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.
Circulating ‘round the internet recently is, wouldn’t you know it, yet another famous list of favorites. But it’s not a “listicle,” I’d say, one of those concocted clickbait hodgepodges that crop up in every corner with sometimes only the most tenuous, or lurid, of organizing principles. While we do have a tradition of showcasing lists here, they are generally on the order of those organically compiled by singular creative minds ranking and ordering their universes. I would say these things are true of Kurt Cobain’s list of albums above, which he titles “Top 50 by Nirvana” (see a full transcription at the bottom of the post, courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan). It not only presents a picture of the late Cobain and his bandmates’ musical heritage, it also offers us a genuine sampler of a generation’s protest music—plenty of classic angry ’80s hardcore punk and post-punk, lo-fi indie, a smattering of classic rock, some fringe outsiders like The Shaggs, and a rap album at #43, the fiercely political Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, a record beloved of almost all children of the 80s.
Having had an almost identical musical education as Cobain, it seems from the list, I can’t say that I find any of the choices here particularly surprising. It almost looks to me like the ideal code for producing a 90s alternative star—just add talent, teen angst, and the look of a bedraggled homeless puppy. But a Flavorwire take on the list does call Public Enemy (see their “Fight the Power” video above) one of a handful of “fascinating surprises.” Other than this stylistic departure, many of the selections from the list are particularly significant as influences on Cobain’s songwriting, and some of the artists listed are those the band covered on occasion.
One of Cobain’s major influences can also be easily claimed by nearly every indie artist of the 90s: Austin, Texas’ Daniel Johnston, a savant songwriter who has weathered a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder yet produced one of the most honest, touching, and funny bodies of work in the past few decades. Cobain namechecks Johnston’s 1983 Yip Jump Music, from which comes the song above, “Worried Shoes,” an almost perfect example of his poignant lyricism and deft handling of emotional disaffection. One can see the appeal of Johnston’s spare homemade folk-blues to a sensibility like Cobain’s: “I took my lucky break / And I broke it in two / Put on my worried shoes / My worried shoes.” Johnston’s reaction to the interest of artists like Nirvana, Mudhoney, Beck, the Butthole Surfers, and Wilco is typically understated. “Ah, it’s pretty cool,” he says, “The attention was nice, ya know. Sells a few records.”
Cobain’s debt to David Bowie is evident in his swiping of some of Bowie’s chord changes and melodic phrasing. A touchstone for the grunge star was “The Man Who Sold the World,” which of course the band covered (above, unplugged) and which many a naïve Nirvana fan assumes was a Cobain original. Cobain places the album, The Man Who Sold the World at #45. Bowie is quoted in rock bio Nirvana: The Chosen Rejects as saying he was “simply blown away” when he found out that Cobain liked his work. Bowie “always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World’’ and said “it was a good straight forward rendition and sounded somehow very honest.” He also expressed surprise at being “part of America’s musical landscape.” However, when young fans would approach Bowie and compliment him on his cover of a “Nirvana song” after he played the tune, his reactions were less than polite. According to Nicholas Pegg, Bowie said, “kids that come up afterwards and say, ‘It’s cool you’re doing a Nirvana song.’ And I think, ‘Fuc& you, you little tosser!’”
No shortage of ’90s artists, like their ’60s folk-rock forebears, named Leadbelly as a primary influence. Cobain places the iconic bluesman’s Leadbelly’s Last Sessions Vol. 1 at number 33. Whether or not anyone can hear acoustic Delta blues in Nirvana, most people are familiar with their unplugged cover of the Leadbelly standard “In the Pines,” aka “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (Cobain learned the song from Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan). Above is a rare, much darker, Nirvana cover of the song from a bootleg album of live recordings called Ultra Rare Trax, performed at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, MN in 1993. (We will never know, of course, what Leadbellly would have thought of Kurt Cobain, though your guesses are appreciated.)
