⌾Curio #47 - Ethan Hawke, Flags & Kiasmos

Dear readers,

I’ve been putting together these newsletters for well over a year now. It’s been a wonderful way to learn and write about things I find intriguing and share them with each of you. Since starting Curio, the news cycle seems to have become even more noisy and chaotic. Writing this each week became a nice little escape from all of that. 

Claude Monet - Impression, Sunrise (1872)

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In the last couple of months my life has changed quite a bit and my priorities and commitments have changed too. The truth is that there are a couple of other projects I am focusing my energies on at the moment and I’m finding that writing a newsletter each week is eating into the time I feel I should be spending on those. As a result, I’m going to pause sending Curio out for the time being. I have no doubt it will resume in some capacity, but perhaps with a different cadence (monthly?) and format that will make it more sustainable moving forward. 

I can’t thank each of you enough. I think I agree with John Cheever who said, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”

Stay well,

Oli

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Ethan Hawke on Creativity

I’m a big fan of the actor Ethan Hawke, particularly his performances in the Before Sunrise trilogy, Training Day, Boyhood, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead and Dead Poets Society. In the following TED Talk, a bewhiskered Hawke discusses the importance of creativity and how people ought to give themselves permission to be a bit more creative in their everyday life. As he mentions, creativity can take many forms, including listening to some new music or speaking with somebody you don’t usually talk to or trying to cook a meal you’ve never made before. He urges people to channel their inner child when approaching creative activities — to be less driven by habit and to care less about whether you are any good. Ultimately, he believes we should all be willing to “play the fool.”

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Flags of the World Trivia (Answers at the bottom)

This hasn’t been a great year for international travel or pub trivia, but that’s no excuse to get rusty in your ability to wow friends, strangers and first dates with niche factoids relating to national flags of the world. See how you go with these questions.

a. While the vast majority of countries use rectangular flags, two countries use square flags. Which countries are they? Hint: both are small European nations

b. Which is the only country in the world without a square or rectangular flag? Hint: this is it

c. The below flag is the only national flag with humans on it. Which country does it represent?

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d. There is only one country in the world whose flag does not have the colors red, white or blue. Which is it?

e. The below flag is the national flag for two (!) totally unrelated countries. Which are they?

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f. Which country’s flag is this?

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g. Which country’s flag is this? (the shade of red is apparently meant to be a fraction darker in this flag compared to the one above)

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h. Which country’s flag is this?

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i. Which two countries didn’t realize they had exactly the same flag (seen below) until the 1936 Olympics opening ceremony? Following the Olympics, both countries quickly changed their flags

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j. Which flag holds the world record for being the oldest continuously used national flag?

k. Which is the only national flag in the world which is different on either side?

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Kiasmos

Kiasmos is a collaboration between Ólafur Arnalds, a classically trained pianist and composer from Iceland, and Janus Rasmussen, a synth-pop producer from the Faroe Islands. Together, Arnalds and Rasmussen have created electronic music popping with emotional gravity. Their distinctive and ethereal sound combines minimalist piano and atmospheric string compositions with various synthesizers, drum machines and tape delays. Looped is from their self titled debut 2014 album and is a track that just keeps building momentum. The below video is of Kiasmos performing at the Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavik in late 2017.

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Flags of the World - Answers

a. Switzerland and the Vatican City

b. Nepal

c. Belize

d. Jamaica

e. Chad and Romania

f. Indonesia

g. Monaco

h. Poland

i. Haiti and Lichenstein

j. Denmark

k. Paraguay

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If you’re interested to learn more trivia surrounding national flags, or if you’re an aspiring vexillologist, this is a great video from the Youtube channel WonderWhy.

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“Our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”

Karl Popper

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Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne

⌾Curio #46 - Tim Urban, Beautiful Bookstores & Junun

Welcome back to another edition of Curio, your weekly antidote to the chaotic and exhausting news cycle. 

I made it! Fourteen days in a hotel room. No in-person contact, no window to open, no direct sunlight. Each day identical to the next. The food was comically bad (example below). It wasn’t easy. 

A typical dinner. Before you ask, the circular thing is a soggy macaroon

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And to top it off, I received a three thousand dollar invoice from the Australian government for my stay. At least I got a certificate!

