Hear a 9‑Hour Tribute to John Peel: A Collection of His Best “Peel Sessions”
If you took a job as a radio DJ at the BBC prior to 1988, you had to labor under something called “needle time,” a law promoted by the Musicians’ Union and Phonographic Performance Limited (and ultimately the major record labels) that put a cap on the amount of recorded music transmissible over the airwaves. Before 1967, the BBC could legally drop the needles of their turntables onto record albums for a mere five hours per day. This may sound positively draconian in our time when music flows freely from all directions, but it did create jobs for in-house radio-station musicians who could cover the hits of the day — and, more importantly, gave rise to DJ John Peel’s legendary Peel Sessions.
“A lot of the things that I listened to and that had a big influence on me I first heard on John Peel,” said artist and music producer Brian Eno, who describes Peel’s first playing of a Velvet Underground record nearly fifty years ago as “like a lightning bolt for me.” In an interview we featured a few years back, Eno named the “two things that really make for good records: deadlines and small budgets,” one of his many eloquent statements on not just the importance but the necessity of limitations to art. The limitation of needle time made Peel get creative as well, overcoming his inability to spin all the records he wanted by inviting the musicians he’d discovered into the radio station to lay down tracks right there in its studios.
The fruits of these Peel Sessions often came out with an energy altogether different than that of the original album, and during Peel’s 37 years on BBC Radio 1, he oversaw the recording of over 4000 of them. They and other efforts at the innovative edges of popular music made Peel a cultural force, and indeed one of British music’s most influential figures, whose broadcasts gave thousands of listeners their first taste of the likes of David Bowie, Joy Division, Bob Marley, and Nirvana. Peel died in 2004, but his legacy has lived on in several forms, including the John Peel Center for Creative Arts and the annual John Peel Lecture, delivered last year by Eno himself.
London-based online radio station NTS, in its own way very much a continuation of Peel’s project, has put together a tribute to Britain’s most astute DJ in the form of a nine-hour broadcast of some of the best Peel Sessions. Broken into four parts, it gathers performances captured at the BBC from artists like Gang of Four, The Fall, My Bloody Valentine, The Pixies, Aphex Twin, Cabaret Voltaire, and many others. “Blimey, he was really at the center of everything,” says Eno. “He was putting so many things together. He was the first person who realized pop music was serious, and that it was a place people could really meet and talk to each other. It became the center of a conversation.” A dozen years after Peel’s passing, the conversation continues.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The New York Times’ First Profile of Hitler: His Anti-Semitism Is Not as “Genuine or Violent” as It Sounds (1922)
I’ve heard it again and again. The now President-elect made vicious and belittling attacks on African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants, women, the disabled, etc. during the campaign season (and for several decades before), but he didn’t mean it. And I have many questions. For example, why should anyone assume—given the history of country after country after country—that a bullying nativist autocrat doesn’t mean what he says?
We know celebrity breeds trivialization. But we also know well that in some of the most famous—but by no means only—cases of demagogues who rose to power with hate speech, the rhetoric quickly turned to many years of incomprehensible, yet calculated, brutality. At least in the U.S., hardly anyone believed that the melodramatic vitriol Hitler and Mussolini spat at scapegoats of all kinds, especially Jews, should be taken very seriously.
In 1922—at the dawn of Hitler’s budding nationalist movement—The New York Times published its first profile, and explained his demagoguery away. The article, titled “New Popular Idol Rises in Bavaria,” begins with several alarming subheadings: “Hitler credited with extraordinary powers of swaying crowds to his will,” “forms gray-shirted army… They obey orders implicitly,” “Leader a reactionary,” “Anti-Red and Anti-Semitic.” It then goes on to undermine these charges.
According to “several reliable, well-informed [unnamed] sources,” we’re told, “Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,” though “the Hitler movement is not of a mere local or picturesque interest.”
