Johnny Cash’s Short and Personal To-Do List

in Life, Music | September 4th, 2012

cashlistjpg

John­ny Cash wrote down at least two lists in his life­time. Let’s start with the big one. In 1973, when his daugh­ter Roseanne turned 18, the leg­endary musi­cian pulled out a sheet of yel­low legal paper and began writ­ing down 100 Essen­tial Coun­try Songs, the songs she need­ed to know if she want­ed to start her own musi­cal career. The list, writes the web­site Folk­Works, did­n’t con­strue coun­try music nar­row­ly. It was eclec­tic, tak­ing in old folk songs, Appalachi­an bal­lads, and also protest songs, ear­ly coun­try clas­sics, and mod­ern folks songs sung by artists like Bob Dylan. (Don’t miss our post on Dylan and Cash’s 1969 col­lab­o­ra­tion here.) This essen­tial list nev­er went pub­lic, at least not in full. Roseanne Cash guard­ed it close­ly until 2009, when she released an album fea­tur­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of 12 titles from her father’s list. The oth­er 88 songs still remain a mys­tery.

Now on to that oth­er list: Some­where along the way (we’re not sure when) The Man in Black jot­ted down 10 “Things to Do Today!” This list feels almost like some­thing you and I could have writ­ten, the stuff of mor­tals. Heck, in a giv­en day, we all “Cough,” “Eat” and “Pee.” We strug­gle with will pow­er (not eat­ing too much, per­haps not smok­ing, maybe not fool­ing around with any­one but our spouse). And we’re hope­ful­ly good to our loved ones. So what sets John­ny Cash apart from us? Just June and that piano.

John­ny’s to-do list sold at auc­tion for $6,250 in 2010.

via The New York Times via Lists of Note

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Vintage Film: Watch Henri Matisse Sketch and Make His Famous Cut-Outs (1946)

in Art | September 3rd, 2012

In April of 1946, a cam­era crew record­ed the scene as the great French artist Hen­ri Matisse sat down at his easel to make a char­coal sketch of his grand­son, Ger­ard, at his his home and stu­dio in Nice. The brief clip above is from a 26-minute film by François Cam­paux which was com­mis­sioned by the French Depart­ment of Cul­tur­al Rela­tions. Alas, we’ve been unable to find the entire film online, but you can watch a 15-minute Ger­man ver­sion on YouTube, or you can vis­it a Web page at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go for a group of high­er qual­i­ty silent excerpts from the film, accom­pa­nied by explana­to­ry cap­tions. In the clip above, we hear Matisse speak­ing in French. Here is a trans­la­tion:

Me, I believe that paint­ing and draw­ing are the same thing. Draw­ing is a paint­ing done in a sim­pler way [or with “limited/reduced resources”]. On a white sur­face, a sheet of paper, with a plume [or “pen”] and some ink, one cre­ates a cer­tain con­trast with vol­umes; one can change the qual­i­ty of the paper giv­en sup­ple sur­faces, light [or clear] sur­faces, hard sur­faces with­out always adding shad­ow or light. For me, draw­ing is a paint­ing with lim­it­ed means/resources.

For anoth­er glimpse of Matisse at work, look below for a rare col­or clip (from an unknown source) of the artist at work cre­at­ing one of his dis­tinc­tive paper cut-outs.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Picas­so Paint­ing on Glass

Aston­ish­ing Film of Arthrit­ic Impres­sion­ist Painter Pierre August Renoir

Rare Film: Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny, 1915

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Caught in the Act of Cre­ation, 1926

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Herbie Hancock: All That’s Jazz!

in Music | September 3rd, 2012

“I think I was sup­posed to play jazz,” says Her­bie Han­cock. Han­cock is one of the most not­ed jazz musi­cians of all time. He was born in Chica­go in 1940, and it became appar­ent ear­ly on that he was a child piano prodi­gy. Her­bie per­formed a Mozart piano con­cert with the Chica­go Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra at age 11, then start­ed play­ing jazz in high school and lat­er dou­ble-majored in music and elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing at Grin­nell Col­lege. His fas­ci­na­tion with musi­cal gad­gets led him to become one of the first jazz pianists to work with elec­tron­ic key­boards. And his land­mark albums blurred the bound­aries of music, effort­less­ly mix­ing jazz with funk, soul, rhythm and the blues, for­ev­er chang­ing the face of jazz. As Miles Davis once said, “Her­bie was the step after Bud Pow­ell and Thelo­nious Monk, and I haven’t heard any­body yet who has come after him.”