It was all worth it

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This is what kept me sane: disconnecting from the news and social media, long luxurious bubble baths, Sam Harris’s meditation app, doing SarahBeth’s yoga classes on Youtube, reading Karl Ove Knausgaard, watching Eric Rohmer films, completing an entire online course on the history of Europe from 1648-1945, ordering Fishbowl and Eat Fuh on UberEats, as well as watching the US Open and NBA finals. One of the big silver linings to the experience was sleep. With the room’s blackout curtains, comfy king bed and soundproof windows, I slept better than I ever had in my life.

Indeed, by historical standards, my quarantine experience could have been much worse. The term ‘quarantine’ originally comes from the old Venetian word for forty days. It derives from the fourteenth-century practice of the city-state Venice requiring ships arriving from unknown locations to moor off the port for forty days in order to contain the spread of the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic in human history. Imagine crossing the ocean in a cramped and rat-infested wooden ship to then be told you had to bob in the harbor for an extra forty days before being able to land. No wifi or bubble baths for them!

I’m now back in the real world and am loving being able to walk around outside with fresh air in my nostrils and the warm glow of sunlight on my skin. 

Yours in freedom,

Oli

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Tim Urban on Procrastination

With its use of child-like stick figures, old fashioned design and humorous tone, you could be forgiven for assuming the website Wait But Why shouldn’t be taken too seriously. In fact, it’s one of the internet’s most influential blogs, full of thought-provoking long form pieces touching the deepest questions.

The creator of this brilliant website is Tim Urban. After graduating from Harvard filled with ambition and expectations of success, Urban moved to LA to pursue a career as a film score composer. However, after a few years of not making much progress, he found himself drifting and uninspired. He launched a tutoring business with a friend and starting blogging on the side and then in 2013, at thirty, decided to devote himself to writing Wait But Why full time.

“I want to write about what's interesting, and what's interesting isn't obvious. It's something with enough research or enough thought and brainstorming that people think or learn something that they didn’t know already.”

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Wait But Why is full of great content, but some favorites of mine include:

• 10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of

• How to Pick Your Life Partner

• Why Generation Y (Millenial) Yuppies Are Unhappy

• The Fermi Paradox (on why humans haven’t found aliens yet)

• 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys

• How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

A few years ago, Urban gave an entertaining TED Talk on procrastination. His thesis is that we’re all procrastinators to a certain extent. Deadlines are what scare people into getting things done, yet many of our dreams and aspirations don’t have deadlines. This causes people to keep putting them off. Urban’s talk now has over thirty million views and is one of the most popular in the history of TED. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it before.

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Beautiful Bookstores

While last week I showcased some extraordinary libraries, this week I wanted to share a selection of some of the world’s most beautiful bookstores. What I would give to be able to teleport to that one in Santorini right about now…

Lello in Porto, Portugal

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Zhongshuge in Chongqing, China

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Boekhandel Dominicanen in Maastricht, The Netherlands

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El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Cărturești Carusel in Bucharest, Romania

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Atlantis Books in Santorini, Greece

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Junun

In 2015, Shye Ben Tzur, an experimental Israeli musician who had lived in India for over a decade, was contacted by Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead and classically trained composer. Greenwood was a longtime admirer of Ben Tzur’s sound and wanted to see if he was interested in collaborating. The two of them were joined by a nineteen member local group called the Rajasthan Express. Ben Tzur wrote the songs and Greenwood contributed on the guitar, bass, keyboards and ondes Martenot. The final result became the album Junun, mixed by Nigel Godrich and recorded in the glorious Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur.

The following is the opening song, also called Junun. It’s an exuberant and rhythmic track that showcases the virtuosity and unique combination of sounds within the group.

The creation of the album Junun is also the subject of a great documentary of the same name by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Magnolia, Boogie Nights). The trailer is below:

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“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

- Bertrand Russell

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Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne

⌾Curio #45 - Joan Didion, Beautiful Libraries & Hot Since 82

Dear reader,

It’s been a while! In fact, it’s been so long you may have forgotten what this is. A quick refresher: I’m a Nigerian prince seeking immediate financial assistance. I would be most grateful if you could transfer USD$100,000 into a savings account regulated by the Central Bank of Lagos. For account details please respond to this email at your earliest convenience.

Just kidding — I’m no Nigerian prince, just Oli Duchesne, writer of haikus, admirer of Indian mud wrestling and creator of Curio, the newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. However, if you do consider this spam, you can always unsubscribe with one click. 

I’m writing to you from a hotel room in Sydney, nine days into a fourteen day mandatory quarantine. I haven’t been able to leave the room and there is no window to open. I’ve forgotten what fresh air smells like.

