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If you’re not familiar with it, the Great Courses provides a very nice service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner. They then make the courses available to customers in different formats (DVD, CD, Video & Audio Downloads, etc.). The courses are very polished and complete, and they can be quite reasonably priced, especially when they’re on sale, as they are today. Click here to explore the offer.
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Note: The Great Courses is a partner with Open Culture. So if you purchase a course, it benefits not just you and Great Courses. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider it win-win-win.
“For a normal person back in the day,” says LEGO designer/architect Rok Kobe about the Colosseum in Rome, “You had never seen a building that was over a story high. And to be confronted with such an amazing piece of engineering that’s almost 200-meters wide and 50 meters tall, it was unprecedented.”
Similarly, any LEGO fan might feel this awe while greeting this month’s debut of the LEGO Colosseum. At 9036 pieces it has broken the record as the biggest LEGO set in existence, beating out the Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon (7,541 pieces) and the Taj Mahal (5,923 pieces). Every few years LEGO steps up its game, which might possibly end with a neighborhood-devouring replica of the Great Wall of China. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The Colosseum’s facade has been faithfully recreated on all three levels, with the Doric columns at the bottom, the Ionic columns in the middle, and the Corinthian columns on top. And it also adds the contemporary part of the arena that has been rebuilt to show the original level of the arena in Roman times.
The original Colosseum was built over eight years between year 72 AD and 80 AD and between two emperors, Vespasian and Titus. And though we know it as a sandstone-colored structure these days, archeologists have determined it was also colored red, black, and azure. The LEGO version may not be so dramatic, but it does contain a bit more color than the real-life model.
Rok Kobe knows of what he speaks and models. Growing up in Ljubljana, capitol of Slovenia, he would play on the Roman ruins in the city center, especially the Roman Wall. “The five year old would be proud of the adult that got to design this LEGO set,” he says.
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.
Those of us who might have grown up harboring literary ambitions may have been humbled and inspired when we first read Toni Morrison. She proves over and again, in novels, essays, and otherwise, the courage and dedication that serious writing requires. She has also shown us the courage it takes to be a serious reader. “Delving into literature is not escape,” she said in a 2002 interview. It is “always a provocative engagement with the contemporary, the modern world. The issues of the society we live in.”
In her seminal text on reading, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison showed us how to read as she does. “As a reader (before becoming a writer),” she wrote, “I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer,” in the space of imaginative empathy. “I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me.”
Critical readers risk vulnerability, open themselves to shock and surprise: “I want to draw a map… to open as much space for discovery… without the mandate for conquest.” This attitude makes criticism an act of “delight, not disappointment,” Morrison wrote, despite the different, and unequal, positions we come from as readers. “It’s that being open,” she said in 2009, “not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you.”
Want to learn to read like that? You can. And you can also, if you have the cash, own and read the books in Morrison’s personal library, the books she thumbed over and read in that same spirit of critical empathy. The over 1,200 books collected at her Tribeca condo can be purchased in their entirety for a price negotiated with her family. In the photos here from realtor Brown Harris Stevens, who currently list her five million dollar, 3 bedroom apartment in a separate sale, certain titles leap out from the spines:
Biographies of Paul Robeson and Charles Dickens, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations, Angela Davis’ An Autobiography, Cornel West’s Democracy Matters. (Her library seems to be enviably alphabetized, something I’ve meant to get around to for a couple decades now….)
Michelle Sinclair Colman at Galerie lists several more titles in the library, including The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, “books about and by the Obamas and the Clintons, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Henry Dumas, James Baldwin, and Mark Twain.” On her nightstand, undisturbed, sit Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story, and Stephen King’s Revival.
Some other points of interest:
She owned a beautiful gold illustrated copy of Song of Solomon with the bookmark on Chapter Four.
She displayed multiple-framed Dewey Decimal catalog library cards of her novels.
She edited as she read.
And…
She had a few never-returned library books. The most interesting was a copy of her own book, The Bluest Eye, from the Burnaby Public Library with copious notes, underlines, cross-outs on every single page.
Were these her own notes, underlines, and cross-outs? It isn’t clear, but should you purchase the library, which cannot be pieced out but only owned as a whole, you can find out for yourself. We hope this historic collection will one day end up in a library, maybe digitized for everyone to see. But for now, those of us who can’t afford the purchase price can be content with this rare glimpse into Morrison’s sanctuary, where she did so much writing, thinking, and maybe most importantly for her, so much reading. Images on this page come from Brown Harris Stevens.
FYI: In 2011, Ward Farnsworth published a two-volume collection called Predator at The Chessboard: A Field Guide To Chess Tactics (Volume 1 — Volume 2) where he explains countless chess tactics in plain English. In this 700-page collection, “there are 20 chapters, about 200 topics within them, and over 1,000 [chess] positions discussed.” Now for the even better part: Farnsworth has also made these volumes available free online. Just visit chesstactics.org and scroll down the page. There you will find the content that’s otherwise available in Farnsworth’s books. With this free resource, you can start making yourself a better chess player whenever you have the urge, or especially as you watch The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix.
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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…
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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.
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