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Pynchon. What to say? An all-night marathon reading of Gravity’sRainbow changed my brain chemistry. A couple days locked in a room with Valtered my reality forever. I read the first chapter of Mason & Dixon. Bought and forgot a copy of Against the Day. Scanned a review of InherentVice.
So maybe the later Pynchon hasn’t grabbed me, or my leisure reading time has just evaporated. Or both. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. But now we’ve got another chance to gape at the reclusive paranoiac’s labyrinthine prose, since his new novel Bleeding Edge comes out September 17th. And publisher Penguin has thrown us a morsel—you can read the first page of Bleeding Edge (above), from Penguin’s Fall 2013 catalog.
Described as a “historical romance on New York in the early days of the internet,” Bleeding Edge takes place in a pre-lapserian 2001, “in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th.” The novel promises plenty of intrigue, dark humor, layers of occult foreboding, “lamentations about the ’60s counterculture,” and “shady fascistic organizations with futuristic names.”
Read the full description of Bleeding Edge at Gothamist.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
As television news continues its pathetic slide into the abyss of celebrity worship, political partisanship and 24-hour punditry, its encouraging to note that in one area of traditional broadcasting there is actually something of a renaissance going on. Public radio is bucking the trend with programs like Radiolab and This American life, shows that do nothing to confirm our biases, but instead engage our curiosity and teach us something new.
In this funny and thought-provoking talk from the 2007 Gel Conference, Ira Glass, host of This American Life, explains a little of what goes into a good radio story. “Narrative,” he says, “is basically a machine that’s raising questions and answering them.” Glass’s talk is very much like his radio show. In exchange for a little patience, you will be rewarded with a good story and perhaps an insight or two.
To some fans of his not-exactly-a-sitcom Louie, Louis C.K. simply appeared a few years ago, fully formed and acclaimed by his peers as perhaps the most skilled, dedicated comedic craftsmen working today. But he does have a past, stretching back well beyond his voice role on the animated series Home Movies and his direction of the film Pootie Tang, and he has offered up entertaining fragments of it online. Above you’ll find his earliest known short film, Ice Cream. Begin watching this black-and-white meditation on the vagaries of disaffected twentysomething love in the nineties — one which opens in a convenient store, no less — and you’ll immediately think of Kevin Smith’s Clerks. But C.K. made Ice Cream in 1993, the year before Clerks came out, and it tilts in directions even Smith wouldn’t dare predict, ultimately arriving at a mariachi band-scored finale.
Just above, we have 1998’s Hello There. In four minutes, the film follows a catatonic-looking fellow (played by comedian Ron Lynch) wearing a poorly fitting suit and a cassette recorder around his neck as he makes his way through town. “Excuse me,” his machine says when he presses its play button, “do you have the correct time?” A bystander nervously answers. “Hello there,” his speaker blares to a bum dozing in a cardboard box, “is that a new hat? You are a good guy.”
As the morning continues, we come to understand that this eccentric is not the only one of his kind. Below you can watch that same year’s Brunch, which throws the verbally NSFW comedian Rick Shapiro into a sharply observed mid-morning huddle of pontificating senior citizens. These all come from Louis C.K.s official Youtube channel, and indeed, C.K. presciently made them in a form neatly suited to the Youtube era, just as Louie has proven an ideal artistic, intellectual, and financial fit for the modern cable television landscape.
Few of us possess the physical strength and even steelier will to follow in the handprints of professional balancer Jaakko Tenhunen, but most of us have other projects that could benefit from the sort of relentless determination he brings to his work. “Effort, not comfort, is what gives the most tangible sense of satisfaction,” he remarks in the voiceover above, as the camera captures him supporting his entire body weight on a single palm, his face intense but not at all anguished. Reduce this elegant philosophy to the far punchier “just do it,” and you stand to sell a lot of shoes.
As Tenhunen knows firsthand, this sort of effortful pursuit depends on discipline and daily practice. Patience is also key, as success is cumulative, and difficult to measure in the early stages.
The stripped down aesthetic of his performance does not necessarily make what he does look easy, so much as worthwhile. If you are a fledgling hand balancer, you may well find it discouraging, but for those of us striving to see other goals through to completion, Tehunen provides a bracing visual metaphor.
Ayun Halliday will be at tabling at the Brooklyn Zinefest this Sunday. Immediately thereafter catch her performing the Complete History of her long running zine, the East Village Inky… in song, as part of Brooklyn Brain Frame.
