Watch Some of Eddie Van Halen’s (RIP) Greatest Performances: “Shredding Was Eddie’s Very Essence”

in Music | October 7th, 2020

Growing up around metalheads gave me an appreciation for the guitar heroics of bands like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, etc. But one band everyone loved, I didn’t get. David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar (let’s not speak of the Cherone era)… it didn’t matter to me. Van Halen seemed to be having way too much sleazy fun to fit my narrow ideas of metal. No spikes, no skulls, no black masses. “Runnin’ with the Devil” sounds like a campfire song, I said….

Sit down, they said, shut up, and listen to “Eruption.” So I did. And I said, Oh. Then I listened carefully to all the rest. I didn’t become a fan of Van Halen, the band. But it was obvious that Eddie Van Halen himself, who passed away yesterday from cancer at the age of 65, deserves the reputation as the most innovative guitarist since Hendrix. His endless creativity powered the band through its tumultuous lineup changes; his playing completely changed the design of metal guitars, not to mention the metal solo; his DIY guitar designs turned him into a builder of his own line of guitars and amplifiers.

There didn’t seem to be anything he couldn’t do with the instrument, but unlike many a guitar virtuoso, Van Halen was entirely self-taught. “Ninety percent of the things that I do on guitar, if I had taken lessons and learned to play by the book,” he once said, “I would not play at all the way I do… Crossing a Gibson with a Fender was out of necessity, because there was no guitar on the market that did what I wanted.” He’s referring to the “Frankenstein” guitar—a heavily modified Fender Strat—one of many such guitars he built, rewired, and painted to suit his needs.

Van Halen first showed off his pioneering two-hand tapping and vibrato dive bombs on the first of many “Frankenstrats” in “Eruption,” recorded as a short instrumental interlude between “Runnin’ with the Devil” and “Jamie’s Cryin’” on the 1978 debut Van Halen. He had innumerable moments of brilliance, in the studio and onstage, in decades afterward, including his unforgettable guitar work on “Thriller” and “Beat It,” classic solos that “will never be matched,” as Quincy Jones tweeted in tribute yesterday. (See “Beat It” live in a very low-quality video above.)

But guitarists still turn to “Eruption”, again and again, as “the peak of guitar performance,” Esquire’s culture editor Matt Miller writes. “It’s true,” Miller concedes, “there were no shortages of self-indulgent guitar solos in the ‘70s, but this one changed the game of how they would sound and what they would mean, heading in to the ‘80s. Every solo that followed would try to emulate the sound of Eddie’s mind-melting ‘Eruption.’” Van Halen insisted the solo wasn’t as complicated as fans made it out to be. There remains an “entire YouTube subculture dedicated to kids trying to play” the solo, to master the tone and technique of the man who may have been the most metal guitarist of them all.

We’ve barely touched on Van Halen’s legacy as a soloist and inventor of weird guitars, sounds and effects, and not at all on his equally important roles as a showman, songwriter, keyboard player, and rhythm guitarist. No matter how ridiculously fast and technical metal becomes, or how many extra strings players add to Eddie’s six, no one has ever matched his level of style and invention. It is no less the case in 2020 as it was in the late 70s that one can point to his solos and say, “with no hyperbole,” writes Miller, “this is shredding.” Truly, shredding was Eddie Van Halen’s very essence.

Musical Comedian Reggie Watts Reinvents Van Halen’s Classic, “Panama”

The Evolution of the Rock Guitar Solo: 28 Solos, Spanning 50 Years, Played in 6 Fun Minutes

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

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

What Caused the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe?: A Brief Investigation into the Poet’s Demise 171 Years Ago Today

in History, Literature | October 7th, 2020

Edgar Allan Poe died 171 years ago today, but we still don’t know why. Of course, we all must meet our end sooner or later, as the literary master of the macabre would well have understood. His inclination toward the mysterious would have prepared him to believe as well in the power of questions that can never be answered. And so, perhaps, Poe would have expected that a death like his own — early, unexpected, and of finally undeterminable cause — would draw public fascination. But could even he have imagined it continuing to compel generation after generation of urban-legend and American-lore enthusiasts, whether or not they’ve read “The Raven” or “The Fall of the House of Usher”?

