As the current president grinds his ax on Twitter, the former one reads and reflects. Yesterday, Barack Obama posted on Facebook his summer reading list, a mix of novels, memoirs, and instructive non-fiction. He writes:
One of my favorite parts of summer is deciding what to read when things slow down just a bit, whether it’s on a vacation with family or just a quiet afternoon. This summer I’ve been absorbed by new novels, revisited an old classic, and reaffirmed my faith in our ability to move forward together when we seek the truth. Here’s what I’ve been reading:
Tara Westover’s Educatedis a remarkable memoir of a young woman raised in a survivalist family in Idaho who strives for education while still showing great understanding and love for the world she leaves behind.
With the recent passing of V.S. Naipaul, I reread A House for Mr Biswas, the Nobel Prize winner’s first great novel about growing up in Trinidad and the challenge of post-colonial identity.
Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases.
POTUS’ previous lists of recommended books can be found in the Relateds below.
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As the mighty House of Medici amassed works of art between the 15th and 18th centuries, could its members have imagined that we would still be enjoying their collection in the 21st? Perhaps they did, given the tendency — sometimes fatal — of business and political dynasties to imagine themselves as eternal. But the Medicis could scarcely have imagined how people all around the world have just gained access to the sculpture they collected, now displayed at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and elsewhere, through the Uffizi Digitization Project.
“The genuinely easy-to-navigate website proves more interactive than many computerized museum archives,” writes Hyperallergic’s Jasmine Weber. “Users are given the opportunity to travel inside tombs and inside every nook of the figures’ construction. The interface allows users to travel around and within the sculptures, getting closer than visitors often can in the museum space itself thanks to three-dimensional rendering from every imaginable angle.” The collection, notes the Uffizzi Digitization Project’s about page, contains “works of exceptional interest to students of Greek and Roman art, notably the Medici Venus, the Medici Faun, the Niobids, and the Ariadne.”
The Uffizi Digitization Project has so far made more than 300 works available to view as 3D models, and you can find them by either searching the collection or scrolling down to browse by category, a list that includes everything from altars and busts to statuettes and vases. And though no more technologically impressive collection of virtual classical sculpture may exist on the internet, after experiencing it you might nevertheless feel the need to see these pieces in an environment other than the black digital void. If so, have a look at the virtual tour of the Uffizi Gallery we featured earlier this year here on Open Culture. But be prepared: from there you may want to book a ticket to Florence and see the sculpture collected by the House of Medici in the very city where it rose to such vast economic and cultural power.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
There are many films of the 70s and 80s that could never get made today. This is not your grumpy uncle’s rant about political correctness gone wild. In many cases, it’s very much for the best. (And did we ever need “movies” like Porky’s or Hardbodies in the first place? I’m going to say no.) Styles and social mores change. Actors and directors who alone could have pulled off what they did, when they did, pass away. And so too do musicians whose equal we will never see again. When these inimitable forces come together, it’s once-in-a-lifetime celluloid magic. Remakes and ill-advised sequels seem like sacrilege.
I am speaking on this occasion of The Blues Brothers, the 1980 musical comedy that brought together a pantheon of legends now mostly departed for that hall of fame in the sky. John Belushi, of course, but also John Candy and Carrie Fisher. James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker… and Aretha Franklin, whom the whole world now mourns. Charges of cultural appropriation might get lobbed at The Blues Brothers, but they would be misplaced. For all its absurdist slapstick, the film was nothing if not a celebration of black American music, a reverent, loving tribute to the blues, R&B, and classic soul that went directly to the source, and in so doing, reinvigorated Aretha’s flagging career.
The music scene of the late seventies had “turned away from soul and toward disco,” writes Laura Bradley at Vanity Fair. “Franklin was struggling to make the transition, especially after Atlantic allowed her contract to expire.” Her attempt to keep up in the 1979 disco album La Divahad flopped. She was the Queen of Soul, not sweaty dancefloors, and so she would remain, thanks in part to the antics of Jake and Elwood and writer/director John Landis, who cast her as Mrs. Murphy, a diner waitress who gets to call the brothers “two honkys dressed like Hasidic diamond merchants” who “look like they’re from the CIA.”
The story of her casting is bittersweet. “You have to remember that in 1979,” says Landis, “rhythm and blues was basically over, and the number one music in the world was Abba, the Bee Gees… when people ask, how did you get the likes of Aretha Franklin and James Brown, it was easy. We just called them and said, ‘Wanna job?’” Studio executives balked, wanting hipper acts like Rose Royce, who had sung the theme from Car Wash. It would have been a tragedy.
