Sanborn appears onscreen, instrument in hand, introducing the eclectic blues icon Taj Mahal, who in turn declares his intent to play a number with “rural humor” and “world proportions.” And so he does, which leads into performances by Todd Rundgren, Nanci Griffith, the Pat Metheny Group, and proto-turntablist Christian Marclay (best known today for his 24-hour montage The Clock). At the end of the show — after a vintage clip of Count Basie from 1956 — everyone gets back onstage for an all-together-now rendition of “Never Mind the Why and Wherefore” from H.M.S. Pinafore.
This was a more or less typical episode of Night Music, which aired on NBC from 1988 to 1990, and in that time offered “some of the strangest musical line-ups ever broadcast on network television.” So writes E. Little at In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi, who names just a few of its performers: “Sonic Youth, Miles Davis, the Residents, Charlie Haden and His Liberation Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Pharoah Sanders, Karen Mantler, Diamanda Galas, John Lurie, and Nana Vasconcelos.”
One especially memorable broadcast featured “a 15-minute interview-performance by Sun Ra’s Arkestra that finds the composer-pianist-Afrofuturist at the peak of his experimental powers, moving from piano to Yamaha DX‑7 and back again while the Arkestra flexes its cosmic muscles.”
“Sanborn hosted the eminently hip TV show,” writes jazz journalist Bill Milkowski in his remembrance of the late saxman, who died last weekend, “not only providing informative introductions but also sitting in with the bands.” One night might see him playing with Al Jarreau, Paul Simon, Marianne Faithfull, Bootsy Collins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dizzy Gillespie, — or indeed, some unlikely combination of such artists. “The idea of that show was that genres are secondary, an artificial division of music that really isn’t necessary; that musicians have more in common than people expect,” Sanborn told DownBeat in 2018. “We wanted to represent that by having a show where Leonard Cohen could sing a song, Sonny Rollins could play a song, and then they could do something together.”
Having wanted to pursue that idea further since the show’s cancellation — not the easiest task, given his ever-busy schedule of live performances and recording sessions across the musical spectrum — he created the YouTube channel Sanborn Sessions a few years ago, some of whose videos have been re-uploaded in recent weeks. But much also remains to be discovered in the archives of the original Night Music for broad-minded music lovers under the age of about 60 — or indeed, for those over that age who never tuned in back in the late eighties, a time period that’s lately come in for a cultural re-evaluation. Thanks to this YouTube playlist, you can watch more than 40 broadcasts of Night Music (which was at first titled Sunday Night) and listen like it’s 1989.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...A Playlist of the 3,300 Best Films & Documentaries on Youtube, Including Works by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Errol Morris & Other Auteurs
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Once upon a time, the most convenient means of discovering movies was cable television. This held especially true for those of us who happened to be adolescents on a break from school, ready and willing morning, midday, or night to sit through the commercial-laden likes of Corvette Summer, Transylvania 6–5000, BMX Bandits, or Freejack. Click on any of those links, and you can watch the relevant picture free on Youtube; click on the link to this playlist, and you’ll find 3,000 of the best films now available on that platform (the exact number may vary depending on your region of the world), as curated by Learnoutloud.com.
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Not all these movies belong in the cheap-thrills bin. You’ll also find the work of celebrated auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps), Stanley Kubrick (Fear and Desire, Barry Lyndon), Akira Kurosawa (Dersu Uzala, Dreams), and Woody Allen (Mighty Aphrodite, Cassandra’s Dream).
Then here are the documentaries, gathered here on their own playlist, including Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line and Werner Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner and Lessons of Darkness. You can even find related pictures across genres: consider following Lost in La Mancha, which documents Terry Gilliam’s thwarted efforts to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
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“Almost all of these movies are free with ads,” writes Learnoutloud.com’s David Bischke, though YouTube Premium subscribers will be able to watch ad-free. “Like any streaming service, the rights to these movies change frequently, especially on YouTube’s official Movies and TV channel. So if you see a movie you really want to watch, then check it out soon!” If you’ve been meaning to get into Raise the Red Lantern and To Live by director Zhang Yimou, to learn about artists and musicians like Jackson Pollock and Glenn Gould, or to behold a young Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early appearances in Pumping Iron and Hercules in New York, now’s the time. And with Vice Versa and Dream a Little Dream currently available, why not revisit the subgenre of the eighties body-switch comedy while you’re at it?
