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The Blue Nile has always been something of a mystery. While its records are unfailingly critically acclaimed, as well as lauded by their peers to an almost unusual degree, the Scottish trio never hit the public sphere with the same impact it did certain nerdy music circles. Though possessor of a distinctive sound that carries easy appeal, the Scottish trio doesn’t make it easy for potential fans.

Released in 1989, Hats, the band’s much-acclaimed second LP, makes the strongest case for its idiosyncratic approach. The album begins with a one-two punch that essentially lays out what the Blue Nile’s music is all about. “Over the Hillside” and “The Downtown Lights” take the U.K.’s distinctive vision of blue-eyed soul and roll it out like a skein of yarn, stretching it across a loom and weaving its various strands into a colorful tapestry of pretty sounds and almost subliminal rhythms. Bell and Moore’s electronic soundscapes have as much in common with post-rock as pop music, as if the pair was as stunned by Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden – released the year before – as everyone else. Buchanan wraps his velvet pipes around lyrics that sing around the idea of love more than of it, his sentiments propelled by his soulful phrasing more than their meaning on paper. These two tracks are quintessential Blue Nile tunes, mysterious in context but luminous in execution.

If you want to understand the history of art in twentieth-century America, you can’t overlook the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in New York City. Not Trump Tower, but the building it replaced: Bonwit Teller, the luxury department store that had stood on the site since 1929. Then as now, any shop on Fifth Avenue has to find a way to set itself apart, and by 1939 Bonwit Teller had built a “reputation for having Manhattan’s screwiest window displays.” So says Time magazine, covering a minor debacle that year over one of the installations by “the world’s No. 1 surrealist, Salvador Dalí.”

Dalí had previously dressed Bonwit Teller’s windows without incident in 1936, riding high on the buzz from his first American exhibition that same year. When invited back by the store to create a new display, writes Tim McNeese in Salvador Dalí, “he decided to use the windows to depict the ‘Narcissus complex,'” divided into day and night. “In the Day window, Narcissus is personified,” says The Art Story. “Three wax hands holding mirrors reached out of a bathtub lined with black lambskin and filled with water. A mannequin entered the tub in a scant outfit of green feathers. For the Night window, the feet of a poster bed are replaced by buffalo legs and the canopy is topped by its pigeon-eating head. A wax mannequin sat nearby on a bed of coals.”


As for the public reaction, writes the New York Times‘ Michael Pollak, “words were exchanged, not all of them complimentary, and the store’s staff made quick changes. The skinny-dipper in ‘Day’ was quickly replaced by an attired mannequin. Out went the sleeper in ‘Night’; in went a standing model.” As soon as he caught sight of the unauthorized modifications, Dalí took corrective action. McNeese quotes the artist’s own memory of the proceedings: “I dashed into the window to disarrange it, so that my name, signed in the window, should not be dishonored. I was never so surprised as when the bathtub just shot through the window when I pushed it and I was thereafter most confused.” Dalí was charged with disorderly conduct but issued a suspended sentence since, as the judge put it, “These are some of the privileges that an artist with temperament seems to enjoy.”