Thankfully, Landis persisted—he had written the part for her. “Everyone in the movie,” he says in a recent interview, “the parts were written specifically for them.” (Except James Brown, who took over as the preacher when Little Richard “found Jesus, again,” and went to back to his church in Tennessee.) Landis also insisted on Aretha singing “Think,” a song from her 1968 album Aretha Now, instead of her biggest hit. (“Really?” he recalls her saying, “Don’t you want me to sing ‘Respect’?”) The song came directly out of the dialogue between her and blues guitarist Matt Murphy, playing her husband.
Landis remembers Aretha’s re-recording of the extended film version of the song:
So, we laid down the tracks for “Think.” She came in, a couple days before she was to be shot. She listened to the track once and said, “OK, but I would like to replace the piano.” We said, great, what do you want to do? She said, “I’ll play.”
So we got a piano, she sat in a recording studio, and it was Universal Studios’ recording studios in Chicago, a very old, funky studio we were delighted to be in because it was where Chess Records did all their recordings. We had a piano for her. She sat with her back to us, at the keys, and the piano and her voice was mic’d. She did it once, listened to the playback. She said, “I’d like to do it again.” She played piano as she sang, and the second take is the one in the movie. She was just wonderful. She didn’t like doing so many takes and she had issues with lip-syncing.
Franklin also thought of the experience fondly, writing in her autobiographythat it was “something I enjoyed making tremendously.” She did finally get the chance to sing “Respect” in a Blues Brothers film, almost twenty years later, when she reprised her role in Blues Brothers 2000. It’s arguable whether that movie ever should have been made. But there’s never any arguing with Aretha Franklin’s commanding voice. See her tell off Murphy and Elwood Blues, again, in a clip from the belated sequel below. Queen Aretha may have left us, but her legacy will live forever.
Cover tunes are not tribute bands. The best covers don’t aim to be carbon copies. They expand our concept of the original with an unexpected element or fresh lens.
Would you believe me if I told you that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s take on David Bowie’s “Heroes”—the second most covered tune in the late rocker’s canon—is even sexier than the original?
No?
Good.
Nothing ever will be.
It is, however, a compelling case for the power of multiple ukuleles.
Bowie may have referred to the tempo and rhythm as “plodding,” but co-writer Brian Eno’s description of the sound as something “grand and heroic” comes much closer to the mark.
Are eight ukes grand and heroic? Well, no. Not really.
And there is something undeniably humorous about a row of formally attired, seated, middle-aged men and women, wailing away in unison with their right hands, but it’s telling that the audience at New York’s multimedia art cabaret (le) Poisson Rouge isn’t laughing.
Admittedly, there were a few isolated chuckles in the beginning, a few notes in.
Philistines.
Probably been dragged there on blind dates with ukulele-enthusiasts.
To be charitable, there will always be those in need of convincing that the ukulele is a legitimate instrument.
Who better to convince them than the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, whose very name suggests that its members are in on the joke, and capable of turning it on its head?
The lyrics, as most Bowie fans can tell you, were inspired by real life, but not exactly Bowie’s. The tune was on solid footing, but the words were still slow to come, when Bowie glanced out the window of his Berlin recording studio to catch a back up singer and Visconti, married at the time, enjoying what they believed was a stolen kiss.
The rest, as they say is history, kept somewhat shrouded in mystery until relatively recently.
The Ukulele Orchestra singers wisely steer clear of Bowie’s howling, emotional delivery, which Visconti got on tape almost before the ink on those lyrics had time to dry.
Instead, they honor him, and the place this song has in so many people’s hearts, with their sincerity.
The setting: London. In particular, Stepney, London E1. The year, a warm summer in 1974, July 21 to be exact. And a very early video camera, only able to shoot in black and white, records the events of the E1 Festival, a free day out for families, restless teens, and bell bottomed, long-haired youth enjoying the sun. There’s Indian musicians, face painting, carnival games, jazz bands, folk dancing, and a “Wellie Boot Chucking Competition”. You know, “the lot,” as the English would say. But then, around 40 minutes in, the videographer decides to shoot the pub rock band playing on the main stage.
If the bespectacled 19 year old looks and sounds a bit familiar, well luvvies, you’re not seeing things. This is the first filmed appearance of a young Elvis Costello, beclad in very fetching dungarees and fronting his first band Flip City. This was their third ever gig, according to the Elvis Costello fan site.
