Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

in Archives, History, Technology | August 30th, 2024

“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to under­stand what they were. When I was a lit­tle kid, going to RadioShack was bet­ter than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall peo­ple.” Yet by the mid-twen­ty-tens, it had become a “pan­icked and half-dead retail empire”; in 2015, it final­ly filed for bank­rupt­cy.

Still, all those cat­a­logs live on, free to browse in the dig­i­tal archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com. The first vol­ume dates from 1939, by which time Radio Shack (as its name was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten) had already been in busi­ness for sev­en­teen years. “This cat­a­log is intend­ed to serve as a com­pre­hen­sive and accu­rate list­ing of what we believe to be the essen­tial and unusu­al require­ments of the radio ama­teur, the ser­vice­man, lab­o­ra­to­ries, indus­tries, and schools,” declares its open­ing let­ter to the cus­tomer. “To boast of our ser­vice in any respect would be so much use­less ver­biage, ser­vice hav­ing been the fea­ture of our growth.”

Nei­ther ser­vice nor growth remained fea­tures of the com­pa­ny by the time Bois was work­ing there. But it had been a pret­ty glo­ri­ous run: to behold the first 50 years of RadioShack cat­a­logs is to behold noth­ing less than the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­can con­sumer elec­tron­ics. At first direct­ed toward those with seri­ous tech­ni­cal know-how, the com­pa­ny’s offer­ings expand­ed over the decades to appeal to hob­by­ists, then to ordi­nary peo­ple look­ing to intro­duce a bit of elec­tron­ic — and lat­er, dig­i­tal — enrich­ment into their pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al lives.

Some Amer­i­cans found their way to RadioShack by build­ing crys­tal radios and sci­ence-fair projects in child­hood; oth­ers began fre­quent­ing its stores while build­ing their first real hi-fi sys­tem, com­po­nent by com­po­nent; oth­ers still got into per­son­al com­put­ing through the store-brand TRS-80 (or “Trash 80,” as more seri­ous com­put­er nerds called it). My own grand­fa­ther was such a habitué that, when he died ear­ly in the nineties, our house sud­den­ly filled up with inher­it­ed RadioShack-only prod­ucts, from Real­is­tic radios to Tandy com­put­ers. (I remem­ber spend­ing many hap­py hours with the Mod­el 100, a prim­i­tive lap­top grand­ly mar­ket­ed as a “Micro Exec­u­tive Work Sta­tion.”)

“This is a con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness that is built to work per­fect­ly in the year 1975,” writes Bois. And indeed, the 1975 RadioShack cat­a­log offers page after won­drous page of remote-con­trolled stere­os (“the ulti­mate in lux­u­ry”) and “action radios”; fiber-optic dec­o­ra­tive light­ing fix­tures, eight-track car tape decks; cal­cu­la­tors promis­ing a “pock­et­ful of mir­a­cles”; and built-it-your­self inter­coms, pock­et lie detec­tors, and “col­or organs.” Alas, like so many com­mer­cial enter­pris­es that rode high in the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, RadioShack failed to take advan­tage of the inter­net, and was ulti­mate­ly crushed by it — an iron­ic fate indeed for what had so long been the one-stop tech­nol­o­gy shop. Enter the archive of RadioShack cat­a­logs here.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

IKEA Dig­i­tizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Cat­a­logs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Fur­ni­ture Giant

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satir­i­cal Film About the Inven­tion of the Audio­phile (1959)

Nir­vana Plays in a Radio Shack, the Day After Record­ing its First Demo Tape (1988)

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo Sys­tem in the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Maurice Sendak’s First Published Illustrations: Discover His Drawings for a 1947 Popular Science Book

in Art, Science | August 30th, 2024

McGraw-Hill/pub­lic domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives

Once upon a time, long before Mau­rice Sendak illus­trat­ed Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he pub­lished, notes Ars Tech­ni­ca, “his first pro­fes­sion­al illus­tra­tions in a 1947 pop­u­lar sci­ence book about nuclear physics, Atom­ics for the Mil­lions.” Only 18 years old, Sendak pro­vid­ed the illus­tra­tions; his physics teacher, Hyman Ruch­lis authored the text, along with pro­fes­sor Maxwell Leigh Eidi­noff.

