Milton Glaser’s Stylish Album Covers for The Band, Nina Simone, John Cage & Many More

in Art, Design, Music | August 12th, 2020

Mil­ton Glaser hard­ly needs an intro­duc­tion. But if the name some­how doesn’t ring a bell, “Glaser’s many con­tri­bu­tions to pop cul­ture,” as Ayun Hal­l­i­day writes in a pre­vi­ous post, cer­tain­ly will. These include “the  I ❤NY logo, the psy­che­del­ic por­trait of a rain­bow-haired Bob Dylan, DC Comics’ clas­sic bul­let logo.” All images that “con­fer unde­ni­able author­i­ty.” Many chil­dren of the six­ties also know Glaser well for his album cov­ers.

Glaser designed the album art for The Band’s clas­sic Music from Pink, though he stepped back from the cov­er and used one of Bob Dylan’s paint­ings instead. He designed cov­ers for clas­sics like Peter, Paul & Mary’s The Best Of: (Ten) Years Togeth­er and Light­nin’ Hop­kins’ Light­nin’! Vol­umes One and Two.

“Glaser had a long his­to­ry with record labels,” writes design­er Rea­gan Ray. “Accord­ing to Discogs, he was cred­it­ed with the design of 255 albums over the course of 60 years. His rela­tion­ship with record label exec­u­tive Kevin Eggers led him to explore a vari­ety of cov­ers for the Pop­py and Toma­to record labels, includ­ing the career of Townes Van Zandt.”

Glaser illus­trat­ed rock, folk, blues, jazz…. “Clas­si­cal album cov­ers nev­er get much atten­tion in graph­ic design his­to­ry,” Ray points out. But “his col­or­ful paint­ings were inter­est­ing and unique in an oth­er­wise stuffy genre.” He even illus­trat­ed an album by Al Caiola’s Mag­ic Gui­tars called Music for Space Squir­rels, what­ev­er that is. Did he lis­ten to all of these albums? Who knows? Glaser left us in June, but not before dis­pens­ing “Ten Rules for Work and Life” that set the bar high for aspir­ing artists.

One of his rules: “Style is not to be trust­ed. Style change is usu­al­ly linked to eco­nom­ic fac­tors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when peo­ple see too much of the same thing too often.” If any­one would know, it was Glaser. “His work is every­where,” writes Ray, “and his lega­cy is vast.” He also had a very rec­og­niz­able style. See a much larg­er selec­tion of Glaser’s album cov­ers, curat­ed by Ray from over 200 albums, here. And vis­it an online col­lec­tion of Glaser’s oth­er graph­ic design work at the School of Visu­al Arts.

  

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mil­ton Glaser (RIP) Presents 10 Rules for Life & Work: Wis­dom from the Cel­e­brat­ed Design­er

Art Record Cov­ers: A Book of Over 500 Album Cov­ers Cre­at­ed by Famous Visu­al Artists

Enter the Cov­er Art Archive: A Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of 800,000 Album Cov­ers from the 1950s through 2018

The Icon­ic Album Cov­ers of Hipg­no­sis: Meet “The Bea­t­les of Album Cov­er Art” Who Cre­at­ed Unfor­get­table Designs for Pink Floyd, Led Zep­pelin, Peter Gabriel & Many More

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

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Ballerina Misty Copeland Recreates the Poses of Edgar Degas’ Ballet Dancers

in Art, Dance, Photography | August 12th, 2020

#Repost @nycdanceproject ・・・ We are remem­ber­ing the Misty Copeland Degas inspired pho­to shoot we did for Harper’s Bazaar in March. The Degas exhib­it that inspired this at @themuseumofmodernart is clos­ing this Sun­day — try to see it if you get a chance! Dress by @maisonvalentino @harpersbazaarus @mistyonpointe #theartof­move­ment #nyc­dan­ce­pro­ject #degas #misty­copeland #misty #harpers­bazaar #moma

“I am a man of motion,” trag­ic mod­ernist bal­let dancer Vaslav Nijin­sky wrote in his famous Diary, “I am feel­ing through flesh…. I am God in a body.” Nijin­sky suf­fered the unfor­tu­nate onset of schiz­o­phre­nia after his career end­ed, but in his lucid moments, he writes of the great­est pain of his illness—to nev­er dance again. A degree of his obses­sive devo­tion seems intrin­sic to bal­let.

Misty Copeland, who titled her auto­bi­og­ra­phy Life in Motion, thinks so. “All dancers are con­trol freaks a bit,” she says. “We just want to be in con­trol of our­selves and our bod­ies. That’s just what the bal­let struc­ture, I think, kind of puts inside of you. If I’m put in a sit­u­a­tion where I am not real­ly sure what’s going to hap­pen, it can be over­whelm­ing. I get a bit anx­ious.” As Nijin­sky did, Copeland is also “forc­ing peo­ple to look at bal­let through a more con­tem­po­rary lens,” writes Stephen Mooallem in Harper’s Bazaar.

