Dylan Thomas’s drinking was legendary. Stories of the debauched and disheveled Welsh poet’s epic drinking binges have had a tendency to drown out serious discussion of his poetry.

It’s a legend that Thomas helped promote, as this pencil sketch he made of himself attests. The undated self-caricature was published in Donald Friedman’s 2007 book, The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers. It depicts a teetering, goggle-eyed figure with tumbler in hand, happily surrounded by bottles.

Thomas would sometimes tell his friends he had cirrhosis of the liver, but his autopsy eventually disproved this. As legend has it, the poet literally drank himself to death on his American tour in the fall of 1953, when he was 39 years old. In fact, it appears Thomas may have been a victim of medical malpractice. He went to his doctor complaining of difficulty breathing. The doctor was aware of the poet’s reputation as a drinker, and had been informed by Thomas’s companion of his now-famous statement from the night before: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.”

So the doctor treated Thomas for alcoholism and didn’t discover he was suffering from pneumonia. He gave Thomas three injections of morphine, which can slow respiration. Thomas’s face turned blue and he went into a coma. He died four days later. When Thomas’s friends investigated, they determined he had likely consumed, at most, eight whiskies. That’s still a large amount, but the poet’s exaggeration appears to have led his doctor astray. In a sense, then, Dylan Thomas was killed not by his drinking, but by the legend of his drinking.

Related Content:

Dylan Thomas Recites ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ and Other Poems

The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revisit Her Sketches, Self-Portraits, Drawings & Illustrated Letters

A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali, Narrated by the Great Orson Welles

Everyone on the internet knows the bitter disappointment of clicking on lists that sound more interesting than they turn out to be, just as enthusiasts of American history have grown weary of hearing claims about what has or hasn’t “changed America.” (Last year, comedy writer Alison Agosti elegantly smacked down both trends in one tweet.) But I have a feeling that PBS and station WTTW’s new series Ten Buildings that Changed America can pull the combination off with snappiness and insight. Hosted by Geoffrey Baer, television personality and noted enthusiast of Chicago (an American built environment if ever there was one), the show promises a look at, among other architectural windows onto the American spirit, “a state capitol that Thomas Jefferson designed to resemble a Roman temple, the home of Henry Ford’s first assembly line, the first indoor regional shopping mall,” and “an airport with a swooping concrete roof that seems to float on air.”

You can watch the debut episode of Ten Buildings that Changed America online. It begins the cross-country architectural road trip in Richmond, Virginia, where Baer visits future President Thomas Jefferson’s state capitol building. “As a founding father of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was passionate about America’s independence from Britain,” says the show’s page on the building. “He was no fan of the king of England and, by extension, no fan of the Georgian architecture that bore the kings’ name,” an inclination which got him looking toward France for inspiration. Subsequent episodes will examine other striking, innovative, influential, and oft-imitated American buildings: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Baer’s beloved Chicago, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York City, and even Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, the still-controversial new icon of the downtown Los Angeles where I type this very post.

Related Content:

The History of Western Architecture: From Ancient Greece to Rococo (A Free Online Course)

David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve

An Animated Tour of Fallingwater, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Creations

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

There’s not much left to say about Jimi Hendrix’s last days. The endless stream of commentary surrounding his life and death threatens to bury the man and his music in music-press fetishization, urban legend, and fawning mythology. When I’m able to totally tune out the hype, Hendrix’s polished work stands the time-test, and some of the more raw releases—the bootlegs and demos that appear every few years—at least document musical roads not taken and preserve moments of stunning genius, if not fully-realized compositions.

And Hendrix’s intriguing persona—revealed in casual interviews and conversations—still captivates, with his offhand lyricism and fractal imagination, qualities on full display in his final press interview, to NME’s Keith Allston, on September 11, 1970, just seven days before the artist’s death. (Listen to the YouTube audio above, or Soundcloud below.) Hendrix is breezy, contemplative, a little evasive, revealing his own sense of being between things, not sure where he’s headed next. As all those late-Hendrix bootlegs and demos testify, he could have done anything and made it work with the right band and a bit more time…

But enough what-ifs. Nobody’s better on Hendrix than Hendrix, so listen to the interview. You can find a full transcript and much more Hendrix-on-Hendrix and music-press chatter in a recent (and quite inexpensive) Kindle publication called Jimi Hendrix: Interviews and Reviews 1967-71. Ultimate Classic Rock calls the final interview the “most interesting thing about the book from a historical standpoint,” and this may be true.

