In the fall of 1979 Bob Marley and his band, the Wailers, went on tour to promote their album, Survival. It turned out to be the second-to-last tour for the reggae star, who had been diagnosed two years earlier with cancer. But in late 1979 Marley appeared to be in excellent form. Lucky for us, a camera crew was there to record one of his shows.
The film above was shot at the Santa Barbara County Bowl in California on November 25, 1979, just 16 months before Marley’s untimely death at the age of 36. It was released on DVD in 2003 as Bob Marley: The Legend Live. The Wailers were in their second incarnation in 1979, and had become little more than a backup band after the departure in 1974 of core members Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer.
The lineup in the film includes Marley on rhythm guitar and vocals, brothers Aston and Carlton Barrett on bass and drums, Junior Marvin and Al Anderson on lead guitar, Tyrone Downie and Earl “Wya” Lindo on keyboards, Devon Evans and Alvin “Seeco” Patterson on percussion, Glen DaCosta on saxophone, Dave Madden on trumpet and the “I Threes” (Judy Mowatt, Marcia Griffiths and Marley’s wife Rita) on backing vocals.
The film is essentially a record of the complete Santa Barbara concert, but the order of the songs has been re-arranged. Here’s the set list as it appears in the film:
Positive Vibration
Wake Up and Live
I Shot the Sheriff
Ambush in the Night
Concrete Jungle
Running Away
Crazy Baldhead
Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)
The Heathen
Ride Natty Ride
Africa Unite
One Drop
Exodus
So Much Things to Say
Zimbabwe
Jamming
Is This Love
Kinky Reggae
Stir It Up
Get Up, Stand Up
Bob Marley: The Legend Live is not the last film ever made of a Marley concert, as some have claimed, but it is an excellent record from the late period of the man who put reggae on the global music map.
The First World War (1914–1918) changed Britain to a degree that was unthinkable in 1914. Pre-war certainties and values such as honor, fatherland and progress disintegrated on the battlefields and trenches in France and Belgium. New technology such as tanks, machine guns, grenades, flame throwers and poison gas were used to destroy the enemy; constant fire for days on end was intended to break the soldiers in the trenches. Unspeakable horrors led to psychological problems of unknown proportions.
Coping with these horrors during and after The Great War (as it’s still called in Britain today) seemed like a Herculean task to poets — how do you put the unspeakable into words? Some poets, e.g. Rupert Brooke, still celebrated the heroism of the English soldiers (e.g., 1914 II. Safety), whereas others, such as Wilfred Owen, tried to describe the horrors of this war (e.g., Dulce et Decorum Est).
Every year on the Sunday closest to November 11, Britain remembers the dead of the First World War. For Remembrance Day 2012, famous British actors were asked to recite First World War poetry. The finished clips were to be shown on TV that day. The video above shows three actors reciting four poems by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen (click the names of the actors for information about them and the titles of the poems for the full text):
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
It comes as no surprise that the man who created the title sequences for The Man with the Golden Arm, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Vertigo can tell you a thing or two about graphic design. He can even tell his established colleagues a thing or two about graphic design, as seen in the clip above. The man, of course, is Saul Bass, and this footage of him comes from a long-form interview conducted by designer and educator Archie Boston.
In 1986, Boston paid a visit to Bass’ studio for a project called 20 Outstanding Los Angeles Designers, shooting a conversation that touched on many subjects, including the eminence’s main piece of advice for graphic design students. “Learn to draw,” Bass pronounces.
“If you don’t, you’re going to live your life getting around that and trying to compensate for that.” Design, as observers of the discipline say, ultimately comes down to communication. According to Bass, aspiring designers fail to master drawing, one of communication’s most basic but richest forms, at their peril.
The clip just above goes deeper than giving practical advice, getting down to the very raison d’être of the graphic designer. Bass puts it unambiguously: “Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. The fact of the matter is, I want everything we do — that I do personally, that our office does — to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks that it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” Explore our related content section below to get an extensive idea of the fruits of Bass’ unbending desire to create beauty. You may or may not find, say, his reimagined American Bell office lady uniforms beautiful, but you can’t deny that they come from a mind wholly dedicated to aesthetics — and one that cared not just about the how of creation, but the why as well.
Update: The great Chuck Berry has passed away at 90, joining many other legends in rock n roll heaven. There’s so many great things to say about Mr. Berry. And we’ll have more on the site in the coming week. For now, enjoy one of our favorite Berry items from the archive.