Accord­ing to sci­ence his­to­ri­an Ryan Dahn, “Sendak agreed to do the work for 1% of the roy­al­ties, of which he received an advance of $100, about $1600 today.” Not bad for a teenag­er cre­at­ing his first cred­it­ed work.

At Physics Today, you can read Dah­n’s new arti­cle on Sendak’s ear­ly physics illus­tra­tions. You can also read/view all of Atom­ics for the Mil­lions on the HathiTrust web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

Mau­rice Sendak Sent Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Let­ters to Fans — So Beau­ti­ful a Kid Ate One

 

 

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Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

in History, Language | August 29th, 2024

If you find your­self grap­pling with an intel­lec­tu­al prob­lem that’s gone unsolved for mil­len­nia, try tak­ing a few months off and spend­ing them on activ­i­ties like swim­ming and med­i­tat­ing. That very strat­e­gy worked for a Cam­bridge PhD stu­dent named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a sum­mer of non-research-relat­ed activ­i­ties, returned to a text by the ancient gram­mar­i­an, logi­cian, and “father of lin­guis­tics” Pāṇi­ni and found it new­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble. The rules of its com­po­si­tion had stumped schol­ars for 2,500 years, but, as Rajpopat tells it in an arti­cle by Tom Almeroth-Williams at Cam­bridge’s web­site, “With­in min­utes, as I turned the pages, these pat­terns start­ed emerg­ing, and it all start­ed to make sense.”

Pāṇi­ni com­posed his texts using a kind of algo­rithm: “Feed in the base and suf­fix of a word and it should turn them into gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect words and sen­tences through a step-by-step process,” writes Almeroth-Williams. But “often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly applic­a­ble at the same step, leav­ing schol­ars to ago­nize over which one to choose.” Or such was the case, at least, before Rajpopat’s dis­cov­ery that the dif­fi­cult-to-inter­pret “metarule” meant to apply to such cas­es dic­tates that “between rules applic­a­ble to the left and right sides of a word respec­tive­ly, Pāṇi­ni want­ed us to choose the rule applic­a­ble to the right side.”

That may not be imme­di­ate­ly under­stand­able to those unfa­mil­iar with the struc­ture of San­skrit. Almeroth-Williams’ piece clar­i­fies with an exam­ple using  mantra, one word from the lan­guage that every­body knows. “In the sen­tence ‘devāḥ prasan­nāḥ mantraiḥ’ (‘The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasan­nāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]’) we encounter ‘rule con­flict’ when deriv­ing mantraiḥ, ‘by the mantras,’ ” he writes. ” The deriva­tion starts with ‘mantra + bhis.’ One rule is applic­a­ble to the left part ‘mantra’ and the oth­er to right part ‘bhis.’ We must pick the rule applic­a­ble to the right part ‘bhis,’ which gives us the cor­rect form ‘mantraih.’ ”

Apply­ing this rule ren­ders inter­pre­ta­tions of Pāṇini’s work almost com­plete­ly unam­bigu­ous and gram­mat­i­cal. It could even be employed, Rajpopat has not­ed, to teach San­skrit gram­mar to com­put­ers being pro­grammed for nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing. It no doubt took him a great deal of inten­sive study to reach the point where he was able to dis­cov­er the true mean­ing of Pāṇini’s clar­i­fy­ing metarule, but it did­n’t tru­ly present itself until he let his uncon­scious mind take a crack at it. As we’ve said here on Open Cul­ture before, there are good rea­sons we do our best think­ing while doing things like walk­ing or tak­ing a show­er, a phe­nom­e­non that philoso­phers have broad­ly rec­og­nized through the ages — and, like as not, was under­stood by the great Pāṇi­ni him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Can Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Deci­pher Lost Lan­guages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Lan­guages

Why Algo­rithms Are Called Algo­rithms, and How It All Goes Back to the Medieval Per­sian Math­e­mati­cian Muham­mad al-Khwariz­mi