He was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
What purposes? The paper quotes one admiring “sophisticated politician” as saying, “You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them.” Where might this be? The shadowy source did not say. We cynically expect all politicians to lie, to feed us “cruder morsels.” But assuming that racism, bigotry, and scapegoating—whether sincere or not—will go down so easily with so many people constitutes a very dark view of “the masses.”
Ten years later, after Hitler was released from prison for treason and had begun his candidacy for president, many, even more complimentary, articles would follow—as Rafael Medoff documents in The Daily Beast—all the way up to Time magazine’s naming him “Man of the Year” for 1938. “Why did many mainstream American newspapers portray the Hitler regime positively,” asks Medoff, “especially in its early months? How could they publish warm human-interest stories about a brutal dictator? Why did they excuse or rationalize Nazi anti-Semitism? These are questions that should haunt the conscience of U.S. journalism to this day.”
One reporter in a 1933 Christian Science Monitor dispatch from Germany informed his readers that “the train arrived punctually”—indulging a trope about fascists making the “trains run on time” that has astonishingly come back in circulation via former Cincinnati mayor Ken Blackwell. “Traffic was well regulated.” The correspondent found “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.” The word we often hear for what happened during the 30s is “normalization,” a process by which the most harrowing portents were blended into the landscape, rendered signs of nothing “unusual afoot.”
The normalization of Nazism in Germany involved a tremendous propaganda effort, much of it aimed at children. In the U.S., the press seemed more than willing to turn an ethno-nationalist movement with frightening—and plainly stated—objectives into an ordinary, rational state actor. Anti-Semitism was described as legitimate political resentment or reasonable anger at German Jews’ “commercial clannishness.” Somehow the victims of Nazism had to be responsible for their own murder and persecution. “There must be some reason,” wrote The Christian Century in an April, 1933 editorial, “other than race or creed—just what is that reason?” Few people, it seems, could or would allow themselves to imagine that the new German Führer actually meant what he said.
via Boing Boing
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Hear “Weightless,” the Most Relaxing Song Ever Made, According to Researchers (You’ll Need It Today)
As I write this, it’s election night, and I do not need to tell you about the thick haze of fear in the air. I have already had a couple friends ask me about resources for meditation and relaxation. I’m no expert, but I have looked into various ways to deal with stress and hypertension. Meditation tops my list (and those of many mental health professionals). At a very close second place: Music.
We’ve brought you many meditation resources in the past (see here, here, here, and here). And we’ve pointed you toward four hours of free original meditation music to help you “not panic,” courtesy of Moby. We’ve also brought you music to help you sleep, from composer Max Richter and many others. Now, we bring you what “a team of scientists and sound therapists” claim is “the most relaxing song ever,” as Electronic Beats informs us. You can hear the track, “Weightless”—by Manchester band Marconi Union and Lyz Cooper, founder of the British Academy of Sound Therapy—above.
The song’s relaxing properties supposedly work “by using specific rhythms, tones, frequencies and intervals to relax the listener,” writes ShortList. I’ve had it on repeat for an hour and will testify to its efficacy. So can 40 women who “found it to be more effective at helping them relax than songs by Enya, Mozart and Coldplay.” In this experiment and others, says UK stress specialist Dr. David Lewis, “Brain imaging studies have shown that music works at a very deep level within the brain, stimulating not only those regions responsible for processing sound but also ones associated with emotions.”