The doc­u­men­tary above — Her­bie Han­cock: All That’s Jazz — was pro­duced for KCET’s sig­na­ture news series “SoCal Con­nect­ed.” It retraces the most impor­tant steps in Han­cock­’s career and shows us his home, the office where his award-win­ning music is com­posed and his pri­vate rit­u­als. Very few peo­ple know that Her­bie is a very reli­gious per­son — he has been a prac­tic­ing Bud­dhist for over forty years.

Bonus mate­r­i­al:

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Evolution of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Signature: From 5 Years Old to 21

in Literature | September 3rd, 2012

Fun fact about F. Scott Fitzger­ald: he was a ter­ri­ble speller. No, real­ly. And his gram­mar was­n’t much bet­ter. Lit­er­ary crit­ic Edmund Wil­son described his debut nov­el This Side of Par­adise (find in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) as “one of the most illit­er­ate books of any mer­it ever pub­lished.” Hem­ing­way couldn’t spell either, and nei­ther could Faulkn­er. With­out the patient revi­sion of great edi­tors like Maxwell Perkins, much of the prose of these Amer­i­can mas­ters may well have been unread­able. Nov­el­ists are artists, not gram­mar­i­ans, and their man­u­script quirks—of spelling, hand­writ­ing, gram­mat­i­cal mistakes—can often reveal a great deal more about them than the typ­i­cal read­er can glean from clean, type­set copies of their work.

Take, for exam­ple, the evo­lu­tion of Fitzgerald’s sig­na­ture (above). From the labored scrawls of a five year-old, to the prac­ticed script of an eleven-year-old school­boy, to the exper­i­men­tal teenaged pos­es, we see the let­ter­ing get loos­er, more styl­ized, then tight­en up again as it assumes its own mature iden­ti­ty in the con­fi­dent­ly ele­gant near-cal­lig­ra­phy of the 21-year-old Fitzgerald–an evo­lu­tion that traces the writer’s cre­ative growth from uncer­tain but pas­sion­ate youth to dis­ci­plined artist. Alright, maybe that’s all non­sense. I’m no expert. The prac­tice of hand­writ­ing analy­sis, or graphol­o­gy, is gen­er­al­ly a foren­sic tool used to iden­ti­fy the marks of crim­i­nal sus­pects and detect forg­eries, not a min­dread­ing tech­nique, although it does get used that way. One site, for exam­ple, pro­vides an analy­sis of one of Fitzgerald’s 1924 let­ters to Carl Van Vecht­en. From the minute char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Gats­by novelist’s script, the ana­lyst divines that he is “cre­ative,” “artis­tic,” and appre­ci­ates the fin­er things in life. Col­or me a lit­tle skep­ti­cal.

But maybe there is some­thing to my the­o­ry of Fitzgerald’s grow­ing matu­ri­ty and self-con­scious cer­tain­ty as evi­denced by his sig­na­tures. He pub­lished This Side of Par­adise to great acclaim three years after the final sig­na­ture above. In the pri­or sig­na­tures, we see him strug­gling for con­trol as he wrote and revised an ear­li­er unpub­lished nov­el called The Roman­tic Ego­tist, which Fitzger­ald him­self told edi­tor Perkins was “a tedious, dis­con­nect­ed casse­role.” The out­sized, extrav­a­gant let­ter­ing of the artist in his late teens is noth­ing if not “roman­tic.” But Fitzger­ald achieved just enough con­trol in his short life to write a ver­i­ta­ble trea­sure chest of sto­ries (many bril­liant and some just plain sil­ly) and a hand­ful of nov­els, includ­ing, of course, the one for which he’s best known. Most of the rest of the time, as most every­one knows, he was kind of a mess.

Try a lit­tle ama­teur hand­writ­ing analy­sis of your own on the last sen­tence of The Great Gats­by, writ­ten in Fitzger­ald’s own hand below a por­trait of the writer by artist Robert Kas­tor.

