Many a singer-songwriter who first rose to prominence in the 1960s has taken the label of “poet,” usually applied by adoring fans, no doubt to the objection of a fair few serious poetry enthusiasts. But who among them could deny Leonard Cohen’s status as a poet? Though best known as a musician, Cohen has also racked up indisputable writerly credentials, having published not just the novels Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game but many books of poetry including Death of a Lady’s Man, Let Us Compare Mythologies, and Flowers for Hitler. Some of them include not just poems written as poems but song lyrics — or perhaps works that began as songs but became poems. Surely his albums contain songs that began as poems. Those interested in figuring out Cohen’s simultaneous development as a poet and songwriter would do well to listen to his early poetry readings, like that of “Prayer for Messiah” at the top of the post.
Just above, you can hear Cohen reading several more poems in the hallowed halls of New York’s 92nd Street Y in February 1966. Below, you can watch a television clip from that same year in which the famously Canadian Cohen appears (naturally) on the CBC in a segment “considering the poetic mind.”
He reads more of his verse and offers a bit of insight into his attitude toward the legacy of his own art — specifically, that he pays no attention to its legacy at all. Perhaps that more than anything allows him the freedom to move as necessary between fields of creative textual endeavor, retaining his inimitable sensibility no matter what shape his work takes at the end of the day. And, in any case, at least for my money, if pieces of his more mature work like “First We Take Manhattan” don’t transcend their form, what does?
In 1874, Stepan Andreevich Bers published The Cookbook and gave it as a gift to his sister, countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, the wife of the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy. The book contained a collection of Tolstoy family recipes, the dishes they served to their family and friends, those fortunate souls who belonged to the aristocratic ruling class of late czarist Russia. Almost 150 years later, this cookbook has been translated and republished by Sergei Beltyukov.
Available in an inexpensive Kindle format ($3.99), Leo Tolstoy’s family recipe book features dozens of recipes, everything from Tartar Sauce and Spiced Mushrooms (what’s a Russian kitchen without mushrooms?), to Stuffed Dumplings and Green Beans à la Maître d’Hôtel, to Coffee Cake and Viennese Pie. The text comes with a translation, too, of Russian weights and measures used during the period. One recipe Mr. Beltyukov provided to us (which I didn’t see in the book) is for the Tolstoy’s good ole Mac ‘N’ Cheese dish. It goes something like this:
Bring water to a boil, add salt, then add macaroni and leave boiling on light fire until half tender; drain water through a colander, add butter and start putting macaroni back into the pot in layers – layer of macaroni, some grated Parmesan and some vegetable sauce, macaroni again and so on until you run out of macaroni. Put the pot on the edge of the stove, cover with a lid and let it rest in light fire until the macaroni are soft and tender. Shake the pot occasionally to prevent them from burning.
We’ll leave you with bon appétit! — an expression almost certainly heard in the homes of those French-speaking Russian aristocrats.
I will admit it: I’m one of those oft-maligned non-sports people who becomes a football (okay, soccer) enthusiast every four years, seduced by the colorful pageantry, cosmopolitan air, nostalgia for a game I played as a kid, and an embarrassingly sentimental pride in my home country’s team. I don’t lose all my critical faculties, but I can’t help but love the World Cup even while recognizing the corruption, deepening poverty and exploitation, and host of other serious sociopolitical issues surrounding it. And as an American, it’s simply much easier to put some distance between the sport itself and the jingoistic bigotry and violence—“sentimental hooliganism,” to use Franklin Foer’s phrase—that very often attend the game in various parts of the world.
In Argentina, as in many soccer-mad countries with deep social divides, gang violence is a routine part of futbol, part of what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges termed a horrible “idea of supremacy.” Borges found it impossible to separate the fan culture from the game itself, once declaring, “soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.” As Shaj Mathew writes in TheNew Republic, the author associated the mass mania of soccer fandom with the mass fervor of fascism or dogmatic nationalism. “Nationalism,” he wrote, “only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.” As Mathews points out, national soccer teams and stars do often become the tools of authoritarian regimes that “take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support [….] This is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.”
