In 1991 Harvard’s music library discovered a lost canon of Mozart, the composer who Leonard Bernstein said offers “the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering — a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.”
It’s called “Lick Me in the Ass.”
Paralyzed in a fall in 1836, John Carter discovered a talent for art, holding a brush in his teeth and working in bed. The figures below are after Albrecht Dürer.
See also No Handicap, Sarah Biffen, and Prince Randian.
The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
See also The General’s Ghost.
In Vertumnus, Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrayed his patron Rudolf II as the Roman god of growth and change. Fortunately, Rudolf appreciated the metaphor and awarded Arcimboldo one of his highest orders.
See also Renaissance Surrealism and The Librarian.
One candidate for the world’s shortest play is The Exile, by Tristan Bernard.
The curtain rises on a mountaineer in a remote cabin. An exile knocks on the door.
EXILE: Whoever you are, have pity on a hunted man. There is a price on my head.
MOUNTAINEER: How much?
The curtain falls.
But shorter still may be Samuel Beckett’s 1969 play Breath, which lasts 35 seconds. As we view a bare, litter-strewn stage, we hear a baby’s cry, a person inhaling once and then exhaling, and then another cry. At the play’s West End debut, one audience member said, “I just want to put on record that I thought the whole evening was completely bogus and pretentious.”
(Thanks, Adam.)
The great thing about Gustave Verbeek’s comic strips is that when you reach the end of a page, you can invert it to see the story continue.
He created 64 such comics for the New York Herald between 1903 and 1905.
The Isle of Dogs. An 18th-century engraving.
This 1872 Currier and Ives print is titled The Puzzled Fox: Find the Horse, Lamb, Wild Boar, Men’s and Women’s Faces. There are eight human and animal faces hidden in the scene. Can you find them?
Ironically, the birds that are visible have now disappeared — they’re passenger pigeons.
Most expensive paintings (sale prices expressed in dollars and adjusted for inflation):
Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito bought both #4 and #5 in 1990 and then announced he would have them burned during his cremation. Perhaps fortunately, he later ran into financial difficulties and was forced to sell them.