Michael Pollan, the bestselling author who describes himself jokingly as a “liberal foodie intellectual,” published Food Rulesin 2009, a handbook that offers “straightforward, memorable rules for eating wisely.” The one I remember best is Rule #2. “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” That’s because it’s likely processed and “designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons, our inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt.” A few other noteworthy suggestions and assertions include:
Rule #6: “Avoid foods that contain more than five ingredients.”
Rule #20: “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”
Rule #37: “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”
Rule #17: “Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans.”
The Yale Puppeteers, consisting of Forman Brown, Harry Burnett, and Roddy Brandon, came together in the 1920s and spent almost the next seven decades touring the United States, putting on satirical performances that featured puppets in starring roles. They also staged performances at the Turnabout Theater from 1941 to 1956, turning it into a Hollywood institution.
In 1965, while speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Harry Burnett reflected on his career and recalled how the puppet troupe “entertained Charles Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore,” and even “presented a special show for Dr. Albert Einstein when he visited the street while teaching at Caltech.” That’s likely the origin of the early 1930s photo above, which features Einstein posing with an Einstein marionette. The website Retronaut provides a little more background on the photo:
Einstein saw the puppet perform at the Teatro Torito [a predecessor to the Turnabout Theater] and was quite amused. He reached into his jacket’s breast pocket, pulled out a letter and crumpled it up. Speaking in German, he said, ‘The puppet wasn’t fat enough!’ He laughed and stuffed the crumpled letter up under the smock to give the puppet a fatter belly. This is a wonderful photograph that Harry treasured. Harry Burnett also kept the letter in a frame and loved to retell the story and at the end give his pixish laugh.
It’s not unusual for introspective indie songwriters to make forays into poetry. Some do it rather successfully, like Silver Jews’ Dave Berman; some, like Will Oldham, stir up the poetry world by turning against poetry. Then there are indie stars like the indefatigably youthful Thurston Moore—formerly of Sonic Youth, currently of Chelsea Light Moving—who was asked to teach at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Better known for his numerous ventures in the New York experimental art world, Moore led a three-day poetry workshop at the Boulder, Colorado school’s summer writing program in 2011.
Moore was very much in demand. Anne Waldman, co-founder of Naropa’s writing program with Allen Ginsberg, said at the time, “We’ve been trying to get him for a while. We need him.” (Poetry teacher Kenneth Goldsmith recalls that the only one who wasn’t impressed with Moore was the recently departed Amiri Baraka, who said “he needs to work on those poems.”) Thanks to some very chatty students, we have detailed descriptions of Moore’s teaching style, as well as scans of his class notes. See the first page of Moore’s notes to himself for “Poetry / Music Workshop #1” at the top and a transcription of his elliptical, idiosyncratic method below:
Teacher improvises on electric guitar while students write single words each to his/her own sense of space and Rhythm and evocation For 4 minutes the guitar is recorded on cassette recorder or computer Recorded music played back through amp. while students Read aloud their writing Simultaneously, All recorded by cassette rec’r or comp.
MAKE CASSETTES
Student Katie Ingegneri, who interviewed Moore, brings us the page of text as well as the video above of Moore reading at Naropa. According to another one of Moore’s former students with the unlikely name Thorin Klosowski, the first day of the workshop consisted of a “rambling, three-hour introduction” during which Moore “revealed that when he initially moved to New York in the ’70s, it was not to make music, but rather to be a writer.” Klosowski’s piece includes additional pages of Moore’s notes, like that above, which cites countercultural hero Emmett Grogan’s autobiography, Ringolevio. Klosowski tells us that once things loosened up, Moore “did a better job of teaching than when he was pretending to be a lecturer.” The workshop also included some “gossipy tidbits”:
For instance, did you now that Kim Gordon had a texting relationship with James Franco? That Stephen Malkmus hates slam poetry? Or that even after years of being out of print, Moore’s list of ten essential free jazz records he wrote for Grand Royale was still brought into record stores (Twist & Shout and Wax Trax included)?
Moore had visited Naropa once before. In 2006 at a benefit for Burma Life and La Casa de la Esperanza, he read from his books Alabama Wildman, What I Like About Feminism, and Nice War and played some songs from Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped. Hear the audio of that event above.
Alice Babette Toklas met Gertrude Stein in 1907, the day she arrived in Paris. They remained together for 39 years until Stein’s death in 1946. While Stein became the center of the avant-garde art world, hosting an exclusive salon that welcomed the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toklas largely preferred to stay in Stein’s shadow, serving as her secretary, editor and assistant.
That changed in 1933 when Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas(read it online)– a retelling of the couple’s life together with Toklas serving as narrator. The book is Stein’s most accessible and best-selling work. It also turned the shy, self-effacing Toklas into a literary figure.
After Stein’s death, Toklas published The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook in 1954, which combined personal recollections of her time with Stein along with recipes and musings about French cuisine. Yet it wasn’t her stories about tending to the wounded during WWI or her opinions on mussels that made the book famous. Instead, it was the inclusion of a recipe given to her by Moroccan-based artist Brion Gysin called “Hashish Fudge.”