If the Nirvana list did not include Black Flag, someone would have to add it. Cobain places the L.A. hardcore band’s My War at number 11 on the list (first place is reserved for Iggy and the Stooges Raw Power). Above, former Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins explains in a 1992 segment of MTV’s late-night alternative video show 120 Minutes what he thought were the reasons for the band’s phenomenal success. “It doesn’t take an idiot to realize that the mass media continually underestimates the intelligence of their audience,” he says, “You know how dissatisfied you’ve been with a lot of mainstream rock and roll.” Rollins goes on: “When a band like Nirvana comes along who are kicking the real thing, you like it because it’s real.”
Not every one of the artists Cobain lists had such nice things to say about him in return, however. The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bullocks gets slotted at #14 on the list. In his autobiography, former Pistols leader and infamous contrarian John Lydon apparently “reserved some venom for the likes of Nirvana,” writes reviewer Tim Kennedy, “comparing them to the clueless metal bands [the Sex Pistols] were up against in the seventies.” For all the millions of Nirvana fans during the band’s heyday, there was also a small contingent of kids who felt similarly, no matter how rarified or representative Cobain’s musical tastes. In some of those cases, no doubt, rival bands felt that way because, as Henry Rollins describes it, while they were still taking the bus, “the other guy is sneering at you from a block-long limo.”
Kurt Cobain’s Favorite Albums
1. Iggy and the Stooges, “Raw Power”
2. Pixies, “Surfer Rosa”
3. The Breeders, “Pod”
4. The Vaselines, “Pink EP”
5. The Shaggs, “Philosophy of the World”
6. Fang, “Landshark”
7. MDC, “Millions of Dead Cops”
8. Scratch Acid, “Scratch Acid EP”
9. Saccharine Trust, “Paganicons”
10. Butthole Surfers, “Pee Pee the Sailor” aka “Brown Reason to Live”
11. Black Flag, “My War”
12. Bad Brains, “Rock for Light”
13. Gang of Four, “Entertainment!”
14. Sex Pistols, “Never Mind the Bollocks”
15. The Frogs, “It’s Only Right and Natural”
16. PJ Harvey, “Dry”
17. Sonic Youth, “Daydream Nation”
18. The Knack, “Get the Knack”
19. The Saints, “Know Your Product”
20. anything by Kleenex
21. The Raincoats, “The Raincoats”
22. Young Marble Giants, “Colossal Youth”
23. Aerosmith, “Rocks”
24. Various Artists, “What Is It”
25. R.E.M., “Green”
26. Shonen Knife, “Burning Farm”
27. The Slits, “Typical Girls”
28. The Clash, “Combat Rock”
29. The Faith/Void, “Split EP”
30. Rites of Spring, “Rites of Spring”
31. Beat Happening, “Jamboree”
32. Tales of Terror, “Tales of Terror”
33. Leadbelly, “Leadbelly’s Last Sessions Vol. 1”
34. Mudhoney, “Superfuzz Bigmuff”
35. Daniel Johnston, “Yip/Jump Music”
36. Flipper, “Generic Flipper”
37. The Beatles, “Meet the Beatles”
38. Half Japanese, “We Are They Who Ache With Amorous Love”
39. Butthole Surfers, “Locust Abortion Technician”
40. Black Flag, “Damaged”
41. Fear, “The Record”
42. PiL, “Flowers of Romance”
43. Public Enemy, “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”
44. Marine Girls, “Beach Party”
45. David Bowie, “The Man Who Sold the World”
46. Wipers, “Is This Real?”
47. Wipers, “Youth of America”
48. Wipers, “Over the Edge”
49. Mazzy Star, “She Hangs Brightly”
50. Swans, “Young God”
Surely most ardent readers of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road have tried to map Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty’s American journey. Above, partially alleviating your own need to take the pains of sketching out that great Beat journey yourself, we have a map drawn by the author himself. Pulled from Kerouac’s diary, it traces the route of a hitchhiking trip of July through October 1948, which no doubt fueled the still-potent literary impact of his best-known book, which would see publication almost a decade later in 1957. Each stop has a label, from the iconic American metropolises of New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. to the less-known but no less evocative smaller towns like Des Moines, North Platte, Laramie, and Selma.
