Hear Young Bob Dylan, Before Releasing His First Album, Tell Amazing Tales About Growing Up in a Carnival

in Music | June 28th, 2016

Back in 2012, we featured a young Bob Dylan talking and playing on The Studs Terkel radio show in 1963. Open Culture’s Mike Springer prefaced the interview with these words, “Dylan had just finished recording the songs for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, when he traveled from New York to Chicago to play a gig at a little place partly owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, called The Bear Club. The next day he went to the WFMT studios for the hour-long appearance on The Studs Terkel Program. Most sources give the date of the interview as April 26, 1963, though Dylan scholar Michael Krogsgaard has given it as May 3.” In talking with Studs, Dylan told some tall tales (scholars say) about his youth, ones that would have made Huckleberry Finn proud. And that tendency to create an alternative biography is on display again in an even earlier interview, dating back to March 11, 1962.

Animated by Blank on Blank above, the (excerpted) interview lets us hear Dylan, only 20 years old, before the release of his eponymous debut album, and before achieving any kind of fame. Young Dylan tells Cynthia Gooding, host of the “Folksinger’s Choice” radio program in NYC, about the six years he spent with the carnival.

I was with the carnival off and on for about six years… I was clean-up boy, I used to be on the main line, on the ferris wheel, uh, do just run rides. I used to do all kinds of stuff like that… And I didn’t go to school a bunch of years and I skipped this and I skipped that.

Later he continued:

I wrote a song once. I’m trying to find, a real good song I wrote. An’ it’s about this lady I knew in the carnival. An’ er, they had a side show, I only, I was, this was, Thomas show, Roy B Thomas shows, and there was, they had a freak show in it, you know, and all the midgets and all that kind of stuff. An’ there was one lady in there really bad shape. Like her skin had been all burned when she was a little baby, you know, and it didn’t grow right, and so she was like a freak. An’ all these people would pay money, you know, to come and see and … er … that really sort of got to me, you know. They’d come and see, and I mean, she was very, she didn’t really look like normal, she had this funny kind of skin and they passed her of as the elephant lady. And, er, like she was just burned completely since she was a little baby, er.

You can hear a nearly complete audio recording of the interview (55 minutes) below, and read a transcript of the full interview on Expecting Rain.

Over on Spotify, you can hear the 11 songs that Dylan played for Gooding that day.

They include several that Dylan wrote, along with some old folk and blues songs:

“(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle” (Hank Williams/Jimmie Davis)
“Fixin’ to Die” (Bukka White)
“Smokestack Lighning” (Howlin’ Wolf)
“Hard Travelin'” (Woody Guthrie)
“The Death of Emmett Till” (Bob Dylan)
“Standing on the Highway” (Bob Dylan)
“Roll on John” (Rufus Crisp)
“Stealin'” (traditional)
“It Makes a Long Time Man Feel Bad” (traditional)
“Baby, Please Don’t Go” (Big Joe Williams)
“Hard Times in New York Town” (Bob Dylan)

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

in Books, Letters | June 28th, 2016

Image by George Leite, via Wikimedia Commons

At one time, writer Anaïs Nin’s reputation largely rested on her passionate, long-term love affair with novelist Henry Miller, whom she also financially supported while he wrote his best-known novels and became, writes Sady Doyle, a “darling of the avant-garde.” Nin herself was a marginalized, “unfashionable” writer, whose “frank portrayals of illegal abortions, extramarital affairs and incest” brought such critical opprobrium down on her that “by 1954, Nin believed the entire publishing industry saw her as a joke.” She had good reason to think so.

Miller’s notoriously censored books won him cult literary status, and inspired the Beats, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and many more hedonistic male writers seeking to turn their lives into art. Nin’s equally explicit work was met, she lamented, “with indifference, with insults.” Critics either ignored her novels, several of them self-published, or dismissed them as vulgar, artless, and worse. One headline, Doyle notes, called Nin “a monster of self-centeredness whose artistic pretentions now seem grotesque.”

All of that changed when Nin published the first volume of her diary in 1966. Thereafter, she achieved global fame as a feminist icon, and the next ten years saw the publication of an additional six volumes of her journals, then several more excerpts after her death in 1977. Most notably, Henry and June appeared in 1986 (subsequently made into a film by Philip Kaufman), a book which—in conjunction with the publication of her and Miller’s letters the following year—further added to the mythology of the two passionately erotic writers.

