Bach wrote 1080 compositions during his lifetime. And now thanks to the new and certainly ambitious All of Bach web site, you can eventually watch the Netherlands Bach Society (founded in 1921) perform each and every one of those compositions. The site features 13 performances so far (see below), which means there’s only another 1067 to go. A new Bach recording will go live every Friday. So you mark your calendars and check in weekly for the next 20 years. Thanks to Erik for sending this our way!
A couple weeks ago, we showed you the Pre-History of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, highlighting a medley of the fancy foot moves of Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire and some lesser-known figures like Rubberneck Holmes and Earl “Snakehips” Tucker. Someone could just as easily make another montage, a Post-History of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, and it would surely have to include the clip above. It features our favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson strutting his stuff atStarTalk Live last year. In the background, you can see another great moonwalker, Buzz Aldrin, on the stage.
Episode #9 of Tyson’s Cosmos reboot airs on Fox tonight. US viewers can watch episodes 1–8 on Hulu here. The original Cosmos with Carl Sagan appears here.
If one can characterize Stanley Kubrick by his complete control over the medium and his dogged insistence on staying within 30 miles of his house when shooting a movie, even if it means dressing up a London factory to look like Hue, Vietnam as he did for Full Metal Jacket, then Werner Herzog can be characterized as his opposite.
Herzog’s movies are strange, messy and ecstatic, a far cry from the chilly aloofness of Kubrick. In both his feature films and his documentaries, Herzog uses his camera to uncover new layers of nature, experience and the human psyche. And there have been few filmmakers more willing to shoot films in rugged, exotic places as Herzog — from Antarctica to the Amazonian rainforest. In fact, a number of his most notorious shoots seem more designed to test the endurance of the cast and crew than to produce a movie.
His film Fitzcarraldo, for example, is about a guy who has the visionary idea to haul a riverboat over a mountain in the Amazon rainforest. Herzog decided, for the purposes of realism, that he would actually drag a riverboat over a mountain. The production, which is in the running for the most miserable film shoot ever, is the subject of the absolutely riveting documentary The Burden of Dreams. At point one in the doc, Herzog quips, “I shouldn’t make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.” And by the end of the movie, you think that he’s probably right.
Of course, that crazed bravura has always been at the center of Herzog’s mystique. After all, this is the guy who actually ate a shoe after losing a bet with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (find 30 of his films online).
In 2009, when Herzog released Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, he was asked by the folks over at Rotten Tomatoes to list his top 5 movies. This is a director who once said, “I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” So it’s a pretty safe bet that The Lion King didn’t make the cut.
The list starts with Nosferatu from 1922 (up top). Herzog liked this movie so much that he shot his own version in 1979.
In my opinion, the greatest of great films is Nosferatu by [F.W.] Murnau, which I should include in the greatest five films of all time.
D.W. Griffith’s epic was his response to the public outcry following his epically racist Birth of a Nation. The movie also happened to revolutionize filmmaking.
Everything that [D.W.] Griffith made: Broken Blossoms, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, you just name it. Everything. He’s the Shakespeare of cinema. Period. Watch his films and you’ll know instantly.
Next is Freaks, Tod Browning’s 1932 cult masterpiece that featured actual circus performers and dwarves. No doubt the movie was an influence on Herzog’s 1970 film Even Dwarves Started Out Small. “It’s just formidable, it’s phenomenal,” says Herzog. “You’ve gotta see it. It would take me an hour to explain.”
The last two films on Herzog’s list? Where Is The Friend’s Home?(1987),Abbas Kiarostami’s quiet tale of a kid who is just looking to return a notebook to his friend. And Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa’s first true masterpiece, the film that introduced Japanese film to the western world after it won a Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. The movie also clearly impressed Herzog:
It is probably the only film that I’ve ever seen which has something like a perfect balance, which does not occur in filmmaking very often. You sense it sometimes in great music, but I haven’t experienced it in cinema, and it’s mind boggling. I don’t know how [Akira] Kurosawa did it. It’s still a mystery to me. That’s greatness.
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.
We’ve brought you Talking Heads shows from New York’s CBGB in 1975, Dortmund, Germany in 1980, and Rome that same year. Now we’ve got one more valuable live find from that formative, busy era for the David Byrne-led, Rhode Island School of Design-forged new-wave band: their November 1978 performance in Syracuse. The exact venue? Perhaps somewhere at Syracuse University, perhaps not, though a college performance space would make sense, given how many institutions of higher education they played in 1978. The Talking Heads Concert History blog has a complete list, and the total number of shows in that year alone comes in, astonishingly, at over 130, a fair few of them at schools like NYU, Brown, Berklee, Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Arizona. “It was really an education for us,” the page quotes drummer Chris Frantz as saying of the 1978 tour. “I’m afraid we bit off more than we could chew. We thought that we could play every night, and we found that after four months we were feeling pretty uninspired.”
