Last Monday,Yukie Ota, a Japanese born flutist now living in Chicago, was performing in the first round of the Carl Nielsen International Flute Competition in Denmark, when a butterfly flitted across the stage and landed, rather inconveniently, on the bridge of her nose. Not missing a beat — er, a note — Ota took a quick glance at the critter, and played on, unfazed. On the merits of her performance, Ota made it to the final round of the competition held on Saturday. She eventually lost out to Sébastian Jacot, who apparently played the entire competition with a damaged flute. In other news, you can check out Vladimir Nabokov’s delightful butterfly drawings here.
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Where other authors might limit themselves to the strictly professional, Chabon spices things up with details on his bar mitzvah, his failed first marriage, and the births of his children.
Where others’ timelines grow weighty with evidence of increasing fame, his reads more like a diary, written in the third person.
Breaking of Hank Aaron’s pure record of 755 home runs amid the now-commonplace American congeries of hypocrisy, excess, bad faith, racism and lies finally proves too much, and the wrong kind, of baseball sadness; turns his back on the game (8/07)
Penetrates to the secret nighttime heart of Disneyland (9/11)
Given his zest for personal milestones, it’s surprising he didn’t see fit to share that he was once the lead singer in a Pittsburgh punk band. It would have fit nicely between the photo in which he and novelist Jon Armstrong are garbed as strolling Renaissance Festival players and the moment he enters an Oakland crawlspace to begin work on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
He might rethink this omission, now that Mindcure Records has released the four-track demo that is his band, the Bats’ only studio recording. Also preserved on vinyl is the author’s sole live outing with the band, a 21st birthday gig at the Electric Banana, shortly before he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and disappeared into that crawlspace. The label describes his vocals as “snotty.” It’s a compliment in context.
Meanwhile in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Chabon recalled the Bats as “a fine little band, a unique assemblage of diverse strengths and quirks, anchored by one of the most rock-solid drummers ever to grace the Pittsburgh scene, and hampered only by the weakness of their goofball frontman.”
Some 33 years ago, Queen started work on a track called “There Must Be More to Life Than This,” which featured vocals by Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson. Written during the Hot Space sessions (circa 1981), the song was eventually abandoned and put on a shelf until Freddie Mercury released his own version on a 1985 solo album. Now, with the upcoming release of a Queen compilation called Queen Forever, you can hear the original. No longer do you have to wonder what a Mercury-Jackson duet might sound like. In fact, you only have to click play above and the suspense will be over.
I should note that the Hot Space sessions also produced perhaps our favorite rock duet ever — Freddie Mercury and David Bowie singing “Under Pressure.” Don’t miss hearing their vocals on this amazing isolated track.
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Anyone interested in the history of the Guggenheim will want to spend time with a collection called “The Syllabus.” It contains five books by Hilla Rebay, the museum’s first director and curator. Together, they let you take a close look at the art originally housed in the Guggenheim when the museum first opened its doors in 1939.
To read any of these 109 free art books, you will just need to follow these simple instructions. 1.) Select a text from the collection. 2.) Click the “Read Catalogue Online” button. 3.) Start reading the book in the pop-up browser, and use the controls at the very bottom of the pop-up browser to move through the book. 4.) If you have any problems accessing these texts, you can find alternate versions on Archive.org.
You can find many more free art books from the Getty and the Met below.
Last year, we brought you an incredible cover of Dave Brubeck’s classic “Take Five” performed by the Pakistan-based group, the Sachal Studios Orchestra (also known as the Sachal Jazz Ensemble). You can find that song, along with two takes on “The Girl From Ipanema,” on their 2011 album Sachal Jazz. You won’t find the Sachal Orchestra’s version of “Eleanor Rigby” (above) on that album. This comes to us from Sachal’s 2013 Jazz and All That, a record Guardian critic John Fordham calls “smooth-jazzier” than its predecessor and “more improvisationally inhibited.” I must say, if that’s the case, I’ll take my jazz smooth just this once.
“Eleanor Rigby,” of course, has always been played by an orchestra, and its mixture of modes makes it a particularly good choice for the sitar soloist, who could have sat in comfortably in studio sessions for nearly every song on the Eastern-inflected Revolver. He shares the spotlight with a dynamite tablas player (watch for his solo at 1:27). It’s no wonder the Sachal players have made such an impression with their unique interpretations of standards and classics. Drawn from “virtuosos who cut their teeth in Pakistan’s once-flourishing Lollywood film industry,” their website informs us, “the Sachal Jazz Ensemble brings together some of the most accomplished classical musicians of the subcontinent.” Lollywood, Lahore’s once-thriving film industry, has still barely recovered from the repressive regime of General Zia-ul-Haq.
