Keith Richards Performs “I’m Waiting For The Man”: A New Tribute to Lou Reed

“To me, Lou stood out. The real deal! Some­thing impor­tant to Amer­i­can music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” — Kei­th Richards

On what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birth­day (March 2), Kei­th Richards released a cov­er of “I’m Wait­ing for the Man,” a track orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by Reed in 1966, then record­ed by the Vel­vet Under­ground the next year. Pre­vi­ous­ly cov­ered by David Bowie, OMD, and French singer Vanes­sa Par­adis, the song makes sense in Kei­th Richards’ hands. As one YouTu­ber put it, “See­ing Kei­th per­form this Vel­vet Under­ground clas­sic is watch­ing him take a vic­to­ry lap over his addic­tion. He’s been away from that life for decades and now he’s telling the sto­ry about some­one else, even though he lived it for a long time. This is a tri­umph for him.”

Richards’ cov­er will appear on the forth­com­ing album The Pow­er of the Heart: A Trib­ute to Lou Reed, where songs move from Reed’s “ground­break­ing years with the Vel­vets into his majes­tic solo career.” Con­trib­u­tors include Joan Jett and the Black­hearts, Rufus Wain­wright, Lucin­da Williams, Rick­ie Lee Jones, Bob­by Rush, and Rosanne Cash. The album will be released on Record Store Day (April 20th). Get more deets here.

Below, as a bonus, watch Reed and Bowie per­form “I’m Wait­ing for the Man” togeth­er, appar­ent­ly at Reed’s 50th birth­day bash in 1997.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Hear Lou Reed’s The Raven, a Trib­ute to Edgar Allan Poe Fea­tur­ing David Bowie, Ornette Cole­man, Willem Dafoe & More

Kei­th Richards Shows Us How to Play the Blues, Inspired by Robert John­son, on the Acoustic Gui­tar

Lou Reed and Lau­rie Anderson’s Three Rules for Liv­ing Well: A Short and Suc­cinct Life Phi­los­o­phy

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned What Life Would Look Like in the Year 2000

Atom­ic physi­cist Niels Bohr is famous­ly quot­ed as say­ing, “Pre­dic­tion is very dif­fi­cult, espe­cial­ly if it’s about the future.” Yet despite years of get­ting things wrong, mag­a­zines love think pieces on where we’ll be in sev­er­al decades, even cen­turies in time. It gives us com­fort to think great things await us, even though we’re long over­due for the per­son­al jet­pack and moon colonies.

800px-France_in_XXI_Century._Whale_bus

And yet it’s Asi­mov who appar­ent­ly owned the only set of post­cards of En L’An 2000, a set of 87 (or so) col­lectible artist cards that first appeared as inserts in cig­ar box­es in 1899, right in time for the 1900 World Exhi­bi­tion in Paris. Trans­lat­ed as “France in the 21st Cen­tu­ry,” the cards fea­ture Jean-Marc Côté and oth­er illus­tra­tors’ inter­pre­ta­tions of the way we’d be living…well, 23 years ago.

The his­to­ry of the card’s pro­duc­tion is very con­vo­lut­ed, with the orig­i­nal com­mis­sion­ing com­pa­ny going out of busi­ness before they could be dis­trib­uted, and whether that com­pa­ny was a toy man­u­fac­tur­er or a cig­a­rette com­pa­ny, nobody seems to know. And were the ideas giv­en to the artists, or did they come up with them on their own? We don’t know.

France_in_XXI_Century._Farmer

France_in_XXI_Century._Water_croquet

One of the first things that stands out scan­ning through these prints, now host­ed at The Pub­lic Domain Review, is a com­plete absence of space trav­el, despite Jules Verne hav­ing writ­ten From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 (which would influ­ence Georges Méliès’ A Voy­age to the Moon in 1902). How­ev­er, the under­wa­ter world spawned many a flight of fan­cy, includ­ing a whale-drawn bus, a cro­quet par­ty at the bot­tom of the ocean, and large fish being raced like thor­ough­bred hors­es.

