Hear a Great 4‑Hour Radio Documentary on the Life & Music of Jimi Hendrix: Features Rare Recordings & Interviews

The lega­cy of Jimi Hendrix’s estate has been in con­flict in recent years. Since his father’s death in 2002, his sib­lings have squab­bled over his mon­ey and bat­tled unli­censed and boot­leg venders. But Hendrix’s musi­cal lega­cy con­tin­ues to amaze and inspire, as Janie Hen­drix—his step­sis­ter and CEO of the com­pa­ny that man­ages his music—has released album after album of rar­i­ties over the last cou­ple decades. Not all of these releas­es have pleased Hen­drix fans, who have called some of them mer­ce­nary and thought­less. But it is always a joy to dis­cov­er an unheard record­ing, whether a live per­for­mance, wob­bly stu­dio out­take, or semi-pol­ished demo, so many of which reveal the ter­ri­to­ry Hen­drix intend­ed to chart before he died.

In 1982, some of that unre­leased mate­r­i­al made it into a four-hour Paci­fi­ca Radio doc­u­men­tary, which you can hear in four parts here. Pro­duced by what the sta­tion calls “some of Pacifica’s finest” at its Berke­ley “flag­ship sta­tion 94.1 FM,” the doc­u­men­tary does an excel­lent job of plac­ing these record­ings in con­text.

With help from Hen­drix biog­ra­ph­er David Hen­der­son, the pro­duc­ers com­piled “pre­vi­ous­ly unheard and rare record­ings” and inter­views from Hen­drix, his fam­i­ly, Noel Red­ding, Ornette Cole­man, Ste­vie Won­der, John Lee Hook­er, John McLaugh­lin, Chas Chan­dler, and more. After a new­ly-record­ed intro­duc­tion and a col­lage of Hen­drix inter­view sound­bites, Part 1 gets right down to it with a live ver­sion of “Are You Expe­ri­enced?” that puls­es from the speak­ers in hyp­not­ic waves (lis­ten to it on a sol­id pair of head­phones if you can).

“I want to have stereo where the sound goes up,” says Hen­drix in a sound­bite, “and behind and under­neath, you know? But all you can get now is across and across.” Some­how, even in ordi­nary stereo, Hen­drix had a way of mak­ing sound sur­round his lis­ten­ers, envelop­ing them in warm fuzzy waves of feed­back and reverb. But he also had an equal­ly cap­ti­vat­ing way with lan­guage, and not only in his song lyrics. Though the received por­trait of Hen­drix is of a shy, retir­ing per­son who expressed him­self bet­ter with music, in many of these inter­views he weaves togeth­er detailed mem­o­ries and whim­si­cal dreams and fan­tasies, com­pos­ing imag­i­na­tive nar­ra­tives on the spot. Sev­er­al extem­po­ra­ne­ous lines could have eas­i­ly flow­ered into new songs.

Hen­drix briefly tells the sto­ry of his rise through the R&B and soul cir­cuit as an almost effort­less glide from the ranks of strug­gling side­men, to play­ing behind Sam Cooke, Lit­tle Richard, and Ike and Tina Turn­er to start­ing his solo career. We move through the most famous stages of Hen­drix’s life, with its icon­ic moments and cau­tion­ary tales, and by the time we get to Part 4, we start hear­ing a Hen­drix most peo­ple nev­er do, a pre­view of where his music might have gone into the seventies—with jazzy pro­gres­sions and long, wind­ing instru­men­tal pas­sages pow­ered by the shuf­fling beats of Bud­dy Miles.

As has become abun­dant­ly clear in the almost four decades since Hen­drix’s death, he had a tremen­dous amount of new music left in him, stretch­ing in direc­tions he nev­er got to pur­sue. But the bit of it he left behind offers proof of just how influ­en­tial he was not only on rock gui­tarists but also on blues and jazz fusion play­ers of the fol­low­ing decade. His pio­neer­ing record­ing style (best heard on Elec­tric Lady­land) also drove for­ward, and in some cas­es invent­ed, many of the stu­dio tech­niques in use today. Process­es that can now be auto­mat­ed in min­utes might took hours to orches­trate in the late six­ties. Watch­ing Hen­drix mix in the stu­dio “was like watch­ing a bal­let,” says pro­duc­er Elliot Maz­er.

