David Byrne Creates a Playlist of Eclectic Music for the Holidays: Stream It Free Online
Whose music do you put on when the holiday season comes around? Perhaps musicians like Lonnie Holley, Gurrumul, Erkin Koray, and Juan Luis Guerra? Maybe you’ve just thrilled with recognition at one or more of those names, or maybe you’ve never heard of any of them — but in either case, you should get ready for a highly unconventional holiday experience featuring their songs and those of many others, all of them curated by David Byrne. Each month the peripatetic, oft-collaborating musician and former Talking Heads frontman posts a new playlist on Radio David Byrne, and the latest, “Eclectic for the Holidays,” will get us into a kind of seasonal spirit into which we’ve never got before.
“So… who recommends this stuff to me?” Byrne asks. “I’ve known Lonnie Holley as an artist for quite some time. I saw him do a show at National Sawdust not too long ago with trombonist Dave Nelson, who toured with St. Vincent and I a few years ago.”
“I heard an orchestral interpretation of this song by Gurrumul when I was waiting to do an interview at the radio station in Melbourne, Australia. I asked, ‘Whose music is that?’ ” “Erkin Koray I heard after first hearing Barış Manço, who may have been recommended by some friends in Istanbul when I was there years ago… Turkey had a serious psychedelic period.” “Juan Luis Guerra may have been recommended many years ago by music journalist Daisann McLane at a music festival in Cartagena, Colombia.”
The 41-song journey that is “Eclectic for the Holidays,” which you can stream below or on Byrne’s official site, offers not just a chance to happen upon intriguing artists you’d never come across before — as happened to Byrne in all those chance encounters that went into its construction — but a break from the same fifteen or twenty songs that have long dominated the holiday-season rotation in homes and public spaces around the world. The holidays themselves teach us that tradition has its place, but Byrne, whose compulsion to discover new music from an ever farther-flung range of societies and subcultures, shows us that you can’t let them get you comfortable enough to close your ears.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Japanese Artist Creates Bookshelf Dioramas That Magically Transport You Into Tokyo’s Back Alleys
Should you find yourself in a Japanese city, spend time not on the Starbucks- and McDonald’s-lined boulevards but on the back streets that wind in all directions behind them. Or better yet, head into the back alleys branching off those streets, those half-hidden spaces that offer the most evocative glimpses of life in urban Japan by far. Only there can you find passage into the wonderfully idiosyncratic businesses tucked into the corners of the city, from bars and restaurants to coffee shops and of course bookstores. Those bookstores have long occupied Japan’s back alleys, but now an artist by the name of Monde has brought the back alleys onto bookshelves.
Monde’s handcrafted wooden bookend dioramas, which you can see on his Twitter feed as well as in a Buzzfeed Japan article about them, replicate the back alleys of his hometown of Tokyo. They do it in miniature, and down to the smallest detail — even the electric lights that illuminate the real thing at night.
Scaled to the height of not just a book but a small Japanese paperback, the likes of which fill those back-alley bookstores from floor to ceiling, they’re designed to slot right into bookshelves, providing a welcoming street scene to those browsing through their own or others’ volumes in the same way that the actual alleys they model come as a pleasant surprise to passersby on the main streets.
Tokyo has become a beloved city to Japanese and non-Japanese alike for countless reasons, but who can doubt the appeal of the way it combines the feeling of small-town life in its many neighborhoods that together make for a megacity scale? Monde’s dioramas capture the distinctive mixture of domesticity and density in the capital’s back alleys, reflecting the narrowness of the spaces in form and their somehow organically manmade nature — stepping stones, potted-plant gardens, and all the small pieces of infrastructure that have accumulated to support life in the homes of so many — in content. Though Tokyo has for decades been regarded, especially from the West, as a place of thorough hypermodernity, its alleys remind us that within the sometimes overwhelming present exists a mixture of eras that feel timeless — just like the content of a well-curated bookshelf.
via Twisted Sifter
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Making of “Bohemian Rhapsody”: Take a Deep Dive Into the Iconic Song with Queen’s 2002 Mini Documentary
Despite being fraught with production difficulties, an absent director, and a critical quibbling over its sexuality politics, Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of Freddie Mercury and Queen, has been doing very well at the box office. And though it has thrust Queen’s music back into the spotlight, has it even really gone away?
