there was no ransom to be paid—no song unsung, no wine untasted

On this day in 2009, the ITV network’s Britain’s Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle’s debut album climbed to the top of the charts, becoming the best-selling first recording in the history of the UK. Appearing as a contestant on series three, she surprised the audience and jury with an amazing rendition of Fantine’s solo from Les Misérables, subsequently rising to stardom.

his grooms and companions, the autobiography of a horse

Though considered the foundational work of pony fiction--that genre of juvenile novels involving teens and learning equestrian skills—Anna Sewell’s final work published on this day in 1877 by Jarrold & Sons, Black Beauty, the first non-human memoir was not necessarily targeted to an audience of children. Instilling sympathy and respect for animals as well as people, the enduring best-seller recounts the stages of the narrator's life--first as a foal, a colt, then a working-horse pulling cabs whose hardships and experiences reflect those of his drivers and passengers in London before being put out to pasture for retirement.

he’s so simple-minded, can’t drive his module

Released on this day in 1972 as the lead single from Aladdin Sane and recorded with his backing band the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie’s composition was an inspired assortment of supposed American trappings with the song’s protagonist a reference to criminal vagabond and French existential playwright Jean Genet, beginning its development as an improvised jam session on a tour bus between Cleveland and Memphis. The title lyric became the namesake of the 1977 Glasgow band Simple Minds. He bites on the neon and sleeps in the capsule. Loves to be loved.

i feel for you

Climbing to first place on the UK singles charts on this day in 1984, singer Chaka Khan’s hit was written by Prince with accompaniment by Stevie Wonder on chromatic harmonica and Grandmaster Melle Mel, whose Ch-ch-ch-chaka-chaka-chaka Khan was originally an editing slip up that the producer decided would stay in.

9x9

poppy watch: juxtaposed recruitment campaign for lorry drivers looks like a cheesy Whovian villain (previously)—via Super Punch 

if past is precedent: a comic illustrating vaccine requirements in public schools—via Nag on the Lake  

voleur de grand chemin: literary correspondence for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road 

wurzelkindern: a delightfully illustrated 1909 children’s book about when the root children wake up—via Everlasting Blört

greatest movie never made: storyboard, note for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, to star Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson and Salvador Dalí, up for auction  

nitt witt ridge: an eccentric castle on a hill—via Messy Messy Chic (lots more to see here)  

could’ve been an email: a concise plan for shorted, more productive meetings from John Cleese in 1976  

high-fidelity: a patent for a playback stylus that moved the needle rather than the record in the form of a VW Bulli 

mop and smiff: the Saw-See annual, a nostalgic diversion from BBC1 uncovered

travels into several remote nations of the world. in four parts.

Through his amanuensis and alter-ego Lemuel Gulliver (First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, see previously here, here and here), Anglo-Irish author and clergyman Jonathan Swift published his multipart novel satirizing social foibles and the obsession with travelogue through London-based printer Benjamin Motte on this day in 1726. An instant best-seller with widespread and ingrained cultural influences and literary legacy, Gulliver’s Travels explores petty and doctrinaire differences magnified, the inherent innocence or corrupt state of human nature and a reinstatement of the struggle between Modernity and Antiquity and associated totems and taboos, each part opposed to the themes explored in the preceding-macrocosm, microcosm, insight, innocence.

trog

Premiering in theatres on this day in 1970, this Freddie Francis (cinematographer for such films as The Elephant Man, Sons and Lovers, Son of Dracula, The Deadly Bees, Glory, The Executioner’s Song, Dune, Cape Fear), low-budget science fiction horror vehicle stars Joan Crawford (in her last role) as a renowned anthropologist who learns that a solitary troglodyte—Ice Age caveman—is dwelling in some remote caverns of the English countryside, whom to the distress of the locals tries to lure him out in order to study and perhaps civilise this missing link. For all its camp and status as a transgressive cult movie, it is surprisingly raw and touching.

