George Harrison had a beloved guitar named Lucy. B.B. King has one named Lucille. Curious, that.
Above, in a new animated video by Blank on Blank, B.B. explains the story behind the naming of his legendary guitar, and then answers the big question: Do you really need to endure hard times to play the blues? No spoilers here.
The audio was recorded in September, 1985 by Warner Bros. A&R manager Joe Smith. While writing a book on the music industry, Smith taped interviews with legendary figures like Dave Brubeck, Lou Reed, Paul McCartney, Joan Baez, Herbie Hancock, David Bowie, George Harrison, Yoko Ono, James Brown, Bo Diddley, Jerry Garcia, Christine McVie, Mick Jagger, Linda Ronstadt and more. Each interview runs 30–60 good minutes. They’re fascinating to listen to, and you can find them on iTunes and the web.
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Giving Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy a re-watch a couple of weeks ago, I found I especially enjoyed William S. Burroughs’ appearance toward the end as — what else? — an aged but wise drug user in whose benevolent presence Matt Dillon’s protagonist comes to life-changing conclusions. That picture represented a break into the mainstream, or close to it, for Van Sant, a director previously known for Mala Noche, a stark black-and-white take on street hustlers on Portland’s Skid Row.
But Burroughs’ presence, among other things, allowedDrugstore Cowboy to keep a certain raw edge. If you really want to see Burroughs’ in a context of cinematic rawness, though, have a look at these home movies. We’ve pulled them out of the internet’s attic as a celebration of the Naked Lunch author’s 101st birthday. Only lightly and tastefully edited, these VHS gems (part one, part two) candidly depict Burroughs at home in Lawrence, Kansas in 1996, just a year before his death.
They also find him in the company of such notable friends as Patti Smith, Steve Buscemi, and Allen Ginsberg, smoking, drinking, and — in Smith’s case — busting out the guitar. Cats, as promised, roam through the frame. You might not call Burroughs himself, made somewhat less exuberant by time, the life of the party, but he does seem to have radiated a kind of askew animating spirit until the end. It certainly kept him surrounded by countercultural luminaries, all of them surely still as keen as that young pharmacy-robber to learn from him.
If you warbled “02134” without hesitation, you probably grew up watching a beloved children’s television show of the 70s.
It turns out Zoom wasn’t the only cool program WGBH hatched in 1972. On March 13, just a couple of months after Zoom’s debut, the station aired Between Time and Timbuktu, a 90-minute special inspired by the work of Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut also wrote the introduction to the published script, a paperback quickie enhanced by production stills and photos taken by Vonnegut’s wife, Jill Krementz. It was as good a forum as any for him to announce his retirement from film, which he cited as a medium “too clanking and real” for his comfort.
The show itself is likely to cause nostalgia for television’s freewheeling, Monty Python era.
Though 1972 wasn’t an entirely silly period, if you’ll recall. The Vietnam War was raging, with Walter Cronkite holding down the CBS Evening News desk.
Between Time and Timbuktu capitalizes on the veteran broadcaster’s ubiquity by casting comedian Ray Goulding of Bob and Ray fame, as an appropriately grave Walter Gesundheit. Bob joined him at the news desk as a fictitious former astronaut. Vonnegut was appreciative of their efforts, stating that American comedians had probably done more to shape his thinking than any other writer.
Also look for William Hickey, who played Prizzi’s Honor’s genial, aged mafia don, in the lead role of Stony Stevenson—now there’s a period character name! If you’ll remember, Stony is also the first civilian in space, at least according to the Sirens of Titan.
If you’ve spent any time at all on a college campus, you’ve heard Bob Marley and the Wailer’s 1984 compilation album Legend wafting from dorm rooms and frat house windows. The longest charting album in the history of Billboard magazine, it contains all of the band’s top 40 hits and more or less stands as every young American’s introduction to the iconic Jamaican singer, if not to reggae music itself. Before Legend, there was Eric Clapton’s cover of Marley’s 1973 single “I Shot the Sheriff.” Clapton’s version hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in ’74—his only number one hit in the U.S.—and introduced American audiences to Marley’s fiery politics, if not always to Marley himself. On what would have been Marley’s 70th birthday, we bring you some early footage of the man and his band.