The song itself, the 6 minute epic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” was the top of the UK singles charts for nine weeks upon its release and hasn’t been forgotten since. It’s part of our collective DNA, but with a certain caveat…it’s notoriously difficult to cover. It is so finely constructed that it can’t be deconstructed, leaving artists to stand in the shadow of Mercury’s delivery. Brian May, in the above video, gives credit to Axl Rose for getting close to the powerful high registers of Mercury, but even that was a kind of karaoke. And let’s not even talk about Kanye West’s stab at it.
So it’s a good time to check in with this 45 minute-long mini-doc on the making of the song, which took the band into the stratosphere. Produced in 2002 for the band’s Greatest Hits DVD, it features guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. The first part is on the writing of the song, the second part on the making of the music video, and the third, the bulk of the doc, on the production.
Don’t expect any explanation of the subject matter of the song–as May says, Mercury would have shrugged off any interpretation and dismissed any search for depth. And while Mercury always took care over his lyrics, the power is all there in the music.
As for the video, that came about from necessity, as the band wanted to be on Top of the Pops and tour at the same time. By using their rehearsal stage at Elstree studios for the performance footage and a side area for the choral/close-up segments, they made a strangely iconic video. (Who doesn’t think of Queen’s four members arranged in a diamond when those vocals start up?). The two main effects were a prism lens on the camera and video feedback, all done live.
The last part is fascinating and a deep dive into the mix. Brian May, alongside studio engineer Justin Shirley Smith, play just the piano, bass, and drums from the song at first. Mercury was a self-taught pianist who played “like a drummer,” with a metronome in his head, says May.
The guitarist also isolates his various guitar parts, including the harmonics during the opening ballad portion, the “shivers down my spine” sound made by scraping the strings, and the famous solo, which he wrote as a counterpoint to Mercury’s melody. It’s geekery of the highest order, but it’s for a song that deserves such attention.
Inside The Rhapsody will be added to our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Free Guided Imagery Recordings Help Kids Cope with Pain, Stress & Anxiety
I don’t have to tell you modern life is full of stressors that exacerbate hypertension, depression, and everything in-between. Therapeutic stress reduction techniques based in mindfulness meditation, trauma research, and a number of other fields have proliferated in our daily lives and everyday conversation, helping people cope with chronic pain, career anxiety, and the toxic miasma of our geopolitics.
These methods have been very successful among adult populations—of monks, veterans, clinical subjects, etc.—but adults process information very differently than children. And as every parent knows, kids get majorly stressed out too, whether they’re absorbing our anxieties second-hand or feeling the pressures of their own social and educational environments.
We can’t expect young children to sit still and pay attention to their breath for thirty minutes, or to change their mental scripts with cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s far easier for kids to process things through their imagination, channeling anxiety through play, or art, or—as pediatric psychologists at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) explain—guided mental visualization, or “guided imagery,” as they call it. How does it work?
Guided imagery involves envisioning a certain goal to help cope with health problems or the task or skill a child is trying to learn or master. Guided imagery is most often used as a relaxation technique that involves sitting or lying quietly and imagining a favorite, peaceful setting like a beach, meadow or forest.
The therapists at CHOC “teach patients to imagine sights, sounds, smells, tastes or other sensations to create a kind of daydream that ‘removes’ them from or gives them control over their present situation.” In the video at the top, Dr. Cindy Kim describes the technique as “akin to biofeedback,” and it has been especially helpful for children facing a scary medical procedure.
