Captain Beefheart Issues His “Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing”

in Music | September 12th, 2013

If you do not believe in Captain Beefheart, I doubt the 1974 Old Grey Whistle Test appearance above will convert you. If you are a Beefheart believer, you know. And if you don’t know where you stand on Beefheart, get to know this wild-eyed rock and roll shaman, poet, bluesman, painter, and childhood friend of Frank Zappa. (Start with his fairly straightforward take on Delta blues and sixties garage rock, 1967’s Safe as Milk.)

Beefheart’s Magic Band, a shifting collection of musicians that initially included Ry Cooder (who served as something of a musical director) created some of the most warped music of the last few decades, much of it very recognizably blues-based and much of it (such as the freak outs on Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica) occupying a space all its own—a space that only exists, really, in Captain Beefheart’s head and heart. While Beefheart acquired a reputation as an uncompromising, and singularly demanding, employer of musicians, speaking as a musician, there are few others that I wish I’d had the chance to play with in their heyday.

Despite his demonically inspired weirdness and storied difficulty, what attracted musicians to Beefheart was his ability to push concepts so far beyond the bounds of intelligibility so as to make insanity make perfect sense. Take, for example, his list of instructions, or rather “commandments,” issued to Moris Tepper when the guitarist joined Beefheart’s band in 1976. This is not an obnoxious practical joke—it is the technique of a Zen master, disorienting his student with nonsensical truths mixed in with some very practical advice. Which one is which is for the student to decide.

Captain Beefheart’s “Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing”

1. Listen to the birds

That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.

2. Your guitar is not really a guitar.

Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.

3. Practice in front of a bush.

Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.

4. Walk with the devil.

Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.

5. If you’re guilty of thinking, you’re out.

If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

6. Never point your guitar at anyone.

Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.

7. Always carry a church key.

That’s your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He’s one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song “I Need a Hundred Dollars” is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he’s doing it.

8. Don’t wipe the sweat off your instrument.

You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.

9. Keep your guitar in a dark place.

When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.

10. You gotta have a hood for your engine.

Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.

If any of the above leads you to think you need to know more about Beefheart, then watch the documentary above, introduced and narrated by the legendary tastemaker John Peel, a true Beefheart believer if one there ever was.

Via Letters of Note

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Jack Kerouac Reads American Haikus, Backed by Jazz Saxophonists Al Cohn & Zoot Sims (1958)

in Animation, Music, Poetry | September 11th, 2013

In the spring of 1958 Jack Kerouac went into the studio with tenor saxmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims to record his second album, a mixture of jazz and poetry called Blues and Haikus. The haiku is a traditional Japanese poetry form with three unrhyming lines in five, seven, and five syllables. But Kerouac took a freer approach. In 1959, the year Blues and Haikus was released, he explained:

The American haiku is not exactly the Japanese Haiku. The Japanese Haiku is strictly disciplined to seventeen syllables but since the language structure is different I don’t think American Haikus (short three-line poems intended to be completely packed with Void of Whole) should worry about syllables because American speech is something again … bursting to pop.

Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.

The opening number on Blues and Haikus is a 10-minute piece called “American Haikus.” It features Kerouac’s expressive recitation of a series of poems punctuated by the improvisational saxophone playing of Cohn and Sims. The video above is animated by the artist Peter Gullerud. For more of Kerouac’s haikus — some 700 of them — see his Book of Haikus.

via The Allen Ginsberg Project

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by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

in English Language, History, Language, Literature, Theatre | September 11th, 2013

What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at London’s Globe Theatre, the 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatrical home. As linguist David Crystal explains, the theater’s purpose has always been to recapture as much as possible the original look and feel of a Shakespearean production—costuming, music, movement, etc. But until recently, the Globe felt that attempting a play in the original pronunciation would alienate audiences. The opposite proved to be true, and people clamored for more. Above, Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate to us what certain Shakespearean passages would have sounded like to their first audiences, and in so doing draw out some subtle wordplay that gets lost on modern tongues.

Shakespeare’s English is called by scholars Early Modern English (not, as many students say, “Old English,” an entirely different, and much older language). Crystal dates his Shakespearean early modern to around 1600. (In his excellent textbook on the subject, linguist Charles Barber bookends the period roughly between 1500 and 1700.) David Crystal cites three important kinds of evidence that guide us toward recovering early modern’s original pronunciation (or “OP”).

1. Observations made by people writing on the language at the time, commenting on how words sounded, which words rhyme, etc. Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson tells us, for example, that speakers of English in his time and place pronounced the “R” (a feature known as “rhoticity”). Since, as Crystal points out, the language was evolving rapidly, and there wasn’t only one kind of OP, there is a great deal of contemporary commentary on this evolution, which early modern writers like Jonson had the chance to observe firsthand.

