“It’s not hard to brew a great cup of coffee,” writes Kelefa Sanneh in a recent New Yorker post on the Melbourne International Coffee Expo. “At least, it shouldn’t be.” He adds that “there’s no such thing as a foolproof process though: even coffee professionals are forever tweaking and rethinking their brew methods, as they get better at identifying, in each cup, what went wrong and what went right.” Even casual coffee drinkers, including those who have never made a cup for themselves, know how complicated the preparation process can become when one really starts to think about it. But the field of coffee studies boasts even more information to master when it comes to the history of the cultivation and usage of the beans themselves. You can begin your own coffee education with this tripartite television documentary, Black Coffee.
A Canadian production aired on PBS, Black Coffee (purchase on DVD here)examines “the world’s most widely taken legal drug,” a beverage whose intellectually intense die-hard enthusiasts give wine’s a run for their money, from historical, political, social, and economic angles.
Part one, “The Irresistible Bean,” follows coffee’s spread from Ethiopa out across the entire world. Part two, “Gold in Your Cup,” looks at the “coffee barons” of the nineteenth century and the rise of coffee-house culture.
Part three, “The Perfect Cup,” brings us up to date with the modern “romantic age of coffee” and what entrepreneurs (such as Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, who appears in the documentary) have done to, depending on your inclination, either democratize or cheapen the pursuit of a worthwhile sip. While a bit of knowledge always enriches the enjoyment of even something as common as coffee — and, in this case, also raises occasional thorny moral and agricultural questions — let us never lose sight of the simple sentiment expressed in expressed in Bach’s Coffee Cantata:
Lovelier than a thousand kisses, smoother than muscatel wine. Coffee, I must have coffee, and if anyone wants to give me a treat, ah!, just give me some coffee!
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Here’s a rare collaboration between the Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen and the Irish supergroup U2. It was staged for the 2005 Lian Lunson documentary, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man. The musicians are performing “Tower of Song,” a spiritual meditation on aging, loss, and survival, originally released on Cohen’s 1988 album I’m Your Man. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, Cohen’s Tower of Song is something unfathomable.
Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey I ache in the places where I used to play And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on I’m just paying my rent every day Oh in the Tower of Song
I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet But I hear him coughing all night long A hundred floors above me In the Tower of Song
In addition to the U2 collaboration, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man includes interviews with Cohen and tribute performances of some of his greatest songs by Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Beth Orton and others. You can watch the complete film here.
Given his ever-growing posthumous popularity, fueled by material newly discovered, released, and re-released, we might call Arthur Russell the 2Pac of experimental disco cello. During his short life, he managed to collaborate with the likes of Philip Glass, Nicky Siano, Walter Gibbons, and even David Byrne. A little-heard version of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” featuring Russell’s cello has recently resurfaced (above), to the delight of both Heads fans intrigued to hear one more slant on a favorite song and listeners newly intrigued by Russell looking to hear how his sound interfaced with the innovative pop music of his day.
In the clip just above, you can hear Byrne discuss the collaborative development of “Psycho Killer” (albeit well before the recording of this B‑side with Russell) at a Q&A session on his How Music Works book tour. Unbelievably, the song first emerged as a ballad. “I can see the song as being softer,” he says. “I’m making it aggressive-sounding and thought, ‘That’s like saying the same thing twice.’ Which the singer of the song says you shouldn’t do. I thought it would be creepier, actually scarier, if you downplay it. But, you know, we had a rock band at the time; we got together, started playing it, and that’s not how it came out. Audiences liked the big chorus everyone could sing along with.” I imagine they also would’ve liked the big string instrument Russell would have brought up on stage, had he ever had the chance to join the Heads for a live performance.
There’s a certain irony to Polish animator Piotr Dumala’s innovative style, a stop-motion technique in which he scratches an image into painted plaster, then paints it over again immediately and scratches the next. Called “destructive animation,” Dumala devised the method while studying art conservation at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
Trained as a sculptor as well as an animator, Dumala’s award-winning films present strikingly expressionistic textures emerging from pitch black and receding again. The 1991 film Kafka (top) begins with the reclusive writer shrouded in darkness and isolation. He coughs once, and we are transported to Prague, 1883. Each frame of Kafka resembles a woodcut, and the sound design is as spare as the extremely high-contrast animation.
In Sciany (Walls), an earlier short film from 1988, Dumala uses light and shadow, and even more minimal music and sound effects to create a haunting, surrealistic piece that conjures the atmosphere of an interrogation room or solitary confinement cell. Like the strange, empty cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, Dumala’s art unsettles, with its skewed perspectives, shadowy, mysterious figures, and unexpected shifts in tone and scale.
