Organized Chaos!: Watch 33 Videos Showing How Saturday Night Live Gets Made Each Week
Who do you think of when you think of Saturday Night Live?
Creator Lorne Michaels?
Whoever hosted last week’s episode?
What about the guy who makes and holds the cue cards?
Wally Feresten is just one of the backstage heroes to be celebrated in Creating Saturday Night Live, a fascinating look at how the long-running television sketch show comes together every week.
Like many of those interviewed Feresten is more or less of a lifer, having come aboard in 1990 at the age of 25.
He estimates that he and his team of 8 run through some 1000 14” x 22” cards cards per show. Teleprompters would save trees, but the possibility of technical issues during the live broadcast presents too big of a risk.
This means that any last minute changes, including those made mid-broadcast, must be handled in a very hands on way, with corrections written in all caps over carefully applied white painter’s tape or, worst case scenario, on brand new cards.
(After a show wraps, its cards enjoy a second act as dropcloths for the next week’s painted sets.)
Nearly every sketch requires three sets of cue cards, so that the cast, who are rarely off book due to the frequent changes, can steal glances to the left, right and center.
As the department head, Feresten is partnered with each week’s guest host, whose lines are the only ones to be written in black. Betty White, who hosted in 2010 at the age of 88, thanked him in her 2011 autobiography.
Surely that’s worth his work-related arthritic shoulder, and the recurrent nightmares in which he arrives at Studio 8H just five minutes before showtime to find that all 1000 cue cards are blank.
Costumes have always been one of Saturday Night Live’s flashiest pleasures, running the gamut from Coneheads and a rapping Cup o’Soup to an immaculate recreation of the white pantsuit in which Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her victory speech a scant 3 hours before the show aired.
“A costume has a job,” wardrobe supervisor Dale Richards explains:
It has to tell a story before (the actors) open their mouth…as soon as it comes on camera, it should give you so much backstory.
And it has to cleave to some sort of reality and truthfulness, even in a sketch as outlandish as 2017’s Henrietta & the Fugitive, starring host Ryan Gosling as a detective in a film noir style romance. The gag is that the dame is a chicken (cast member Aidy Bryant.)
Richards cites actress Bette Davis as the inspiration for the chicken’s look:
Because you’re not going to believe it if the detective couldn’t actually fall in love with her. She has to be very feminine, so we gave her Bette Davis bangs and long eyelashes and a beautiful bonnet, so the underpinnings were very much like an actress in a movie, although she did have a chicken costume on.
The number of quick costume changes each performer must make during the live broadcast helps determine the sketches’ running order.
Some of the breakneck transformations are handled by Richards’ sister, Donna, who once beat the clock by piggybacking host Jennifer Lopez across the studio floor to the changing area where a well-coordinated crew swished her out of her opening monologue’s skintight dress and skyscraper heels and into her first costume.
That’s one example of the sort of traffic the 4‑person crane camera crew must battle as they hurtle across the studio to each new set. Camera operator John Pinto commands from atop the crane’s counterbalanced arm.
Those swooping crane shots of the musical guests, opening monologue and goodnights (see below) are a Saturday Night Live tradition, a part of its iconic look since the beginning.
Get to know other backstage workers and how they contribute to this weekly high wire act in a 33 episode Creating Saturday Night playlist, all on display below:
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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Read More...Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee & More (1926/35)
The fate of the visionary is to be forever outside of his or her time. Such was the life of Nikola Tesla, who dreamed the future while his opportunistic rival Thomas Edison seized the moment. Even now the name Tesla conjures seemingly wildly impractical ventures, too advanced, too expensive, or far too elegant in design for mass production and consumption. No one better than David Bowie, the pop artist of possibility, could embody Tesla’s air of magisterial high seriousness on the screen. And few were better suited than Tesla himself, perhaps, to extrapolate from his time to ours and see the technological future clearly.
Of course, this image of Tesla as a lone, heroic, and even somewhat tragic figure who fell victim to Edison’s designs is a bit of a romantic exaggeration. As even the editor of a 1935 feature interview piece in the now-defunct Liberty magazine wrote, Tesla and Edison may have been rivals in the “battle between alternating and direct current…. Otherwise the two men were merely opposites. Edison had a genius for practical inventions immediately applicable. Tesla, whose inventions were far ahead of the time, aroused antagonisms which delayed the fruition of his ideas for years.” One can in some respects see why Tesla “aroused antagonisms.” He may have been a genius, but he was not a people person, and some of his views, though maybe characteristic of the times, are downright unsettling.
