Lou Reed Curates an Eclectic Playlist of His Favorite Songs During His Final Days: Stream 27 Tracks Lou Was Listening To

in Music | June 6th, 2017

Lou Reed was a voracious listener. Rather than consume music, he imbibed it, drank it down in draughts, then sweated it out through his pores. His inexhaustible thirst for songs resulted in a body of work that has always sounded intimately familiar, even when it takes us to places no songwriters had before: the bitter, tender, violent underside of glamour, art, and romance.

But where, exactly, did Reed’s wry, bleak, yet tender sensibility come from? How did he manage so much complex emotional resonance in such seemingly simple songs as “Sunday Morning” and “Perfect Day”? Part of the answer comes from his veneration of Beat poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, as well as his one-time mentor Delmore Schwartz. “I thought if you could do what those writers did,” he said, “and put it to drums and guitar, you’d have the greatest thing on earth.”

This was no easy accomplishment. It took someone like Reed, steeped in pop, folk, rock, and jazz songcraft, to pull it off in such a way that Rolling Stone could call the Velvet Underground “the most influential American rock band of all time”—largely, writes the Daily Dot, “because of Reed’s sonic and lyrical contributions.” For most of Reed’s career, however, discovering the sources of his magic could be difficult.

Reed’s interview moods ranged from irascibly confrontational to disdainfully taciturn to facetiously garrulous. “Everything is jokes to this bibulous bozo,” remarked Lester Bangs in a 1973 interview. “He really makes a point of havin’ some fun!” But age, it seems, and the internet, mellowed him out and made him more likely to share. He opened up about his love for Kanye West’s Yeezus and other things. He appeared on Saturday Night Live to dispute internet rumors that he had died in 2001.

And when he did die, in 2013, he left behind the Spotify account “he was curating… himself,” keeping “playlists of songs he liked from the radio,” and showing both serious and casual students of Lou Reed that “the best online source on Lou Reed is… Lou Reed.” In the two volume playlist above called “What I’m Listening To,” Reed shows us just how serious he was about soaking up all of the sounds around him.

Nicki Minaj, Prince, Waylon Jennings, indie funk/soul Canadians King Khan & BBQ, psychedelic indie chamber pop band Of Montreal, Tom Waits, Miles Davis, Deerhoof, post-hardcore band Fucked Up, brilliant neo-soul singer/rapper/songwriter Georgia Anne Muldrow, Captain Beefheart… and that’s just volume one. Name a genre—Reed has found what he clearly considers its perfect exemplar. You can almost see him taking notes, scowling with envy, smirking with appreciation for how his own influence has permeated the past few the decades.

Famous musicians aren’t always the most interesting people, though Reed’s private life was sensational enough to warrant retelling. But many fans will find it much more interesting to get into the mind of Reed the artist. And for that, you’ll need to try and hear what he heard. Or, at least, listen to what he listened to.

If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. Here are the direct links to the two Spotify playlists: Playlist 1 — Playlist 2.

Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)

An Animation of The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” … for Your Sunday Morning

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Bob Dylan’s Newly-Released Nobel Lecture: A Meditation on Music, Literature & Lyrics

in Literature, Music | June 6th, 2017

The furor surrounding Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize win in Literature last October now seems several ages away. What was all that about again? Could it possibly have meant, as many a disgruntled writer suggested, that “people don’t care about books anymore”? Was this an “ill-conceived nostalgia award,” as Irvine Welsh bitterly proclaimed, bestowed by a committee of “senile, gibbering hippies”? Even Dylan himself seemed confused and embarrassed. He remained silent after the announcement, ignoring the Swedish Academy’s calls and seeming to one Academy member “impolite and arrogant.”

As anyone who has ever seen a Dylan interview from the mid-sixties can attest, these qualities once defined his public persona. And yes, he isn’t nearly as culturally relevant now as he was in those days, when he played the near-untouchable superstar and mercurial pop culture savant. But the Swedish Academy voted to celebrate Dylan as a literary writer, not a celebrity. And while writers may fall in and out of fashion, we like to think of literature as timeless. Many, perhaps most, authors awarded the Nobel have been “past their prime,” in the sense of having a lifetime’s worth of work behind them. Dylan is certainly no exception.

