Sleeping Muse and Falling Rocket

The music for the original, Japanese cooking program Iron Chef was adapted from Hans Zimmer's score for the Ron Howard film Backdraft.

"My father named me  Autolycus; who being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles."             The Winter's Tale, act 4, scene 3

The apartment building in Polanski's Chinatown, the El Macondo Apartments, was named after the village in Garcia Marquez' 100 Years of Solitude.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket c. 1875 James McNeill Whistler

Responding to Tennyson's poem 'The Vision of Sin,' mathematician and "Difference Engine" visionary Charles Babbage wrote to Tennyson: "In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads 'Every moment dies a man/Every moment one is born.'  If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read: 'Every moment dies a man/Every moment 1 1/16 is born. Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

To my mind, each of these describes the same world: de Chirico, Brancusi, Gaudi, the 1973 Czech film Fantastic Planet, Borges' “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Satie ’ s   Trois Gymnopédies,  Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights,  Gulliver's Travels ,  Cirque du Soleil ,  Brian Quinette’s Invisible Library,   both the  Codex Seraphianus  and the Voynich Manuscript, the library at Alexandria, the game of chess and the numbered (but not the titled) chapters of Calvino's   If, on a Winter's Night, a Traveler .   And Barcelona.

On George Harrison's first solo album, Wonderwall Music, the banjo being played belonged to Paul McCartney, but was played by Peter Tork of The Monkees. True story.

Imagining those moments of fury. Of creational rage. The spontaneous combustion of a mind and paper, of brush and canvas, of fingers and keys. Coleridge and Kublai Khan. Johnny adding the mariachi to June's song. Freddie in Rhapsody. The Yin and Yang of Charlotte and Jane. The mysterious J and her words reshaping old stories. Michelangelo paying the bills with a brush, biding his time until he could get back to his true love in Carrara.