You may recognize Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser, aka 2CELLOS, from their rocking arrangement of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal earlier this year. This time, the classically-trained musicians have done themselves one better, with a frenetic, hard-hitting take on GNR’s “Welcome To The Jungle” that would give Slash himself a run for his hardcore cred.
2CELLOS are currently touring with Elton John, and you can pre-order their debut CD, which includes covers of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and U2’s “With or Without You.”
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Time to roll out a new media collection — a big collection of Cultural Icons. Here you will find great writers, dazzling filmmakers and musicians, brilliant philosophers and scientists — figures who have changed our cultural landscape throughout the years. You’ll see them in video, or hear their voices in audio.
The list currently features 230 icons, all speaking in their own words. The collection will inevitably grow as we add more material, or as you send suggestions our way. For now, how about we whet your appetite with 10 favorites? Then you can rummage through the full collection of Cultural Icons here.
(Note: Down the road, you can access this collection by clicking “Cultural Icons” in the top navigation bar.)
Salvador Dali - Video – Surrealist artist appears on “What’s My Line?” (1952)
Johnny Depp - Video – The versatile actor reads a letter from Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Anne Frank - Video – It is the only known footage of Anne Frank, author of the world’s most famous diary, and it’s now online.
Patti Smith — Video — The “godmother of punk” recalls her friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
Quentin Tarantino - Video – Pulp Fiction director lists his favorites films since 1992.
Leo Tolstoy – Video – Great footage of the last days of the towering Russian novelist. 1910.
Mark Twain – Video – America’s fabled writer captured on film by Thomas Edison in 1909.
Andy Warhol - Video – In 1979, Warhol created public access television programs. In this episode, he chats with Bianca Jagger & Steven Spielberg.
Tom Waits - Video – The raspy singer reads “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski.
Virginia Woolf — Audio — Recording comes from a 1937 BBC radio broadcast. The talk, entitled “Craftsmanship,” was part of a series called “Words Fail Me.” The only known recording of her voice.
A witty rendition of Queen’s classic played by the Finnish award winning street band Porkka Playboys. More of their work appears on the band’s YouTube channel. Enjoy…
FYI: It looks like “Inside Job,” the Oscar-Winning Documentary on the 2008 financial meltdown, is back online, thanks to the Internet Archive.
Google celebrated Les Pauls’ 96th birthday today with a playable electric guitar doodle. And, naturally, some tried to make it sing. Above, we have a version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, while others strummed out versions of The Beatles’ Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, and Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi. By popular demand, the doodle will stay live on Google’s homepage for an extra day.
One of the most unique concerts from the British blues revival of the 1960s was the “Blues and Gospel Train,” filmed May 7, 1964 by Granada TV for the BBC. Fans who were lucky enough to get tickets–some 200 of them–were instructed to gather at Manchester’s Central Station by 7:30 that evening for a short train ride to the abandoned Wilbraham Road Station. When the train pulled in at Wilbraham Road, the audience poured out and found seats on one platform. The opposite side, decorated to look like an old railway station in the American South, served as a stage for Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Cousin Joe and Reverend Gary Davis. The performances are available on DVD as part of American Folk-Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963–1966. In the scene above, Muddy Waters sings, “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.”
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This week, U2’s 360° Tour hit the west coast of the US, stopping first in Seattle, then Oakland and next Anaheim. Though critics have offered mixed reviews (this v. that), we had ourselves a ball, horrendous traffic jams aside. And we were particularly touched by one moment with a poignant backstory.
During the show, the audience gets beamed up to Mark Kelly, an astronaut on the space shuttle Endeavour, who happens to be married to Gabby Giffords, the US representative shot this past January in Arizona. To the 70,000 onlookers, Kelly says “Tell my wife I love her very much she knows” – the same lines delivered by Major Tom, the fictional astronaut, made famous by David Bowie’s Space Oddity: And, with that, U2 breaks into “Beautiful Day,” the song that served as a wake-up call for the Endeavour crew, at Gabby Giffords’ personal request. How’s that for a nice touch?
P.S. Yes we know that Endeavour returned to earth last week. But we have nothing against the willing suspension of disbelief.
Andrés Segovia first visited the Alhambra, the storied 14th Century Moorish palace in Granada, Spain, when he was ten years old. “It was here,” he said, “that I opened my eyes to the beauty of nature and art. To be here is to feel oneself to be near, very near, paradise.”
Segovia is often called the father of classical guitar. As a young boy he learned to play flamenco, the traditional music of his native Andalusia, but by the time he was a teenager he was transcribing Bach and other composers, adapting music originally intended for different instruments. Over the course of his lifetime, Segovia transcribed much of the classical repertoire, refined the standard technique, and established the guitar as a serious instrument, bringing it out of the parlors and into the concert halls.
In 1976, at the age of 84, Segovia returned to the Alhambra to perform for the documentary, Andrés Segovia: The Song of the Guitar. In the excerpt above, Segovia plays one of his favorite pieces, “The Legend of Asturias,” by Isaac Albéniz, who composed it for the piano as a prelude to his “Cantos de España.” The complete documentary is available on a two-film DVD, Andrés Segovia: In Portrait.
Thirty-five years ago today, New York magazine published “Tribal Rights of Saturday Night,” a beautifully-written paean to the dancing teens of the city’s boroughs. And the story focused on a working-class disco dancer named Vincent:
Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge—the ultimate Face. He owned fourteen floral shirts, five suits, eight pairs of shoes, three overcoats, and had appeared on American Bandstand. Sometimes music people came out from Manhattan to watch him, and one man who owned a club on the East Side had even offered him a contract. A hundred dollars a week. Just to dance.
“Vincent” become the model for Tony Manero, the hero of John Badham’s 1977 disco-ganza Saturday Night Fever, a hit film which launched the 70’s hottest dance craze and the career of young John Travolta. Plus it gave us the best-selling soundtrack album of all time and introduced the line dance, an exercise in inebriated communal humiliation that would dominate the dance floors of American wedding receptions for decades to come.
With all this to its credit, perhaps it shouldn’t matter that Nik Kohn’s article was more fiction than non-fiction, and that “Vincent” was, in Kohn’s own words, “completely made up, a total fabrication.” The ostensibly conscience-stricken journalist came clean in the Guardian in 1994:
My story was a fraud, I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road.” [Ed. Note: The Guardian piece is not available online, but it was quoted extensively in Charlie LeDuff’s 1996 article, “Saturday Night Fever: The Life”]
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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