P.S. In case you’re wondering about the legality of the films, the Learnoutloud site notes: To make the playlist, “the movies had to be legally free on YouTube either from YouTube’s official Movies and TV channel, from a YouTube channel legally distributing the movie, or from a movie on YouTube that is in the public domain.” Just thought you might want to know…
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Meet Fanny, the First Female Rock Band to Top the Charts: “They Were Just Colossal and Wonderful, and Nobody’s Ever Mentioned Them”
When the Beatles upended popular music, thousands of wannabe beat groups were born all over the world, and many of them–for the first time ever, really–were all-female groups. This Amoeba Records article has a fairly exhaustive list of these girl bands, with names like The Daughters of Eve, The Freudian Slips, The Moppets, The Bombshells, and The What Four. Very few got past a few singles.
Instead, it would take until the 1970s for an all-female rock band to crack the charts. And no, it wasn’t the Runaways.
Formed in Sacramento by two Filipina sisters, Jean and June Millington, the group known as Fanny would be the first all-female band to release an album on a major label (their self-titled debut, on Reprise, 1970) and land four singles in the Billboard Hot 100–the title track from their 1971 album Charity Ball, a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar” (as seen above), “I’ve Had It,” and finally “Butter Boy,” their highest chart success, at #29 in 1975. That last track was Jean Millington’s song about David Bowie, with whom she’d had a brief fling while touring the UK.
Born to a Filipina mother and a white American serviceman father, the two sisters found refuge in music when life at their Sacramento middle school was intimidating and racist. Rock music, however, was a way to make friends and find a support system. In their teens, they started a band called The Svelts, and watched as various other band members came and went due to marriage, or boyfriends who insisted they stop making music. The Millingtons didn’t stop, and having gained reliable band members in Addie Lee on guitar and Brie Brandt on drums, they followed their rhythm section to Los Angeles, changed the band name to Wild Honey, and wound up getting signed to Reprise after changing the name one more time to Fanny.
Though the man who signed them, Mo Ostin, considered them a novelty act, they were soon sent out on tour to open for groups like The Kinks and Humble Pie. They also backed Barbra Streisand on her Barbra Joan Streisand album, when the singer wanted a rockier sound.
In a 1999 Rolling Stone interview, David Bowie still sang their praises: “They were one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time, in about 1973. They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them. They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time.”
After five albums and some personnel changes (including bringing in Patti Quatro, Suzi Quatro’s sister), the band called it quits. Jean would go on to marry Bowie’s guitarist Earl Slick; June came out as gay and later established the Institute for Musical Arts, which supported the women’s music movement.
Fanny dropped from rock consciousness, more or less, and are rarely brought up when pioneering women in rock are mentioned. June Millington still bristles about it, telling the Guardian, “All these women carved out their careers and I never once heard them mention Fanny…I looked. I waited. I read interviews. And I never saw it.”
They reunited in 2018 for an album, Fanny Walked the Earth, bringing back June, Jean, and Brie for a batch of politically charged songs and celebrity appearances by Runaways singer Cherie Currie, Kathy Valentine of the Go-Go’s and Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson of the Bangles.
Rhino Records also rereleased their first four albums in a box set in 2002, for those who would like to investigate further.
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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.
Read More...Read 20 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Alice Munro (RIP) Free Online
Note: Back in 2013, when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, we published a post featuring 20 short stories written by Munro. Today, with the sad news that Alice Munro has passed away, at the age of 92, we’re bringing the original post (from October 10, 2013) back to the surface–in part because you can still read the 20 stories free online. Please find the stories at the bottom of this post.
Calling her a “master of the contemporary short story,” the Swedish Academy awarded 82-year-old Alice Munro the Nobel Prize in Literature today. It is well-deserved, and hard-earned (and comes not long after she announced her retirement from fiction). After 14 story collections, Munro has reached at least a couple generations of writers with her psychologically subtle stories about ordinary men and women in Huron County, Ontario, her birthplace and home. Only the 13th woman writer to win the Nobel, Munro has previously won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in Canada three times (1968, 1978, and 1986), and two O. Henry Awards (2006 and 2008). Her regional fiction draws as much from her Ontario surroundings as does the work of the very best so-called “regional” writers, and captivating interactions of character and landscape tend to drive her work more so than intricate plotting.
Of that region she loves, Munro has said: “It means something to me that no other country can—no matter how important historically that other country may be, how ‘beautiful,’ how lively and interesting. I am intoxicated by this particular landscape… I speak the language.” The language she may have learned from the “brick houses, the falling-down barns, the trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire.” But the short story form she learned from writers like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty. She names all three in a 2001 interview with The Atlantic, and also mentions Chekhov and “a lot of writers that I found in The New Yorker in the fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did—about emotions and places.”
