1,000 Musicians Perform Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly” in Unison in Italy

in Music | July 30th, 2015

Despite breaking his leg during a gig earlier this summer, Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have blitzed their way through Europe and America, playing sometimes 5–6 shows per week, in cities often large, but sometimes small.

On September 16th, the band will make a pitstop in my hometown, Mountain View, CA (population 75,000). So it doesn’t seem implausible for the residents of Cesena, Italy (population 100,000) to ask the Foo Fighters to play a show in their small city, which sits right near the Adriatic Sea.

And boy did they make the request in style. I get chills when I watch this, every time.

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Emily Dickinson’s Handwritten Coconut Cake Recipe Hints at How Baking Figured Into Her Creative Process

in Food & Drink, Poetry | July 30th, 2015

The Emily Dickinson Museum will tell you that “The kitchen appears to be one of the rooms where [Emily] Dickinson felt most comfortable, perhaps most at home.” But the “many drafts of poems written on kitchen papers tell us also that this was a space of creative ferment for her, and that the writing of poetry mixed in her life with the making of delicate treats.”

We still have access to Dickinson’s gingerbread and doughnut recipes. But if you want to see an example of how baking nourished her creative process, then look no further than Emily’s recipe for Coconut Cake. The image above shows the ingredients scratched out in her handwriting:

1 cup coconut
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon cream of tartar

On the flip side of the recipe, Dickinson then wrote the beginning of a poem, “The Things that never can come back, are several” (read the transcript here). Presumably the recipe inspired the poem, but perhaps it was the other way around?

If you’re looking for your own source of creative inspiration, you can try out Dickinson’s recipes for Black Cake and also Rye and Indian Bread here. (According to The Public Domain Review, “her loaf of Indian and Rye won second prize in the Amherst Cattle Show of 1856.”) And you can even head up to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA and take part in their annual baking contest.

Over at NPR, Dickinson scholar Nelly Lambert has more on the poet’s relationship to baking and food.

The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges

Watch an Animated Film of Emily Dickinson’s Poem ‘I Started Early–Took My Dog’

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12 Classic Literary Road Trips in One Handy Interactive Map

in Literature, Maps | July 30th, 2015

Fantasy fiction invariably includes a map for readers to understand the hero’s journey, literally. We know that Hobbits had to walk a long way into Mordor, but seeing it cartographically really hits home. But what of the great road trip novels, where the country is America, the journey is long and often circular, and self-actualization awaits the hero, and not an army of orcs?

Atlas Obscura, Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras’ blog of discovery and adventure in the modern world, have come to the rescue with an interactive map that plots out the travels of road trip-filled books, some non-fiction, others fictionalized reality. Where a location is mentioned in a text, it has been pinned to the map, and by clicking on the pin, the relevant text is revealed. Clever stuff.

For example, the map for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (see snapshot above) plots out the five trips contained in the novel, and one can see the main hubs of the story: NYC and San Francisco, of course, but also Denver and the crazed detour town to Mexico City, where Sal, Dean, and Stan Shephard party hard in a bordello and Sal winds up with dysentery for his troubles.

For something more straightforward, check out the Northwest travels at the heart of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Written in the first person, the novel’s narrator travels by motorcycle with his son from Minnesota to Northern California, ending up in San Francisco, taking 17 days. The philosophical journey, however, covers wider terrain.

Another Bay Area tale, Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test starts in La Honda, California, a mountain getaway to the west of San Jose, and, as one can see, completes a circle of the States, including trips to both Calgary, Canada and Manzanillo, Mexico, where everybody is “uptight,” man, heading northeast to both Guanajuato and Aguascalientes, where Acid Tests are administered.

There’s more at the link, including maps for Wild, A Walk Across America, and Travels with Charley. It might inspire a repeat reading of a favorite book. Or it might inspire you to just light out for the territories.

Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

The Books You Think Every Intelligent Person Should Read: Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online)

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Orson Welles Reads From Moby-Dick: The Great American Director Takes on the Great American Novel

in Film, Literature | July 30th, 2015

If you took a poll to determine in whose voice most readers would like to hear their audio books, I imagine Orson Welles would land pretty high on the list. And if you took a poll to determine which book most readers would rather approach in audio form than paper form, I imagine Herman Melville’s weighty but undeniably important (and still literarily fascinating) Moby-Dick would land pretty high on the list. Unfortunately for us, Welles never sat down to get the entirety of Moby-Dick on tape, but he did give the book a few readings on film, rounded up today for your enjoyment.

Most famously, Welles appeared in John Huston’s 1956 adaptation of the novel as Father Mapple, deliverer of the sermon on Jonah heard by the narrator Ishmael and his bunkmate Queequeg early on in the story, just before they sign on to the Pequod. Possessed of an interest of his own in Melville’s masterwork, Welles used his paycheck from the cameo to bring Moby-Dick to the stage. But he also wanted to do something cinematic with the material, as evidenced by the other two videos here: readings he shot in 1971, during production of The Other Side of the Wind. In them, he speaks the novel’s immortal opening line, “Call me Ishmael.”

Though he may sound even more compelling in Ishmael’s role than in Father Mapple’s, these clips do make you wonder what, or which character, stoked Welles’ fascination with Moby-Dick in the first place. Certainly we can draw obvious parallels between him and the Pequod’s Captain Ahab in terms of their tendency toward grand, all-consuming, impossible-seeming projects. Then again, Ahab labors under the idea that man can, with sufficient will, directly perceive all truths, while Welles made F for Fake, so perhaps he was a questioning, skeptical Ishmael after all. Whomever he identified with, this pillar of American cinema must have had big plans for this pillar of American literature — which, alas, we can now only struggle to perceive, just as Ahab and Ishmael struggle to perceive the form of the whale deep in the water.

The Moby Dick Big Read: Celebrities and Everyday Folk Read a Chapter a Day from the Great American Novel

A View From the Room Where Melville Wrote Moby Dick (Plus a Free Celebrity Reading of the Novel)

An Illustration of Every Page of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Orson Welles Reads Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in a 1977 Experimental Film

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketches of Mind-Bending Chess Problems

in Games, Literature | July 30th, 2015

Most of us strive to achieve some kind of distinction—or competence—in one, often quite narrow, field. And for some of us, the path to success involves leaving behind many a path not taken. Childhood pursuits like ballet, for example, the high jump, the trumpet, acting, etc. become hazy memories of former selves as we grow older and busier. But if you have the formidable will and intellect of émigré Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, you see no need to abandon your beloved avocations simply because you are one of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers—in both Russian and English. No indeed. You also go on to become a celebrated amateur lepidopterist (see his butterfly drawings here), earning distinction as curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and originator of an evolutionary theory of butterfly migration. And as if that were not enough, you spend your spare time formulating complicated chess problems, earning such a reputation that you are invited in 1970 to join the American chess team to create problems for international competitions.

Nabokov was not easily impressed by other writers or scientists, but he held chess players in especially high regard. His “heroes include a chess grandmaster,” writes Nabokov scholar Janet Gezari, “and a chess problem composer…; chess games occur in several of the novels; and chess and chess problem language and imagery regularly put his readers’ chess knowledge to the test.” His third novel, 1930’s The Defense, centers on a chess master driven to despair by his genius, a character based on real grandmaster Curt von Bardeleben. For Nabokov, the skill and ingenuity required for composing chess problems paralleled that required for great writing: “The strain on the mind is formidable,” he wrote in his memoir Speak, Memory, “the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness.” Puzzling out chess problems and solutions, he wrote, “demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity and splendid insincerity”—all qualities, we’d have to agree, of Nabokov’s finely wrought fictions.

In 1970, Nabokov published Poems and Problems, a collection of thirty-nine Russian poems, with English translations, fourteen English poems, and eighteen chess problems, with solutions. He had pursued this passion since his teens, and published nearly three dozen chess problems in his lifetime. At the top of the post, see one of them, “Mate in 2,” sketched out in Nabokov’s hand (try to solve it yourself here). Below it, see another of the author’s chess problem sketches, and in the photo above, see Nabokov absorbed in a chess game with his wife.