@harpersbazaarus she channels artist #EdgarDegas’s most famous ballet works ahead of a new exhibition at #MOMA, dancer @MistyOnPointe opens up about what it feels like to make history. Go to the link in our bio to read her interview from the March 2016 issue and see the full fashion shoot by Ken Browar and Deborah Ory of @NYCDanceProject, styled by @Michelle_Jank.

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Copeland has been can­did about her strug­gles on the way to becom­ing the first African Amer­i­can woman named a prin­ci­pal dancer at the Amer­i­can Bal­let The­atre, includ­ing cop­ing with depres­sion, a leg-injury, body-image issues, and child­hood pover­ty. She is also “in the midst of the most illu­mi­nat­ing pas de deux with pop cul­ture for a clas­si­cal dancer since Mikhail Barysh­nikov went toe-to-toe with Gre­go­ry Hines in White Nights” (a ref­er­ence that may be lost on younger read­ers, but trust me, this was huge).

Like anoth­er mod­ernist artist, Edgar Degas, Copeland has rev­o­lu­tion­ized the image of the bal­let dancer. Degas’ bal­let paint­ings, “which the artist began cre­at­ing in the late 1860s and con­tin­ued mak­ing until the years before his death, in 1917, were infused with a very mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ty. Instead of ide­al­ized visions of del­i­cate crea­tures pirou­et­ting onstage, he offered images of young girls con­gre­gat­ing, prac­tic­ing, labor­ing, danc­ing, train­ing….” He showed the unglam­orous life and work behind the cos­tumed pageantry, that is.

#Repost @dancenthusiast ・・・ ​“I feel like I rep­re­sent every young dancer, and even non-dancer, who felt they were not accept­ed by the bal­let world. I’d like to think that they can see them­selves in me.” ~ Misty Copeland 👑 [Image: Misty Copeland recre­at­ing ‘The Lit­tle Four­teen-Year-Old Dancer,’ a sculp­ture by Edgar Degas] ____________________________________ pho­to by @nycdanceproject

Pho­tog­ra­phers Ken Browar and Deb­o­rah Ory envi­sioned Copeland as sev­er­al of Degas’ dancers, pos­ing her in cou­ture dress­es in recre­ations of some of his famous paint­ings and sculp­tures. The pho­tographs are part of their NYC Dance Project, in part­ner­ship with Harper’s Bazaar. As Kot­tke points out, con­flat­ing the his­to­ries of Copeland and Degas’ dancers rais­es some ques­tions. Degas had con­tempt for women, espe­cial­ly his Parisian sub­jects, who danced in a sor­did world in which “sex work” between teenage dancers and old­er men “was a part of a ballerina’s real­i­ty,” writes author Julia Fiore (as it was too in Nijinsky’s day).

This con­text may unset­tle our view­ing, but the images also show Copeland in full con­trol of Degas’ scenes, though that’s not the way it felt, she says. “It was inter­est­ing to be on shoot and to not have the free­dom to just cre­ate like in nor­mal­ly do with my body. Try­ing to re-cre­ate what Degas did was real­ly dif­fi­cult.” Instead, she embod­ied his fig­ures as her­self. “I see a great affin­i­ty between Degas’s dancers and Misty,” says Thel­ma Gold­en, direc­tor of the Stu­dio Muse­um in Harlem. “She has knocked aside a long-stand­ing music-box stereo­type of the bal­le­ri­na and replaced it with a thor­ough­ly mod­ern, mul­ti­cul­tur­al image of pres­ence and pow­er.”

@popsugarfitness continues to take our breath away as she recreates paintings and sculptures by artist Edgar Degas for @harpersbazaarus. 😍(📷 @nycdanceproject) #mistycopeland #ballet

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See more of Copeland’s Degas recre­ations at Harper’s Bazaar.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Impres­sion­ist Painter Edgar Degas Takes a Stroll in Paris, 1915

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

Watch the Ser­pen­tine Dance, Cre­at­ed by the Pio­neer­ing Dancer Loie Fuller, Per­formed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Broth­ers

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

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When Edward Gorey Designed Book Covers for Classic Novels: See His Ironic-Gothic Take on Dickens, Conrad, Poe & More

in Art, Books | August 12th, 2020

Twen­ty years after his death, it’s cool­er than ever to like Edward Gorey. This is evi­denced not just by the fre­quent post­ing of his inten­sive­ly cross­hatched, Vic­to­ri­an- and Edwar­dian-peri­od-inflect­ed, grim­ly com­ic art on social media, but by the num­ber of artists who now claim him as an influ­ence. Where, one won­ders, did they come across Gorey in the first place? Hav­ing pub­lished more than a hun­dred books in his life­time (if often in small runs from obscure press­es), he cer­tain­ly put the work out there to be found.