Emotions—fear, rage, and disgust—are running wild nationwide. Justifiable or not, they can wreak havoc on our mental and physical health if we can’t find ways to relax. “Weightless,” reports The Telegraph, “induced a 65 per cent reduction in overall anxiety and brought [study participants] to a level 35 per cent lower than their usual resting rates.” That’s no small change in attitude, but if you find this atmospheric track doesn’t do it for you, maybe try out some other tunes from the research team’s top 10 list of most relaxing (hear them all in the playlist above):
- Marconi Union and Lyz Cooper – Weightless
- Airstream – Electra
- DJ Shah – Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix)
- Enya – Watermark
- Coldplay – Strawberry Swing
- Barcelona – Please Don’t Go
- All Saints – Pure Shores
- AdelevSomeone Like You
- Mozart – Canzonetta Sull’aria
- Cafe Del Mar – We Can Fly
And then, again, there’s Moby’s four hours of ambient sounds, Max Richter’s eight-hour Sleep, the work of German ambient composer Gas, and hundreds of other supremely relaxing pieces of music to bring your stress levels down to manageable. Maybe keep some relaxing music on hand for extra-stressful moments, and as always, don’t forget to breathe.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Odd Vintage Postcards Document the Propaganda Against Women’s Rights 100 Years Ago
The vicious, vitriolic imagery and rhetoric of this election season can seem overwhelming, but as even casual students of history will know, it isn’t anything new. Each time historic social change occurs, reactionary counter-movements resort to threats, appeals to fear, and demeaning caricatures—whether it’s anti-Reconstruction propaganda of the 19th century, anti-Civil Rights campaigns 100 years later, or anti-LGBT rights efforts today.
At the turn of the century, the women’s suffrage movement faced significant levels of abuse and resistance. One photograph has circulated, for example, of a suffrage activist lying in the street as police beat her. (The woman in the photo is not Susan B. Anthony, as many claim, but a British suffragist named Ada Wright, beaten on “Black Friday” in 1910.) It’s an arresting image that captures just how violently men of the day fought against the movement for women’s suffrage. [It’s also worth noting, as many have: the early suffrage movement campaigned only for white women’s right to vote, and sometimes actively resisted civil rights for African-Americans.]
As you can see from the sample anti-suffrage postcards here—dating from the late 19th to early 20th centuries— propaganda against the women’s vote tended to fall into three broad categories: Disturbingly violent wish-fulfillment involving torture and physical silencing; characterizations of suffragists as angry, bitter old maids, hatchet-wielding harridans, or domineering, shrewish wives and neglectful mothers; and, correspondingly, depictions of neglected children, and husbands portrayed as saintly victims, emasculated by threats to traditional gender roles, and menaced by the suggestion that they may have to care for their children for even one day out of the year!
These postcards come from the collection of Catherine Palczewski, professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Northern Iowa. She has been collecting these images, from both the U.S. and Britain, for 15 years. On her website, Palczewski quotes George Miller’s comment that postcards like these “offer a vivid chronicle of American political values and tastes.” Palczewski describes these particular images as “a fascinating intersection [that] occurred between advocacy for and against woman suffrage, images of women (and men), and postcards. Best estimates are that approximately 4,500 postcards were produced with a suffrage theme.”
As she notes in the quote above, the postcards printed during this period did not all oppose women’s suffrage. “Suffrage advocates,” writes Palczewski, “recognized the utility of the postcard as a propaganda device” as well. Pro-suffrage postcards tended to serve a documentary purpose, with “real-photo images of the suffrage parades, verbal messages identifying the states that had approved suffrage, or quotations in support of extending the vote to women.” For all their attempts at presenting a serious, informative counterweight to incendiary anti-suffrage images like those you see here, suffrage activists often found that they could not control the narrative.
As Lisa Tickner writes in The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–1914, postcard producers without a clear agenda often used photos and illustrations of suffragists to represent “topical or humorous types” and “almost incidentally” undercut advocates’ attempts to present their cause in a newsworthy light. The image of the suffragette as a trivial figure of fun persisted into the mid-twentieth century (as we see in Glynis Johns’ comically neglectful Winifred Banks in Walt Disney’s 1964 Mary Poppins adaptation).
