An Impressive Audio Archive of John Cage Lectures & Interviews: Hear Recordings from 1963–1991

in Music, Philosophy, Radio | March 8th, 2018

His­to­ry has remem­bered John Cage as a com­pos­er, but to do jus­tice to his lega­cy one has to allow that title the widest pos­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tion. He did, of course, com­pose music: music that strikes the ears of many lis­ten­ers as quite uncon­ven­tion­al even today, more than a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry after his death, but rec­og­niz­able as music nonethe­less. He also com­posed with silence, an artis­tic choice that still intrigues peo­ple enough to get them tak­ing the plunge into his wider body of work, which also includes com­po­si­tions of words, many thou­sands of them writ­ten and many hours of them record­ed.

Ubuweb offers an impres­sive audio archive of Cage’s spo­ken word, begin­ning with mate­r­i­al from the 1960s and end­ing with a talk (embed­ded at the top of the post) he gave at the San Fran­cis­co Art Insti­tute in the penul­ti­mate year of his life. There he read a 30-minute piece called “One 7” con­sist­ing of “brief vocal­iza­tions inter­spersed with long peri­ods of silence” before tak­ing audi­ence ques­tions which “range from inquiries about the process by which Cage com­pos­es, his lack of inter­est in pleas­ing an audi­ence, his love of mush­rooms, Bud­dhism, chance oper­a­tions, and whether Cage can stand on his head.”

Turn the Cage clock back 28 years from there and we can hear a spir­it­ed 1963 con­ver­sa­tion between him and Jonathan Cott, the young music jour­nal­ist lat­er known for con­duct­ing John Lennon’s last inter­view. “At every turn Cott antag­o­nizes Cage with chal­leng­ing ques­tions,” says Ubuweb, adding that he mar­shals “quotes from numer­ous sources (includ­ing Nor­man Mail­er, Michael Stein­berg, Igor Stravin­sky and oth­ers) crit­i­ciz­ing Cage and his music.”

Cage, in char­ac­ter­is­tic response, “par­ries Cot­t’s thrusts with a ver­i­ta­ble tai chi prac­tice of music the­o­ry.” This con­trasts with the mood of Cage’s 1972 inter­view along­side pianist David Tudor embed­ded just above, pre­sent­ed in both Eng­lish and French and fea­tur­ing ref­er­ences to the work of Hen­ry David Thore­au and Mar­cel Duchamp.

Cage has more to say about Duchamp, and oth­er artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschen­berg, in the undat­ed lec­ture clip from the archives of Paci­fi­ca Radio just above. Have a lis­ten through the rest of Ubuwe­b’s col­lec­tion and you’ll hear the mas­ter of silence speak volu­mi­nous­ly, if some­times cryp­ti­cal­ly, on such sub­jects as Zen Bud­dhism, anar­chism, utopia, the work of Buck­min­ster Fuller, and “the role of art and tech­nol­o­gy in mod­ern soci­ety.” The con­texts vary, both in the sense of time and place as well as in the sense of the per­for­ma­tive expec­ta­tions placed on Cage him­self. But even a sam­pling of the record­ings here sug­gests that being John Cage, in what­ev­er set­ting, con­sti­tut­ed a pro­duc­tive artis­tic project all its own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

How to Get Start­ed: John Cage’s Approach to Start­ing the Dif­fi­cult Cre­ative Process

Lis­ten to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Mat­ters Worse)

Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage’s Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

Nota­tions: John Cage Pub­lish­es a Book of Graph­ic Musi­cal Scores, Fea­tur­ing Visu­al­iza­tions of Works by Leonard Bern­stein, Igor Stravin­sky, The Bea­t­les & More (1969)