Poe’s end thus makes ideal material for Buzzfeed Unsolved, a video series whose other popular episodes include the death of Vincent van Gogh, the disappearance of D.B. Cooper, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 25 minutes, “The Macabre Death Of Edgar Allan Poe” summarizes the writer’s remarkably unlucky life and gets into the detail of his equally unlucky death, beginning on September 27th, 1849, when “Poe left Richmond by steamer, stopping the next day in Baltimore. For the next five days, Poe’s whereabouts are unknown.” Then, on October 3rd, he was found “delirious, immobile, and dressed in shabby clothing” in “a gutter outside of a public house that was being used as a polling place.”

“Rapping at death’s chamber’s door, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital that afternoon.” (The narration works in several such references to his writing.) “Assumed to be drunk, the weak and weary Poe was brought to a special room reserved for patients ill from intoxication.” Alas, “Poe never fully regained consciousness to be able to detail what had happened to him,” and expired on October 7th at the age of 40. The hosts examine several of the theories that attempt to explain what happened (nineteen of which we previously featured here on Open Culture): did a binge trigger his known physical intolerance of alcohol? Did he have a brain tumor? Did he get beaten up by his fiancée’s angry brothers? Was he a victim of “cooping”?

Cooping, a “violent form of voter fraud that was extremely common in Baltimore at that time,” involved roving gangs who “would kidnap a victim and force him to vote multiple times in a variety of disguises.” This jibes with the location and state in which Poe was found — and because “voters were often given some alcohol after voting as a celebration,” it also explains his apparent stupor. But none of the major theories actually contradict each other, and thus more than one could be true: “Edgar Allan Poe may very well have been beaten and kidnapped in a cooping scheme, sent into a stupor with alcohol after voting, and unable to recover due to a brain tumor.” However it happened, his death became a final story as enduring as — and even grimmer than — many of his tales of the grotesque.

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Animated Video Explains

Famous Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buckley, Christopher Walken, Marianne Faithful & More

5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone

Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875)

Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Can Superhero Media Teach Us About Ethics: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#63) Discussion with Philosophy Professor Travis Smith

in Comics/Cartoons, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | October 7th, 2020

Is there no end to the seemingly endless fascination with superhero media? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Travis Smith, who teaches political philosophy at Concordia University, to discuss. Travis sees their resonance as a matter of metaphor: How can we do more with the abilities we have? His book Superhero Ethics: 10 Comic Book Heroes, 10 Ways to Save the World, Which One Do We Need Now? matches up heroes like Batman vs. Spider-Man for ethical comparison: Both “act locally,” but Batman would like to actually rule over Gotham, while Spider-Man engages in a more “friendly neighborhood” patrol. What philosophy should govern the way we try to do good in the world?

Lurking in the background is the current release of season two of the Amazon series The Boys, based on Garth Ennis’ graphic novels, which assumes that power corrupts and asks what regular folks might do in the face of corporate-backed invulnerability. This cynical take is part of a long tradition of asking “what if super-heroes were literally real?” that goes through Watchmen all the way back to Spider-Man himself, who faces financial and other mundane problems that Superman was immune to.

Given Travis’ book, we didn’t really need supplementary articles for this episode, but you can take a look at this interview with him to learn more about his comic book loves and the Canadian heritage that led him to start fighting crime (you know, indirectly, through ethical teaching).

