Here’s the gist: If you buy an All-Access pass to their 90+ courses, you will receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge. An All-Access pass costs $180 (or $15 per month), and lasts one year. For that fee, you–and a family member or friend–can watch courses created by Annie Leibovitz, Neil Gaiman, Malcolm Gladwell, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, David Mamet, Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Helen Mirren, Herbie Hancock, Alice Waters, Billy Collins and so many more. If you’re thinking this sounds like a pretty good way to get through quarantine, we’d have to agree. The deal is available now.
Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
You’re most likely to know Mark’s work from the string introduction to REM’s “Shiny Happy People,” but he’s been a staple of the New Orleans recording scene since he moved there in 1982, producing groups like Flat Duo Jets, Glenn Branca, John Scofield, Marianne Faithful, and the Rebirth Brass Band. He and his studio were also featured on the HBO show Treme. He had a whole lifetime of musical development before then, though, first getting signed as a teenager in Los Angeles and recording a single as a solo artist. He then left to study music in Indiana where he was one of two guitarists and several singers for the very adventurous, theatrical Screaming Gypsy Bandits, who released their one album, In the Eye, in 1973. Following the times, he eschewed progressive rock for a more minimalist but still very arty style in New York City with a band called Social Climbers. He’s released two albums since then under his own name in between production work: A jazz-rock inflected singer-songwriter album called I Passed for Human in 1989, and then a more rootsy endeavor called Psalms Of Vengeance in 2009. He is due for a significant archive release within the next year with something like ten albums of additional compositions.
In this episode of Nakedly Examined Music, we pick four of his songs to play in full and discuss. After a short introduction over the song “Flies R All Around Me” by Screaming Gypsy Bandits from Back to Doghead (1970, but not released until 2009), the first full discussion covers “Pissoffgod.com” (featured in the video link in this post) from Psalms of Vengeance (2009). We then turn to “Ash Wednesday and Lent” by Ed Sanders (music by Mark Bingham) from Ed’s album Poems for New Orleans (2007). We then look back to “That’s Why” by Social Climbers from their self-titled album (1981). We conclude with “Blood Moon,” a group improvisation by Michot’s Melody Makers from Cosmic Cajuns from Saturn (2020). This is a band that plays mostly traditional cajun music that Mark was producing and has now for two albums joined as their guitarist.
Around the country today, along with a food-coma inducing serving of turkey, ham, stuffing and all the trimmings, a great many of you will be following another tradition: listening to Arlo Guthrie’s 1968 song “Alice’s Restaurant.” According to one YouTuber, when her kids were young, she’d “sit them down together and play this/torture them with it from beginning to end.” The replies suggest she’s not alone. Somewhere a child has now grown up and is passing the song down to a younger generation.
“Alice’s Restaurant” is about Thanksgiving in the same way that it’s about a restaurant owned by Alice–very little. Instead, it’s a long shaggy but true tale about Guthrie and his friend Rick Robbins helping their friends out after a Thanksgiving dinner that “couldn’t be beat”. With trash filling up the gutted former small-town Massachusetts church where Alice and her husband were living, the two fill up their VW van with the refuse and illegally dump it in the back woods. Guthrie gets arrested, taken to court, and fined for littering, only to have his new criminal record later disqualify him for the draft.
That’s the destination, but it’s the journey that makes the song, an 18-plus minute “talking blues” that Guthrie would have learned from his dad, folk legend Woody Guthrie. Woody in turn learned it from a 1920s country and Blues musician called Chris Bouchillon, who talked his way through songs because his singing voice wasn’t all that good. And the simple picking style Guthrie traces from Mississippi John Hurt to Pete Seeger and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot all the way back to the motherland: “In its infancy, that’s an African style approach to a six-string guitar and I have always loved it,” he told Rolling Stone.
Guthrie started writing the song, titling it “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” an esoteric word meaning a series of absurd events. He workshopped it in coffee houses and live venues, adding to it, taking bits out that weren’t working, playing with the time, from 18 minutes all the way up to 35. In February of 1967 Guthrie was invited to play live on New York City’s WBAI-FM. The recording became a hit, and helped the non-profit station fund-raise, broadcasting the song when a total dollar amount was hit. When the song got too much airplay, they also fund-raised to stop playing the song.
