Too bad there are no leopard seals on National Geographic’s payroll. Photographer Paul Nicklen’s intimate portraits of the one who took particular interest in him on a recent Antarctic expedition are delightful. Imagine how great it would be to have some reverse angle reaction shots of Nicklen as his new friend attempts to serve him a succession of live, dead, and mutilated penguins.
He may have turned up his nose at his subject’s cuisine, but Nicklen brings something else to the table, namely four days’ worth of up close and personal shots of an animal doing something other than going about its business. Without anthropomorphizing its intentions over much, this creature went out of its way to acclimate its strange guest to his new surroundings, sticking around when lesser hosts would have abandoned him alongside the buffet. Pretty cool when you consider that Nicklen’s entire head could — and briefly did — fit inside its massive, sharp fanged jaws.
In the mid 1960s Miles Davis responded to the form-breaking influence of free jazz by surrounding himself with a group of brilliant young musicians and encouraging them to push him in new directions.
The group was Davis’s last with all acoustic instruments, and came to be known as his “second great quintet.” It featured Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. Between 1964 and 1968 the quintet recorded a string of innovative albums, including E.S.P., Sorcerer and the transitional Miles in the Sky, in which Hancock introduces the electric Fender Rhodes piano.
For Guardian jazz critic John Fordham, the second great quintet was Davis’s best group ever. “Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing,” writes Fordham in a 2010 article. “The quintet’s method came to be dubbed ‘time, no changes’ because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band’s open-minded leader had recorded before.”
You can hear for yourself in these two concerts, shown back-to-back, recorded for television during the quintet’s 1967 tour of Europe. The first concert was recorded on October 31, 1967 at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden. Here’s the set list:
Agitation (Miles Davis)
Footprints (Wayne Shorter)
‘Round Midnight (Thelonius Monk)
Gingerbread Boy (Jimmy Heath)
Theme (Miles Davis)
The next concert was recorded one week later, on November 7, 1967, at the Stadhalle in Karlsruhe, Germany:
Agitation (Miles Davis)
Footprints (Wayne Shorter)
I Fall in Love Too Easily (Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne)
Every year from 1963 to 1969, the Beatles recorded a special Christmas greeting to their fans. It started when “Beatlemania” took off and the band found itself unable to answer all the fan mail. “I’d love to reply personally to everyone,” says Lennon in the 1963 message, “but I just haven’t enough pens.” The first message was intended to make their most loyal fans feel appreciated. Like those that followed, the 1963 message was mailed as a paper-thin vinyl “flexi disc” to members of the Beatles fan club. The recording features the Beatles’ trademark wit and whimsy, with a chorus of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Ringo” and a version of “Good King Wenceslas” that refers to Betty Grable. It was made on October 17, 1963 at Abbey Road Studios, just after the band recorded “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
The band recorded their next holiday greeting, Another Beatles Christmas Record, on October 26, 1964, the same day they recorded the song “Honey Don’t.” Lennon’s rebellious nature begins to show, as he pokes fun at the prepared script: “It’s somebody’s bad hand wroter.”
Recorded on November 8, 1965 during the Rubber Soul sessions at Abbey Road, the 1965 message features a re-working of “Yesterday,” with the refrain “Oh I believe on Christmas Day.” The band’s gift for free-associational role playing is becoming more apparent. One piece of dialogue near the end was eventually re-used by producer George Martin and his son Giles at the end of the re-mixed version of “All You Need is Love” on the 2006 album Love: “All right put the lights off. This is Johnny Rhythm saying good night to you all and God Blesses.”
You can sense the band’s creative powers growing in the 1966 message, Pantomime: Everywhere It’s Christmas. The recording was made at Abbey Road on November 25, 1966, during a break from working on “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Beatles were just beginning work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Instead of simply thanking their fans and recounting the events of the year, the Beatles use sound effects and dialogue to create a vaudeville play based around a song that goes, “Everywhere it’s Christmas, at the end of every year.” Paul McCartney designed the cover.
This was the last Christmas message recorded by the Beatles all together in one place. Titled Christmas Time (Is Here Again), it reveals the group’s continuing experimentation with sound effects and storytelling. The scenario, written by the band earlier on the day it was recorded (November 28, 1967), is about a group of people auditioning for a BBC radio play. Lennon and Ringo Starr designed the cover.
By the Christmas season of 1968, relations within the Beatles were becoming strained. The holiday message was produced around the time the “White Album” was released, in November of 1968. The four members’ voices were recorded separately, in various locations. There’s plenty of self-mockery. Perhaps the most striking moment comes when the American singer Tiny Tim (invited by George Harrison) strums a ukulele and sings “Nowhere Man” in a high falsetto.