In the lengthy Liberty essay, “as told to George Sylvester Viereck” (a poet and Nazi sympathizer who also interviewed Hitler), Tesla himself makes the pronouncement, “It seems that I have always been ahead of my time.” He then goes on to enumerate some of the ways he has been proven right, and confidently lists the characteristics of the future as he sees it. No one likes a know-it-all, but Tesla refused to compromise or ingratiate himself, though he suffered for it professionally. And he was, in many cases, right. Many of his 1935 predictions in Liberty are still too far off to measure, and some of them will seem outlandish, or criminal, to us today. But some still seem plausible, and a few advisable if we are to make it another 100 years as a species. Tesla’s predictions include the following, which he introduces with the disclaimer that “forecasting is perilous. No man can look very far into the future.”
- “Buddhism and Christianity… will be the religion of the human race in the twenty-first century.”
- “The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established.” Tesla went on to comment, “no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.”
- “Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2025 than the Secretary of War.” Along with personal hygiene, Tesla included “pollution” as a social ill in need of regulation.
- “I am convinced that within a century coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life.”
- “There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India.” (Tesla did not foresee the anti-gluten mania of the 21st century.)
- “Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power.” Along with this optimistic prediction, Tesla foresaw that “the struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.”
Tesla goes on to predict the elimination of war, “by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself,” after which war chests would be diverted to funding education and research. He then describes—in rather fantastical-sounding terms—an apparatus that “projects particles” and transmits energy, enabling not only a revolution in defense technology, but “undreamed of results in television.” Tesla diagnoses his time as one in which “we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age.” The solution, he asserts—along with most futurists, then and now—“does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.” As an example of such mastery, Tesla describes the future of “automatons” taking over human labor and the creation of “a thinking machine.”
Matt Novak at the Smithsonian has analyzed many of Tesla’s claims, interpreting his predictions about “hygiene and physical culture” as a foreshadowing of the EPA and discussing Tesla’s work in robotics (“Today,” Tesla proclaimed, “the robot is an accepted fact”). The Liberty article was not the first time Tesla had made large-scale, public predictions about the century to come and beyond. In 1926, Tesla gave an interview to Collier’s magazine in which he more or less accurately foresaw smartphones and wireless telephony and computing:
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
Telsa also made some odd predictions about fuel-less passenger flying machines “free from any limitations of the present airplanes and dirigibles” and spouted more of the scary stuff about eugenics that had come to obsess him late in life. Additionally, Tesla saw changing gender relations as the precursor of a coming matriarchy. This was not a development he characterized in positive terms. For Tesla, feminism would “end in a new sex order, with the female as superior.” (As Novak notes, Tesla’s misgivings about feminism have made him a hero to the so-called “men’s rights” movement.) While he fully granted that women could and would match and surpass men in every field, he warned that “the acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership, will dull and finally dissipate feminine sensibilities, will choke the maternal instinct, so that marriage and motherhood may become abhorrent and human civilization draw closer and closer to the perfect civilization of the bee.”
It seems to me that a “bee civilization” would appeal to a eugenicist, except, I suppose, Tesla feared becoming a drone. Although he saw the development as inevitable, he still sounds to me like any number of current politicians who argue that society should continue to suppress and discriminate against women for their own good and the good of “civilization.” Tesla may be an outsider hero for geek culture everywhere, but his social attitudes give me the creeps. While I’ve personally always liked the vision of a world in which robots do most the work and we spend most of our money on education, when it comes to the elimination of war, I’m less sanguine about particle rays and more sympathetic to the words of Ivor Cutler.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
via Smithsonian/Paleofuture
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Discovered: Lost Johnny Cash Concert Recorded by the Grateful Dead’s LSD Chemist Owsley Stanley (1968)
On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash recorded his famous live concerts within the walls of Folsom State Prison, California, a week into what would be one of his busiest years of touring. While Columbia Records worked on trimming down the two sets into one LP, Cash set off across the States, into Canada and back, playing almost every night, and returning to the West Coast for a final stop at the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco.
