Patti Smith’s Musical Tributes to the Russian Greats: Tarkovsky, Gogol & Bulgakov

in Literature, Music, Poetry | December 17th, 2014

In 2010, Patti Smith won a National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, making her, by my count, the only Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member to land that prize. Of course, she’s also the only person I can think of who has appeared in both a movie by Jean-Luc Godard (Film Socialisme) and an episode of Law and Order. And she’s definitely the only rocker out there who has a personal invite from the Pope to play at the Vatican.

Back in the mid-‘70s, Smith fused the noise and urgency of punk rock with spoken word poetry and created something unlike anything before or since. She performed with such intensity on stage that she looked like a modern day shaman in the midst of an ecstatic revelry. Yet she had a literary sensibility that made her stand apart from most of her fellow proto-punks at CBGBs. (The Ramones are awesome but no one is going to parse the lyrics of “Beat on the Brat with a Baseball Bat.”) The B‑side track of Smith’s first single, “Piss Factory,” describes the unrelenting tedium she experienced working at a factory before she swiped a copy of Illuminations by French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

While making Film Socialisme with Godard, she conceived of her latest album, Banga, released in 2012. When she started writing songs, she was, as she said in an interview, very interested in Russian culture.

I like my travels to be akin with my studies, and so when I started being smitten with Bulgakov and started reading a lot of Russian literature and then watching a lot of Tarkovsky, being very immersed in Russian culture, I got some jobs in Russia. … But I’ve always done that. We have very idiosyncratic tours – I always make sure that the band does well financially, but a lot of our tours are based on things that I’m studying, and I’ll make choices as to where we go so that I can see something special.

The title track of the work, Banga, is taken from a minor character in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – Pontus Pilate’s extremely loyal dog who waited centuries for his master to come to heaven. Fun fact: Johnny Depp played drums on this track.

According to the liner notes, the album’s first single, “April Fool” was inspired by novelist Nikolai Gogol. As John Freeman notes in the Moscow Times, a number of lines from the song evoke the writer.

We’ll race through alleyways in tattered coats” is a fairly clear reference to Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat,” while “we’ll burn all of our poems” begs to be considered a nod to the fact that Gogol famously burned the second volume of his great novel “Dead Souls.” That work, one of Russia’s funniest and darkest, is conjured in the lines, “We’ll tramp through the mire when our souls feel dead. With laughter we’ll inspire them back to life again.

And the track “Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)”, not surprisingly, evokes images from the films of cinematic auteur Andrei Tarkovsky – specifically, his metaphysical sci-fi epic Solaris along with Ivan’s Childhood. Hear the track at the top of this post, and watch Tarkovsky’s films online here.

In case you thought that the album was just about Russians, her song “This is the Girl” is about the life and death of Amy Winehouse, “Fuji-San” is a tribute to the massive 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and “Nine” is a birthday present to Johnny Depp.

See Patti Smith Give Two Dramatic Readings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl”

Patti Smith Plays Songs by The Ramones, Rolling Stones, Lou Reed & More on CBGB’s Closing Night (2006)

Patti Smith Documentary Dream of Life Beautifully Captures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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O Frabjous Day! Neil Gaiman Recites Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Memory

in Books, K-12, Literature, Poetry | December 15th, 2014

When the young Neil Gaiman was learning Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” by heart, he surely had no inkling that years later he’d be called upon to recite it for legions of adoring fans…particularly on the Internet, a phenomenon the budding author may well have imagined, if not technically implemented.

Worldbuilders, a fundraising portal that rewards donors not with tote bags or umbrellas, but rather with celebrity challenges of a non-ice bucket variety, scored big when Gaiman agreed to participate.

Earlier this year, a rumpled looking Gaiman read Dr. Seuss’s “rather wonderful” Green Eggs and Ham into his webcam.

This month, with donations to Heifer International exceeding $600,000, he found himself on the hook to read another piece of the donors’ choosing. Carroll’s nonsensical poem won out over Goodnight Moon, Fox in Socks, and Where the Wild Things Are.

Like fellow author, Lynda Barry, Gaiman is not one to underestimate the value of memorization.