While many Americans may been rather late to the Bob Marley party, and to reggae, the English have long had a fascination with West Indian music. Ska pioneers like Desmond Dekker drew huge crowds in the UK while remaining much less popular stateside (though Dekker had a number one hit in the U.S. in 1969). But even some Brits didn’t quite know what to do with Marley when he and the Wailers hit English shores in the spring of 1973. Playing the Sundown Theater in the London suburb of Edmonton in support of Dekker and a host of other acts (top), Marley, writes Dangerous Minds, “was still somewhat of an enigma and the Wailers were sonically much more adventurous than some of the other acts on the bill that day…. According to reports at the time, most of the audience at this Wailers gig didn’t ‘get’ the group.”
Nevertheless, that ’73 tour changed the band’s fortunes forever. After three albums, a previous UK tour, and several attempts to break into the pop charts, the Wailer’s fourth record, major label-debut Catch a Fire, finally made them international stars, if not yet every American college freshman’s favorite band. Just above, hear an FM broadcast of another date from the UK leg of the Catch a Firetour (see the Youtube page for the full setlist). After Britain, the band played a run of shows at Paul’s Mall in Boston, then four nights at New York’s Max’s Kansas City. Just a few months later, they hit major cities all over the U.S. before returning to England in November in support of Burnin’, and the song Clapton made famous.
While we tend to associate Marley with peace, love, and patchouli—an impression furthered by Legend, which leans rather heavily on the love songs—these early albums are fierce and militant, and do not hold back from explicit calls for violent revolution and condemnation of historical oppression. It’s a somewhat neglected side of Marley’s legend, but in these concerts, we see just how multifaceted a songwriter and performer he was. Charismatic and vibrant, and flanked by the talented Peter Tosh, Marley exudes star power. Today on his 70th birthday, it’s still as good a time as any to celebrate his life and remember his strident yet soulful calls for love and justice.
Never has the work of so popular a filmmaker felt so distant from the mainstream than in the case of Stanley Kubrick. Just thinking of the man who directed movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining,Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut in the same cultural context as a rom-coms and explosion-intensive blockbusters gets one chuckling. But Robert Ryang took it to the next level when he cut together the trailer above, which converts The Shining, one of the most haunting psychological horror pictures ever made, into Shining, a garden-variety feel-good dramedy.
Ryang, then a young editor, pulled off this astonishing conversion as his winning submission for an Association of Independent Creative Editors contest, which asked for new trailers for existing films that put them into different genres. The Shining trailer’s success has spawned many imitators, including quite a few based on Kubrick’s work alone. Just above, we have 2001 turned into an entirely different kind of science-fiction movie — the kind that try to overwhelm us with their sheer intensity summer after tiring summer.
This trailer produces another lighthearted Kubrick, this time out of perhaps Kubrick’s most dark-hearted piece, the unrelenting Vietnam picture Full Metal Jacket. Here it plays a lot more like Stripes without the satirical edge. Below, Kubrick’s family-unfriendly Christmas film Eyes Wide Shut becomes a family-friendly Christmas film. Ultimately, though, it speaks to the quality of the original movies that, try as they might to convert them into the blandest of standard Hollywood fare, these trailers still can’t fully conceal the presence of something cinematically intriguing indeed. I know I’d still buy a ticket.
The medieval travelogue presents present-day writers and artists with an abundance of material. Writing in an age when the boundaries between fiction and non- were not so sharply drawn, early explorers and sailors had little compunction about embellishing their tales with exaggerations and outright lies. Travelers circulated stories of giants and monsters and credulous readers back home swallowed them whole. Well, sometimes. In the case of the most famed medieval traveler, Marco Polo, scholars have debated whether Il Milione—one of the titles of a narrative based on his accounts—refers to a family nickname or to Polo’s reputation for telling “a million lies.” But whether Polo told the truth or not hardly mattered to Italo Calvino, who found in the explorer’s colorful tales just the inspiration he needed for his 1972 novel Invisible Cities.
More a series of vignettes than a narrative, the book consists of chapter after chapter of Polo describing for Kublai Khan the various cities he encountered on his travels, each one more fantastic and magical than the last. “Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says,” Calvino tells us in his introduction, “but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” As readers, we too listen with rapt attention to curious stories of cities like Olinda, which “grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring” and Eusapia, where “the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground,” so that the dead can “continue their former activities.”