But it was the much more well-known books of oth­er writ­ers like Charles Dick­ens, Joseph Con­rad, T.S. Eliot, and Her­man Melville that first prop­a­gat­ed Gorey’s sen­si­bil­i­ty of, as The New York Times’ Steven Kurutz puts it, “camp-macabre, iron­ic-goth­ic or dark-whim­sy.”

Gorey designed the cov­ers for these books and oth­ers between 1953 to 1960, when he worked at the art depart­ment of pub­lish­ers Dou­ble­day Anchor. He had been tasked specif­i­cal­ly with their new series of paper­backs meant to be “seri­ous,” as opposed to the abun­dance of cheap, low­brow, and often sala­cious­ly pack­aged nov­els that had inspired the term “pulp fic­tion.”

Of the first 200 titles in this series, says Goreyo­g­ra­phy, “about a fourth of these have line drawn cov­ers by Gorey.” Even when oth­er artists (the line­up of whom includ­ed Leonard Baskin, Mil­ton Glaser, Philippe Julian, and Andy Warhol) drew the illus­tra­tion, “Gorey then designed the fin­ished prod­uct lend­ing a uni­form appear­ance to the whole line.” You can see a vari­ety of Gorey’s Dou­ble­day Anchor paper­back cov­ers at Lithub, the most Goreyesque of which (such as Joseph Con­rad’s The Secret Agent at the top of the post) not only bear his illus­tra­tions but con­tain noth­ing not drawn by Gorey, text and colophon includ­ed.

“When these cov­ers first appeared against the back­drop of mass-mar­ket cov­ers in gen­er­al,” accord­ing to Goreyo­g­ra­phy, “they were hailed as ‘mod­ern’ and ‘arty.’ Print mag­a­zine praised ‘a feel­ing of uni­ty… a qual­i­ty of their own.’ ” The end of Gorey’s time at Dou­ble­day did­n’t mean the end of his work on oth­ers’ books: in the 1970s, for exam­ple, he con­tributed suit­ably eerie cov­er and inte­ri­or art to John Bel­lairs’ young-adult nov­el The House with a Clock in Its Walls and five of the sequels that would fol­low it. It was in Bel­lairs’ books that I first encoun­tered the visions of Edward Gorey. More than a few read­ers of my gen­er­a­tion and the gen­er­a­tions since could say the same — and also that we’ve been plea­sur­ably haunt­ed by them ever since.

See more cov­ers over at Lithub.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edward Gorey Illus­trates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inim­itable Goth­ic Style (1960)

Lemo­ny Snick­et Reveals His Edward Gorey Obses­sion in an Upcom­ing Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Ani­mat­ed Series, “Goreytelling”

The Best of the Edward Gorey Enve­lope Art Con­test

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

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What Is a “Blerd?” Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #56 Discusses Nerd Culture and Race with The Second City’s Anthony LeBlanc

in Comics/Cartoons, Current Affairs, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi | August 12th, 2020

The Inter­im Exec­u­tive Pro­duc­er of The Sec­ond City joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the scope of black nerd-dom: what nerdy prop­er­ties pro­vide to those who feel “oth­ered,” using sci-fi to talk about race, Black Pan­ther and oth­er heroes, afro­fu­tur­ism, black ani­me fans, Star Trek, Key & Peele, Get Out vs. Us, and more.

A few arti­cles you might enjoy:

Some rel­e­vant videos and pod­casts:

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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The Strange Costumes of the Plague Doctors Who Treated 17th Century Victims of the Bubonic Plague

in History | August 11th, 2020

In the 17th and 18th cen­turies, what we know of as The Age of Enlight­en­ment or ear­ly moder­ni­ty, Euro­peans tra­versed the globe and returned to pub­lish trav­el accounts that cast the natives they encoun­tered as child­like beings, des­ti­tute sav­ages, or lit­er­al mon­sters. Unable to make sense of alien lan­guages and cul­tures, they mis­took every­thing they saw.

Mean­while, the bubon­ic plague swept Europe, and plague doc­tors wan­dered towns and coun­try­side in a “fan­ci­ful-look­ing cos­tume [that] typ­i­cal­ly con­sist­ed of a head-to-toe leather or wax-can­vas gar­ment,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review, “large crys­tal glass­es; and a long snout or bird beak, con­tain­ing aro­mat­ic spices (such as cam­phor, mint, cloves, and myrrh), dried flow­ers (such as ros­es or car­na­tions), or a vine­gar sponge.”

