We’re likely to be snowed in for several days, so in hopes of entertaining some other snowbound folks, this is the first of five daily releases on some tangents I followed when I stumbled onto something with rich connections. Tangent A1 will be followed by A2 through A5.

Give people facts and you feed their minds for an hour. Awaken curiosity and they feed their own minds for a lifetime.

Ian Russell

Back in 1985, I discovered James Burke, the British science historian, author, and television producer, through his series The Day the Universe Changed that came to Public Broadcasting. Burke had long rejected the conventional linear view of historical progress, contending that our world is the product of a web of interconnected and isolated events, driven by personal motivations, occurring with no conception of the modern results. The series struck a nerve with me, and I incorporated episodes of it into my physics teaching, continuing to show my students at least part of the fifth episode, Infinitely Reasonable, for decades. Burke’s earlier series, Connections, was less linear and led to five additional follow-ups, the most recent being Connections with James Burke in 2023 via CuriosityStream.

I enjoy adapting Burke’s ping-pong methodology to my own entertainment and edification. I call these posts Tangents because they needn’t feature any through-line, simply reflecting connections that captured my interest. My personality profile ranks me at the 93rd percentile in Openness, so I’m as curious as a cat and happily careen from one topic to another.

This first series will detail (of course! relentlessly) how a mere music video triggered my insatiable curiosity, leading me to watch a French New Wave film, pursue essays by a failed star of silent films, explore combinatorial mathematics, and read an 85-year-old Argentine science fiction novella.

The Instigating Video

It all began months ago when the YouTube algorithm coughed up The Blue Ball Music‘s video of Greek DJ and producer Dim Zach‘s remix of Duran Duran’s 1993 song Come Undone.

I first encountered Duran Duran, an English pop rock band, on MTV in the 1980s. In that bygone era, if I wanted to listen to my favorite songs in my car, I had to create a mix cassette tape from vinyl record long-playing albums or 45-rpm singles.

In 1982 I saved a bit of money by purchasing The Beat, a K-Tel compilation vinyl album. That got me 14 songs at one fell swoop. Among them was Duran Duran’s Girls on Film, but I didn’t care for it, much preferring We Got the Beat by the Go-Go’s, I Ran (So Far Away) by A Flock of Seagulls, and I Want Candy by Bow Wow Wow.

Ah, youth. I don’t listen to any of those songs anymore, although I do still love the Go-Go’s Our Lips Are Sealed.

I kept seeing Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf on MTV, but I thought most of their videos were cheesy. Their best video to me was Rio by Russell Mulcahy with the band in Antony Price silk suits aboard a yacht sailing near Antigua.

The only Duran Duran songs I purchased as 45-rpm singles for transfer to a mix tape were The Reflex and A View to a Kill. I can certainly live without the former these days, but I still enjoy listening to the title song from the last of Roger Moore’s James Bond films. I didn’t always listen to B-sides on my 45s, but I liked John Barry’s instrumental version.

The group was misnamed after the villain Dr. Durand Durand of the rather baked movie Barbarella, which was based on a French science fiction comic book. One of the band’s founding members saw the 1968 film when it was broadcast on the BBC on October 20, 1978, and sold the others on using the name, although it is unclear if they realized it was misspelled. There already was a famed night club and music venue in Birmingham named Barbarella’s, so that may have been a factor, although the band didn’t perform there until June 1, 1979.

Music videos were instrumental in the band’s eventual success, but I had stopped watching those long before 1993 when their original video for Come Undone was released, featuring colorful footage in the London Aquarium. However, I did manage to hear and enjoy the song back in the day, although as with many songs, I can only reproduce bits and snatches of the lyrics, and I had no grasp of its meaning; many vocals blend into the wall of sound for me. Vocalist Simon Le Bon wrote the lyrics as a birthday gift to his wife Yasmin, which is why it includes the line, “‘Happy Birthday to you’ was created for ya”. The song was the band’s last top-40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

When I saw this video remix, it was drastically different from what I would have expected from the group, with black-and-white footage that seemed to come from some vintage film, which I deduced was likely French New Wave.

And thus I took off on Tangent A2…to the Left Bank in Paris.