Palczewski’s site offers a brief history of the “Golden Age” (1893–1918) of political postcards and organizes the collection into categories. One variety we might find particularly charming for its use of cats and kittens actually has a pretty sinister origin in the so-called “Cat-and-Mouse Act” in the UK. Jailed suffragists had begun to stage hunger strikes, and journalists provoked public outcry by portraying force-feeding by the government as a form of torture. Instead, striking activists were released when they became weak. “If a woman died after being released,” Palczewski explains, “then the government could claim it was not to blame.” When a freed activist regained her strength, she would be rearrested. “On November 29, 1917,” Palczewski writes, “the US government announced it plans to use Britain’s cat and mouse approach.”
You can see many more historical pro- and anti-suffrage postcards at Palczewski’s website, and you are free to use them for non-commercial purposes provided you attribute the source. You are also free, of course, to draw your own comparisons to today’s hyperbolic and often violently misogynist propaganda campaigns.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch the Proto-Punk Band The Monks Sow Chaos on German TV, 1966: A Great Concert Moment on YouTube
Call them proto-punk, call them avant-garde, but the American ex-pat group the Monks would have been a tiny footnote in rock music history if it wasn’t for a slow rediscovery of the group’s work. The above video is from their summer 1966 appearance on Beat Club, a live pop music show broadcast in Germany.
Enthusiastic teens bop away to the repetitive stomp of “Monk Chant,” with its tribal drums from Roger Johnston, a multi-tamborine attack, and a solo section which features both Larry Clark’s manic organ and three band members attacking the strings of a prone guitar. There’s a sense that anything can happen. These guys are gleefully crazy. (On other songs, band member Dave Day Havliceck would further freak out audiences with his electric banjo.)
Neither ur-hippies nor beatniks, the guys behind the Monks were five American G.I.s who were stationed in Germany and first started a more traditional garage rock band called the Five Torquays (not to be confused with the surf band from Orange County). After one single, they dropped the cover songs and trying to ape popular trends and turned into the Monks, shaving their heads in a monastic style and dressing in monk’s clothing.
Their brutal, repetitive songs and anti-Vietnam war lyrics were ahead of their time, but the latter was one of the main reasons they found it hard to break into the American market after they released Black Monk Time on Polydor Germany. That and internal conflict within the band led to the band breaking up in 1967. You can hear a lot of the Monks in the Velvet Underground, but it’s hard to say one was an influence on the other. It’s more like one great idea was in the air and only certain people had their antennas up.
The influence of the Monks popped up in the abrasive and hypnotic sounds of Krautrock several years later, and by the late 1980s post-punk band The Fall were covering their songs “I Hate You,” “Oh, How to Do Now,” and “Shut Up.”
Jon Spencer, Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic T.V., and Stephen Malkmus of Pavement would all credit the Monks as an influence.
In 1997, their sole album was rereleased and two years later the band reunited for a New York concert to promote a retrospective compilation. In 2004, band member Roger Johnston passed from lung cancer, and after Transatlantic Feedback, a 2006 documentary on the group, several other members had passed away.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the 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.
Read More...Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine
The skilled chef has always held a place of honor amongst gourmands and the fine dining elite. But it took television to bring us the celebrity chef: Julia Childs and Jacques Pepin; Dom DeLuise and Paul Prudhomme. Those were the good old days, before reality TV turned cooking into a competitive sport. Still, we’ve got many quality cooks on the tube, entertaining and hugely informative: Alton Brown, Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver…. Many of us who take cooking seriously have at one time or another apprenticed under one of these food gurus.
My personal favorite? Well, I’m a fan of haute cuisine as fashioned by Salvador Dalí. Sure, the surrealist painter and all-around weirdo has been dead since 1989, and never had anything approaching a cooking show in his lifetime (though he did make a few TV ads and an appearance on What’s My Line?). Nor is Dalí known for his cooking. As you might guess, there’s good reason for that.
Dishes like “Veal Cutlets Stuffed with Snails,” “Thousand Year Old Eggs,” and “Toffee with Pine Cones” were never going to catch on widely. But when it comes to food as art—as an especially strange and imaginative form of art—it’s hard to beat Dalí’s rare, legendary 1973 cookbook Les Diners de Gala, just reissued by Taschen.