More­over, the plague doctor—as you can see from illus­tra­tions of this bizarre character—also car­ried with him a wand, “with which to issue instruc­tions,” one schol­ar writes, “such as order­ing dis­ease-strick­en hous­es filled with spi­ders or toads ‘to absorb the air’ and com­mand­ing the infect­ed to inhale ‘bot­tled wind’ or take urine baths, purga­tives, or stim­u­lants.” The wand was also used to force­ful­ly fend off patients.

Vis­it­ing trav­el­ers from else­where might be jus­ti­fied in think­ing the plague doc­tor rep­re­sent­ed some strange, prim­i­tive reli­gious cus­tom: per­haps a monstrous—and most­ly ineffective—exorcism rit­u­al. The “ear­ly-mod­ern haz­mat suit” is per­fect­ly rea­son­able, of course, if you under­stand the reign­ing the­o­ry of “mias­mas,” which posit­ed that dis­ease is spread through “bad air.” Not entire­ly wrong, as our cur­rent masked exis­tences show, but in the case of the plague, mias­ma the­o­ry was only very par­tial­ly explana­to­ry.

Which is to say the cos­tume wasn’t entire­ly use­less. “The ankle-length gown and herb-filled beak… would also have offered some pro­tec­tion against germs,” espe­cial­ly since its herbs were some­times lit on fire and allowed to smol­der, send­ing bil­low­ing smoke from the plague doctor’s face. (The satir­i­cal engrav­ing above from 1700 mocks this prac­tice.) “The appear­ance of one of these human-sized birds on a doorstep could only mean that death was near.”

This par­tic­u­lar design has been cred­it­ed to a French doc­tor, Charles de Lorme, said to have invent­ed it in 1619. “De Lorme thought the beak shape of the mask would give the air suf­fi­cient time to be suf­fused by the pro­tec­tive herbs before it hit the plague doc­tors’ nos­trils and lungs.” Often mis­tak­en for Medieval or Renais­sance garb, the plague doc­tor cos­tume is, in fact, a mod­ern piece of kit.

Much has been made of the bird mask, but as one skep­ti­cal his­to­ry writer has effec­tive­ly shown, there are good rea­sons to doubt the wide­spread adop­tion of the beak. It may have been a rar­i­ty; most plague doc­tors prob­a­bly wore what would look to us today like Klan robes and hoods. All the more rea­son for plague doc­tor cos­tumes to seem shock­ing once again, as a British teen dis­cov­ered when he decid­ed in May to dress the part of the clas­sic beaked fig­ure. (Res­i­dents found it “ter­ri­fy­ing” and police offered stern “words of advice.”)

No mat­ter how wide­spread the beak was his­tor­i­cal­ly, its icon­ic sta­tus as part of the plague doc­tor cos­tume remains inscribed in art and cul­ture. “The look was so icon­ic in Italy that the ‘plague doc­tor’ became a sta­ple of Ital­ian com­me­dia dell’arte and car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions,” Erin Blake­more writes at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. Giv­en the asso­ci­a­tions a more authen­tic cos­tume would evoke, no one seems to be clam­or­ing to replace beaked masks with point­ed hoods in rep­re­sen­ta­tions of plague doc­tors. The beak also sym­bol­i­cal­ly con­veys an impor­tant fact about plague doc­tors: they were not healers—they were most­ly wit­ness­es of death.

Few of their reme­dies had any effect. Rather, on the government’s pay­roll, plague doctors—often sec­ond or third-rate prac­ti­tion­ers attempt­ing to build a career—recorded demo­graph­ic data, wit­nessed wills, and per­formed autop­sies. They were like weird avian aliens come to observe the cus­toms of a continent’s dying pop­u­la­tion, appear­ing in what came to be wide­ly under­stood as the “cos­tume of death,” as the illus­tra­tion above puts it. See more rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the plague doc­tor cos­tume at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

The His­to­ry of the Plague: Every Major Epi­dem­ic in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Down­load Clas­sic Works of Plague Fic­tion: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shel­ley, to Edgar Allan Poe

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

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

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How John Woo Makes His Intense Action Scenes: A Video Essay

in Film | August 11th, 2020

The world does not lack action movies, but well-made ones have for most of cin­e­ma his­to­ry been few and far between. Despite long under­stand­ing that action sells, Hol­ly­wood sel­dom man­ages to get the most out of the gen­re’s mas­ter crafts­men. Hence the excite­ment in the ear­ly 1990s when fans of Hong Kong gang­ster pic­tures learned that John Woo, that coun­try’s pre­em­i­nent action auteur, was com­ing state­side. His streak of Hong Kong hits at that point includ­ed A Bet­ter Tomor­row, The Killer, Bul­let in the Head, and Hard Boiled, most of which starred no less an action icon than Chow Yun-fat. For Woo’s Amer­i­can debut Hard Tar­get, star­ring a Bel­gian mus­cle­man called Jean-Claude Van Damme, it would prove a hard act to fol­low.