While all of us might need to go to our happy place once in a while, most kids find it hard to relax without some form of creative redirection, like the guided imagery program above from Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. At the CHOC website, you’ll find over a dozen other audio programs tailored for pain and stress management and relaxation, for both young children and adolescents. Lifehacker’s parenting editor Michelle Woo describes a representative sampling of the programs:
- For pain management for young kids, listen to “The Special Cake.” Sample line: “With your next deep breath in, notice the sweet smell of the yummy frosting.”
- For pain management for teens, listen to “Climbing a Ladder.” Sample line: “Let’s have a look at the first step. As you put your foot on it, you begin to remember a time when you realize that you can have control over your body.”
- For anxiety, listen to “The Magic Kite.” Sample line: “All of the uncomfortable feelings or sadness or anger or pain or worry are all on the ground and you are flying away from it.”
As kids listen to audio, Woo writes, “have them notice how their body feels—their breathing may slow and their muscles might relax.” And hey, there’s no reason guided imagery can’t work for grown-ups too. Try it if you’re feeling stressed and let us know how it works for you.
via Lifehacker
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...The History of Philosophy Visualized in an Interactive Timeline
The connections we make between various philosophers and philosophical schools are often connections that have already been made for us by teachers and scholars on our paths through higher education. Many of us who have taken a philosophy class or two leave it at that, content we’ve got the gist of things and that specialists can parse the details perfectly well without us. But there are those curious people who continue to read abstruse and difficult philosophy after their intro classes are over, for the sheer, perverse joy of it, or from a burning desire to understand truth, beauty, justice, or whatever.
And then there are those who embark on a thorough self-guided tour of Western philosophical history, attempting, without the aid of university departments and faddish interpretive schemes, to weave the disparate strains of thought together. One such autodidact and academic outsider, designer Deniz Cem Önduygu of Istanbul, has combined an encyclopedic mind with a talent for rigorous outline organization to produce an interactive timeline of the history of philosophical ideas. It is “a purely personal project,” he writes, “that I’m doing in my own time, with my limited knowledge, for myself.”
Önduygu shares the project not to show off his learning but, more humbly, to “get feedback and to make it accessible to those who are interested.” It may be precious few people who have both the time and inclination to teach themselves the history of philosophy, but if you are one of them, this incredibly dense infographic is as good a place to start as any, and while it may appear intimidating at first glance, its menu in the upper right corner allows users to zero in on specific thinkers and schools, and to confine themselves to smaller, more manageable areas of the whole.
As for the timeline itself, “viewers can zoom in and out,” notes Daily Nous, “and see philosophers listed in chronological order, with ideas they’re associated with listed beneath them. These ideas, in turn, are connected by green lines to similar or supporting ideas elsewhere on the timeline, and connected by red lines to opposing or refuting ideas elsewhere on the timeline. If you hover your mouse cursor over a single idea, all but it and its connected ideas fade. You can then click on the idea to bring those connected ideas closer for ease of viewing.”
The designer admits this is a “never-ending work in progress” and mainly a source for reminding himself of the main arguments of the philosophers he’s surveyed. The major sources for his timeline are “Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy and Thomas Baldwin’s Contemporary Philosophy, along with other works for specific philosophers and ideas.” But many of the connections Önduygu draws in this extensive web of green and red are his own.
He explains his rationale here, noting, “The lines here do not always depict a direct transfer between two people; I think of them as tracing the development of an idea throughout time within our collective conception.” Spend some more time with this impressive project at the History of Philosophy Summarized & Visualized (the site works best in Chrome), and feel free to get in touch with its creator with constructive criticism. He welcomes feedback and is open to opposing ideas, as every lifelong learner should be.
via Daily Nous
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue
Among a number of influential women in electronic music whom we’ve profiled here before, French avant-garde composer Eliane Radigue stands out for her single-minded dedication to “a certain music that I wished to make,” as she says in the video portrait above, “this particular music and no other.” Her compositions are haunting and meditative, “prefiguring the concept of ‘deep listening,’ expressed by Pauline Oliveros some years later,” as Red Bull Academy notes in an extensive profile of Radigue.