A full three years before Declan MacManus would change his name and burst upon the scene with My Aim Is True, here he is paying his dues.
Flip City was Costello’s second group, the first being a folk rock duo called Rusty that played John Prine, Jesse Winchester, and Van Morrison covers in between their own songs. After Costello split from Liverpool and left for London, he jumped on the pub rock bandwagon that was already formed around Nick Lowe, Dr. Feelgood, and Brinsley Schwarz, mixing up Americana and R’n’B covers with very British originals. They even recorded demos a few years after this gig, which were widely bootlegged until most of them appeared on bonus tracks on various CD reissues. (You can listen to them here.)
But back to 1974. We have no record of their full set, but the two songs on the video are from the Coasters’ “I’m a Hog for You” (the B‑side of “Charlie Brown” but covered by Screaming Lord Sutch in 1963) and from the Isley Brothers, “This Old Heart of Mine,” a Motown staple. Despite Costello’s encyclopediac knowledge of music, he never again played these two songs live again.
It might be 20/20 hindsight, but one can already hear the talent and the confidence (or at least mock confidence) that would soon propel the young man into the charts. The rest, as they say, is much better than winning the wellie chucking contest.
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.
During the past month, the Great Big Story has released a series of videos that revisit the design aesthetic of the Bauhaus movement. Their first video explored the radical buildings designed by Bauhaus architects. A second focused on the legacy of minimalist Bauhausfurniture. And now a third takes as its subject Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 “Triadic Ballet”–a ballet famous for putting geometry and structure into dance. The video above shows the “Bayerisches Junior Ballet München as they prepare to bring Bauhaus center stage again.” You can watch a full recreation of the ballet and learn much more about Schlemmer’s experimental production by reading this post from our archive.
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It sounds like the plot of a Werner Herzog film: Aleister Crowley, heir to a brewing fortune and “flamboyant, bisexual drug fiend with a fascination for the occult,” meets “son of a well-known Jewish Socialist” Oscar Eckenstein, “a chemist turned railway engineer.” The two strike up a friendship over their mutual passion for mountaineering, and, in four years time, co-lead an expedition to reach the summit of K2, the second highest mountain in the world.
The descriptions of these characters come from Mick Conefrey’s The Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World’s Most Deadly Mountain,a book detailing the many grueling attempts, many deaths, and few successes, in over a century of climbs to the mountain’s peak. Crowley and Eckenstein’s expedition, undertaken in 1902, was the first. Though unsuccessful, their effort remains a legendary feat of historical bravery, or hubris, or insanity—an ascent up the face of what climber George Bell called “a savage mountain that tries to kill you.”
In those days, nobody had a clue about what it was going to be like. They thought they would go to the Himalayas and knock off K2 in a couple of days. But as the expedition proceeded, it started falling apart. Eckenstein, the leader, had a bad respiratory infection. Crowley had malaria and spent most of the time in his tent with a high fever. At one point he got so delirious, he started waving his revolver at other members of the team.
There are many other Herzogian touches. In his book Fallen Giants, Maurice Isserman describes the team—also consisting of a novice Englishman, a Swiss doctor, and two experienced Austrian climbers—as “unreasonably burdened by three tons of luggage.” Some of that unnecessary burden came from a “several-volume library” Crowley “intended to haul onto the glacier.” The others “objected to the superfluous weight, but Crowley had read enough Joseph Conrad to know what happened to those who let go of their hold on civilization in the wild.” The library stayed, and a train of 200 porters hauled the team’s luggage to Baltoro Glacier. (See Crowley in a photo from the expedition above, presumably stricken with malaria.)
Prior to setting off for K2 Eckenstein and Crowley had climbed volcanoes in Mexico, then the latter had traveled to San Francisco, Hawaii, Japan, Sri Lanka, and India—along the way having affairs, learning meditation, and developing a “lifelong devotion to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.” While it takes a certain rare personality to subject themselves to the rigors of scaling a mountain almost five miles high, Crowley—notorious for his “magick,” sexual adventures, drug use, lewd poetry, and founding of a religious order—is arguably the most out-there personality in the history of a very extreme sport.
But mountaineering “is not a normal pursuit,” writes Scottish climber Robin Campbell, “and we should not be too surprised to find its adepts showing odd behavior in other spheres of life.” Like all devotees of strenuous, death-defying pursuits, Crowley “wanted extreme experiences,” says Conefrey, “where he pushed himself to the limit.” It just so happened that he wanted to push far beyond the natural and human worlds. After the failed K2 attempt, he would only make one more daring expedition with Eckenstein, in 1905, a climb up the Himalayan mountain of Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world.