Then came the Newport Folk Festival, where the daytime crowd of 3,500 loved it so much that Guthrie returned for the evening set to play it to 9,500, joined on stage with a who’s‑who of folk legends including Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand. This was a big deal for an 18-year-old musician. The album came in October of that year, where the song took up a whole side. A movie adaptation appeared two years later, with the actual people from the song–including police chief William Obanhein (Officer Obie in the song) and the blind Judge James Hannon–playing themselves in the movie.
The song might not have its staying power if it wasn’t for its themes of resisting authority and bureaucracy, possibly even more than the anti-war message at its end.
“I’ve remained distrustful of authority for my entire life,” Guthrie told Smithsonian Magazine, “I believe it’s one of the great strengths of a democracy, that we take seriously our role as the ultimate authorities by our interest and our votes. Younger people have always had a rebellious streak. It goes with the territory of growing up.”
Guthrie retired from touring, and had retired the song even earlier than that. But it lives on every Thanksgiving in many households. As he told Rolling Stone, that’s a fine legacy:
“Hey if they’re gonna play one song of yours on the radio one day a year, it might as well be the longest one you wrote!”
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.
“A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like,” the late anthropologist David Graeber once wrote in the Baffler. This refers to “a particular generational promise — given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties — one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like.” In the confusingly disappointing future we now inhabit, one question hovers above them all: “Where, in short, are the flying cars?”
Even those of us not yet born in the mid-20th century can sense the cultural import of the flying car to that era, and not just from its science fiction. Chuck Berry was singing about flying cars back in 1956: His song “You Can’t Catch Me” tells of racing down the New Jersey Turnpike in a custom-made “airmobile,” a “Flight DeVille with a powerful motor and some hideaway wings.”
This wasn’t wholly fantastical, given that an actual flying car had been built seven years earlier. Demonstrated in the newsreel from that year at the top of the post, the Aerocar came designed and built by a solo inventor, former World War II pilot Moulton Taylor of Longview, Washington, who in 1959 would appear on the popular game show I’ve Got a Secret.
The program’s panelists attempt to guess the nature of Taylor’s invention as he puts it together onstage, for the Aerocar required some assembly. Though considerably more complicated than the push-button mechanism imagined by Berry, the process took only five minutes to convert from automobile to airplane, or so the inventor promised. Despite securing the Civil Aviation Authority’s approval for mass production, Taylor couldn’t find a sufficient number of buyers, and in the end only built six Aerocars. But one of them still flies, as seen on the first episode of the 2008 series James May’s Big Ideas. “I wouldn’t have flown it if I’d seen the wings were attached with elaborate paperclips,” writes the former Top Gear co-host, “but by the time I realized this, we were already at 2,000 feet.”
“As an airplane, it was actually pretty good,” May admits, “but then, it would be, because an airplane is what it was.” As a car, “it was diabolical. Worse than the Beetle, to be honest, and not helped by the requirement to drag all the unwanted airplaney bits behind you on a trailer.” Still, the experience of flying in the Aerocar clearly thrilled him, as it would any car or plane enthusiast. Even in a non-airworthy state the Aerocar certainly thrills Matthew Burchette, curator at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. In the video above he introduces the museum’s Aerocar III, the last one Taylor built. “If you’re about my age, you really wanted your jetpack,” says the gray-haired Burchette, though a flying car would also have done the trick. Alas, more than half a century after Taylor’s ambitious project, humanity seems to have made no apparent progress in that department; jetpacks, however, seem to be coming along nicely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
One of the earliest known non-human visual artists, Congo the chimpanzee, learned to draw in 1956 at the age of two. Moody, fiercely protective of his work, and particular about his process, he made around 400 drawings and paintings in a style described as “lyrical abstract impressionism.” He appeared several times on British television before his death in 1964. He counted Picasso among his fans and, in a 2005 auction, outsold Warhol and Renoir.
One wonders if whoever gave the four-headed beast known as the Beatles canvas and paint (“possibly Brian Epstein or their Japanese promoter, Tats Nagashima”) remembered Congo as the fab four bounced off the walls in their hotel rooms in Tokyo during their last, 1966 tour, when extra security forced them to stay inside for three full days. Or perhaps their keepers were inspired by the humane practice of art therapy, coming into its own at the same time in mental health circles with the founding of the British Association of Art Therapists in 1964.