Crime and Punishment, Dumala’s idiosyncratic half-hour Dostoevsky adaptation (which we’ve featured previously), uses “destructive animation” to similar effect as in Kafka and Walls, creating shadowy, minimalist set pieces that emerge slowly from darkness and return to it. But this time, Dumala incorporates color—greens, reds, and browns—and the images are much more detailed, almost painterly.
Stripping the Russian masterwork down to just two scenes—the murder and Raskolnikov’s meeting of Sonia—Dumala interprets the novel’s themes with the light-and-shadow intensity with which he renders all of his artistic visions, saying, “This is about love and how obsession can destroy love. In our life we are under two opposite influences to be good or bad and to love or hate.” In Dumala’s almost claustrophic worlds, the lines between light and darkness are stark, even if they’re also ever shifting and ephemeral.
A little while back, we gave you The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. While he was still alive, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version of “Take Five” he had ever heard. Now, the Pakistani Orchestra is back with an interpretation of “Everybody Hurts,” the melancholic song from the 1992 REM album Automatic for the People. It will appear on the forthcoming album Jazz and All That, scheduled for release this summer.
For more great moments in musical fusion, don’t miss these performances:
Forget the airports, the ticket lines, and the crowds. Now you can step right into the Vatican’s most sacred spaces and inspect the wonders of Renaissance art and architecture with just a click of a mouse. The Vatican has posted a series of virtual tours created by students and faculty in the communication and computing science departments at Pennsylvania’s Villanova University. The four Papal Basilicas are included, along with the smaller Sistine and Pauline chapels. Here are six links to six amazing virtual tours:
Basilica of St. Peter: Designed by Michelangelo and others, St. Peter’s is the focal point of the Vatican, and perhaps the most famous example of Renaissance architecture. You can scroll up and down to inspect the walls and ceilings–including the famous dome–and zoom in for a close look at Michelangelo’s masterpiece the Pietà or Bernini’s ornate canopy, or baldachin, over the Papal Altar.
The Sistine Chapel: The most famous building in the Vatican, after St. Peter’s, is the Sistine Chapel, a part of the Pope’s official residence, the Apostolic Palace. Frescoes by Raphael, Bernini, Botticelli and others adorn the walls–and on the ceiling, one of the great masterpieces in the history of art: Michelangelo’s early 16th century depiction of scenes from the Book of Genesis, covering some 12,000 square feet. On a walking tour you would barely have enough time to recognize some of the major scenes. With this virtual tour you can spend all the time you want scanning around and zooming in to study the details.
Archbasilica of St. John Lateran: The Pope’s official ecclesiastical seat, St. John Lateran is the oldest Papal Basilica. But many of its most famous features are relatively recent. The basilica is perhaps best known for its neoclassical façade by Alessandro Galilei, completed in 1735.
Basilica of Paul Outside-the-Walls: Built outside the old city walls, this basilica contains the tomb of St. Paul. You can see the tomb and other features of the graceful church (which was rebuilt in the 19th century after a devastating fire) on the tour.
Basilica of St. Mary Major: This basilica is actually located outside the Vatican City compound, in Rome, but has extraterritorial status similar to that of a foreign embassy. Built in the fifth century, with some later additions, the basilica is a beautiful example of classical Roman architecture.
The Pauline Chapel: Another chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the Pauline Chapel is separated from the Sistine Chapel by the Sala Regia, or “Regal Room.” Although less well-known than the Sistine Chapel, the Pauline Chapel houses two great frescoes by Michelangelo: “The Conversion of Saul” and “The Crucifixion of St. Peter.”
In the spring of 1934, a young man who wanted to be a writer hitchhiked to Florida to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway.
Arnold Samuelson was an adventurous 22-year-old. He had been born in a sod house in North Dakota to Norwegian immigrant parents. He completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but refused to pay the $5 fee for a diploma. After college he wanted to see the country, so he packed his violin in a knapsack and thumbed rides out to California. He sold a few stories about his travels to the Sunday MinneapolisTribune.
In April of ’34 Samuelson was back in Minnesota when he read a story by Hemingway in Cosmopolitan, called “One Trip Across.” The short story would later become part of Hemingway’s fourth novel, To Have and Have Not. Samuelson was so impressed with the story that he decided to travel 2,000 miles to meet Hemingway and ask him for advice. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson would later write, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.”
And so, at the time of year when most hobos were traveling north, Samuelson headed south. He hitched his way to Florida and then hopped a freight train from the mainland to Key West. Riding on top of a boxcar, Samuelson could not see the railroad tracks underneath him–only miles and miles of water as the train left the mainland. “It was headed south over the long bridges between the keys and finally right out over the ocean,” writes Samuelson. “It couldn’t happen now–the tracks have been torn out–but it happened then, almost as in a dream.”