Vincent van Gogh - Bedroom in Arles (1888)

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I left New York early last week and arrived here via long layovers in LA and Auckland (Air New Zealand were the only airline not costing a king’s ransom). We were taken from the flight into an area where we were examined by doctors and had our temperature checked and then herded onto a series of buses by members of the Australian Army. It was grey and drizzling. 

Upon arriving outside the hotel, a police officer hopped on, greeted us and read the obligatory government information. He was a jovial character, adding jokes (“No virtual raves in the room, okay? I’m looking at you,” while pointing at an elderly Asian woman in the second row) and cracking one-liners at every opportunity (“Cheer up everybody, it could be worse. You could be staying in a complete shithole!”). Stupefied with tiredness, we weren’t a great audience and just stared blankly back. 

We were ordered off the bus at intervals and taken into the hotel to fill out various forms. I was then escorted to my room by a member of the Army, a young guy who looked about my age. It vaguely registered that this would be my last person to person conversation in two weeks but I was too exhausted to say anything interesting or original. All I could muster was, “So, have you been here long?”

“Six weeks.”

I nodded mindlessly.

“Everyday is a workout,” he said, lifting my bags out of the elevator. “I haven’t needed to go to the gym since I got here.”

We arrived at a door on the eleventh floor.

“This is your home for the next fourteen days,” he said as we entered the room. “All the information about your stay is in a packet on the desk. You don’t get a key as you can’t leave. Any questions at all, just call guest services. Good luck.”

He shut the door.

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Joan Didion On Leaving New York

“I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again”

In Joan Didion’s classic collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), she offers a series of impressions, critiques and insights on various aspects of America during the turbulent decade of the sixties. The title essay is perhaps the most influential and aimed to shatter the idealistic mythology surrounding the counter-culture hippy movement in San Francisco, where she leaves the reader with the harrowing image of a toddler staggering around a filthy apartment without any sign of his parents, high on LSD.

Didion’s book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats

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One of the other iconic pieces in the collection is an essay Didion wrote when she left New York, titled “Goodbye To All That”. I was reminded of it on my long journey back home to Australia.

Goodbye To All That

Excerpts from the famous essay are below:

When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.

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All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

Berenice Abbott - Seventh Avenue looking south from 35th Street, Manhattan (1935)

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Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

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You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May.

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I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals.

Berenice Abbott - New York at Night (1933)

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Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm days.

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And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.

Berenice Abbott - West Street (1938)

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All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.

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If you haven’t yet seen the Netflix documentary on Didion, you can check out the trailer here.

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Beautiful Libraries

Is there anything more soothing than looking at photos of beautiful libraries? Below is a selection of some of the world’s most incredible collections of books. If you’ve been to any of these or have a suggestion for any others that are worth visiting please let me know!

Next week I’ll be sharing photos of some of the world’s most beautiful bookshops.

The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading in Rio De Janeiro

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Trinity College Library in Dublin

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The Tianjin Binhai Library of Tianjin in China

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The Girolamini Library in Naples

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Palace Of Mafra Library, Mafra, Portugal

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Wiblingen Monastery Library, Ulm, Germany

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The Library of Seitenstetten, Austria

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Hot Since 82

In 2010, Daley Padley, a lad from Yorkshire who grew up DJing at clubs in Leeds, was at an afterparty in Ibiza when the music cut out. He plugged his iPhone into the speakers and played some tracks, including a couple he had created himself. The response was so positive that the owner of a record label asked him to send through his songs and in 2011 Padley released a debut single under his new name, Hot Since 82. Success quickly followed and after a number of popular releases he founded his own house record label, Knee Deep In Sound. Padley now travels the world as an in-demand house DJ and has a summer residency at Pacha in Ibiza.

His recorded sets on Youtube (including this epic one on top of a fort in Dubrovnik) have been a regular feature of my lockdown. Europe 2021, anyone?

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“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”

- Socrates

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Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne

⌾Curio #44 - Anthony Bourdain, New York in 1911 & Gregorio Allegri

Dear readers,

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of Curio, the newsletter for curious minds seeking a small break from the relentless and exhausting news cycle.

Some personal news — it’s with a heavy heart that I’ll be leaving New York at the end of August. This means I’ll have spent exactly three years in this incredible city. I plan on writing more about this at some point, but at the moment I’m still processing it. I’m eventually moving back to Australia for an exciting opportunity starting next year but my immediate plans are less clear. While I’m figuring it out, packing up my life and saying goodbye to friends, I’ll be taking a brief hiatus from writing Curio as I think I’ll have too much on my mind over the next short period to devote proper attention to it. I hope to be back writing it soon.

