Hear 280 Blues, Country, Reggae & Rock Songs Keith Richards Namechecks in His Memoir, Life

in Music | July 19th, 2016

Image by Machocarioca, via Wikimedia Commons

You don’t have to, like, stretch your brain or anything to rattle off a list of Keith Richards’ influences. If you’ve ever heard a Rolling Stones song, you’ve heard him pull out his Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry riffs, and he’s never been shy about supporting and naming his idols. He’s played with Waters, Berry, and many more blues and early rock and roll greats, and after borrowing heavily from them, the Stones gave back by promoting and touring with the artists who provided the raw material for their sound.

Then there’s the 2002 compilation The Devil’s Music, culled from Richards’ personal favorite collection of blues, soul, and R&B classics, and featuring big names like Robert Johnson, Little Richard, Bob Marley, Albert King, and Lead Belly, and more obscure artists like Amos Milburn, and Jackie Brenston. You may also recall last year’s Under the Influence, a Netflix documentary by 20 Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville, in which Richards namechecks dozens of influential musicians—from his mum’s love of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, to his and Jagger’s youthful adoration of Waters and Berry, to his rock star hangouts with Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf.

Point is, Keith Richards loves to talk about the music he loves. A big part of the Stones’ appeal—at least in their 60s/early 70s prime—was that they were such eager fans of the musicians they emulated. Yes, Jagger’s phony country drawls and blues howls could be a little embarrassing, his chicken dance a little less than soulful. But the earnestness with which the young Englishmen pursued their Americana ideals is infectious, and Richards has spread his love of U.S. roots music through every medium, including his 2010 memoir Life, a wickedly ironic title—given Richards’ No. 1 position on the “rock stars most-likely-to-die list,” writes Michiko Kakutani, “and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war.”

It’s also a very poignant title, given Richards’ single-minded pursuit of a life governed by music he’s loved as passionately, or more so, as the women in his life. Richards, Kakutani writes, dedicated himself “like a monk to mastering the blues.” Of this calling, he writes, “you were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin.” In the course of the book, Richards mentions over 200 artists, songs, and recordings that directly inspired him early or later in life, and one enterprising reader has compiled them all, in order of appearance, in the Spotify playlist above.

You’ll find here no surprises, but if you’re a Stones fan, it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t put this one on and listen to it straight through without skipping a single track. When it comes to blues, soul, reggae, country, and rock and roll, Keith Richards has impeccable taste. Scattered amidst the Aaron Neville, Etta James, Gram Parsons, Elvis, Wilson Pickett, etc. are plenty of classic Stones recordings that feel right at home next to their influences and peers.

With the exception of reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff and Sly & Robbie, most of the tracks are from U.S. or U.S.-inspired artists (Tom Jones, Cliff Richard). Again, no surprises. Not everyone Richards appropriated has appreciated the homage (Chuck Berry long held a grudge), but were it not for his fandom and apprenticeship, it’s possible a great many blues records would have gone unsold, and some artists may have faded into obscurity. Thanks to playlists like these, they can live on in a digital age that doesn’t always do so well at acknowledging or remembering its history.

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

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Browse & Stream Jeff Buckley’s Entire Record Collection on a New Interactive Web Site

in Music | July 19th, 2016

Jeff Buckley released just one studio album, Grace, before the emerging star died unexpectedly in May, 1997, drowning while swimming in the waters flowing from the Mississippi River. He was only 30 years old.

Given his painfully short discography, fans will delight in the newly-dropped album, You and I, which features, among other things, previously-unreleased Buckley covers of songs originally recorded by Bob Dylan (“Just Like a Woman”); Sly & the Family Stone (“Everyday People”); Led Zeppelin (“Night Flight”) and more. The album is now streaming on Spotify.

Starved for some more Buckley music? Then you’ll also want to check out this new interactive website which lets you browse/stream every album in Buckley’s varied vinyl record collection. Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Van Morrison, the Stones, Dylan, Bowie, Coltrane and The Clash–they’re all part of the collection. The video above shows you how to take full advantage of the new site. Enjoy.