Hard Tar­get, Evan Puschak (bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer) dri­ly puts it in the video essay above, is “not quite a mas­ter­piece.” Woo “bat­tled a mediocre script, stu­dio pres­sure, and a star who could­n’t real­ly act,” and then “the stu­dio re-edit­ed a lot of the movie to get an R rat­ing, and to make it more palat­able for Amer­i­can movie­go­ers, dilut­ing Woo’s sig­na­ture style in the process.”

But despite being a weak spot in Woo’s fil­mog­ra­phy, it makes for an illu­mi­nat­ing case study in his cin­e­mat­ic style. Puschak calls its action scenes “absurd­ly cre­ative” in a way that has “grown more impres­sive over time”: in them Woo employs slow motion — a sig­na­ture tech­nique “he weaves it into his high­ly kinet­ic sequences like an expert com­pos­er” — and oth­er forms of time dila­tion to “height­en the expe­ri­ence of impact.”

Like most action movies, Hard Tar­get offers a great many impacts: punch­es, kicks, improb­a­ble leaps, gun­shots, and explo­sions aplen­ty. Under Woo’s direc­tion they feel even more plen­ti­ful than they are, giv­en that he “often repeats things two or three times so that the impact has an echo­ing effect.” Yet unlike in run-of-the mill exam­ples of the genre, we feel each and every one of those impacts, owing to such rel­a­tive­ly sub­tle edit­ing strate­gies as pre­sent­ing the fir­ing of a gun and the bul­let hit­ting its tar­get as “two dis­tinct moments.” (Sev­er­al such gun­shots, as Puschak shows us using delet­ed footage, were among the stu­dio-man­gled sequences.) “This is unlike any tra­di­tion­al films in the States,” Woo lat­er said of Hard Tar­get’s dis­ap­point­ing per­for­mance, “so the audi­ence didn’t under­stand what’s going on with these tech­niques.” More than a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry lat­er, West­ern audi­ences have more of a grasp of Woo’s cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage, but few oth­er film­mak­ers have come close to mas­ter­ing it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Hire: 8 Short Films Shot for BMW by John Woo, Ang Lee & Oth­er Pop­u­lar Film­mak­ers (2002)

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Why Is Jack­ie Chan the King of Action Com­e­dy? A Video Essay Mas­ter­ful­ly Makes the Case

How Ser­gio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghet­ti West­erns, Cre­at­ing a Per­fect Har­mo­ny of Sound & Image

How One Sim­ple Cut Reveals the Cin­e­mat­ic Genius of Yasu­jirō Ozu

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

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Dessert Recipes of Iconic Thinkers: Emily Dickinson’s Coconut Cake, George Orwell’s Christmas Pudding, Alice B. Toklas’ Hashish Fudge & More

in Food & Drink, Literature | August 11th, 2020

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Of all the desserts to attain cul­tur­al rel­e­vance over the past cen­tu­ry, can any hope to touch Alice B. Tok­las’ famous hashish fudge? Call­ing for such ingre­di­ents as black pep­per­corns, shelled almonds, dried figs, and most vital of all Cannabis sati­va, the recipe first appeared in 1954’s The Alice B. Tok­las Cook Book. (Tok­las would read the recipe aloud on the radio in the ear­ly 1960s, a time when the fudge’s key ingre­di­ent had become an object of much more intense pub­lic inter­est.) More than a how-to on Tok­las’ favorite dish­es, the book is also a kind of mem­oir, includ­ing rec­ol­lec­tions of her life with Gertrude Stein — her­self the author of the osten­si­ble Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Alice B. Tok­las.

This puts us in the realm of seri­ous lit­er­a­ture where sweets, you might assume, are scarce­ly to be found. But bak­ing con­sti­tut­ed a part of the cre­ative process of no less a lit­er­ary mind than Emi­ly Dick­in­son, whose hand­writ­ten recipe for coconut cake appears above.

That same sheet of a paper’s reverse side, which you can see in our ear­li­er post about it, bears the first lines of her poem “The Things that nev­er can come back, are sev­er­al.” Dick­in­son also, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly post­ed here on Open Cul­ture, had her very own recipes for gin­ger­bread, donuts, and some­thing requir­ing five pounds of raisins called “black cake.”