For a representation more strictly reflecting the fiction, see Michael J. Hess’ map of Paradise and Moriarty’s route across the country. It offers passages straight from Kerouac’s text about all the places they stopped briefly, stayed a while, or only mentioned, like Salt Lake City, “a city of sprinklers” at dawn; Flagstaff, whose “every bump, rise, and stretch mystified my longing”; Omaha, home to “the first cowboy I saw”; and the Indianapolis Paradise enters on a bus which has just “roared through Indiana cornfields.” Writer Dennis Mansker, on his own site, has created four separate interactive maps, each covering one of the novel’s parts. He also includes a rundown of the road story’s four major vehicles, including the 1949 Hudson seen just above. “This is the car in which they blast off to New Orleans and the West Coast, January 1949,” Mansker notes. “Like all of Dean’s cars, this one really took a beating.” But Dean’s cars just had to take it, since, as the band Guided by Voices once sang, “Kerouac Never Drove, So He Never Drove Alone.”
You liked our Facebook page. Now you’re expecting to see our material in your Facebook news feed. It’s not an unreasonable expectation. But it’s also very unlikely to happen. As Derek Muller, the curator of science video blog Veritasium, explains very articulately in the video above, “The problem with Facebook is that it’s keeping things from you. You don’t see most of what’s posted by your friends or the pages you follow.” And that’s partly because, Muller goes on to explain, Facebook is overwhelmed by content, and busy trying to find ways to monetize its newsfeed. Following a change to an algorithm in December, the problem has only gotten worse. (We have 245,000 followers, and maybe 7,000 — or 2% — see a post on average in January, as compared to 30,000 in November.) If you care about how you use Facebook — either to connect with friends, or gather information — the video is well worth watching. It clearly lets you know that Facebook is controlling your social media experience, when it should be you.
Note: If you want to make sure you receive all of our posts, get our daily email or sign up for our RSS feed. Facebook doesn’t control those … yet.
From the paranoid fundamentalist tracts of Jack Chick, to Ronald McDonald promoting scouting, to an upcoming graphic novel explaining the science of climate change, comics and graphic novels have long been a means of both proselytizing and informing, condensing complex narratives into a digestible format with broad appeal. The medium is so elastic, it can seemingly adapt itself to any kind of story, even the most soberly serious and historically significant. For example, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, veteran of the Civil Rights movement, chose to tell his story—in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell—as a graphic novel called March (making him the first lawmaker to appear at a Comic-Con). Part one of three was published late last year and rose to the top of the New York Times and Washington Post bestseller lists. March has also become an important resource for teachers and librarians (download a free 11-page teachers guide from publisher Top Shelf here).
Lewis’ choice of medium may seem motivated by the current esteem in which the form is held in scholarly and popular circles alike, but he was primarily influenced by a much earlier civil rights comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. (See cover up top. Read it onlinehere.) Begun just five months after Rosa Parks’ historic refusal, the comic aimed to disseminate the epic tale of the Montgomery, AL bus boycott throughout the South. A section called “The Montgomery Method” (first page above) instructs readers on the nonviolent resistance techniques employed by civil rights workers in Alabama, with a primer on Gandhi and his influence on King. In the short video below, see NYU professor and King scholar Sylvia Rhor explain the genesis of the comic in the work of Alfred Hassler, then leader of Civil Rights organization Fellowship of Reconciliation. Hassler, a little-known figure who died in 1991, is now receiving more recognition through similar means. He himself recently became the subject of a graphic novel project (and now documentary) called The Secret of the 5 Powers about his work with Buddhist peace activists Thich Nhat Hanh and Sister Chan Khong during the Vietnam War.
As Rhor notes above, the King comic has had tremendous influence, not only in the past, and not only on Rep. Lewis in the present. In 2003–2004, The Montgomery Story was translated into Arabic, and Egyptian revolutionaries during the Arab Spring found inspiration in the comic book that “turned Martin Luther King into a superhero”
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
