On Wednesday night, Las Vegas will mercifully host the final presidential debate. And it promises to be another rated‑R affair. You’d except nothing less from the candidate who’s going to “make America great again.”
If you want a spectacle your kids can actually watch, then shut your TVs and travel back into America’s past. Created by PBS and Microsoft, the web site watchthedebates.org lets you watch every televised presidential debate since 1960. They’re generally substantive, all rated PG, and certainly a little nostalgia-inducing.
Above you can watch Kennedy and Nixon go at it in the first televised debate (1960). Head over to www.watchthedebates.org for more.
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If you’re an Open Culture old timer, you know the work of EmperorTigerstar–a Youtuber who specializes (to quote myself) “in documenting the unfolding of world historical events by stitching together hundreds of maps into timelapse films”. We’ve previously featured his “map animations” of the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), World War I(1914–1918), and World War II (1939–1945) and also the History of Rome. This week, the map animator released The History of Europe: Every Year. In ten minutes, he takes us from The Minoan civilization that arose on the Greek island of Crete (3650 to 1400 BC), down to our modern times. About 5,000 years of history gets covered before you can boil a pot of pasta. Enjoy.
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In the mid-20th century, the red-blooded reading man in America and Britain each had a character on whom he could rely to have vivid, in their separate ways exotic, and on a certain level somehow relatable adventures on the page: Philip Marlowe in the former, and James Bond in the latter. Raymond Chandler’s luckless Los Angeles private detective and Ian Fleming’s always impeccably kitted-out agent on Her Majesty’s Secret Service would seem at first to have little in common, but when their creators got together on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1958, they had a lot to talk about.
Chandler, two decades Fleming’s senior and then in the final year of his life, had seen better days. “This once-handsome man was, at the age of 66, a wreck,” says the announcer in a preface to this 1988 re-broadcast, “depressed, alcoholic, written out. But he was lionized, and one of his new friends was Ian Fleming, whose Bond novels he’d been the first to appreciate. He reviewed Diamonds Are Foreverin the Sunday Times, providing the kind of serious criticism he wanted himself, and in 1956, in a letter to Fleming, Chandler said, ‘I did not think that I did quite do you justice in my review of your book, because anyone who writes as dashingly as you ought, I think, to try for a little higher grade.”
This mix of praise and criticism from the elder writer invigorated Fleming, who promptly redoubled his efforts in Bondcraft. Two years later, ostensibly to promote his seventh novel (and, it turned out, his last) Playback, the London-raised Chandler joined Fleming on the air to talk about British and American thrillers. “In America, a thriller or mystery story writer is slightly below the salt,” complains Chandler, who’d preceded this morning recording session with whisky. “You can write a very lousy, long historical novel full of sex and it can be a bestseller, it can be treated respectfully. But a very good thriller writer who writes far, far better just gets a little paragraph — that’s all.”
The two go on to discuss where they get their material, how to write villains (“I don’t think I ever in my own mind think anybody is a villain,” says Chandler when Fleming brings up the difficulty of creating such characters), the emergence of heroes (Fleming first intended Bond as “a sort of blank instrument wielded by a government department”), the secrets of literary productivity (Fleming took two months off in Jamaica from his Sunday Times job each year to write another book), the mechanics of gangland killings, and whether they have anybody they personally want to shoot (Chandler does, replying only that “I just thought they’d be better dead,” when Fleming asks why).
And what, at bottom, does Diamonds Are Forever’s kind of writing and The Big Sleep’s kind of writing really have in common? “We both like making funny jokes,” says Fleming. Toward the end of this broadcast, now the sole extant recording of Chandler’s voice, the creator of Philip Marlowe leaves us with some wise words in addition: “A solemn thriller is really rather a bore.”
Most stars are understandably choosy about what products, if any, they’re willing to endorse. Serious artists are mindful about their reputations.
The late great Godfather of Soul James Brown lent his prodigious talents to McDonalds (for a price), but it’s worth noting that most of the heavy lifting was done by a cast of unknowns playing ticket holders fortifying themselves before a hotly anticipated concert. Brown arrives at the end, to bedazzle everyone in the restaurant with his fancy footwork, sequined suit, and sheer proximity.
Clearly, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business had standards.
(Since his death in 2006, his hits have been used to sell athletic wear, gin, beer, and pork tenderloin, proof that these things are harder to control from beyond the grave.)
Japanese television is one arena where many Western celebrities are willing to relax their usual policies. The prospect of an enormous paycheck for so little work is hard to beat, though in the age of Youtube, there’s a far greater likelihood that their core fans will see the results.