It may seem obvi­ous that women like Tok­las and Dick­in­son, born and raised in the 19th cen­tu­ry, would have been expect­ed to learn this sort of thing. But a fair few of the lit­er­ary men of gen­er­a­tions past knew some­thing of their way around the kitchen as well. George Orwell, for instance, wrote an essay on “British cook­ery,” ear­ly in which he states that “in gen­er­al, British peo­ple pre­fer sweet things to spicy things.” While describ­ing “sweet dish­es and con­fec­tionery – cakes, pud­dings, jams, bis­cuits and sweet sauces” as the “glo­ry of British cook­ery,” he admits that “the nation­al addic­tion to sug­ar has not done the British palate any good.” And so he includes the recipe for a Christ­mas pud­ding which, sub­tle by that stan­dard, calls for only half a pound of the stuff.

Born a gen­er­a­tion after Orwell, Roald Dahl made no secret of his own sug­ar-addict­ed British palate. In his book Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry Dahl had “daz­zled young read­ers with visions of Cav­i­ty-Fill­ing Caramels, Ever­last­ing Gob­stop­pers, and snozzber­ry-fla­vored wall­pa­per,” writes Open Cul­ture’s own Ayun Hal­l­i­day. But his own can­dy of choice was “the more pedes­tri­an Kit-Kat bar. In addi­tion to savor­ing one dai­ly (a lux­u­ry lit­tle Char­lie Buck­et could but dream of, pri­or to win­ning that most gold­en of tick­ets) he invent­ed a frozen con­fec­tion called ‘Kit-Kat Pud­ding,’ ” whose sim­ple recipe is as fol­lows: “Stack as many Kit-Kats as you like into a tow­er, using whipped cream for mor­tar, then shove the entire thing into the freez­er, and leave it there until sol­id.”

If you’re look­ing for a slight­ly more chal­leng­ing dessert that still comes with a cul­tur­al fig­ure’s impri­matur, you might give Nor­mal Rock­well’s favorite oat­meal cook­ies a try. Going deep­er into Amer­i­can his­to­ry, we’ve also got Thomas Jef­fer­son­’s recipe for ice cream, the taste for which he picked up while liv­ing in France in the 1780s. That same coun­try’s cui­sine also inspired Ernest Hem­ing­way’s fruit pie, meant for sum­mer-camp­ing with one’s pals: “If your pals are French­men,” Hem­ing­way adds, “they will kiss you.” Alas, if any­one has deter­mined the exact recipe for the most famous dessert in all of French lit­er­a­ture, Mar­cel Proust’s mem­o­ry-trig­ger­ing madeleines, they haven’t released it to the hun­gry pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Recipes of Icon­ic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Mar­quis de Sade & More

Ernest Hemingway’s Sum­mer Camp­ing Recipes

82 Vin­tage Cook­books, Free to Down­load, Offer a Fas­ci­nat­ing Illus­trat­ed Look at Culi­nary and Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

His­toric Mex­i­can Recipes Are Now Avail­able as Free Dig­i­tal Cook­books: Get Start­ed With Dessert

Wagashi: Peruse a Dig­i­tized, Cen­turies-Old Cat­a­logue of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Can­dies

Ani­mat­ed Noir: Key Lime Pie

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

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When We All Have Pocket Telephones (1923)

in Technology | August 11th, 2020

From Eng­land’s Dai­ly Mir­ror (Jan­u­ary 23, 1923).

Find more time­ly pre­dic­tions in the Relat­eds below.

via Neil Gaiman

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

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The Wine Windows of Renaissance Florence Dispense Wine Safely Again During COVID-19

in Architecture, Food & Drink, History, Life, Travel | August 10th, 2020

Every­thing old is new again and Tuscany’s buchette del vino—wine windows—are def­i­nite­ly rolling with the times.

As Lisa Har­vey ear­li­er report­ed in Atlas Obscu­ra, buchette del vino became a thing in 1559, short­ly after Cosi­mo I de’ Medici decreed that Flo­rence-dwelling vine­yard own­ers could bypass tav­erns and wine mer­chants to sell their prod­uct direct­ly to the pub­lic. Wealthy wine fam­i­lies eager to pay less in tax­es quick­ly fig­ured out a workaround that would allow them to take advan­tage of the edict with­out requir­ing them to actu­al­ly open their palace doors to the rab­ble:

Any­one on the street could use the wood­en or met­al knock­er … and rap on a wine win­dow dur­ing its open hours. A well-respect­ed, well-paid ser­vant, called a can­ti­niere and trained in prop­er­ly pre­serv­ing wine, stood on the oth­er side. The can­ti­niere would open the lit­tle door, take the customer’s emp­ty straw-bot­tomed flask and their pay­ment, refill the bot­tle down in the can­ti­na (wine cel­lar), and hand it back out to the cus­tomer on the street.