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

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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David Sedaris Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Jazz Tracks: Stream Them Online

in Jazz, Music, Radio | March 2nd, 2018

Image by WBUR, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

You can’t read far into David Sedaris’ writ­ing with­out encoun­ter­ing his father Lou, a cur­mud­geon­ly, decades-and-decades-retired IBM engi­neer with a stiffly prac­ti­cal mind and a harsh word for every­body — espe­cial­ly his mis­fit son, ded­i­cat­ing his life as he has to the qua­si-occu­pa­tion of writ­ing while liv­ing in far-flung places like Paris and rur­al Eng­land. Even now, solid­ly into his nineties, Sedaris père keeps on pro­vid­ing the six­tysome­thing Sedaris fils with mate­r­i­al, all of it — once pol­ished up just right — a source of laugh­ter for the lat­ter’s many read­ers and lis­ten­ers. But Lou has also giv­en David some­thing else: a pas­sion for jazz.

“My father loves jazz and has an exten­sive col­lec­tion of records and reel-to-reel tapes he used to enjoy after return­ing home from work,” writes Sedaris in one essay. “He might have entered the house in a foul mood, but once he had his Dex­ter Gor­don and a vod­ka mar­ti­ni, the stress melt­ed away and every­thing was ‘Beau­ti­ful, baby, just beau­ti­ful.’ ” He then goes on to tell the sto­ry of how his father once attempt­ed to train young David and his sis­ters into a Brubeck-style fam­i­ly jazz com­bo — a hope­less dream from the start, but one that has since enter­tained his fans around the world. (Not that Sedaris has­n’t pro­vid­ed some of that enter­tain­ment by per­form­ing com­mer­cial jin­gles in the voice of Bil­lie Hol­i­day.)

Appear­ing on a guest DJ seg­ment on Los Ange­les pub­lic radio sta­tion KCRW, Sedaris told of how his father intro­duced him to jazz: “I remem­ber see­ing the movie Lady Sings the Blues, right, and think­ing Diana Ross did such a good job. And my Dad say­ing, ‘Oh boy, you’ve got a lot to learn,’ and then him play­ing Bil­lie Hol­i­day 78s for me… and then him tak­ing it back even fur­ther and sit­ting me down to lis­ten to Mabel Mer­cer. He real­ly did give me quite an edu­ca­tion and it’s the music that’s stuck with me.” As for the first jazz album he ever heard, he names in a recent Jaz­zTimes inter­view Charles Min­gus’ The Clown, the one “with a close-up of a clown’s face on the cov­er” that still, in his esti­ma­tion, “looks so mod­ern and it sounds so mod­ern.”

When Sedaris’ offi­cial Face­book page post­ed ten of his favorite songs, he came up with an all-jazz list includ­ing the work of Nina Simone, Anto­nio Car­los Jobim, John Coltrane, and oth­er lumi­nar­ies of the tra­di­tion. (He did not, of course, neglect Bil­lie Hol­i­day.) A fan turned it into a Spo­ti­fy playlist, which you’ll find embed­ded below (and if you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, you can down­load it here):

“I used to work in com­plete silence,” Sedaris tells Jaz­zTimes, but “about three or four years ago I start­ed lis­ten­ing to music [while I work], but not music with lyrics in it.” Much of the jazz he loves fits that descrip­tion, and he’s also, in com­bi­na­tion with the vari­ety of music-stream­ing ser­vices avail­able now, dis­cov­ered new jazz artists while writ­ing. Hav­ing put drink­ing and smok­ing com­plete­ly behind him — and hav­ing writ­ten about both of those expe­ri­ences — Sedaris retains jazz as one of the sub­stances that keeps him going. It cer­tain­ly seems to have worked for the man who brought the music into his life, whom Sedaris has imag­ined may yet out­live us all: “If any­thing hap­pens to me,” he says, “the one thing my father wants is my iPod.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Sedaris: A Sam­pling of His Inim­itable Humor

Be His Guest: David Sedaris at Home in Rur­al West Sus­sex, Eng­land

David Sedaris Sings the Oscar May­er Theme Song in the Voice of Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