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ted Turner Asks Carl Sagan “Are You a Socialist?;” Sagan Responds Thoughtfully (1989)

in Economics, Politics | October 6th, 2020

Socialism should not be a scare word in the U.S. Were it not for socialists like Eugene V. Debs and the labor movements organized around his presidential campaigns in the early 20th century, reforms like the 8‑hour workday, worker safety protections, women’s suffrage, minimum wage, the abolition of child labor, and vacation and sick time would likely never have made it into a major party’s platform. The legacy of this strain of socialism in the U.S. endured, Jill Lepore writes at The New Yorker, “in Progressive-era reforms, in the New Deal, and in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society,” all widely supported by self-described liberals.

Yet while socialist policies are broadly popular in the U.S., the word may as well be a writhing, high-voltage wire in mainstream discourse. The same was true in the Reagan 80s, when so many progressive reforms were undone: military spending ballooned, social spending was cut to the bone, and homelessness became a major crisis, exacerbated by the A.I.D.S. epidemic the administration mocked and ignored. In 1989, at the end of the president’s two terms, Ted Turner lobbed the charge of “socialism” at Carl Sagan in a CNN interview. The astrophysicist and famed science communicator refused to take the bait.

Rather than denouncing or distancing himself from socialists, he made it clear that the label was less important to him than the material conditions under which millions of people suffered as a result of deliberate policy choices that could be otherwise. “I’m not sure what a ‘socialist’ is… I’m talking about making people self-reliant, people able to take care of themselves,” he says, in an echo of Debs’ praise of the virtue of “sand.” But this sort of self-reliance is not the same thing as the kind of mythic, Old West rugged individualism of conservatism.

Sagan acknowledges the reality that self-reliance, and survival, are impossible without the basic necessities of life, and that the country has the means to ensure its citizens have them.

I believe the government has a responsibility to care for the people…. There are countries which are perfectly able to do that. The United States is an extremely rich country, it’s perfectly able to do that. It chooses not to. It chooses to have homeless people.

Sagan mentions the U.S. infant mortality rate, which then placed the country at “19th in the world” because of a refusal to spend the money on healthcare needed to save more infant lives. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he says. Instead, billions were allocated to the military, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative, called Star Wars: “They’ve already spent something like $20 billion dollars on it, if these guys are permitted to go ahead they will spend a trillion dollars on Star Wars.”

Is objecting to a vast waste of the country’s resources and human potential “socialism”? Sagan doesn’t care what it’s called—the word doesn’t scare him away from pointing to the facts of inequality. The problems have only worsened since then. Military spending has grown to an obscene amount—more than the next ten countries combined. The figure usually given, $705 billion, is actually more like $934 billion, as Kimberly Amadeo explains at The Balance.

“Monopolies have risen again,” writes Lepore, “and income inequality has spiked back up to where it was in Debs’ lifetime.” Newsweek reports that in 2018, “America’s Health Rankings found that the U.S. was ranked 33rd out of the 36 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for infant mortality.” We have only just begun to reckon with the devastating policy outcomes exposed by the coronavirus. As Sagan would say, these problems are not accidental; they are the result of deliberate choices. We could have a very different society—one that invests its resources in people instead of weapons, in life instead of death. And we could call it whatever we wanted.

See the full Sagan-Turner interview here.

Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit”: A Toolkit That Can Help You Scientifically Separate Sense from Nonsense

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

How Vividly Colorized Photos Helped Introduce Japan to the World in the 19th Century

in History, Photography | October 6th, 2020

Since the mid-20th century heyday of Sony transistor radios, the world has associated Japan with high technology. But between the mid-17th and mid-19th century, the world could barely associate Japan with anything at all. The isolationist policy of sakoku, or “closed country,” kept the Land of the Rising Sun virtually free of outside influence — especially Western religious and colonial influence — until, in 1853, the American Navy commodore Matthew Perry rolled up in his “Black Ships” and demanded an opening of its ports. Thereafter, according to the Vox Darkroom video above, “foreigners coming to Japan brought their clothes, their culture, and their cameras.”