And for an added treat, watch jour­nal­ist and sports­writer Bill Nack recite the final lines of Gats­by to his friend Roger Ebert. “Gats­by believed in the green light…”

via I always want­ed to be a Tenen­baum

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Swerve, Available as AudioBook on iTunes for $5.95

in Books, Literature | September 1st, 2012

In the pref­ace of The Swerve: How the World Became Mod­ern, Stephen Green­blatt recalls the day he encoun­tered a trans­la­tion of Lucretius’ 2000 year old poem, On the Nature of Things. He was a grad stu­dent back at Yale, liv­ing on mod­est means, when he ambled into a book­store and found a copy marked down to ten cents. He picked it up, not hav­ing much to lose and not know­ing what he’d find. Soon enough he was read­ing one of the most scan­dalous and ground­break­ing texts from antiq­ui­ty, a book that even­tu­al­ly trav­eled a long and wind­ing road and changed our entire mod­ern world. That sto­ry Green­blatt tells in The Swerve.

The ten cents Green­blatt spent in the 1960s may be rough­ly equiv­a­lent to the deal you can get today. Right now, The Swerve, the win­ner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for gen­er­al non­fic­tion, can be down­loaded as an audio book for $5.95 via iTunes. Yes, we know, $5.95 is not free, and iTunes is not open, but it’s cer­tain­ly a deal worth men­tion­ing nonethe­less.

But if you’re real­ly han­ker­ing for some­thing free, then don’t miss our meta lists of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks, which include a copy of Lucretius’ famous work. Or def­i­nite­ly check out Audible.com’s Free Tri­al offer, which lets you down­load pret­ty much any audio book you want (clas­sic or mod­ern) for free. Get details here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ray Bradbury: “The Things That You Love Should Be Things That You Do.” “Books Teach Us That”

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | August 31st, 2012

“I sup­pose you’re won­der­ing why I’ve called you all here,” says Ray Brad­bury above, in a lengthy inter­view with the The Big Read project spon­sored by the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts. Break­ing the ice with this stock phrase, Bradbury–author of Fahren­heit 451, The Illus­trat­ed Man, The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, and sev­er­al dozen more fan­ta­sy and sci-fi nov­els and short sto­ry col­lec­tions (and some tru­ly chill­ing hor­ror)–begins to talk about… Love. Specif­i­cal­ly a love of books. “Love,” he says, “is at the cen­ter of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love, and the things that you love, should be things that you do.” That’s what books teach us, he says, and it becomes his mantra.

Brad­bury, who passed away in June, was cer­tain­ly an ear­ly inspi­ra­tion for me, and sev­er­al mil­lion oth­er book­ish kids whose warmest mem­o­ries involve dis­cov­er­ing some strange, life-alter­ing book on the shelf of a library. As he recounts his child­hood expe­ri­ences with books, he’s such an enthu­si­as­tic boost­er for pub­lic libraries that you may find your­self writ­ing a check to your local branch in the first ten min­utes of his talk.  And it’s easy to see why his most famous nov­el sprang from what must have been a very press­ing fear of the loss of books. Brad­bury was large­ly self-taught. Unable to afford col­lege, he pur­sued his fierce ambi­tion to become a writer imme­di­ate­ly out of high school and pub­lished his first short sto­ry, “Hollerbochen’s Dilem­ma,” at the age of nine­teen. As he says above, he became a writer because, “I dis­cov­ered that I was alive.” But I’m not doing it jus­tice. You have to watch him tell it to real­ly feel the thrill of this epiphany.

The Big Read’s mis­sion is to cre­ate a “Nation of Read­ers,” and to do so, it posts free audio guides for clas­sics such as Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by. They also fea­ture video inter­views with oth­er authors, like Amy Tan, Ernest J. Gaines, and Tobias Wolff. Each of the inter­views is fan­tas­tic, and the read­ers’ guides are superb as well. Bradbury’s, for exam­ple, nar­rat­ed by poet and author Dana Gioia, also fea­tures sci-fi giants Orson Scott Card and Ursu­la K. Le Guin, as well as sev­er­al oth­er writ­ers who were inspired by his work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Face to Face with Bertrand Russell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish’

in Philosophy, Television | August 31st, 2012

In April of 1959 the British philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian Bertrand Rus­sell sat down with John Free­man of the BBC pro­gram Face to Face for a brief but wide-rang­ing and can­did inter­view. Rus­sell rem­i­nisced about his ear­ly attrac­tion to math­e­mat­ics. “I got the sort of sat­is­fac­tion that Pla­to says you can get out of math­e­mat­ics,” he said. “It was an eter­nal world. It was a time­less world. It was a world where there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cer­tain kind of per­fec­tion.”