The Best Music to Write By: Give Us Your Rec­om­men­da­tions

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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Hear Glenn Gould Channel Marshall McLuhan and Create an Experimental Radio Documentary Analyzing the Pop Music of Petula Clark (1967)

in Music, Radio | January 5th, 2018

Glenn Gould, that intel­lec­tu­al­ly intense, aes­thet­i­cal­ly aus­tere inter­preter of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach, had lit­tle time for pop music. He had espe­cial­ly lit­tle time for the Bea­t­les: “Theirs is a hap­py, cocky, bel­liger­ent­ly resource­less brand of har­mon­ic prim­i­tivism,” he wrote in High Fideli­ty in 1967, when the Fab Four had reached the top of the zeit­geist. “The indul­gent ama­teur­ish­ness of the musi­cal mate­r­i­al, though close­ly rivaled by the indif­fer­ence of the per­form­ing style, is actu­al­ly sur­passed only by the inep­ti­tude of the stu­dio pro­duc­tion method,” he declares, liken­ing “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” to “a moun­tain wed­ding between Clau­dio Mon­tever­di and a jug band.”

But the Bea­t­le-bash­ing was inci­den­tal to the pur­pose of the arti­cle, a paean to Eng­lish singer Petu­la Clark. At first lis­ten, her four sin­gles on which Gould focus­es his analy­sis — 1964’s “Down­town,” 1956’s “My Love,” and 1966’s “A Sign of the Times” and “Who Am I?” — sound like noth­ing more than ado­les­cent-ori­ent­ed pop hard­ly touched by any of that decade’s musi­cal (or indeed social) rev­o­lu­tions. But “this quar­tet of hits,” in Gould’s view, “was designed to con­vey the idea that, bound as she might be by lim­i­ta­tions of tim­bre and range, she would not accept any cor­re­spond­ing restric­tions of theme and sen­ti­ment,” with the result that she came to com­mand an audi­ence “large, con­stant, and pos­sessed of an enthu­si­asm which tran­scends the gen­er­a­tions.”

Gould says all this in The Search for Petu­la Clark, a 23-minute radio doc­u­men­tary that aired on the CBC on Decem­ber 11, 1967, less than three weeks before his much bet­ter-known exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary The Idea of North. He sit­u­ates his analy­sis of the singer he calls “Pet Clark,” which gets into not just her songs’ themes and lyrics but their tech­ni­cal qual­i­ties as music, in the con­text of a solo road trip around Lake Supe­ri­or when “Who Am I?” first hit the air­waves. So com­pelled did he find him­self that he timed his dri­ve to get with­in range of one of the radio sta­tions scat­tered across the vast­ness of his home­land at the top of each hour in order to hear the song over and over again, after 700 miles he got to “know it if not bet­ter than the soloist, at least as well, per­haps, as most of the side­men.”

Though born with­in two months of each oth­er in 1932 and there­after liv­ing lives ded­i­cat­ed to music, Gould and Clark would seem to have lit­tle else in com­mon. While Gould died at 50, Clark, at the age of 85, con­tin­ues to both record and per­form. Gould, as J.D. Con­nor writes in an essay on The Search for Petu­la Clark, “stopped per­form­ing for live audi­ences in 1964. Freed from the rig­ors of the con­cert cir­cuit, he dove into radio and tele­vi­sion at just the moment when he and Cana­di­an state media could par­lay his immense musi­cal pop­u­lar­i­ty into some­thing more.”  This and the more intri­cate radio pro­duc­tions that would fol­low both sprang from and allowed Gould to con­struct “a media the­o­ry of his own. In print, on tele­vi­sion, and, most impor­tant, on radio, Gould became the great com­ple­ment to Mar­shall McLuhan.” And like McLuhan, when Gould obsess­es over some­thing that nev­er seemed to mer­it seri­ous atten­tion, we’d do well to heed the insights he draws from it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s Shock­ing­ly Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary, The Idea of North (1967)

Glenn Gould: Off and On the Record: Two Short Films About the Life & Music of the Eccen­tric Musi­cian