Munro was no young literary phenom—she did not achieve fame in her twenties with stories in The New Yorker. A mother of three children, she “learned to write in the slivers of time she had.” She published her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968 at 37, an advanced age for writers today, so many of whom have several novels under their belts by their early thirties. Munro always meant to write a novel, many in fact, but “there was no way I could get that kind of time,” she said:
Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel. But when I was younger, it was simply a matter of expediency. I had small children, I didn’t have any help. Some of this was before the days of automatic washing machines, if you can actually believe it. There was no way I could get that kind of time. I couldn’t look ahead and say, this is going to take me a year, because I thought every moment something might happen that would take all time away from me. So I wrote in bits and pieces with a limited time expectation. Perhaps I got used to thinking of my material in terms of things that worked that way. And then when I got a little more time, I started writing these odder stories, which branch out a lot.
Whether Munro’s adherence to the short form has always been a matter of expediency, or whether it’s just what her stories need to be, hardly matters to readers who love her work. She discusses her “stumbling” on short fiction in the interview above from 1990 with Rex Murphy. For a detailed sketch of Munro’s early life, see her wonderful 2011 biographical essay “Dear Life” in The New Yorker. And for those less familiar with Munro’s exquisitely crafted narratives, we offer you below several selections of her work free online. Get to know this author who, The New York Times writes, “revolutionized the architecture of short stories.”
“Voices” - (2013, Telegraph)
“A Red Dress—1946” (2012–13, Narrative—requires free sign-up)
“Amundsen” (2012, The New Yorker)
“Train” (2012, Harper’s)
“To Reach Japan” (2012, Narrative—requires free sign-up)
“Axis” (2001, The New Yorker — in audio)
“Gravel” (2011, The New Yorker)
“Fiction” (2009, Daily Lit)
“Deep Holes” (2008, The New Yorker)
“Free Radicals” (2008, The New Yorker)
“Face” (2008, The New Yorker)
“Dimension” (2006, The New Yorker)
“Wenlock Edge” (2005, The New Yorker)
“The View from Castle Rock” (2005, The New Yorker)
“Passion” (2004, The New Yorker)
“Runaway” (2003, The New Yorker)
“Some Women” (2008, New Yorker)
“The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999, The New Yorker)
“Queenie” (1998, London Review of Books
“Boys and Girls” (1968)
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Wes Anderson Directs & Stars in an Ad Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Montblanc’s Signature Pen
One hardly has to be an expert on the films of Wes Anderson to imagine that the man writes with a fountain pen. Maybe back in the early nineteen-nineties, when he was shooting the black-and-white short that would become Bottle Rocket on the streets of Austin, he had to settle for ordinary ballpoints. But now that he’s long since claimed his place in the top ranks of major American auteurs, he can indulge his taste for painstaking craftsmanship and recent-past antiquarianism both onscreen and off. For a brand like Montblanc, this surely made him the ideal choice to direct a commercial celebrating the hundredth anniversary of their flagship writing tool, the Meisterstück.
Shot at Studio Babelsberg in Germany, where Anderson is at work on his next feature The Phoenician Scheme, the resulting short “features Anderson himself, sporting a wispy walrus mustache, as well as frequent collaborators Jason Schwartzman and Rupert Friend, all posing as a group of mountain-climbers with a particular affection for the freedom and inspiration offered by Montblanc’s products,” writes Indiewire’s Harrison Richlin.
Within its first minute, “the ad takes us from the cold, snowy caps of Mont Blanc to a cozy chalet Anderson announces as The Mont Blanc Observatory and Writer’s Room.” Vogue Business’ Christina Binkley reports that this indoor-to-outdoor transition alone required 50 takes, which was only one of the surprises in store for Montblanc’s marketing officer.
Anderson also turned up with an unexpected proposal of his own. “The filmmaker presented a prototype pen of his own design that he asked the German company to manufacture,” Binkley writes. “He’d even named it: the Schreiberling, which means ‘the scribbler’ in German. That had not been part of the pitch.” Perhaps convinced by the built prototype assembled by Anderson’s set-design team, Montblanc “agreed to produce 1,969 copies of this small, green fountain pen to commemorate Anderson’s birth year, 1969.” At 55 years of age, Anderson may no longer be the preternaturally confident young filmmaker we remember from the days of Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums, but since then, he’s only grown more adept at getting exactly what he wants from a company, whether it be a movie studio or a European luxury-goods manufacturer.
Related Content:
Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Commercials: A Playlist of 8 Short Andersonian Works
Montblanc Unveils a New Line of Miles Davis Pens … and (Kind of) Blue Ink
Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?
Has Wes Anderson Sold Out? Can He Sell Out? Critics Take Up the Debate
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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