Frank E Jamieson - Scottish lake landscape in front of mountains

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In the meantime, I hope you stay happy and healthy 🙂

- Oli

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Anthony Bourdain’s Rules For Eating

I first came across Anthony Bourdain (1956 – 2018) when watching his entertaining Parts Unknown food and travel show. However, it wasn’t until I read his acclaimed memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), that I really appreciated his gifts. On top of being a famous chef and award-winning television presenter, he’s also a talented writer with a skill for story telling and irony.

The book is very entertaining, detailing “twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine.” Many of the stories are outrageous and paint a vivid and hilarious picture of what life was like behind the scenes in New York restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s.

“For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous”

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Early on in the book, Bourdain famously outlines some of his rules for eating.

“There are some general principles I adhere to, things I’ve seen over the years that remain in my mind and have altered my eating habits. I may be perfectly willing to try the grilled lobster at an open-air barbeque shack in the Caribbean, where the refrigeration is dubious and I can see with my own eyes the flies buzzing around the grill (I mean, how often am I in the Caribbean? I want to make the most of it!), but on home turf, with the daily business of eating in restaurants, there are some definite dos and don’t I’ve chosen to live by.”

Never Order Fish On Monday

“I never order fish on Monday... I know how old most seafood is on Monday — about four to five days old!

You walk into a nice two-star place in Tribeca on a sleepy Monday evening and you see they’re running a delicious-sounding special of Yellowfin Tuna, Braised Fennel, Confit Tomatoes and a Saffron Sauce. Why not go for it? Here are the two words that should leap out at you when you navigate the menu: ‘Monday’ and ‘Special’.

Here’s how it works: The chef of this fine restaurant orders his fish on Thursday for delivery Friday morning. He’s ordering a pretty good amount of it, too, as he’s not getting another delivery until Monday morning… The chef is hoping to sell the bulk of that fish — your tuna — on Friday and Saturday nights, when he assumes it will be busy. He’s assuming also that if he has a little left on Sunday, he can unload the rest of it then, as a seafood salad for lunch, or as a special.

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This is why you don’t see a lot of codfish or other perishable items as a Sunday or Monday night special — they’re not sturdy enough. The chef knows. He anticipates the likelihood that he might still have some fish lying around on Monday morning — and he’d like to get money for it without poisoning his customers.”

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Be Careful with Mussels

“I don’t eat mussels in restaurants unless I know the chef personally, or have seen, with my own eyes, how they store and hold their mussels for service. I love mussels. But in my experience, most cooks are less than scrupulous in their handling of them… Some restaurants, I’m sure, have special containers, with convenient slotted bins, which allow the mussels to drain while being held — and maybe, just maybe, the cooks at these places pick carefully through every order, mussel by mussel, making sure that every one is healthy and alive before throwing them into a pot. I haven’t worked in too many places like that.”

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Seafood on Sunday? It Depends

“How about seafood on Sunday? Well…sometimes, but never if it’s an obvious attempt to offload aging stuff, like seafood salad vinaigrette or seafood frittata, on a brunch menu. Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business. You see a fish that would be better served by quick grilling with a slice of lemon, suddenly all dressed up with vinaigrette? For en vinaigrette on the menu, read ‘pre-served’ or ‘disguised’.”

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Brunch

“While we’re on brunch, how about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order. Most likely, the stuff on your eggs was made hours ago and held on station…”

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Cooks hate brunch. A wise chef will deploy his best line cooks on Friday and Saturday nights; he’ll be reluctant to schedule those same cooks early Sunday morning, especially since they probably went out after work Saturday and got hammered until the wee hours. Worse, brunch is demoralizing to the serious line cook. Nothing makes an aspiring Escoffier feel more like an army commissary cook, or Mel from Mel’s Diner, than having to slop out eggs over easy with bacon and eggs Benedict for the Sunday brunch crowd. Brunch is punishment block for the ‘B’ team cooks, or where the farm team of recent dishwashers learn their chops. Most chefs are off on Sundays, too, so supervision is at a minimum. Consider that before ordering the seafood frittata.”

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Bathrooms

“I wont’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn’t a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like. Bathrooms are relatively easy to clean. Kitchens are not.”