800px-France_in_XXI_Century._Helicopter

There are a few inven­tions we can say came true. The “Advance Sen­tinel in a Heli­copter” has been doc­u­ment­ing traf­fic and car chas­es for decades now, fed right into our tele­vi­sions. A lot of farm work is now auto­mat­ed. And “Elec­tric Scrub­bing” is now called a Room­ba.

800px-France_in_XXI_Century._Electric_scrubbing

For a card-by-card exam­i­na­tion of these future visions, one should hunt out Isaac Asimov’s 1986 Future­days: A Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry Vision of the Year 2000, which can be found on Ama­zon right now. (Or see the nice gallery of images at The Pub­lic Domain Review.) And who knows? Maybe next year, your order will come to your door by drone. Just a pre­dic­tion.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1922, a Nov­el­ist Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wire­less Tele­phones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

Author Imag­ines in 1893 the Fash­ions That Would Appear Over the Next 100 Years

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future in 1982: Com­put­ers Will Be “at the Cen­ter of Every­thing;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

A Look Inside David Bowie & Iman’s Beautiful Mountain Home

It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine Iman and David Bowie invit­ing Vogue read­ers to join them on the above vir­tu­al tour of their moun­tain­top home near Wood­stock, New York when the rock leg­end was alive.

Grant­ed, short­ly after their 1992 wed­ding, he gave Archi­tec­tur­al Digest a peek at their ultra-lux­u­ri­ous, Indone­sian-style hol­i­day digs on the Caribbean island of Mus­tique, but, as reporter Christo­pher Buck­ley not­ed, “role changes have always been part of David Bowie’s per­sona.”

By the time they bought prop­er­ty and start­ed a fam­i­ly in New York, they had honed tech­niques for fly­ing under the radar in pub­lic, allow­ing them to lead a fair­ly reg­u­lar life in both Man­hat­tan and Ulster Coun­ty where the house they built on their 64-acre plot of Lit­tle Ton­shi Moun­tain is locat­ed.

Even the most ded­i­cat­ed city slick­er should be able to appre­ci­ate the beau­ty of their floor-to-ceil­ing Catskills views.

“It’s stark, and it has a Spar­tan qual­i­ty about it,” Bowie said pri­or to break­ing ground on the house:

The retreat atmos­phere honed my thoughts. I’ve writ­ten in the moun­tains before, but nev­er with such grav­i­tas.

WPDH in Pough­keep­sie report­ed that “the moun­tain­top retreat was kept “secret” from fans and paparazzi as much as any­thing can be hid­den in the age of the Inter­net and TMZ:”

Locals, how­ev­er, are well aware of Bowie’s moun­tain­top home. Although many knew of his address, the rock icon’s requests for pri­va­cy were most­ly hon­ored by his neigh­bors and fel­low Ulster Coun­ty res­i­dents. Bowie was spot­ted around town but rarely has­sled by strangers.

By and large, his neigh­bors left him in peace to pick up Chi­nese take out, browse the indie book­shop, and cel­e­brate his daughter’s birth­day at a near­by water park.

Bowie record­ed his final album, Black Star, on the moun­tain. Soon after, friends and fam­i­ly gath­ered to scat­ter his ash­es there too.

Iman con­fides that she found it dif­fi­cult to spend time at the house fol­low­ing his 2016 death, but spend­ing time there dur­ing the most intense part of the pan­dem­ic helped her come to terms with grief, and rejoice in the many con­tents that remind her of him.

Some high­lights:

  • Bowie’s 1980 paint­ing, Mus­tique, one of many self-por­traits he paint­ed over the years.

I feel like when I look at his eyes and I move around the house, it’s like it’s fol­low­ing me.

  • Lynn Chadwick’s sculp­ture “Ted­dy Boy and Girl”

Art con­sul­tant Kate Cher­ta­vian recalls how Iman enlist­ed her to help her track it down in the sum­mer of 1993 to mark the couple’s first wed­ding anniver­sary:

David had shared with her a small draw­ing of a sculp­ture by Lynn Chad­wick… a ver­sion of his Ted­dy Boy and Girl that had won the Inter­na­tion­al Sculp­ture Prize at the 1956 Venice Bien­nale. Although I didn’t yet know David, his inter­est in this sculp­ture, with its musi­cal ref­er­ences and incred­i­ble ener­gy, made per­fect sense. Ted­dy Boy and Girl is one of Chadwick’s best-known bod­ies of sculp­ture that helped rock­et the artist to inter­na­tion­al fame. The series elo­quent­ly embod­ies the emer­gent 1950s British Pop cul­ture as they depict post-war music-mad teens in their Edwar­dian frock coats danc­ing with arms in the air.

