Watch 12-Year-Old Joe Bonamassa Shred the Blues as He Opens for B.B. King in 1989

in Music | July 7th, 2017

There are guitar players, who can play a handful of songs and pick out some pleasing riffs, and there are guitarists: players who’ve mastered several styles, have a back pocket full of standards, and tour and record for a living. And then there are guitar gods, goddesses, heroes, or whatever… men and women like St. Vincent, Joe Satriani, Jeff Beck, Nancy Wilson, Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Merle Travis, Jimi Hendrix, and Joe Bonamassa, electric blues wunderkind who, in a way, is a successor to some the past masters. Many guitar heroes are child prodigies, and many of them had the opportunity to learn from genius musicians in their youth. Bonamassa is no exception in either case, as you can see in the video up top, in which a 12-year-old “Smokin’ Joe Bonamassa” opens for B.B. King.

Bonamassa started playing at 4 and studied under the late, great Washington, DC guitarist Danny Gatton at 11, perhaps the most unsung, most naturally gifted guitarist of all time. In 1989, he had the opportunity to tour with King, playing over 20 shows, after he had already made a name for himself in “places like Buffalo and Scranton, PA,” writes Forgotten Guitar.

In the video above, you can see Bonamassa, 12 years old, destroy on Gatton’s signature butterscotch Telecaster. It takes him and the band a couple minutes to get going, and the skeptical audience begins to shuffle their feet impatiently. Then he proceeds to blow their minds, just as he blew the minds of television audiences who saw the news segment below on Bonamassa that same year.

At thirteen, Bonamassa attracted the national attention of a program called Real Life, hosted by Jane Pauley. In the clip below, we have the pleasure of seeing the awkward middle schooler in his other element, the locker-lined hallways and the libraries at his day job. But the live footage of Bonamassa removes any doubt about how extraordinary his abilities are.

An early childhood affinity for the instrument and parental urging has had a lot to do with Bonamassa’s phenomenal skill, but as he often acknowledges, so has his tutelage under some of the greatest guitar heroes to ever live. (See him pay tribute to B.B. King below.) And as everyone who plays guitar will acknowledge, what often distinguishes guitar players from guitarists and guitar heroes is an awful lot of practice. Read Bonamassa’s top 5 practice tips for guitarists here.

via Forgotten Guitar

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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 ( 5 ) |

Meet Clara Rockmore, the Pioneering Electronic Musician Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Early 1920s

in Music | July 7th, 2017

Fascination with the theremin, the otherworldly electronic musical instrument developed in the late 1910s and early 1920s out of Soviet research into proximity sensors, may never cease. Some of that has to do with the unusual nature of its touchless interface, consisting of twin antennas that the player moves their hands around in order to control the tone. More of it has to do with what the few who have dared to master the theremin have achieved with it, and no discussion of the masters of the theremin can be complete without the name Clara Rockmore.

“Born in Russia, March 9, 1911, Clara inherited the family trait of perfect pitch and could pick out melodies on the piano at age two,” says the Nadia Reisberg and Clara Rockmore Foundation’s biography. Accepted into the prestigious St. Petersburg Imperial Conservatory as a violin student at the unprecedentedly young age of four, it seemed like she’d already found her path to musical stardom — until the Russian Revolution got in the way.

The family fled to America, with Clara and her pianist sister Nadia giving concerts to make money throughout the arduous journey. They arrived in New York in December 1921, but before Clara could continue her studies there, “she developed an arthritic problem with her bow arm, and had to give up the violin.”

But all was not lost: she met Leon Theremin, inventor and namesake of the theremin (previously featured here), and found herself “fascinated by the aesthetic part of it, the visual beauty, the idea of playing in the air.” Soon developing “her own finger technique, allowing her infinitely greater control of pitch and phrasing” and later suggesting modifications to the instrument to improve its range and sensitivity, she could within years play classical pieces on the theremin, making sounds no classical composer could have imagined. Her performances, sometimes accompanied by Nadia and sometimes as a part of an orchestra, led to the release of her first album (recorded by Robert Moog, whose name also echoes down the halls of electronic music), The Art of the Theremin in 1977. (Stream it on Spotify below.)