There is certainly a sense in which Borges’ hatred of soccer is also indicative of his well-known cultural elitism (despite his romanticizing of lower-class gaucho life and the once-demimonde tango). Outside of the hugely expensive World Cup, the class dynamics of soccer fandom in most every country but the U.S. are fairly uncomplicated. New Republic editor Foer summed it up succinctly in How Soccer Explains the World: “In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class.” (The inversion of this soccer class divide in the U.S., Foer writes, explains Americans’ disdain for the game in general and for elitist soccer dilettantes in particular, though those attitudes are rapidly changing). If Borges had been a North, rather than South, American, I imagine he would have had similar things to say about the NFL, NBA, NHL, or NASCAR.
Nonetheless, being Jorge Luis Borges, the writer did not simply lodge cranky complaints, however politically astute, about the game. He wrote a speculative story about it with his close friend and sometime writing partner Adolfo Bioy Casares. In “Esse Est Percipi” (“to be is to be perceived”), we learn that soccer has “ceased to be a sport and entered the realm of spectacle,” writes Mathews: “representation of sport has replaced actual sport.” The physical stadiums crumble, while the games are performed by “a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.” An easily duped populace follows “nonexistent games on TV and the radio without questioning a thing.”
The story effectively illustrates Borges’ critique of soccer as an intrinsic part of a mass culture that, Mathews says, “leaves itself open to demagoguery and manipulation.” Borges’ own snobberies aside, his resolute suspicion of mass media spectacle and the coopting of popular culture by political forces seems to me still, as it was in his day, a healthy attitude. You can read the full story here, and an excellent critical essay on Borges’ political philosophy here.
A catchy tribute to mid-century Soviet hipsters popped up a few years back in a song called “Stilyagi” by lo-fi L.A. hipsters Puro Instinct. The lyrics tell of a charismatic dude who impresses “all the girls in the neighborhood” with his “magnitizdat” and guitar. Wait, his what? His magnitizdat, man! Like samizdat, or underground press, magnitizdat—from the words for “tape recorder” and “publishing”—kept Soviet youth in the know with surreptitious recordings of pop music. Stilyagi (a post-war subculture that copied its style from Hollywood movies and American jazz and rock and roll) made and distributed contraband music in the Soviet Union. But, as a recent NPR piece informs us, “before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootleg jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X‑ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.” See one such X‑ray “record” above, and below, see the fascinating process dramatized in the first scene of a 2008 Russian musical titled, of course, Stilyagi (translated into English as “Hipsters”—the word literally means “obsessed with fashion”).
These records were called roentgenizdat (X‑ray press) or, says Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita), “bone music.” Author Anya von Bremzen describes them as “forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens”: “They would cut the X‑ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan….” The ghoulish makeshift discs sure look cool enough, but what did they sound like? Well, as you can hear below in the sample of Bill Haley & His Comets from a “bone music” album, a bit like old Victrola phonograph records played through tiny transistor radios on a squonky AM frequency.
Dressed in fashions copied from jazz and rockabilly albums, stilyagi learned to dance at underground nightclubs to these tinny ghosts of Western pop songs, and fought off the Komsomol—super-square Leninist youth brigades—who broke up roentgenizdat rings and tried to suppress the influence of bourgeois Western pop culture. According to Artemy Troitsky, author of Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, these records were also called “ribs”: “The quality was awful, but the price was low—a rouble or rouble and a half. Often these records held surprises for the buyer. Let’s say, a few seconds of American rock ’n’ roll, then a mocking voice in Russian asking: ‘So, thought you’d take a listen to the latest sounds, eh?, followed by a few choice epithets addressed to fans of stylish rhythms, then silence.”