Nin had kept her diaries religiously since age 11, and has become known as “modernity’s most prolific and perceptive diarist,” writes Maria Popova, a distinction that has led to a tremendous resurgence in pop culture popularity in our time, when well-crafted self-revelation is de rigeur for artists, activists, online personalities, and aspirants of all kinds. Henry Miller is now “a marginalized and largely forgotten American writer” (or so claims his biographer Arthur Hoyle), and Nin has become a “patron saint of social media,” writes Doyle, a “proto-Lena-Dunham.” Pithy quotations from her diaries—properly credited or not—constantly circulate on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter.

A new generation just discovering Anaïs Nin can access her work in any number of ways—from hip, meme-heavy Tumblr accounts like Fuck Yeah Anais Nin to more formal online venues like the Anais Nin Blog, which aggregates biographies, podcasts, scholarship, bibliographies, controversies, and anything else one might want to know about the author. Anaïs Nin fans can also hear the author herself read from her famous diary in the audio here. At the top of the post, hear Nin’s reading, recorded in ’66, the year of the first volume’s publication. The complete recording runs about 60 minutes.

After the acclaim of Nin’s diaries, and the celebrity she enjoyed in her last decade, her reputation once again suffered, posthumously, as biographers and critics savaged her life and work in moralistic torrents of what would today be called “slut-shaming.” But Nin is now once again rightly revered as a writer fully dedicated to the art, no matter the reception or the audience. The astonishing stream of words that flowed from her, recording every detail of her experiences, “seems nothing less than phenomenal,” wrote Noel Young of Nin’s nonstop letter writing. When it came to the detailed, insightful, and acutely philosophical recording of her life, “the act of writing may have even surpassed the act of living.”

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

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

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The Very First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Thomas Edison Production (1910)

in Film, Literature | June 28th, 2016

The story of humans creating monstrous beings in their image may have perennial relevance, even if it seems specific to our contemporary cultural moment. What, after all, is Oscar Isaac’s AI inventor in Ex Machina but a 21st century update of Victor Frankenstein? And what is Frankenstein’s monster but a Gothic recreation of the Golem, or any number of folkloric automatons in cultures far and wide? It’s an age-old archetypal story that seems to get an update every year.

People have imagined making artificial people, perhaps for as long as people have told stories. But each iteration of that story emerges from a historical matrix of particular technological, philosophical, and metaphysical anxieties. In the case of Ex Machina, we have not only a thinking, feeling humanoid, but one created out of mass data collection and designed to serve the prurient interests of a Nietzschean venture capitalist engineer. How very 2015, no?

In the original Frankenstein, a novel written by a woman, Mary Shelley, we have a very different kind of monster, born out of a Romantic convergence of interest in alchemy and the occult—the original domains of early modern scientists like Isaac Newton—and more modern, industrial scientific methods (hence the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus). Many critics have called the novel the first work of science fiction, and many, like Maurice Hindle in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, have described its main theme as “the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities.”

And yet, writes Ruth Franklin at the New Republic—drawing convincingly on Shelley’s own traumatic experiences with birth, including her own—Frankenstein might “also be a story about pregnancy.” Intriguing as this possibility may be, most interpretations of the novel have seen it as “a fable of masculine reproduction, in which a man creates life asexually.” That tradition continues in the movies with the first film adaptation of Frankenstein, made by Edison studios just over 100 years after the novel’s 1818 publication.

The 1910 short silent film, which you can watch above, bills itself as “a liberal adaptation from Mrs. Shelley’s famous story,” and opens in its first scene with Victor Frankenstein leaving home for college. Two years later, the Faustian mad scientist discovers the mystery of life, uses the knowledge to make his “creature”—a surprisingly grotesque scene—and, appalled at the sight of it, rejects the thing in horror. The rest of the story proceeds along the usual lines, as the monster, in rags and fright wig, seeks recognition from his creator/parent and wreaks havoc when he does not receive it.