The purpose of Taylor Hackford’s 1987 film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll was to document two concerts held at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis to celebrate Chuck Berry’s 60th birthday, and that it does, giving audiences loads of concert footage. Berry plays the hits, backed by an all-star band of legendary bluesmen, R&B singers, and rock guitarists, assembled and directed by president of the Chuck Berry fan club, Keith Richards: There’s Bobby Keys and Chuck Leavell, Robert Cray and Eric Clapton, Etta James and Linda Ronstadt.
And that’s not to mention the talking head appearances from people like Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Little Richard, and Bruce Springsteen. In the pantheon of rock-docs, it’s right up there with Last Waltz. The live takes are electrifying—the band’s pistons pound as they struggle to keep up with Berry. If the man had slowed down any in his sixth decade, it’s little wonder he had trouble holding onto backing bands in his youth. Watch him go in the 1958 clip below.
But there’s another reason Berry burned through musicians. He is not an easy man to work with (nor, I would think, for). Brilliant live performances abound in Hackford’s film, but one of its principle charms is the rehearsal footage, where Berry berates and bewilders his musicians–and sometimes, like he does above to Richards, takes them to rock ’n’ roll school. In the clip above, Richards, Berry, and band rehearse “Carol,” but it takes them a good while to get going. Richards tries to play bandleader and, thinking he’s doing Chuck a favor—or not wanting to lose the spotlight—suggests that Berry play rhythm while he plays the lead.
Berry agrees at first. They bicker and look daggers at each other as Richards spoils a bend that only Chuck can play to his own satisfaction. Finally he dives in and takes over. Why not? It is his song. Richards falls in line, takes the rhythm part, but looks a little sullen as Berry outshines him. It’s almost an oedipal struggle. But the rock forefather isn’t about to roll over and let Richards take over.
Elsewhere in the film, Berry gives voice to the underlying anger he harbored for Richards. The Stones and other British bands took Berry’s riffs (he claimed) and made millions, and Chuck never forgave them. He still doesn’t get enough credit. The Rolling Stones still tour and record, but Berry, almost twenty years older than Richards, is still out on the road too, still showing ‘em how it’s done. See second video below.
1958
2012
Bonus:
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
In 1980, the revered Japanese director Akira Kurosawa shot Kagemusha, otherwise known asThe Shadow Warrior. Francis Ford Coppola was the producer. Somewhere during the production, the two filmmakers lent their star power to a series of commercials for Suntory Whisky. If you’re a regular reader, you know that many cultural icons have pitched Japanese products in times past — take for example Woody Allen, James Brown, Nicolas Cage, Paul Newman and good ole Dennis Hopper. And, if you’re even a casual moviegoer, you know that Sofia Coppola (daughter of Francis) put an American movie star drinking whisky at the center of her Oscar-nominated film, Lost in Translation (2003). And it wasn’t just any whisky that Bill Murray was sipping. It was Suntory Whisky.
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Few filmmakers have been so often, or so unambiguously, called masters of the medium as Andrei Tarkovsky. In acclaimed pictures like The Mirror, Stalker, and Nostalghia (find free online versions of his films here), he realized his visions without compromise. If you can engage with these visions, watching a Tarkovsky film makes for a cinematic experience without compare. Geoff Dyer, for example, one of the director’s particularly high-profile fans, recently published Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, a volume on nothing but watching Stalker. If you can’t engage with these visions, you may find watching a Tarkovsky film rough going indeed. (Admittedly, Nostalghia’s nine minutes of candle-carrying requires a certain frame of mind.) But if you make films, you’d do well to consider Tarkovsky’s methods either way. The clip above from the documentary Voyage in Timeoffers some insight into how the man thought about his work.
First and foremost, he didn’t think about it as “work,” separate from other pursuits. “It’s not hard to learn how to glue the film, how to work a camera,” Tarkovsky says. “But the advice I can give to beginners is not to separate their work, their movie, their film, from the life they live. Not to make a difference between the movie and their own life.” These words don’t come as a surprise from a director well known for crafting deeply personal films, but one suspects that creators of any kind all too rarely find it in themselves to heed them. But Tarkovsky, always described as a thoroughly rigorous man, could have lived no other way. “Cinema is a very difficult and serious art,” he continues. “It requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn’t belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.” A great demand indeed, but we’d surely have a more interesting cinema if young directors accepted it. The artistic world could use more Tarkovskys.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In late September of 2011, Maurice Sendak spoke one last time with Terry Gross for the NPR program Fresh Air. Ostensibly the interview was to promote Sendak’s final book, Bumble-Ardy, but as the conversation progressed it was clear they just wanted to talk.