Recording the gig that night was Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s engineer and also the man responsible for creating the purest LSD on the West Coast. As Rolling Stone once asked, would there have been a Summer of Love if not for Stanley? Apparently, Stanley had *another* secret stash, and we are only now hearing a tiny fraction of it. This gig is one of over 1,300 the engineer recorded and kept in his private collection. Stanley died in 2011, and ten years later the Oswald Stanley Foundation is selectively releasing recordings from this treasure trove as a way to preserve the recordings and fund more releases. This Cash set was one of the first releases in the “Bear’s Sonic Journals” series, released in October of 2021.
Cash’s new bride June Carter Cash joined him onstage. It was on the Ontario stop of the aforementioned tour that Cash proposed to her live on stage, and they were married March 1 in Kentucky. You can hear his pride as he introduces her to the audience; the two immediately launch into “Jackson.” “We got married in a fever,” indeed. (The two remained married until her death in 2003.) June sings several numbers, including “Wabash Cannonball,” and Carl Perkins’ “Long Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man.”
The other artist figuring prominently in these recordings (as an influence) is Bob Dylan. The two had been circling each other in admiration for years, and here Cash covers “One Too Many Mornings” and then “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” The man owns it, turns it into what sounds like a Tennessee Three original. Dylan and Cash would finally record together in 1969, in sessions that would be bootlegged until a recent official release.
Stanley recorded these sets for himself, coming straight out of the soundboard. Where the Carousel Ballroom concert lacks in quality—-vocals, audience, and Cash’s guitar are on the left, the band to the right—-they make up for in history and excitement.
Currently, the label has released full concerts from Tim Buckley, Ali Akbar Khan, with Indranil Bhattacharya and Zakir Hussain, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, New Riders of The Purple Sage, Jorma Kaukonen & Jack Casady, The Allman Brothers Band, and Doc and Merle Watson. As Stanley recorded for two decades of his career, the catalog promises untold delights.
The full playlist from the Carousel Ballroom gig is below:
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Watch Nirvana Perform as an Opening Band, Two Years Before Their Breakout Album Nevermind (1989)
The story of Nirvana’s first album, first single, and first video launching the band to instant mega-stardom, and the story of their tragic crash back down to Earth, have been told too many times to count. Less well known are the years of the band’s early ascent through the local Pacific Northwest scene, opening for then-bigger acts like TAD (who got swept up, then left behind in grunge’s first wave). Nirvana first formed in 1987 in Aberdeen, WA and played as a few iterations with names like Fecal Matter and Skid Row, always as a three-piece with Kurt Cobain out front and Krist Novoselic on bass.
As they ironed out their image (avoiding a lawsuit from the Jersey hair metal band), Nirvana also moved through a couple different drummers behind the kit before lucking into Dave Grohl. “Aaron Burckhard was Nirvana’s first drummer,” writes the Museum of Pop Culture, “but he and the band ultimately parted ways. While the band searched for a replacement, Dale Crover helped Nirvana with their first demo and Dave Foster honored their live bookings. Chad Channing officially joined Nirvana in 1988, and the band began work on their debut album Bleach, which was officially released in June of 1989 followed by a short American tour and a lengthy UK tour.” Just above, you can see them open for TAD on December 1, 1989 at Fahrenheit, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France.
Signed to Seattle indie label Sub Pop at the time, the band was eager for success but hadn’t quite nailed down their sound. When Nevermind producer Butch Vig heard Bleach the following year, after Sub Pop recruited him to work with the band, he “thought it was pretty one-dimensional,” he writes, “except that one song, ‘About a Girl.’ ” Cobain would only say he wanted the band to sound like “Black Sabbath.” The label’s Jonathan Poneman assured Vig that Nirvana “would be as big as The Beatles,” but that wouldn’t happen until Channing left, or felt pushed out. As Vig remembers, there was considerable “tension between Kurt and Chad” during their first sessions in Madison, Wisconsin in 1990. “Kurt would sometimes go behind the drums and show Chad how to play.” Of course, that’s something the moody Cobain was also known to do to Channing’s replacement.