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toron­to, His Beloved Home­town (1979)

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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Listen to Glenn Gould’s Shockingly Experimental Radio Documentary, The Idea of North (1967)

in Radio | December 30th, 2017

If genius is an infi­nite capac­i­ty for tak­ing pains, Glenn Gould mer­its each and every one of the many appli­ca­tions of the word “genius” to his name. The world knows that name pri­mar­i­ly as one of a genius of the piano, of course, espe­cial­ly when inter­pret­ing the genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach, but he also made an impres­sion in his home­land of Cana­da as a genius of the radio edit­ing suite. Hav­ing record­ed for the Cana­di­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion’s clas­si­cal-and-jazz record label CBC Records placed him well to real­ize his ideas on the CBC’s air­waves, most mem­o­rably in the form of The Idea of North, an hour­long med­i­ta­tion on the vast, cold expanse that con­sti­tutes the top third of the coun­try, which first aired on Decem­ber 28, 1967.

The broad­cast’s fifti­eth anniver­sary has prompt­ed Cana­di­ans and non-Cana­di­ans alike to have anoth­er lis­ten to Gould’s best-known radio project, back then shock­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal and still bold­ly uncon­ven­tion­al today. “The pianist used a tech­nique he called ‘con­tra­pun­tal radio,’ lay­er­ing speak­ing voic­es on top of each oth­er to cre­ate a unique son­ic envi­ron­ment sit­u­at­ed in the space between con­ver­sa­tion and music,” says the site of CBC’s Ideas, which recent­ly aired a new episode about the mak­ing of The Idea of North called Return to North.

The page quotes Gould biog­ra­ph­er Geof­frey Payzant as describ­ing it and Gould’s sub­se­quent doc­u­men­taries as “hybrids of music, dra­ma, and sev­er­al oth­er strains, includ­ing essay, jour­nal­ism, anthro­pol­o­gy, ethics, social com­men­tary, [and] con­tem­po­rary his­to­ry.”

One might might well com­pare The Idea of North’s form to that of a fugue, the type of com­plex con­tra­pun­tal com­po­si­tion so close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Bach and thus with Gould as well. But the form also serves the sub­stance, “that incred­i­ble tapes­try of tun­dra and taiga which con­sti­tutes the Arc­tic and sub-Arc­tic of our coun­try,” as Gould him­self puts it in the broad­cast’s intro­duc­tion. “I’ve read about it, writ­ten about it, and even pulled up my par­ka once and gone there,” he con­tin­ues, but like most Cana­di­ans remained ever “an out­sider” to the North, “and the North has remained for me, a con­ve­nient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.”

The North also offered Gould a pow­er­ful sym­bol of soli­tude, a con­di­tion which he sought through­out his life, espe­cial­ly after quit­ting live per­for­mance to focus exclu­sive­ly on the stu­dio short­ly before mak­ing The Idea of North. In the decade there­after he made two more for­mal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar doc­u­men­taries, one on coastal New­found­lan­ders and anoth­er on Men­non­ites in Man­i­to­ba, and the three togeth­er make up his “Soli­tude Tril­o­gy.” A tele­vi­sion film of The Idea of North, co-pro­duced by the CBC and PBS, appeared in 1970, lay­er­ing images of the North atop of the words about the North Gould had col­lect­ed. It cer­tain­ly adds a dimen­sion to Gould’s painstak­ing­ly con­struct­ed audio col­lage, but some­how pure radio, the old “the­ater of the mind,” still suits it best: the images of the North he want­ed to evoke, one sens­es just as well now as half a cen­tu­ry ago, exist only in the mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glenn Gould: Off and On the Record: Two Short Films About the Life & Music of the Eccen­tric Musi­cian

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Offers a Strik­ing­ly Uncon­ven­tion­al Inter­pre­ta­tion of 1806 Beethoven Com­po­si­tion