…way before David and I met, this was one of his favorite books. And actu­al­ly, he told me some of the lyrics from his song “Heroes” were actu­al­ly inspired by this book. And then of course, final­ly, when we meet, we can’t believe that we both adore the same book, but that also the whole sto­ry hap­pens from where I come from, Soma­lia.

  • A self-por­trait by their then-fif­teen-year-old daugh­ter Alexan­dria Jones, in which she and her moth­er are depict­ed inclin­ing gen­tly towards each oth­er:

It’s me and her and, of course, the black star. That’s David… she paint­ed this in 2016, which was the first year with­out David.

Of per­haps less imme­di­ate inter­est to those uncon­nect­ed to the world of high fash­ion is a pricey black croc­o­dile Her­mès Birkin bag, a sou­venir of a Parisian hol­i­day ear­ly in the couple’s romance. This item does come with an endear­ing sar­to­r­i­al sur­prise for Bowie fans, how­ev­er:

…and he bought him­self, you won’t believe it, san­dals.

Round­ing out the tour are a lim­it­ed edi­tion porce­lain pitch­er by Kara Walk­er and gifts from fash­ion design­er and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Hedi Sli­mane and fel­low for­mer mod­els Bethann Hardi­son and Nao­mi Camp­bell.

(Are we wrong to wish those san­dals had been Crocs?)

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Behold The Paint­ings of David Bowie: Neo-Expres­sion­ist Self Por­traits, Illus­tra­tions of Iggy Pop, and Much More

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

The Art Col­lec­tion of David Bowie: An Intro­duc­tion

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

Gillian Anderson Reads Anaïs Nin’s Passionate Letter about Sex and Poetry

From Let­ters Live comes a let­ter read by Gillian Ander­son. They pref­ace it with this: “In 1932, Cuban diarist Anaïs Nin and Amer­i­can nov­el­ist Hen­ry Miller began an incred­i­bly intense love affair that would last for many years. In the 1940s, at which point she, Miller, and a col­lec­tive of oth­er writ­ers were earn­ing $1 per page writ­ing erot­ic fic­tion for the pri­vate con­sump­tion of an anony­mous client known only as the “Col­lec­tor,” Nin wrote a pas­sion­ate let­ter to this mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure and made known her frustrations—frustrations caused by his repeat­ed insis­tence that they ‘leave out the poet­ry’ and instead ‘con­cen­trate on sex.’ ”

This let­ter comes from The Diary Of Anais Nin Vol­ume 3.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Lin­guis­tic The­o­ry, Nar­rat­ed by The X‑Files’ Gillian Ander­son

Hen­ry Miller Makes a List of “The 100 Books That Influ­enced Me Most”

Hear Anaïs Nin Read From Her Cel­e­brat­ed Diary: A 60-Minute Vin­tage Record­ing (1966)

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

The Cardboard Bernini: An Artist Spends 4 Years Building a Giant Cardboard Fountain Inspired by the Baroque Sculptor Bernini, Only to Let It Dissolve in the Rain

From the Tri­ton Foun­tain in the Piaz­za Bar­beri­ni to the Foun­tain of the Four Rivers in Piaz­za Navona, sculp­tor Gian Loren­zo Berni­ni’s glo­ri­ous pub­lic foun­tains have impressed vis­i­tors to Rome for cen­turies.

Berni­ni angled for immoral­i­ty when carv­ing his Baroque mas­ter­pieces from mar­ble.

Image by Trdinfl, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Eter­ni­ty occu­pied artist James Grashow’s mind, too, through­out four years of toil on his Cor­ru­gat­ed Foun­tain, a mas­ter­piece of planned obso­les­cence.

