Patrick Adelman is a student at the University of Rochester pursuing degrees in mathematics and political science. He’s also, according to his LinkedIn profile, a member of the Chamber Boys, the university’s radio comedy group. And, oh yes, a production intern at the Howard Stern show. That’s probably all the set up you need to see what happened in Dr. Benjamin Hafensteiner’s Chemistry 131 class last week. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
When a 96-year-old man becomes a social media sensation, it’s usually not too hard to see why.
Fred Stobaugh, the gent featured above, ran across a call for entries for Green Shoe Studio’s Singer Songwriter Contest and used it as an excuse to write a love song for his wife, Lorraine. That’s plenty sweet, especially when one does the math—Fred and Lorraine were together for 75 years, and married for all but three. When one learns that Fred buried his bride just six weeks before hearing about the contest, the story takes on a sort of romantic urgency. We need him to win this contest.
Rather than uploading a video of his “Oh Sweet Lorraine” to YouTube as instructed, Stobaugh slipped the lyrics into a manila envelope and mailed them off along with an explanatory note. Green Shoe’s Jake Colgan was open to the transgression, as befits a record producer who made the conscious decision to set up shop in Peoria, Illinois.
It’s safe to assume most of the entrants approached the contest with their eyes on the prize, a professionally recorded demo CD and photo shoot, and laurels with which to adorn their developing careers. No disrespect to them—they were following the rules in good faith—but the purity of Strobaugh’s motives no doubt set him apart as much, if not more than his longevity.
Speaking of which, it was just announced that Stobaugh has toppled the-then-85-year-old Tony Bennett to become the oldest artist ever appearing in Billboard’s Hot 100.
With all the attention being paid to the endearingly modest Mr. Strobaugh, let’s do take a moment to acknowledge this year’s actual contest winner Graham Cowger, as well as the runners up. A class act can be a difficult act to follow. To quote Lou Reed entirely out of context, “always back to Lorraine.”
We’ve recently featured the all-time-greatest-film-selections from such celebrated directors as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Quentin Tarantino. Some of these lists came from the grand poll put on last year by Sight & Sound, the British Film Institute’s well-respected cinema journal. While scrutinizing the voting records in the directors’ division yields no small pleasure for the cinephile, to focus too closely on that would ignore the big picture. By that, I mean the overall standings in this most painstaking critical effort to determine “the Greatest Films of All Time”:
These results came out with a bang — the sound, of course, of Vertigo displacing Citizen Kane. How many who watched the young Orson Welles’ debut during its financially inauspicious original run could have guessed it would one day stand as a byword for the height of cinematic craftsmanship?
But Citizen Kane just flopped, drawing a good deal of critical acclaim even as it did so, whereas, seventeen years later, Hitchcock’s Vertigo not only flopped, but did so into a fog of mixed reviews, tumbling unceremoniously from there into obscurity. Prints became scarce, and the ones Hitchcock aficionados could later track down had seen better days. It would take a kind of obsession — not to mention a thorough restoration — to return Vertigo to the zeitgeist.
We ignored Vertigo at our peril, and if we now ignore Citizen Kane because of its new second-chair status, we do that at our peril as well. The 90-minute documentary, The Complete Citizen Kane, originally aired in 1991 as an episode of the BBC’s Arena. It looks at Welles’ masterpiece from every possible angle, even bringing in New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, whose essay “Raising Kane” took a controversial anti-auteurist position about this most seemingly auteur-driven of all American films.
In the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway wrote a series of short pieces for Esquire magazine called the “Key West Letters.” One of those pieces, the 1935 “Remembering Shooting-Flying” has an interesting premise—Hemingway claims that remembering and writing about shooting are more pleasurable than shooting itself. Or at least that he’d rather remember shooting pheasant than actually shoot clay pigeons. In the next paragraph, this nostalgia for good shooting gets tied up with good books, such that the essay betrays its true desire—to be a meditation on reading. Before he catches himself and gets back on topic, Hemingway launches into a long parenthetical:
I would rather read again for the first time Anna Karenina, Far Away and Long Ago, Buddenbrooks, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sportsman’s Sketches, The Brothers Karamazov, Hail and Farewell, Huckleberry Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, La Reine Margot, La Maison Tellier, Le Rouge et le Noire, La Chartreuse de Parme, Dubliners, Yeat’s Autobiographies and a few others than have an assured income of a million dollars a year.