The question of whether folk and rock and roll songs can be properly considered literature is another matter, but you’d have to be naïve not to know that all literature began its life as song. Maybe much of it will return to this primordial state in the future. Sensing that songcraft needed an advocate before critics of literature, when he recorded his Nobel lecture–with musical accompaniment, on June 4th, six months after his win (hear him read it above)–Dylan discussed the interdependence of the two. He pointed to Homer’s Odyssey, an epic song in verse before it assumed written form, as the source for not only so much Western literature, but also so much American folk song, including his own.

“The Odyssey is a great book whose themes have worked its way into the ballads of a lot of songwriters,” says Dylan, then he concedes that “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read.” That’s okay. “The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage,” not read by groups of students in uncomfortable desks and airless rooms. No one became furiously angry when playwright Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in 2005. Should they have? But Dylan doesn’t pursue this line of reasoning, and he doesn’t necessarily compare himself to Shakespeare. Not quite.…

He did, however, make a similar argument in his short acceptance speech (read it here)—which he wrote and handed to the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji, to read in his place at the ceremony (see her deliver it above)–asking whether Shakespeare, and hence Dylan, should be considered literature: “I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist… I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question ‘Is this literature?’” Like Shakespeare, Dylan writes, he has been busy with the exigencies of touring, creating ensembles, and performing: “not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, ‘Are my songs literature?’” (Believe that or not.) He thanks the Swedish Academy for taking up the question, and “for providing such a wonderful answer.”

In his newly-released recorded lecture, at the top, Dylan also doesn’t answer the question directly. He carefully considers it—“wondering, exactly, how my songs relate to literature.” He confesses needing to “reflect on it, and see where the connection was.” It is in the influence of The Odyssey, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and other great works. It is also, he suggests, in the way music participates in literary traditions, trading similar themes and establishing similar affiliations. But he expresses no commitment to collapsing the distinctions between them. “His apparent attitude throughout the process” of winning the Nobel Prize, writes Emily Temple at Lit Hub, “has been… something along the lines of: ‘okay, if you say so.”

“The fact that Bob Dylan doesn’t consider his songs literature doesn’t make them not literature, of course,” writes Temple. We’re free to agree or disagree with him, but in either case his lecture might make us “consider the possibility that they will become literature, as William Shakespeare’s plays have.” By that time, Shakespeare was long dead. While he still lives, Dylan concludes, “I hope some of you will get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’”

You can read the transcript of Dylan’s lecture here.

Patti Smith Sings Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rains Gonna Fall” at Nobel Prize Ceremony & Gets a Case of the Nerves

Kurt Vonnegut on Bob Dylan: He “Is the Worst Poet Alive”

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Ennio Morricone’s Iconic Song, “The Ecstasy of Gold,” Spellbindingly Arranged for Theremin & Voice

in Music | June 6th, 2017

You know Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy Of Gold,” a musical composition first made famous in Sergio Leone’s 1966 spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It has since been covered by everyone from Metallica, to Yo-Yo Ma. And now you can add German electronic musician Carolina Eyck to the list.

Above, watch Eyck take “The Ecstasy Of Gold” in new, intriguing directions, using a theremin and a voice looper. It’s pretty mesmerizing.

Below, watch Carolina’s introduction to the theremin. And down in the Relateds, find much more on the theremin, including vintage footage of Russian inventor Leon Theremin giving a demo of the newfangled electronic instrument.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Musical Compositions of A Clockwork Orange Author Anthony Burgess, and Download His Musical Scores for Free

in Music | June 6th, 2017

Most of us remember Anthony Burgess not as the author of dozens of novels, as well as short stories, essays, and poems, but as the author of A Clockwork Orange. This owes, for better or for worse, to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation of the “badly flawed” American edition of Burgess’ 1962 dystopian satire, although even if A Clockwork Orange didn’t overshadow the rest of his literary career, his literary career would probably still overshadow what he considered his life’s truly serious endeavor: music.