This doc­u­men­tary keeps its focus square­ly on Hen­drix’s work, phe­nom­e­nal tal­ent, and unique­ly inno­v­a­tive cre­ative thought, and as such it pro­vides the per­fect set­ting for the rare and then-unre­leased record­ings you may not have heard before. Paci­fi­ca re-released the doc­u­men­tary last year as part of its annu­al fundrais­ing cam­paign. The sta­tion is again solic­it­ing funds to help main­tain its impres­sive archives and dig­i­tize many more hours of tape like the Hen­drix pro­gram, so stop by and make a dona­tion if you can.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band” for The Bea­t­les, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)

Jimi Hen­drix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Gui­tar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Bud­dy Guy & B.B. King

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view on Sep­tem­ber 11, 1970: Lis­ten to the Com­plete Audio

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

“Every Country in the World”–Two Videos Tell You Curious Facts About 190+ Countries

From Wen­dover Productions–a Youtube chan­nel ded­i­cat­ed to explain­ing how our world works, from trav­el, to eco­nom­ics, to geography–comes a two part series called “Every Coun­try in the World.”

In 30 min­utes, the videos tra­verse the world, telling you curi­ous facts about 190+ coun­tries, start­ing with this: Chi­na, despite being so vast, does­n’t have time zones. It’s the same time across the entire coun­try. Mean­while it’s neigh­bor, Afghanistan is “off­set from Green­wich Mean Time by a 30 minute inter­val.” When it’s 9 am in San Fran­cis­co and 5:00 pm in Lon­don, it’s actu­al­ly 9:30 pm in Kab­ul.

How about anoth­er fac­toid: Cana­da is so geo­graph­i­cal­ly large that it’s east­ern bor­der is clos­er to Croa­t­ia than Van­cou­ver. Get the gist?

You can watch “Every Coun­try in the World” above and below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Lets You Down­load Thou­sands of Maps from the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

From Caligari to Hitler: A Look at How Cinema Laid the Foundation for Tyranny in Weimar Germany

When I first got into film crit­i­cism and was final­ly in a col­lege town with a decent used book­shop, Siegfried Kracauer’s From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Psy­cho­log­i­cal His­to­ry of the Ger­man Film was in that first huge batch of books I bought to place on my shelf. I had just watched The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari (watch it online here) for the first time, and had seen the book ref­er­enced often. Alas, it also sat on my shelf unread, along with some oth­er thick crit­i­cal tomes.

But need­less to say, I guess I’m okay with that now, for Kyle Kall­gren’s 16 minute dis­til­la­tion of Kracauer’s influ­en­tial 1947 book does an amaz­ing job of explain­ing the critic’s main thesis–that the kinds of heroes and vil­lains, along with the kind of sto­ries that were suc­cess­ful in Weimar-era Ger­many, were lay­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal ground­work for the rise of fas­cism and Hitler. Because films are a mass medi­um that take a mass of peo­ple to make and con­sume, they reveal the sub­con­scious mind of its soci­ety. Kra­cauer was­n’t say­ing that the cre­ators were anti-Semit­ic or Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers. In fact, Weimar’s best known direc­tors fled the Nazis and made films in Amer­i­ca. But there was some­thing in the air, so to speak, that in ret­ro­spect made Hitler seem like an inevitable real-world out­come of these var­i­ous forces.

Kracauer’s the­sis was influ­enced by the writ­ers and philoso­phers of the Frank­furt School, who posit­ed that a “cul­ture indus­try” of mass-pro­duced art helped rein­force a stamp­ing out of iden­ti­ty. Anti-Marx­ists may call this passé, but we still talk about these ideas when­ev­er there’s a think piece about vio­lence in the movies reflect­ing a vio­lent culture—but usu­al­ly the wrong way around, sug­gest­ing that vio­lent movies cre­ate vio­lent peo­ple. Or look at how each ver­sion of Bat­man is seen as reflect­ing con­cerns of the time in which it is made.

As Kall­gren says in his brief video descrip­tion, “I felt a strong need to make this one.” After he sums up Kracauer’s work he tracks the paths of those direc­tors and stars of Weimar Germany—I for­got that the sleep­walk­ing Cesare of Cali­gari was played by the same actor who plays the Nazi major in Casablan­ca—he turns to Amer­i­ca, cir­ca 2016, in par­tic­u­lar post-elec­tion. This is not explic­it­ly to com­pare a cer­tain per­son to Hitler, going full God­win. But rather, Kall­gren looks to our own block­busters, our sto­ries, our own cul­ture indus­try to see what greater nar­ra­tive is going on here. The con­tra­dic­tions come thick and fast at the end, and will pro­vide much to debate.