2. Spellings. Unlike today’s very frustrating tension between spelling and pronunciation, Early Modern English tended to be much more phonetic and words were pronounced much more like they were spelled, or vice versa (though spelling was very irregular, a clue to the wide variety of regional accents).

3. Rhymes and puns which only work in OP. The Crystals demonstrate the important pun between “loins” and “lines” (as in genealogical lines) in Romeo and Juliet, which is completely lost in so-called “Received Pronunciation” (or “proper” British English). Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the father and son team claim, have rhymes that only work in OP.

Not everyone agrees on what Shakespeare’s OP might have sounded like. Eminent Shakespeare director Trevor Nunn claims that it might have sounded more like American English does today, suggesting that the language that migrated across the pond retained more Elizabethan characteristics than the one that stayed home.

You can hear an example of this kind of OP in the recording from Romeo and Juliet above. Shakespeare scholar John Barton suggests that OP would have sounded more like modern Irish, Yorkshire, and West Country pronunciations, an accent that the Crystals seem to favor in their interpretations of OP and is much more evident in the reading from Macbeth below (both audio examples are from a CD curated by Ben Crystal).

Whatever the conjecture, scholars tend to use the same set of criteria David Crystal outlines. I recall my own experience with Early Modern English pronunciation in an intensive graduate course on the history of the English language. Hearing a class of amateur linguists read familiar Shakespeare passages in what we perceived as OP—using our phonological knowledge and David Crystal’s criteria—had exactly the effect Ben Crystal described in an NPR interview:

If there’s something about this accent, rather than it being difficult or more difficult for people to understand … it has flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too. It’s a sound that makes people — it reminds people of the accent of their home — and so they tend to listen more with their heart than their head.

In other words, despite the strangeness of the accent, the language can sometimes feel more immediate, more universal, and more of the moment, even, than the sometimes stilted, pretentious ways of reading Shakespeare in the accent of a modern London stage actor or BBC news anchor.

For more on this subject, don’t miss this related post: Hear What Hamlet, Richard III & King Lear Sounded Like in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Google & edX to Create MOOC.Org: An Open Source Platform For Creating Your Own MOOC

in Google, Harvard, MIT, MOOCs | September 11th, 2013

Almost exactly a year ago, we told you about Google’s release of Course Builder, an open source platform that would let you build your own online courses/MOOCs for free. This week, Google has a new announcement: it’s joining forces with edX, (the MOOC provider led by Harvard and MIT), to work on a new open source platform called MOOC.org. The new service will go live in the first half of 2014. And it will allow “any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.” This will give innovative educators the opportunity to put a MOOC online without necessarily making a steep investment in a course. (When added all up, the costs can otherwise be enormous.) If MOOC.org sounds of interest to you, you can put your name on a waiting list, and they’ll contact you when the service launches next year.

Meanwhile, let me mention that 125 MOOCs will be launching between now and the end of October. To see a full list, visit or our collection of 625 MOOCs/Certificate Courses from Great Universities. You’ll find many interesting titles on the list — History of Chinese Architecture: Part 1; Søren Kierkegaard – Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity; Dark Matter in Galaxies: The Last Mystery, and Exploring Engineering, just to name a few. If you have questions about what MOOCs are all about, please see our new MOOC FAQ.

via The Chronicle of Higher Ed

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Radical Thinkers: 5 Videos Profile Max Horkheimer, Alain Badiou & Other Radical Theorists

in Philosophy | September 11th, 2013

If you’ve ever considered drawing up a list of the most debased words, allow me to nominate radical. If you call someone a “radical thinker,” for instance, a great many listeners might assume you mean something along the lines of “cool thinker.” While we do tend to find thinkers cool here at Open Culture, more interesting usages exist. Some interpret the meaning of “radical thinker” as closer to “thinker of very different thoughts than everyone else,” and hit closer to the mark though they may, you can bet that someone else nearby has readied themselves to denounce the thinker in question as not nearly radical enough to qualify for the label. Like any complex word, phrase, or other element of language, we may have to define radical by looking at examples. Luckily, the Guardian and Verso Books have put together Radical Thinkers, a series of three-minute videos profiling exactly those.

In each video, a modern academic delivers a three-minute lecture on a radical thinker of choice, drawing on a book in Verso’s Radical Thinkers editions. “Ordinarily, we are more or less resigned to the world as it is,” says Peter Hallward of Kingston University, standing in London’s Housmans (“Radical Booksellers Since 1945”), summarizing Alan Badiou’s Ethics. “We adapt as best we can to the existing logic of the system, of the established order of things. We get a job, we go through life as best we can, we get by. What Badiou calls ethics is essentially the discipline and resources you need in order to resist those temptations to abandon or betray or give up on something.” Stella Stanford, also of Kingston, takes on Wilhelm Reich’s Sex-Pol in the Freud Museum. This radical thinker, she says, “argued against Freud’s view that sexual repression was the condition of possibility for all civilization. He used the same kind of anthropological work that Freud himself used to argue that sexual freedom and civilization were compatible.”