Finally, if you don’t make it all the way to the end of the audio, Hendrix leaves on this vivid and quite funny note:

ALTHAM: Do you feel personally that you have enough money to live comfortably without necessarily making more as a sort of professional entertainer?

HENDRIX: Ah, I don’t think so, not the way I’d like to live, because like I want to get up in the morning and just roll over in my bed into an indoor swimming pool and then swim to the breakfast table, come up for air and get maybe a drink of orange juice or something like that. Then just flop over from the chair into the swimming pool, swim into the bathroom and go on and shave and whatever.

ALTHAM: You don’t want to live just comfortably, you wanna live luxuriously?

HENDRIX: No! Is that luxurious? I was thinking about a tent, maybe, [laughs] overhanging … overhanging this … a mountain stream! [laughter].

Related Content:

Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Performed on a Gayageum, a Traditional Korean Instrument

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

Previously Unreleased Jimi Hendrix Recording, “Somewhere,” with Buddy Miles and Stephen Stills

See Jimi Hendrix’s First TV Appearance, and His Last as a Backing Musician (1965)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness.

Right now, you can find 1,520 TED Talks compiled into a neat online spreadsheet. That’s a lot of TED Talks. And the most popular one (in case you’re wondering) was delivered by Sir Ken Robinson in 2006. If you regularly visit our site, then chances are you’re among the 20 million people who have viewed Robinson’s talk on why Schools Kill Creativity. There’s also a good chance that you’ll want to watch his newly-released TED Talk, How to Escape Education’s Death Valley. Filmed just last month, this talk takes aim at America’s test-centric educational system, a system that increasingly treats education as an industrial process and bleeds creativity and curiosity out of our classrooms. You get that problem when you put technocrats and politicians, not teachers, in charge of things. And you’re only going to get more of it (sorry to say) as computer scientists start putting their stamp on America’s educational future.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

So everyone knows Hemingway was a bruiser. Some of the best stories of his macho posturing involve fellow writers. There was, of course, that time he and Wallace Stevens slugged it out in Key West. I’ve been told Stevens asked for it, drunkenly telling Hemingway’s sister Ursula that her brother wrote like a little boy. I don’t know whose version of the story this comes from, but by all accounts, Hemingway knocked the bear of a poet down several times. The two made up soon after. Then there’s the story of Hemingway and James Joyce; the diminutive Irish writer apparently hid behind his pugnacious friend when trouble loomed.

There are many other such yarns, I’m sure, but one I’ve just learned of shows us a much more passive-aggressive side of Papa H. As the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library blog informs us, Hemingway once sent F. Scott Fitzgerald a typescript of A Farewell to Arms. Fitzgerald sent back ten pages of edits and comments, signing off with “A beautiful book it is!” You can see Hemingway’s first reaction above (signed EH). In later drafts, it seems, he took some of Fitzgerald’s advice to heart.

via @matthiasrascher

Related Content:

Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Drag (1916)

James Joyce in Paris: “Deal With Him, Hemingway!”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow  him @jdmagness

In the final months of his short life, Bruce Lee wrote a personal essay, “In My Own Process” where he said, “Basically, I have always been a martial artist by choice and actor by profession. But, above all, I am hoping to actualize myself to be an artist of life along the way.” If you’re familiar with Bruce Lee, you know that he studied philosophy at The University of Washington, and even when he auditioned for The Green Hornet in 1964 (and showed off his amazing kung fu moves), he took pains to explain the philosophy underlying the martial arts.

Lee wasn’t just a philosopher. He was also a poet and a translator of poetry. In the book, Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, John Little has published 21 original poems found within Lee’s personal archive. The poems, Little writes, “are, by American standards, rather dark — reflecting the deeper, less exposed recesses of the human psyche… Many seem to express a returning sentiment of the fleeting nature of life, love and the passion of human longing.” Above, you can see Shannon Lee, the daughter of Bruce Lee, read a poem published in Little’s collection. It’s called “Boating on Lake Washington.” Immediately below, she reads ”IF” by Rudyard Kipling, a poem her father loved so much that he had it engraved on a plaque and mounted on the wall in his home.

Finally, we leave you with Lee’s translation of another favorite poem, “The Frost” by Tzu Yeh. The video features pieces of his handwritten translation.