As a side note, Kallgren’s work shows the pow­er of video essays to bring alive and resus­ci­tate major works of cul­tur­al crit­i­cism. We hope he and oth­ers start to adapt oth­er works in the future.

Many of the films ref­er­enced in this video essay– like Cali­gariNos­fer­atu and Metrop­o­liscan be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch Fritz Lang’s 1927 Mas­ter­piece

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

Watch The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, the Influ­en­tial Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Film (1920)

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

Where Hor­ror Film Began: The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Fritz Lang Tells the Riv­et­ing Sto­ry of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Ger­many

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Late Alan Thicke Hosts a Twin Peaks Behind-the-Scenes Special (1990)

When Alan Thicke died this week, he died a true man of tele­vi­sion. His more than forty-year career saw him not just star in the hit ABC sit­com Grow­ing Pains but host game, talk, and dance shows as well as com­pose the theme songs for Dif­f’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life. His final tweet praised the new sea­son of the Net­flix reboot of Full House (Grow­ing Pains’ near-con­tem­po­rary) on which he made a guest appear­ance. But he did­n’t live exclu­sive­ly in the main­stream: in Sep­tem­ber of 1990, he con­fessed — on nation­al tele­vi­sion, of course — his love of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s bound­ary-push­ing, real­i­ty bend­ing mys­tery series Twin Peaks.

“Every decade has its TV cult,” says Thicke, open­ing this ABC sea­son-pre­view spe­cial from the Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios lot. “Now, I was nev­er a Trekkie myself, but I do con­fess, I am a Peak­er.” A fair few view­ers across Amer­i­ca could, at that moment, say the same, since enthu­si­asm for the show peaked, as it were, around the end of its first sea­son and the begin­ning of its sec­ond, the pre­miere of which the net­work put togeth­er this seg­ment to hype (along­side the debut of Cop Rock, the non-iron­ic police-pro­ce­du­ral/­mu­si­cal). “There’s so much more to Twin Peaks than a riv­et­ing mur­der mys­tery,” Thicke con­tin­ues. “There’s a whole look and a feel and a tex­ture,” an expe­ri­ence “180 degrees away from any­thing else on tele­vi­sion.”

These fif­teen min­utes include brief con­ver­sa­tions with Twin Peaks’ cre­ators and col­lab­o­ra­tors. “It need­ed to be away from the reg­u­lar world and be a kind of a hair of a dream spot,” says Lynch, some­what cryp­ti­cal­ly, “and it need­ed a woods that had a wind of a mys­tery, you know, blow­ing through it.” Kyle MacLach­lan, who starred as FBI Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er, offers fur­ther insight into the show’s appeal: “The peo­ple don’t… they don’t behave nor­mal­ly.” It also includes Sheryl Lee, who played the mur­dered home­com­ing queen Lau­ra Palmer, read­ing from the char­ac­ter’s “secret diary… her real diary.”

Using a map of the epony­mous small Wash­ing­ton town, Thicke attempts to catch those who missed all or part of Twin Peaks’ first sea­son up on its many plot threads, all direct­ly or indi­rect­ly relat­ed to the ques­tion of who killed Lau­ra Palmer. That cen­tral mys­tery would dri­ve the plot all the way up to the mid­dle of the sec­ond sea­son, and its res­o­lu­tion result­ed in declin­ing rat­ings and even­tu­al can­cel­la­tion. But as we learned with from the col­lec­tion of video essays we fea­tured yes­ter­day, the work of David Lynch is built on a foun­da­tion not of plot, but of pure images and sounds.

That so many more of us now under­stand that has placed us well to enjoy Twin Peaks’ long-await­ed third sea­son. Set to pre­miere next year on Show­time, it has, like Full House — two shows sel­dom com­pared to one anoth­er — trans­posed its core con­cepts from the realm of 20th-cen­tu­ry net­work tele­vi­sion into that of 21st-cen­tu­ry spe­cial­ty tele­vi­sion. “Revis­it­ing all this ter­ri­to­ry, there’s a fresh­ness to it, there’s a light­ness to it,” says MacLach­lan in the new behind-the-scenes teas­er above. Encour­ag­ing words, but one hopes above all that the project retains the ani­mat­ing cre­ative ten­sion expressed a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago, when Thicke asked how thought-out the show real­ly was: “Not too thought-out,” insist­ed Lynch. “Very thought-out,” insist­ed Frost.