Punk rock has died a thousand deaths in the West. Almost as soon as the mass media picked it up, punk split into several hundred subspecies and spawned other monoliths—post-punk, new wave, “alternative.” Given that history, it’s generally assumed—a couple generations of suburban mallrats aside—that the original movement flashed and failed, overtaken by keyboards and drum machines, corporate greed and narcissism. But that history is incomplete. As a recent Guardian headline proclaims, punk rock is “alive and kicking in a repressive state near you.” The cause célèbre of international punk is, of course, Russia’s Pussy Riot, three of whose members were convicted of “hooliganism” and sent to labor camps. But dissident punk scenes thrive under the radar in many other places hostile to dissent, such as Burma, Indonesia, and China.
And while the contemporary phenomenon of global punk makes for fascinating news stories, a new documentary, Punk in Africa, demonstrates that international punk rock is as old as the Western variety. It just never got the same press. In South Africa, shortly after the 1976 Soweto Uprising, multi-racial punk bands began to form, with names like Gay Marines, National Wake, and Screaming Foetus. Meeting and performing under the pall of Apartheid, these bands defied laws against racial mixing and braved constant harassment by police. As one member of National Wake says in the trailer above, “the vice squad would visit us, sometimes three times in one day.” He calls the racial territory the band had to navigate a “minefield.”
A lot of the Afropunk featured in the film is reminiscent of the meeting of black and white sounds and musicians in England, especially in bands like The Clash, The Beat and The Specials. Later African ska bands like Hog Hoggity Hog and The Rudimentals certainly carry on that tradition. But many of the bands profiled—from South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique—melded raw punk energy with African polyrhythms and distinctive local sounds and instrumentation. National Wake provides a good example of such hybridization. The live performance above even includes a drum solo—anathema to most Western punk rock.
Punk in Africa promises to add some necessary balance to the slew of punk histories that focus only on Britain and the U.S.. In the interview above, one of the documentary’s directors, Deon Maas, points out that the “punk thing in Africa” started virtually weeks after its U.K. cousin, first in imitation, then as a true movement in its own right. Like the international punk scenes burgeoning around the world today, it’s a movement that deserves to be heard.
David Gerlach left a comfortable job working as a TV producer to launch Blank on Blank, a multimedia nonprofit with a simple mission — to curate journalists’ forgotten interviews with cultural icons, and then bring them back to life again, sometimes as animated shorts. You can start enjoying the fruit of Blank on Blank’s labors by watching a series of web animations, recently produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. Above, we’re starting you off with a four-minute animation of David Foster Wallace reflecting on his early tennis days, the perils of perfectionism, and his tendency to be a “grammar nazi” when teaching college students — something we’ve covered here before. The interview originally aired on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show in 1996, and you can listen to the conversation in its entirety here.
Next comes some memorable moments with Jim Morrison, the great singer-songwriter, who met with Village Voice writer Howard Smith back in November, 1969. Going into the meeting, Smith sensed that things wouldn’t be easy. He later recalled, “I had a feeling that it was going to be a tough interview. I just kinda had a feeling that … it was going to be tricky, and I said .… if things get really difficult with him, I’m gonna suggest that we arm wrestle.” As you’ll hear, Smith made his great arm-wrestling escape an inevitability when he needled Morrison, suggesting that the singer had put on too much weight. You can see how things played out above, or catch the complete interview here.
Blank on Blank has produced other animated interviews with Bono, Larry King, and surfer Kelly Slater. But we’re going to wind things down with Dave Brubeck recalling how President Eisenhower sent him to Eastern Europe to fight Communism with Jazz. Brubeck related this story at the Litchfield Jazz Festival in 2008.
If you’re looking to rummage through a big archive of lost interviews, I’d encourage you to spend time with the Blank on Blank podcast available on iTunes and rss.
A group of top American libraries and academic institutions launched a new centralized research resource today, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), making millions of resources (books, images, audiovisual resources, etc.) available in digital format. First hatched as an idea at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the DPLA is now realizing its vision of being “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”
The Digital Public Library of America rolls out today as a beta site with some kinks to work out. Some links to materials don’t work at the other end. And right now the offering is built around a modest number of online exhibitions that have been digitized by cultural institutions throughout the country, according to Robert Darnton, a driving force behind the DPLA. When you visit the site, a dynamic map and timeline will help you navigate the collections by year, decade or place. It will lead you to exhibitions, for example, about the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal, Boston’s storied sports temples, and Prohibition in the US. Around this core, the DPLA will grow until it truly serves as the digital public library of America.
