As Season 3 of Louie winds to a close, we find things looking up for the hapless Louis CK. The head of CBS invites Louie to his office and gives him a career-defining opportunity, the chance to take over the Late Show from a retiring David Letterman. But that is all predicated on one thing — the schlumpy comedian becoming a polished late-night talk show host in a few short months. And the man tasked with helping Louie make the transition is none other than David Lynch, playing the role of “Jack Dahl.” Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Jay Leno all make appearances in this episode. But make no mistake, it’s Lynch, the only non-comedian of the bunch, who provides the biggest laughs.
We’re fascinated by lists. Other people’s lists. Even the ones left behind in shopping carts are interesting (Jarlsburg, Gruyere and Swiss? Must be making fondue.) But it’s the lists made by famous people that are the really good stuff.
It’s fun to peek into the private musings of people we admire. Johnny Cash’s “To Do” list sold for $6,400 at auction a couple of years ago and inspired the launch of Lists of Note, an affectionate repository of personal reminders, commandments and advice jotted by celebrities and other notables.
Most of the site’s best lists are in the “memo to self” category, some with tongue in cheek and others in earnest. But a few offer advice to others. Transcribed by soprano sax player Steve Lacy in a spiral-bound notebook, Thelonious Monk created a primer of do’s and don’ts for club musicians. For the greenhorns, Monk presented a syllabus for Band Etiquette 101 titled “1. Monk’s Advice (1960).” For the rest of us, it’s a view into one of the greatest, quirkiest minds of American music.
Some highlights:
“Don’t play the piano part. I’m playing that. Don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!”
Monk himself was famous for his eccentricity—some say he was mentally ill and others blame bad psychiatric medications. He was known to stop playing piano, stand up and dance a bit while the band played on. But through his advice he reveals his fine sense of restraint.
“Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.”
Monk was evidently a stickler for band protocol. He leads his list with “Just because you’re not a drummer doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time!”
What should players wear to a gig? Definitively cool, Monk replies “Sharp as possible!” Read that as rings on your fingers, a hat, sunglasses and your best suit coat.
Here’s a transcript of the text:
Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.
Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play.
Stop playing all that bullshit, those weird notes, play the melody!
Make the drummer sound good.
Discrimination is important.
You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
All reet!
Always know
It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.
Let’s lift the band stand!!
I want to avoid the hecklers.
Don’t play the piano part, I am playing that. Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompanying you!
The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.
Don’t play everything (or everytime); let some things go by. Some music just imagined.
What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.
A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig & when it comes, he’s out of shape & can’t make it.
When you are swinging, swing some more!
(What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as possible!
Always leave them wanting more.
Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.
Those pieces were written so as to have something to play & to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal!
You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drummer who didn’t want to solo).
Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelancer. Find more of her work at .
The story behind the writing of Frankenstein is famous. In 1816, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, summering near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, were challenged by Lord Byron to take part in a competition to write a frightening tale. Mary, only 18 years old, later had a waking dream of sorts where she imagined the premise of her book:
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.
This became the kernel of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the novel first published in London in 1818, with only 500 copies put in circulation.
Nearly two centuries later, a first edition signed by Shelley has turned up in the vestiges of Lord Byron’s library. The grandson of Lord Jay notes, “I saw the book lying at an angle in the corner of the top shelf. On opening it, I saw the title page, recognised what it was at once and leafed hungrily through the text — it was only when I flicked idly back to the first blank that I saw the inscription in cursive black ink, “To Lord Byron, from the author.”
Today this inscribed copy is on display at Peter Harrington’s, a London specialist in rare books. And there it will be put on auction, likely fetching north of £350,000, or $575,000. The video above gives you more of the backstory on the writing and gifting of the book.
If it is the bulk of the world’s cheating, stealing, and deception you seek, says Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan Ariely, look not to the heinous acts of individual villains; look to the countless dishonest acts committed daily by the rest of humanity. “The magnitude of dishonesty we see in society is by good people who think they’re being good but are in fact cheating just a little bit,” so we learn in the lecture above (find the complete lecture here). Ariely speaks these words, but they also appear written onscreen by a pen-wielding hand that rapidly summarizes and (literally) illustrates Ariely’s points as he makes them. This unusual style of animation appears in a whole series of videos from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce called RSA Animate. These have, the RSA claims, “revolutionised the field of knowledge visualisation whilst spreading the most important ideas of our time.” Revolutionary or not, The Truth About Dishonesty makes, in under twelve minutes, the kind of observations that let you see reality just a little more clearly.