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Well-Done Meat

“‘Saving for well-done’ is a time-honored tradition dating back to cuisines earliest days: meat and fish cost money. Every piece of cut, fabricated food must, ideally, be sold for three or even four times its cost in order for the chef to make his ‘food cost percent’. So what happens when the chef finds a tough, slightly skanky end-cut of sirloin that’s been pushed repeatedly to the back of the pile? He can throw it out, but that’s a total loss, representing a three-fold loss of what it cost him per pound. He can feed it to the family, which is the same as throwing it out. Or he can ‘save for well-done’ — serve it to some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk or carbon, who won’t be able to tell if what he’s eating is food or flotsam.”

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Shrimp

“Shrimp? All right, if it looks fresh, smells fresh and the restaurant is busy, guaranteeing turnover of product on a regular basis. But shrimp toast? I’ll pass. I’ll walk into a restaurant with a mostly empty dining room, and an unhappy-looking owner staring out the window? I’m not ordering shrimp.”

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Fine Dining

“Watchwords for fine dining? Tuesday through Saturday. Busy. Turnover. Rotation. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best nights to order fish in New York. The food that comes in Tuesday is fresh, the station prep is new, and the chef is well rested after a Sunday or Monday off. It’s the real start of the new week, when you’ve got the goodwill of the kitchen on your side. Friday and Saturdays, the food is fresh, but it’s busy, so the chef and cooks can’t pay as much attention to your food as they — and you — might like. And weekend diners are universally viewed with suspicion, even contempt, by both cooks and waiters alike; they’re the slackjaws, the rubes, the out-of-towners, the well-done-eating, undertipping, bridge-and-tunnel pretheatre hordes, in to see Cats or Les Miz and never to return. Weekday diners, on the other hand, are the home team — potential regulars, whom all concerned want to make happy. Rested and ready after a day off, the chef is going to put his best food forward on Tuesday; he’s got his best quality product coming in and he’s had a day or two to think of creative things to do with it. He wants you to be happy on Tuesday night. On Saturday, he’s thinking more about turning over tables and getting through the rush.”

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But

“Do all these horrifying assertions frighten you? Should you stop eating out? Wipe yourself down with antiseptic towelettes every time you pass a restaurant? No way. Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

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A Trip Through New York in 1911

This 1911 video of New York City was taken by the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern on a trip to America. With the footage slowed down and sound and color added, it’s an extraordinary virtual time machine to an era when William Howard Taft was President, the Titantic was still being built and all men wore hats. Highlights include footage of the early elevated subways, the grand Brooklyn Bridge, and the gorgeous Flatiron building.

However, the reason I wanted to share the video was so you could see the family in the car at four minutes in.

Jarrett Ross is a professional genealogist who runs a YouTube channel called The GeneaVlogger. Through brilliant investigative work trawling through various historical records and archival material, Ross was able to identify the family in the car. If you’re curious to see how he managed to do this, I’d recommend watching the fascinating below video (start from 1:39).

Ross discovered that the family in the car were called the Lochowitz’s and they lived in 548 Eighth St, just near Prospect Park in South Brooklyn. The man in the front seat, Florian Lochowitz, was the patriarch of the family and was married to Antoinette who sits in the back with the large hat. The couple had three children, all of whom are in the video. Florian was born in Poland in 1871 and emigrated to the US in 1890 as a nineteen year old. He worked as a barber and rose up to become a successful businessman, opening up a number of well regarded barber shops throughout the city (a regular patron was JP Morgan), including one in the prestigious Woolworth Building. Florian was forty when the video was taken and he would die seven years later in 1918. By the time he passed away, he was a prominent member in his local community and a dozen papers ran his obituary.

When watching videos set in the distant past it’s easy to forget they contain real people, leading real lives. Ross’s amazing investigative effort helps add such rich context to this old footage.

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Gregorio Allegri

Gregorio Allegri (1582 – 1652) was a Roman Catholic priest and Italian composer who in the 1630s wrote Miserere mei, Deus, an exquisite piece of music sung in the below video by The Choir of King's College, Cambridge. It was composed for the exclusive use of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel in the lead up to Easter and was considered so special that the Pope forbade anyone from transcribing it.

In 1770, almost one hundred and fifty years after it was composed, Leopold Mozart traveled through Europe showcasing his fourteen-year-old prodigy of a son, Wolfgang Amadeus. When the Mozart’s were in Rome, they attended a service at the Vatican at which the Miserere mei, Deus was performed. The young genius heard the piece and later that evening transcribed the entire thing from memory. Further on in their European tour, they ran into a British music historian Charles Burney. The young Mozart passed on the manuscript to Burney, who took it to London and had it published there in 1771. The Vatican’s secret was out: Miserere mei, Deus was now available to anyone.