Though it may seem that Nabokov had limitless energy and time to devote to his extra-literary pursuits, he also wrote with regret about the price he paid for his obsession: “the possessive haunting of my mind,” as he called it, “with carved pieces or their intellectual counterparts swallowed up so much time during my most productive and fruitful years, time which I could have better spent on linguistic adventures.” Like the lepidopterists still marveling over Nabokov’s contributions to that field, the chess lovers who encounter his problems, and his ingenious use of the game in fiction, would hardly agree that his pursuit of chess was fruitless or unproductive.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings

Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

An Animated Intro to G.W.F. Hegel, and Everything Else You Wanted to Know About the Daunting German Philosopher

in Philosophy | July 29th, 2015

There’s no way around it, German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is incredibly difficult to understand. And yet, his work, like few others since Plato, has been reduced over and over again to one idea—the “Hegelian dialectic” of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” As a 1996 beginner’s guide to Hegel phrases it, this “triadic structure” is the “organic, fractal form” of the effusive thinker’s logic. The formula is what most lay people learn of Hegel, and often no more. So it may come as a surprise to learn that Hegel himself never used these terms in this way. As Gustav E. Mueller has written of this “most vexing and devastating legend,” Hegel “does not use this ‘triad’ once” in all twenty volumes of his complete works, nor “does it occur in the eight volumes of Hegel texts, published for the first time in the twentieth century.” So where does the idea come from?

From Hegel’s interpreters, who—baffled by his “obscurity” and “peculiar terminology and style”—have imposed all sorts of clarifying (or distorting) concepts on his work. In his animated School of Life video introduction above, Alain de Botton begins with the problem of Hegel’s famous difficulty. Hegel’s writing has generally been thought of as “horrible”—obscure, overstuffed, tangled, “confusing and complicated when it should be clear and direct.” I can’t speak to his German, but this certainly seems to be the case in English. Yet, whether anyone can say what a philosopher’s work “should be” seems like a matter of interpretive bias. How can we, after all, separate a thinker’s ideas from his or her prose, as though these things can exist independently of each other? De Botton continues with another should:

He tapped into a weakness of human nature: to be trustful of grave-sounding, incomprehensible prose. This has made philosophy much weaker in the world than it should be, and it’s made it much harder to hear the valuable things that Hegel has to say to us.

The video goes on to make a short list of “a small number of lessons” we can take from Hegel. I’ll leave it to you to find out what de Botton thinks those are. Some may find in his tidy summations a useful guide to Hegel’s thought, others a further oversimplification of a philosophy that deliberately resists easy reading. No doubt, whatever we make of Hegel, we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that his thinking easily boils down to a “Hegelian dialectic.”

For those seeking to understand why his work has been so influential despite, or because of, its legendary difficulty, there are numerous resources online. One might start with “Hegel by Hypertext,” a huge compendium of introductory and biographical material, analysis, discussion, links, and Hegel’s own writing. Hegel.net collects excerpts and full texts of the philosopher’s work in both German and English, as well as “works of Hegel’s 19th century followers” on both the right and left. Hegel’s most famous interpreter was of course Karl Marx, and you will find in every archive a number of commentaries and critiques from Marx himself and several Marxist thinkers.

The Hegel Society of America also gives us articles on Hegel from a range of thinkers across the political spectrum. Finally, we should attempt, as best we can, to grapple with Hegel’s own words, and we can do so with all of his major work on line in translation at the University of Adelaide’s eBooks library. For two very different ways of reading Hegel, see professor Rick Roderick’s lecture on “Hegel and Modern Life” and Slavoj Žižek’s lecture on “The Limits of Hegel,” above. And should you feel that any or all of these interpreters misrepresent the formidable German philosopher, have a listen to the lecture below by Dr. Justin Burke entitled, appropriately, “Everything You Know About Hegel is Wrong.”

Find courses on Hegel in our collection of 140 Free Online Philosophy Courses, and texts by the philosopher on our list of 135 Free Philosophy eBooks.

Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life

Download Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Modern Thought (1960)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hayao Miyazaki’s Universe Recreated in a Wonderful CGI Tribute

in Animation | July 29th, 2015

The exponential democratization of digital technology every year has led to a wealth of video essays and fan films from bedroom auteurs, the likes of which would have been unimaginable even five years ago To wit: this beautiful tribute to the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s anime god, and his Studio Ghibli. A typical fan video would have edited together a “best of” clip show, using a song to link the scenes. But a Paris-based animator named “Dono” has gone one step further and created a tribute where scenes and characters from Miyazaki all frolic about a 3‑D modeled world, where the bathhouse from Spirited Away is rendered in all of its glory, and Totoro’s catbus is only a few blocks away from Kiki’s Delivery Service, and next door to Porco Rosso’s favorite hangout. Even Lupin III, not Miyazaki’s original creation, but who starred in the director’s first feature, gets a look in.

It’s very charming, and judging from Dono’s other work on his Vimeo channel, a huge step up and no doubt a labor of love. And here’s the other thing about this seamless work of fan art. In the past, the software and the computing power needed to make such a film would have been both prohibitively expensive and the domain of a design company. For this tribute, three of the four software programs named in its creation–Gimp, Blender, and Natron–are free and open-source, and run on a laptop. (The fourth, Octane, costs a little bit of money.)

via Vice

The Simpsons Pay Wonderful Tribute to the Anime of Hayao Miyazaki

The Delightful TV Ads Directed by Hayao Miyazaki & Other Studio Ghibli Animators (1992–2015)

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Free: Hours of Jack Kerouac Reading Beat Poems & Verse

in Music, Poetry | July 29th, 2015

Image by Tom Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons

A high school friend who paid me a visit last weekend said she still doesn’t know whether reading Jack Kerouac saved or ruined her life. I, for one, could think of no higher praise for a writer. I believe she entered that dissolute Beat’s literary whirlwind through the portal of a second-hand copy of his America-crisscrossing novel On the Road, as many young people do, but since then the internet has made it much easier to get into Kerouac through a variety of other media as well.

Long-playing records, for instance: if you happen to use Spotify (and if you don’t yet, you can download the free software to get onboard here), you already have access to a good deal of material delivered in Kerouac’s own voice, sometimes against music. On 1959’s Poetry for the Beat Generation (above), an album he put together with Steve Allen (on whose talk show he famously appeared), he reads his work while Allen accompanies him on the piano. That same year saw the release of Blues and Haikus, featuring that same Kerouac voice and sensibility, but backed this time by jazz saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.

On 1960’s Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (bottom), his final spoken-word album, Kerouac goes without jazzmen entirely. But then, some of his die-hard fans might argue that he doesn’t need them, that his use of the English language constitutes more than enough wild, improvisational, but somehow still disciplined music by itself. That may sound like a bit much, but Kerouac actually had a lot in common with his fellow American icons in the realm of jazz, not least a lifestyle that led him into an early grave and a legacy as a figure both tragic and inspiring in equal measure. Maybe you hear it in his prose; maybe you’ll hear it in his voice.

As a final bonus, you can stream a fourth album, On the Beat Generation.

An 18-Hour Playlist of Readings by the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg & Even Bukowski Too

Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitchhiking Trip Narrated in On the Road

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebowski?

in Comedy, English Language, Literature | July 29th, 2015

We live in an age of mash ups. A few years ago some malcontent came up with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Our cities are teeming with food trucks hawking Korean tacos and ramen burgers. And chess boxing is apparently a thing. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that some evil genius would merge the most quotable movie of the past 20 years, The Big Lebowski, with William Shakespeare.

The resulting book, written by Adam Bertocci, is called Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, and it does a surprisingly good job of capturing the language of the Bard while staying true to the original movie. The author reportedly wrote the first draft of the book in a single sleepless weekend. An impressive feat that the author dismisses in an interview with CNN that you can see above.

“Anybody could, given the lack of a social life,” deadpans Bertocci, “take a weekend with a movie they admired and an author that they knew well and make a similarly lengthy mash up of it.”