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 20 Min­utes of Mark Frost’s New Secret His­to­ry of Twin Peaks, the Book Fans Have Wait­ed 25 Years to Read

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Ange­lo Badala­men­ti Reveals How He and David Lynch Com­posed the Twin Peaks‘ “Love Theme”

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Exper­i­men­tal Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Dan­ish Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recre­at­ed in an Adorable Paper Ani­ma­tion

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

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.

The Surreal Filmmaking of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

The inter­net is full of peo­ple who don’t under­stand David Lynch movies: some ask for appre­ci­a­tion assis­tance on Quo­ra, oth­ers defend their dis­taste on Red­dit, and oth­ers still sim­ply declare both the film­mak­er and his fans a lost cause. But the inter­net is also full of peo­ple who, whether they claim to under­stand them or not, gen­uine­ly love David Lynch movies, and some of them make video essays explain­ing, or at least shed­ding addi­tion­al light on, just what makes the seem­ing­ly inscrutable likes of Eraser­headBlue Vel­vetMul­hol­land Dri­ve, and the tele­vi­sion series Twin Peaks (as well as Lynch’s less-acclaimed projects) such high cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ments.

The lat­est, “David Lynch — The Elu­sive Sub­con­scious,” comes from Lewis Bond’s Chan­nel Criswell, the source for video essays on Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasu­jiro Ozu, Stan­ley Kubrick, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, and the hor­ror genre pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. It includes a clip of Char­lie Rose ask­ing Lynch him­self the mean­ing of the word “Lynchi­an.” The direc­tor’s reply: “I haven’t got a clue. When you’re inside of it, you can’t see it.”

Bond looks for Lynchi­an by div­ing right in, find­ing how Lynch’s movies go about their sig­na­ture work of “pro­duc­ing the unfa­mil­iar­i­ty in that which was once famil­iar” by using just the right kinds of vague­ness, ambi­gu­i­ty, incom­plete­ness, incon­sis­ten­cy, unpre­dictabil­i­ty, and dual­ism in their images, sounds and sto­ries to pro­duce just the right kinds of doubt, fear, and dis­tress in their char­ac­ters and view­ers alike.


A fur­ther def­i­n­i­tion of the Lynchi­an comes in “What is ‘Lynchi­an’?” by Fan­dor’s Kevin B. Lee, which adapts a sec­tion of film crit­ic and Lynch schol­ar Den­nis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man from Anoth­er Place. It, too, draws on an episode of Char­lie Rose, though not any of Lynch’s appear­ances at the table but David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s. “What the real­ly great artists do is, they’re entire­ly them­selves,” Wal­lace says in response to a ques­tion about his inter­est in Lynch’s work. “They’ve got their own vision, their own way of frac­tur­ing real­i­ty, and if it’s authen­tic and true, you will feel it in your nerve end­ings. And this is what Blue Vel­vet did for me.”

Wal­lace had appeared on the show osten­si­bly to pro­mote his essay col­lec­tion A Sup­pos­ed­ly Fun Thing I’ll Nev­er Do Again, which con­tains the expand­ed ver­sion of “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” the 1996 Pre­miere mag­a­zine arti­cle that took him to the set of Lost High­way and on the intel­lec­tu­al mis­sion of pin­ning down what, exact­ly, gives Lynch’s work at its best so much and so strange a pow­er. Lee, via Lim, quotes Wal­lace’s work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of “Lynchi­an,” which for many fans remains the best any­one has ever come up with: that it “refers to a par­tic­u­lar kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mun­dane com­bine in such a way as to reveal the for­mer’s per­pet­u­al con­tain­ment with­in the lat­ter.”

As one of the most visu­al­ly ori­ent­ed of all liv­ing film­mak­ers, Lynch express­es this par­tic­u­lar kind of irony much less in words than in imagery, specif­i­cal­ly the kind of imagery that view­ers describe in terms of dreams — and not always the good kind. “Beau­ti­ful Night­mares: David Lynch’s Col­lec­tive Dream” by Indiewire’s Nel­son Car­va­jal gath­ers some of the ele­ments of Lynch’s visions: the danc­ing, the pick­et-fence domes­tic­i­ty, the red cur­tains, the blondes, the creepy stares, the dis­fig­ure­ment, the voyeurism. “I grew up in the north­west, in a very, very beau­ti­ful world,” says Lynch, fair­ly sum­ming up the expe­ri­ence of his own movies in the video’s only spo­ken words. “A lot of my life has been dis­cov­er­ing this strange sick­ness. It’s got a fas­ci­na­tion to me. I love the idea of going into some­thing and dis­cov­er­ing a world, being able to watch it and expe­ri­ence it. It’s a dis­turb­ing thing, because it’s a trip beneath a beau­ti­ful sur­face, but to a fair­ly uneasy inte­ri­or.”