Rus­sell, of course, dis­tin­guished him­self in that rar­i­fied world as one of the founders of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy and a co-author of Prin­cip­ia Math­e­mat­i­ca, a land­mark work that sought to derive all of math­e­mat­ics from a set of log­i­cal axioms. Although the Prin­cip­ia fell short of its goal, it made an enor­mous mark on the course of 20th cen­tu­ry thought. When World War I came along, though, Rus­sell felt it was time to come down from the ivory tow­er of abstract think­ing. “This world is too bad,” Rus­sell told Free­man. “We must notice it.”

The half-hour con­ver­sa­tion, shown above in its entire­ty, is of a qual­i­ty rarely seen on tele­vi­sion today. The inter­view­er Free­man was at that time a for­mer Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and a future Ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States. Rus­sell talks with him about his child­hood, his views on reli­gion, his polit­i­cal and social activism, even his amus­ing con­vic­tion that smok­ing extend­ed his life. But per­haps the most famous moment comes at the end, when Free­man asks the old philoso­pher what mes­sage he would offer to peo­ple liv­ing a thou­sand years hence. In answer­ing the ques­tion, Rus­sell bal­ances the two great spheres that occu­pied his life:

I should like to say two things, one intel­lec­tu­al and one moral:

The intel­lec­tu­al thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed, but look only and sole­ly at what are the facts. That is the intel­lec­tu­al thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more close­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way, and if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er we must learn a kind of char­i­ty and a kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell on the Exis­tence of God and the After­life

Three Pas­sions of Bertrand Rus­sell (and a Col­lec­tion of Free Texts)

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) Talks Death Penalty with William F. Buckley (1968)

in Law, Television | August 31st, 2012


“Tru­man Capote did­n’t study to become expert in cap­i­tal crime and its pun­ish­ment,” says William F. Buck­ley on the Fir­ing Line broad­cast of Sep­tem­ber 3, 1968, “but his five and one half year engage­ment of the slaugh­ter of the Clut­ter fam­i­ly, which went into the writ­ing of In Cold Blood, left him with high­ly set­tled impres­sions in the mat­ter.” You can hear Buck­ley elic­it and Capote con­cise­ly lay out the posi­tion to which these impres­sions brought him in the clip above. Though remem­bered for his own con­ser­v­a­tive views, Buck­ley seemed ever eager to invite onto his show, fre­quent­ly and with­out hes­i­ta­tion, pub­lic fig­ures who strong­ly dis­agreed with him. This sense of con­tro­ver­sy gen­er­at­ed a stream of clas­si­cal­ly com­pelling tele­vi­su­al moments over Fir­ing Line’s 33-year run, but for my mon­ey, all the direct con­flicts have less to offer than the times a guest — or even the host — broke from stan­dard ide­o­log­i­cal posi­tions, as Capote does here.

Buck­ley opens by ask­ing whether “sys­tem­at­ic exe­cu­tion of killers over the pre­ced­ing gen­er­a­tion might have stayed the hand of the mur­der­ers of the Cut­ter fam­i­ly.” Capote replies that “cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — which I’m opposed to, but for quite dif­fer­ent rea­sons than are usu­al­ly advanced — would in itself be a sin­gu­lar­ly effec­tive deter­rent, if it were, in fact, sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly applied. But because pub­lic sen­ti­ment is very much opposed to it and the courts have allowed this end­less pol­i­cy of appeal — to such a degree that a per­son can be eleven, twelve, thir­teen, four­teen years under a sen­tence of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — it becomes, in effect, an extreme, unusu­al, and cru­el pun­ish­ment. If peo­ple real­ly were sen­tenced to be exe­cut­ed and were with­in a rea­son­able peri­od of time, the pro­fes­sion­al mur­der­er knew the absolute, pos­i­tive end of their actions would be their own death, I think it would cer­tain­ly give them sec­ond thoughts.” This per­haps lends itself poor­ly to a sound bite, but Fir­ing Line at its best nev­er dealt in those.

Relat­ed con­tent:

William F. Buck­ley Meets (Pos­si­bly Drunk) Jack Ker­ouac, Tries to Make Sense of Hip­pies, 1968

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Allen Gins­berg Reads a Poem He Wrote on LSD to William F. Buck­ley

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.