How Schol­ars Final­ly Deci­phered Lin­ear B, the Old­est Pre­served Form of Ancient Greek Writ­ing

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the Guggenheim Museum Pink

in Architecture, History, Museums | August 28th, 2024

Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives

Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occu­py sev­er­al time peri­ods at once, look­ing both mod­ern and some­how ancient. The lat­ter qual­i­ty sure­ly has to do with its bright white col­or, which we asso­ciate (espe­cial­ly in such an insti­tu­tion­al con­text) with Greek and Roman stat­ues. But just like those stat­ues, the Guggen­heim was­n’t actu­al­ly white to begin with. “Few­er and few­er New York­ers may recall that the muse­um, in a then-grim­i­er city, used to be beige,” writes the New York Times’ Michael Kim­mel­man. “Robert Moses thought it looked like ‘jaun­diced skin.’ ” Hence, pre­sum­ably, the deci­sion dur­ing a 1992 expan­sion to paint over the earth­en hue of Wright’s choice.

Not that beige was the only con­tender in the design phase. Look at the archival draw­ings, Kim­mel­man writes, and you’ll find “a reminder that Wright had con­tem­plat­ed some pret­ty far-out col­ors — Chero­kee red, orange, pink.”

The very thought of that last “leads down a rab­bit hole of alter­na­tive New York his­to­ry,” and if you’re curi­ous to see what a pink Guggen­heim might have looked like from the street, David Romero at Hooked on the Past has cre­at­ed a few dig­i­tal­ly mod­i­fied pho­tos. The result hard­ly comes off as being in taste quite as poor as one might expect; in fact, it could have fit quite well into the Mem­phis-embrac­ing nine­teen-eight­ies, and even the post­mod­ern nineties. The image above, show­ing the Guggen­heim imag­ined in pink, comes from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives.

But as it is, “closed off to the city around it, the building’s anti­sep­tic, spank­ing-white facade, today is in keep­ing with the neigh­bor­hood.” That itself is in keep­ing with Wright’s ideas for trans­form­ing the Amer­i­can city, which he kept on putting forth until the end of his life. Attempt­ing to solve “the prob­lem of the inner city,” he con­ceived “fan­tas­ti­cal megas­truc­tures for places like down­town Pitts­burgh, Bagh­dad, and Madi­son, Wis­con­sin,” all of them “city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets.” Even work­ing in the Unit­ed States’ dens­est metrop­o­lis, Wright expressed a long­ing for the splen­did iso­la­tion of the Amer­i­can coun­try­side, where a man — at least as the lore has it — can paint his house any col­or he pleas­es.

via Messy Nessy/Hooked on the Past

Relat­ed con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Plan to Turn Ellis Island Into a Futur­is­tic Jules Verne-Esque City (1959)

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Is Andrew Huberman Ruining Your Morning Coffee Routine?

in Food & Drink, Science | August 28th, 2024

Andrew Huberman–the host of the influ­en­tial Huber­man Lab pod­cast–has got­ten a lot of mileage out of his rec­om­mend­ed morn­ing rou­tine. His rou­tine empha­sizes the impor­tance of get­ting sun­light with­in 30–60 min­utes of wak­ing; also engag­ing in light phys­i­cal activ­i­ty; hydrat­ing well; and avoid­ing cof­fee for the first 90–120 min­utes. In his words:

I high­ly rec­om­mend that every­body delay their caf­feine intake for 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing. How­ev­er painful it may be to even­tu­al­ly arrive at that 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing, you want, and I encour­age you, to clear out what­ev­er resid­ual adeno­sine is cir­cu­lat­ing in your sys­tem in that first 90 to 120 min­utes of the day. Get that sun­light expo­sure, get some move­ment to wake up, and then, and only then, start to ingest caf­feine because what you’ll do if you delay caf­feine intake until 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing is you will avoid the so-called after­noon crash.

And if you drink caf­feine at any point through­out the day, real­ly try and avoid any caf­feine, cer­tain­ly avoid drink­ing more than a hun­dred mil­ligrams of caf­feine after 4:00 p.m and prob­a­bly even bet­ter to lim­it your last caf­feine intake to 3:00 p.m. or even 2:00 p.m.