Watch a 27-Year-Old Glenn Gould Play Bach & Put His Musi­cal Genius on Dis­play (1959)

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toron­to, His Beloved Home­town (1979)

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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Hear the Christmas Carols Made by Alan Turing’s Computer: Cutting-Edge Versions of “Jingle Bells” and “Good King Wenceslas” (1951)

in History, Music, Radio, Technology | December 22nd, 2017

Alan Tur­ing (right) stands next to the Fer­ran­ti Mark I. Pho­to cour­tesy of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­ches­ter

This Christ­mas, as our com­put­ers fast learn to com­pose music by them­selves, we might gain some per­spec­tive by cast­ing our minds back to 66 Christ­mases ago, a time when a com­put­er’s ren­di­tion of any­thing resem­bling music at all had thou­sands and thou­sands lis­ten­ing in won­der. In Decem­ber of 1951, the BBC’s hol­i­day broad­cast, in most respects a nat­u­ral­ly tra­di­tion­al affair, includ­ed the sound of the future: a cou­ple of much-loved Christ­mas car­ols per­formed not by a choir, nor by human beings of any kind, but by an elec­tron­ic machine the likes of which almost nobody had even laid eyes upon.

“Among its Christ­mas fare the BBC broad­cast two melodies that, although instant­ly rec­og­niz­able, sound­ed like noth­ing else on earth,” write Jack Copeland and Jason Long at the British Library’s Sound and Vision Blog. “They were Jin­gle Bells and Good King Wences­las, played by the mam­moth Fer­ran­ti Mark I com­put­er that stood in Alan Tur­ing’s Com­put­ing Machine Lab­o­ra­to­ry” at the Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­ches­ter. Tur­ing, whom we now rec­og­nize for a vari­ety of achieve­ments in com­put­ing, cryp­tog­ra­phy, and relat­ed fields (includ­ing crack­ing the Ger­man “Enig­ma code” dur­ing the Sec­ond World War), had joined the uni­ver­si­ty in 1948.

That same year, with his for­mer under­grad­u­ate col­league D. G. Cham­per­nowne, Tur­ing began writ­ing a pure­ly the­o­ret­i­cal com­put­er chess pro­gram. No com­put­er exist­ed on which he could pos­si­bly try run­ning it for the next few years until the Fer­ran­ti Mark 1 came along, and even that mam­moth proved too slow. But it could, using a func­tion designed to give audi­to­ry feed­back to its oper­a­tors, play music — of a kind, any­way. The com­put­er com­pa­ny’s “mar­ket­ing supre­mo,” accord­ing to Copeland and Long, called its brief Christ­mas con­cert “the most expen­sive and most elab­o­rate method of play­ing a tune that has ever been devised.”

Since no record­ing of the broad­cast sur­vives, what you hear here is a painstak­ing recon­struc­tion made from tapes of the com­put­er’s even ear­li­er ren­di­tions of “God Save the King,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and “In the Mood.” By man­u­al­ly chop­ping up the audio, write Copeland and Long, “we cre­at­ed a palette of notes of var­i­ous pitch­es and dura­tions. These could then be rearranged to form new melodies. It was musi­cal Lego.” But do “beware of occa­sion­al dud notes. Because the com­put­er chugged along at a sedate 4 kilo­hertz or so, hit­ting the right fre­quen­cy was not always pos­si­ble.” Even so, some­where in there I hear the his­tor­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal seeds of the much more elab­o­rate elec­tron­ic Christ­mas to come, from Mannheim Steam­roller to the Jin­gle Cats and well beyond.

via The British Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the First Record­ing of Com­put­er Music: Researchers Restore Three Melodies Pro­grammed on Alan Turing’s Com­put­er (1951)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