“Human beings basically try to do two things at the same time,” Ariely says and the hand writes. “On one hand, we want to be able to look in the mirror and feel good about ourselves. On the other hand, we want to benefit from dishonesty.” This dilemma would seem to allow no compromise — you’re either honest or you’re dishonest, right? — but Ariely finds that most of us instinctively strive for the gray area between: “Thanks to our flexible cognitive psychology and our ability to rationalize our actions, we could do both.” We then hear and see how, if the proper rationalization happens and the instances of cheating remain minor and distanced from their effects, everybody acts with a mixture of honesty and dishonesty. (But sometimes the “what the hell effect” — the lecture’s finest coinage — kicks in, where people temporarily stop considering themselves good and proceed to act freely.) Ariely brings up the example, ripped from the headlines, of bankers and hedge fund managers who, distanced by vast corporate structures and elaborate mathematics from those whom their actions concretly affect. The hand draws a caricature of Oscar Wilde, then writes the most appropriate quote beside it: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”
On a sweltering summer day in 1969, over 100,000 people crammed into Hyde Park in central London for a first look at what promised to be the next great thing in rock and roll: Blind Faith.
It was an amazing lineup. The band was made up of two-thirds of Cream (guitarist Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker) along with the frontman of Traffic (keyboardist and vocalist Steve Winwood) and the bassist from the progressive group Family (Ric Grech). The free concert on June 7, 1969 (see here) was promoted with a great deal of fanfare and hyperbole. Expectations were high, so perhaps disappointment was inevitable. In any case the band came off sounding hesitant and unsteady. For a “supergroup,” they seemed surprisingly unsure of themselves.
“It was our first gig,” Winwood said later, “and to do that in front of 100,000 people was not the best situation to be in. Nerves were showing and it was very daunting. We couldn’t relax like you can on tour.” The band showed none of the verve or audacity of Cream. Clapton stood behind the drums and seemed reluctant to let loose. “In rehearsals and during recording,” said Baker, “Eric had been doing amazing stuff, but in Hyde Park I kept wondering when he was going to start playing. It wasn’t a brilliant start, obviously.”
The band avoided playing anything by Cream. The set list included one Traffic song (“Means to an End”) and another by the Rolling Stones (“Under My Thumb”), but was otherwise made up entirely of original songs written for their yet-to-be-released album, Blind Faith:
Well All Right
Sea of Joy
Sleeping in the Ground
Under My Thumb
Can’t Find My Way Home
Do What You Like
Presence of the Lord
Means to an End
Had to Cry Today
Later that year the band toured Scandinavia and America, and their debut album was a commercial success despite considerable controversy over its strange cover image of a topless pubescent-looking girl holding a toy airplane. But it was clear from the start that Blind Faith wouldn’t last. Clapton’s heart, in particular, wasn’t into it. “I’d left The Yardbirds because of success,” he said later, “and Cream ended as a direct result of its false success. So with Blind Faith I wanted no more to do with success. I wanted to be accepted as a musician.” At the end of Blind Faith’s American tour Clapton made the unusual career move of quitting a supergroup to become a sideman for its supporting act, the relatively obscure Delaney & Bonnie. In a 1996 Mojo article on Blind Faith called “Born Under a Bad Sign,” rock journalist Johnny Black sums things up:
In retrospect, Blind Faith was cursed almost from the outset. This was a band whose members rarely seemed to tell each other anything. A band at loggerheads with its management. A management at loggerheads with itself. A heroin addicted drummer. A guitarist who wanted out almost from the word go. A stadium tour that the keyboard player didn’t want to be on. A record cover scandal. Worst of all, though, they were mind-numbingly successful when they didn’t want to be.
Recorded and aired last year, HBO’s Talking Funny is an hour long, unscripted sit-down with four of the biggest names in comedy—Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K.. If you’re familiar with the work of any or all of these guys, you know you’re in for a little profundity and a lot of profanity. This is definitely, I repeat, not safe for work, and not safe for anyone who takes offense easily. They go to some pretty nervy places, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from these four. Well, three actually. Seinfeld comes in for some good-natured ribbing for an entire career of working “clean,” dropping an f‑bomb maybe once or twice in his act, ever.