For many, this isn’t exact­ly a wel­come piece of advice. And you nat­u­ral­ly won­der how the advice sits with James Hoff­mann, author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee, who has devel­oped a robust YouTube chan­nel where he explores the ins and outs of mak­ing cof­fee. In the video above, Hoff­mann explores the research sup­port­ing Huber­man’s advice, all with the goal of deter­min­ing whether Huber­man is ruin­ing (or improv­ing) our ear­ly wak­ing hours.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Human­i­ty Got Hooked on Cof­fee: An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

How Caf­feine Fueled the Enlight­en­ment, Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion & the Mod­ern World: An Intro­duc­tion by Michael Pol­lan

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

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The 11 Censored Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Cartoons That Haven’t Been Aired Since 1968

in Animation, Film, History | August 27th, 2024

For decades and decades, Warn­er Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Mer­rie Melodies car­toons have served as a kind of default chil­dren’s enter­tain­ment. Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived for the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion in the nine­teen-thir­ties, they were ani­mat­ed to a stan­dard that held its own against the sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions along­side which they would lat­er be broad­cast. Even their clas­si­cal music-laden sound­tracks seemed to sig­nal high­er aspi­ra­tions. But when scru­ti­nized close­ly enough, they turned out not to be as time­less and inof­fen­sive as every­one had assumed. In fact, eleven Looney Tunes and Mer­rie Melodies car­toons have been with­held from syn­di­ca­tion since the nine­teen-six­ties due to their con­tent.

The LSu­per­Son­icQ video above takes a look at the “Cen­sored Eleven,” all of which have been sup­pressed for qual­i­ties like “exag­ger­at­ed fea­tures, racist tones, and out­dat­ed ref­er­ences.” Pro­duced between 1931 and 1944, these car­toons have been described as reflect­ing per­cep­tions wide­ly held by view­ers at the time that have since become unac­cept­able. Take, for exam­ple, the black pro­to-Elmer Fudd in “All This and Rab­bit Stew,” from 1941, a col­lec­tion of “eth­nic stereo­types includ­ing over­sized cloth­ing, a shuf­fle to his move­ment, and mum­bling sen­tences.” In oth­er pro­duc­tions, like “Jun­gle Jit­ters” and “The Isle of Pin­go Pon­go,” the offense is against native islanders, depict­ed there­in as hard-par­ty­ing can­ni­bals.

At first glance, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” from 1943, may resem­ble a grotesque car­ni­val of stereo­types. But as direc­tor Bob Clam­pett lat­er explained, it orig­i­nat­ed when he “was approached in Hol­ly­wood by the cast of an all-black musi­cal off-broad­way pro­duc­tion called Jump For Joy while they were doing some spe­cial per­for­mances in Los Ange­les. They asked me why there weren’t any Warn­er’s car­toons with black char­ac­ters and I did­n’t have any good answer for that ques­tion. So we sat down togeth­er and came up with a par­o­dy of Dis­ney’s Snow White, and ‘Coal Black’ was the result.” These per­form­ers pro­vid­ed the voic­es (cred­it­ed, out of con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion, to Mel Blanc), and Clam­pett paid trib­ute in the char­ac­ter designs to real jazz musi­cians he knew from Cen­tral Avenue.

How­ev­er admirable the inten­tions of “Coal Black” — and how­ev­er mas­ter­ful its ani­ma­tion, which has come in for great praise from his­to­ri­ans of the medi­um — it remains rel­e­gat­ed to the banned-car­toons nether­world. Of course, this does­n’t mean you can’t see it today: like most of the “Cen­sored Eleven,” it’s long been boot­legged, and it even under­went restora­tion for the first annu­al Turn­er Clas­sic Movies Film Fes­ti­val in 2010. Some of these con­tro­ver­sial shorts appear on the Looney Tunes Gold Col­lec­tion Vol­ume: 3 DVDs, intro­duced by Whoopi Gold­berg, who makes the sen­si­ble point that “remov­ing these inex­cus­able images and jokes from this col­lec­tion would be the same as say­ing they nev­er exist­ed.” Grown-ups may be okay with that, but kids — always the most dis­cern­ing audi­ence for Warn­er Bros. car­toons — know when they’re being lied to.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