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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Hear The Cinnamon Bear, the Classic Holiday Radio Series That Has Aired Between Thanksgiving and Christmas for 80 Years

in Radio | November 24th, 2017

Eighty years ago, just after Thanks­giv­ing, chil­dren across Amer­i­ca turned on their radios and heard a cou­ple of voic­es very much like their own: those of Judy and Jim­my Bar­ton, a sis­ter and broth­er eager­ly com­pos­ing their wish lists to send off to San­ta Claus. Judy asks for a veloci­pede, seem­ing­ly a hot item in 1937 but not even a rec­og­niz­able word to most of the chil­dren who’ve lis­tened to the broad­cast in hol­i­day sea­sons since. Despite the occa­sion­al such archaism, The Cin­na­mon Bear, the series in which Judy and Jim­my star, con­tin­ues to enchant not just gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of kids, but also those grown-ups among us who savor the oppor­tu­ni­ties this time of year affords to more ful­ly appre­ci­ate time­less child­hood plea­sures.

The Cin­na­mon Bear fol­lows the adven­tures of Judy and Jim­my as they search for the lost sil­ver star that tops their Christ­mas tree. They first check the attic, there encoun­ter­ing the title ani­mal: Pad­dy O’Cin­na­mon, an Irish-accent­ed ted­dy bear with a ten­den­cy to great­ly over­es­ti­mate his own fear­some­ness but an inde­fati­ga­ble spir­it of ser­vice as well. He even helps the Bar­ton chil­dren “de-grow” to minia­ture size in order to take the hunt to his home of May­be­land, a hid­den fan­ta­sy realm inhab­it­ed by such eccentrics, harm­less and oth­er­wise, as the Crazy Quilt Drag­on, the Roly-Poly Police­man, the Win­ter­green Witch, Oliv­er Ostrich (pre­pared with a musi­cal num­ber about his love of scram­bled alarm clocks and bacon), a fly­ing hat, and even San­ta Claus him­self.

But Pad­dy O’Cin­na­mon and the kids don’t meet jol­ly old Saint Nick until the prop­er time: Christ­mas day, on which the orig­i­nal broad­cast of The Cin­na­mon Bear con­clud­ed. The first fif­teen-minute episode aired on Novem­ber 26, 1937, with the sto­ry con­tin­u­ing six days a week until the big hol­i­day. Pro­duced in Hol­ly­wood by radio syn­di­ca­tor Transco and writ­ten, songs and all, by the hus­band-wife team of Glanville and Eliz­a­beth Heisch, it ini­tial­ly found local spon­sor­ship across the coun­try from depart­ment stores, some of whom paid for many years of repeat broad­casts and even put up Cin­na­mon Bear-themed dis­plays and events along with their San­ta Claus­es. (The now long-defunct Lip­man’s of Port­land, Ore­gon got into it in a big way, estab­lish­ing the show as some­thing of a tra­di­tion in the city, where Cin­na­mon Bear Christ­mas riv­er cruis­es run to this day.)

With Christ­mas over, the chil­dren of 1937 had no choice but to wait almost an entire year before they could hear The Cin­na­mon Bear again. Grow­ing up myself about half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, I had the show as a box set of cas­sette tapes to which I binged-lis­tened on a few dif­fer­ent hol­i­day sea­sons. But now, with seem­ing­ly the entire gold­en age of radio freely avail­able on the inter­net, kids and any­one else besides can lis­ten how­ev­er and when­ev­er they like. You’ll find all 26 episodes of The Cin­na­mon Bear on the Inter­net Archive, as a Youtube playlist, and even as a pod­cast on iTunes. (You can stream them all above.) This year, on the 80th anniver­sary of the orig­i­nal broad­cast, why not “air” it for you and yours as those first lis­ten­ers heard it, once an evening except Sat­ur­days, until Decem­ber 25th? Though each episode may be in doubt as to whether Judy and Jim­my will ever recov­er the sil­ver star, it’s no spoil­er to say that, with the assis­tance of Pad­dy O’Cinnamon, they do find their way to a mem­o­rable Christ­mas indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Christ­mas Car­ol, A Vin­tage Radio Broad­cast by Orson Welles and Lionel Bar­ry­more (1939)