The videography may be casual, but his off-book performance in an undisclosed tulgey wood is the stuff of high drama.

Callooh!

Callay!

Is that a memory lapse at the one minute mark? Another interpreter might have called for a retake, but Gaiman rides out a four second pause cooly, his eyes the only indicator that something may be amiss. Perhaps he’s just taking precautions, listening for telltale whiffling and burbling.

If you’re on the prowl to make some year end charitable donations, recreational mathemusician Vi Hart and author John Green are among those Worldbuilders has in the pipeline to perform stunts for successfully funded campaigns.

Jabberwocky is a poem that appears in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the 1871 sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). You can find both in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

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

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Muhammad Ali Gives a Dramatic Reading of His Poem on the Attica Prison Uprising

in History, Life, Poetry, Sports, Television | December 10th, 2014

In July of 1972, boxer Muhammad Ali traveled to Dublin to fight Alvin ‘Blue’ Lewis, an ex-con from Detroit. In the days leading up to the bout, he amused himself by busting on Fight of the Century victor Smokin’ Joe Frazier from afar, referring to him on live television as a “tramp” and a “slave” who lived on a “chicken plantation.”

It was a career defining encounter for interviewer Cathal O’Shannon, who praised Ali’s deftness in that area and noted that the champ said things “he would not have been able to say in America.”

It’s doubtful that O’Shannon was referring to the name calling, part of Ali’s campaign to draw Frazier back into the ring. (The champ got his wish less than two years later, when he defeated Frazier at Madison Square Garden in the second of their three fights.)

What’s more likely is that O’Shannon was alluding to the original poem Ali recites from memory, one minute into clip above, after orienting Irish viewers to the previous fall’s Attica Prison uprising, still the deadliest in U.S. history.

Ali imagines himself in the shoes of a black prisoner, responding to the white warden issuing a final ultimatum. His reply, which could be taken as a call to arms , but which Ali touchingly calls a “poetic poem,” takes the form of a dozen tercets:

Better far from all I see

To die fighting to be free

What more fitting end could be?

Better surely than in some bed

Where in broken health I’m led

Lingering until I’m dead

Better than with prayers and pleas

Or in the clutch of some disease

Wasting slowly by degrees

Better than of heart attack

Or some dose of drug I lack

Let me die by being Black

Better far that I should go

Standing here against the foe

Is the sweeter death to know

Better than the bloody stain

On some highway where I’m lain

Torn by flying glass and pane

Better calling death to come

Than to die another dumb

Muted victim in the slum

Better than of this prison rot

If there’s any choice I’ve got

Kill me here on the spot

Better far my fight to wage

Now while my blood boils with rage

Lest it cool with ancient age

Better vowing for us to die

Than to Uncle Tom and try

Making peace just to live a lie

Better now that I say my sooth

I’m gonna die demanding truth

While I’m still akin to youth

Better now than later on

Now that fear of death is gone

Never mind another dawn.

The poem draws to a close with an inexpert but heartfelt sound effect.

The poet — whose maternal great-grandfather was born in County Clare — went on to knock out his opponent in the 11th round.

The trailer for the documentary, When Ali Came to Ireland, featuring Cathal O’Shannon, is below.

More poetry readings can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books.

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

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Hear Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Read His Strange & Visceral Poetry

in Film, Poetry | December 9th, 2014

You have to give the Russian Futurists this: those guys didn’t mince words. It was in their 1912 publication Пощёчина общественному вкусу, known in English as A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, that poet, playwright, artist, actor, and filmmaker Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (pictured above in the center of a group that includes Sergei Eisenstein, Boris Pasternak, and his muse Lilya Brik) made his literary debut. As his sensibility developed throughout the rest of that decade — a time which, of course, included the Russian Revolution — Mayakovsky made himself into an almost anti-poetic poet, incorporating the most common varieties of language, engaging straight-on with politics, and presenting himself as anything but a lofty artistic figure.