The cameras in particular made it possible for everyone around the world to finally get a glimpse of this mysterious island nation they’d previously known only in their imagination. Photography, itself an excitingly new technology at the time, rapidly boomed in the newly opened Japan as an industry.

“Photographers — mostly European, but some Japanese — documented Japan’s landscape and people, creating collectible and highly prized images of Japanese culture,” first in black-and-white and subsequently with early colorization methods. Then, as would happen over and over again in subsequent decades, Western technology and Japanese craftsmanship united to take it to the next level.

An Italian-British photographer named Felice Beato “made expert-quality hand-coloring the defining characteristic of this era of Japanese photography,” drawing on a “large body of highly trained artisans from the ukiyo‑e woodblock print industry.” By the time foreigners began using cameras to capture images of Japanese life, the Japanese had already been capturing Japanese life with ukiyo‑e, or “pictures of the floating world,” for centuries. Photographers soon discovered they could tap into the “expertise of patient precision in the application of color on to flat images that had been in place in Japan for generations.”

This new wave of Japanese “color” photography studios set themselves apart with masterful watercoloring that “added to the sense of realism in these images, which made them even more collectible.” Some photographers, such as Kusakabe Kimbei, got even more artistic, “staging elaborate, sometimes mythic scenes of Japanese culture” in the studio, then adding not just watercolors but other visual effects: in Girl in Heavy Storm, the photograph above, “the ‘rain’ is simulated by scratches into the glass plate negative.” Her kimono is also pinned in places to the background, all in the name of capturing another of the industry’s “supposedly typical scenes of Japanese life.” Even when it’s right before your eyes, Japan is in the imagination.

Hand-Colored 1860s Photographs Reveal the Last Days of Samurai Japan

Hand-Colored Photographs from 19th Century Japan: 110 Images Capture the Waning Days of Traditional Japanese Society

Download Hundreds of 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters of the Tradition

Watch Vintage Footage of Tokyo, Circa 1910, Get Brought to Life with Artificial Intelligence

Watch Chilling Footage of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Bombings in Restored Color

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

The Only Time Prince & Miles Davis Jammed Together Onstage: Watch the New Year’s Eve, 1987 Concert

in Music | October 6th, 2020

A too-precious genre of internet meme has departed public figures who did not know each other in life meeting in heaven with hugs, high-fives, and wincingly earnest exchanges. These sentimental vignettes are almost too easy to parody, a kitschy version of the “what if” game, as in: what if two creative geniuses could collaborate in ways they never did before they died?

What if John Lennon had formed a band with Eric Clapton—as Lennon himself had once proposed? Or what if a Jimi Hendrix/Miles Davis collaboration had come off, as Hendrix envisioned the year before his death? More than just fantasy baseball, the exercise lets us speculate about how musicians who influenced each other might evolve if given the chance to jam indefinitely.

When it comes to Miles, there are few who haven’t been influenced by the jazz great, whether they know it or not. Prince Rogers Nelson knew it well. The son of a jazz pianist, Prince grew up with Miles’ music. Although he “gravitated to the worlds of rock, pop, and R&B,” writes pianist Ron Drotos, Prince “seems to have seen jazz as a way to express himself in a broader way than he could through more commercial styles alone.”

Prince was so interested in exploring jazz—and Davis’ particular form of jazz—in the 80s that he formed a band anonymously, called Madhouse (actually just him and horn player Eric Leeds), and released two albums of fusion instrumentals. The influence went both ways. “Miles considered Prince to have the potential to become another Duke Ellington and even modeled his own 1980’s music partly on Prince’s style,” with 1986’s Tutu standing out as an example. What if the two musicians had worked together? Can you imagine it?