Rockmore passed away in 1998, having been brought back into the public eye a few years earlier, at least to an extent, by Steve M. Martin’s documentary Theremin: an Electronic Odyssey. Just last year, countless many more of us learned not just the word theremin but the name Clara Rockmore when Google’s front-page “doodle” celebrated her 105 birthday. Those who clicked on it could receive a brief, game-like theremin lesson from an animated version of Rockmore herself, all while hearing sounds precisely engineered to replicate her distinctive playing style. You can see the real Rockmore playing Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” at the top of the post. Anyone who’s heard the theremin knows that no other instrument sounds quite like it — and anyone who’s heard Rockmore playing the theremin knows no other theremin has ever sounded quite like hers.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, 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 ( 1 ) |

An 8‑Hour Marathon Reading of 500 Emily Dickinson Poems

in Books, Life, Literature, Poetry | July 7th, 2017

It’s unlikely that reclusive poet Emily Dickinson would have wanted much fuss made over her birthday while still alive to celebrate it.

But with the lady safely ensconced in Amherst’s West Cemetery’s plot 53 for more than a century, fans can observe the day in the manner they see fit.

The Library of Congress’ Poetry and Literature Center threw in with the Folger Library in celebration of her 184th, inviting poetry lovers to the free marathon reading of her work, above (and below).

Poet Eleanor Heginbotham cited Dickinson’s letter to her editor, abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson–“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?”–before priming the breakfast crowd on what they should expect from the 8 hour marathon:

We’re just going to have a day with no discussion beyond… And it will be frustrating that we can’t ask questions, we can’t stop and say, “Oh, my goodness. Let’s do that one over again.” We’re just going to read and read and read. And from this moment on, the voice of Emily Dickinson, through those of you in this room, that’s the only voice we’re going to hear, and won’t that be fun?

Yes, though you may want to pack a nutritious snack to keep your energy up. The reading slots were secured by means of an online sign up sheet, and while such egalitarianism is laudable, it does not necessarily confer performance chops on the inexperienced.

Naturally, there are stand outs.

Marianne Noble, Associate Professor of Literature at American University, is a highlight with Poem 75, (2:36:40, above). Her Emily Rocks t‑shirt is pretty rad too.

Professor Heginbotham is another sort of treat with Poem 416, 30 minutes and 40 seconds into the second video, below.

All told, the volunteer readers held the podium for 8 hours, making it through 500 poems, slightly less than a third of the poet’s output.

A transcript of the event, with the readers’ names recorded before their chosen verses can be found here.

Single tickets for the Folger’s 2017 Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute, co-hosted by poet and feminist literary critic, Sandra M. Gilbert, go on sale August 1.

This marathon reading of Dickinson’s poems will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Discuss Emily Dickinson with her informally at Pete’s Mini Zinefest in Brooklyn this Saturday. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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

65,000 Fans Break Into a Singalong of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” at a Green Day Concert in London’s Hyde Park

in Music | July 7th, 2017

Last week, Green Day played a massive concert in London’s Hyde Park. But arguably the climax happened before the band even took the stage. Prior to the show, the stadium piped Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” through the speakers, at which point a massive singalong got underway. As one YouTuber put it, “Only Queen can rock a stadium without even being there,” a testament to their enduring influence. Enjoy the show.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

New Archive Is Digitizing the Entirety of Phenomenology: Browse Works by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and More

in Philosophy | July 6th, 2017

Chances are, if you can define the word phenomenology, you’re already a student of the 20th century philosophical school, field, movement, or—as its earliest expositor, Edmund Husserl wrote in a preface to the English edition of his 1913 Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, “new science—though, indeed, the whole course of philosophical development since Descartes has been preparing the way for it.”

Husserl’s messianic claim for phenomenological thinking–that which, broadly, deals with the contents of consciousness and the objects of experience–presages the discipline’s enormity, well represented by the totalizing thought of Martin Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher who intended with his 1927 Being and Time to accomplish the “destruction” of philosophy. In a way, writes Simon Critchley, he succeeded. “There is no way of understanding what took place in continental philosophy after Heidegger without coming to terms with Being and Time.”

