In 1932 George Eastman, the 77 year old entrepreneur who established the Eastman Kodak Company, popularized the use of roll film, and brought photography to the mainstream, found himself in declining health. Suffering from lumbar spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that can lead to considerable back pain and difficulty walking, Eastman was depressed and increasingly disabled. On March 14th, he committed suicide by firing a single gunshot through his heart. An act as brief, and to the point, as the note he left behind. It read:
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“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen is one of the most audacious pop songs ever made. Part ballad, part opera, part heavy metal orgasm, the song has six distinct sections and took over a month to record. At just under six minutes, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was considered too long for pop radio. “The record company, in their infinite ignorance, of course immediately suggested that we cut it down,” said Queen drummer Roger Taylor, who stood by his bandmates and refused to let the song be cut. “It really was hit or miss. It was either going to be massive or it was going to be nothing.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” of course, went on to become one of the most popular songs in music history. It spent nine weeks at number one in the UK following its release in the fall of 1975, and went back to number one after the death of singer Freddie Mercury in 1991. In America the song peaked at number nine in 1976 and re-entered the charts at number two in 1992, when it was featured in the movie Wayne’s World. Last year, an ITV poll in Great Britain listed “Bohemian Rhapsody” as “The Nation’s Favorite Number One” song in 60 years of music.
Above, in the 3‑part mini documentary Inside the Rhapsody, Queen takes you inside the making of the song. And, along the way, guitarist Brian May goes back to the mixing board to explain the complexity of layers that went into realizing Mercury’s vision for the song. The original 24-track analogue recording system was far too limited, so the band used the ping-pong technique to “bounce” literally hundreds of overdubs into the mix. May explains how the operatic vocal layers were inspired by the “cascading strings” effect made famous by Annunzio Paolo Mantovani, a technique May first tried out in 1974 with the guitar solo on “Killer Queen.”
Budding science-fiction authors today know that, to get their start, they should probably go online and publish themselves. But even before the advent of the modern internet, many writers eager to tell speculative tales of humanity’s future struggle with technology, knowledge, and its own nature showed a similar self-starting bent. They made especially advantageous use of photocopiers and staplers in the seventies and eighties, the decades commonly considered the heyday of those low-circulation publications known as zines. But long before before that, the format already incubated serious science-fiction talent. Take Futuria Fantasia, which published four issues between 1939 and 1940. Its editor? A certain Ray Bradbury, before Fahrenheit 451, before The Martian Chronicles — before everything.
“Released in 1939 shortly after Bradbury graduated from high school,” says Zinewiki’s entry on the magazine, “Futuria Fantasia was published with the help of [sci-fi promoter] Forrest J. Ackerman, who lent Bradbury $90.00 for the fanzine.” The first issue, available free from Project Gutenberg, includes Bradbury’s story “Let’s Get Technatal” (written under the pseudonym “Ron Reynolds”) and poem “Thought and Space.”
The second issue includes an article he wrote under “Guy Amory” and his story “The Pendulum.” The third includes a Bradbury editorial, the fourth another editorial and the pseudonymous stories “The Piper” and “The Flight of the Good Ship Clarissa.” “I hope you like this brain-child, spawned from the womb of a year long inanimation,” the ambitious young Bradbury writes in his introduction to the summer 1939 issue. “This is only the first issue of FuFa … if it succeeds there will be more, better issues coming up.” Three more would, indeed, emerge, but surely even such a predictive mind as Bradbury’s couldn’t imagine what his career really held in store.
You can hear all ten stories from the Spring 1940 edition of Futuria Fantasia in the playlist below. It includes “Gorgono and Slith” by Ray Bradbury:
Billed and sold as the ninth and final studio album by The Doors, An American Prayer tends to divide Jim Morrison fans. On the one hand, it’s a captivating document of the late singer reading his free-associative poetry: dark, weirdly beautiful psychedelic lyrical fugues. On the other hand, it’s only a “Doors album” in that the three remaining members convened in 1978 to record original music over the deceased Morrison’s solo readings. While the resulting product is both a haunting tribute and an immersive late-night listen, many have felt that the band’s rendering did violence to the departed singer’s original intentions. (Listen to and download it here for free.)
An American Prayer’s readings were recorded unaccompanied in March 1969 and December 1970. In 1971, Morrison joined his long-time lover Pamela Courson in Paris. That same year, Jim Morrison died, under some rather mysterious circumstances, at the age of 27.
Before his death, however, he made what is said to be his final studio recording, a poetry reading/performance with a couple of unknown Parisian street musicians. Although Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek allegedly dismissed this recording as “drunken gibberish,” Doors fans have circulated it since 1994—combined with a 37-minute poetry reading from 1968—as a bootleg called The Lost Paris Tapes.
While it’s true that An American Prayer is a powerful and haunting album, it’s also true that The Lost Paris Tapes represents the unadorned, unedited Morrison, in full control of how his voice sounds, and without his famous band. I cannot help you find a copy of The Lost Paris Tapes, but many of the tracks are on Youtube, such as “Orange County Suite” (top), an affecting piece written for Pamela Courson. Other excerpts from the bootleg, such as “Hitler Poem” (above) show Morrison in a very strange mood indeed, and show off his unsetting sense of humor. While the work on The Lost Paris Tapes ranges in quality, all of it preserves the seductive voice and cryptic imagination that Jim Morrison never lost, even as he began to slip away into alcoholism.
