MAN: What do you do in that book all the time, Richard? 

RICHARD SERRA: Um, I keep track of myself. 

MAN: Are you writing poetry?

RICHARD SERRA: No, it’s a way of keeping your eye and your hand together.

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 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 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 “Radioactivity” (“Radioactivity / is in the air for you and me”) to “Airwaves,” which has surf-rock vibes (“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. (Of all the bummers of COVID-19, missing Kraftwerk play in Texas this summer is high up there.) Kraftwerk made at least five perfect records, but this is one that deserves and rewards more listens.

French artist Eugène Atget (1857-1927) focused his lens on the city and people of Paris for nearly four decades, producing more than 8,500 pictures throughout his career. In his photograph Eclipse, a crowd is gathered in Paris’ Place de la Bastille to observe the 1912 solar eclipse. Rather than recording the astronomical event itself, Atget turned his attention to its spectators. Fun fact: Surrealist artist Man Ray bought Atget’s photograph to illustrate the June 1926 cover of La Révolution Surréaliste—a subversive publication that adopted a pseudo-scientific format to explore the irrational nature of existence

This delightful relic from 1963 accompanied Glenn Bretthauer’s How To Make Money With Simple Gags: A Complete Course in Gag Writing!, the cover of which can be seen below. One spin, and you too could be riding that G-Nib of success to the big paycheck in the stars.