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In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

in Environment, Literature | July 18th, 2016

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Commons

The mind of Kurt Vonnegut, like the protagonist of his best-known novel Slaughterhouse-Five, must have got “unstuck in time” somewhere along the line. How else could he have managed to write his distinctive brand of satirical but sincere fiction, hyper-aware of past, present, and future all at once? It must have made him a promising contributor indeed for Volkswagen’s 1988 Time magazine ad campaign, when the company “approached a number of notable thinkers and asked them to write a letter to the future — some words of advice to those living in 2088, to be precise.”

The beloved writer’s letter to the “Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088” begins as follows:

It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn’t do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

You can read the whole thing at Letters of Note, where Vonnegut goes on to give his own interpretation of humanity’s perspective at the time, when “we were seeing ourselves as a new sort of glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything and then make love — and then double in size again.” He puts the question to his future-inhabiting readers directly: “Is it possible that we aimed rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?”

Finally, Vonnegut issues seven commandments — as much directed to readers of the late 20th century as to readers of the late 21st, or indeed to those of the early 21st in which you read this now — intended to help humanity avert what he sees as the utter catastrophe looming ahead:

Reduce and stabilize your population.
Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
And so on. Or else.

Volkswagen had asked him to look one hundred years into the future. As of this writing, 2088 lies less than 75 years ahead, and how many of us would agree that we’ve heeded most or even any of his prescriptions? Then again, Vonnegut grants that pessimism may have got the better of him; perhaps the future will bring with it a utopia after all, one where “nobody will have to leave home to go to work or school, or even stop watching television. Everybody will sit around all day punching the keys of computer terminals connected to everything there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astronauts,” a comically dystopian utopia, and not an entirely un-prescient one — a Vonnegutian vision indeed.

via Letters of Note/Va Viper

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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French Artist Creates Digital Street Art in the Sky

in Architecture, Art, Environment, Life, Photography | July 18th, 2016

We humans are a quarrelsome lot. But one thing that unites us is the time spent on our backs, gazing at clouds for the pleasure of identifying whatever objects they may fleetingly resemble.

It’s a very relaxing activity.

I was surprised there’s an actual, medical name for it: pareidolia, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful, image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.”

Thomas Lamadieu, the artist whose work is showcased above, has a different, but not wholly unrelated condition.

A photo posted by Artzop® (@artzop) on Mar 31, 2015 at 10:07am PDT

Most of us prefer to contemplate the heavens in a bucolic setting. Lamadieu’s art compels him to look upwards from a more urban landscape. The tops of the buildings hemming him in supply with irregularly shaped frames, which he captures using a fish eye lens. Later, he fills them in with Microsoft Paint drawings, which frequently feature a bearded man whose t‑shirt is striped in sky blue. Negative space, not Crayola, supplies the color here.

Think of it as street art in the sky.

Not every day can be a brilliant azure, but it hardly matters when even Lamadieu’s grayest views exhibit a determined playfulness. It takes a very unique sort of eye to tease a pink nippled, stripe-limbed bunny from a steely UK sky.

Like many street artists, he takes a global approach, traveling the world in search of giant unclaimed canvases. His portfolio contains vistas originally captured in Hong Kong, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Austria, Canada, Belgium, and the United States, as well as his native France.

“The bearded man in my images stands for the sky itself,” he told The Independent, adding that his is a wholly secular vision.

View a gallery of Lamadieu’s sky art here.

h/t to reader Alan Goldwasser

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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How to Jumpstart Your Creative Process with William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

in Writing | July 18th, 2016

The inner critic creates writer’s block and stifles adventurous writing, hems it in with safe clichés and overthinking. Every writer has to find his or her own way to get free of that sourpuss rationalist who insists on strangling each thought with logical analysis and fitting each idea into an oppressive predetermined scheme or ideology. William S. Burroughs, one of the most adventurous writers to emerge from the mid-20th century, famously employed what he called the cut-up method.