“All artists talk about process”, he rumi­nates in an out­take from Olympia Stone’s doc­u­men­tary, The Card­board Berni­ni, “but the process that they talk about is always from begin­ning to fin­ish:

Nobody real­ly talks about full term process to the end, to the destruc­tion, to the dis­so­lu­tion of a piece. Every­thing dis­solves in an eter­ni­ty. I’d like to speak to that.

He picked the right medi­um for such a med­i­ta­tion — cor­ru­gat­ed card­board, sourced from the Dan­bury Square Box Com­pa­ny. (The founders chose its name in 1906 to alert the local hat­ting indus­try that they did not traf­fic in round hat box­es.)

Grashow chal­lenged him­self to make some­thing with card­board and hot glue that would “out­shine” Berni­ni before it was sac­ri­ficed to the ele­ments:

Water and card­board can­not exist togeth­er.  The idea of a paper foun­tain is impos­si­ble, an oxy­moron that speaks to the human dilem­ma. I want­ed to make some­thing hero­ic in its con­cept and exe­cu­tion with full aware­ness of its poet­ic absur­di­ty. I want­ed to try to make some­thing eter­nal out of card­board… the Foun­tain was an irre­sistible project for me.

The doc­u­men­tary catch­es a mix of emo­tions as his metic­u­lous­ly con­struct­ed Baroque fig­ures — nymphs, hors­es, dol­phins, Posei­don — are posi­tioned for destruc­tion on the grounds of the Aldrich Con­tem­po­rary Art Muse­um.

A young boy at the exhibition’s open­ing is untrou­bled by the sculpture’s impend­ing fate:

I think it’s cool, coz it’s made out of trees and it’s return­ing to mush…or what­ev­er you want to call it.

His bud­dy finds it hard to share his enthu­si­asm, ges­tur­ing help­less­ly toward the mon­u­men­tal work, his voice trail­ing off as he remarks, “I don’t see why you would want that to…”

An adult vis­i­tor unashamed­ly reveals that she had been active­ly root­ing for rain.

When a storm does reduce the sculp­ture to an Ozy­man­di­an tableau a short while lat­er, Grashow sus­pects the project was ulti­mate­ly a self por­trait, “full of blus­ter and brava­do, hol­low and melan­choly at its core, doomed from the start, and search­ing for beau­ty in all of the sad­ness.”

Then he and a helper cart what’s left off to a wait­ing dump­ster.

His daugh­ter, Rab­bi Zoë Klein, likens the Cor­ru­gat­ed Fountain’s imper­ma­nence to the sand man­dalas Tibetan monks spend months cre­at­ing, then sweep away with lit­tle fan­fare:

…the art is about just the gift of cre­ation, that we have this abil­i­ty to cre­ate, that we cel­e­brate that, not that we can con­quer time, but rather we can make the most of the time we have by mak­ing it beau­ti­ful and mean­ing­ful, liv­ing up to our poten­tial..

Grashow speaks ten­der­ly of the ephemer­al mate­r­i­al he uses fre­quent­ly in his work:

It’s so grate­ful for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to become some­thing, because it knows it’s going to be trash.

Watch The Card­board Berni­ni here.

See more of James Grashow’s card­board works here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Design­er Cre­ates Origa­mi Card­board Tents to Shel­ter the Home­less from the Win­ter Cold

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man 1st Graders in Cute Card­board Robot Cos­tumes

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Music Producer Steve Albini, Director Godfrey Reggio & Actor Fred Armisen Explain Why Creating Is Crucial to Human Existence

Imag­ine, if you will, an evening’s enter­tain­ment con­sist­ing of an episode of Port­landia, a spin of Nir­vana’s In Utero, and a screen­ing of Koy­aanisqat­si. Per­haps these works would, at first glance, seem to have lit­tle in com­mon. But if you end the night by watch­ing the above episode of Big Think’s series Dis­patch­es from the Well with Kmele Fos­ter, their com­mon spir­it may well come into view. In it, Fos­ter trav­els Amer­i­ca in order to vis­it with God­frey Reg­gio, Steve Albi­ni, and Fred Armisen, wide­ly known, respec­tive­ly, as the direc­tor of Koy­aanisqat­si, the pro­duc­er of In Utero, and the co-cre­ator of Port­landia. All of them have also made a great deal of oth­er work, and none of them are about to stop now.