Using feedback, tape loops, field recordings, and, beginning in the 70s, the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer, Radigue “developed soundscapes… an interweaving of electronic drones, subsequently assimilated to what would later be called drone music.” But she has rejected the term as too static, stressing the variations and constant change in her music:
In Radigue’s work, sounds interact with each other like the cells of an organism, progressing in glissando in an extremely slow and subtle way. “I had found my own vocabulary. For me, maintaining the sound did not interest me as such; it was primarily a means to bring out the overtones, harmonics and subharmonics. This is what made it possible to develop this inner richness of sound.”
Radigue seems particularly self-assured, possessed of an intuitive sense of her work’s directions from the beginning. “I cannot start a piece if I don’t have an idea of what it would become, but what I would call the spirit,” she says in an interview with Electronic Beats.
“The spirit of what I wanted to do should be there… And I keep that spirit, that theme in mind, quite often several months before I start to do something. So, when I come to make the sounds it’s already there.”
But her career took many turns on a path through the compositional centers of mid-century avant-garde music. After studying traditional music theory as a child, she left her home in Nice at 19 and married the artist Arman. She was swept into an “exciting bohemian life” that would soon take her, in 1955, into the orbit of musique concrete pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.
While working as an intern for the composers (“If I claimed to be more, I don’t think they would have accepted me, because they were both the damndest machos!”), Radigue learned their methods and collaborated on their compositions. In 1967, she worked with Henry on L’Apocalypse de Jean, a piece designed to last for 24 hours. She ended her (unpaid) apprenticeship that year and began focusing on her own work, like Vice Versa (1970, excerpted further up) and Geerlriandre (1972, above) and Triptych (1978, below).
You can hear more of Radigue’s work at Ubuweb, including a more recent synthesizer piece recorded in 1992, as well as a 1980 interview for program The Morning Concert with Charles Amirkhanian. That same year, she became a convert to Tibetan Buddhism, and her work—like the Adnos series, below—was inspired by the religion’s history, her own meditation practice, and texts like the Bardo Thodol.
As the pulsing, droning, humming compositions she created throughout the late 20th century have become integral to the sound of the 21st, Radique has moved on, since 2001, to writing work for acoustic instruments. She made her last electronic piece, I’lle-Re-sonante, in 2000. The move came in part from requests she received from musicians, but it also represents a deliberate turn away from modern technology. “There’s always something missing with digital,” she says, even if it is somehow cleaner and clearer.”
Radigue has always favored the absorption of analogue sound, intent on taming its unpredictability as a meditator tames the darting, leaping, busy mind. “My music is always changing,” she says, “It comes from the first access I had to electronic sounds which was the wild sounds coming from feedback,” the noise of a microphone and a speaker getting too close to each other. “If you find the right place, which is very narrow, then you can move it very slowly and it changes but that requires a lot of patience.”
The word could define her entire approach, one radically opposed to instant gratification and quick fixes, focused singularly on outcomes while also fully present for the process.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Brian Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Soundtracks
Think of “interviewing Brian Eno” (listen to it here) like a piece of his generative music. Yes, the man has no problems talking and actually encourages it. But input the same old questions about those same four albums (you know them, right?) and you get the same old answers as output. Feed in a completely different subject–like his favorite film soundtracks–and lo and behold, a very intriguing 80 minutes follows.
That’s what happened when Hugh Cornwell (lead vocalist of The Stranglers) interviewed Mr. Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno–that’s Brian to you–in 2013 for his short-lived internet radio show on film.
Eno has always had an interest in film. As he mentions in the second half of the show, he produced his 1976/78 album Music for Films not for any specific film, but in the hopes that they would be used for soundtracks in the future. Also, he hoped that the descriptive titles–“Alternative 3,” “Patrolling Wire Borders”–and the evocative music would lead listeners to create films in their heads. Since then every track has been used at least once, and documentarians like Adam Curtis have used Eno to great effect.