Developed by Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin, this literary take on the collage technique used by avant-garde artists like Georges Braque originated with Surrealist Tristan Tzara, who “proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat.” The suggestion was so provocative, Burroughs claims in his essay “The Cut-Up Method,” that cut-ups were thereafter “grounded… on the Freudian couch.”

Since Burroughs and Gysin’s literary redeployment of the method in 1959, it has proved useful not only for poets and novelists, but for songwriters like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain. And any frustrated novelist, poet, or songwriter may use it to shake off the habitual thought patterns that cage creativity or choke it off entirely. How so?

Well, it’s best at this point to defer to the authority, Burroughs himself, who explains the cut-up technique thus:

The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise)–in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.

Burroughs gives us “one way” to do it. There may be infinite others, and it’s up to you to find what works. I myself have pushed through a creative funk by making montages from scraps of ancient poetry and phrases of modern pop, clichés ripped from the headlines and esoteric quotes from obscure religious texts—pieced together more or less at random, then edited to fit the form of a song, poem, or whatever. Virtual cut-and-paste makes scissors unnecessary, but the physical act may precipitate epiphanies. “Images shift sense under the scissors,” Burroughs writes; then he hints at a synesthesia experience: “smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic.”

Who is this method for? Everyone, Burroughs asserts. “Cuts ups are for everyone,” just as Tzara remarked that “poetry is for everyone.” No need to have established some experimental art world bona fides, or even call oneself an artist at all; the method is “experimental in the sense of being something to do.” In the short video at the top, you can hear Burroughs explain the technique further, adding his occult spin on things by noting that many cut-ups “seem to refer to future events.” On that account, we may suspend belief.

As Jennie Skerl notes in her essay on Burroughs, cut-up theory “parallels avant-garde literary theory” like Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction. “All writing is in fact cut ups,” writes Burroughs, meaning not that all writing is pieced together with scissors and glue, but that it’s all “a collage of words read heard overheard.” This theory should liberate us from onerous notions of originality and authenticity, tied to ideas of the author as a sui generis, all-knowing god and the text as an expression of cosmically ordered meaning. (Another surrealist writing method, the game of Exquisite Corpse, makes the point literal.) All that metaphysical baggage weighs us down. Everything’s been done—both well and badly—before, Burroughs writes. Follow his methods and his insistent creative maxim and you cannot make a mistake—“Assume that the worst has happened,” he writes, “and act accordingly.”

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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 ( 1 ) |

How to Start a Start-Up: A Free Online Course from Y Combinator Taught at Stanford

in Business, How to Learn for Free, Online Courses, Stanford, Technology | July 18th, 2016

If you have any entrepreneurial aspirations, you’ve likely heard of Y Combinator (YC), an accelerator based in Silicon Valley that’s been called “the world’s most powerful start-up incubator” (Fast Company) or “a spawning ground for emerging tech giants” (Fortune). Twice a year, YC carefully selects a batch of start-ups, gives them $120,000 of seed funding each (in exchange for some equity), and then helps nurture the fledgling ventures to the next stage of development. YC hosts dinners where prominent entrepreneurs come to speak and offer advice. They hold “Demo Days,” where the start-ups can pitch their concepts and products to investors, and they have “Office Hours,” where budding entrepreneurs can work through problems with the seasoned entrepreneurs who run YC. Then, with a little luck, these new start-ups will experience the same success as previous YC companies, Dropbox and Airbnb.

Given Y Combinator’s mission, it makes perfect sense that YC has ties with Stanford University, another institution that has hatched giant tech companies–Google, Cisco, Yahoo and more. Back in 2014, Sam Altman (the president of Y Combinator) put together a course at Stanford called “How to Start a Start-Up,” which essentially offers students an introduction to the key lessons taught to YC companies. Altman presents the first two lectures. Then some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley take over. Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder), Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder), Marc Andreessen (Netscape creator/general partner of Andreessen Horowitz), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo CEO, prominent Googler), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder), Ron Conway (Silicon Valley super angel), Paul Graham (YC founder)–they all make an appearance in the course.