This first Frankenstein film, directed by J. Searle Dawley, arrived two years after Edison’s Bronx, New York studios began full and very lucrative operations, and, by this time, writes Rich Drees, motion pictures had begun to receive unwelcome attention from “moral crusaders and reform groups, who decried the new medium as being dangerous and encouraging of immorality.” Edison responded quickly, fearing “a serious threat to his bottom line,” and ordered that his films’ production quality and “moral tone” be improved.

Frankenstein, writes Drees, “was the perfect choice to kick off production under this new moral banner. It’s a story that deals with the extremes of the human condition, life and death, and the dangers of tampering in God’s realm.” Edison released the film with the following disclaimer:

To those familiar with Mrs. Shelly’s story it will be evident that we have carefully omitted anything which might be any possibility shock any portion of the audience. In making the film the Edison Co. has carefully tried to eliminate all actual repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale. Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story it is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience.

Five years after the Edison studio’s short, another silent adaptation, Life Without Soul, appeared. Made by the Ocean Film Corporation, this film is now lost to history, but it qualifies as the first feature-length adaptation at 70 minutes. A review of the film, writes the blog Frankensteinia, “reveals a story that hews fairly close to Mary Shelley’s novel,” making a “bold attempt at capturing the world-spanning sweep of the tale.”

Several dozen film adaptations in the ensuing years have tracked more or less closely to Shelley’s narrative—giving Frankenstein’s monster a bride and having Victor Frankenstein reanimate his dead lover with the mind of a wrongly-executed man. But none of these films, so far as I know, has drawn out the subtext of Frankenstein as a novel about pregnancy and childbirth. Such an adaptation remains to be made, perhaps by the first woman director to take on a Frankenstein film.

You can find Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

The film above will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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

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Colorful Animation Visualizes 200 Years of Immigration to the U.S. (1820-Present)

in History | June 28th, 2016

Many of us, whether born there, residing there, or just interested in the place, describe the United States of America as “a nation of immigrants.” What exactly that phrase means has in recent times become the subject of heated public debate. As this year’s presidential candidates strain to appeal to voters with a wide variety of views on the question of what role immigration should play in America’s future (to say nothing of what’s going on in Britain right now), it might help to look at what role immigration has played in its past, and a new animated infographic of who has immigrated from where since 1820 gives the clearest possible look at the whole picture.

“Through most of the 1800s, immigration came predominantly from Western Europe (Ireland, Germany, the U.K.),” writes the data visualization’s creator Max Galka at Metrocosm. “Toward the end of the century, countries further east in Europe (Italy, Russia, Hungary) took over as the largest source of migration. Beginning in the early 1900’s, most immigrants arrived from the Americas (Canada, Mexico). And the last few decades have seen a rise in migration from Asia.”

Each colored dot flying toward the U.S. represents a part of that country’s population, and the brightness of a country’s color on the map corresponds to its total migration to the U.S. at that particular time. Galka provides other charts that show immigration flows by country of origin over time, which makes immigration look higher than ever, and then the same data as a percentage of the total population of the United States, which makes it look almost lower than ever. (And as an American who moved to Korea last year, I can’t help but ask whether we should now give as much thought to emigration out of the U.S. as we have to immigration into it.)

To really feel the advantages and complications of the nation of immigrants first-hand, you’ll want to spend time in a major American city, those always vibrant, often troubled places that people like The Wire creator David Simon have dedicated themselves to observing. “You look at what New Orleans is capable of, as a product of the American melting pot, and it’s glorious,” he once said. “It’s in the friction and in the dynamic between the various groups that inhabit a city that creativity really happens. What makes cities work is a level of tolerance and human endeavor and wit that is absolutely required on the part of all people. Whether or not we succeed as an urban people is the only question worth asking.” And in America, an urban people has always been a diverse people.

via Mental Floss

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Slavoj Žižek Explains the Artistry of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films: Solaris, Stalker & More

in Film | June 27th, 2016

Though a filmmaker of strong personal convictions, artistic and otherwise, Andrei Tarkovsky made films that endure in part because they open themselves to a multiplicity of interpretations. Nothing in the Tarkovsky canon opens itself up to quite such a multiplicity of interpretations as Stalker, which continues to produce fascinating new works derived from their creators’ experience of the film, such as Geoff Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games, and even a segment of the Slavoj Žižek-starring documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which you can watch above.