Another prominent phenomenologist, French thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty, asserts a no less mind-bogglingly huge mandate for the method: “phenomenology is the study of essences,” he writes in his 1947 Phenomenology of Perception. “It is the search for a philosophy which shall be a ‘rigorous science,’ but it also offers an account of space, time and the world as we ‘live’ them.” Again, if this makes sense to you, you may already be a student of phenomenology, and you’ve probably read a lot of it.

Philosophy students and professors must have ready access to a huge number of texts by a wide range of authors, most of whom are having multiple conversations with each other at once. It is, of course, ideal to have at hand the kinds of resources one might find at the Stadtbibliothek in Berlin, one of the largest libraries in the world, or even at most large university libraries. But if you don’t have such access, you can still gather a fair number of full texts by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and their many famous students and colleagues on the web.

Soon, you will be able to do so all in one place, in multiple languages and formats, at the Open Commons of Phenomenology, a “non-profit, international scholarly association” aiming to “provide free access to the full corpus of phenomenology” by 2020. A suitably ambitious task for a very ambitious school of thought. Currently, project founders Patrick Flack (whom you’ll see in the promo video at the top), Rodney Parker, Nicolas de Warren, and the Husserl Archives have compiled “about 12000 bibliographic entries,” close to a quarter of which link to open access pdfs.

The project still needs to iron out a number kinks, and broken links, but it plans in the coming years to collect not only previously online essays and books, but also newly digitized texts and translations, “enhanced with a number of powerful tools, such as interactive timelines and genealogies of phenomenologists and psychologists, .xml versions of texts,” and much more. Read more about the project at Daily Nous, at the now-closed Indiegogo page from its funding campaign last year, and at the Open Commons site itself, where you’ll also find reviews, calls for papers, lists of events, and more. The dense outline on the site’s About page promises great things for this new “digital infrastructure” of phenomenology research. Enter the Open Commons of Phenomenology here.

via Daily Nous

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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 ) |

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Original Handwritten & Illustrated Manuscript for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864)

in Art, Books | July 6th, 2017

Almost exactly 155 years ago, Lewis Carroll told three young sisters a story. He’d come up with it to enliven a long boat trip up the River Thames, and one of the children aboard, a certain Alice Liddell, enjoyed it so much that she insisted that Carroll commit it to paper. Thus, so the legend has it, was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland born, although Lewis Carroll, then best known as Oxford mathematics tutor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, hadn’t taken up his famous pen name yet, and when he did write down Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it took its first form as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. You can read that handwritten manuscript, complete with illustrations, at the British Library.

Carroll presented the fictional Alice’s namesake with the manuscript, according to the British Library, as an early Christmas present in 1864. When his friends encouraged him to publish it, he performed a few revisions, “removing some of the family references included for the amusement of the Liddell children,” adding a couple of chapters (the beloved Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter’s tea party being among their new material), and enlisting John Tenniel, a Punch magazine cartoonist known for his illustrations of Aesop’s Fables, to create professional art to accompany it. The result, retitled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, came out in 1865 and has never gone out of print.

Though Tenniel’s vivid renderings of Alice and the eccentric characters she encounters have remained definitive, plenty of other artists, including Salvador Dalí and Ralph Steadman, have attempted the surely almost irresistible challenge of illustrating Carroll’s highly imaginative story. But today, says Skidmore College professor Catherine J. Golden at The Victorian Web, “critics have reevaluated Carroll’s caricature-style illustration. Carroll expertly intertwines his handwritten text with his pictures to advance the growth motif. His conception of the mouse’s ‘tale’ shaped like an actual mouse’s ‘tail’ is an excellent example of emblematic verse.”

Tenniel, Golden argues, “essentially refashioned with realism and improved upon many of Carroll’s sketchy or anatomically incorrect illustrations, adding domestic interiors and landscapes that appealed to middle-class consumers of the 1860s.” Even “late twentieth-century graphic novel adaptations of Alice in Wonderland recall many of Carroll’s inventive designs as well as those of Tenniel,” which gives Carroll’s original manuscript more claim to having provided the visual basis, not just the textual one, for the following century and a half of sequels official and unofficial, as well as adaptations, reenvisionings, and reimaginings of this “Christmas gift to a dear child in memory of a summer day.”

