“It is no secret that the late Alfred Hitchcock was—and still is—not only one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, but also the ‘Master of Suspense.’ After having started his career as a silent film title designer and art director, the London-born auteur had his directorial debut with the 1925 (silent) movie The Pleasure Garden and subsequently went on to make a number of films that would, after a mere few shots, become instantly recognizable as his. Dramatic shadows, unpredictable visual revelations and odd camera angles were all part of his repertoire, with the narrative of wrongfully accused people becoming a pervasive one throughout his career. … One of them is, of course, the 1959 noir Vertigo (with the other three being Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960)). But the now-adored film was not always considered one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, quite the…

The Last Poets in 1970; half a century later—and counting—Oyewole is keeping poetry in the moment.

“A founding member of the American music and spoken-word group The Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole is also known as a founding father of hip hop. Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, Erykah Badu, and countless others cite The Last Poets as a major influence. ‘When The Revolution Comes,’ from the Last Poets’ eponymous 1970 debut album, has been sampled in ‘Party and Bullshit,’ by The Notorious B.I.G.; ‘Concerto in X Minor,’ by Brand Nubian; and ‘Prolly,’ by Sevyn Streeter, featuring Gucci Mane. Samples of ‘On the Subway,’ from the same album, have been used by Digable Planets. The list goes on. Oyewole was born Charles Davis, in Cincinnati, but grew up in Queens and regularly attended church in Harlem, a place of congregation, inspiration, and social measurement. His mother encouraged him to…

The Greensboro Four: (left to right) David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair, Jr., and Joseph McNeil.

“The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in February to July 1960, primarily in the Woolworth store—now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum—in Greensboro, North Carolina, which led to the F. W. Woolworth Company department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. While not the first sit-in of the civil rights movement, the Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action, and also the best-known sit-ins of the civil rights movement. They are considered a catalyst to the subsequent sit-in movement, in which 70,000 people participated. This sit-in was a contributing factor in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In August 1939, African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized the Alexandria Library sit-in in Virginia…

“Captain Archibald Haddock … is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. He is one of Tintin’s best friends, a seafaring pipe-smoking Merchant MarineCaptain. Haddock is initially depicted as a weak and alcoholic character under the control of his treacherous first mate Allan, who keeps him drunk and runs his freighter. He regains his command and his dignity, even rising to president of the Society of Sober Sailors (The Shooting Star), but never gives up his love for rum and whisky, especially Loch Lomond, until the final Tintin adventure, Tintin and the Picaros, when Professor Calculus ‘cures’ him of his taste for alcohol. In the adventure Secret of the Unicorn (and continuing in Red Rackham’s Treasure) he and Tintin travel to find a pirate’s treasure captured by his ancestor, Sir…

“The American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, derived from the natural Harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in the standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals. One of Partch’s scales has 43 tones to the octave. To play this music, he built many unique instruments, with names such as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl. Partch called himself ‘a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry’. The path towards Partch’s use of many unique instruments was a gradual one. Partch began in the 1920s using traditional instruments, and wrote a string quartet in just intonation (now lost). He had his first specialized instrument built for him in 1930—the Adapted Viola, a viola with a cello’s neck fitted on it. He re-tuned the reeds of several reed organs and labeled the keys…

“The New York Correspondence School is an alternative social network formed by the artist Ray Johnson who encouraged artists, friends, acquaintances, and strangers to share their art through the postal system. Johnson began sending aestheticized mail to his friends as a teenager in the 1940s, a practice he continued to develop while studying at Black Mountain College, and by the 1950s, these mailings, often called ‘mail art,’ had become a major aspect of Johnson’s work as an artist. In 1962, Ed Plunkett, one of Johnson’s correspondents, named the international network of participants ‘The New York Correspondence School’ (NYCS), a play on ‘The New York School’ of abstract expressionist painters. Johnson’s mailings to the NYCS turned forms of communication and education into artistic media in personal letters, mass-produced flyers, absurd packages, and everything in between. While a multiplicity of reoccurring images and references appear in Johnson’s work, from animals such as…

“Kilgore Trout is a fictional character created by author Kurt Vonnegut. In Vonnegut’s work, Trout is a notably unsuccessful author of paperback science fiction novels. ‘Trout’ was inspired by the name of the author Theodore Sturgeon (Vonnegut’s colleague in the genre of science fiction—Vonnegut was amused by the notion of a person with the name of a fish, Sturgeon, hence Trout), although Trout’s consistent presence in Vonnegut’s works has also led critics to view him as the author’s own alter ego. In a homage to Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout is also the titular author of the novel Venus on the Half-Shell (1975), written pseudonymously by Philip José Farmer. In 1957, Theodore Sturgeon moved to Truro, Massachusetts, where he befriended Vonnegut, then working as a salesman in a Saab dealership. At the time, both were writing in the genre of science fiction; Vonnegut…

“By the time 22-year-old Kenneth Rexroth arrived in San Francisco in 1927, he had already developed a career as a professional bohemian and radical. Orphaned at a young age, he’d been living happily among the seedier elements of Chicago’s underground as a modernist painter, stage performer and poet, and using his natural born oratorical skills to soapbox for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Rexroth and his new wife, Andree, had arrived in San Francisco penniless and with no contacts whatsoever. … Rexroth’s home at 250 Scott Street, above Jack’s Record Cellar, became a magnet for this rapidly spreading mood of disaffection from American society, as all sorts of poets, artists, radicals, and notably conscientious objectors began to find each other and develop a common language and lifestyle in the Bay Area. … Eventually, Rexroth came to be regarded as something of a San Francisco institution. Out of the…