“We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what they truly are,” declares the philosophical, cultural, and political provocateur over footage of what many consider Tarkovsky’s masterpiece. He describes it as “a film about a ‘Zone,’ a prohibited space where there are debris, remainders of aliens visiting us.” The titular professionals he describes as “people who specialize in smuggling foreigners who want to visit into this space where you get many magical objects.” The ultimate goal of all who make the harrowing journey to the Zone? “The room in the middle of this space, where it is claimed your desires will be realized.”

Not a bad summing-up of the premise of a movie even whose biggest fans struggle to explain. But Žižek, of course, takes his analysis further, bringing in Solaris, Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel about a planet that can read the minds of the humans in orbit around it, “an id machine as an object which realizes your nightmares, desires, fears, even before you ask for it.” With Stalker, Tarkovsky envisions the opposite, “a zone where your desires, your deepest wishes, get realized on condition that you are able to formulate them. Which, of course, you are never able.”

If you subscribe to Žižek’s reading of the films, it actually makes perfect sense that they could continue to find new, enthralled audiences: the human relationship to desire remains as fraught as ever — and perhaps has only gained fraughtness as we find ways to satisfy our desires — and both Solaris and Stalker find artistically striking new ways to dramatize it. And according to Žižek, the respected filmmaker also provides a solution: “religious obscurantism,” a “gesture of self-sacrifice” of the kind we see made in his final films, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice. Tarkovsky also sacrificed himself, but for cinema, and so created some of the most formally remarkable motion pictures ever made, ones in which, in Žižek’s words, “we are made to feel this inertia, drabness of time,” and even “the density of time itself.” If you wonder what he means by that, as ever, you’ve just got to experience Tarkovsky for yourself. A number of his major films you can watch free online.

Watch Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bending Masterpiece Free Online

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Masterpiece Stalker Gets Adapted into a Video Game

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

Photographer Bill Cunningham (RIP) on Living La Vie Boheme Above Carnegie Hall

in Design, Life, Media, Photography | June 27th, 2016

New York City lost some of its charm this weekend, with the news that Bill Cunningham, the Times’ beloved, on-the-street fashion photographer, had passed away at the age of 87.

Much has been made over the fact that he was designated a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. It’s an honor he earned, hitting the streets daily in his usual mufti of khakis, sneakers, and bleu de travail cotton jacket to hunt his quarry by bicycle, but one could never accuse him of courting it.

His employer frequently sent him to cover the elite, but he had no interest in joining their ranks, despite his own growing celebrity. His “Evening Hours” column documented the dressed up doings on the “party circuit.” (This living New York landmark never shook his Boston accent, one of the chief delights of his weekly video series for the Times.) A recent installment suggests that shooting the likes of actress Nicole Kidman and Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour during tony private functions at MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“aht”) was far less exciting than encountering colorfully clad Himalayan dancers and a children’s craft table at an entirely free Sunday afternoon street fair sponsored by the Rubin Museum of Art.

Playwright Winter Miller shared this anecdote the morning Cunningham’s death was announced:

…he didn’t give a fk about who was famous or not. I once met Bill Murray in the lobby of the old New York Times building. He’d shown up to see if he could track down a photo of him and his then-wife that Bill had shot. I brought one Bill to the other, but Bill (Cunningham) was out on the streets with his blue jacket, white bike and camera. When he returned, I explained how I’d come to take Bill Murray under my wing to help him track down this photo. Bill had no idea who Bill Murray was and not unkindly told me (that) none of his photos were digital, so it would involve him personally digging through old files and he didn’t have time. I admired that he knew his priorities and never strayed from his task. I had been eager to get Bill Murray the thing he’d wanted and would have combed though vast files myself… but I never looked. Bill Cunningham’s files were impenetrable to an outsider.

One likes to think that Murray, who’s known for using his fame as his ticket to hang with ordinary mortals, would find much to love about that.

In fact, Murray strikes me as the perfect candidate to play Cunningham in a biopic covering the six decades spent living and working in a studio over Carnegie Hall. As far as I know, Bill Cunningham New York, a feature length documentary, is the only time his story has been captured on the silver screen. How can it be that no one has thought to make a movie centered on the lost bohemian period Cunningham recalls so fondly in the slideshow above? It sounds like an American spin on the Lost Generation—sneaking down to the unlocked stage for photographer Editta Sherman’s impromptu amateur performances of The Dying Swan, an elderly circus performer and her dog roaming the halls on a unicycle, someone always in a state of undress…

Perhaps Murray’s frequent collaborator, Wes Anderson, could be enlisted to set these wheels in motion. The colorful cast of characters seem tailor-made for this director, already a fashion world favorite.