The Beatles were in the process of breaking up when they recorded (separately) their final Christmas message in November and December of 1969. A couple of months earlier, just before the release of Abbey Road, Lennon had announced to the others that he was leaving the group. Yoko Ono appears prominently on the recording, singing and talking with Lennon about peace. Fittingly, the 1969 message incorporates a snippet from the Abbey Road recording of “The End.”
Say chowder out loud: chowder. The word sounds like food. Not an appetizer either. An entree in a small crock topped with broken crackers.
As with so many things related to food, chowder is a storied dish. It hails from New England and northeastern Canada, its first written reference dating back to 1732 when a journalist recalls dining on a “fine chowdered cod.”
There are as many types of chowder as there are soup, though a true chowder is more like a stew than a soup. Some purists would rather eat slugs than a chowder with tomatoes in it or whose name references New York. But all chowders must feature the following: broth, salt pork, biscuit and seafood.
Aside from that, all bets are off. Chow down.
Of course a regional dish with this long a history and which leaves this much room for interpretation deserves a history of its own, and so the good people at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst created the New England Chowder Compendium, a collection of recipes and ephemera exploring how chowder rose to become a staple of New England cookery.
Culled from cookbooks held by the university’s Beatrice McIntosh Cookery Collection, the compendium chronicles chowder recipes from the 1700s to the 1970s, through lean times and fat, through recipes heavy with cream and without.
And so, as readers click through featured chowder recipes from the 1920s on through to the 1940s, they’re sure to notice the ways ingredients vary. Use evaporated milk and a little water, if cream is not available. Housewives were wise in the 1940s to be thrifty while making fresh stock from knuckles: Save that fat that rose to the top and sell it to your meat dealer.
One must take care, when writing about well-connected cultural figures, not to abuse the word iconic. But when one writes about the photographer Annie Leibovitz, one almost has to abuse it. Here we have a woman who took two of the most memorable photos of John Lennon, collaborated (to the extent possible) with Hunter S. Thompson, went on tour with the Rolling Stones, followed Richard Nixon out of the White House the last time he left it, convinced Whoopi Goldberg to get into a bathtub of milk, and loved Susan Sontag. This whole post couldn’t possibly contain a complete list of her professional and personal involvement with the, yes, icons of twentieth-century popular culture. Her portraits of them became icons themselves, which, in turn, made Leibovitz herself iconic. For a visually rich sense of the scope of her life and career, look no further than the documentary above, Life Through a Lens.
This 2008 production comes from the PBS-distributed American Masters television series, which we featured on Tuesday. Directed by Leibovitz’s own sister and therefore possessed of the unusual familial insight you’d expect, Life Through a Lens also includes a great many of the hard-to-interview luminaries without which no profile of this photographer could be complete. We hear from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jann Wenner, Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Patti Smith, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bette Midler, Yoko Ono, and George Clooney, to name but a few of her admirers who’ve held their own at the business end of her camera. In the four years since this documentary, Leibovitz’s photographs — now of 21st-century celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Sasha Baron Cohen, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and LeBron James — have continued to impress in the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Whenever someone rises toward iconic status, Annie Leibovitz’s visual imagination can’t be far behind.
I’ve always been somewhat amused by the accounts of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s brief bohemian affair. The older, married, and internally tortured Catholic Verlaine’s pining for the self-destructive and precocious young Rimbaud always presents a ridiculous picture in prose. But it’s a picture that takes on much clearer contours when, for the first time, I get to see the house they occupied on 8 Royal College Street (above). The image of the house, with its forbidding brick façade, gives their really pretty unpleasant story a gravitas that literary history can’t approach. Whether seen in person or in a photograph, the effect of viewing any revered author’s home is similar: histories once subject to biographers’ caprice take on the irrefutable weight of physical reality. And while I’d love to have the luxury of a pilgrimage to all my literary heroes’ homes, I’m content with the next best thing: an internet tour in pictures. That’s exactly what one gets at the Writers’ Houses site, which has collected dozens of images of famous writers’ homes, sourced mainly from user photos.
And so homebodies like myself can read their favorite Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets while gazing at her Austerlitz, NY home “Steepletop” (below, a bit more modest than I’d imagined):
Likewise, I can read Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque little stories and be continually amazed that she did not emerge from some Medieval cloister in a fiery Southern wild but from the bright, rambling farmhouse called “Andalusia” (below).
And while I can only connect Thomas Hardy’s country gothic novels and bleak poetry with the terminal despair of a man who never leaves his firelit study in some sturdy, formal estate, his little cottage (below) is really kind of cheery and resembles something out of Peter Jackson’s Shire (though Hardy’s “Max Gate” home in Dorchester is exactly what I picture him in).