The beloved children’s writer and illustrator was 83 years old and in declining health. He was feeling the loss of people close to him who had died in recent years. Inevitably, the discussion turned to issues of mortality. As the conversation built to an emotional crescendo, Sendak laid bare the qualities that made him such a great author: sincerity, depth of feeling, and an insuperable need to connect with people in some elemental way.
By the time it was over there were teary-eyed people in cars all across North America. One listener, Brent Eades, left a message on the NPR Web site: “I happened to be listening to this extraordinary interview while on the early-morning commute from my small Ontario town to Ottawa. I was entirely absorbed in it; and the final couple of minutes left me with tears streaming down my face, which I’m sure nonplussed my fellow commuters.”
The German-born illustrator Christoph Niemann had a similar experience. On Sunday The New York TimesMagazine posted this touching animation by Niemann, which tells the story of how the interview affected him. In the film, various creatures from Sendak’s fertile imagination revisit Niemann as he listens in his car, transporting him again to someplace special.
You have shown through your works, that it is possible to succeed without violence even with those who have not discarded the method of violence.
The letter long precedes the first atomic bombs and Einstein’s letters to F.D.R. warning of their development and use; though often discussed only in relation to the horrific events of World War II, the physicist’s opposition to violence and war was a longstanding passion for him. Einstein called his pacifism an “instinctive feeling” based only on his “deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred,” rather than any “intellectual theory.” His politics often paralleled those of fellow intellectual giant and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell (the two collaborated on a 1955 “Manifesto” for peace).
Gandhi remained an important influence on Einstein’s life and thought. In the audio clip above from 1950, he again offers generous praise for the man known as “Mahatma” (great soul). In the recording, Einstein says of Gandhi:
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, which roughly translates as “devotion to the truth,” appealed to Einstein, perhaps, because of its principled stand against political expediency and for a kind of moral commitment that depended on self-scrutiny and inquiry into cause and effect. Like the counter-intuitive theories of Einstein and Russell, Gandhi biographer Mark Shepard writes that the concept of satyagraha is “a hard one to grasp”–Especially, “for those used to seeing power in the barrel of a gun.”
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly,” was one of the greatest blues musicians of all time. His songs have been covered by hundreds of artists, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Led Zeppelin. Lead Belly is also famous for what his biography at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes as “the mythic outline of his life”:
Born circa 1885 in rural northwest Louisiana, Lead Belly rambled across the Deep South from the age of 16. While working in the fields, he absorbed a vast repertoire of songs and styles. He mastered primordial blues, spirituals, reels, cowboy songs, folk ballads and prison hollers. In 1917, Lead Belly served as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “lead boy”–i.e., his guide, companion and protégé–on the streets of Dallas. A man possessed with a hot temper and enormous strength, Lead Belly spent his share of time in Southern prisons. Convicted on charges of murder (1917) and attempted murder (1930), Lead Belly literally sang his way to freedom, receiving pardons from the governors of Texas and Louisiana. The second of his releases was largely obtained through the intervention of John and Alan Lomax, who first heard Lead Belly at Angola State Prison while recording indigenous Southern musicians for the library of Congress.
In 1935 the March of Time newsreel company told the story of John Lomax’s discovery of Lead Belly in the short film above. Although the scripted film will strike modern viewers as dubious in some respects (March of Time founder Henry Luce once described the series as “fakery in allegiance to the truth”), the newsreel is nevertheless a fascinating document of Lead Belly, who was about 50 years old at the time, along with Lomax and Martha Promise, Lead Belly’s wife. At one point Lead Belly sings his classic song, “Goodnight, Irene.”
According to Sharon R. Sherman in Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture, the 1935 Lead Belly newsreel is the earliest celluloid document of American folklore. Lead Belly did work for Lomax after his second release from prison, as the newsreel says, accompanying him back East to serve as his chauffeur. In New York Lead Belly performed in Harlem and also came into contact with leftist folk singers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Lead Belly became known as the “King of the Twelve-String Guitar.”