Hear “Twas The Night Before Christ­mas” Read by Stephen Fry & John Cleese

Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christ­mas” Read by Date­line’s Kei­th Mor­ri­son

Wal­ter Benjamin’s Radio Plays for Kids (1929–1932)

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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Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

in Books, Politics, Radio | July 18th, 2017

Image  via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Half a cen­tu­ry ago, Hunter S. Thomp­son got his big jour­nal­is­tic break with a book called Hel­l’s Angels: The Strange and Ter­ri­ble Saga of the Out­law Motor­cy­cle Gangs. In it he pro­vid­ed a curi­ous and fear­ful pub­lic with a look into the inner work­ings of one of the most out­ward­ly men­ac­ing social move­ments of the day, based on knowl­edge gained not by mere­ly observ­ing the Hel­l’s Angels but by get­ting on a hog and spend­ing a year as a qua­si-mem­ber him­self. This gave him oppor­tu­ni­ty both to devel­op what would become his style of “gonzo jour­nal­ism” in the long form and to catch an ear­ly glimpse of big­ger trou­ble ahead in Amer­i­ca.

“To see the Hell’s Angels as care­tak­ers of the old ‘indi­vid­u­al­ist’ tra­di­tion ‘that made this coun­try great’ is only a pain­less way to get around see­ing them for what they real­ly are,” Thomp­son writes in that book, call­ing them “the first wave of a future that noth­ing in our his­to­ry has pre­pared us to cope with. The Angels are pro­to­types. Their lack of edu­ca­tion has not only ren­dered them com­plete­ly use­less in a high­ly tech­ni­cal econ­o­my, but it has also giv­en them the leisure to cul­ti­vate a pow­er­ful resent­ment… and to trans­late it into a destruc­tive cult which the mass media insists on por­tray­ing as a sort of iso­lat­ed odd­i­ty” des­tined for extinc­tion.

Studs Terkel, after read­ing that pas­sage out loud in a 1967 inter­view with Thomp­son (stream it online here), calls it “the key” to the entire book. “Here we have tech­nol­o­gy, we have the com­put­er, we have labor-sav­ing devices,” he says to Thomp­son, but we also “have the need for more and more col­lege edu­ca­tion for almost any kind of job, and we have this tremen­dous mass of young who find them­selves obso­lete.” But Thomp­son replies that the real con­se­quences have only start­ed to man­i­fest: “The peo­ple who are being left out and put behind won’t be obvi­ous for years. Christ only knows what’ll hap­pen in, say, 1985 — a mil­lion Hel­l’s Angels. They won’t be wear­ing the col­ors; they’ll be peo­ple who are just look­ing for vengeance because they’ve been left behind.”

The Angels, wrote Susan McWilliams in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed Nation piece late last year, “were clunky and out­classed and scorned, just like the Harley-David­sons they chose to dri­ve.” And “just as there was no ratio­nal way to defend Harleys against for­eign-made chop­pers, the Angels saw no ratio­nal grounds on which to defend their own skills or loy­al­ties against the emerg­ing new world order of the late 20th cen­tu­ry.” The result? An “eth­ic of total retal­i­a­tion. The Angels, rather than grace­ful­ly accept­ing their place as losers in an increas­ing­ly tech­ni­cal, intel­lec­tu­al, glob­al, inclu­sive, pro­gres­sive Amer­i­can soci­ety, stuck up their fin­gers at the whole enter­prise. If you can’t win, you can at least scare the bejeesus out of the guy wear­ing the medal.”