Is this hyperbole? Literary bluster? The genuine desire to encounter again “for the first time” the literature that transformed and widened his world? Maybe all of the above. Better to stay home and remember the greats—write about them and hope for a time when they’re new again—than to fill one’s time with mediocre and forgettable books. At least that seems to be his argument. And while I’m sure you have your own lists (feel free to add them to the comments section below!), some of you may wish to take a shot at Hemingway’s and savor those works that for him overshadowed nearly every other.
To that end, we’ve compiled a list of the books he names, with links to online texts and audio, where available. Enjoy them for the first time, or read (and listen) to them once again. And remember that the texts are permanently housed in our collections of Free Book Audio Books and Free eBooks.
Roger Waters of Pink Floyd turns 70 years old today. Waters was the principal songwriter and dominant creative force during the band’s famous 1970s period, when it released a string of popular and influential concept albums such as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. But today we thought it would be interesting to take you all the way back to 1967, when Waters was 23 years old and the band was led by his childhood friend Syd Barrett.
The video above is from a May 14, 1967 broadcast of the BBC program The Look of the Week. Pink Floyd hadn’t released an album yet. Only two nights earlier the band had staged its attention-getting “Games for May” concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. In the TV broadcast, Pink Floyd plays its early favorite “Astronomy Domine” before Waters and Barrett sit down for a rather tense interview with the classically trained musician and critic Hans Keller. It’s amusing to watch Keller’s face as he expresses his extreme irritation at the band’s loud, strange music. “My verdict is that its a little bit of a regression to childhood,” he says with a grimace. “But after all, why not?”
Waters and Barrett manage to hold their own during the interview. Barrett comes across as lucid and well-spoken, despite the fact that his heavy LSD use and mental instability would soon make him unable to function within the band. By December of 1967, Pink Floyd would add guitarist David Gilmour to the lineup to compensate for Barrett’s erratic behavior. By March of 1968 — only 10 months after the BBC broadcast — Barrett would quit the group.
We’ll close with an even earlier video of Pink Floyd onstage. Filmed on January 27, 1967 at the legendary UFO club in London, the clip is from the February 7, 1967 Granada TV documentary So Far Out It’s Straight Down. It shows the band playing another major song from its psychedelic era, “Interstellar Overdrive.”
Singer/songwriter Warren Zevon died of lung cancer ten years ago tomorrow. I remember the day of his passing well, but at the time I was a little baffled by the enormous number of tributes to the musician, who I vaguely thought of (stupidly) as a novelty songwriter vaguely associated with the L.A. soft rock scene. How wrong I was. I arrived at the Zevon party late, but I finally showed up, and came to understand why almost every musician from the seventies and eighties that I admire deeply admires Warren Zevon and his hardbitten, witty, and unsentimental narrative style. There’s so much Zevon in so many troubadours I love: Joe Jackson, Tom Waits, Springsteen. Always on the cusp of stardom but never quite a star like peers and former roommates Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Jackson Browne, Zevon was nevertheless one of the most well-regarded writers of the L.A. rock scene. Whether it was his misanthropic commitment to his cynicism—as Allmusic describes his personality—that sidelined him or his struggles with acute alcoholism isn’t entirely clear, but he always had his champions among critics and peers alike.