So, if you can take the strong language that pops up occasionally–albeit in very reflective and hilarious ways that I argue diffuse tension and aren’t in the least bit mean-spirited–then you will be rewarded by a conversation between four highly accomplished actors and comedians who love to talk about their craft, compare war stories, deconstruct their comic personae, and express genuine appreciation for each other’s work. But as soon as the conversation seems to get too heady or sentimental, it’s back to sick humor and insults. There’s something of the insecure ten-year old boy in each of these guys, who tend to use comedy as a defensive weapon to fend off pain and sadness without running away from either one; it works differently in each comic, and it’s fascinating to watch.
Gervais is especially thoughtful about his responsibility to the audience (after some initial bravado), which comes as some surprise considering his usual role as an oblivious ass. Seinfeld, the elder statesman, gets some deference from the others, but even at 57 is still boyish and slightly corny. Rock and C.K. are two of the smartest comics of their generation and also two of the most profane, but again, I think they pull it off because they are also two of the most honest and least threatening men to ever grace a stage—C.K. the self-deprecating sad sack and Rock the diminutive class clown with a perpetual impish grin. Make up your own mind about the touchy subjects, or avoid them altogether, but overall, I think each of these comedians comes across as lovable precisely because they’re willing to be themselves, vulnerabilities, childish insults, sweaty male ids, and all. They might make it look easy, but this is work for professionals.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
“Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”
That’s how Plymouth University introduces Herman Melville’s classic tale from 1851. And it’s what sets the stage for their web project launched earlier this week. It’s called The Moby Dick Big Read, and it features celebrities and lesser known figures reading all 135 chapters from Moby Dick — chapters that you can start downloading (as free audio files) on a rolling, daily basis. Find them on iTunes, Soundcloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.
The project started with the first chapters being read by Tilda Swinton (Chapter 1), Captain R.N. Hone (Chapter 2), Nigel Williams (Chapter 3), Caleb Crain (Chapter 4), Musa Okwonga (Chapter 5), and Mary Norris (Chapter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow and even Prime Minister David Cameron will read future chapters, which often find themselves accompanied by contemporary artwork inspired by the novel.
If you want to read the novel as you go along, find the text in our collection of Free eBooks. We also have versions read by one narrator in our Free Audio Books collection. Tilda Swinton’s narration of Chapter 1 appears right below:
In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel introduced Chicago radio listeners to an up-and-coming musician, not yet 22 years old, “a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huckleberry Finn, if he lived in the 20th century. His name is Bob Dylan.” (Listen to the interview below.)
Dylan had just finished recording the songs for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, when he traveled from New York to Chicago to play a gig at a little place partly owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, called The Bear Club. The next day he went to the WFMT studios for the hour-long appearance on The Studs Terkel Program. Most sources give the date of the interview as April 26, 1963, though Dylan scholar Michael Krogsgaard has given it as May 3.
Things were moving fast in Dylan’s life at that time. He was just emerging as a major songwriter. His debut album from the year before, Bob Dylan, was made up mostly of other people’s songs. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which was finished but hadn’t yet been released, contained almost all original material, including several songs that would become classics, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” Within a few months Dylan would make his debut at the Newport Folk Festival and perform at the historic March on Washington. But when Dylan visited WFMT, it’s likely that many of Terkel’s listeners had never heard of him. In the recorded broadcast he plays the following songs:
Farewell
A Hard Rain’s a‑Gonna Fall
Bob Dylan’s Dream
Boots of Spanish Leather
John Brown
Who Killed Davey Moore?
Blowin’ In The Wind
Dylan tells Terkel that “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” is not about atomic fallout, even though he wrote the song in a state of anxiety during the Cuban missile crisis. “No, it’s not atomic rain,” Dylan says, “it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen.… In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,’ that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.”
But as the conversation progresses it becomes clear that the motivation behind Dylan’s comments isn’t to dispel myths or to clear up any of the “lies that people get told on their radios.” Rather, he’s driven by his life-long dread of being pigeonholed by others. Dylan is happy to spread his own myths. At one point he tells Terkel a “stretcher” that would have made Huckleberry Finn proud: He claims that when he was about ten years old he saw Woody Guthrie perform in Burbank, California. Regardless of its factuality, the Dylan-Terkel interview is an entertaining hour, a fascinating window on the young artist as he was entering his prime. You can stream it here.
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