Youtube was not a concern in 1992, when Brown filmed the above 15-second spot for Nissin Cup Noodles. No one can accuse him of phoning it in. He dances, lip synchs soup-centric Japanese lyrics to the tune of Sex Machine, and even—in a longer version on a kitchen set—pours boiling water into the cup, just like millions of budget-conscious artists and students the world over.
What he doesn’t do is “bite and smile,” a staple of commercial acting. He raises a forkful of product to his mouth with an obliging grin, but doesn’t ingest so much as a noodle.
For that, we must turn to former bodybuilder and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, who supplemented his movie career as Nissin Cup Noodles’ previous Japanese TV pitchman. Not only did he consent to funny costumes, he pile drives that ramen like a World Record in Competitive Eating depends on it. None of that clowning for Brown!
Readers, we invite you to contribute to our scholarship of Western celebs’ Japanese TV commercials in the comments section below.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
His apocalyptic poetry plucks images and forms from the blues, the Bible, the Beats, Symbolists, William Blake, T.S. Eliot, and a balladeer tradition dating from medieval French and English minstrelsy to Appalachian settlement to Woody Guthrie, his first muse. His narrative voice shifts from work to work as he has fully embodied various American characters for over half a century—folk troubadour, rock and roll trickster, earnest country crooner, evangelist, weary bluesman, starry-eyed jazz singer. “There is no systematic way of analyzing Dylan’s song lyrics or poems,” writes Julia Callaway at the Oxford Dictionaries blog; “they span more than five decades of historical context and musical style. But perhaps one of the most interesting sides of Dylan is how he uses language and his lyrics to project certain identities, including folksinger and protest-musician.”
Dylan began in that tradition with songs like “The Times They Are A‑Changin’” and “A Hard Rains A‑Gonna Fall”—picking up Guthrie’s inflections and mannerisms in ballads much more sophisticated than they seemed at first listen. “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” is a “seven minute epic,” writes Rolling Stone, “that warns against a coming apocalypse while cataloging horrific visions—gun-toting children, a tree dripping blood—with the wide-eyed fervor of John the Revelator.” The song “began life as a poem, which Dylan likely banged out on a typewriter owned by his buddy… Wavy Gravy.” Dylan has been ambivalent about whether or not we should call him a poet, but this is how so much of his work took shape—banged out on typewriters in New York apartments—as poetry set to music. “Every line in [A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall] is actually the start of a whole song,” said Dylan, “but when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one.”
After over five decades of lyrics packed with allusion and densely woven themes and meanings, Dylan has had time to write those songs—several more apocalyptic epics set to a few chords on the acoustic guitar. “There are some novels, some trilogies, in fact, with less actual content than Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower,’” says the Nerdwriter in the analysis of that cryptic John Wesley Harding song above. One could say the same about certain songs that appear on nearly every Dylan record, like the 11-minute “Desolation Row,” below. Amid only a few missteps, Dylan has released album after album, decade after decade, that showcase his unparalleled wordcraft in various song forms. And some of his finest work has appeared only in recent years, when it seems his career might have come to a close. Despite some mixed reactions—and some concern for Philip Roth—most people have responded to news this morning of his win for the Nobel Prize in Literature with a decided, “yes, of course.”
Dylan’s recognition by the Nobel Committee validates not only the songwriter himself, but the form he embraced and shaped. As permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius remarked in her announcement, Dylan “created new poetic expressions within the American song tradition.” The award represents “a recognition of the whole tradition that Bob Dylan represents,” says critic David Hadju, “so it’s partly a retroactive award for Robert Johnson and Hank Williams and Smokey Robinson and the Beatles. It should have been taken seriously as an art form a long time ago.” One could argue that American song has already been taken as seriously as any art form, but that it isn’t literature.
Several people have done so. As New York Times writer Hiroko Tabuchi put it, “this might be a disappointing day for booksellers and publishers.” Hardly. Not only does Dylan have a memoir out, Chronicles: Volume One, the first of a planned trilogy, but we may also find renewed appreciation for his first book, 1966’s Tarantula. Dylan’s songs and drawings have been turned into picture books, published in collections, and pored over in biography after biography, commentary after commentary. And next month, Dylan himself will release The Lyrics: Since 1962, a comprehensive, definitive collection of the songwriter’s lyrics, complete with expert annotations. You can pre-order a copy here.
The literary output by and about Dylan should keep booksellers busy for many months after this announcement. But Dylan’s is primarily a living, bardic tradition, lest we forget that all literature began as song. So congratulations to Dylan and for perhaps long-overdue recognition of American songcraft as a genuinely literary art form.