The Radical Thinkers series has three more videos: Esther Leslie in Camden Market on Max Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (above), an indictment of the Enlightenment’s failure to deliver a rational society.

Federico Campagna in his kitchen on Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding, a look into the inevitably disappointed heart of modern liberal democracy.

And Nina Power on Ludwig Feuerbach’s Christianity-criticizing collection of writings The Fiery Brook.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Volumes for Free (in Russian)

in Archives, Literature | September 11th, 2013

This is surely worth a quick heads up: Leo Tolstoy’s entire body of work – all 46,000 pages of it – will appear on the Tolstoy.ru web site. According to Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter Fyokla Tolstaya, all of the author’s novels, short stories, fairy tales, essays and personal letters will be made freely available in PDF, FB2 and EPUB formats (which you can easily load onto a Kindle, iPad or almost any other ebook reader). She goes on to tell the Russian newspaper RIA Novosti that the “90-volume edition was scanned and proofread three times by more than 3,000 volunteers from 49 countries.” Truly an incredible crowdsourcing feat.

What’s the rub? You have to read Russian. Yes, it’s potentially a downer. But you can always find Tolstoy’s major works in translation in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

And if that doesn’t make you feel better, see the excellent bonus material below.

via The Paris Review

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Download Free Music from 150+ Classical Composers, Courtesy of Musopen.org

in Music | September 10th, 2013

Yesterday, we told you about a new Kickstarter campaign that intends to put 245 pieces by Frédéric Chopin into the public domain. The campaign is being spearheaded by Musopen.org, a non-profit located a few miles up the road from us, in Palo Alto, CA. Operating since 2005 (a year before we took flight), Musopen provides free public domain scores and a library of recordings by classical composers that you’ll want to check out.

The library is best accessed via this page where you can browse recordings organized by composer, performer, instrument, form, and time period As you’ll see, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart — they’re all there. So is Debussy, Ravel and Copland, not to mention another 140+ composers.

Music can be streamed online for free. But if you become a registered user for the site, you can download 5 tracks per day in standard audio quality. Or, if you pay $55 per year, you can enjoy unlimited downloads in high quality audio. Paying members help sustain the site, and they also get to help determine what music will be made available online in the future. Have more questions? Check out Musopen’s FAQ.

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!

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 22 ) |

Bob Dylan and George Harrison Play Tennis, 1969

in Music | September 10th, 2013

Click images for larger versions

Bob Dylan’s mysterious motorcycle accident in 1966—an event that has provoked all sorts of wild speculation—gave the overworked mercurial star an opportunity to become a full-fledged recluse, which he seemed to need, whether it was warranted by his injuries or not. He skipped out on Woodstock, turned his back on the flower power rock scene, and in 1967, recorded what I consider his absolute best album, John Wesley Harding (go ahead and yell about my tastes in the comments). By 1969, he had recovered enough musically to expand his palate and record my second favorite of his albums, the full-on country Nashville Skyline. He had also recovered enough physically to play tennis with George Harrison, as you can see above.

Harrison, meanwhile, had quit The Beatles in January, then was coaxed back into the band, which more or less broke up later that year. But he had been busy—recording two mostly-instrumental solo albums and writing his Hindu gospel hit “My Sweet Lord” and the rest of his incredible 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass. Somehow amidst all the turmoil and transition, as Harrison began his most productive solo period and Dylan prepared to release what nearly everyone considers his worst record, Self Portrait, the two found time to hit some balls before Dylan’s performance at the Isle of Wight festival. Dylan was apparently a longtime tennis fan. His 1964 “I Shall be Free No. 10” contains references to the sport. The photos were released by the Harrison family for the 2011 Martin Scorsese-directed doc George Harrison: Living in the Material World (trailer below).

via Retronaut/Dangerous Minds

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Captain Beefheart Issues His “Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing”

Jack Kerouac Reads American Haikus, Backed by Jazz Saxophonists Al Cohn & Zoot Sims (1958)

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

Google & edX to Create MOOC.Org: An Open Source Platform For Creating Your Own MOOC

Radical Thinkers: 5 Videos Profile Max Horkheimer, Alain Badiou & Other Radical Theorists

The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Volumes for Free (in Russian)

Download Free Music from 150+ Classical Composers, Courtesy of Musopen.org

Bob Dylan and George Harrison Play Tennis, 1969

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