“According to photographer Robert Whitaker,” David Wolman writes at The Atlantic, the Beatles’ manager “brought the guys a bunch of art supplies to help pass the time. Then Epstein set a large canvas on a table and placed a lamp in the middle. Each member of the group set to work painting a corner—comic strippy for Ringo, psychedelic for John.” Paul’s corner resembles an oddly erotic sea creature, George’s the spiritual abstractions of Kandinsky. According to the Beatles Bible, it was Nagashima “who suggested that the completed painting be auctioned for charity.”
Whitaker documented the experiment and later pronounced it an immediate success: “I never saw them calmer, more contented than at this time… They’d stop, go and do a concert, and then it was ‘Let’s go back to the picture!’” Once finished, the lamp was lifted, all four signed their names in the center, and the painting was titled Images of A Woman, which may be no indication of the artists’ intentions. Who knows what kind of scouser humor passed between them as they worked.
The painting then passed to cinema executive Tetsusaburo Shimoyama, whose widow auctioned it in 1989 to wealthy record store owner Takao Nishino, who had seen them at Budokan in 1966 during the same historic tour that produced the painting. Then it ended up under a bed for twenty years before being auctioned again in 2012. It’s certainly true the band, most especially Paul and John, had always taken to visual art, as artists themselves or as collectors and appreciators. But this is something special. It represents their only collaborative artwork, aside from some doodles on a card sent to the Monterrey organizers.
When looking at Whitaker’s photographs of the band at work (see video montage above), one doesn’t, of course, think of Congo the chimp or the patients of a psychiatric hospital. Instead, they look like students in a ‘60s alternative school, set loose to create without interruption (but for the occasional mega-concert) to their hearts’ content. Maybe Epstein or Nagashima had just seen the 1966 National Film Board of Canada documentary Summerhill, about just such a school in England? Whatever inspired the zeitgeist‑y moment, we can see why it never came again. That year, they played their final concert and retired to the studio, where they could lock themselves away with their preferred means of creative distraction.
A quick heads up. From November 23rd through December 31st, you can stream for free all classes offered by Nikon School Online. Normally priced at $15-$50 per course, this 10-course offering covers Fundamentals of Photography, Dynamic Landscape Photography, Macro Photography, Photographing Children and Pets, and more.
Finding the courses on the Nikon site is not very intuitive. To access the courses, click here and then scroll down the page until you see a yellow button that says “Watch Full Version.” From there you will get a prompt that allows you to sign up for the courses…
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!
What made Stevie Ray Vaughan such a great guitarist? If you ask Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, a devoted student of the blues, it’s “his timing, his tone, his feel, his vibrato, his phrasing–everything. Some people are just born to play guitar, and Stevie was definitely one of them.” This may come as disappointing news to guitar players who want to sound like SRV but weren’t born with his genes. Hammett assures them it’s possible to approximate his style, to some degree, with the right gear and mastery of his signature techniques. Hammett lays out the SRV repertoire thoroughly, but there is no substitute for the source.
SRV’s dual education in both the British blues and the American blues of his heroes gave him “less reservations and less reasons to be so-called a ‘purist,’” he says in the video above. He then proceeds to blow us away with imitations of the greats and his own particular spin on their techniques.
You could call it a guitar lesson, but as his student, you had better have advanced blues chops and a very good ear. As he runs through the styles of his idols, Vaughan doesn’t slow down or pause to explain what he’s doing. If you can keep up, you probably don’t need the lessons after all.
Although compared, favorably or otherwise, to his idol Jimi Hendrix during his life and after his tragic death at 35, Vaughan also “incorporated the jazz stylings of Django Reinhardt, Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery,” Guitar magazine notes, and was “a keen student of Muddy Waters, Albert King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Lonnie Mack and Otis Rush.” Muddy Waters, in turn, was a great admirer of Vaughan. “Stevie could perhaps be the greatest guitar player that ever lived,” the blues legend remarked in 1979. But like his hero Hendrix, Vaughan’s talent could be overshadowed by his addictions. “He won’t live to get 40 years old if he doesn’t leave that white powder alone,” Waters went on.
The drugs and alcohol nearly killed him, but they didn’t seem to cramp his playing. The video above comes from a January 1986 soundcheck, the same year Vaughan’s substance abuse hit its peak and he entered rehab after nearly dying of dehydration in Germany. He would get sober and survive, only to die in a helicopter crash four years later. While his early death may have something to do with the way he has been deified, what comes through in his albums and performances thirty years after he left us is the brute fact of his originality as a blues player.