The Writers’ Houses site allows you to browse by author, state, and city, with a separate category for “international houses.” Its main page is a regular blog with a wealth of current information on writers’ homes, replete with links to other sites and sources. For lovers of travel and architectural and literary history, this is not to be missed.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
It might not surpass Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations from 1981. (Watch him perform it here). But this clip, featuring teenage pianist Kadar Qian and beatbox extraordinaire Kevin Olusola of Pentatonix, has a charm of its own. The clip comes from From the Top, a non-profit whose YouTube channel presents outstanding performances from the country’s best young classical musicians.
If you want your own copy of the Goldberg Variations, you can instantly download The Open Goldberg Variations, the first Kickstarter-funded, open source recording of Bach’s masterpiece. It’s available entirely for free. Also don’t miss the Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach. They’re free too!
No one will ever accuse Jason Silva of lacking in enthusiasm. The self-professed “filmmaker, futurist, epiphany addict” is in love, head over heels, with technology, and it’s a love infectious, as he shows us above in his short monologue, Attention: The Immersive Power of Cinema. Inspired by Diana Slattery’s essay “Virtual Reality and Hallucination,” Silva extracts a theory of cinema as a “rhetorical technology, a shrine to immersion.” His ideas are also built around a narrative and linguistic concept known as “deictic shift theory,” from deixis or “self-orientation.” For Silva, the deictic shift occurs when the “viewer assumes a viewpoint in the story,” and, in total immersion, “enters the dream as dream.” He speculates that at this point, the “pre-frontal lobe dims, and there’s a loss of ego,” such that “cinema is akin to godliness.” Hogwash, you say? Perhaps, but it’s entertaining hogwash, and if one takes the time to process the ideas embedded in Silva’s manic, form-is-content presentation, it’s even persuasive. But poor Beethoven. Fur Elise doesn’t deserve another beating.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
If you’re into William S. Burroughs, maybe you’ve watched all the Burroughs-related material we’ve featured here on Open Culture, like his 1981 Saturday Night Live appearance or the 1991 documentary Commissioner of Sewers. But another documentary on Burroughs exists — the earliest one of all — and we can’t show it to you. Nobody can show Burroughs: The Movie to you, or at least they can’t show it to you in any crisp, clear, accessible form. Sure you could pay between 25 and 90 dollars for a VHS copy on Amazon, but that money might be more productively put toward restoring the original film. As you can see in the video above, such a restoration is in the works, provided the restorers can raise the $20,000 they need to do it on Kickstarter by the end of this month.
Aaron Brookner, nephew of Burroughs: The Movie’s director Howard Brookner, found a print of the film in good condition, but now needs the funding to remaster it cleanly into a modern digital form. Begun in 1979 and debuted on the BBC in 1983, the documentary includes interviews not just with Burroughs but with Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Francis Bacon, Herbert Hunke, Patti Smith, Terry Southern, and Lauren Hutton. Howard Brookner, who died in 1989, made it as his New York University film school thesis, and to operate the camera and record the sound he enlisted two soon-to-be famous classmates, Tom DiCillo and Jim Jarmusch. As of this writing, Aaron Brookner has received $9,425 in pledges, nearly half of his goal. Burroughs enthusiasts interested in chipping in — backing premiums include limited-edition DVDs, never-before-heard audio recordings, and Burroughs: The Movie photobooks — should visit the project’s Kickstarter page.
It’s surely worth giving you the quick heads up that, starting today, “the complete collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, both long and short, have been compiled together for the first time.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes (download it here)is free on the Kindle thanks to Simon & Schuster. Unlike many free texts, the formatting looks quite nice on my Kindle Paperwhite as well as on the iPad using the Free Kindle app. So, we’re gladly adding this one to our collection of 375 Free eBooks, which gives you immediate access to many more classics.
NOTE: We have unfortunately discovered that this particular text is not available in some countries. Sorry, there was no way for us to know that in advance. But, fear not, you can find other versions of Sherlock Holmes on the web. Give these links a try:
Doyle, Arthur Conan - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Over the years the physicists behind the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols have answered some big questions — like what happens if you stick your hand inside the Large Hadron Collider? Or do physicists believe in God? But now these fine scientists from The University of Nottingham have brought physics to a level that I can personally appreciate. They’ve hit the streets of Dublin to demystify what goes into the finest of Irish libations, the perfect glass of Guinness Beer. Their inquiry starts with the most obvious question: What creates that thick beige froth that sits elegantly atop the dark brown stout? It sounds like a mundane question. Until you realize it’s not. The dynamics of Guinness foam can be explained partly by work done by the Irish physicist Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) long ago. But other aspects of Guinness foam are still being hotly contested by physicists today. Take for example this paper, Waves in Guinness, published in 2008 in the journal Physics of Fluids. Now we’ll let Sixty Symbols explain the rest.…
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