Sev­en­ty years fur­ther on, these lit­er­al holes-in-the-walls served as a means of con­tact­less deliv­ery for post-Renais­sance Ital­ians in need of a drink as the sec­ond plague pan­dem­ic raged.

Schol­ar Francesco Rondinel­li (1589–1665) detailed some of the extra san­i­ta­tion mea­sures put in place in the ear­ly 1630s:

A met­al pay­ment col­lec­tion scoop replaced hand-to-hand exchange

Imme­di­ate vine­gar dis­in­fec­tion of all col­lect­ed coins

No exchange of emp­ty flasks brought from home

Cus­tomers who insist­ed on bring­ing their own reusable bot­tles could do self-serve refills via a met­al tube, to pro­tect the essen­tial work­er on the oth­er side of the win­dow.

Sound famil­iar?

After cen­turies of use, the win­dows died out, falling vic­tim to flood, WWII bomb­ings, fam­i­ly relo­ca­tions, and archi­tec­tur­al ren­o­va­tion.

The nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic has def­i­nite­ly played a major role in putting wine win­dows back on the public’s radar, but Babae, a casu­al year-old restau­rant gets cred­it for being the first to reac­ti­vate a dis­used buchet­ta del vino for its intend­ed pur­pose, sell­ing glass­es of red for a sin­gle hour each day start­ing in August 2019.

Now sev­er­al oth­er authen­tic buchette have returned to ser­vice, with menus expand­ed to accom­mo­date serv­ings of ice cream and cof­fee.

Giv­en this suc­cess, per­haps they’ll take a cue from Japan’s 4.6 mil­lion vend­ing machines, and begin dis­pens­ing an even wider array of items.

They may even take a page from the past, and send some of the mon­ey they take in back out, along with food and yes—wine—to sus­tain needy mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty.

The Buchette del Vino Asso­ci­azi Cul­tur­ale cur­rent­ly lists 146 active and inac­tive wine win­dows in Flo­rence and the sur­round­ing regions, accom­pa­ny­ing their find­ings with pho­tos and arti­cles of his­tor­i­cal rel­e­vance.

Via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Quar­an­tined Ital­ians Send a Mes­sage to Them­selves 10 Days Ago: What They Wish They Knew Then

Ital­ians’ Night­ly Sin­ga­longs Prove That Music Soothes the Sav­age Beast of Coro­n­avirus Quar­an­tine & Self-Iso­la­tion

A Free Course from MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Classic Punk Rock Sketches from Saturday Night Live, Courtesy of Fred Armisen

in Comedy, Music | August 10th, 2020

Come­di­an Fred Armisen is best known for his years on Sat­ur­day Night Live, his eight sea­sons of sur­re­al sketch com­e­dy (with Car­rie Brown­stein) on Port­landia, and his unnerv­ing com­mand of region­al accents and impres­sions. True fans also know that for much of his career he’s also been a musi­cian, pri­mar­i­ly a drum­mer, since col­lege. Start­ing in high school, he’s been in var­i­ous bands, includ­ing Trench­mouth, the Blue Man Group, and some­times sit­ting in with Seth Mey­ers’ house band.

So the above skit from SNL is fun because Armisen gets to indulge his love of punk music. It’s a basic set-up, a 40-some­thing groom and his best buds “get­ting the band back togeth­er” to play one more song at a wed­ding. But here the band used to be a polit­i­cal punk band along the lines of Fear, The Dead Kennedys, and Sui­ci­dal Ten­den­cies, and the anti-Rea­gan lyrics (you too, Alexan­der Haig, you fas­cist!) have been pre­served in amber.

Like most SNL sketch­es it unfolds kind of how you expect (and just kinda…ends), but man, this must have been fun to shoot. And yes, that’s the Foo Fighters/Nirvana’s Dave Grohl on drums.

If that skit was a trib­ute to Amer­i­can punk, then this oth­er one is a nod to the Sex Pis­tols and the steady right­ward drift of John Lydon. Armisen plays lead singer Ian Rub­bish (you know, of Ian Rub­bish and the Bizarros) whose lyrics decry and attack everything…except for Mar­garet Thatch­er. The Queen? She’s use­less (and oth­er words we can’t write on Open Cul­ture), but Mag­gie? Ian has a soft spot.

This 2013 skit came short­ly after Thatch­er died and Amer­i­cans were treat­ed to videos of some Britons (not all, but *a lot*) cel­e­brat­ing her death much as you would the death of Hitler or Mus­soli­ni. Good­bye, good rid­dance, and let me know where she’s locat­ed so we can pee on her grave. That sor­ta thing. And if that’s where you’re at, you might find the turn this sketch takes a bit too nice. But kudos to ex-Pis­tol Steve Jones for turn­ing up and doing the Rut­les-like thing. There’s even a nice par­o­dy of the infa­mous Bill Grundy inter­view.