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“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”

- Voltaire

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Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne

⌾Curio #43 - Maria Svarbova, 536 AD & Poolside FM

Welcome back, dear readers, to another edition of Curio, the newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. If doomscrolling the news and social media is making you feel gloomy, then Curio aims to be a brief antidote, like a refreshing dip at the beach on a sultry summer day.

Claude Monet - Sainte-Adresse (1873)

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I hope you’re staying well!

Until next time,

- Oli

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Maria Svarbova

Maria Svarbova is a Slovakian photographer who creates gorgeous, dream-like images of characters that appear frozen in time.

Svarbova was born in 1988 and is heavily influenced by the Soviet-era aesthetic in Czechoslovakia

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Plastic World

In her 2015 series, Plastic World, Svarbova creates a unique atmosphere relying on pastel tones, hauntingly still figures, a Soviet-era aesthetic and emotional detachment. Through elegant, harmonious and balanced compositions, she explores loneliness, isolation, normality and social expectations.

The following quotes are from Svarbova’s website:

“Through blank stares, stiff poses and total absence of emotion, the series challenges the viewer to question the ingrained roles people play in society.”

“The atmosphere that’s depicted through a palette of pastel colors and overexposed tones transports the viewer into a sterilized world in which the characters have chosen to give up any kind of emotional extravagance that might unmask them.”

In 2018, Svarbova was interview by Plastik Magazine:

“I am a completely self-taught. I used to listen and ask technical questions to other photographers. But apart from that, I just took pictures and worked on them. I enjoyed taking pictures and playing with the editor program. I've never read any photo book. It has all just been practice.”

“I want people to think. I don’t want to give away the whole story because I like the idea of seduction. It’s like film stills that make you want to see the whole movie. You want to know more.”

You can check out more of Svarbova’s shots here.

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536AD - The Worst Year In History

According to Michael McCormick, historian and archaeologist at Harvard University, there are a few contenders for the worst year to be alive. In 1918, with the First World War and Russian Civil War still raging, the Spanish Flu killed between fifty and one hundred million people, most of whom were young adults. In 1349, on top of various devastating earthquakes and Jewish pogroms, the Black Death — the worst pandemic ever recorded — wiped out half of Europe’s population. However, Professor McCormick, who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past, believes 536 ought to be considered the most awful of them all: “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year."

Thomas Cole - The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836)

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In 536, a massive volcano in Iceland erupted, spewing ash into the sky. This led to a thick, black fog that plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Africa into darkness, day and night — for eighteen months. Global temperatures dropped, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Around the world, from Scandinavia to Mesopotamia, crops failed and people starved. In China, snow fell in the middle of summer and in Ireland, records describe "a failure of bread from the years 536–539."

Byzantine historian Procopius wrote in 536 that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year.” He also noted that during this time, “men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.” Cassiodorus, a Roman politician, described the sun as having a “bluish” color, causing people to “see no shadows of our bodies at noon.”

Josse Lieferinxe - Saint Sebastian pleads with Jesus for the life of a gravedigger afflicted by plague during the Plague of Justinian (1497–1499)

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To make the shocking weather conditions even worse, two further enormous volcanic eruptions followed in 540 and 547. In addition to this, in 541 a horrific bout of bubonic plague swept throughout Europe, killing up to half the population. This brutal sequence of events starting in 536 plunged Europe into deep economic stagnation that lasted until the middle of the seventh century.

After reading this, 2020 didn’t seem so bad after all.

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Poolside FM

Poolside FM might be one of the most laid-back places on the web. It’s an online radio station designed like a late 1980s/early 1990s desktop in your browser window. It has a fantastic retro-infused soundtrack paired with nostalgic low-fi visuals (often care-free ads from the 80s and 90s). The intro copy of the website says it all: “The sunniest spot on the internet. Poolside FM is an online radio station, playing an infinity pool of summer sounds. Swimwear optional.”

According to the creator, Marty Bell, Poolside FM achieved one million listens last year with zero marketing.

You can check out Poolside FM here. If you do, the summer mixtapes are great.

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“He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.”

- Confucius

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Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne. If you’re enjoying it, you can show your support by ‘liking’ it by clicking the heart under my name or by sharing it with friends