Don­ald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Oth­er Dis­ney Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons from World War II

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Enchanting Opera Performances of Klaus Nomi

in Music | August 26th, 2024

After mak­ing one of the grand­est entrances in music his­to­ry on the stages of East Vil­lage clubs, the BBC’s The Old Grey Whis­tle Test, and Sat­ur­day Night Live, the­atri­cal Ger­man new wave space alien Klaus Nomi died alone in 1983, a vic­tim of the “first beach­head of the AIDS epi­dem­ic.” The dis­ease fright­ened Nomi’s friends away—no one knew any­thing about what was then called “gay can­cer” but that it was dead­ly. Soon after­ward, the immense­ly tal­ent­ed singer’s rep­u­ta­tion declined. Writer Rupert Smith pro­nounced Nomi “large­ly for­got­ten” in a 1994 issue of Atti­tude mag­a­zine, and made a case for renewed atten­tion. “Nomi,” wrote Smith, “remains rock music’s queer­est expo­nent, who out­shone the many acts fol­low­ing in his wake.”

But Nomi has since received his due, in a moment of revival that has extend­ed over sev­er­al years, thanks in part to many of those lat­er acts. In his own day, wrote LD Beghtol at The Vil­lage Voice, “the under­ground punk-opera singer was most­ly unknown beyond his small cir­cle of friends and fans.” Nomi was “queer in mul­ti­ple sens­es of the word and stood well apart from his fel­low East Vil­lage bohos.

And he pos­sessed an unde­ni­able gift, a voice that surged up from a husky Weimar croon into the falset­to stratos­phere. Oper­at­ic coun­tertenors, though, were hope­less­ly déclassé. His pro­fes­sion­al options were few.” It’s also the case that Nomi’s opera expe­ri­ence wouldn’t have tak­en him very far. “As young Klaus Sper­ber,” writes Smith, “he had worked front-of-house at the Berlin Opera in the late Six­ties, and would enter­tain col­leagues with his ren­di­tions of the great arias as they swept up after per­for­mances.”


But with or with­out the résumé, Nomi had the voice—one audi­ences could hard­ly believe came from the strange, diminu­tive cabaret char­ac­ter with heavy make­up and tri-cor­nered reced­ing hair­line. At the top of the post, see Nomi’s 1978 debut at New Wave Vaude­ville, a four-night revue at Irv­ing Plaza. “Nomi,” Smith tells us, “was a smash.” Skip ahead to 2:14 to see Nomi’s musi­cal direc­tor Kris­t­ian Hoff­man intro­duce his per­for­mance of “Mon cœur s’ou­vre à ta voix” (“My heart opens to your voice”) from Camille Saint-Saëns’ 1877 opera Sam­son et Dalila. After every sub­se­quent per­for­mance, Hoff­man says, the cabaret’s MC had to assure audi­ences that Nomi’s voice was “not an elec­tri­cal record­ing.”

Nomi’s voice and pres­ence attract­ed the atten­tion of stars like David Bowie, who hired him as a back­up singer for that SNL appear­ance in 1979 after he appeared on the cult New York pub­lic access show TV Par­ty. Glenn O’Brien’s intro­duc­tion of Nomi as “one of the finest pas­try chefs in New York,” above, is only part­ly tongue in cheek; that was indeed the singer’s day job. But in char­ac­ter, he wield­ed his oth­er­world­ly falset­to like a ray­gun. “Every song,” writes Pitch­fork in an appre­ci­a­tion, “includ­ed dra­mat­ic mul­ti­ple shifts in octave, where Klaus would rise to extreme highs and lows, han­dling both effort­less­ly. He would jerk his hands into karate chops with each chang­ing note, widen­ing his eyes every time he skirt­ed into high­er octaves.”

