Give the piece a listen, especially if you’ve ever considered “Valkyries” too overbearing. The all-piano arrangement does full justice to the music’s power, while also relieving some of its bombast. A definite winner. H/T @brainpicker
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.
If you’re looking forward to this week’s release of the Buddy Holly cover album Rave On (and you should be, if only for John Doe’s awesome take on Peggy Sue Got Married), then you’ll definitely get a kick out of the crooner’s first ever known recording. The song is from 1949, and the sound quality isn’t great, but no amount of static can block out the kid’s familiar warble. His voice may not have changed yet, but he’s already Buddy Holly.
We have added this Buddy Holly clip to our collection of 250 Cultural Icons. There you’ll find great writers, dazzling filmmakers and musicians, brilliant philosophers and scientists presented in video and audio.
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.
Last week, we asked Open Culture readers to write in with your favorite non-fiction titles of all time, and you didn’t disappoint. We had a hard time culling from the more than 100 suggestions, but we did have a few criteria to guide us:
1. Priority went to repeat nominees (Bill Bryson, Hunter S. Thompson, and Richard Dawkins, to name a few).
2. We leaned toward books that are available for free online.
3. When all else failed, we relied on our own preferences — or prejudices.
Thanks again for all of your recommendations, and may we congratulate you on your excellent taste in non-fiction, equalled by only your excellent taste in websites.
Lastly, and only in part because we’ve been warned that we would be roundly scolded for the omission: The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White
Thanks again, and happy reading!
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.
Last Tuesday, the residents of Poznan, Poland set a world record when they released 8,000 Chinese lanterns into the sky to mark the shortest night of the year — or what’s otherwise called Midsummer Night. The video above lets you see the lanterns in full flight. The image below offers a close-up view of a lantern before heading into the night sky…
Peter Falk made his career playing a quirky detective in the 1960s and 70s television show Columbo. But the art world will remember a moment when Falk played himself in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire. In the credits, he was listed simply as ‘Der Filmstar.’ This is our 1:46 tribute to Falk, who passed away Friday at age 83. H/T @SteveSilberman
In 1982, Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth directed 66 Scenes from America, a film that stitched together a series of lengthy shots, each a visual postcard from a journey across America. And, taken together, you have a tableau of the American experience.
Along the way, the pop artist Andy Warhol makes his appearance. The man who coined the expression “15 Minutes of Fame” takes four minutes to eat a hamburger, mostly without saying a word. And simply because of his fame, we watch … and watch. About this scene Leth gives a few details:
[Warhol] is told that he has to say his name and that he should do so when he has finished performing his action, but what happens is that the action takes a very long time to perform; it’s simply agonizing. I have to admit that I personally adore that, because its a pure homage to Warhol. It couldn’t be more Warholesque. That’s of course why he agreed to do it.
This was presumably not a paid placement by Burger King.
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Before clicking on this extraordinary video — which shows a meeting of civilizations that may never happen again on our planet — be sure to turn the sound off and spare yourself the awful soundtrack. The expressions on the faces of the Toulambi tribesmen are enough anyway, and even though history tells us that these parties end badly for the team with the fewest toys, you can’t help feeling a certain amount of awe and joy while watching the encounter.
This footage was shot in Papua New Guinea by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, a Belgian filmmaker and activist perhaps best known for his Academy Award-nominated 1979 documentary Raoni: The Fight for the Amazon. You can visit Dutilleux’s web site to get more photos and a little more backstory on the Toulambi. Have a good weekend…
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.
When Charles Darwin finished reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, a book suggesting that there are clear limits to the variation of species, he wrote in the margins: “If this were true adios theory.” It’s a great piece of marginalia. And it’s just one of many comments that adorn books in Darwin’s personal library, and help illuminate his intellectual path to writing On The Origin Of Species(1859).
A quicks heads up: If you like Herb Alpert and Engelbert Humperdinck, then this BBC doc is definitely for you. Here’s what you get in 90 minutes:
In-depth documentary investigation into the story of a popular music that is often said to be made to be heard, but not listened to. The film looks at easy listening’s architects and practitioners, its dangers and delights, and the mark it has left on modern life.
From its emergence in the 50s to its heyday in the 60s, through its survival in the 70s and 80s and its revival in the 90s and beyond, the film traces the hidden history of a music that has reflected society every bit as much as pop and rock — just in a more relaxed way.
Invented at the dawn of rock ’n’ roll, easy listening has shadowed pop music and the emerging teenage market since the mid-50s. It is a genre that equally soundtracks our modern age, but perhaps for a rather more ‘mature’ generation and therefore with its own distinct purpose and aesthetic. Contributors include Richard Carpenter, Herb Alpert, Richard Clayderman, Engelbert Humperdinck, Jimmy Webb, Mike Flowers, James Last and others.
A few days ago, we asked you to send us your favorite non-fiction titles. We’ll be posting your many excellent suggestions soon, and, in the meantime, we thought we should offer something in return — more specifically, yet another list of excellent non-fiction compiled by someone other than ourselves.
Kevin Kelly, web-pioneer, co-founder of Wired Magazine, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the best all-around living arguments for ditching college and traveling the world instead, has put together a crowdsourced list of the best magazine articles from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s, almost all of them available on the web. He’s also gathered the top 25 of all time (based on the number of votes received) on one thrilling page.
The list includes pieces like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, and Gay Talese’s legendary 1966 Esquire cover story, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. It’s an invaluable resource, whether you’re an aspiring journalist or novelist, a history buff, or just a person who wants to enjoy the evolution of the past 60 years of the English language.
You may already be familiar with the sites Instapaper, Longreads, and Longform. All three can help you find great reading material on the web, organize it, and download it to your Kindle, iPad, or tablet. Enjoy.
Get more classics from our collection of Free eBooks.
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.
With freedom come choices. Every choice is an opportunity to select the best possible outcome, the one that would make us happiest. More choices lead to more happiness, right? Of course we find the opposite to be true. As choices increase, so does anxiety. In the latest installment of the RSA animated lecture series, Slovenian social and legal theorist Renata Salecl argues that this anxiety, coupled with the capitalist ideal of the self-made person, leads to a kind of social paralysis. “Today’s ideology of choice,” says Salecl, “actually pacifies people and makes us constantly turn criticism to ourselves instead of organizing ourselves and making a critique of the society we live in.” The animated feature was adapted from a lecture Salecl gave last summer in London. (You can watch the entire lecture here.) It draws on ideas presented in her book, Choice.
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