Had to look into this image a bit–turns out that it accompanies the New York Timesobituary of Fred Bass, the Strand’s owner, (son of the Benjamin Bass whose name is on the window above) who passed away earlier this year at age 89. The photo appears in the NYT courtesy of the Strand and the obit is worth a read.
"I have a friend who wears headphones on long solo runs because, he says, “I can’t spend that much time alone in my head.” I disagree. He can, and he should. Spending that much time inside one’s head, along with the voices and the bats hanging from the various dendrites and neurons, is one of the best things about running, or at least one of the most therapeutic. Your brain is like a duvet cover: Every once in a while, it needs to be aired out."
As right as “La Bamba” is for these times, it’s got a long history. As the story goes, 1950s rock star Ritchie Valens — that 17-year-old kid from the the San Fernando valley — probably grew up hearing the Andres Huesca version of the old Mexican folk song, which was popularized during the golden age of Mexican cinema around the 1940s.His own recording, released in 1958, was actually a B-side — but it became a surprise hit, climbing to No. 22 on the singles chart.
It was the most enduring hit in a short career. Valens was just 17 years old when he died, along with Buddy Holly and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, in a plane crash in Iowa on Feb. 3, 1959. In 1987, his life and death became the subject of a film, also called La Bamba, which featured a new version of the song by Los Lobos.
“If there is one song that represents the Americas, it is this one song,” says Luis Valdez, the director of La Bamba.
While the song is familiar to most Americans today, Valdez says the meaning of its title remains a mystery. He did lots of research for the film, and thinks it’s a reference to something he calls “umbamba,” from Africa. “It was a beat, it was a sound, that landed on the shores of Veracruz.”
The ancient Egyptians famously gave us paper and the pyramids, but were also early adopters of the stripy sock.
Scientists at the British Museum have developed pioneering imaging to discover how enterprising Egyptians used dyes on a child’s sock, recovered from a rubbish dump in ancient Antinoupolis in Roman Egypt, and dating from 300AD.
New multispectral imaging can establish which dyes were used – madder (red), woad (blue) and weld (yellow) – but also how people of the late antiquity period used double and sequential dying and weaving, and twisting fibres to create myriad colours from their scarce resources.
Crucially, the imaging is non-invasive. Previously studying ancient textiles using radiocarbon dating and dye analysis required physical samples to be taken. Read more.