Sev­er­al of Lynch’s tech­niques come in for more thor­ough analy­sis in a tril­o­gy of video essays Andreas Hal­skov made for the Dan­ish film-stud­ies jour­nal 16:9“Between Two Worlds” deals with the host of “com­pet­ing moods, gen­res and tonal­i­ties” that man­i­fest in each one of his films and pro­duce “an ambiva­lent or uncan­ny expe­ri­ence on the part of the view­er.” “What’s the Fre­quen­cy, David?” explores the pres­ence in Lynch’s work of “noise and faulty wiring, hic­cups and mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” and “elec­tron­ic devices that don’t work,” all of which illus­trate “the con­stant bat­tle between the con­scious and the uncon­scious world” so impor­tant to his sto­ries. “Mov­ing Pic­tures” iden­ti­fies the influ­ence of painters like René Magritte, Fran­cis Bacon, Edward Hop­per, Vil­helm Ham­mer­shøi, and Sal­vador Dalí on Lynch who, hav­ing start­ed out as a painter him­self, begins his films not with sto­ries but images and builds them from there.

What­ev­er has influ­enced Lynch’s movies, Lynch’s movies have exert­ed plen­ty of influ­ence of their own. Crit­ic Pauline Kael called Lynch “the first pop­u­lar sur­re­al­ist,” and with that pop­u­lar­i­ty has come an inte­gra­tion of his brand of sur­re­al­ism into the wider cin­e­mat­ic zeit­geist. Jacob T. Swin­ney’s “Not Direct­ed By David Lynch” cuts togeth­er five min­utes’ worth of espe­cial­ly Lynchi­an moments from oth­er direc­tors’ movies over the past quar­ter-cen­tu­ry, a for­mi­da­ble selec­tion includ­ing Adri­an Lyne’s Jacob’s Lad­der, Dar­ren Aronof­sky’s Pi and Requiem for a Dream, Richard Kel­ly’s Don­nie Darko, Gas­par Noé’s Irréversible and Jonathan Glaz­er’s Under the Skin.

But while some film­mak­ers have con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly drawn inspi­ra­tion from or paid homage to Lynch, oth­er film­mak­ers have tried to cash in on the pop­u­lar­i­ty of his style in much less cre­ative ways. Or at least so argues “David Lynch’s Lost High­way as a Com­men­tary on Oth­er Direc­tors” by Jeff Keel­ing, a video essay that puts Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir up against a few oth­er pieces of film and tele­vi­sion that came out in the years pre­ced­ing it, espe­cial­ly the Oliv­er Stone-direct­ed fea­ture Nat­ur­al Born Killers and the Oliv­er Stone-pro­duced series Wild Palms. Point­ing out the numer­ous ways in which Lynch ref­er­ences the too-direct bor­row­ings that Stone and oth­ers had recent­ly made from his own work, Keel­ing not uncon­vinc­ing­ly frames Lost High­way as, among oth­er things, a cin­e­mat­ic j’ac­cuse.

Though poor­ly reviewed upon its orig­i­nal release, Lost High­way has put togeth­er a decent fol­low­ing in the near­ly two decades since. But what­ev­er acclaim it now draws can’t com­pare to the praise lav­ished upon Lynch’s 2001 tele­vi­sion-pilot-turned-fea­ture-film Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, which a BBC crit­ics poll recent­ly named the best movie of the 21st cen­tu­ry so far. In Mul­hol­land Dri­ve: How Lynch Manip­u­lates You,” Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, breaks down how it sub­verts the expec­ta­tions we’ve devel­oped through moviego­ing itself, one of the sto­ry­telling strate­gies Lynch uses to make this par­tic­u­lar tale of death, sex, Hol­ly­wood, the sud­den loss of iden­ti­ty (and, need­less to say, a plat­inum-haired ingenue, men­ac­ing heav­ies, and a mys­te­ri­ous dwarf) so very com­pelling indeed.