But they weren’t all cruel censor’s jokes. Thanks to a company called Wanderer Records, you can own a piece of this odd cultural history. Roentgenizdat records, like the scratchy Bill Haley or the Tony Bennett “Lullaby of Broadway” disc sampled above, go for somewhere between one and two hundred bucks a piece—fair prices, I’d say, for such unusual artifacts, though of course wildly inflated from their Cold War street value.
See more images of bone music records over at Laughing Squid and Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly’s blog Street Use, and above dig some historical footage of stilyagi jitterbugging through what appears to be a kind of Soviet training film about Western influence on Soviet youth culture, produced no doubt during the Khrushchev thaw when, as Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich tells NPR, things got “a little more liberal than before.”
As a podcaster, I’ve long since grown used to the idea of periodically issuing audio content. But the convenient recording, internet, and computer, and mobile listening technologies that made such a medium possible only really converged in the early 2000s. How would I have gone about it had I wanted to put out a “podcast,” say, 40 years earlier? We have one such example in Audio Arts, a British contemporary art “sound magazine” distributed through the mail on audio cassettes. “The seventies were the years of conceptual art with text adding value to the actual works,” co-creator William Furlong once said in an interview. “As an artist I was more interested in ‘discussion,’ the idea of language and the people that already worked in conceptual fields in Great Britain. Soon I realised there weren’t magazines capable of reporting such material inspired by conversation, sounds and discussions. The evocative force of a voice is lost with the written word as it will only ever be a written voice.”
Furlong, a sculptor, and Barry Barker, a gallerist, began publishing Audio Arts in 1973. Its run lasted until, astonishingly, 2006, by which time its archives had come to 25 volumes of four issues each. Its list of subscribers included the formidable Tate, such fans that they actually acquired the magazine’s master tapes, digitized them, and made them all publicly available on their web site. No longer must you seek out nth-generation duplicated analog cassettes and dig out your Walkman; now you can simply stream on your media player of choice every issue from January 1973, “four cassettes with contributions from Caroline Tisdall, Noam Chomsky, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats,” to January 2006, which caps everything off with contributions by Gilbert & George and Jake and Dinos Chapman. Other notable artistic presences include Marcel Duchamp in Volume 2, Philip Glass in Volume 6, and Andy Warhol in Volume 8. Helpfully, Tate has also put together a section with tools to explore Audio Arts’ highlights — something more than a few modern-day podcasts could no doubt use.
The tag line for Stanley Kubrick’s sixth feature was “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” And it’s a good question. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel, first published in 1955, is a delirious account of a middle-aged sophisticate’s obsession with a 12 year-old “nymphet.” The book was both praised and pilloried when it came out. Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year while an English newspaper called it “sheer unrestrained pornography.” With press like that, Lolita quickly became a best-seller.
So when Kubrick, along with his producing partner James B. Harris, bought the rights to the book in 1958, they first had to prove that it could be filmed in a way that could get past the censors. The Hays code was still in effect in Hollywood, which suppressed any hint of sex between two adults. A love story between a prepubescent girl and a middle-aged pervert was going to be a tall order. “If I realized how severe the [censorship] limitations were going to be,” Kubrick stated later, “I wouldn’t have made the film.”
Eventually, Kubrick had to bow to reality; they changed Lolita’s age from 12 to 14, casting the teenaged Sue Lyon for the part. As Richard Corliss noted in his study on Lolita, “The book is about child abuse; the movie is about the wiles a teenage girl might have learned in those two years: an awareness of her power over men.”
The other challenge of adapting Lolita was the book itself. There’s an old truism in Hollywood that mediocre books make great movies and great books make for lousy films. After all, a novel like Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is all about story, characters and suspense – the same stuff as a good script. Authors like James Joyce, William Faulkner and Nabokov, on the other hand, foreground elements that are particular to literature — interior monologues, unreliable narrators, and a musicality of language – elements that are damned tricky to reproduce on the silver screen. If you don’t believe me, compare The Great Gatsby with its numerous dreadful movie adaptations.