The musicians of Sachal are refugees of a sort; rescued from poverty, these “veteran session players [had been] retired since the 1980s due to various anti-music zealotries.” During those times, writes Yaqoob Khan Bangash, television drama provided “great succor to a fatigued and demoralized society.” Musicals, however, were very much frowned on by the regime, which banned most Western-influenced productions and shuttered most of the Lahore studios. We should be glad the Sachal Studios Orchestra can now perform and tour. They recently appeared with Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center in an event, Fordham writes, suggesting that “the most creative phase of Sachal Studios’ heartening story of renewal might just be beginning.”
For more on Sachal Studios, watch the introductory video, “Who We Are…,” above—shot at, where else, the studios at Abbey Road.
In 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ventured to Cuba during, as he wrote, the “honeymoon of the revolution.” Military strongman Fulgencio Batista’s regime had fallen to Fidel Castro’s guerilla army and the whole country was alight with revolutionary zeal. As Beauvoir wrote, “after Paris, the gaiety of the place exploded like a miracle under the blue sky.”
At the time, Sartre and de Beauvoir were internationally renown, the intellectual power couple of the 20th century. Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex (1949), laid the groundwork for the feminism movement, and her book The Mandarins won France’s highest literary award in 1954. Sartre’s name had become a household word. The philosophy he championed – Existentialism – was being read and debated around the world. And his political activism — loudly condemning France’s war in Algeria, for instance — had given him real moral authority. When Sartre was arrested in 1968 for civil disobedience, Charles de Gaulle pardoned him, noting, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” As Deirdre Bair notes in her biography of Beauvoir, “Sartre became the one intellectual whose presence and commentary emerging governments clamored for, as if he alone could validate their revolutions.” So it’s not terribly surprising that Fidel Castro wined and dined the two during their month in Cuba.
Cuban photographer Alberto Korda captured the couple as they met with Castro, Che Guevara and other leaders of the revolution. One picture (above) is of Guevara in his combat boots and trademark beret, lighting a cigar for the French philosopher. Sartre looks small and unhealthy compared to the strapping, magnetic revolutionary. Sartre was apparently impressed by the time he spent with the guerilla leader. When Che died in Bolivia seven years later, Sartre famously wrote that Guevara was “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.”
Later, Korda caught them as they were guided through the streets of Havana. And as you can see (below), that iconic image of Guevara, later plastered on T‑shirts and Rage Against the Machine album covers, is on that same role of film.
When the couple returned to Paris, Sartre wrote article after article extolling the revolution. Beauvoir, who was equally impressed, wrote, “For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence.”
Yet their enthusiasm for the regime cooled when they returned to Cuba a year later. The streets of Havana had little of the joy as the previous year. When they talked to factory workers, they heard little but parroting of the official party line. Beauvoir and Sartre ultimately denounced Castro (along with a bunch of other intellectual luminaries like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz) in an open letter that criticized him for the arrest of Cuban poet Herberto Padillo.
You can read more about the life and photography of Alberto Korda in the 2006 book, Cuba: by Korda.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily. The Veeptopus store is here.
In December 1967, The Monkees blew their audience’s minds by hosting Frank Zappa, “participant in and perhaps even leader of” the Mothers Of Invention.
Or did they?
The tidal wave of affection that comprises twenty-first century Monkees mania makes us forget that children were the primary audience for The Monkees’ titular sitcom. (One might also say that The Monkees were the sitcom’s titular band.)
But even if the kids at home weren’t sufficiently conversant in the musical underground to identify the special guest star of the episode, “The Monkees Blow Their Minds,” we are.
It’s a joy to see Zappa and The Monkees’ supremely laid back Michael Nesmith (he auditioned for the show with his laundry bag in tow) impersonating each other.
Zappa’s idea, apparently. He’s in complete control of the gimmick from the get go, whereas Nesmith struggles to keep their names straight and his prosthetic nose in place before getting up to speed.
It’s important to remember that it’s not Frank, but Nesmith playing Frank who accuses The Monkees’ music of being banal and insipid.
Zappa himself was a great supporter of The Monkees. “When people hated us more than anything, he said kind things about us,” Nesmith recalled in Barry Miles’ Zappa biography. Zappa attempted to teach Nesmith how to play lead guitar, and offered drummer Micky Dolenz a post-Monkees gig with The Mothers of Invention.
Their mutual warmth makes lines like “You’re the popular musician! I’m dirty gross and ugly” palatable. It put me in mind of comedian Zach Galifianakis’ Between Two Ferns, and countless other loosely rehearsed web series.
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