Perhaps the the most concise statement of this comes from John Mayer’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech:
There is an intensity about Stevie’s guitar playing that only he could achieve, still to this day. It’s a rage without anger, it’s devotional, it’s religious. He seamlessly melded the supernatural vibe of Jimi Hendrix, the intensity of Albert King, the best of British, Texas and Chicago Blues and the class and sharp shooter precision of his older brother Jimmie. Stevie is the ultimate guitar hero.
If you’ve ever had reason to doubt, see it for yourself above.
People do weird things in the desert. A spokesman for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources acknowledges that widely understood truth in a recent New York Times article about a mysterious monolith discovered in Red Rock Country. “A team that was counting bighorn sheep by helicopter spotted something odd and landed to take a closer look,” writes Alan Yuhas. “It was a three-sided metal monolith, about 10 to 12 feet tall, planted firmly in the ground with no clear sign of where it came from or why it was there.” Whatever the differences in size, shape, and color, this still-unexplained object brings to mind nothing so much as 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its most famous monolith of all.
Though Stanley Kubrick shot that particular scene in London’s Shepperton Studios, plenty of other productions have made use of the Utah Desert, including installments of the spectacle-driven Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible series. But as far as anyone knows, the monolith isn’t a piece of set dressing.
Crowdsourcing guesses on social media, the Utah Highway Patrol received such responses as “a ‘resonance deflector,’ ‘an eyesore,’ ‘some good metal.’ Some theorized, vaguely, that it was a satellite beacon. Others joked that it was a Wi-Fi router.” Whoever assembled and installed it, they did so with “human-made rivets” and a skilled enough hand to cut a perfectly shaped hole into the rock — the kind of combination of apparent skill and inexplicability that once stirred up so much fascination over crop circles.
Image by Utah Department of Public Safety
The Art Newspaper’s Gabriella Angeleti describes the monolith as “resembling the freestanding plank sculptures of the late Minimalist artist John McCracken.” Though McCracken never officially made an installation in the Utah desert, he did spend the last years of his life not far away (at least by the standards of the southwestern United States) in northern New Mexico, and anyone familiar with his work will sense a certain affinity with it in this newly discovered object. “While this is not a work by the late American artist John McCracken,” says a spokesman for the gallery that represents him, “we suspect it is a work by a fellow artist paying homage.” Whether or not the monolith has an intended message, the reactions now going viral around the world already have many of us wondering how far we’ve really evolved past the apes.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In 1919, Sigmund Freud published “The ‘Uncanny,’” his rare attempt as a psychoanalyst “to investigate the subject of aesthetics.” The essay arrived in the midst of a modernist revolution Freud himself unwittingly inspired in the work of Surrealists like Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, and many others. He also had an influence on another artist of the period: his niece Martha-Gertrud Freud, who started going by the name “Tom” after the age of 15, and who became known as children’s book author and illustrator Tom Seidmann-Freud after she married Jakob Seidmann and the two established their own publishing house in 1921.
Seidmann-Freud’s work cannot help but remind students of her uncle’s work of the unheimlich—that which is both frightening and familiar at once. Uncanniness is a feeling of traumatic dislocation: something is where it does not belong and yet it seems to have always been there. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Seidmann-Freud’s named their publishing company Peregrin, which comes from “the Latin, Peregrinos,” notes an exhibition catalogue, “meaning ‘foreigner,’ or ‘from abroad’—a title used during the Roman Empire to identify individuals who were not Roman citizens.”
Uncanny dislocation was a theme explored by many an artist—many of them Jewish—who would later be labeled “decadent” by the Nazis and killed or forced into exile. Seidmann-Freud herself had migrated often in her young life, from Vienna to London, where she studied art, then to Munich to finish her studies, and finally to Berlin with her husband. She became familiar with the Jewish philosopher and mystic Gershom Scholem, who interested her in illustrating a Hebrew alphabet book. The project fell through, but she continued to write and publish her own children’s books in Hebrew.