“I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels,” Burgess once went so far as to say, “instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.” Since even those of us who’ve read widely in his bibliography may never have heard any of the over 250 pieces of music he wrote in his lifetime, today we offer you a listen as well as a look at his orchestral compositions.

In the Spotify playlists embedded here (and if you don’t have Spotify’s free software, you can download it here), you can hear the albums Burgess: Orchestral Music, The Piano Music of Anthony Burgess, and the anthology Anthony Burgess: The Man and His Music (the title of that last a reference to This Man and His Music, the book that brought together his two great pursuits most directly).

“Music was at the heart of Anthony Burgess’s creative life,” says the site of The Burgess Foundation, who there have made “scores of his music available free of charge to anybody who wishes to study or play it.” Prolific in his writing as well as his composing, Burgess’ music includes a piece only discovered in 2012, nearly twenty years after death; the news clip at the top of the post briefly tells the story of Burgess’ “lost sonata,” his earliest surviving complete musical work.

Many of Burgess novels, including but hardly limited to A Clockwork Orange, suggest a deep interest and understanding of music, but they also (recall the Droogs’ wide lexicon of invented slang) reveal a similar capacity for linguistics. Call no Burgess fan a completist, then, unless they’ve read his books, heard his music, and also read his translations. “Translation is not a matter of words only,” the man once said. “It is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.” Practiced in fields as “untranslatable” as poetry and as translation-independent as orchestral music, he should know. But one wonders: what other little-known cultural side career remains hidden in the depths of the Burgess archives?

A Clockwork Orange Author Anthony Burgess Lists His Five Favorite Dystopian Novels: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Island & More

Anthony Burgess’ Lost Introduction to Joyce’s Dubliners Now Online

Hunter S. Thompson Writes a Blistering, Over-the-Top Letter to Anthony Burgess (1973)

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Dr. Jane Goodall Will Teach an Online Course About Conserving Our Environment

in Environment, Nature, Online Courses | June 5th, 2017

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

A quick heads up: The great primatologist and anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall–now 83 years old–will soon teach her first online course ever. Hosted by Masterclass, the course, consisting of 25 video lectures, will teach students how they can conserve the environment. It will also share Goodall’s research on the behavioral patterns of chimpanzees and what they taught her about conservation. The course won’t get started until this fall, but you can pre-enroll now. The cost is $90.

Other courses currently offered by Masterclass include:

Find more courses taught by star instructors here.

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Hunter S. Thompson Typed Out The Great Gatsby & A Farewell to Arms Word for Word: A Method for Learning How to Write Like the Masters

in Literature, Writing | June 5th, 2017

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The word quixotic derives, of course, from Miguel Cervantes’ irreverent early 17th century satire, Don Quixote. From the novel’s eponymous character it carries connotations of antiquated, extravagant chivalry. But in modern usage, quixotic usually means “foolishly impractical, marked by rash lofty romantic ideas.” Such designations apply in the case of Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which the titular academic writes his own Quixote by recreating Cervantes’ novel word-for-word.

Why does this fictional minor critic do such a thing? Borges’ explanations are as circuitously mysterious as you might expect. But we can get a much more straightforward answer from a modern-day Quixote—an individual who has undertaken many a “foolishly impractical” quest: Hunter S. Thompson. Though he would never be mistaken for a knight-errant, Thompson did tilt at more than a few windmills, including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, from which he typed whole pages, word-for-word “just to get the feeling,” writes Louis Menand at The New Yorker, “of what it was like to write that way.”

“You know Hunter typed The Great Gatsby,” an awestruck Johnny Depp told The Guardian in 2011, after he’d played Thompson himself in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and a fictionalized version of him in an adaptation of Thompson’s lost novel The Rum Diaries. “He’d look at each page Fitzgerald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece.” This exercise prepared him to write one, or his cracked version of one, 1972’s gonzo account of a more-than-quixotic road trip, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Menand points out that Thompson first called the book The Death of the American Dream, likely inspired by Fitzgerald’s first Gatsby title, The Death of the Red White and Blue.