If, how­ev­er, none of these video essays get you believ­ing in Lynch as a cre­ative genius, then you’ll sure­ly enjoy a hearty laugh with Joe McClean’s “How to Make a David Lynch Film,” a short but elab­o­rate satire of the tropes of Lynchi­an­ism pre­sent­ed as an instruc­tion­al film — made in the style of Lynch’s beloved 1950s — inside the set­ting of Lost High­way. Its com­mand­ments, many of which over­lap in one way or anoth­er with the points made in the ana­lyt­i­cal video essays high­er above, include “Start by hav­ing dra­mat­ic paus­es between every line of dia­logue,” “There must be omi­nous music or sounds in every scene,” “When in doubt, add close-ups of lips and eyes,” and “There should be nudi­ty for absolute­ly no rea­son.” (The video con­tains some poten­tial­ly NSFW con­tent, though only in ser­vice of par­o­dy­ing the NSFW con­tent of Lynch’s movies them­selves.)

“I watch David Lynch movies and I just don’t under­stand them,” writes McClean. “I decid­ed I was going to try and fig­ure them out so I sta­pled my eyes open and had a Lynch-a-thon. It didn’t help. I thought if I forced myself to watch, at some point it would just click and it would all make since. That nev­er hap­pened.” But per­haps he tried too hard to under­stand them, rather than not enough. Lynch, in the words of Lewis Bond, “inten­tion­al­ly mis­guides our per­cep­tions through offer­ing plots that embrace a sub­con­scious man­ner of sto­ry­telling. Our expec­ta­tions so often go unful­filled in his movies because he shows that we expect so much from life, yet know so lit­tle.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Young David Lynch Talks About Eraser­head in One of His First Record­ed Inter­views (1979)

The Incred­i­bly Strange Film Show: Revis­it 1980s Doc­u­men­taries on David Lynch, John Waters, Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky & Oth­er Film­mak­ers

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Four Video Essays Explain the Mas­tery of Film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi (RIP)

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.

Frank Zappa Gets Surprised & Serenaded by the U.S. Navy Band at the San Francisco Airport (1980)

Who the f*@% is Frank Zap­pa? Do we need to answer that ques­tion? Maybe so. As com­menter Kat­tul­lus remarks on a recent Zap­pa-relat­ed MetaFil­ter post, “When I was a kid… he was one of those rock stars that pret­ty much every­one knew. Now he’s almost van­ished from pop­u­lar cul­ture.” He has also van­ished from his mor­tal coil, as of 1993, and so it’s maybe no won­der we don’t hear that much about him. But it’s a shame all the same. Those who know and love Zap­pa know he was a musi­cal genius and more—“a mas­ter show­man,” says Alex Win­ter, direc­tor of the new crowd­fund­ed doc­u­men­tary Who the F*@% is Frank Zap­pa.

Win­ter calls Zap­pa a “per­former, ora­tor, wit, polit­i­cal pun­dit, etc.” And in dis­cussing the clip above, the direc­tor (best known as Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture) reminds us that Frank Zap­pa was also a reg­u­lar guy with reg­u­lar emo­tions. The footage comes from April, 1980, when Zap­pa was greet­ed at the San Fran­cis­co air­port by the Navy Band play­ing his song “Joe’s Garage.” Win­ter enthus­es about Zappa’s response to the sur­prise. The com­pos­er and gui­tarist, he says, “was so rarely him­self in pub­lic… In this clip, Frank is gen­uine­ly and pro­found­ly moved by the band’s per­for­mance of his music, and so we get to see him unpre­pared and just being him­self.”

Indeed, Zap­pa played char­ac­ters in pub­lic, though each one at the core con­tained his wry sar­don­ic wit. And the fact that he always came pre­pared is part of what made him seem so effort­less­ly great at every­thing he did. So this moment is rare for its can­dor, on the part of both Zap­pa and the Navy Band mem­bers. Zap­pa, “it turns out,” writes Navy Times, “was a huge fan of the Navy Band.” That love was requit­ed. Half the fun of the clip is watch­ing “the joy, con­cern, ner­vous­ness and rev­er­ence of these musi­cians, doing a fan­tas­tic job of play­ing a dif­fi­cult piece for the noto­ri­ous­ly dis­cern­ing com­pos­er.” The musi­cians occa­sion­al­ly stum­ble or hit a sour note, but like Pat­ti Smith’s heart­felt trib­ute to Bob Dylan at the Nobel Cer­e­mo­ny, these mis­takes make the per­for­mance all the more endear­ing.