The only track, he reveals, on that album to be written for a film was closer “Final Sunset” put to great, transcendent use in Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebastiane.
But if you think Eno might choose similar ambient tracks or instrumentals during the rest of the interview, you’re in for a surprise.
As he grew up, Eno had no exposure to what was “cool” and what was not. And that led to an ear that heard things stripped of cultural context. When he plays a track from the musical Oklahoma called “The Farmer and the Cowboy,” we might just be able to put aside our memories of high school productions and hear the weird, humorous and very exciting vocal arrangement underneath. Similarly, despite not being the biggest fan of Elvis Presley at the time (“I was a snob,” Eno says), he selects this jaunty pop number “Didja Ever” from G.I. Blues. “One of the wittiest, cleverest bits of writing,” as he calls it, written by Sid Wayne and Sherman Edwards, who wrote at least one song in every subsequent Presley movie.
Eno also has space for the jazz of Miles Davis and the evocative score for Louis Malle’s 1961 film Elevator to the Gallows, in particular how it was recorded: improvised live while watching the screen. (Not mentioned: its huge influence on Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack.)
There’s much more in the interview to check out, including the source of a sample used in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and one of David Bowie’s best but most underrated songs. Listen here.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...A Brief History of Guitar Distortion: From Early Experiments to Happy Accidents to Classic Effects Pedals
The sound of rock and roll is the sound of a distorted guitar, but the history of that sound predates the genre by a few years. It started out with blues and Western swing guitarists, searching “for a dirtier sound,” writes Noisey in a brief history, “a sound that reflected the grittiness of their music.” That sound was pioneered by a guitarist named Junior Barnard, who played with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and designed his own humbucking pickups to produce a fatter, louder tone and push his small amp into overdrive. As the Polyphonic video above notes, Barnard was an aggressive player who needed aggressive tones, and so, as guitarists have always done, he invented the means himself.
Other forerunners achieved distorted tones by cranking early amps like the 18-watt Fender Super, first introduced in 1947, all the way up, until the vacuum tubes clipped the signal to keep from breaking. Goree Carter, sometimes credited with recording the first rock and roll song, “Rock A While,” pushed the overdriven sound in a heavier direction than Barnard, playing dirty Chuck Berry-like licks in 1949 before Chuck Berry’s first hit. Distortion, a sound audio engineers struggled mightily to avoid in live sound and recording, gave blues-based guitarists exactly what they needed for the loud, lewd postwar sounds of rock.
The distorted tones of the 40s came from a deliberate desire for grit. Later, even dirtier, guitar tones were the result of happy accidents. Another contender for the first rock and roll recording—Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm’s 1951 “Rocket 88”—contains some very distorted rhythms from guitarist Willie Kizart, who, legend has it, dropped his tweed Fender amp before the session. Sam Phillips “leaned into” the sound, notes Polyphonic, immediately hearing its serendipitous potential.
Seven years later, the evil overdrive of Link Wray’s instrumental “Rumble”—so sinister it was once banned from radio—came from an intentional equipment failure. Wray repeatedly stabbed the speaker cone of his amp with a pencil.
Do-it-yourself distortion continued into the sixties. Following Wray’s lead, the Kinks’ Dave Davies slashed his amp’s speaker with a razor blade for the fuzzed-out attack of “You Really Got Me” in 1965. But a few years earlier, “fuzz” had already been codified in an effects pedal: Gibson’s 1962 Maestro FZ‑1 Fuzz-Tone, partly inspired by another accident, a faulty mixing board connection that distorted Grady Martin’s bass solo in the Marty Robbins’ 1961 country tune “Don’t Worry” (below, at 1:25). The Fuzz-Tone most famously drove Keith Richards’ riff in “Satisfaction,” but it didn’t sell well. Other, more popular fuzz boxes followed, like the Arbiter Fuzz Face, Jimi Hendrix’s choice for his distorted tones.