Thompson referred to Gatsby frequently in books and letters. Just as often, he referenced another literary hero—and pugnacious Fitzgerald competitor—Ernest Hemingway. He first began typing out Gatsby while employed at Time magazine as a copy boy in 1958, one of many magazine and newspaper jobs in a “pattern of disruptive employment,” writes biographer Kevin T. McEneaney. “Thompson appropriated armloads of office supplies” for the task, and also typed out Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and “some of Faulkner’s stories—an unusual method for learning prose rhythm.” He was fired the following year, not for misappropriation, but for “his unpardonable, insulting wit at a Christmas party.”

In a 1958 letter to his hometown girlfriend Ann Frick, Thompson named the Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels as two especially influential books, along with Brave New World, William Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (or “Girls before Girls”), a novel that “hardly belongs in the abovementioned company,” he wrote, and which he did not, presumably, copy out on his typewriter at work. Surely, however, many a Thompson close reader has discerned the traces of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway in his work, particularly the latter, whose macho escapades and epic drinking bouts surely inspired more than just Thompson’s writing.

In Borges’ “Pierre Menard,” the title character first sets out to “be Miguel de Cervantes”—to “Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918….” He finds the undertaking not only “impossible from the outset,” but also “the least interesting” way to go about writing his own Quixote. Thompson may have discovered the same as he worked his way through his influences. He could not become his heroes. He would have to take what he’d learned from inhabiting their prose, and use it as fuel for his literary firebombs–or, seen differently, for his idealistic, impractical, yet strangely noble (in their way) knight’s quests.

Not since Thompson’s Nixonian heyday has there been such need for a ferocious outlaw voice like his. He may have become a stock character by the end of his life, caricatured as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury, given pop culture sainthood by Depp’s unhinged portrayal. But “at its best,” writes Menand, “Thompson’s anger, in writing, was a beautiful thing, fearless and funny and, after all, not wrong about the shabbiness and hypocrisy of American officialdom.” Perhaps even now, some hungry young intern is typing out Fear and Loathing word-for-word, preparing to absorb it into his or her own 21st century repertoire of barbed-wire truth-telling about “the death of the American dream.” The method, it seems, may work with any great writer, be it Cervantes, Fitzgerald, or Hunter S. Thompson.

Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent

Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Omni, the Iconic Sci-Fi Magazine, Now Digitized in High-Resolution and Available Online

in Magazines, Sci Fi, Science | June 5th, 2017

There was a time, not so long ago, when not only could a blockbuster Hollywood comedy make a reference to a science magazine, but everyone in the audience would get that reference. It happened in Ghostbusters, right after the titular boys in gray hit it big with their first high-profile busting of a ghost. In true 1980s style, a success montage followed, in the middle of which appeared the cover of Omni magazine’s October 1984 issue which, according to the Ghostbusters Wiki, “featured a Proton Pack and Particle Thrower. The tagline read, ‘Quantum Leaps: Ghostbusters’ Tools of the Trade.’ ”

The movie made up that cover, but it didn’t make up the publication. In reality, the cover of Omni’s October 1984 issue, a special anniversary edition which appears at the top of the magazine’s Wikipedia page today, promised predictions of “Love, Work & Play in the 21st Century” from the likes of beloved sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury, social psychologist Stanley Milgram, physicist Gerard O’Neill, trend-watcher John Naisbitt — and, of course, Ronald Reagan. Now you can find that issue of Omni, as well as every other from its 1978-to-1995 run, digitized in high-resolution and made available on Amazon.

“Omni was a magazine about the future,” writes Motherboard’s Claire Evans, telling the story of “the best science magazine that ever was.” In its heyday, it blew minds by regularly featuring extensive Q&As with some of the top scientists of the 20th century–E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk–tales of the paranormal, and some of the most important science fiction to ever see magazine publication” by William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Harlan Ellison, George R. R. Martin — and even the likes of Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and William S. Burroughs. “By coupling science fiction and cutting-edge science news, the magazine created an atmosphere of possibility, where even the most outrageous ideas seemed to have basis in fact.”