In addition to the aforementioned luminaries, Zevon’s career was boosted by members of R.E.M., with whom he recorded under the name Hindu Love Gods, and—most visibly and consistently—by David Letterman, who had a twenty year relationship with Zevon as his guest and sometime substitute band leader. At the top of the post, you can see Zevon’s final appearance on Letterman’s show. The two attempt light banter but lapse occasionally into awkward pauses as they discuss Zevon’s diagnosis. The talk is frank and filled with mordant wit, as was Zevon’s way, and Letterman confesses he’s astounded at his longtime friend’s ability to keep his sense of humor. When Letterman asks Zevon if he’s learned something Dave doesn’t know about life and death, Zevon responds with the endlessly quotable line, “not unless I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.” In the clip above, watch one of Zevon’s final performances on the same show. He plays the powerful ballad “Mutineer,” a song with a fitting epitaph for Zevon’s life: “ain’t no room on board for the insincere.”
And in the clip above, see Zevon’s first appearance on Letterman in 1982, playing “Excitable Boy” and “The Overdraft.” Watching these early and late performances, I’m baffled again—this time by why Warren Zevon wasn’t a major star. But it doesn’t matter. Those who know his work, including nearly every major singer/songwriter of the last forty years, know how amazing he was. For more of Zevon’s amazingness, check out this full 1982 concert film from an appearance in Passaic, New Jersey. And please, remember to enjoy every sandwich.
Last week we featured 1937’s The Tale of the Fox, the crowning glory of inventive Russian filmmaker Ladislas Starevich’s work in puppet animation. But he didn’t always shoot puppets as we know them; at the dawn of his career — and thus the dawn of Russian animation — he had to make use of what lay close at hand. Today we go back a couple decades further, to the time when Starevich (then known, before his immigration to Paris, as Władysław Starewicz) worked not as an animator but as the director of Kovno, Lithuania’s Museum of Natural History. Interested in filming nocturnal stag beetles but unable to get a performance out of them under film lights, he hit upon the idea of shooting not living insects but dead ones, their legs replaced with wire which he could reposition frame-by-frame. The result? Starevich’s early, still-entertaining shorts like 1911’s The Ant and the Grasshopper (also known as The Dragonfly and the Ant) at the top.
But you haven’t truly experienced dead-bug animation until you’ve seen The Cameraman’s Revenge, just above. Starevich made it in 1912, by which time his animation skills had developed to the point that each player moves in a manner both realistically buglike (some contemporary viewers mistook them for trained insects moving in real time) and parodically evocative of human characters. Slate’s Joan Newberger describes the plot of this “comic melodrama in meticulously detailed miniature sets” as follows: “We meet a beetle couple, Mr. and Mrs. Zhukov (zhuk means beetle in Russian), both of whom are carrying on extramarital affairs. Zhukov wins the affections of a dragonfly cabaret dancer, but flies into a rage when he comes home to discover his wife in the ‘arms’ of an artist (also played by a beetle).” But the plot thickens, and this seemingly simple (if obviously complex in craft, especially for the time) tale even uses a bit of cinema-within-cinema at its denouement. Starewicz made early stop-motion for sure, but he didn’t make the earliest. Smithsonian.com has a post on that, citing the 1902 Thomas Edison-produced Fun in a Bakery Shop as the first surviving example — but, alas, a bugless one.
There’s no two ways about it. Henry Miller had a way with words. He could be blunt, lewd, cutting, all in one short sentence. You want a little case study? Ok, how about the notes Miller scrawled back in 1973, when he called Salvador Dalí “the biggest ‘prick” of the 20th century” (or, in another instance a “prick of the first water”). What was his beef with the Spanish surrealist? It all started in 1940, when Miller and his lover, the incomparable Anaïs Nin, spent some time cooped up in the same house with Dalí, who turned out to be an insufferable prima donna. Their time together ended in a wild shouting match, with Miller and Nin storming out of the home and holding a grudge for decades to come. The story is nicely recounted by Book Tryst, a site that has recently become a new favorite of ours.
I have many memories growing up of gingerly placing my father’s Abbey Road LP on the turntable and spending the afternoon lying on the floor and peering at the photos inside the album cover’s gatefold—trying to wrap my head around what kind of hairy geniuses could make music like this. I had no inkling that this was their final recording together, that the band was about to come apart. None of that mattered to me. I didn’t quite grasp how this band evolved from the teen pop sensations in identical suits and haircuts with their legions of flailing schoolgirl fans and goofy comedy troupe banter. This seemed like an entirely different entity—and the particular sublimity of the medley on side 2 (listen to it here) had me lifting up the needle and dropping it back at the intro to “You Never Give Me Your Money” over and over.