“When you have a mania, you can scream and go nuts, or you can write every­thing down,” says Reg­gio. “I write every­thing down.” The same con­cept aris­es in Fos­ter’s con­ver­sa­tion with Albi­ni, who believes that “the best music is made in ser­vice of the mania of the peo­ple doing it at the moment.” As for “the peo­ple who are try­ing to be pop­u­lar, who are try­ing to, like, enter­tain — a lot of that music is triv­ial.”

Fos­ter cred­i­bly describes Albi­ni as “a man with a code,” not least that which dic­tates his rejec­tion of dig­i­tal media. “I’m not mak­ing an aes­thet­ic case for ana­log record­ing,” he says. “Ana­log record­ings are a durable archive of our cul­ture, and in the dis­tant future, I want peo­ple to be able to hear what our music sound­ed like.”

To cre­ate as per­sis­tent­ly as these three have demands a will­ing­ness to play the long game — and to “re-per­ceive the nor­mal,” as Reg­gio puts it while artic­u­lat­ing the pur­pose of his uncon­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tary films. To his mind, it’s what we per­ceive least that affects us most, and if “what we do every day, with­out ques­tion, is who we are,” we can enrich our expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty by ask­ing ques­tions in our life and our work like, “Is it the con­tent of your mind that deter­mines your behav­ior, or is it your behav­ior that deter­mines the con­tent of your mind?” This line of inquiry will send each of us in dif­fer­ent intel­lec­tu­al and aes­thet­ic direc­tions, impos­si­ble though it is to arrive at a final answer. And in the face of the fact that we all end up at the same place in the end, Armisen has a cre­ative strat­e­gy: “I real­ly cel­e­brate death,” he explains. “I have my funer­al all planned out and every­thing.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers & Writ­ers Have Always Known

How TV Addles Kids’ Brains: A Short Film Direct­ed by God­frey Reg­gio (Mak­er of Koy­aanisqat­si) & Scored by Philip Glass

Read Steve Albini’s Uncom­pro­mis­ing Pro­pos­al to Pro­duce Nirvana’s In Utero (1993)

Fred Armisen Teach­es a Short Sem­i­nar on the His­to­ry of Punk

Koy­aanisqat­si at 1552% Speed

Why Man Cre­ates: Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Look at Cre­ativ­i­ty (1968)

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 or on Face­book.

How Loneliness Is Killing Us: A Primer from Harvard Psychiatrist & Zen Priest Robert Waldinger

In 1966, Paul McCart­ney famous­ly sang of “all the lone­ly peo­ple,” won­der­ing aloud where they come from. Near­ly six decades lat­er, their num­bers seem only to have increased; as for their ori­gin, psy­chi­a­trist, psy­cho­an­a­lyst, and Zen priest Robert Waldinger has made it a long­time pro­fes­sion­al con­cern. “Start­ing in the nine­teen fifties, and going all the way through to today, we know that peo­ple have been less and less invest­ed in oth­er peo­ple,” he says in the Big Think video above. “In some stud­ies, as many as 60 per­cent of peo­ple will say that they feel lone­ly much of the time,” a feel­ing “per­va­sive across the world, across all age groups, all income groups, all demo­graph­ics.”

“Hav­ing an exten­sive net­work of friends is no guar­an­tee against lone­li­ness,” writes the late soci­ol­o­gist Ray Old­en­burg in The Great Good Place. “Nor does mem­ber­ship in vol­un­tary asso­ci­a­tions, the ‘instant com­mu­ni­ties’ of our mobile soci­ety, ensure against social iso­la­tion and atten­dant feel­ings of bore­dom and alien­ation. The net­work of friends has no uni­ty and no home base.” He names as a key fac­tor the dis­ap­pear­ance, espe­cial­ly in Amer­i­can life since World War II, of “con­ve­nient and open-end­ed social­iz­ing — places where indi­vid­u­als can go with­out aim or arrange­ment and be greet­ed by peo­ple who know them and know how to enjoy a lit­tle time off.”