Nomi’s brand of opera-infused synth-pop and retro-futur­ist, shiny-suit­ed cabaret act—the “Klaus Nomi Show” as it was called—brought him noto­ri­ety in the New York art scene dur­ing his life­time, and has since made him a star, decades after his trag­ic death. As grat­i­fy­ing as that may be for long­time fans of Nomi’s work, we should also remem­ber that Nomi’s devo­tion to opera was no mere gim­mick, but a life­long pas­sion and unde­ni­able tal­ent. As we not­ed in an ear­li­er post, in Nomi’s last per­for­mance before his death—in a small 1982 Euro­pean tour—he sang the aria “Cold Genius” from Hen­ry Purcell’s 1691 opera King Arthur or, The British Wor­thy, a per­for­mance, wrote Matthias Rasch­er, that was “cer­tain­ly one of the most mem­o­rable in oper­at­ic his­to­ry.” Per­haps we might call it one of the most mem­o­rable moments in pop music his­to­ry as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Klaus Nomi: Watch the Final, Bril­liant Per­for­mance of a Dying Man

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hyp­not­ic Per­for­mance on SNL (1979)

Klaus Nomi’s Ad for Jäger­meis­ter (Cir­ca 1980)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 & Redefined Art

in Art, History | August 26th, 2024

Mar­cel Duchamp did­n’t sign his name on a uri­nal for lack of abil­i­ty to cre­ate “real” art. In fact, as explained by gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Ducham­p’s grand­fa­ther was an artist, as were three of his sib­lings; he him­self attained impres­sive tech­ni­cal pro­fi­cien­cy in paint­ing by his teen years. In 1912, when he was in his mid-twen­ties, he could tran­scend con­ven­tion thor­ough­ly enough to bewil­der and even enrage the pub­lic by paint­ing Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, which also drew crit­i­cisms from his fel­low Cubists for being “too Futur­ist.” From then on, his inde­pen­dent (and not entire­ly un-mis­chie­vous) streak became his entire way of life and art.

That same year, Duchamp, Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși, and Fer­di­nand Léger went to the Paris Avi­a­tion Salon. Behold­ing a pro­peller, Duchamp declared paint­ing “washed up”; what artist could out­do the appar­ent per­fec­tion of the form before him? Get­ting a job as a librar­i­an, he indulged in a stretch of read­ing about math­e­mat­ics and physics.

This got him think­ing of the pow­er of chance, one of the forces that moved him to put a bicy­cle wheel in his stu­dio and spin it around when­ev­er the spir­it moved him. This he would lat­er con­sid­er his first “ready­made” piece, delib­er­ate­ly cho­sen for being “a func­tion­al, every­day item with a total absence of good or bad taste” that “defied the notion that art must be beau­ti­ful.”

The famous uri­nal, enti­tled Foun­tain, would come lat­er, in 1917, after he had relo­cat­ed from Paris to New York. Tech­ni­cal­ly, he did­n’t sign his name on it at all, but rather “R. MUTT,” for Richard Mutt, a name par­tial­ly “inspired by the com­ic strip Mutt and Jeff, which Duchamp loved. And Richard is French slang for a rich showoff, or a mon­ey­bags.” Sub­mit­ted by a “female friend” and hid­den behind a cur­tain at the show at which it made its debut, the orig­i­nal signed uri­nal would nev­er be seen again. But it pro­voked a suf­fi­cient­ly endur­ing curios­i­ty that, near­ly half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a mar­ket had emerged for care­ful­ly craft­ed sculp­tur­al repli­cas for Foun­tain and the oth­er ready­mades. The irony could hard­ly have been lost on any­one with a sense of humor — or a will­ing­ness to ques­tion the nature of art itself — like Ducham­p’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Icon­ic Uri­nal & Work of Art, “Foun­tain,” Wasn’t Cre­at­ed by Mar­cel Duchamp But by the Pio­neer­ing Dada Artist Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven

What Made Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal Art–and an Inven­tive Prank

The Mar­cel Duchamp Research Por­tal Opens, Mak­ing Avail­able 18,000 Doc­u­ments and 50,000 Images Relat­ed to the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist

Hear the Rad­i­cal Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions of Mar­cel Duchamp (1912–1915)

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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