Zap­pa, notes Rolling Stone, “liked the clip so much that he dupli­cat­ed the mas­ter onto his own tapes.” The clip we have at the top was record­ed from a mon­i­tor in the Zap­pa Vault (to the left, you can see the edge of a poster for the Zap­pa-direct­ed film 200 Motels). Zappa’s dada pos­es and vir­tu­oso musi­cal the­ater seemed to offer the ide­al response to the repres­sion of the Nixon-era six­ties, and the Rea­gan-era 80s, when he became a vocal crit­ic of Tip­per Gore’s PMRC. Per­haps, after all, as Kat­tul­lus says, he’s “due for a resur­gence.”

If so, we can learn a good deal about not only Zap­pa the musi­cian, but Zap­pa the per­son, through his fam­i­ly archive of art­work, pho­tos, per­son­al let­ters, etc., all of which Win­ter and his col­leagues have raised mon­ey to help pre­serve. See the doc­u­men­tary project’s ful­ly-fund­ed Kick­starter page here, where the top prize, for a dona­tion of 9 mil­lion dol­lars, is “Frank Zappa’s actu­al f*@%ing house” in the Hol­ly­wood Hills.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed: Frank Zap­pa on Why the Cul­tur­al­ly-Bereft Unit­ed States Is So Sus­cep­ti­ble to Fads (1971)

Frank Zap­pa Explains the Decline of the Music Busi­ness (1987)

Frank Zappa’s Amaz­ing Final Con­certs: Prague and Budapest, 1991

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

When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981)

Though he nev­er said so direct­ly, we might expect that Sit­u­a­tion­ist Guy Debord would have includ­ed Sat­ur­day Night Live in what he called the “Spec­ta­cle”—the mass media pre­sen­ta­tion of a total­iz­ing real­i­ty, “the rul­ing order’s non­stop dis­course about itself, its nev­er-end­ing mono­logue of self-praise.” The slick­ness of TV, even live com­e­dy TV, masks care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed maneu­vers on the part of its cre­ators and adver­tis­ers. In Debor­d’s analy­sis, noth­ing is exempt­ed from the spec­ta­cle’s con­sol­i­da­tion of pow­er; it co-opts every­thing for its pur­pos­es. Even seem­ing con­tra­dic­tions with­in the spectacle—the skew­er­ing of polit­i­cal fig­ures, for exam­ple, to their seem­ing displeasure—serve the pur­pos­es of pow­er: The spec­ta­cle, wrote Debord, “is the oppo­site of dia­logue.”

So I won­der, what he might have made of the appear­ance of cult writer and Beat pio­neer William S. Bur­roughs on the com­e­dy show in 1981? Was Burroughs—a mas­ter­mind of the counterculture—co-opted by the pow­ers that be? The author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night also appeared in a Nike ad and sev­er­al films and music videos, becom­ing a “pres­ence in Amer­i­can pop cul­ture,” writes R.U. Sir­ius in Every­body Must Get Stoned.

David Seed notes that Bur­roughs “is remem­bered by many mem­bers of intel­li­gentsia and glit­terati as din­ner part­ner for the likes of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Mick Jag­ger,” though he had “been a mod­el for the polit­i­cal and social left.” Had he been neutered by the 80s, his out­ra­geous­ly anar­chist sen­ti­ments turned to rad­i­cal kitsch?

Or maybe Bur­roughs dis­rupt­ed the spec­ta­cle, his dron­ing, monot­o­nous deliv­ery giv­ing view­ers of SNL exact­ly the oppo­site of what they were trained to expect. The appear­ance was his widest expo­sure to date (imme­di­ate­ly after­ward, he moved from New York to Lawrence, Kansas). One of the show’s writ­ers con­vinced pro­duc­er Dick Eber­sol to put Bur­roughs on. In rehearsal, writes Bur­roughs’ biog­ra­ph­er Ted Mor­gan, Eber­sol “found Bur­roughs ‘bor­ing and dread­ful,’ and ordered that his time slot be cut from six to three and a half min­utes. The writ­ers, how­ev­er, con­spired to let his per­for­mance stand as it was, and on Novem­ber 7, he kicked off the show sit­ting behind a desk, the light­ing giv­ing his face a sepul­chral gaunt­ness.”