Musical tension did not result in long-term hard feelings, Channing says. “I found out what a really nice guy Dave is.” For his part, Grohl has pushed for recognition of Channing’s contributions, objecting to his exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. “Grohl took steps to rectify the injustice,” notes Far Out Magazine. “With Channing in attendance, Grohl publicly applauded and thanked Channing for his vital contributions to the band, and more critically, noted that some of Nirvana’s most iconic drum riffs from the period were, in fact, Channing’s.” Hear some of the evidence above in a setlist that includes several tracks from Bleach, including “About a Girl,” and “Polly” from the upcoming Nevermind. And stick around for TAD, forgotten stalwarts of the Seattle scene.
via Boing Boing
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Explore the New 717-Gigapixel Scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the Most Detailed Photo Ever Taken of a Work of Art
Filmmaker and serious Rembrandt enthusiast Peter Greenaway once called The Night Watch the most famous painting in the Western world, behind the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But if the resources devoted to its scrutiny are anything to go by, the Dutch masterwork has been gaining on those other three in recent years. Can any work of Leonardo or Michelangelo, for example, boast of having been digitized at a resolution of 717 gigapixels, as the Rijksmuseum has just done with The Night Watch?
In fact, no other work of art in existence has ever been the subject of such a large and detailed photograph. Each of its 717,000,000,000 pixels, says the Rijksmuseum’s site, “is smaller than a human red blood cell.”
This necessitated the use of “a 00-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos measuring 5.5cm x 4.1cm. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.” You may remember artificial intelligence also having played a role in the reconstruction of the painting’s missing sections, previously featured here on Open Culture.
The result far surpasses the digital version of The Night Watch made available by the Rijksmuseum in 2020, itself high-resolution enough to allow viewers to zoom in to see the painting’s every individual brush stroke. (It even outdoes last year’s 10-billion-pixel scan of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the best-known work by Rembrandt’s fellow Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.) Now, writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert, you can see all the way down to “the cracked texture of the paint, brushstrokes, and slight pigment variations that wouldn’t be visible even if you were standing in front of the work itself.”
380 years after Rembrandt painted it, The Night Watch remains almost uniquely striking in its employment of contrasting shadow and light, all in service of a large-scale composition at once lifelike and somehow more vivid than reality. This digitization and the AI-assisted completion are both arts of “Operation Night Watch,” the thoroughgoing restoration project now underway at the Rijksmuseum, which will make all the elements of that composition more immediately visible than they’ve been in generations.
But the question of how, exactly, Rembrandt achieved such powerful effects can be answered only through rigorous examination of each and every detail, an activity open to all on the 717-gigapixel scan at the Rijksmuseum’s site.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Famous Downfall Scene Explained: What Really Happened in Hitler’s Bunker at the End?
Before his role as Hitler in the 2004 German film Downfall turned Swiss actor Bruno Ganz into a viral internet star, he was best known for playing an angel who comforts the dying in Wim Wenders’ 1987 Wings of Desire. “People really seemed to think of me as a guardian angel,” he told The Irish Times in 2005. “People would bring their children before me for a blessing or something.” Seventeen years later, the self-described introvert transformed his gentle, comforting face into the Nazi screen monster: “Nothing prepared me for what must be the most convincing screen Hitler yet,” wrote The Guardian’s Rob Mackie. “An old, bent, sick dictator with the shaking hands of someone with Parkinson’s, alternating between rage and despair in his last days in the bunker.”
This portrayal has never been surpassed, and perhaps it never will be. How many fictionalized film treatments of these events do we need? Especially since this one lives forever in meme form: Ganz endlessly spitting and gesticulating, while captions subtitle him ranting about “his pizza arriving late” – Gael Fashingbaeur Cooper writes at cnet – or “the Red Wedding scene on Game of Thrones, or finding out he wasn’t accepted into Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.” As Virginia Heffernan wrote at The New York Times in 2008 – maybe the height of the meme’s virality – “It seems that late-life Hitler can be made to speak for almost anyone in the midst of a crisis…. Something in the spectacle of an autocrat falling to pieces evidently has widespread appeal.”
Given the widespread preference for memes over facts, the ubiquity of the Downfall clip as viral spectacle, and the renewed relevance of murderous autocracy in the West, we might find ourselves wondering about the historical accuracy of Downfall’s portrayal. Did the dictator really lose it in the end? And why do we find this idea so satisfying? To begin to answer the first question, we might turn to the video above, “That Downfall Scene Explained,” from the makers of The Great War, billed as the “biggest ever crowdfunded history documentary.” Despite taking as their subject the First World War, the filmmakers also cover some of the events of WWII for fans.