The book, writes This is Colossal, represented “a dream fulfilled” for Dalí, “who claimed at the age of 6 that he wanted to be a chef.” As is sometimes the case when a life’s goal goes unmet—it is perhaps for the best that the Spanish painter never seriously attempted to interest the general public in his sometimes inedible concoctions. He did, however, entertain his coterie of admirers, friends, and celebrity acquaintances with “opulent dinner parties thrown with his wife Gala.” As the cookbook suggests, these events “were almost more theatrical than gustatory.” In addition to the bizarre dishes he and Gala prepared, the guests “were required to wear completely outlandish costumes and an accompaniment of wild animals often roamed free around the table”…..
If only Dalí had lived into the age of the Kardashians. Likely he would have leapt at the chance to turn these art parties into great TV. Or maybe not. In any case, we can now reconstruct them ourselves with what design site It’s Nice That calls “a delicious combination of elaborately detailed oil paintings and kitsch 1970s food photography.” Along the way, Dalí drops aphorisms like “the jaw is our best tool to grasp philosophical knowledge” (recalling Nietzsche’s preoccupation with digestion). And despite the absurdity of many of these dishes—and paintings like that above which make the turducken look like casual fare—many of the actual recipes, This is Colossal notes, “originated in some of the top restaurants in Paris at the time including Lasserre, La Tour d’Argent, Maxim’s, and Le Train Bleu.”
However, even as far back as 1973, home cooks had begun to fret about the healthiness of their food. Dalí gives such people fair warning; Les Diners de Gala, he writes, “is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of Taste. Don’t look for dietetic formulas here.”
We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.
As if you thought Dalí would bow to something as quotidian as nutrition. See many more surreally sensual food illustrations and quotes from the book at Brain Pickings, where you’ll also find the full, extravagant recipe for “Conger of the Rising Sun.” You can order Les Diners de Gala online.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...When L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz Series Was Banned for “Depicting Women in Strong Leadership Roles” (1928)
We’ve reached the final stretch of the most infuriating, unsettling election I’ve ever experienced. And we find the U.S. so polarized that—as The Wall Street Journal chillingly demonstrates in their “Blue Feed Red Feed” feature—the left and right seem to live in two entirely different realities. Still, one would have to work very hard on either side, I think, to deny the role sexism has played. One candidate, a known and well-documented misogynist, leads millions of supporters calling for his opponent’s death, imprisonment, and humiliation. That opponent, of course, happens to be the first woman to run on a major party ticket in a general election.
Do many Americans still have a problem with accepting women as leaders? I personally don’t think there’s much of an argument there, and people who see the question as redundant marvel at how long archaic attitudes about women in power have persisted. At least these days we can openly have the—often highly inflamed—conversation about sexism in business, entertainment, and government. And we can support a cultural industry thriving on strong female characters in fiction, film, and television. Not so much in 1928, when the Chicago Public Library banned The Wizard of Oz, writes Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa Department of Special Collections, “arguing that the story was ungodly for ‘depicting women in strong leadership roles.’”
First published in 1900, L. Frank Baum’s fantasy novel initiated a series of 13 Oz-themed sequels, all of which became immensely popular after MGM’s 1939 film adaptation. (You can find them all in text and audio format here.) And yet, “throughout the years the books have been opposed for their positive portrayals of femininity.” Various libraries used similar excuses to ban the books throughout the 50s and 60s. The Detroit public library banned the Oz books in 1957, stating they had “no value for children of today.” The ban remained in place until 1972. One Florida librarian circulated a memo to her colleagues calling the books “unwholesome,” among other things, and causing a run on local bookstores as children desperately tried to find them.
