Radioactivity 📖💿🎥

Tuesday Trio: One book, one album, and one movie recommendation

Hey y’all,

Last month I was reminiscing about shopping at Borders around the turn of the century. In particular, I was thinking about their sign:

Books, music, movies. (I didn’t remember the “Cafe” part. Probably because I didn’t drink coffee back then!) Those are still the art forms I care the most about — the ones you used to be able to go out and hold in your hands for around $20.¹

I thought it’d be fun to start a new series where we take an imaginary visit to Borders and I select one favorite book, album, and movie based on a theme.

Today’s theme: Radioactivity.

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📖 Radioactive by Lauren Redniss

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010) is one of those great books where the format and the content are perfectly matched.

In a TED Talk, Lauren Redniss described her process of picture-making:

Because this is a book in which I’m doing the writing and the research and the artwork and also the design of the book itself, it’s very important to me that each of these components is meaningful and that they each embody the ideas in the narrative. So, when it became time for me to choose the medium with which I was going to create the artwork… I decided that I would make the images with something called cyanotype printing…

I had two reasons for this choice. The first was thematic. To make a cyanotype print, you take paper, you coat it with certain chemicals. You take that chemically coated paper, you expose them to the ultraviolet rays of the sun and that turns the paper a deep blue. Now, a process using exposure to penetrating rays I thought made sense in a book about the history of radioactivity.

My second reason was aesthetic. A cyanotype print has this kind of moody, twilight quality. The white lines against the blue background I thought captured what Marie Curie described as the element radium’s spontaneous luminosity. A kind of internal glow…

You can learn more about the book over at Redniss’s website and take a look inside at The Marginalian, which is where I first heard about it.

(Inside our copy just now I found a wonderful zine from a show at The New York Public Library about how prints and drawings from the library’s collection inspired Redniss’s work. Books = paper time capsules!

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💿 Radio-Activity by Kraftwerk

I played Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” for my son Owen when he was 4 years old, and he became completely obsessed with the band. Kraftwerk, it turns out, is perfect music for little kids: they wrote simple, beautiful melodies to repetitive, exciting beats and they sang about real things that kids can understand, things like roads, radios, trains, robots, computers, and bicycles.

For a while, Owen and I were going to the record store every week to buy a new Kraftwerk album. Owen never wanted vinyl, he only wanted CDs: he could handle them in his little fingers, and he could skip the tracks easily.

Radio-Activity is a record that often gets overlooked, but shows Kraftwerk, in some ways, at their most pure: it was their first fully electronic record and it’s a record built conceptually around their weird humor and love of puns and wordplay. (For example, on their previous record, Autobahn: “Fahr’n Fahr’n Fahr’n auf der autobahn” is a pun on The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun”: “fahr’n” means “driving.”)

Most concept records fall apart after a few songs, but Radio-Activity holds together the whole way through, from the pulse of “Radioactivity” (“Radioactivity / is in the air for you and me”) to the surf-rock vibes of “Airwaves” (“when airwaves swing / distant voices sing”) to my favorite track, “Antenna” (“I’m the antenna / catching vibration / you’re the transmitter / give information”). Several of the song titles are puns: “Radio Stars,” for example, sounds like a song about fame, but it’s actually about pulsars and quasars.

And that’s the genius of Kraftwerk: simple enough for a kid to get into, but deep enough for any age. Kraftwerk made at least five perfect records, but this is one that deserves and rewards more listens.

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