They did not—to our knowledge, although Prince’s vault is vast—collaborate on an album, but they did create one studio track together, “Can I Play With U?” And the two virtuoso composers and musicians jammed together onstage, once, at Paisley Park, on New Year’s Eve, 1987. The concert was a benefit for the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless and the last time Prince performed the Sign O’ the Times stage show. At the tail end of the concert, Davis steps onstage for “an ice-cold appearance,” Okayplayer notes. “As a companion to the release of a deluxe edition” of the album, “the late icon’s estate has relinquished the full two-hour-plus set.”

Watch the concert at the top (trust me, don’t just skip ahead to see Davis at 1:43:50). Just above, you can see an hourlong “pre-show” taped with Maya Rudolph, “lifelong Prince devotee,” Emmy-winning comedian, and daughter of Minnie Ripperton. Other guests include Prince’s longtime sideman and collaborator on his jazz project, Eric Leeds. “If you’re here, then you’re cool, like me,” Rudolph jokes, “and you know a lot about Prince.” Or maybe you don’t. Let Rudolph and her guests fill you in, and imagine Prince and Davis making celestial jazz-funk forever, between high-fives, in the Great Beyond.

When Miles Davis Discovered and Then Channeled the Musical Spirit of Jimi Hendrix

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hendrix Invites Paul McCartney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch the Dadaist Masterpiece Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928): Hans Richter’s Film Was So Avant Garde It Was Desecrated by the Nazis

in Film | October 5th, 2020

The hats won’t stay on heads. The bowtie won’t be tied. The gun can’t shoot and the target can’t keep still. When objects themselves rebel, something terrible is upon the land, and anarchism will out. This is one of the takeaways from painter Hans Richter’s 1928 DADA short film Ghosts Before Breakfast, or Vormittagsspuk in its original German (literally “Morning Spook”). And you might take that a very different way than the audience in 1928. That is fine. This is Dada. It is a bomb thrown into the mind.

But actual events and problems surround the film and its aftermath. By the end of the 1920s Richter was nearly two decades into his abstract/cubist painting career, and at the beginning of the decade he had already been experimenting with the relatively new medium of film. His 1921 Rhythmus 21 was one of the first films to attempt to bring abstract ideas–shapes, light, rhythm– to the medium. Writing in a German periodical around 1926, he said “…cinema can fulfill certain promises made by the ancient arts, in the realization of which painting and film become close neighbors and work together.”

Ah, but could music and silent film work together? In 1927 he was asked by the Gessellschaft Fur Neu Musik in Berlin to work with composer Paul Hindemith on a piece to screen at their annual festival. Hindemith suggested something pleasant, something set in the countryside. Richter ran out of time and shot something in an improvisational style. But, you know, sometimes deadlines really bring out the best in people. If the legacy of Ghosts Before Breakfast is any indication, it did. It’s considered by many to be one of the best Dada films for pure invention and playfulness.

If Ghosts has any narrative it’s this: objects confound their human owners, while a clock relentlessly counts down the minutes to noon, a play on the German phrase “Es ist fünf vor zwölf,” literally “five minutes to 12” or “time in running out.” (There’s also a duck).

Richter throws it all in: there’s backwards film, negative film, cut-out and stop-motion animation, in-camera special effects. And as a throughline, one of the simplest effects: four, then three, then two ghostly bowler hats floating in the sky, just out of the reach of their owners.

And the artist called in his friends to help: Richter used Bauhaus student and sculptor Werner Graeff, Hindemith himself, composer Darius Milhaud and his cousin/wife Madeleine Milhaud, and film editor Willi Pferdekamp to populate the film.

Ghosts has a tragic afterlife: the Nazis burned the original film and the score Hindemith wrote for it. However that has left a flowering of music in its wake, as composers have tried to fill the gap: Ian Gardener, Jean Hasse, the band The Real Tuesday Weld, and others. Steve Roden composed four versions for a LACMA retrospective of Richter’s work, using various Dadaist tactics, including recording a Hindemith vinyl he had prepared with sandpaper.