Six years lat­er, Terkel invit­ed Thomp­son back into his stu­dio for anoth­er inter­view (click here to lis­ten) that fol­lowed straight on from the first. Osten­si­bly there to talk about Thomp­son’s book Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail ’72 (which fol­lowed his best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), the two, hav­ing cracked open a beer, get into what the Studs Terkel Radio Archive blog describes as “the sense of sur­re­al­ism in ‘real’ life,” which becomes “a very seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion about the direc­tion in which our coun­try was head­ing. After Thomp­son recount­ed his expe­ri­ence of talk­ing to Richard Nixon about foot­ball” — the only sub­ject per­mit­ted — “Studs responds, ‘Isn’t this what we’re faced with now? … That fan­ta­sy and fact become one.’ ”

What’s a reporter to do in such an envi­ron­ment? Terkel seems to see in Thomp­son the per­fect kind of “sub­jec­tive” jour­nal­ist, one “who can make lit­er­al what is psy­chic in our lives,” for a time that has lost its own objec­tiv­i­ty. “Has there ever been any such thing as objec­tive jour­nal­ism?” he asks. “It’s prob­a­bly the high­est kind of jour­nal­ism, if you can do it.” Thomp­son replies. “Nobody I know has ever done it, and I don’t have time to learn it.” But the dis­tinc­tive suite of jour­nal­is­tic skills he did pos­sess primed him to per­ceive cer­tain real­i­ties — and per­ceive them with a dis­tinc­tive vivid­ness — that have only become more real in the decades since. What, for instance, did he learn from cov­er­ing the 1972 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign? “Pow­er cor­rupts… but it’s also a fan­tas­tic high.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Ani­ma­tion: Hunter S. Thomp­son Talks with Studs Terkel About the Hell’s Angels & The Out­law Life

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets Con­front­ed by The Hell’s Angels: Where’s Our Two Kegs of Beer? (1967)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Con­spir­a­to­r­i­al 9/11 Inter­view: “The Pub­lic Ver­sion of the News is Nev­er Real­ly What Hap­pened”

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets in a Gun­fight with His Neigh­bor & Dis­pens­es Polit­i­cal Wis­dom: “In a Democ­ra­cy, You Have to Be a Play­er”

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

Read 11 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

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 Face­book.

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Sci-Fi Radio: Hear Radio Dramas of Sci-Fi Stories by Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin & More (1989)

in Audio Books, Radio, Sci Fi | June 16th, 2017

Image by Mr.Hasgaha, via Flickr Com­mons

If you dig through our archives, you can find no short­age of fine­ly-pro­duced radio drama­ti­za­tions of your favorite sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries. Dur­ing the 1950s, NBC’s Dimen­sion X adapt­ed sto­ries by the likes of Isaac Asi­mov, Ray Brad­bury, Robert Hein­lein, and even Kurt Von­negut. Lat­er in the ’50s, X Minus One con­tin­ued that tra­di­tion, dra­ma­tiz­ing sto­ries by Robert A. Hein­lein, Philip K. Dick, Poul Ander­son and oth­ers. By the 1970s, Mind Webs got into the act and pro­duced 188 adap­ta­tions–clas­sics by Ursu­la K. LeGuin, Isaac Asi­mov, Arthur C. Clarke. And the BBC did up Isaac Asimov’s Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy.

Those pro­duc­tions will keep you busy for a good while. But if you’re won­der­ing what the 1980s deliv­ered, then tune into Sci-Fi Radio, a series of 26 half-hour shows which aired on NPR Play­house, start­ing in 1989. Some of the adapt­ed sto­ries include: “Sales Pitch” and “Imposter” by Philip K. Dick, “Diary of the Rose” and “Field of Vision” by Ursu­la K. LeGuin, “Wall of Dark­ness” by Arthur C. Clarke, and “Frost and Fire” by Ray Brad­bury.

You can stream all episodes below, or over at Archive.org. Sci-Fi Radio will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. Hope you enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asimov’s Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy: Hear the 1973 Radio Drama­ti­za­tion

X Minus One: Hear Clas­sic Sci-Fi Radio Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

Lis­ten to 188 Dra­ma­tized Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries by Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Isaac Asi­mov, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Bal­lard & More

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Hear 6 Clas­sic Philip K. Dick Sto­ries Adapt­ed as Vin­tage Radio Plays

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