The hats alone!

Prior to acquiring an Olympus Pen D half-frame camera from a friend in 1966, Cunningham worked as a milliner. Marilyn Monroe used to crack herself up, trying them on in between classes at the Actor’s Studio. The wife of a Carnegie Hall neighbor and Cunningham’s boss, fashion photographer Ray Solowinski, served as his model. After he was established as a fashion expert in his own right, Cunningham admitted that his designs were “a little too exotic – you know, for normal people”.

I think they’re wonderful, and hopefully, Bill Murray, Wes Anderson and you will agree. See below. I think they’re wonderful, and hopefully, Bill Murray, Wes Anderson and you will agree. Hats off to the inimitable Bill Cunningham, as much a fixture of New York as Carnegie Hall.

Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye, a Revealing Look at “The Father of Modern Photography”

Stanley Kubrick’s Jazz Photography and The Film He Almost Made About Jazz Under Nazi Rule

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Free: Hear 24 Hours of Noam Chomsky’s Lectures & Talks on the Powers That Subvert Our Democracies

in Politics | June 27th, 2016

Noam Chomsky is optimistic. Yes, the world seems to teeter on the brink of… well, name your dystopian scenario, but Noam Chomsky is optimistic. The same Chomsky who, for decades, has sought to show the myriad ways our most revered institutions are largely sham operations behind which powerful elites conduct secret wars, propaganda campaigns, environmental destruction, and concerted efforts to defraud the people and disable democratic processes… well, he tells us, in a recent interview with James Resnick, that we too “can be very optimistic. Things like this have happened before and they’ve been overcome.”

By “things like this,” the renowned linguist and anarchist political philosopher specifically means astounding levels of wealth inequality and the ascendency, once again, of far-right extremism in Europe and the U.S., a phenomenon he first observed in the years prior to World War II. Chomsky began his career of social and political critique in 1938 at the age of 10, “writing articles for the school newspaper on the rise of fascism in Europe and the threats to the world as I saw them.”

He went on to completely revolutionize the field of linguistics, an achievement that, stunningly, can seem secondary to his political writing and activism, given the sheer number of his books, essays, interviews, and speeches critical of state power, war, and media manipulation over the past several decades. (Some of his books you can read free online here.) I suppose if Chomsky weren’t something of an optimist, he would have given up a long time ago. He tells Resnik what keeps him going:

The things I consider inspiring is seeing people struggling: poor suffering people, with limited resources, struggling to really achieve anything. Some of them are very inspiring. For example, a remote very poor village in southern Colombia organizing to try to prevent a Canadian gold-mining operation from destroying their water supply and the environment; meanwhile, fending off para-military and military violence and so on. That kind of thing which you see all over the world is very inspiring.

Are you inspired? Maybe it depends on how many of these grassroots struggles you’ve witnessed. The worldwide, ground-level resistance Chomsky describes—and refers to again and again in his political work—is largely hidden from us, by a mass media that sees no dollar value in it, or perhaps obscures it for more sinister reasons. As Chomsky has argued since the sixties—most comprehensively in his 1988 Manufacturing Consent with Edward S. Herman—the campaigns of war and economic depredation conducted by the West against minorities, indigenous people, and small nations around the world mostly occur with the consent of Western people: a consent manufactured by a massive propaganda operation called the Free Press.

His position should not sound especially controversial to anyone who has paid the least bit of attention in the last few years. The seeming collusion of respected news organizations like The Washington Post and The New York Times in the push for the second Iraq War led to well over a decade of post-hoc introspection by journalists. Recent months have seen those same organs—for perhaps more baldly profit-seeking motives—provide a couple of billion dollars-worth of free PR for Donald Trump, a candidate who has on multiple occasions threatened to retaliate against the press for any criticism, and who recently revoked the Post’s credentials to cover his events. (A recent Harvard study concluded that during this protracted, ugly primary season, “the press became [Trump’s] dependable if unwitting ally.”)