Yet this Syracuse gig, which came ten months in, sounds pretty inspired to me. It looks it, too, at least from what I can discern from the lo-fi footage. What the image lacks in crispness, though, it makes up for in technological interest; it has the signature look of the Sony Portapak, one of the very early portable consumer video recording systems beloved of the 1970s’ video amateurs and video artists alike. Whoever manned the Portapak for these 92 minutes in Syracuse captured a valuable chapter in the Talking Heads story, one the band spent working as hard as possible — which, of course, meant playing as hard, and as often, as possible — and refining their inimitable sound and sensibility in concert spaces that, while often low-profile, nevertheless provided them with excited and appreciative audiences. College students and otherwise, came eager to hear something new — and given that the 70s, that decade of slick disco and smooth rock, had almost come to a close, something a bit askew. The Talking Heads, as we see them here, could gladly deliver.
Experimental electronic musician and inventor Bruce Haack’s compositions expanded many a young consciousness, and taught kids to dance, move, meditate, and to be endlessly curious about the technology of sound. All of this makes him the perfect guest for Fred Rogers, who despite his totally square demeanor loved bringing his audience unusual artists of all kinds. In the clips above and below from the first, 1968 season of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Haack introduces Rogers and a group of youngsters to the “musical computer,” a homemade analog synthesizer of his own invention—one of many he created from household items, most of which integrated human touch and movement into their controls, as you’ll see above. In both clips, Haack and longtime collaborator Esther Nelson sing and play charming songs as Nelson leads them in various movement exercises. (The remainder of the second video mostly features Mr. Roger’s cat.)
Although he’s seen a revival among electronic musicians and DJs, Haack became best known in his career as a composer of children’s music, and for good reason. His 1962 debut kid’s record Dance, Sing & Listen is an absolute classic of the genre, combining a dizzying range of musical styles—country, classical, pop, medieval, and experimental electronic—with far-out spoken word from Haack and Nelson. They followed this up with two more iterations of Dance, Sing & Listen, then The Way Out Record for Children, The Electronic Record for Children, the amazing Dance to the Music, and several more, all them weirder and more wonderful than maybe anything you’ve ever heard. (Don’t believe me? Take a listen to “Soul Transportation,” “EIO (New MacDonald),” or the absolutely enchanting “Saint Basil,” with its Doors‑y organ outro.) A psychedelic genius, Haack also made grown-up acid rock in the form of 1970’s The Electric Lucifer, which is a bit like if Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had written Jesus Christ Superstar on heavy doses of LSD and banks of analog synthesizers.
While Haack’s Mr. Rogers appearance may not have seemed like much at the time, in hindsight this is a fascinating document of an artist who’s been called “The King of Techno” for his forward-looking sounds meeting the cutting edge in children’s programming. It’s a testament to how much the counterculture influenced early childhood education. Many of the progressive educational experiments of the sixties have since become historical curiosities, replaced by insipid corporate merchandising. What Haack and Nelson’s musical approach tells me is that we’d do well to revisit the educational climate of that day and take a few lessons from its freeform experimentation and openness. I’ll certainly be playing these records for my daughter.
What would you do if you won a Nobel Prize? Who would you thank? We’ve all wondered about it, perhaps not about the Nobel specifically, but about some potentially legacy-confirming prize or other — maybe an Oscar, maybe a MacArthur Fellowship. When Albert Camus, the short-lived French novelist-philosopher who wrote such enduring works as The Strangerand The Myth of Sisyphus, won the Nobel for Literature in 1957 “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times,” he thanked an elementary-school teacher. “One could argue that, in the history of the field, few teacher-pupil relationships have had more dramatic impact than that of Louis Germain on his young pupil Albert Camus,” says a Chicago Tribune articlepublished during an upswing in American interest in Camus’ work. That happened soon after the publication of his unfinished autobiographical novel The First Man, a “classic story of a poor boy who made good” whose appendix includes the author’s real-life correspondence with his former teacher.
One of these letters Camus wrote to Germain not long after winning the Nobel. (You can hear his actual acceptance speech here.) He no doubt saw the older man’s formative influence as essential to the work that brought that prestigious prize his way, since, as Letters of Note puts it, “he was just 11-months-old when his father was killed in action during The Battle of the Marne; his mother, partially deaf and illiterate, then raised her boys in extreme poverty with the help of his heavy-handed grandmother. It was in school that Camus shone, due in no small part to the encouragement offered by his beloved teacher.” Though never thrilled about public honors of this type, Camus nonetheless knew a chance to express long-felt gratitude when he saw it, and to Germain he wrote these sentences as brief and as powerful as many in his books:
19 November 1957
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.
But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.
I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
Even the greatest filmmakers out there sometimes need to pay the bills.