Librarians are breaking the mold lately and flirting with the world of hip hop and punk. Courtesy of The New York Public Library Tumblr, we have Chicago librarians paying homage to The Beastie Boys’s 1994 video, “Sabotage,” directed by Spike Jonze. Of course, the original 1994 video paid comedic tribute to TV crime shows of the 1970s, shows like Hawaii Five‑O and Starsky and Hutch. So what we have above is a tribute to a tribute.
The way people read on the internet has encouraged the provision of “tips,” especially presented as short sentences collected in lists. While we here at Open Culture seldom ride that current, we make exceptions for lists of tips by authors best known for their long-form textual achievements. Richard Ford (The Sportswriter books), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections and Freedom), and Anne Enright (The Portable Virgin, The Gathering) here offer ten suggestions each to guide your own writing habits. Though presumably learned in the process of writing novels, many of these lessons apply just as well to other forms. I, for example, write mostly essays, but still find great value in Franzen’s instruction to treat the reader as a friend, Enright’s point that description conveys opinion, and Ford’s injunction not to write reviews (or at least, as I read it, not reviews as so narrowly defined).
Some of these tips have to do with technique: Ford advises against drinking while writing, Franzen advises against using “then” as a conjunction, and Enright advises you simply to keep putting words on the page. Others have more to do with maintaining a certain temperament: “Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night,” says Ford; “You have to love before you can be relentless,” says Franzen; “Have fun,” says Enright. And as any successful writer knows, you can’t pull it off at all without a strong dose of practicality, as exemplified by Enright’s “Try to be accurate about stuff,” Franzen’s doubt that “anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,” and Ford’s “Don’t have children.” Can we draw out an overarching guideline? Avoid distraction, perhaps. But you really have to read these authors’ lists in full, like you would their novels, to grasp them. The lists below originally appeared in The Guardian, along with tips from various other esteemed writers.
Richard Ford
1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.
7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.
9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10 Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.
Jonathan Franzen
1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3 Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.
Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
There’s a new film coming out about the rise of CBGB as the premier site of New York punk, new wave, and art rock. And I have to agree with Dangerous Minds, it looks like this might just be “AWFUL.” But then again, maybe not. Who am I to make a critical appraisal of a work I haven’t seen yet? Watch the trailer and make your own pre-judgments.
No matter how this fictionalized version of the CBGB story turns out, we are lucky to have copious footage from the real heyday of the dirty Bowery club that made the careers of The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Blondie, the Talking Heads and countless other New York bands who rose to semi-stardom, or local notoriety, from CBGB’s famous, filthy bowels. Although Alan Rickman must surely do a fine job as CBGB’s owner Hillel Kristal, there’s nothing like hearing from the real thing, and you can, in the documentary CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk (part one above, part two below).
Kristal, who intended to create a space for “Country, BlueGrass, and Blues,” ended up managing a very different beast when he realized that no one in lower Manhattan cared about his tastes. Instead, to keep the lights on, he was forced to let the lowlifes in, the “derelicts, lost souls… hookers and pimps and junkies,” who came from the flophouses and tenements to hear music that spoke to them.
Sometimes they got it, sometimes they didn’t, but for the musicians who used Kristal’s dive bar as a live rehearsal space, the opportunity to play, night after night, and create their own sounds and identities, the CBGB’s experience was invaluable. You’ll hear a few of them reflect on those heady times in the film, but mostly, CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk is a carnival of vintage performances from New York’s seminal punk bands. Maybe the Hollywood version won’t be so bad, eh? Even so, I’d rather watch, and listen to, the real thing.
Alexander Calder’s Calder’s Circus, a toy theater piece the artist constructed between 1926 and 1931, and performed for decades, has the rag bag appeal of a much-repaired stuffed animal who’s loved into a state of baldness. This charm presented conservators at the Whitney Museum of American Art with a unique set of challenges. Not only were the cloth and wire structures fragile with age, they’d taken a beating during the period when they were on active duty. Should the work be restored to its pristine state or should the artist’s clumsy, on-the-fly patch jobs be preserved as evidence of use?
As part of the restoration effort, the Whitney’s team of conservators, archivists and historians delved into circus history, learning that Calder’s ringmaster, tightrope dancer, bareback rider, and lion tamer were all based on circus stars of the period.
They also leaned on two films depicting the work in motion, Jean Painleve’s Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927 andLe Cirque de Calderby Carlos Vilardebo. But with more than two hundred live performances, it seemed a good bet that the characters could be manipulated in ways other than the ones captured on film. An acrobat who was consulted agreed, but also concluded that some of the moves of which these little wire figures were capable would be impossible for human beings.
As archivist Anita Duquette notes above, even in its restored state the Circus will now be a static affair, partly from the ongoing effort to conserve its delicate materials, but more because the master who apparently took such pleasure in bringing it to life is not available for an encore performance.
- Ayun Halliday will take a cork-wire-and-fabric-scrap tabletop circus over a 3D CGI any old day. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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