You can view Carroll’s original manuscript, complete with illustrations, here.

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Photo of the Real Alice in Wonderland Circa 1862

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, 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 ( 1 ) |

Does Quentin Tarantino’s First Film, Reservoir Dogs, Hold Up 25 Years Later?: A Video Essay

in Film | July 6th, 2017

When’s the last time you watched Reservoir Dogs? For myself, it really has been a while, but certain iconic scenes stick in my mind: the slo-mo walk (parodied endlessly since), the opening diner discussion, the “Mexican standoff” of guns. But there’s a lot I’ve forgotten (and since having been underwhelmed by Tarantino’s last film, the relentless cruel and much too long The Hateful Eight), I wondered, much like Evan “The Nerdwriter” Puschak, does in his video essay above, “Has Reservoir Dogs Aged Well?”

Puschak’s quick answer is yes, and in his usual jam-packed but salient style he goes through the reasons.

Though this is Tarantino’s first feature (or rather the first fully surviving one), it contains the seeds of a style, but one held back by budget. A clip of Siskel & Ebert suggests that favorable critics knew this too. Siskel calls the film “an exercise in style” and wishes it went further. Pulp Fiction would grant Siskel’s wish.

Puschak points out the adrenaline of its in media res opening, with Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) bleeding out in the back of Mr. White’s car. We already know a heist has gone wrong, but not how, and we’re not hopeful about Mr. Orange’s chances of surviving. Tarantino would go on to pull a similar trick in Pulp Fiction, but as he’s matured, he’s left this kind of jolting opening behind.

The film propels ahead not like a novel, as Tarantino once remarked, but, as Puschak says, more like a classic album, a perfectly sequenced selection of contrasting moods and pacing.

Where the film hasn’t aged as well, he continues, is in its use of dated references that don’t land like they once did 25 years ago. Yet, Puschak notes, this sort of pop-culture laden dialog still exists. In fact, it’s everywhere, from Marvel blockbusters to Netflix series.

If the film is one of the weakest in Tarantino’s filmography–I would dispute that, actually, but feel free to hash that out in the comments–it does contain a thread that rises above its pulpy, referential style, and that’s the “commode” story, which we see Mr. Orange learn, rehearse, perform, and perfect through the film. Its examination of performance, of playing a role, would later get a full workout in Pulp Fiction and in many other Tarantino films, and here’s where that fascination begins. Lastly, why does the film still hold up? Simply: because of videos like this, and web articles also like this. We can’t help revisiting those Reservoir Dogs.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

in Books, Design | July 6th, 2017

In 1929, the book publisher George Macy founded The Limited Editions Club (LEC), an imprint tasked with publishing finely illustrated limited editions of classic books. In the years to come, Macy worked with artists like Matisse and Picasso, and photographers like Edward Weston, to produce books with artistic illustrations on their inner pages. And sometimes The Limited Editions Club even turned its design focus to other parts of the book. Take for example this 1946 edition of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and its pretty amazing spine design.

Created by Clarence P. Hornung, the design captures the essence of Gibbon’s classic, showing Roman pillars progressively crumbling as your eyes move from Volume 1 to Volume 7. George Macy later called the collection, which also features illustrations by the great 18th-century printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “the most herculean labor of our career.”

Find more information about this 1946 edition here. Or, if you have deep pockets, purchase a copy here.

Note: an earlier version of this post appeared on our site in June 2015.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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!

Watch 12-Year-Old Joe Bonamassa Shred the Blues as He Opens for B.B. King in 1989

Meet Clara Rockmore, the Pioneering Electronic Musician Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Early 1920s

An 8‑Hour Marathon Reading of 500 Emily Dickinson Poems

65,000 Fans Break Into a Singalong of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” at a Green Day Concert in London’s Hyde Park

New Archive Is Digitizing the Entirety of Phenomenology: Browse Works by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and More

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Original Handwritten & Illustrated Manuscript for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864)

Does Quentin Tarantino’s First Film, Reservoir Dogs, Hold Up 25 Years Later?: A Video Essay

The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

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