Hendrix brilliantly innovated new guitar effects, and the powerful Marshall amps he played through also drove the distorted sounds of Clapton, Townshend, Page, Blackmore, etc., who competed for grittier and heavier tones and in the process more or less invented metal guitar. In the seventies and eighties, distorted tones took on some standardized forms, thanks to transistors and classic effects pedals like the Ibanez Tube Screamer, ProCo Rat, and Boss DS‑1. Distinctions between overdrive, distortion, and fuzz effects can get technical, but in the early days of rock and roll, distorted guitar tones came from whatever worked, and it’s that wild early sound of gear pushed to its limits and beyond that every modern distortion effect attempts to replicate.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Monster, 600-Speaker Sound System–Changed Rock Concerts & Live Music Forever
There is a scene in Return of the Jedi when Luke Skywalker defeats the monstrous, man-eating Rancor, crushing its skull with a portullis, and we see the beast’s keeper, a portly shirtless gentleman in leather breeches and headgear, weeping over the loss of his beloved friend. I think of this scene when I read about a night in 1974 at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom when Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart walked on the stage and found the band’s sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley standing in front of “a solid wall of over 600 speakers.”
As Enmore Audio tells it:
Tears streamed down his face and he whispered to the mass of wood, metal, and wiring, with the tenderness of any parent witnessing their child’s first recital, “I love you and you love me—how could you fail me?”
The story sums up Owsley’s total dedication to what became known as “The Wall of Sound,” a feat of technical engineering that “changed the way technicians thought about live engineering.” The “three-story behemoth… was free of all distortion… served as its own monitoring system and solved many, if not all of the technical problems that sound engineers faced at that time.” But, while it had required much trial and error and many refinements, it did not fail, as you’ll learn in the Polyphonic video above.
Live sound problems not only bedeviled engineers but bands and audiences as well. Throughout the sixties, rock concerts grew in size and scope, audiences grew larger and louder, yet amplification did not. Low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard over the sound of screaming fans. Without monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. This “noise crisis,” writes Motherboard, “confronted musicians who went electric at the height of the war in Vietnam,” but it has been “routinely snuffed from the annals of modern music.”
In dramatic recreations of the period, drums and guitars boom and wail over the noise of stadium and festival crowds. For ears accustomed to the power of modern sound systems, the actual experience, by contrast, would have been underwhelming. Most Beatles fans know the band quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. Things improved somewhat, but the Dead, “obsessed with their sound to compulsive degrees,” could not abide the noisy, feedback-laden, underpowered situation. Still, they weren’t about to give up playing live, and certainly not with Owsley on board.
“A Kentucky-born craftsman and former ballet dancer”—and a manufacturer and distributer of “mass quantities of high-grade LSD,” whose profits financed the Dead for a time—Owsley applied his obsession with “sound as both a concept and a physical thing.” To solve the noise crisis for the Dead, he first built an innovative sound system in 1973 (after serving a couple stints in prison for selling acid). The following year, he suggested putting the PA system behind the band, “a crazy idea at the time.”
His experiments in ‘74 evolved to include line arrays—“columns of speakers… designed to control the dispersion of sound across the frequency range”—noise-canceling microphones to clear up muddy vocals, six separate sound systems that could isolate eleven channels, and a quadraphonic encoder for the bass, “which took a signal,” Enmore notes, “from each string and projected it through its own set of speakers.” The massive Wall of Sound could not last long. It had to be streamlined into a far more manageable and cost-effective touring rig. All the same, Owsley and the band’s willingness take ideas and execution to extreme lengths changed live sound forever for the better.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Hunter S. Thompson Hated Getting Caricatured as “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury: ‘If I Ever Catch That Little Bastard, I’ll Tear His Lungs Out’
Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury is hardly the cultural touchstone it once was, but then again, neither are comic strips in general, and political strips in particular. No amount of urbane witticism and sequential narrative humor can compete with the crazed jumble of arcane memes in the 21st century. Hunter S. Thompson may have written about the late-20th century political scene as a hallucinatory nightmare, but perhaps even he would be surprised at how close reality has come to his hyperbole.