All scores have resisted perfect synchronization, however. Indeed, in 1947 Richter himself spoke out against that desire:

We should find a way to let the sound and the picture move on its own in the same direction, but nevertheless, separately. This refers to the spoken word as well as to the musical and other sounds.

Nearly 100 years old, Ghosts Before Breakfast is still setting the table for us, ready with a strong brew of truth.

Watch Dreams That Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter

Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago: Celebrate the Avant-Garde Movement Launched by Hugo Ball on July 14, 1916

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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

Jazz Typefaces Capture the Essence of 100 Iconic Jazz Musicians

in Design, Jazz, Music | October 5th, 2020

In the 1950s and 60s, one record label stood “like a beacon,” writes Robin Kinross at Eye, among a host of Civil Rights era independents that helped jazz “escape the racial-commercial constraints applied by White Americans, and find its own place, unpatronised and relatively free of exploitation.” That label, Blue Note, ushered in the birth of the cool—both cool jazz and its many hip signifiers—as much through graphic design as through its meticulous approach to recording.

Blue Note album covers may seem principally distinguished by the photography of Francis Wolff, whose instincts behind the camera produced visual icon after icon. But the label’s style depended on the layout, graphic design, and lettering of Reid Miles, who drew on minimalist Swiss trends in “over 500 album covers for Blue Note Records,” designer Reagan Ray writes. “He pioneered the use of creatively-arranged type over monochromatic photography, which is a style that is still widely used in graphic design today.”

As we noted in a recent post on Blue Note’s legendary design team, Reid’s lettering sometimes edged the photography to the margins, or off the cover altogether. Jazz greats were given the freedom to create the music they wanted, but it was the designers who had to sell their creativity to the public in a visual language.

They had done so with distinctive typefaces before Reid, of course. But the art of lettering became far more interesting through his influence, both more playful and more refined at the same time.

Since typeface has always played a significant role in the music’s commercial success, Ray decided to compile several hundred samplings of album lettering of jazz musician’s names, “for easy browsing and analysis” of typeface as an essential element all on its own. The gallery may attempt “to cover most of the genre’s significant musicians,” but there are, Ray admits, many inevitable omissions.

Nonetheless, it’s a formidable visual record of the various looks of jazz in lettering, and the visual identities of its biggest artists over the course of several decades. Ray does not name any of the designers, which is frustrating, but those in the know will recognize the work of Reid and others like album cover pioneer Alex Steinweiss. You may well spot lettering by Milton Glaser, whom Ray previously covered in a huge curated gallery of the famous designer’s album art.

The names behind the big names matter, but it’s the musicians themselves these individualized typefaces are meant to immediately evoke. Consider just how well most all of these examples do just that—representing each artist’s music, period, and image with the perfect font and graphic arrangement, each one a unique logo. Somewhat like the music it represents, Ray’s gallery is, itself, a collective tour-de-force performance of visual jazz.

Visit Ray’s gallery here.

via Kottke

Classic Jazz Album Covers Animated & Brought to Life

The Groundbreaking Art of Alex Steinweiss, Father of Record Cover Design

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

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

Watch Some of Eddie Van Halen’s (RIP) Greatest Performances: “Shredding Was Eddie’s Very Essence”

What Caused the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe?: A Brief Investigation into the Poet’s Demise 171 Years Ago Today

What Can Superhero Media Teach Us About Ethics: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#63) Discussion with Philosophy Professor Travis Smith

Ted Turner Asks Carl Sagan “Are You a Socialist?;” Sagan Responds Thoughtfully (1989)

How Vividly Colorized Photos Helped Introduce Japan to the World in the 19th Century

The Only Time Prince & Miles Davis Jammed Together Onstage: Watch the New Year’s Eve, 1987 Concert

Watch the Dadaist Masterpiece Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928): Hans Richter’s Film Was So Avant Garde It Was Desecrated by the Nazis

Jazz Typefaces Capture the Essence of 100 Iconic Jazz Musicians

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