In Bertocci’s fevered reworking (read the first 3 scenes for free here), the Dude is recast as The Knave. His belligerent best friend is Sir Walter of Poland. The hapless Donnie is Sir Donald of Greece. Knox Harrington, Mauve’s gratingly giggly conceptual artist friend, is in this version a tapestry artist. And of course, Da Fino, the PI, who shadows the Dude in the movie, is listed simply as Brother Seamus.

But where Bertocci really shines is in his clever appropriation of Shakespearean language. The film’s copious profanity has been replaced with more Bard-worthy epithets like “rash egg” or “varlet.” The word “verily” peppers the Knave’s dialogue as the word “like” peppers the Dude’s. And when Walter waxes poetic about the rules of bowling, he does so in iambic pentameter.

To get a sense of the differences, compare the clip above from the movie with the Bard-ofied text of the same scene below.

THE KNAVE’s house. Enter THE KNAVE, carrying parcels, and BLANCHE and WOO. They fight.

BLANCHE
Whither the money, Lebowski? Faith, we are as servants to Bonnie;
promised by the lady good that thou in turn were good for’t.

WOO
Bound in honour, we must have our bond; cursed be our tribe
if we forgive thee.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the chamber-pot, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.

They insert his head into the chamber-pot.

BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cool’d
thy head; think now upon drier matters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the
money, Lebowski?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse
again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.

They again insert his head into the chamber-pot.

BLANCHE
Trifle not with the fury of two desperate men. Long has thy
wife sealed a bond with Jaques Treehorn; as blood is to blood,
surely thou owest to Jaques Treehorn in recompense.

WOO
Rise, and speak wisely, man—but hark;
I see thy rug, as woven i’the Orient,
A treasure from abroad. I like it not.
I’ll stain it thus; to deadbeats ever thus.

He stains the rug.

THE KNAVE
Sir, prithee nay!

BLANCHE
Now thou seest what happens, Lebowski, when the agreements
of honourable business stand compromised. If thou wouldst
treat money as water, flowing as the gentle rain from heaven,
why, then thou knowest water begets water; it will be a watery
grave your rug, drown’d in the weeping brook. Pray remember,
Lebowski.

THE KNAVE
Thou err’st; no man calls me Lebowski. Hear rightly, man!—for
thou hast got the wrong man. I am the Knave, man; Knave in
nature as in name.

BLANCHE
Thy name is Lebowski. Thy wife is Bonnie.

THE KNAVE
Zounds, man. Look at these unworthiest hands; no gaudy gold
profanes my little hand. I have no honour to contain the ring. I
am a bachelor in a wilderness. Behold this place; are these the
towers where one may glimpse Geoffrey, the married man? Is
this a court where mistresses of common sense are hid? Not for
me to hang my bugle in an invisible baldric, sir; I am loath to
take a wife, or she to take me until men be made of some other
mettle than earth. Hark, the lid of my chamber-pot be lifted!

Personally, I’m hoping that the Globe Theatre stages a version of this.

While you are waiting for that to happen, you can see another scene from Two Gentlemen from Lebowski above where The Knave and Sir Walter commiserate about a rug, which was besmirched by a “most miserable tide.”

Watch the Coen Brothers’ TV Commercials: Swiss Cigarettes, Gap Jeans, Taxes & Clean Coal

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The 5 Best Noir Films in the Public Domain: From Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street to Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker

in Film | July 28th, 2015

I try to catch the Noir City film festival whenever it comes through Los Angeles, not just because it uses the Egyptian, one of my favorite theaters in town, but because it comes curated by the experts. You’d have a hard time finding any group more knowledgeable about film noir than the Film Noir Foundation, who put Noir City on, and anyone in particular more knowledgeable than its founder and president, “noirchaeologist” Eddie Muller.

The talks he sometimes gives before screenings give a sense of the depth and scope of his knowledge of the genre; you can sample it in a video clip where he introduces Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (above) at last year’s Noir City Seattle.

You may remember Muller’s name from our post featuring his list of the 25 noir films that will stand the test of time. I do recommend Noir City as the finest context in which to watch any of them, but you don’t have to wait until the festival comes to your town to see a few, such as Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour. (2nd and 3rd on this page.) They and various other important pieces of the film noir canon have fallen into the public domain, making them easily and legally viewable free online. Watch The Hitch-Hiker that way after you’ve seen Muller’s introduction, and you can replicate a little of the Noir City experience in the comfort of your own home.