First, we must remember that Downfall is an “artistic interpretation.” It condenses weeks into days, days into hours, and takes other such dramatic liberties with accounts gathered from eyewitnesses. So, “what is Hitler freaking out about” in the famous scene?, the subtitle asks. It is April 1945. The Red Army is 40 kilometers from Nazi headquarters in Berlin. The dictator’s Chief of the Army General Staff Hans Krebs explains the situation. Hitler remains in control, drawing possible lines of attack on the map, believing that SS commander Felix Steiner’s Panzer divisions will repel the Soviets.
Little does he know that Steiner’s divisions exist only on paper. In reality, the SS leader has refused to take to the field, convinced the battle cannot be won. Another General, Alfred Jodel, steps in and delivers the news. Hitler then clears the room of all but Jodl, Krebs, and two other high-ranking generals. Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann stay behind as well. Then (as played by Ganz, that is) Hitler has that famous screen meltdown. The outburst “shows just how he had centralized the chain of command,” and how it failed him.
This may have been so. Downfall presents us with a convincing, if highly condensed, portrait of the major personalities involved. But “the scene that spawned a thousand YouTube parodies,” writes Alex Ross at The New Yorker, “is based, in part, on problematic sources.” One of these, the so-called Hitler Book, was compiled from “testimony of two Hitler adjutants, Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, who had been captured by the Red Army and interrogated at length…. The most curious thing about The Hitler Book is that it was intended for a single reader: Joseph Stalin.” The Soviet dictator wanted, and got, “a lavishly detailed chronicle of Hitler’s psychological implosion.” Other sources “convey a more complex picture.”
According to other accounts, Hitler was “generally composed” when learning about the Red Army attack on Berlin, even as he decided to give up and die in the bunker. According to Nazi stenographer, Gerhard Herrgesell, it was the generals who “violently opposed” surrender and spoke harshly to Hitler to persuade him to defend the city – a speech that had some effect during an April 22nd meeting. It did not, of course, prevent Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun’s eventual April 30 suicide. For Ross, however, this more complex historical picture shows “how cults of personality feed as much upon the aspirations of their members as upon the ambitions of their leaders.” The members of Hitler’s inner circle were as committed to the ideology as the leader himself.
There is more to the film’s title in German, Untergang, than its translation suggests, Ross writes: “It carries connotations of decline, dissolution, or destruction.” When we fix the end of Nazism to the suicidal death of one delusional, drug-addled madman, we lose sight of this wider meaning. In the viral spread of the Hitler meme, we see a kind of comically banal triumph. It is “the outcome,” Heffernan argues, that “Hitler, the historical figure sought….” A situation in which he becomes “not the author of the Holocaust” but “the brute voice of the everyman unconscious,” a proliferating grievance machine. From another perspective, imagining Hitler’s end may offer “comforting moral closure to a story of limitless horror,” writes Ross. But it has helped feed the myth that it could only happen there and then: “Now German historians are ending their books on Nazism with thinly veiled references to an American Untergang.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Doreen Ketchens’ Astonishing Rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun”: A World-Class Clarinetist Busks on the Streets of New Orleans
Dirtiness has no description. It is a feeling. — music transcriber George Collier
You may be able to read music and play the clarinet, but it’s extremely unlikely you — or anyone — will be able to play along with Doreen Ketchens’ “dirty” solo on “The House of the Rising Sun,” above, despite an assist from Tom Pickles’ scrolling transcription.
Download the transcription for free and keep trying.
It’s what Ketchens, a world renowned clarinetist and music educator, who has played for four US presidents and busks regularly in the French Quarter, would advise.
“You have to practice and be ready to perform at the drop of a hat” she told The Clarinet’s Ben Redwine, when he asked if she had any advice for young musicians hoping to make it professionally.
She’s also a strong advocate of listening robustly, not throwing in the towel when someone else gets the job instead of you, and letting your personality come through in your playing:
You don’t want to sound like you’re playing an etude book. This is for all types of music – even classical. You want to move the audience, you want to touch them.