That medley is such an impressive demonstration of The Beatles’ range of voice and sensibility that it almost functions as a capsule for the sound of their whole later career—all the weird narratives, blues, ballads, and gorgeously lush hymns and lullabies. What remains constant throughout every Beatles’ record—even before George and Ringo’s songwriting contributions—is the vocal and lyrical interplay of Lennon/McCartney, and it’s all on fine display in the medley.
George Harrison described side 2 in 1969 as “a big medley of Paul and John’s songs all shoved together.” Lennon gave George and Ringo more credit for the medley in an interview that same year:
We always have tons of bits and pieces lying around. I’ve got stuff I wrote around Pepper, because you lose interest after you’ve had it for years. It was a good way of getting rid of bits of songs. In fact, George and Ringo wrote bits of it… literally in between bits and breaks. Paul would say, ‘We’ve got twelve bars here– fill it in,’ and we’d fill it in on the spot. As far as we’re concerned, this album is more ‘Beatley’ than the double (White) album.
However it all came about, it’s the medley’s strange lyrical twists, mélange of vocal styles, and powerful harmonies that stay with me, and that I find myself singing softly, even after having gone several years without hearing the album in full. Perhaps you do this too. Now we can hear what The Beatles’ themselves sounded like in the studio sans instruments with the isolated vocal tracks for the side 2 medley at the top of the post. Hear the full album version here and see the Medley tracklist below.
On October 13, 1972, the charismatic and controversial French theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is giving a lecture at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, when a young man with long hair and a chip on his shoulder walks up to the front of the lecture hall and begins making trouble. He spills water and what appears to be flour all over Lacan’s lecture notes and then stammers his way into a strange speech that sounds as if it were taken straight out of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle:
“The composite body which up to fifty years ago could be called ‘culture’– that is, people expressing in fragmented ways what they feel — is now a lie, and can only be called a ‘spectacle,’ the backdrop of which is tied to, and serves as, a link between all alienated individual activities. If all the people here now were to join together and, freely and authentically, wanted to communicate, it’d be on a different basis, with a different perspective. Of course this can’t be expected of students who by definition will one day become the managers of our system, with their justifications, and who are also the public who with a guilty conscience will pick up the remains of the avant-garde and the decaying ‘spectacle.’ ”
The 71-year-old Lacan never loses his composure. (His cigar appears bent out of shape, but it was that way from the beginning.) The audience, too, retains a certain Gallic nonchalance. Dangerous Minds sums it up in the headline “The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.” The scene is from Jacques Lacan Speaks, a one-hour documentary by Belgian filmmaker Françoise Wolff. You can watch the complete film, which includes Lacan’s extended and rather cryptic response to the incident and other excerpts from the lecture, followed by Wolff’s interview with Lacan the following day, in our post: “Charismatic Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan Gives Public Lecture (1972).”
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was a famous American journalist, essayist, critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English. An expert in so many fields, he was called “the Baltimore Sage.” At the age of 22, Mencken became managing editor of the Morning Herald in his hometown of Baltimore. But it was not only through his work as a journalist that he was “as famous in America as George Bernard Shaw was in England.” The influential literary critic helped launch the Southern and Harlem literary renaissances. With his literary journal The Smart Set, Mencken paved the way for writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and James Joyce. He also wrote several books, most notably his monumental study The American Language.
“The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.” (source) His spirited defense of the freedom of speech and of the press almost landed him in jail when he fought against the banning of his second literary journal, The American Mercury.
This interview above was conducted by Mencken’s colleague Donald Howe Kirkley of The Baltimore Sun in a small recording room at the Library of Congress in Washington on June 30, 1948. It gives you a rare chance to hear his voice.
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.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