Three Songs by Leadbelly, the only other film known to exist of the great bluesman, was made ten years after the newsreel. The footage of Lead Belly performing was shot in 1945 by Blanding Sloan and Wah Mong Chang, and edited two decades later by Pete Seeger. The film begins with scenes of the graveyard in Mooringsport, Louisiana, where Lead Belly was buried after his death in 1949, accompanied by an instrumental version (with humming) of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Lead Belly actually performed six songs for the film, but only three could be salvaged. Seeger is quoted by Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell in The Life and Legend of Leadbelly as describing Sloan’s work as “pretty amateurish”:
I think that he recorded Leadbelly in a studio the day before, then he played the record back while Leadbelly moved his hands and lips in synch with the record. He’d taken a few seconds from one direction and a few seconds from another direction, which is the only reason I was able to edit it. I spent three weeks with a Movieola, up in my barn, snipping one frame off here and one frame off there and juggliing things around. I was able to synch up three songs: “Grey Goose,” “Take This Hammer,” and “Pick a Bale of Cotton.”
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Another year gone by. Another 1200+ cultural blog posts in the books. Which ones did you like best? We let the data decide. Below, you’ll find the 17 that struck a chord with you. Free Art Books from The Guggenheim and The Met: Way back in January, the Guggenheim made 65 art catalogues available online, all free of charge. The catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Calder, Munch, Bacon, and Kandinsky, among others. Then, months later, The Met followed suit and launched MetPublications, a portal that now makes available 370 out-of-print art titles, including works on Vermeer, da Vinci, Degas and more.
The Best Animated Films of All Time, According to Terry Gilliam: Terry Gilliam knows something about animation. For years, he produced wonderful animations for Monty Python (watch his cutout animation primer here), creating the opening credits and distinctive buffers that linked together the offbeat comedy sketches. Given these bona fides, you don’t want to miss Gilliam’s list, The 10 Best Animated Films of All Time.
Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Guitar Solo by George Harrison: Here’s another great discovery — the long lost guitar solo by George Harrison from my favorite Beatles’ song, “Here Comes the Sun.” In this clip, George Martin (Beatles’ producer) and Dhani Harrison (the guitarist’s son) bring the forgotten solo back to life. When you’re done taking this sentimental journey, also see another favorite of mine: guitarist Randy Bachman demystifying the opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization: In June, we lost Ray Bradbury, who now joins Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick in the pantheon of science fiction. In this post, we revisit two moments when Bradbury offered his personal thoughts on the art and purpose of writing — something he contemplated during the 74 years that separated his first story from the last.
Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Speaking of science fiction, we brought you a roundup of some of the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian classics available on the web in audio, video and text formats. They include Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia,many stories by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman, and much more. Find more great works in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
This is Your Brain in Love: Scenes from the Stanford Love Competition: Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what Stanford researchers and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. And they each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine. It’s to hard watch this short film and not shed a happy tear.
Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’: In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–Flannery O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story.
33 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web: On the eve of the 2012 Academy Awards, we scouted around the web and found 33 Oscar-winning (or nominated) films from previous years. The list includes many short films, but also some long ones, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic version of War & Peace. Sit back, enjoy, and don’t forget our collection of 500 Free Movies Online, where you’ll find many great noir films, westerns, classics, documentaries and more.
The Story Of Menstruation: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946: Staying with movies for a second, we also showed you a very different mid-1940s Disney production – The Story of Menstruation. Made in the 1940s, an estimated 105 million students watched the film in sex ed classes across the US.
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web: We spent some time tracking down 23 free stories and essays published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.
Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975): In January 1975, Buckminster Fuller sat down to deliver the twelve lectures that make up Everything I Know, all captured on video and enhanced with the most exciting bluescreen technology of the day. The lecture series is now online and free to enjoy, so please do so.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story: When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight tips on how to write a short story.
Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities: A Complete List: We gathered a list of 200 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by leading universities. Most of these free courses offer “certificates” or “statements of completion.” Many new courses start in January 2013. So be sure to check it out. Also don’t miss our other new resource collection: 200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & Beyond.
To fully experience the clip above, you’ll need to be awake and pressing play at precisely 12:04 am. What you’ll be seeing is a very small segment of The Clock, a 24-hour video assemblage that keeps time with clips culled from a century’s worth of film history. Some of these markers are in the dialogue, but most are shots of clocks and watches in which a specific time is clearly visible.
If viewing the complete piece sounds like a marathon, consider that artist Christian Marclay and a phalanx of assistants spent three years locating and placing the clips and smoothing out the resulting soundtrack. Some of these moments came preloaded with the import of a High Noon. Others were of a more incidental, background-type nature prior to being cast in Marclay’s project.
Those unable to spend quality time with The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art this January can get a feel for it via philosopher and writer Alain de Botton’s brief chat with Marclay below.
- Ayun Halliday resolves to use it better in 2012. Perhaps you shouldn’t follow her on Twitter @AyunHalliday.
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