Doubtless aware of such pitfalls, Kubrick approached Nabokov, the author himself, to write the script. After their first meeting, Nabokov turned the offer down. “The idea of tampering with my own novel caused me only revulsion,” Nabokov later wrote in the foreword to the published version of his Lolita script. Kubrick, however, is not a person to be dissuaded easily. He sent Nabokov a telegram renewing the offer a few months later, just as the author was beginning to regret passing on the offer and its generous paycheck.
So Nabokov traveled back to Los Angeles to meet with Kubrick, beginning what he would characterize as “an amiable battle of suggestion and countersuggestion on how to cinemize the novel.” By the end of the summer of 1960, Nabokov delivered his first draft – a 400-page behemoth. The script would require some serious editing. After that, Nabokov’s meetings with the director became more and more sporadic.
True to form, Kubrick was secretive about the film. The author had little idea what shape the final movie was going to take until he saw it a couple of days before the premiere in 1962. “I had discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors, and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used.” Kubrick took the script and stripped out all the backstory and most of the narration. He expanded the character of Quilty to give Peter Sellers more to do. While Nabokov was generally complimentary about the film, he still had some complaints. “Most of the sequences were not really better than those I had so carefully composed for Kubrick, and I keenly regretted the waste of my time while admiring Kubrick’s fortitude in enduring for six months the evolution and infliction of a useless product.”
Nonetheless, Nabokov got a single screenwriter credit for the movie and he ended up getting an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. You can see some of Nabokov’s script of Lolita, complete with margin notes, below. (The margin notes apparently don’t appear in the published version.) You can click on each image to view them in a larger format. They come to us via Vice.
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.
If you dream of becoming the next Disney Channel star, you’d do well to heed the advice of casting director Judy Taylor, who uses “read” and “talent” according to their industry definitions, and seems unlikely to cut anyone slack for youth or inexperience.
If, however, you’ve got the soul of a poet, a painter, a musical adventurer, all three, or none of the above, I suggest falling to your knees and thanking Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art for providing you with an alternative. The weekly videos on art, literature, design and architecture for its Louisiana Channel are a goldmine of inspiration for non-mainstream types both young and old, but certain segments speak explicitly to those just embarking on the journey.
As any number of us geezers can attest, Patti Smith and David Byrne speak with authority. It’s okay if you’ve never heard of them. If you were three or four decades further along, you would have.
(As to Marina Abramović, go easy on your parents if they need to spend a moment or two dialing her up on Wikipedia. I’ll bet Patti or David wouldn’t peer down their noses at someone for not recognizing one of the world’s greatest living performance artists. Excuse the dangling preposition, but she’s definitely someone worth finding out about.)
I realize I don’t speak for most of America, but for me, these guys loom larger than Jay‑Z and Beyonce combined. I also realize that in terms of both wealth and name recognition, there’s a stable full of teen celebrities who leave them in the dust.
Interesting how all three resist the notion of talent as something to be commodified.
Abramović, above, speaks of artistic exploration in literal terms. In her view difficult work should be pursued with the bravery of 17th-century sailors who sallied forth, believing that the world was flat. I suspect she’s a tougher cookie than casting director Taylor. Witness her differentiation between garden variety artists and great artists, the month long rubbish basket task she assigned her students, and the rigorousness of her own practice.
Her fellow trailblazer Smith has a more maternal touch. The path she promotes is similarly twisty, low-paying, and hard, but counterbalanced with “the most beautiful experiences.”
Byrne tackles some of the more practical aspects of committing to the artistic way. To wit, there’s no shame in day jobs, even if it’s been eons since he was in a position to need one. He also makes some very valid points about technology, below, with nary a peep as to the impossibility of concentrating on one’s studies when one is checking Twitter every two seconds. We all stand to benefit.
- Ayun Halliday is the author of seven books, including No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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