Here, courtesy of PennSound, you can hear Mayakovsky himself reading “An Extraordinary Adventure Which Happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Summer in the Country”:

You can read the Russian here, or an English translation here, and even in the latter version the poem’s final lines, which Mayakovsky speaks after having befriended the sun itself, remain memorably invigorating:

Shine all the time,
for ever shine.
the last days’ depths to plumb,
to shine — !
spite every hell combined!
So runs my slogan -
and the sun’s!

PennSound also has Mayakovsky’s own reading of “And Could You?” [Russian] [English], a much shorter but no less strangely visceral work (1913), which runs, in its entirety, as follows:

I suddenly smeared the weekday map
splashing paint from a glass;
On a plate of aspic
I revealed
the ocean’s slanted cheek.
On the scales of a tin fish
I read the summons of new lips.
And you
could you perform
a nocturne on a drainpipe flute?

Mayakovsky, the complete collection of whose translated poems you can download at Ubuweb, lived from 1893 until his suicide in 1930 — a span coeval with the development of the motion picture. He took to that art form just as he took to others like the stage play and the propaganda poster, and it makes sense that the kind of reality-bending visual mind revealed in his poetry would fall under the spell of that wholly new and dreamlike medium. In his short life — all in 1918, in fact — Mayakovsky directed and starred in three short films, It Cannot Be Bought for Money, Shackled by Film, and The Young Lady and the Hooligan. Only the last of them survives today, and you can watch it below. It’s also housed in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More. More poetry read by great poets can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books.

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

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Dostoyevsky Got a Reprieve from the Czar’s Firing Squad and Then Saved Charles Bukowski’s Life

in Literature, Poetry | November 25th, 2014

Yesterday we featured Charles Bukowski’s first-ever recorded readings. Perhaps you found them, in their way, inspirational, but for me the feeling of inspiration always leads to a question — who inspired my inspirer? In the case of Bukowski, the poet has, in his work, clearly named one of his main inspirations: the work of 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The author of Crime and Punishment might at first seem to have little in common with the author of Ham on Rye, but often the most resonant inspirations don’t involve much direct resemblance. And as Bukowski remembers in the poem he gave Dostoyevsky’s name (albeit in one of the other standard spellings), his ancestor in the world of letters did more than just get him writing:

Dostoevsky

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn’t have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.

You can also listen to “Dostoevsky” read aloud at the top of the post. Those with a working knowledge of its namesake’s life might think back to Dostoyevsky’s time in prison, recounted briefly in the “Siberian exile (1849–1854)” section of his Wikipedia page. Arrested on trumped-up charges of conspiracy for simply reading the wrong books, he was sentenced to “eight years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service.” Today, any of us can read Bukowski’s rough-and-tumble verse to get us through hard times; we can also, as Bukowski did, read Dostoyevsky (see our collection of Free eBooks). But Dostoyevsky himself, considered particularly dangerous by his jailers, was “permitted to read nothing but his New Testament.” Hard times indeed.

A Reading of Charles Bukowski’s First Published Story, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip” (1944)

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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Told in a Beautifully Animated Film by Piotr Dumala

Fyodor Dostoevsky Draws Elaborate Doodles In His Manuscripts

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

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

Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968)

in Poetry | November 24th, 2014

Image via Wikimedia Commons

We enjoy the work of Charles Bukowski here at Open Culture, but recently we’ve weighted our attention toward his late work. And I mean his very late work, like the last poem he ever faxed. So today we turn to the very back of Bukowski’s back pages, for 130 minutes of the cantankerous yet oddly hope-filled poet and novelist’s first-ever recorded readings, all available at Ubuweb. They come, as the site says, “culled from tapes made by Bukowski at his Los Angeles home in 1968 for biographer and rock critic Barry Miles, long before the author had begun regular public readings.” Few would expect the behavior of a shrinking violet from the likes of Bukowski, but this occasion found him “so shy he insisted that he record alone. He reads both poetry and prose, gets thoroughly drunk during the recording, and bitches about his life, his landlord, and his neighbors.”