The great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, it is said, drew his conceptions of god and the universe from his work as an optician, grinding lenses day after day. He lived a life singularly devoted to glass, in which his “evenings to evenings are equal.” So wrote Jorge Luis Borges in a poetic appreciation of Spinoza, of which he later commented, “[Spinoza] is polishing crystal lenses and is polishing a rather vast crystal philosophy of the universe. I think we might consider those tasks parallel. Spinoza is polishing his lenses, Spinoza is polishing vast diamonds, his ethics.”
The polishing of lenses, and work in optics generally, has a long philosophical pedigree, from the experiments of Renaissance artists and scholars, to the natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution who made their own microscopes and pondered the nature of light. Over a century after Spinoza’s birth, polymath artist and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his great work on optics, just one of many directions he turned his gaze. Unlike Spinoza, Goethe had little use for concepts of divinity or for systematic thinking.
But unlike many freethinking aristocratic dilettantes who were a fixture of his age, Goethe–-writes poet Philip Brantingham—“was a universal genius, one of those talents whose works transcend race, nation, language-and even time.” It’s a dated concept, for sure, but when we think of genius in the old Romantic sense, we most often think of Goethe, as a poet, philosopher, and scientist. When he turned his attention to optics and the science of color, Goethe refuted the theories of Newton and created some enduring scientific art, which would later inspire philosophical iconoclasts like Wittgenstein and expressionist painters like Wassily Kandinsky.
In the case of Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810), we get a high-quality look at the images in what the author himself considered his best work. “Known as a fierce attack on Newton’s demonstration that white light is composite,” writes the Hagerstromer Library, “Goethe’s colour theory remains an epochmaking work.” Goethe’s illustrations came directly from “a large number of observations of subjective colour-perceptions, recorded with all the exactness of a scientist and the keen insight of an artist.” It’s partly the bridging of sciences and the arts—of Enlightenment and Romanticism—that has made Goethe such a remarkable figure in European intellectual history. But as many of the finely illustrated, carefully observed texts at the Hagerstromer Medical Library show, he wasn’t alone in that regard.
In addition to these classic texts, the Hagerstromer also hosts the Wunderkammer, an eclectic archive of (often quite bizarre) naturalist images and illustrations from the 16th to the 20th centuries. One MetaFilter user describes the collection thus:
It takes a year to age a wheel of fine parmesan cheese. And about 4 minutes, of good hard work, to break it open. Above, cheese expert Carlo Guffanti walks us through the process. The first incision comes at the 3 minute mark. Various knives come into play. Until we reach the seven minute mark, when the wheel of cheese finally breaks open. All the while, Guffanti talks about the cheese as if it’s a living, breathing person with volition and feelings. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend your life making fine cheeses. Or, maybe he’s just translating Italian expressions directly into English. Either way, it’s endearing.
Note: According to The Cheese Channel, which produced this video, what we’re actually seeing is “a wheel of Trentingrana – a parmesan-style cheese that’s from Trentino. The quality of Trentingrana is tightly controlled by appellation law, which states that it can only be made with raw milk from cows grazing on pastures or hay (silage is banned).” View more of The Cheese Channel’s videos here.
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A couple months ago we featured a video of eight writers on how to face the blank page produced by Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. (And if you should ever find yourself in Copenhagen with time for a bit of a train ride, I do recommend a visit to the museum itself.) Now, Louisiana has released eight separate videos, each offering one notable writer’s viewpoint on that scariest of all confrontations in their profession. But as The Corrections and Freedom author Jonathan Franzen puts it, “the blank page in the mind has to be filled before you have the courage to face the actual blank page.”
“If you say, ‘I want to write,’ and turn on the computer and look at the blank page, it’s over. It’s not going to happen,” says the man who somehow manages to turn out his weighty, American-zeitgeist-capturing novels faster as the years go by. “It’s when you have had a thought in the shower before, you’ve woken in the middle of the night, and suddenly you have a sentence or two — you have something. You’ve already written it in your mind.” In contrast, the even more experienced and prolific Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, sees “something compelling about the blank page that beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled,” whether or not you’ve filled your mind already.
She likens this phenomenon to “an invitation, but it’s an invitation to something like going swimming in a very cold lake. So you approach it in a similar fashion: you put your toe in, you change your mind, ‘Maybe I won’t do that,’ you put your foot in, ‘Really, do I want to do that?’ You come back, and finally you just run screaming and you plunge in. Unless you plunge in, you’re never going to begin.” The immensely imaginative number9dream and Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell uses a different metaphor: “A blank page is a door. It contains infinity, like a night sky with a supermoon really close to the Earth, with all the stars and the galaxies you can see — it’s very, very clear, maybe at a high altitude. You know how that just makes your heart beat faster?”