lying awake intent at tuning in on you

Originally recorded by songwriter Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club—featuring Thomas Dolby on keyboard, the follow-on version performed by the synth-pop group the Buggles, released a month prior as the debut single from their first studio album The Age of Plastic, the foundational, nostalgic hit, influenced by the music of Kraftwerk and inspired by memories of covertly listening to Radio Luxembourg late at night, topped the UK charts this week in 1979. The accompanying music video, first aired on Top of the Pops, went on, just after midnight on the first day of August 1981, to mark the beginning of MTV’s broadcasting run.

the tragical death of an apple pie, who was cut to pieces and eaten by twenty-five gentlemen, with whom all little people ought to be acquainted

In the midst of the season for apple picking and pie baking, Spitalfields Life presents us a rhyming Abecedarium (also called battledores, from the wooden tablet or paddle used in the classroom for instruction that resembled the racket from the game of shuttlecock) first in print in the late seventeenth century

and then republished by prolific printer Jemmy Catnach (*1769 - †1813) at the end of his long career, whom produced thousands of chapbooks and affordable literary material, in the form of educational pamphlets, political satires, poetry revues and other ephemera to surfeit a voracious and newly literate public in the Seven Dials (named for the horological devices strategically placed there to record the hour with the sun for the rest of the city, which was not necessarily free of the impediment of shadow) district of London. Go through the whole alphabet with much more to explore at the links above.

lieutenant pigeon

Topping the UK charts this week in 1972, the novelty band’s song “Moldy Old Dough” (a play on the flexible jazz-era phrase vo-dee-o-doe) featured Rob Woodward and his mother Hilda respectively on keyboard and piano, not only making this short, endearing tune the only number one hit to feature mother and son but also the eldest woman to earn that distinction, aged fifty-eight at the time. The band from Coventry was the second incarnation of a project called Stavely Makepeace and subsequent recordings included “Desperate Dan,” “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” “Grandfather Clock,” and “Disco Bells.”

designgroep

Named after the tarot card, the psychedelic design collective based in Amsterdam, The Fool, and influenced by the hippie community of Ibiza (see previously), whose costuming for stage and album cover art include iconic outfits for Procol Harum, Cream and the Beatles, as seen in televised broadcasts of “All You Need is Love,” the Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s inside graphics plus the largest mural in the world for a performance of Hair at the Aquarius Theatre. Much more at Messy Messy Chic at the link above.

upstairs, downstairs

Tracking the gradual decline of the British aristocracy through the lens of a wealthy family living at a posh address in Belgravia, a countess who entered into a morganatic marriage with the son of a county parson, and their domestics, over a span of twenty-seven years, from the turn of the century through the Great War, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression in the 1930s during the regencies of Edward VII, George V and Edward VIII, the ITV series debuted on this day in 1971, running for five seasons. The introductory credits of each episode featured a cartoon from Punch magazine over the opening theme The Edwardians—performed as a the mildly bawdy, music hall piece “What Are We Going to Do with Uncle Arthur?” with an instrumental version also used as a wedding march (see also) for a marriage ceremony in the show.

no one i think is in my tree

On this day in 1985, on what would have been the artist’s forty-fifth birthday, his widow Yoko Ono, who contributed significantly to the landscaping and upkeep through the years, and New York City mayor Ed Koch dedicated the one hectare memorial within Central Park to the memory of murdered former Beatle John Lennon.

7x7

the boy on the bike: a trip down Golden Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset with a beloved bread advert directed by Ridley Scott with music by Dvořák  

dedication—devotion, turning all the night time into the day: more on the hypothesis (see previously) that the Dire Straits song can improve any movie ending 

the hauntening: various AIs try their hand at spookifying, exorcising Victorian mansions—previously

outbreak: a timelapse of COVID-19 cases in the United States over the past eighteen months 

just the punctation: what text without words reveals to authors about their style—via Waxy  

abecedarium: a 1968 Alphabet (previously) of the Dada movement hosted by Hans Richter (caution, some rapid, flashing images) 

rašínovo embankment: revitalised Prague riverfront features vaulted arches for cafes and gallery spaces