Trained as a classical clarinetist, Ketchens cozied up to jazz shortly after she cozied up to the tuba player who would become her husband. “All of the sudden, jazz wasn’t so bad,” she says:
I started to listen to jazz so I could learn the tunes and fit in with his band. I started listening to Louis Armstrong. He is my biggest influence. Some people call me Mrs. Satchmo, I guess because that concept is in my head. I’ll hear something he plays, which I’ve heard thousands of times, and I’ll think, “What? How did he do that?” Then, I listened to the clarinetists who played with him: Edmund Hall, Buster Bailey, Barney Bigard. Those cats were awesome too! Edmund Hall had this thing he could do, where it sounds like he was playing two tones at the same time. People today might hum while they play to achieve something similar, but I don’t think that was what he was doing. Buster Bailey had a similar background to me, starting out with classical music, then learning jazz. Early on, I emulated Jerry Fuller, clarinetist with the Dukes of Dixieland. I would steal so many of his solos just so I could keep up with my husband’s band. Eventually, I realized what he was doing, and it translated into me being able to improvise. I’d start out transcribing solos, then playing by ear, copying what those clarinetists were doing. I don’t remember those solos now, but I’m sure that I still play snippets of them that creep into my improvisations.
However she got there, she possesses a singular ability to make her instrument growl and her command of 32nd notes makes us feel a little lightheaded.
Clarinetists abound in New Orleans, and they probably all cover “The House of the Rising Sun,” but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more exciting rendition than Ketchens’ on the corner of St. Peter and Royal, with husband Lawrence on tuba and daughter Dorian on drums. Here’s the full versions, sans transcription.
You want an encore? Of course you do.
How about Ketchens’ magnificent solo on “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” for the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra?
Find more astonishing, transcribed solos and a heaping helping of Jacob Collier on George Collier’s (no relation) YouTube Channel.
His transcriptions, and those of collaborator Tom Pickles, are available for free download here, unless the artist sells their own transcription, in which case he encourages you to support the artist with your purchase.
If you’re a music nerd who would like to discuss transcriptions, give feedback on others’ attempts, and upload your own, join his community on Discord.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, theatermaker, and the Chief Primaologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest book, Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, will be published in early 2022. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...George Harrison “My Sweet Lord” Gets an Official Music Video, Featuring Ringo Starr, Al Yankovic, Patton Oswalt & Many Others
To help celebrate the 50th anniversary of George Harrison’s classic solo album, All Things Must Pass, the classic track, “My Sweet Lord,” has now received an official music video. And it features a number of cameo appearances–from other former Beatles (Ringo Starr), to family members (Olivia Harrison and Dhani Harrison), to other guests (Mark Hamill, Fred Armisen, Al Yankovic, Rosanna Arquette). Enjoy.
Featuring In Order of Appearance:
Mark Hamill
Fred Armisen
Vanessa Bayer
Moshe Kasher
Natasha Leggero
Jeff Lynne
Reggie Watts
Darren Criss
Patton Oswalt
Al Yankovic
David Gborie
Sam Richardson
Atsuko Okatsuka
Rosanna Arquette
Brandon Wardell
Ringo Starr
Joe Walsh
Jon Hamm
Brett Metter
Anders Holm
Dhani Harrison
Rupert Friend
Angus Sampson
Taika Waititi
Eric Wareheim
Tim Heidecker
Kate Micucci
Riki Lindhome
Alyssa Stonoha
Mitra Jouhari
Sandy Honig
Olivia Harrison
Aimee Mullins
Courtney Pauroso
Natalie Palamides
Shepard Fairey
Claudia O’Doherty
Tom Scharpling
Paul Scheer
Sarah Baker
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Read More...
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Will Be Retold from a Woman’s Point of View
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been a byword for totalitarian dystopia longer than most of us have been reading books. But apart from its the title and certain words from its invented “newspeak” — doubleplusgood, unperson, thoughtcrime — how deeply is George Orwell’s best-known novel embedded into the culture? Most of us recognize the name Winston Smith, and many of us may even remember details of his job at the Ministry of Truth, where the facts of history are continually rewritten to suit ever-shifting political exigencies. But how much do we know about the other major character: Julia, Winston’s fellow ministry employee who becomes his clandestine co-dissident and forbidden lover?
“In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.” Julia’s amorality throws the rigidity of Winston’s own attitudes into contrast, and also shows up their impracticality. Now, in the hands of novelist Sandra Newman, Julia will become not just star of the story but its narrator.
Or so it looks, at least, from the brief passage quoted in the Guardian’s announcement of Julia, a re-telling of Nineteen Eighty-Four approved by Orwell’s estate and to be published in time for the 75th anniversary of the original. Though it has no firm publication date yet, Julia will come out some time after Newman’s next book The Men, in which, as the Guardian’s Alison Flood puts it, “every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes from the world.” It will join an abundance of recent retellings from the woman’s point of view, including everything from “Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a version of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which centers on the life of Shakespeare’s wife.”