Playing on the bizarre nature of travelers’ tales and the imaginative excesses of exotic romances, Calvino’s novel abounds in delightful architectural absurdities and puzzling allegories, almost demanding to be illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Deciding to meet the challenge, artists Matt Kish, Leighton Connor, Joe Kuth began illustrating Invisible Cities in April of 2014. Their tumblr, Seeing Calvino, updates every Wednesday with a new interpretation of the novel’s many strange cities. At the top of the post, see “Thekla,” the “city forever under construction,” by Kish. Below it, Kuth’s imagining of “Irene,” the “name for a city in the distance, and if you approach it, it changes.” And just above, Connor’s interpretation of “Beersheba,” in which it is believed that “suspended in the heavens, there exists another Beersheba … They also believe, these inhabitants, that another Beersheba exists underground.”
Seeing Calvino isn’t Kish’s first foray into literary illustration. Previously, he undertook an illustration of every page of Melville’s Moby Dick, an impressive effort we featured last week. (Above, see another of his Invisible Cities pieces, “Adelma.”) Of the new, collaborative Calvino project, Kish tells us, “the episodic structure really appealed to us and we thought it was the perfect kind of thing to build a tumblr around and share with people.”
Invisible Cities has been fascinating to create… each of us brings a very different approach to the work. Joe’s Cities tend to be far more literal, realistic and representational, which I find kind of staggering because that is so difficult to do with Calvino. My illustrations are far more abstract and conceptual, trying to show in symbolic ways the ideas behind each chapter. Leighton falls somewhere between us on that spectrum, and his work has elements of realism and abstraction. None of us even talked about this before we started, we simply began independently (after settling on a rotation) and watched each other’s work evolve.
The three artists of Seeing Calvino have to date painted 45 of the 56 cities in Calvino’s novel. Kish has also illustrated Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and his blog features many other graphic interpretations of literary and cinematic works. The Moby Dick project saw publication as a book in 2011. We can only hope that Calvino’s publisher sees the value of an Invisible Cities edition incorporating Kish, Kuth, and Connor’s illustrations.
Attention sulky art school students! Next time you’re stocking up on pre-smashed TVs, baby doll parts, riot cop stencils and mannequins, be sure to say hello to Shepard Fairey.
Fairey’s real, but the store, a brightly lit emporium catering to those seeking to make subversive statements with their art, is the invention of Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia. (The full episode aired last week on IFC.)
Meanwhile, Fairey wins laughs by leaving the comedy to the comedians. Though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Shocking Art Supply employee Shepard F is an admirer of Henry Rollins. You can read all sorts of things into a performance that deadpan.
The segment was filmed in a Portland store where Fairey remembered purchasing art supplies a few years back. As he notes on his website:
I’m no actor, but this part, along with maybe “jaded art student” or “jaded skate shop employee,” are the closest I’ll ever get to method acting.
- Ayun Halliday is an author whose last sting in Portland involved making final edits to the Zinester’s Guide to NYC in a broken down vintage camper infested with flying ants. Follow her @AyunHalliday
This week, Rebecca Onion’s always interesting blog on Slate features historical maps that illustrate the toll measles took on America before the advent of vaccines. The map above brings you back to 1890, when measles-related deaths were concentrated in the South and the Midwest. That year, according to the U.S. census, 8,666 people died from the disease. Fast forward to the period moving from 1912 to 1916, and you’ll find that there were 53,00 measles-related deaths in the US.
America continued to struggle with the disease, until 1962, when scientists mercifully invented a vaccine, and the rate of measles infections and deaths began to plummet. The authors of “Measles Elimination in the United States,” published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases (2004),note that “Since 1997, the reported annual incidence [of measles] has been <1 case/1 million population” — meaning that the disease had been pretty much eradicated in the US. But not elsewhere. The authors go on to warn, “Measles is the greatest vaccine-preventable killer of children in the world today and the eighth leading cause of death among persons of all ages worldwide.” It doesn’t take much to deduce that if we dismiss the science that has served us so well, we could see dreadfully colored maps all over again. Except this time the dark orange will likely be concentrated on the left coast.
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