cyrus charter

Though in possession of the British Museum, the ancient clay cylinder bearing the declaration of king Cyrus the Great, outlining his genealogy and conquest of Babylonia as favourite of the god Marduk and documentation of the end of exile of the Jewish people and allowing them to resettle within the empire was loaned to Tehran on this day in 1971 for a period of sixteen days for the gala celebration of the two-thousand-five-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Persia—see previously, beginning mid-month ten days later. The artefact recovered in 1829 (in Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq) is considered by many historians as the pioneering attempt to administer and multicultural state with universal human rights and was made the official symbol of Iran in absentia.

tubular bells

On this day in 1974 Mike Oldfield’s technically rich and complex instrumental arrangement, Opus One, the nineteen year old’s debut studio recording, climbed to the top position on the UK charts (see also), some fifteen months after its release, its opening theme used for the horror film The Exorcist shortly thereafter. Several anniversary and occasional versions have been produced in subsequent years

the final programme

Adapted from the eponymous Michael Moorcock novel and premiering in UK cinemas on this day in 1973, the Robert Fuest sci-fi, action production (thanks to the introduction from The Flop House), the plot centring around the quest for post-humanism beings—perfect and self-propagating—is a post-modern Prometheus story that shares a lot of energy and aesthetics with the roughly contemporary Abominable Doctor Phibes. Bent on carrying out the taboo and contro-versial plan of a recently deceased mad scientist and bring human kind into a new age and out of an existence condemned to near post-apocalyptic wasteland, Miss Brunner—a sado-masochistic techno-magician—instigates the epiphanical sequence, causing her to merge with the protagonist, a suave playboy physicist and son of the man scientist called Jerry Cornelius and dispatching with the henchman named Dmitri who had helped bring their plot to fruition—briefly manifesting as some sort of messianic figure to herald a new age before devolving into a caveman (see also). The creature, as it escapes the secret lair, observes that it is indeed “a very tasty world.”

how does it feel when you got no food?

Released mid-September as a single from their debut studio album, The Youth of Today, the song from the British-Jamaican reggae band topped the UK charts this week in 1982 with their bowdlerised cover of The Mighty Diamonds’ 1981 tune “Pass the Kutchie,” a slang term for a cannabis pipe from the patois for Dutch oven, which excised and substituted all drug references for poverty, launching the song’s popularity outside of the Caribbean community. The original line “How does it feel when you got no herb?” became the above but with dutchie itself becoming synonymous with a marijuana joint. Give me the music—make me jump and prance.

born to the purple

Via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, we very much enjoyed learning about young aspiring chemist William Henry Perkin’s accidental discovery of one of the first synthetic dyes whilst trying to extract quinine, the sole treatment for malaria known to Victorian London, from coal tar—a considered a waste by-product of burning coke and coal but in reality quite useful. Purple was still very much en vogue—signalling that wearers were otherwise porphyrogenita though to harvest the mollusks that were its natural source, the Murex snail, was exceedingly hard to come (as the species was nearly driven to extinction by dint of the royal colour) by and substitutes were quick to fade and wash-out. The substance that Perkin’s experiments yielded stained fabric and appeared to be colourfast, and capitalising on tradition, originally deemed it Tyrian purple, later naming the product, the first to be marketed commercially and leading to an revolution in chemical research, to mauveine after the French term for the mallow (Malva sylvestris) wildflower.

computerised axial tomography

On this day in 1971, the first CAT scan (nowadays usually referred to as a CT scan) was conducted at Wimbledon on an unidentified patient on a diagnostic machine developed by engineer Godfrey Hounsfield and physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack. The duo were recipients of the 1979 Nobel prize for their collaboration and the former is the namesake for the quantitative gauge of radiopacity—that is the ability of electromagnetic radiation to penetrate a media with air at -1000 HU (Housfield Units), water at the baseline of zero and bone set at +1000 at the other end of the spectrum, with identifiable values for various fats, tissues and ligaments.