If that image doesn’t get you writing, Mitchell has another: “A slightly overweight, bald boss saying, “It’s time to work. Get to work, come on. You’re supposed to be a writer, aren’t you? You can’t just sit around on your fat arse waiting to be inspired, waiting for creativity. You’re stuck? Fine. Why are you stuck? Why isn’t this working? Why can’t you push on with this scene? What are you trying to hold on to what just isn’t working here? Be more honest.’ ” Have a look at the series’ entire playlist (embedded above), which also features Joyce Carol Oates, Lydia Davis, and others, and you’ll find as many strategies for battling the blank page as writers who win that battle. Whether you use ideas thought up in the shower, plunge straight into the lake, or stare up at the night sky or a bothersome boss, only one thing matters: that your page ends up with some words on it.
Through the darkness of future’s past, the magician longs to see…
The incantation that kicks off Detective Cooper’s dream vision in Twin Peaksis part abstract clue and part divination, and occult elements reoccur through the David Lynch-Mark Frost created series. So it makes sense that pop artist Benjamin Mackey would look at combining characters from the show with the designs of the well known and well loved Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck from 1910.
Initially, Mackey created just the 22 Major Arcana from the deck and sold them as prints. Detective Cooper is the Magician, Sheriff Truman is Justice, the Log Lady is the High Priestess, Benjamin Horne is the Emperor and so on. (Guess who the Devil is!)
Not too surprisingly considering the show’s devoted fan-base, the Twin Peaks Tarot was a hit, and Mackey focused on completing the full deck of 78 tarot cards (view them all here), riffing on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck’s penchant for enigmatic and mystic tableaux. And now, 10 months later, he’s offering the entire deck for sale through an Indiegogo campaign for what looks like a very affordable price.
The initial campaign ask of $5,000 was reached within days, and now is heading towards $50,000. There are also extra goodies too for those who want to give more, including a booklet and an original sketch.
The Minor Arcana shows Mackey’s deep love for the television show and film, and gives a chance for even minor characters to have their own card, from Lili with the Blue Rose to Donna Hayward’s sister Harriet.
“The Magician Longs to See” decks are scheduled to arrive by December, just in time to help you tell your friends’ fortunes while reading the upcoming Twin Peaks book, waiting for the new series, or drinking some damn fine coffee.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
The history of 20th-century music offers plenty of stories of luminaries meeting, playing together, and sometimes even entering into long-term collaboration. But it typically only happened within traditions: encounters between rock and rock, jazz and jazz, modernism and modernism. And so it still thrills to hear of the time in 1951 when Charlie Parker added one more story to the most storied jazz club of all time by performing for Igor Stravinsky at Birdland. Alfred Appel tells it definitively in his book Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce:
The house was almost full, even before the opening set — Billy Taylor’s piano trio — except for the conspicuous empty table to my right, which bore a RESERVED sign, unusual for Birdland. After the pianist finished his forty-five-minute set, a party of four men and a woman settled in at the table, rather clamorously, three waiters swooping in quickly to take their orders as a ripple of whispers and exclamations ran through Birdland at the sight of one of the men, Igor Stravinsky. He was a celebrity, and an icon to jazz fans because he sanctified modern jazz by composing Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his Orchestra (1946) — a Covarrubias “Impossible Interview” come true.
As Parker’s quintet walked onto the bandstand, trumpeter Red Rodney recognized Stravinsky, front and almost center. Rodney leaned over and told Parker, who did not look at Stravinsky. Parker immediately called the first number for his band, and, forgoing the customary greeting to the crowd, was off like a shot. At the sound of the opening notes, played in unison by trumpet and alto, a chill went up and down the back of my neck.
They were playing “KoKo,” which, because of its epochal breakneck tempo — over three hundred beats per minute on the metronome — Parker never assayed before his second set, when he was sufficiently warmed up. Parker’s phrases were flying as fluently as ever on this particular daunting “Koko.” At the beginning of his second chorus he interpolated the opening of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite as though it had always been there, a perfect fit, and then sailed on with the rest of the number. Stravinsky roared with delight, pounding his glass on the table, the upward arc of the glass sending its liquor and ice cubes onto the people behind him, who threw up their hands or ducked.
Parker didn’t just happen to know a few bits of Stravinsky to whip out as a novelty; he had, at that point, already deeply internalized the work of the man who composed The Rite of Spring (1913), the most rhythmically complex piece of orchestral music to date.
“Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing; he was speaking something close to their language,” writes New Yorker music critic Alex Ross in his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. “When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on ‘Salt Peanuts’.”
In a piece on why jazz musicians love The Rite of Spring, NPR’s Patrick Jarenwattananon discusses other instances where Parker quoted (or paid musical tribute to) Stravinsky: “A personal favorite comes from 1947, when Parker was a guest soloist on trumpeter and arranger Neal Hefti’s ‘Repetition,’ as heard on a compilation called The Jazz Scene. Not only does Hefti’s arrangement quote the transitional horn motif which signals the second half of the ‘Augurs of Spring’ movement from The Rite, but Parker riffs on the same motif to start his solo.”
Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebrationcontains a chapter by Daniel G. Williams on Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker, which, in establishing Parker’s engagement in “revivifying the vocabulary of jazz,” gets into how that got him drawing from Stravinsky, whose work Parker called “music at its best.” Williams quotes Parker’s trumpeter Howard McGhee as remembering that Parker “knew everything, and he hipped me to, like, Stravinsky and all those guys. I didn’t know nothin’ about Stravinsky.” When Parker brought The Rite of Spring over to listen to at McGhee’s house, he prefaced the experience with these words: “Yeah, this cat, he’s kind of cool, you know; he knows what he’s doing.” And the more we learn about what went into Parker’s music, the more we realize that he, too, knew even more thoroughly what he was doing than we’d ever realized.
Never meet your idols, they say. It can put a cramp in your appreciation of their work. There are always exceptions, but maybe Bill Murray proves the rule. On the other hand, you should always learn from your idols. There’s a reason you admire them, after all. Find out what it is and what they have to teach you. In the series we feature here, Advice to the Young, many an idol of many an aspiring artist and musician offers some broad, existential advice—ways to absorb a little of their process.
Laurie Anderson, above, tells us to “be loose.” Widen our boundaries, “make it vague,” because “there are so many forces that are trying to push us in certain directions, and they’re traps…. Don’t be caught in that trap of definition. It’s a corporate trap…. Be flexible.” Good advice, if you’re as eclectic and loose as Laurie Anderson, or if you seek artistic liberation ahead of sales. “I became an artist because I want to be free,” she says.
Just above, Daniel Lanois, superstar slide guitarist and producer of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, Peter Gabriel, and Emmylou Harris, tells us what he learned from working with Brian Eno. His advice is impressionistic, alluding to the importance of atmosphere and environment, as one might expect. It’s about appreciating the process, he suggests. He does get concrete about a difficulty nearly every artist faces: “if you have a financial limitation, that might be okay. You don’t have to have everything that the other people have. I think a financial limitation or a technological limitation may free up the imagination.” In an age of home studios, that’s always welcome news.
David Byrne has always told it straight, in his cultural criticism and songwriting, and in his segment, above, he steers hopeful musicians and artists away from the dream of Jay Z‑level fame. “Often the artists who are very successful that way” he says, “they don’t have much flexibility. In achieving success, they lose a little bit of their creative freedom. They have to keep making the same thing over and over again.” Byrne’s advice solidly underlines Anderson’s. If you want creative freedom, be prepared to fly under the radar and make much less money than the stars. Ending on a starkly realist note, Byrne admits that in any case, you’ll probably need a day job: “it’s very, very hard to make money in the music business.”
Novelist Umberto Eco also brings us down to earth in his interview, saying “not to think you are inspired,” then slyly dropping a cliché: “genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” The old wisdom is truest, I suppose. He also urges writers to take their time with a book. “I cannot understand those novelists who publish a book every year. They lose this pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to tell a story.” Eco’s advice: rise through the ranks, “go step by step, don’t pretend immediately to receive the Nobel prize, because that kills a literary career.”
Patti Smith, comfortably addressing an audience from an outdoor stage, urges them to “just keep doing your work” whether anyone’s listening, reading, etc. To those people who criticize her success as selling out her punk rock roots, Smith says, to laughs, “fuck you.” She then transmits some advice she received from William S. Burroughs: “build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t’ make compromises, don’t worry about making a lot of money or being successful; be concerned with doing good work.”
Easy perhaps for Burroughs the adding machine-heir to say, but good advice nonetheless, and consistent with what each artist above tells us: do it your way, don’t get pigeonholed, work with what you have, don’t worry about success or money, keep your expectations realistic.
You can watch more interviews with Marina Abramović, Wim Wenders, Jonas Mekas, and many more on this Advice to the Young playlist assembled by The Louisiana Channel. All 21 talks in the series can be viewed below:
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