(Bonus info: Ian Rub­bish and the Bizarros played some actu­al shows.)

Armisen had anoth­er crack, by the way, at the reunion joke. In Sea­son 8 of Port­landia, the “Band Reunion” skit brought togeth­er Hen­ry Rollins (Black Flag), Krist Novosel­ic (Nir­vana), and Bren­dan Canty (Fugazi) to bring back Armisen’s character’s band “Riot Spray” and record one more time. (Brown­stein only fig­ures a bit in the skit, but her reac­tion is price­less). The humor is just a lit­tle bit more mel­low, a bit more empa­thet­ic, and hurts just that lit­tle bit more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

The Sex Pis­tols’ 1976 Man­ches­ter “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began

The Sex Pis­tols Play in Dal­las’ Long­horn Ball­room; Next Show Is Mer­le Hag­gard (1978)

Ian Rub­bish (aka Fred Armisen) Inter­views the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mock­u­men­tary
Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks, Here’s … John Lydon in a But­ter Com­mer­cial?

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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The Golden Age of Berlin Comes to Life in the Classic, Avant-Garde Film, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927)

in Film, History | August 10th, 2020

The redis­cov­ery of Berlin began thir­ty years ago this Novem­ber, with the demo­li­tion of the wall that had long divid­ed the city’s west­ern and east­ern halves. Specif­i­cal­ly, the Berlin Wall had stood since 1961, mean­ing the younger gen­er­a­tion of West and East Berlin­ers had no mem­o­ry of their city’s being whole. In anoth­er sense, the same could be said of their par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion, who saw near­ly a third of Berlin destroyed in the Sec­ond World War. Only the most ven­er­a­ble Berlin­ers would have remem­bered the social and indus­tri­al gold­en age the undi­vid­ed city enjoyed back in the 1920s — an age exhil­a­rat­ing­ly pre­sent­ed in the film Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis.

An ear­ly exam­ple of the silent-era “city sym­phonies” that showed off the cap­i­tals of the world on film (sev­er­al of which you can watch here on Open Cul­ture), Berlin takes the view­er along streets and water­ways, through parks, onto trains and ele­va­tors, on roller coast­ers, and into fac­to­ries, build­ing sites, cabarets, and skies. Shot over a year and com­pressed into less than an hour, this avant-garde doc­u­men­tary cap­tures the expe­ri­ence of Berlin in the 1920s — or rather it cap­tures, in that might­i­ly indus­tri­al age, expe­ri­ence at the inter­sec­tion of human and machine. Direc­tor Walther Ruttmann “charts the move­ments of crowds of chil­dren, work­ers, swim­mers, row­ers, and so on,” writes Pop­mat­ters’ Chad­wick Jenk­ins, “but only occa­sion­al­ly focus­es on a per­son as an indi­vid­ual. More­over, many of the most strik­ing scenes in the film avoid the intru­sion of peo­ple alto­geth­er, con­cen­trat­ing instead on the oper­a­tion of mechan­i­cal devices.”

Absent explana­to­ry nar­ra­tion or title cards, the film invites a vari­ety of read­ings. Chad­wick sees it as “the defam­a­to­ry dehu­man­iza­tion of the human, the dero­ga­tion of human auton­o­my and domin­ion over a world of indif­fer­ent mat­ter, a reduc­tion of the divine spark in humankind to the sta­tus of anoth­er mere thing.” This same qual­i­ty drove away one of Ruttman­n’s key col­lab­o­ra­tors on Berlin, the writer Carl May­er. Ruttmann, for his part, described his own moti­va­tion as “the idea of mak­ing some­thing out of life, of cre­at­ing a sym­phon­ic film out of the mil­lions of ener­gies that com­prise the life of a big city.”

A pri­ma­ry inter­est in move­ment itself is per­haps to be expect­ed from a film­mak­er who had pre­vi­ous­ly dis­tin­guished him­self as an abstract ani­ma­tor. (What his lat­er work as an assis­tant to Leni Riefen­stahl on Tri­umph of the Will indi­cates is anoth­er mat­ter.) But if Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis “dehu­man­izes,” writes Jenk­ins, it does so as a delib­er­ate artis­tic strat­e­gy to show that “the city is more than its var­i­ous com­po­nents, includ­ing its human com­po­nents,” and to “pro­vide an insight into the emer­gent qual­i­ties that make a city what it is, beyond being a mere com­pos­ite of the ele­ments with­in its geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries,” how­ev­er those bound­aries get drawn and redrawn over time.

Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Samuel Beck­ett Walk the Streets of Berlin Like a Boss, 1969

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

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

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