In this 1963 recording from Pacifica Radio, Toklas reads her notorious recipe. The snack “might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR,” Toklas notes in her reedy, dignified voice. Then she gets on to the recipe itself:
Take one teaspoon black peppercorns, one whole nutmeg, four average sticks of cinnamon, one teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of Cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
Toklas concedes that getting the key ingredient “can present certain difficulties” and recommends finding the stuff in the wild, which might have been possible to do in the early 1960s. Nowadays, the best course of action is to move to Washington, Colorado or Uruguay.
In the recording, Toklas then goes on to recall how hashish fudge came to be included into her book.
“The recipe was innocently included without my realizing that the hashish was the accented part of the recipe,” she says without a trace of facetiousness. “I was shocked to find that America wouldn’t accept it because it was too dangerous.”
“It never went into the American edition,” she says. “The English are braver. We’re not courageous about that sort of thing.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
We know that Michelangelo wrote grocery lists; now we have evidence that Leonardo wrote resumes. “Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these things, Leonardo da Vinci was an artificer, an armorer, a maker of things that go ‘boom,’ ” writes Marc Cendella on his blog about job-searching and recruitment advice. “Like you, he had to put together a resume to get his next gig. So in 1482, at the age of 30, he wrote out a letter and a list of his capabilities and sent it off to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan.” Having yet to establish his reputation as perhaps the Italian Renaissance’s most respected polymath, Leonardo spelled himself out, in translation, as follows:
Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.
1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.
3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.
5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.
6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.
7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.
8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.
9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.
10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.
11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.
Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency – to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.
Even the densest fifteenth-century Duke, I wager, could see the use in a man able to make portable bridges, get water out of trenches, destroy rock built upon rock, fling a storm of stones, fortify vessels, pass under rivers, and make everything from “big guns,” catapults, mangonels, and trabocchi to unattackable covered chariots. Though Leonardo understandably concentrates on his wartime engineering skills, he also touches on the range of other disciplines — Renaissance man, remember — he has mastered, like architecture, sculpture, and painting. Perhaps most impressively of all, he rattles off all these points without seeming particularly boastful, a feat seemingly out of the reach of many college graduates today. “You’ll notice he doesn’t recite past achievements,” Cendella adds, “because those are about hisachievements, and not about the Duke’s needs.” Still, he might have added that, given just a few more years, he could design a pretty captivating organ.
The Wellcome Library, in London, specializes in the history of medicine. While the institution has long offered a good digital collection for browsing, the library announced yesterday that they are making more than 100,000 historical images free to download under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. (Users can distribute, edit, or remix at will; the license even allows for commercial use, with attribution.)
The Wellcome’s holdings represent the institution’s long-term interest in collecting art related to medicine, the body, public health, and medical science. The drop-down menu labeled “Technique” in the standard search box returns a staggering array of types of visual culture, from aquatint to carving to fresco to X‑ray. The library reports that the earliest image available is from 400 AD: a fragment of papyrus from an illustrated herbal manuscript, featuring a faded color drawing of a plant.
Browsers interested in dipping a toe into the stream of images may try out the galleries listed on the Images homepage. The “Olympic Sports” gallery offers an 1829 engraving of the famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng holding badminton rackets, and an 1870 illustration of recommended ring exercises for lady gymnasts. The “Witchcraft” collection (under the “Favourites” tab) contains many illustrations from historical books covering witchcraft in Europe and the American colonies, along with a more surprising 19th-century Malayan black-magic charm.
Rights-managed images are marked as such in the thumbnail results that appear after a search. Although the archive requires you to enter a CAPTCHA to access the free images, you can select several thumbnails on the search-results page in order to bulk-download files for many images at the same time. The sample files I requested arrived on my desktop at 300 dpi.
The image above is an illustration of a mechanical hand from 1564.
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
The state of music has changed radically in recent years. Of course, the largest change that springs to mind is Napster, the program that made collective musical sharing possible and triggered the inexorable decline in record sales in the early 2000s. Business model aside, however, the music industry has also weathered tremendously volatile changes in taste over the past half-century.
To see just how dramatic the changes in musical fashion have been, check out Google’s new Music Timeline, pictured above. This simple, color-coded chart displays the popularity of various genres from 1950 onwards (pre-50s sales data is just too spotty and inconsistent). While jazz record sales held the lion’s share of the market throughout much of the 1950’s, the advent of rock and pop acts such as the Beatles in the 1960s relegated jazz to the minor leagues.
The timeline also allows you to look at the popularity of various bands throughout the course of their careers. Metallica, the litigious critics of Napster’s file-sharing ways, are an interesting example of the waxing and waning of a particular band’s success. Initial spike of popularity aside, as is clear from the image right above, the band had been relatively successful with each of their studio albums. After the release of their cover album in 1998, entitled Garage Inc., things quickly headed south. Whether it’s because of the Napster debacle of 2000, when the band’s lawsuit effectively shut down the company, or a regrettable change of direction, many former fans simply weren’t interested anymore.
Before fans come to the defense of whichever bands were slighted by Google’s visualization, a few caveats: the data used to judge relative success is derived from Google Play user libraries. The more users have an album, the more successful it’s deemed by the algorithm. Additionally, if you’re a classical music fan, you’re out of luck. For various logistical reasons, Google decided against its inclusion in the timeline.
For more information about Google’s Music Timeline, click here. For a Michael Hann’s first look review over at The Guardian’s music blog, which discusses the possible skews in the data, head this way.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
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