Old­en­burg’s ele­gy for and defense of “cafés, cof­fee shops, com­mu­ni­ty cen­ters, gen­er­al stores, bars,” and oth­er engines of com­mu­ni­ty life, was pub­lished in 1989, well before the rise of social media — which Waldinger frames as the lat­est stage in a process that began with tele­vi­sion. As more Amer­i­can homes acquired sets of their own, “there was a decline in invest­ing in our com­mu­ni­ties. Peo­ple went out less, they joined clubs less often. They went to hous­es of wor­ship less often. They invit­ed peo­ple over less often.” Then, “the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion gave us more and more screens to look at, and soft­ware that was designed specif­i­cal­ly to grab our atten­tion, hold our atten­tion, and there­fore keep it away from the peo­ple we care about.”

We also know, he con­tin­ues, that “peo­ple with strong social bonds are much less like­ly to die in any giv­en year than peo­ple with­out strong social bonds.” This is a cred­i­ble claim, giv­en that he hap­pens to direct the now 85-year-long Har­vard Study of Adult Devel­op­ment. In 2016, we fea­tured Waldinger’s TED Talk on some of its find­ings here on Open Cul­ture. Before that, we post­ed a PBS Brain­Craft video that con­sid­ers the Har­vard Study of Adult Devel­op­ment along with oth­er research on the con­tribut­ing fac­tors to hap­pi­ness, a body of work that, tak­en togeth­er, points to the impor­tance of love — which, even if it isn’t all you need, is cer­tain­ly some­thing you need. And thus one more Bea­t­les lyric con­tin­ues to res­onate.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

All You Need is Love: The Keys to Hap­pi­ness Revealed by a 75-Year Har­vard Study

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Six Great Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

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 or on Face­book.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Gives Life-Changing Advice to Teens: Watch His Speech, “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” (1967)

Six months before his assas­si­na­tion, Mar­tin Luther King Jr. spoke to stu­dents at Bar­ratt Junior High School in Philadel­phia, and asked What Is Your Life’s Blue­print?

Address­ing the stu­dents, he observed: “This is the most impor­tant and cru­cial peri­od of your lives. For what you do now and what you decide now at this age may well deter­mine which way your life shall go. When­ev­er a build­ing is con­struct­ed, you usu­al­ly have an archi­tect who draws a blue­print. And that blue­print serves as the pat­tern, as the guide, as the mod­el, for those who are to build the build­ing. And a build­ing is not well erect­ed with­out a good, sound, and sol­id blue­print.”

So what makes for a sound blue­print? The civ­il rights leader had some sug­ges­tions:

Num­ber one in your life’s blue­print should be: a deep belief in your own dig­ni­ty, your own worth and your own some­bod­i­ness. Don’t allow any­body to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ulti­mate sig­nif­i­cance.

Now that means you should not be ashamed of your col­or. You know, it’s very unfor­tu­nate that in so many instances, our soci­ety has placed a stig­ma on the Negro’s col­or. You know there are some Negros who are ashamed of them­selves? Don’t be ashamed of your col­or. Don’t be ashamed of your bio­log­i­cal fea­tures…

Sec­ond­ly, in your life’s blue­print you must have as the basic prin­ci­ple the deter­mi­na­tion to achieve excel­lence in your var­i­ous fields of endeav­or. You’re going to be decid­ing as the days and the years unfold, what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be.

And once you dis­cov­er what it will be, set out to do it, and to do it well.

You can read a tran­script of the speech here. As a post­script, it’s worth high­light­ing a remark­able com­ment left on YouTube, from the stu­dent who appar­ent­ly record­ed the speech on Octo­ber 26, 1967. It reads:

I can­not believe that I found this footage. I am the stu­dent cam­era­man that record­ed this speech. I remem­ber this like it was yes­ter­day. I have been telling my boys for years about this and now I can show them. I thought this was lost years ago and am so hap­py that it sur­vived the years. I was 12 or 13 years old when he can to Bar­rett and was mes­mer­ized by what he was say­ing. I can’t wait to share this with my fam­i­ly. Wow I am elat­ed that I found this.

Amaz­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.‘s Hand­writ­ten Syl­labus & Final Exam for the Phi­los­o­phy Course He Taught at More­house Col­lege (1962)

How Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Got C’s in Pub­lic Speaking–Before Becom­ing a Straight‑A Stu­dent and a World Class Ora­tor

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.