Since time immemorial — or, in any case, since the mid-twentieth century — adolescents have looked to rock stars for life lessons. This works out better with some rock stars than others, of course, and in bygone days kids would have to infer these lessons from song lyrics and the occasional Rolling Stone interview. Now that most of their musical idols maintain active, even garrulous presences on several forms of social media at once, internet-age youngsters in need of counsel have a great deal more material to work with. Certain rock stars have taken this responsibility seriously, as you can see in the video above featuring Radiohead mastermind Thom Yorke and producer/multi-instrumentalist Nigel Godrich (also known as the men behind the supergroup Atoms for Peace). If you find yourself confused by boys, let these two fortysomething Brits clear it right up.
You can find a little more coverage of the video at, yes, Rolling Stone. “Yorke is particularly sage about teenage love woes,” writes the magazine’s Jon Blistein. “ ‘If you have a crush on him,’ Yorke says, ‘if you’re really, really, really, really shy, which is what I was at that age — also, I was at a boys’ school so it was impossible to meet girls anyway — how about just write him a note? Or throw him against the wall some time.’ ” Yorke and Godrich’s seventeen minutes of advice comes as the latest installment in the series “Ask a Grown Man” from Rookie, just the sort of web magazine we wish we could have had back when we were teenage girls — if we were ever teenage girls, that is. We’ve previously featured Ira Glass’ segment, and you can enjoy other moments of sagacity with the likes of comedian-filmmaker Judd Apatow, talk-show host Jimmy Fallon, and actor John Hamm. You certainly wouldn’t find them in the pages of Sassy.
Here is a rare recording of Flannery O’Connor reading an early version of her witty and revealing essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.”
O’Connor gives an eloquent outline of her vision as both a Southern and a Catholic writer. She defends her work against critics who say it is highly unrealistic. “All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real,” she says, “but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.” In the published version of the essay, she writes:
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.
This passage can be heard, in different form, beginning at the 3:40 mark in the recording. Like many of O’Connors essays, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” was written not for publication, but for public reading. She was known to rewrite and rearrange these pieces between readings. In this recording, O’Connor is using the piece as a preparatory statement for a reading of her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
We don’t know the date of the recording, but the text differs significantly from the posthumously published version, so perhaps it is an early version. The earliest extant recording of the essay that we know of was made on October 28, 1960 for the Dorothy Lamar Blount Lecture Series at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. There is also known to be a recording of O’Connor reading the piece on November 16, 1962 at East Texas State University.
How’s that New Year’s resolution going? You know, the one where you promised to make better use of your free time and learn new things? If you’re off track, fear not. It’s only April. It’s not too late to make good on your promise. And we can help. Below, we’ll tell you how to fill your Kindle, iPad, computer, smartphone, computer, etc. with free intelligent media — great ebooks and audio books, movies, courses, and the rest:
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 400 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.
If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle –Nook) beforehand.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gagdets, then listen as you go.
[Note: If you’re looking for a contemporary book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audible’s no-strings-attached deal here.]
Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 700 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses (click here for courses that do offer certificates). But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive is immeasurable.
Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 525 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.
Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is one of your resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
It all came to an end with “The End,” the last real track on the Beatles’ final studio album Abbey Road.* Recorded in July and August of 1969, “The End” takes up the last 2 minutes and 20 seconds of the masterful 16-minute medley (listen here) that brings Abbey Road to a climax. And it features some of the last great “cosmic, philosophical lines” (as John Lennon later called them) the Beatles left us to ponder:
And in the end,
The love you take,
Is equal to the love you make.
The song also gave us something we weren’t accustomed to: all four Beatles performing a solo. Any ardent Beatles fan knows that Ringo Starr never liked drum solos. As Paul recalled years later, “[Ringo] hated drummers who did lengthy drum solos. We all did.” Despite this general view, McCartney thought a solo worked on this final track, and it took a fair amount of “gentle persuasion” before Starr relented and gave us the only drum solo performed on a Beatles album. You can hear it below.
The End has another signature moment — the moment when Paul, George and John sparred on lead guitars, playing solos in rapid succession, without missing a beat. As you’ll see in the annotated video above, Paul kicks things off with a solo that features some fancy string bends. George picks up with some melodic slides. And John takes over with his own distortion-filled solo. Around it goes three times, until we reach the end.
Note: When we call “The End” the last real track on Abbey Road, we’re discounting “Her Majesty,” the 23-second song that was tacked on as something of an afterthought. We call Abbey Road the last studio album because it was recorded after (though released before) Let It Be.
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