When Samuelson arrived in Key West he discovered that times were especially hard there. Most of the cigar factories had shut down and the fishing was poor. That night he went to sleep on the turtling dock, using his knapsack as a pillow. The ocean breeze kept the mosquitos away. A few hours later a cop woke him up and invited him to sleep in the bull pen of the city jail. “I was under arrest every night and released every morning to see if I could find my way out of town,” writes Samuelson. After his first night in the mosquito-infested jail, he went looking for the town’s most famous resident.
When I knocked on the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, he came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinty with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit.
“What do you want?” said Hemingway. After an awkward moment, Samuelson explained that he had bummed his way from Minneapolis just to see him. “I read your story ‘One Trip Across’ in Cosmopolitan. I liked it so much I came down to have a talk with you.” Hemingway seemed to relax. “Why the hell didn’t you say you just wanted to chew the fat? I thought you wanted to visit.” Hemingway told Samuelson he was busy, but invited him to come back at one-thirty the next afternoon.
After another night in jail, Samuelson returned to the house and found Hemingway sitting in the shade on the north porch, wearing khaki pants and bedroom slippers. He had a glass of whiskey and a copy of the New York Times. The two men began talking. Sitting there on the porch, Samuelson could sense that Hemingway was keeping him at a safe distance: “You were at his home but not in it. Almost like talking to a man out on a street.” They began by talking about the Cosmopolitan story, and Samuelson mentioned his failed attempts at writing fiction. Hemingway offered some advice.
“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along.”
Hemingway advised Samuelson to avoid contemporary writers and compete only with the dead ones whose works have stood the test of time. “When you pass them up you know you’re going good.” He asked Samuelson what writers he liked. Samuelson said he enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “Ever read War and Peace?” Hemingway asked. Samuelson said he had not. “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”
His workshop was over the garage in back of the house. I followed him up an outside stairway into his workshop, a square room with a tile floor and shuttered windows on three sides and long shelves of books below the windows to the floor. In one corner was a big antique flat-topped desk and an antique chair with a high back. E.H. took the chair in the corner and we sat facing each other across the desk. He found a pen and began writing on a piece of paper and during the silence I was very ill at ease. I realized I was taking up his time, and I wished I could entertain him with my hobo experiences but thought they would be too dull and kept my mouth shut. I was there to take everything he would give and had nothing to return.
Hemingway wrote down a list of two short stories and 14 books and handed it to Samuelson. Most of the texts you can find in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. If the texts don’t appear in our eBook collection itself, you’ll find a link to the text directly below.
Hemingway reached over to his shelf and picked up a collection of stories by Stephen Crane and gave it to Samuelson. He also handed him a copy of his own novel, A Farewell to Arms. “I wish you’d send it back when you get through with it,” Hemingway said of his own book. “It’s the only one I have of that edition.” Samuelson gratefully accepted the books and took them back to the jail that evening to read. “I did not feel like staying there another night,” he writes, “and the next afternoon I finished reading A Farewell to Arms, intending to catch the first freight out to Miami. At one o’clock, I brought the books back to Hemingway’s house.” When he got there he was astonished by what Hemingway said.
“There is something I want to talk to you about. Let’s sit down,” he said thoughtfully. “After you left yesterday, I was thinking I’ll need somebody to sleep on board my boat. What are you planning on now?”
“I haven’t any plans.”
“I’ve got a boat being shipped from New York. I’ll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I’ll have to have someone on board. There wouldn’t be much work. If you want the job, you could keep her cleaned up in the mornings and still have time for your writing.”
“That would be swell,” replied Samuelson. And so began a year-long adventure as Hemingway’s assistant. For a dollar a day, Samuelson slept aboard the 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar and kept it in good condition. Whenever Hemingway went fishing or took the boat to Cuba, Samuelson went along. He wrote about his experiences–including those quoted and paraphrased here–in a remarkable memoir, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. During the course of that year, Samuelson and Hemingway talked at length about writing. Hemingway published an account of their discussions in a 1934 Esquire article called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter.” (Click here to open it as a PDF.) Hemingway’s article with his advice to Samuelson was one source for our February 19 post, “Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction.”
When the work arrangement had been settled, Hemingway drove the young man back to the jail to pick up his knapsack and violin. Samuelson remembered his feeling of triumph at returning with the famous author to get his things. “The cops at the jail seemed to think nothing of it that I should move from their mosquito chamber to the home of Ernest Hemingway. They saw his Model A roadster outside waiting for me. They saw me come out of it. They saw Ernest at the wheel waiting and they never said a word.”
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