Originally founded by Kathy Keeton (formerly, according to Evans, “a South African ballerina who went from being one of the highest-paid strippers in Europe”) and Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Omni not only had an impact in unexpected areas (the eccentric musical performer Klaus Nomi, himself a cultural innovator, took his name in part from the magazine’s) but took steps into the digital realm long before other print publications dared. It first established its online presence on Compuserve in 1986; seven years later, it opened up its archives, along with forums and new content, on America Online, a first for any major magazine. Now Amazon users can purchase Omni’s digital back issues for $2.99 each, or read them for free if they have Kindle Unlimited accounts. (You can sign up for a 30-day free trial for Kindle Unlimited and start binge-reading Omni here.)

Jerrick Media, owners of the Omni brand, have also begun to make available on Vimeo on Demand episodes of Omni: The New Frontier, the 1980s syndicated television series hosted by Peter Ustinov. And without paying a dime, you can still browse the fascinating Omni material archived at Omni Magazine Online, an easy way to get a hit of the past’s idea of the future — and one presenting, in the words of 1990s editor-in-chief Keith Farrell, “a fascination with science and speculation, literature and art, philosophy and quirkiness, serious speculation and gonzo speculation, the health of the planet and its cultures, our relationship to the universe and its (possible) cultures, and a sense that whatever else, tomorrow would be different from today.”

via The Verge

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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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A New Theme Park Based on Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro Set to Open in 2020

in Animation, Film, Travel | June 5th, 2017

Is a frame of reference necessary to appreciate Disney World? Can you enjoy a ride in a spinning teacup if you have no working knowledge of Alice in Wonderland? What sort of magic might the Magic Kingdom hold for those who’ve never heard of Cinderella or Peter Pan?

Now imagine if the theme park’s scope was narrowed to a single film.

You’ve got until 2020 to sneak in a viewing of the Hayao Miyazaki film, My Neighbor Totoro, before Ghibli Park, a 500-acre amusement park on the grounds of Japan’s 2005 World’s Fair site, opens.

To date, Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli has produced more than a dozen feature-length animated films. That’s a lot of raw material for attractions.

Porco Rosso’s 1930s seaplanes have ride written all over them, and think of the Haunted Mansion-esque thrills that could be wrung from Spirited Away’s bathhouse.

How about a Jungle Cruise-style ramble through the countryside in Howl’s Moving Castle?

An underwater adventure with goldfish princess Ponyo?

Prepare for a very long wait if you’re joining the queue for those. It’s being reported that Ghibli Park will focus exclusively on a single film, 1988’s My Neighbor Totoro.

(Care to take a guess what its Mouse Ears will look like?)

The film’s theme of respect for the natural world is good news for the area’s existing flora. The governor of Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, where Ghibli Park is to be situated, has announced that it will be laid out in such a way as to preserve the trees.

Presumably the film’s iconic cat bus and fast growing camphor tree, above, will be powered by the greenest of energies.

Preview the sort of wonders in store by touring the lifesize house of My Neighbor Totoro’s human characters, Satsuki and Mei, below.

via NPR

Hayao Miyazaki’s Masterpieces Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke Imagined as 8‑Bit Video Games

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Hayao Miyazaki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll be appearing onstage in New York City in Paul David Young’s Faust 3, opening later this week. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Lou Reed Curates an Eclectic Playlist of His Favorite Songs During His Final Days: Stream 27 Tracks Lou Was Listening To

Hear Bob Dylan’s Newly-Released Nobel Lecture: A Meditation on Music, Literature & Lyrics

Ennio Morricone’s Iconic Song, “The Ecstasy of Gold,” Spellbindingly Arranged for Theremin & Voice

Hear the Musical Compositions of A Clockwork Orange Author Anthony Burgess, and Download His Musical Scores for Free

Dr. Jane Goodall Will Teach an Online Course About Conserving Our Environment

Hunter S. Thompson Typed Out The Great Gatsby & A Farewell to Arms Word for Word: A Method for Learning How to Write Like the Masters

Omni, the Iconic Sci-Fi Magazine, Now Digitized in High-Resolution and Available Online

A New Theme Park Based on Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro Set to Open in 2020

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