In the grainy video above, Bur­roughs reads from Naked Lunch and cut-up nov­el Nova Express, bring­ing the sadis­tic Dr. Ben­way into Amer­i­ca’s liv­ing rooms, as the audi­ence laughs ner­vous­ly. Sound effects of bombs and strains of the nation­al anthem play behind him as he reads. It stands as per­haps one of the strangest moments in live tele­vi­sion. “Bur­roughs had posi­tioned him­self as the Great Out­sider,” writes Mor­gan, “but on the night of Novem­ber 7 he had reached the posi­tion where the actress Lau­ren Hut­ton could intro­duce him to an audi­ence of 100 mil­lion view­ers as Amer­i­ca’s great­est liv­ing writer.” I’m sure Bur­roughs got a kick out of the descrip­tion. In any case, the clip shows us a SNL of bygone days that occa­sion­al­ly dis­rupt­ed the usu­al state of pro­gram­ming, as when it had punk band Fear on the show.

Per­haps Bur­roughs’ com­mer­cial appear­ances also show us how the coun­ter­cul­ture gets co-opt­ed and repack­aged for mid­dle-class tastes. Then again, one of the great ironies of Bur­roughs life is that he both began and end­ed it as “a true mem­ber of the mid­west­ern tax-pay­ing mid­dle class.” The fol­low­ing year in Lawrence, Kansas, he “caught up on his cor­re­spon­dence.” One stu­dent in Mon­tre­al wrote, imag­in­ing him in “a male whore­house in Tang­i­er.” Bur­roughs replied, “No… I live in a small house on a tree-lined street in Lawrence, Kansas, with my beloved cat Rus­ki. My hob­bies are hunt­ing, fish­ing, and pis­tol prac­tice.” Did Bur­roughs, who spent his life destroy­ing mass cul­ture with cut-ups and curs­es, sell out—as he once accused Tru­man Capote of doing—by becom­ing a celebri­ty?

Per­haps we should let him answer the charge. In answer to a fan from Eng­land who called him “God,” Bur­roughs wrote, “You got me wrong, Ray­mond, I am but a hum­ble prac­ti­tion­er of the scriven­er’s trade. God? Not me. I don’t have the qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Old Sarge told me years ago: ‘Don’t be a vol­un­teer, kid.’ God is always try­ing to foist his lousy job not some­one else. You got­ta be crazy to take it. Just a Tech Sergeant in the Shake­speare Squadron.” Bur­roughs may have used his celebri­ty sta­tus to his lit­er­ary advan­tage, and used it to pay the bills and work with artists he admired and vice-ver­sa, but he nev­er saw him­self as more than a writer and (and per­haps lay magi­cian), and he abjured the hero wor­ship that made him a cult fig­ure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

William S. Bur­roughs Sends Anti-Fan Let­ter to In Cold Blood Author Tru­man Capote: “You Have Sold Out Your Tal­ent”

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

The Night John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on Sat­ur­day Night Live, And They Got Banned from the Show

Beat Writer William S. Bur­roughs Spreads Coun­ter­cul­ture Cool on Nike Sneak­ers, 1994

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

A Lccokrkow Garneo: All 245,000 Frames of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange Randomized.


Watch with cau­tion if you’re sen­si­tive to flash­ing lights and fast mov­ing images.

Stan­ley Kubrick films take a while to unpack. Watch his A Clock­work Orange once, you’ll see one thing. Watch it again, you’ll notice details you did­n’t get the first time. Dit­to the third time, and beyond.

Think you know A Clock­work Orange back­wards and for­wards? Good. Now check out A Lccokrkow Gar­neo, which takes all 245,000 frames of the 1971 dystopi­an film and ran­dom­izes them. You might see some­thing you’ve nev­er seen before.

If you’re prone to epilep­sy, beware. If you’re not, good luck get­ting very far.

A Lccokrkow Gar­neo was arranged by Andrew Fil­ip­pone Jr. (who gave us “Char­lie Rose” by Samuel Beck­ett, a piece of com­i­cal absur­dist the­ater we fea­tured ear­li­er this fall). The score for this ran­dom­ized film is “an impro­vised work, record­ed in one take while the movie played on a near­by mon­i­tor.” That you can watch unfold below.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Char­lie Rose” by Samuel Beck­ett: Watch Char­lie Rose Meet Char­lie Rose in a Com­i­cal Piece of Absur­dist The­ater

Peter Sell­ers Calls Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange “Vio­lent,” “The Biggest Load of Crap I’ve Seen” (1972)

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.