In Berlin, the couple established themselves in the Charlottenburg neighborhood, the center of the Hebrew publishing industry. Seidmann-Freud’s books were part of a larger effort to establish a specifically Jewish modernism. Tom “was a typical example of the busy dawn of the 1920s,” Christine Brinck writes at Der Tagesspiegel. Scholem called the chain-smoking artist an “authentic Bohèmienne” and an “illustrator… bordering on genius.” Her work shows evidence of a “close familiarity with the world of dreams and the subconscious,” writes Hadar Ben-Yehuda, and a fascination with the fear and wonder of childhood.
In her 1923 The Fish’s Journey, Seidmann-Freud draws on a personal trauma, “the first real tragedy to have struck her young life when her beloved brother Theodor died by drowning.” Other works illustrate texts—chosen by Jakob and the couple’s business partner, poet Hayim Nahman Bialik—by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, “with drawings adapted to the landscapes of a Mediterranean community,” “a Jewish, socialist notion… added to the texts,” “and the difference between boys and girls made indecipherable,” the Seidmann-Freud exhibition catalogue points out.
These books were part of a larger mission to “introduce Hebrew-speaking children to world literature, as part of establishing a modern Hebrew society in Palestine.” Tragically, the publishing venture failed, and Jakob hung himself, the event that precipitated Tom’s own tragic end, as Ben-Yehuda tells it:
The delicate, sensitive illustrator never recovered from her husband’s death. She fell into depression and stopped eating. She was hospitalized, but no one from her family and friends, not even her uncle Sigmund Freud who came to visit and to care for her was able to lift her spirits. After a few months, she died of anorexia at the age of thirty-eight.
Seidmann-Freud passed away in 1930, “the same year that the liberal democracy in Germany, the Weimar Republic, started it frenzied downward descent,” a biography written by her family points out. Her work was burned by the Nazis, but copies of her books survived in the hands of the couple’s only daughter, Angela, who changed her name to Aviva and “emigrated to Israel just before the outbreak of World War II.”
Kevin was in the infamous, NYU-based sketch comedy group The State which had a show for a season on MTV and seemed like it was going to get picked up by CBS, but no. After several years getting over this disappointment, Kevin discovered a new outlet for his energies: He delivers, curates, and coaches personal stories (bordering on too personal, thus the “risk”) for his stage show and podcast RISK!
Kevin joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss this idiosyncratic form: Do the stories have to be funny? Can you change things? What’s the relation to autobiographical, humorous essays a la David Sedaris? What might be too personal or actually indicating trauma to actually share on RISK? This seems like something anyone can do, so what’s the role of craft and story-telling history?
Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This time, the hosts tell (or at least outline) their own RISK!-like stories, and the result is predictably too personal for our public feed.
Today we associate the word polygraph mainly with the devices we call “lie detectors.” The unhidden Greek terms from which it originates simply mean “multiple writing,” which seems apt enough in light of all those movie interrogation scenes with their juddering parallel needles. But the first “polygraph machine” meriting the name long predates such cinematic clichés, and indeed cinema itself. Patented in 1803 by an Englishman named John Isaac Hawkins, it consisted essentially of twin pens, mounted side-by-side and connected by means of levers and springs so as always to move in unison. The result, in theory, was that it would make an identical copy of a letter even as the writer wrote it.
“The polygraph was pushing technology to the absolute limit,” but for years “it was nearly impossible to make it work correctly.” So says Charles Morrill, a guide at Thomas Jefferson’s estate Monticello, in the video above.
Despite the prolonged technical difficulties, the third president of the United States of America fell in love with the polygraph, “a device to duplicate letters, just the thing if you’re carrying on multiple conversations with different people all over the world. You want to keep a copy of the letter to catch yourself up, to see what you had written to cause a response” — and, of special concern to a national politician, to check on the exact degree to which the press was misquoting you.
Jefferson wrote nearly 20,000 letters, one of them a complaint to John Adams about suffering “under the persecution of Letters,” a condition ensuring that “from sun-rise to one or two o’clock, I am drudging at the writing table.” That the polygraph reduced this drudgery somewhat made it, in Jefferson’s words, “the finest invention of the present age.” Like technological early adopters today, Jefferson acquired each new model as it came out, the device having been continually retooled by American rights-holder Charles Willson Peale. By 1809 Peale had improved the polygraph to the point that Jefferson could write that it “has spoiled me for the old copying press the copies of which are hardly ever legible … I could not, now therefore, live without the Polygraph.” Imagine how he would’ve felt had Monticello been wired for e‑mail.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