Other groups decided that the books promoted witchcraft in charges similar to those levied at the Harry Potter series. In 1986, a group of Fundamentalist Christian families in Tennessee came together to remove the The Wizard of Oz from their schools’ curriculum, protesting “the novel’s depiction of benevolent witches.” They argued, writes Rosenthal, “that all witches are bad, therefore it is ‘theologically impossible ‘for good witches to exist.” Many seeking to ban the books since have similarly referred to their positive depictions of magic and “godless supernaturalism,” but the Tennessee case stands as a landmark in the Religious Right’s litigious crusade against the government. The attorney who represented plaintiff Vicki Frost called on “every born-again Christian to get their children out of public schools.”
It’s odd to think of whimsical children’s literature so seemingly innocuous as The Wizard of Oz books as territory in the long culture wars of the 20th century. But as we are reminded every year during Banned Books Week (September 25 − October 1, 2016), literature often arouses the ire of those incensed by change and difference. Yet their attempts to suppress certain books have always backfired, making the targets of their censorship even more popular and sought-after. If you’d like to read Baum’s Oz books now, you needn’t confront a gatekeeping librarian; simply head over to our post on the complete Wizard of Oz series, with free eBooks and audio books of all 14 female-centric fantasy classics.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Art of Making Old-Fashioned, Hand-Printed Books
Reports of traditional books’ death are greatly exaggerated, thanks in part to the success of print-on-demand publishing and other digital innovations.
As thrilled as we are about the survival of the printed page—it’s a relief to have something to read after Wi-Fi fails during the zombie invasion—the craftsmanship that goes into hand-printed, hand-bound volumes is an almost-lost art.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s video, above, documents the painstaking process, beginning with the arranging of metal type that will result in an octavo, the most common type of book.
It’s a quiet endeavor, though surely a bit louder than the V&A’s silent documentation, an unusual choice given a certain segment of the millennial populace’s appetite for well-edited artisanal craft videos in which music plays a big part.
A well-deployed tune could elevate these lovely visuals to the realms of the advanced elegy.
YouTube user, Kraftsman Sheng, attempts to remedy the situation by reproducing the video (sans attribution) with a soundtrack of his own choosing—pianist Roger Williams’ syrupy 1965 rendition of “Softly As I Leave You,” below.
An unconventional choice, to be sure. I should think something baroque would go better with all of this meticulous folding, cutting, and binding.
Though perhaps something a little more robust could highlight the hardcore heroism of the artisans toiling to keep this ancient art alive. Electric Lit has a round up of great book-inspired punk songs, of which “Time” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids seems particularly apt.
Print’s not dead!
via Atlas Obscura
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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.
Read More...Watch Jimmy Page Rock the Theremin, the Early Soviet Electronic Instrument, in Some Hypnotic Live Performances
It can be frustrating for Led Zeppelin fans to hear the band reduced to plagiarism lawsuits or the quintessence of sexually-aggressive rock-star entitlement (though much of that is deserved). For one thing, Zeppelin’s occult songwriting tendencies, courtesy of both Page and Plant, play just as prominent a role as their blues-rock come-ons (as several generations of fantasy metal bands can attest). For another, their studio productions and live shows are renowned for pioneering mash-ups of modern rock, folk, and classical instrumentation, courtesy of both Page and Jones. And finally, the band’s recording techniques were—for the time—demonstrations of technical wizardry.
Thus it should come as no surprise that technical wizard Jimmy Page would play the Theremin, though he does play on it the kind of screaming, feedback-laden bends he unleashed from his Les Paul. Introduced to the world by Soviet inventor Leon Theremin in 1919, the early electronic instrument emits high-pitched singing when a player’s hands come within range of its invisible electrical fields. “It hasn’t got six strings,” Page says in his demonstration at the top of the post, from 2009 film It Might Get Loud, “but it’s a lot of fun.”
Page used a Sonic Wave Theremin in his Zeppelin days in a very guitar-like way—running it through a Maestro Echoplex and Orange amps and cabinets. (Watch him revive the technique in a 1995 French TV broadcast above.) For several months in 1971, writes fansite Achilles Last Stand, Page “used a double-stacked Theremin” for twice the sonic assault.