This material all comes the album At Terror Street and Agony Way, commercially issued in 2000 but now out of print. Now that it has made its way to the internet, you can enjoy such vintage, lean Bukowski cuts as “The State of World Affairs” (“The Hollywood hills stand there, stand there, full of drunks and insane people and much kissing and automobiles”), “I Cannot Stand Tears” (“There were several hundred fools around the goose who broke his leg, trying to decide what to do, when the guard walked up and pulled out his cannon”), and “I Wanted to Overthrow the Government” (“The weakness was not Government but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as their ideas, and that ideas were governments turned into men; and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini and it ended in the bedroom”).

You can hear the whole thing, in all its spirited (in both senses of the word) glory on Ubuweb’s Bukowski page, which also offers such choice recordings as 1969’s 70 Minutes in Hell, 1973’s Poems and Insults, and 1980’s Hostage.

Find more of Bukowskis’s 1968 recordings at Ubuweb.

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

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

Naropa Archive Presents 5,000 Hours of Audio Recordings of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & Other Beat Writers

in Internet Archive, Poetry, Writing | November 19th, 2014

Image via Christiaan Tonnis

Schools like Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne surely have qualities to recommend them, but to my mind, nothing would feel quite as cool as saying your degree comes from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. If you aspire to say it yourself, you’ll have to apply to Naropa University, which Tibetan Buddhist teacher (and, incidentally, Oxford scholar) Chögyam Trungpa established in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. This rare, accredited, “Buddhist-inspired” American school has many unusual qualities, as you’d expect, but, as many of us remember from our teenage years, your choice of university has as much to do with who has passed through its halls before as what you think you’ll find when you pass through them. Naropa, besides naming a school after the late Kerouac has hosted the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

But you don’t actually have to attend Naropa to partake of its Beat legacy. At the Naropa Poetics Audio Archives, freely browsable at the Internet Archive, you can hear over 5000 hours of readings, lectures, performances, seminars, panels, and workshops recorded at the school and featuring the aforementioned luminaries and many others. “The Beat writers had intervened on the culture,” says Waldman in an interview about her book Beats at Naropa. “It wasn’t just a matter of simply offering the usual kind of writing workshops, but reading and thinking lectures, panels, presentations as well. The Beat writers have been exceptional as political and cultural activists, investigative workers, translators, Buddhists, environmental activists, feminists, seers. There’s so much legendary history here.” Emphasis — I repeat, 5000 hours — on so much.

To help you dive into this legendary history, we’ve rounded up today some previously featured highlights from Naropa. Begin here, and if you keep going, you’ll discover varieties of Beat experience even we’ve never had — and maybe you’ll even consider putting in a Kerouac School application, and doing some cultural intervention of your own.

Enter the Naropa Audio Archive here.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Bill Murray Sings the Poetry of Bob Dylan: Shelter From the Storm

in Music, Poetry | October 7th, 2014

We’ve shown you Bill Murray in full-blown literary mode, reading long passages from Huck Finn and poems by Wallace Stevens, Billy Collins and Emily Dickinson. (My favorite is the poetry reading at the construction site.) Now it’s time to add Bob Dylan to that list. And, why not? Dylan is the undisputed “poet laureate of rock ’n’ roll.” Who would argue with that?

The poem recited — or rather muttered in Murray’s inimitable style — is “Shelter from the Storm,” found on Dylan’s 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks. The scene comes from the film “St. Vincent,” which you can find in theaters on October 10. “Shelter from the Storm” begins:

’Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I’ll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”

Read along with the full poem here.

Bill Murray Gives a Delightful Dramatic Reading of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1996)

Bill Murray Reads Great Poetry by Billy Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Manguso

13 Lectures from Allen Ginsberg’s “History of Poetry” Course (1975)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Patti Smith’s Musical Tributes to the Russian Greats: Tarkovsky, Gogol & Bulgakov

O Frabjous Day! Neil Gaiman Recites Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Memory

Muhammad Ali Gives a Dramatic Reading of His Poem on the Attica Prison Uprising

Hear Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Read His Strange & Visceral Poetry

Dostoyevsky Got a Reprieve from the Czar’s Firing Squad and Then Saved Charles Bukowski’s Life

Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968)

Naropa Archive Presents 5,000 Hours of Audio Recordings of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & Other Beat Writers

Bill Murray Sings the Poetry of Bob Dylan: Shelter From the Storm

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