Other public-domain noirs of note include Orson Welles’ The Stranger, a subject of controversy among Welles fans but one about which Noir of the Week says “you couldn’t make a better choice if you’re looking for a conventional, fantastic looking film noir thriller.”

And as the name of the festival implies, when we talk about such a highly urban storytelling tradition as noir, we very often talk about the city as well. Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. includes as a particularly vivid depiction of 1940s Los Angeles and one of the more dramatic uses of the beloved Bradbury Building in cinema history. These five pictures should put you well on your way to a stronger grasp of film noir, and no doubt get you ready to explore our list of 60 free noir films online.

The 5 Essential Rules of Film Noir

Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Radiohead’s “Creep” Performed in a Vintage Jazz-Age Style

in Jazz, Music | July 28th, 2015

Smashing Pumpkins’ leader—and sole remaining original member—Billy Corgan is a man of many opinions, most of which I find easy to ignore. But in one of his recent made-for-headlines quotes, he referred to fellow nineties alt-rock superstars Radiohead as “the last band that did anything new with the guitar.” It is, of course, impossible to quantify this not-especially controversial statement, but I haven’t found it easy to dismiss either. After Radiohead’s first three albums, we had maybe a solid decade of musicians looking back to a time before electric guitars to find an alternate path forward (as Radiohead themselves largely traded guitars for synthesizers). That said, in the years since Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OK Computer, Thom Yorke and band’s breakout song, “Creep,” has successfully translated to so many unplugged arrangements that they deserve credit for writing a universally beloved new standard as well as reinventing rock guitar—even if they’d prefer we all forget their first, angst-ridden hit.

There’s Mexican actor Diego Luna’s powerful rendition, as the animated troubadour Manolo in Jorge Gutierrez’s Book of Life. There’s Tori Amos’ characteristically intense, live voice and piano version; there’s Amanda Palmer on ukulele, Damien Rice on acoustic guitar, and Korn—believe it or not—in a very tasteful acoustic cover. Now we can add to these the bring-down-the-house swing arrangement at the top of the post, with jazz singer Haley Reinhart, who slides from playful vamp to an almost gospel crescendo, and all, we’re told, on a first take. This jazz-age cover comes to us from pianist Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, a touring collection of ensemble musicians that Bradlee assembles to re-interpret famous pop songs. He previously recorded a sweet, classic soul cover of “Creep” with Karen Marie, above. The list of other Postmodern Jukebox covers ranges from a “Sad Clown with a Golden Voice” version of Lorde’s “Royals” to a klezmer take on Jason Derulo’s club anthem “Talk Dirty” (with the song’s 2 Chainz rap in Yiddish). We previously featured a New Orleans jazz rendition of “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” with stage actress and singer Miche Braden. As Ayun Halliday wrote of the Guns n’ Roses’ reimagining, the Radiohead covers above are “not without gimmick, but it’s a winning one.”

Patti Smith’s Passionate Covers of Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Jefferson Airplane & Prince

Listen to a New Album Featuring Tom Waits Songs in Hebrew (2013)

Hear 38 Versions of “September Song,” from James Brown, Lou Reed, Sarah Vaughan and Others

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

1,000 Musicians Perform Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly” in Unison in Italy

Emily Dickinson’s Handwritten Coconut Cake Recipe Hints at How Baking Figured Into Her Creative Process

12 Classic Literary Road Trips in One Handy Interactive Map

Orson Welles Reads From Moby-Dick: The Great American Director Takes on the Great American Novel

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketches of Mind-Bending Chess Problems

An Animated Intro to G.W.F. Hegel, and Everything Else You Wanted to Know About the Daunting German Philosopher

Hayao Miyazaki’s Universe Recreated in a Wonderful CGI Tribute

Free: Hours of Jack Kerouac Reading Beat Poems & Verse

The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebowski?

The 5 Best Noir Films in the Public Domain: From Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street to Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker

Radiohead’s “Creep” Performed in a Vintage Jazz-Age Style

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