As in these examples, the role of the British press in spreading fear and misinformation prior to this month’s Brexit vote has become its own significant story. We constantly see the press turning in agonized circles, trying to come to grips with its complicity in pushing various agendas. Whether or not mainstream media organizations take direct orders from government bodies or economic elites, they accede to the interests of the powerful all the same, and they wield enormous influence over a voting public who depend upon them for information. The situation presents a serious problem for the health of a functioning democracy, which itself depends upon an informed and educated electorate.

But as Chomsky has often argued—drawing as always on primary sources and directly quoting the West’s most influential political philosophers, policy architects, and business leaders—elites since the 17th and 18th centuries have intentionally thwarted the ability of the public to make informed decisions, and have shut the populace out of the most important decision-making processes. As he wrote in his 1999 critique of Neoliberalism, Profit Over People, “the general population must be excluded entirely from the economic arena, where what happens in the society is largely determined. Here the public is to have no role, according to prevailing democratic theory.”

Chomsky follows this line of reasoning in his talk “When Elites Fail,” at the top of the post, delivered as the keynote address for the Ecoconvergence Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2009. You can also hear this talk, along with 19 others, in the Spotify playlist just above—a total of 24 hours of Chomskyan social, political, and economic analysis, delivered by the man himself in his calm, measured, understated way. (If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.) Chomsky addresses “The Tyranny of Corporations,” the “U.S. Media as Propaganda System,” “Politics and Language,” “Iraq: The Forever War,” and more—levying criticisms against the systems of power, whether Republican, Democratic, or international, that doggedly seek to increase their domains and, in the approving words of James Madison, to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971

Read 9 Free Books By Noam Chomsky Online

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

And Now for Some Culinary Weirdness: Christopher Walken Shows You How to Cook Chicken & Pears

in Comedy, Film, Food & Drink | June 27th, 2016

I don’t need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own.

– Christopher Walken

Five years ago, actor Christopher Walken casually shared a simple recipe for roast chicken with pears, above. The lighting was amateur, his implements fairly utilitarian, and, much to my gratification, he couldn’t keep his cat off the counter, either.

His improvised patter was as nonchalant as his handling of his ingredients. Undeterred, legions of fans still found plenty of Walken-esque quotes with which to spice up the video’s comments section.

Chalk it up to the dozens of soft spoken, seriously unhinged characters on which this actor’s reputation rests. It’s painfully easy to imagine a rival gang member or law enforcement official lashed to a chair just off camera, squirming in terror as Walken pauses to appreciate the “little cookies” the caramelized pears leave behind on the bottom of his pan.

Whatever he’s planning to do to this imaginary unfortunate, one hopes it won’t involve flaps of skin and a vertical poultry roaster.

As to the recipe, it’s as delicious as it is innocuous. Try it!

If you’re feeling less than adventurous, you can decrease the creep factor by replicating the shoot with a grandfatherly gent of your choosing prior to serving. (Anyone who’s not Christopher Walken will do.)

If you’re looking for further serving suggestions, the comedy channel Funny or Die revisited the dish in 2012, pairing it with salad, seafood melange, red wine, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star Richard Belzer, and two heavily made up assistants who appear to be on loan from Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video.

Things get cooking with a visit to the Byzantine Stew Leonard’s supermarket, and end with a cell phone pic of Walken’s nose. There’s a live mandolin serenade and the kitchen seems vastly more expensive, but I found myself missing the homey sense of foreboding created by the original.

Still, one can never go wrong with poultry and pears.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price & Christopher Lee

How Cooking Can Change Your Life: A Short Animated Film Featuring the Wisdom of Michael Pollan

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Young Bob Dylan, Before Releasing His First Album, Tell Amazing Tales About Growing Up in a Carnival

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

The Very First Film Adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Thomas Edison Production (1910)

Colorful Animation Visualizes 200 Years of Immigration to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Slavoj Žižek Explains the Artistry of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films: Solaris, Stalker & More

Photographer Bill Cunningham (RIP) on Living La Vie Boheme Above Carnegie Hall

Free: Hear 24 Hours of Noam Chomsky’s Lectures & Talks on the Powers That Subvert Our Democracies

And Now for Some Culinary Weirdness: Christopher Walken Shows You How to Cook Chicken & Pears

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