In its heyday, Trudeau’s topical, liberal-leaning satire of politicians, political journalists, clueless hippies, and cynical corporate and academic elites hit the target more often than it missed. For many fans, one of Trudeau’s most beloved characters, Uncle Duke—a caricature of Thompson introduced in 1974—was a perfect bullseye. Writer Walter Isaacson paid tongue-in-cheek tribute to the character as his “hero” on the strip’s 40th anniversary. Duke even made an animated appearance on Larry King Live in 2000 (below), announcing his candidacy for president after serving as Governor of American Samoa and Ambassador to China.
It would be a tremendous understatement to say that Thompson himself was not flattered by the portrayal. The amoral Duke—a “self-obsessed, utterly unscrupulous epitome of evil who has sent a chill down readers’ spines,” writes The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, sent Thompson into a paroxysm of rage. The gonzo writer saw the character “as a form of copyright infringement.” He “sent an envelope of used toilet paper to Trudeau and once memorably said: ‘If I ever catch that little bastard, I’ll tear his lungs out.’” The threats got even more specific and gruesome.
“Hunter despised Trudeau,” writes Thompson biographer William McKeen in his book Outlaw Journalist. “’He’s going to be surprised someday,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m going to set him on fire first, then crush every one of his ribs, one by one, starting from the bottom.’” He had been turned into a joke. Jan Wenner, “when he couldn’t get Hunter to write for him… put him on the cover of Rolling Stone anyway, as Uncle Duke in a Trudeau-drawn cover.” Thompson pondered a $20 million libel suit. “All over America,” he ranted, “kids grow up wanting to be firemen and cops, presidents and lawyers, but nobody wants to grow up to be a cartoon character.”
The mockery began immediately after Uncle Duke first appeared in the strip in 1974. In a High Times interview, Thompson describes the day he first learned of the character:
It was a hot, nearly blazing day in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court looking for somebody, Carl Wagner or somebody like that. I’d been inside the press section, and then all of a sudden I saw a crowd of people and I heard them saying, “Uncle Duke,” I heard the words Duke, Uncle; it didn’t seem to make any sense. I looked around, and I recognized people who were total strangers pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. I had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. I had no idea what this outburst meant…It was a weird experience, and as it happened I was sort of by myself up there on the stairs, and I thought: “What in the fuck madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court? Then I must have asked someone, and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that morning.
While Trudeau seems to have taken the physical threats seriously, he didn’t back down from his relentless satirical takedowns of Thompson’s violent tendencies, paranoia, and comically exaggerated substance abuse. As Dangerous Minds describes, in 1992, Trudeau published a book called Action Figure!: The Life and Times of Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke “that chronicled the misadventures of Uncle Duke.” It also “came with a five-inch action figure of the dear Uncle Duke along with a martini glass, an Uzi, cigarette holder, a bottle of booze, and a chainsaw.”
See the Uncle Duke action figure at the top—one of a half-dozen images Dangerous Minds pulled from eBay (his t‑shirt reads “Death Before Unconsciousness.”) As much as Thompson despised Uncle Duke, and Trudeau for creating him, he himself helped feed the caricature—with his alter ego Raoul Duke and his chronicles of his own bizarre behavior. Trudeau’s admiration, of a sort, for Thompson’s excesses was a continuing driver of the writer’s fame, for good or ill. “Uncle Duke was who fans craved,” writes Sharon Eberson at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “and Thompson often felt obliged” to live up to his cartoon image.
Related Content:
Read 11 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965–2005)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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