In the 1990s, Swiss tobacco company F. J. Burrus hired name brand art house directors to make commercials for their Parisienne brand of cigarettes. The company gave free rein to the filmmakers both in terms of content and approach. And the talent they managed to attract is astonishing: David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Emir Kusturica, Roman Polanski and, most puzzlingly, Jean-Luc Godard.
Wait a second, you might say. Wasn’t Godard an avowed Maoist at one point in his life? Wasn’t he one of the most consistently anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist figures in filmdom? Yes. And he also did cigarette commercials. He did a few for Nike too.
You can see his ad for Parisienne above. Typical with late period Godard, the commercial is both literary, political and willfully difficult. Credited to both Godard and his long time creative and romantic partner Anne-Marie Miéville, the commercial features a skateboarder slaloming between large boxes of cigarettes, some guy in bare feet shuffling through a floor littered with Parisienne packages and a well-to-do woman reading a novel called Parisienne People. On the soundtrack, Godard reads a quote from Racine. It’s probably nothing that Don Draper would have been happy with, but Burrus was pleased.
Ads by other filmmakers similarly show off their quirks and obsessions. The Coen brothers’ commercial, for instance, looks less like an advert than a scene from one of their movies. A dandy smoking a cig from a holder is deeply moved by a sweaty vaudeville performance. When it ends, he whispers, “Again.” It’s a resolution that raises as many questions as it answers. It’s a whole short story in 30 seconds.
Emir Kusturica’s ad is packed with magicians, acrobats, Balkan pastiche and gorgeous ingénues in black. Just like his movies. Side note: Kusturica has a successful side career playing in a band called The No Smoking Orchestra.
Roman Polanski’s commercial is a jokey tale about a vampire that has an unsettlingly undercurrent of menace and sexual violence. Just like his movies.
And David Lynch’s ad plays out like a nightmare from someone who fell asleep reading a Walter Mosley novel.
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.
The legacy of Rick James, who died in 2004, may be forever entwined with Dave Chappelle’s insane impersonations and MC Hammer’s use of “Super Freak,” but there is another major star whose onetime association with James has been obscured in music history. I’m talking about Neil Young, who once played guitar in a Toronto R&B group called The Mynah Birds, the first mostly white band signed to Motown Records in the mid-60s. The band’s lead singer? A young AWOL American sailor who went by the name of Ricky James Matthews, later Rick James. Before James went full-on funk and Young invented folk-rock, the two connected in this proto-supergroup that included, writes rock historian Nick Warburton, “several notable musicians who later found fame with the likes of Buffalo Springfield and Steppenwolf.” “It would be a gross oversight,” writes Warburton, “to view the group as merely a footnote to Rick James and Neil Young’s careers.”
It would also be a mistake to consider The Mynah Birds a minor league outfit. As you can hear above in “I’ve Got You In My Soul” (top), “It’s My Time” (above—co-written by Young and James), and “I’ll Wait Forever” (below), this was serious rock and roll, with a loose, garage-rock jangle and raw, soulful vocal melodies. The Mynah Birds were also, according to Jimmy McDonough, serious showmen. McDonough describes their onstage presence in his Neil Young biography Shakey:
The Mynah Birds—in black leather jackets, yellow turtlenecks and boots—had quite a surreal scene going…. Those lucky enough to see any of the band’s few gigs say they were electrifying. ‘Neil would stop playing lead, do a harp solo, throw the harmonica way up in the air and Ricky would catch it and continue the solo.’
This is a far cry from the scruffy, earnest Young of Harvest or CSNY or even the Les Paul-wielding jam-rocker of Crazy Horse and his 90s grunge revival period (and more recent Psychedelic Pill). But the folky leads in his guitar work with James’ band hint at his later incarnations.
Is it a stretch to imagine James fronting a band of white Canadian rockers? Young remembers the driven American singer—who crossed the border to avoid his draft assignment—as “a little bit touchy, dominating—but a good guy.” He also told McDonough that James was drawn primarily to the sound of the Rolling Stones, and brought the rest of the band around: “We got more and more into how cool the Stones were. How simple they were and how cool it was.” James had them play “Get Off My Cloud” and “Satisfaction”—before the braids, cocaine, and sequins, Rick James “fancied himself the next Mick Jagger.”
Unfortunately for the band, U.S. authorities caught up with James, Motown shelved the tapes, and they were never released. Discouraged—Young told MOJO Magazine in 1995—he “moved instead towards acoustic music and immediately became very introspective and musically-inward. That’s the beginning of that whole side to my music.” Young got in his hearse and headed for the States, James did his stint in the Navy, and the rest is, well, you know…. But the sound of The Mynah Birds lived on, perhaps, in at least one Neil Young song. His 1967 “Mr. Soul” with Buffalo Springfield, below, is classic sixties rock and soul with a riff lifted right from the Stones.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