Though he seems to have gone back to just the one Theremin in the solo above, the effect is no less electrifying, if you’ll excuse the pun, as he sends echoes of ray-gun noise cascading around the theater. Well over five minutes into the hypnotic affair, Page takes to his Les Paul, creating more ragged patterns with violin bow and Echoplex. Even if you aren’t in a dazed and confused state, you’ll feel like you are if you give yourself over to this piece of performance art. Heroics? Yes, and indeed the bowed guitar act has its phallic overtones. But it begins and ends with long stretches of the kind of droning experimental noise one would expect to find onstage at an early Kraftwerk show.
Those in the know will know that Page put the theremin to use on one of the band’s most technically experimental recordings (though it also happens to be an appropriated blues stomper), “Whole Lotta Love” from 1969’s Led Zeppelin II. “I always envisioned the middle to be quite avant-garde,” Page recently told Guitar World, “The Theremin generates most of the higher pitches and my Les Paul makes the lower sounds.” Watch him rip out a theremin-and-guitar solo above in the live performance above from 1973. Taken with the psychedelic video effects, the performance reaches mystical planes of rhythmic abstraction.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...How Literature Can Improve Mental Health: Take a Free Course Featuring Stephen Fry, Ian McKellen, Melvyn Bragg & More
The great 18th century writer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who suffered from severe bouts of depression, said “the only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”
So…is it true? Can a poem help you cope with grief? Can a sonnet stir your soul to hope?
The University of Warwick have teamed up with some famous faces, and a team of doctors to tackle these questions and others like them, in a free online course on FutureLearn.
Poets, writers and actors like Stephen Fry, Ian McKellen, Melvyn Bragg, Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time), Ben Okri (The Famished Road), Rachel Kelly (Black Rainbow) and others, will discuss their own work and the work of famous writers like Austen, Shakespeare and Wordsworth — exploring how they can impact mental health and why works of writing are so often turned to in times of crisis.
Here’s Stephen Fry on the pleasure of poetry:
Plus throughout the 6‑week course doctors will offer a medical perspective, giving an insight into different mental health conditions.
The course is offered through FutureLearn which means it’s broken into chunks — so you can do it step by step. FutureLearn also features lots of discussion so you can share your ideas with other learners, which often can be as beneficial as the course material (as one previous learner put it “a really wonderful experience and I’ve loved the feedback and comments from fellow course members”).
Here’s a runthrough of what’s on the syllabus. The course focuses on six themes:
- Stress: In poetry, the word “stress” refers to the emphasis of certain syllables in a poem’s metre. How might the metrical “stresses” of poetry help us to cope with the mental and emotional stresses of modern life?
- Heartbreak: Is heartbreak a medical condition? What can Sidney’s sonnets and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility teach us about suffering and recovering from a broken heart?
- Bereavement: The psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously proposed that there are five stages of grief. How might Shakespeare’s Hamlet and poems by Wordsworth and Hardy help us to think differently about the process of grieving?
- Trauma: PTSD or “shellshock” has long been associated with the traumatic experiences of soldiers in World War 1. How is the condition depicted in war poetry of the era? Can poems and plays offer us an insight into other sources of trauma, including miscarriage and assault?
- Depression and Bipolar: The writer Rachel Kelly subtitles her memoir Black Rainbow “how words healed me – my journey through depression”. Which texts have people turned to during periods of depression, and why? What can we learn from literature about the links between bipolar disorder and creativity?
- Ageing and Dementia: One of the greatest studies of ageing in English Literature is Shakespeare’s King Lear. Is it helpful to think about this play in the context of dementia? Why are sufferers of age-related memory loss often still able to recall the poems they have learned “by heart”?
Start the course for free today.
Jess Weeks is a copywriter at FutureLearn. The one poem which helps her endure is The Orange by Wendy Cope.
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