On the trip, Crowley, the leader, reportedly treated the local porters with brutal arrogance, and when three of them were killed along with one of the expedition members, he refused to help, writing to a Darjeeling newspaper, “a mountain ‘accident’ of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever.” He left the following day and gave up mountaineering, devoting the rest of his life to his occult interests and the exploits that earned him the tabloid reputation as “the wickedest man in the world.”
K2 was finally conquered by two Italian climbers in 1954, who reached the summit, frostbitten and half-mad, as Joanna Kavenna puts it in a review of Conefrey’s spellbinding book, “in a moment of sublime anticlimax.”
“It is no secret that David Lynch, the writer-director-composer-painter, has an unusual relationship with Bob’s Big Boy,” begins a 1999 Los Angeles Times article on the auteur of films like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. “For seven years in the 1980s he ate lunch there every day, ordering cup after cup of over-sweetened coffee and a single chocolate milkshake while scribbling notes on Bob’s little square napkins.” He took pains, notes reporter Amy Wallace, “to arrive at Bob’s at precisely 2:30 p.m. each day. The reason: It increased the odds that he would encounter perfection.”
“If you go earlier, at lunchtime, they’re making a lot of chocolate milkshakes. The mixture has to cool in a machine, but if it doesn’t sit in there long enough — when they’re serving a lot of them — it’s runny,” Wallace quotes Lynch as saying. “At 2:30, the milkshake mixture hasn’t been sitting there too long, but you’ve got a chance for it to be just great.”
For his pains, he received “only three perfect milkshakes out of more than 2,500. But that wasn’t the point. For Lynch, it was enough to know he had set the stage for excellence to occur,” believing that “whether with milkshakes or movies,” one “must make room for inspiration to strike — to lay the proper groundwork for greatness to take hold.”
When the 1980s British television series The Incredibly Strange Film Showdevoted an episode to Lynch, it naturally went to Los Angeles not just to interview him but to shoot some footage at Bob’s, the sacred space itself. In the clip at the top of the post, you can see host Jonathan Ross, seated in one of the retro diner’s booths and Lynchianly dressed in a white shirt buttoned all the way up, describe how, after an “all-American lunch,” the director would embark on “marathon coffee-drinking sessions. Fueled by the caffeine and his excessive sugar intake, he’d then spend the afternoon writing down ideas for movies on the napkins helpfully provided by Bob.”
In the interview that follows, Lynch himself confirms all this. “I was into Bob’s halfway through Eraserhead,” he says, establishing the chronology. “The end of Dune” — his traumatic, failed experience with big-budget studio production — “was pretty much the end of Bob’s.” Even Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, for a time her father’s Bob’s-going companion, reminisces about “the drawing on napkins” and the “tons of coffee with lots of sugar.” In this late-80s interview, Lynch describes himself as “heavily into sugar. I call it ‘granulated happiness.’ It’s just a great help, a friend.”
Lynch’s reputation for drinking Bob’s milkshakes long outlasted his actual habit. Charlie Rose makes a point of asking about it in the clip in the middle of the post, prompting Lynch to explain the reasoning behind his daily trips — both literally and metaphorically, since when Rose asks if all the sugar got him high, Lynch admits that “it is like a drug, I suppose, because it revs you up.” Though by all accounts still a prodigious drinker of coffee and smoker of cigarettes, Lynch has grown more health-conscious in recent years, a shift that may well have begun when, for reasons of his own, he went behind his beloved Bob’s and climbed into its dumpster. “I found one of these cartons that milkshakes came from,” says Lynch in the more recent interview clip above. “Every ingredient ended in ‑zene or ‑ate. There was nothing natural anywhere near that carton.”
Even though that discovery put an end to Lynch’s 2:30 appearances, all his coffee-soaked, sugar-saturated afternoons spent at Bob’s had already filled him with ideas. One day, for example, “I saw a man come in. He came to the counter, and that’s all I remember of this man, but from seeing him came a feeling, and that’s where Frank Booth came from.” Blue Velvet’s psychotic, gas-huffing, Dennis Hopper-portrayed villain aside, Lynch fans who make their own pilgrimage to Bob’s Big Boy even today will understand how well its sensibility may have resonated with the filmmaker’s obvious attraction to midcentury Americana. But as we’ve learned from his life as well as his work, it’s best not to go around back.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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