You can watch the complete set of 20 lectures above, which covers everything you need to start a start-up–from creating a team, to building products users love, to raising money, to creating the right culture and beyond. Altman’s site also features a recommended reading list, plus a set of additional resources. (Bonus: A Georgetown undergrad has created an ebook pulling together the class notes from the course. If you download it, please donate a few bucks so he can pick up some ramen.) The videos for “How to Start a Start-Up”–which will be added to our collection of Free Online Business Courses–can be found on YouTube and iTunes U.

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Fashionable 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

in Fashion, History | July 17th, 2016

When the Romans pushed their way north into the German provinces, they built (circa 90 AD) The Saalburg, a fort that protected the boundary between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribal territories. At its peak, 2,000 people lived in the fort and the attached village. It remained active until around 260 AD.

Somewhere during the 19th century, The Saalburg was rediscovered and excavated, then later fully reconstructed. It’s now a UNESCO World Heritage site and houses the Saalburg Museum, which contains many Roman relics, including a 2,000 year old shoe, apparently found in a local well.

If you think the Italians have mastered the craft of making shoes, well, they don’t have much on their ancestors. According to the site Romans Across Europe, the Romans “were the originators of the entire-foot-encasing shoe.” The site continues:

There was a wide variety of shoes and sandals for men and women. Most were constructed like military caligae, with a one-piece upper nailed between layers of the sole. Many had large open-work areas made by cutting or punching circles, triangles, squares, ovals, etc. in rows or grid-like patterns. Others were more enclosed, having only holes for the laces. Some very dainty women’s and children’s shoes still had thick nailed soles.

The image above, which puts all of the Roman’s shoe-making skill on display, comes to us via Reddit and imgur.

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How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: A Short Free Course

in History | July 17th, 2016

Over on iTunes, you can find a short course (8 lectures in total) on the age-old mystery: How did Hannibal and his elephants cross the Alps during the Second Punic War? The course was presented by archeologist Patrick Hunt in the Continuing Studies program at Stanford University, back in 2007. Here’s the description for the course:

Hannibal is a name that evoked fear among the ancient Romans for decades. His courage, cunning and intrepid march across the dangerous Alps in 218 BCE with his army and war elephants make for some of the most exciting passages found in ancient historical texts written by Polybius, Livy, and Appian. And they continue to inspire historians and archaeologists today. The mystery of his exact route is still a topic of debate, one that has consumed Patrick Hunt (Director of Stanford’s Alpine Archaeology Project) for more than a decade. This course examines Hannibal’s childhood and his young soldierly exploits in Spain. Then it follows him over the Pyrenees and into Gaul, the Alps, Italy, and beyond, examining his victories over the Romans, his brilliance as a military strategist, and his legacy after the Punic Wars. Along the way, students will learn about archaeologists’ efforts to retrace Hannibal’s journey through the Alps and the cutting-edge methods that they are using. Hunt has been on foot over every major Alpine pass and has now determined the most probable sites where archaeological evidence can be found to help solve the mystery.

This course on the great military leader will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities as well as our specialized list of courses on Ancient history, literary and philosophy.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Are, you’ll definitely want to check out the courses offered by Stanford Continuing Studies (where I also happen to work). The program also regularly offers online courses, for students living anywhere on this planet.

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!

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 19 ) |

Hear 280 Blues, Country, Reggae & Rock Songs Keith Richards Namechecks in His Memoir, Life

Browse & Stream Jeff Buckley’s Entire Record Collection on a New Interactive Web Site

In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

French Artist Creates Digital Street Art in the Sky

How to Jumpstart Your Creative Process with William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

How to Start a Start-Up: A Free Online Course from Y Combinator Taught at Stanford

Fashionable 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: A Short Free Course

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