Related Content:

Bruce Lee: The Lost TV Interview

Watch 10-Year-Old Bruce Lee in His First Starring Role (1950)

Bruce Lee Plays Ping Pong with Nunchucks

Brooklynites, be apprised: Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge, Williamsburg’s week-long celebration of all things Henry Miller, began yesterday and will run until May 19th. If you can’t make it out there, I suggest you instead sit down to watch The World of Henry Miller: Reflections on Writing (part two, part three, part four). Shot in the late sixties by the documentarian Robert Snyder, otherwise known for his award-winning films on Michelangelo and the world of insects, the film follows Miller, entering his final decade, as he retraces his steps through the literary places he’s known, and has reminiscence-intensive conversations with the literary people he’s known, reflecting all the while on how both shaped his writing.

Alexander Nazaryan’s New Yorker post, “Henry Miller, Brooklyn Hater,” written for the occasion of Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge, goes into some detail about the Tropic of Cancer author’s loathing for his birthplace. Though he would ultimately find a kind of peace in Big Sur, only on the move in the thirties—especially as an expatriate in France, where he worked for the Chicago Tribune‘s Paris edition, and Greece, where he stayed with British novelist Lawrence Durrell—did his writing take its true shape. Miller himself tells it that way in Reflections on Writing, to friends like Durrell, famed diarist Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Clark Powell, the UCLA librarian Miller thought “representative of all that is best in the American tradition.” Though Snyder also includes footage of Miller reading his work aloud, you can see a bit more in the clip of a Black Spring reading just above, and hear half an hour more of the book here.

Related Content:

Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Tom Schiller’s 1975 Journey Through Henry Miller’s Bathroom (NSFW)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the most admired and influential architects of the 20th century. He was a flamboyant, unabashedly arrogant man who viewed himself from an early age as a genius. Others tended to agree. In 1991, The American Institute of Architects named Wright the greatest American architect of all time.

Wright believed that the adage “form follows function” was something of a misstatement. “Form and function should be one,” he said, “joined in a spiritual union.” A sense of spiritual union ran all through Wright’s work. He identified God with Nature (which he spelled with a capital “N”) and strove to design buildings that were in harmony with their natural surroundings. “No house should ever be on a hill or on anything,” Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography. “It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”

Wright spoke about life and the creativity of man in mystical terms. In this rare recording from June 18, 1957, a 90-year-old Wright describes his philosophy. “Man is a phase of Nature,” he says, “and only as he is related to Nature does he matter, does he have any account whatever above the dust.”

Related content:

The Gas Station Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Fallingwater, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Creations, Animated

Sylvia Plath’s poetic talent should go unquestioned, but as Plath fans will know, she first intended to become a visual artist, and some of her earliest work—illustrated childhood letters like the adorable dog below—remained hidden away in the family attic until 1996. Editor Kathleen Connors included this juvenilia in a 2007 collection of Plath’s work entitled Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, which also features sketches, photographs, and portraits—such as the brooding 1951 self-portrait above—that represent Plath’s work while an art student at Smith College.

Much of the art-school work is not representative of Plath’s best. While she made the difficult decision at age 20 to abandon aspirations for an art career and focus on her writing, Plath continued to make visual art. For example, at 23, she produced a confidently-rendered series of pen-and-ink drawings—such as the fishing boats below—while she and Ted Hughes honeymooned in Paris and Spain.

The Telegraph has a gallery of thirty of these drawings, which were on display at London’s Mayor Gallery between November and December of 2011. Plath’s writing has always been remarkably visual, her deft handling of sometimes startling imagery giving her work so much of its ability to seduce, enthrall, and unsettle. As in her poetry, the images of herself seem to attract the most interest. There are other pieces of Plath self-portraiture, but none contrasts so much with the youthful painting above, I think, as the accomplished pencil drawing below, with the poet’s fearless sidelong stare and bare shoulders expressing both her vulnerability and considerable personal and creative power.

Related Content:

Sylvia Plath’s Poetry Becomes Experimental Cinema in 1991 Film Lady Lazarus

On 50th Anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s Death, Hear Her Read ‘Lady Lazarus’

Sylvia Plath Reads “Daddy”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

A quick heads up: Daft Punk’s fourth album, Random Access Memories, will be released on May 21. But, right now, you can hop over to iTunes and stream it for free on your computer or iPad (for a limited time).

To access the stream, simply click this link, tap the “View in iTunes” button, and then click the “Listen Now” button.

If you like what you hear, you can always pre-order the album on iTunes and Amazon.

PS If you need iTunes software, you can download it for free here.

Find us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and we’ll make it easy to share cultural media with your friends!