Entrusting a literary property to a writer of another era, culture, and sensibility is a tricky business, but there arguably has never been a more opportune time to put out a book like Julia. It seems the dystopia-hungry public has never been readier to identify the “Orwellian” in life, nor more responsive to re-interpretations and expansions of long-established bodies of popular myth. And what with women having conquered the world of fiction, there will naturally be great interest in Julia’s take on life under Big Brother — as well as in its inevitable television adaptation.
Related content:
George Orwell’s 1984 Staged as an Opera: Watch Scenes from the 2005 Production in London
Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)
George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You!
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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...8 Hours of David Bowie’s Historic 1980 Floor Show: Complete & Uncut Footage
Bowie completists rejoice. Eight hours of footage from his 1973 television program “The 1980 Floor Show,” have found their way to YouTube, including, Boing Boing notes, “uncut footage… multiple takes, backstage moments, and all of the dance rehearsals.” The show — actually an episode of the NBC series The Midnight Special curated by Bowie — lived up to its title (itself a pun on “1984,” the opening song of the broadcast), with elaborate dance numbers, major costume changes, and several guest performers: The Troggs, Amanda Lear, Carmen, and — most importantly — Marianne Faithfull, in career free-fall at the time but also in top form for this cabaret-style variety show.
When Midnight Special producer Burt Sugarman approached Bowie about doing the hour-long show, the singer agreed on the condition that he could have complete creative control. He chose to hold rehearsals and performances at London’s Marquee Club. The audience consisted of 200 young fans drawn from the Bowie fan club. Faithfull was “actually invited as one of the reserve acts,” notes Jack Whatley at Far Out, “ready to be called upon should someone else drop out.”
“The show was heavily advertised in the US press in the run up to the broadcast,” noted Bowie 75 in 2018, “but has never been shown outside the US or officially released,” though bootlegs circulated for years. Shooting took place over three days in late October, just a few months after Bowie played his final show as Ziggy Stardust at the Hammersmith Odeon Theatre, cryptically announcing at the end, “not only is it the last show of the tour, it’s the last show we’ll ever do.” Bowie then went on to release Aladdin Sane and his covers record Pin-Ups the following year, dropping the Ziggy character entirely.
But Bowie brought Ziggy back, at least in costume, for one last gig in “The 1980 Floor Show,” wearing some of the outfits Kansai Yamamoto designed for the Ziggy Stardust tours and still sporting the signature spiked red mullet he would continue to wear as his dystopian Halloween Jack persona on 1974’s Diamond Dogs. “The 1980 Floor Show” promoted songs from Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups while visually representing the transition from Bowie’s space alien visitor persona to a different kind of outsider — an alien in exile, just like the character he played a few years later in Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. As Maria Matheos writes at Hasta:
Ziggy no longer played guitar: Bowie had metamorphosed into Aladdin Sane. Parading across the stage in red platform boots and a patent-leather black and white balloon leg jumpsuit, referred to by designer Yamamoto as the ‘Tokyo pop’ jumpsuit, Bowie sought to assault the senses of his audience. Completely over the top? Yes. Verging on a parody of excess? Possibly. Would he have wanted us to take him seriously? He certainly did not (take himself seriously).
With Aladdin Sane, Bowie gave us a hyperbolic extension of his prior alien doppelganger; adding that his character, a pun on ‘A Lad Insane’, represented “Ziggy under the influence of America.”
See how Bowie constructed that new, and short-lived, persona from the materials of his former glam superstar character, and see the revelation that was Marianne Faithfull. The singer performed her 1964 hit, written by The Rolling Stones, “As Tears Go By,” solo. But the highlight of the show, and of her mid-seventies period, was the duet of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” with which she and Bowie closed the show. “The costumes of the pair are magical.” Whatley writes,” with Bowie “in full Ziggy attire… aka his ‘Angel of Death’ costume—while Faithfull has on a nun’s habit that was open at the back.”
Bowie reportedly introduced the song with the tossed-off line, “This isn’t anything serious, it’s just a bit of fun. We’ve hardly even rehearsed it.” You can scroll through the 8 hours of footage at the top to see those rehearsals, and so many more previously unavailable Bowie moments caught on film.
via Boing Boing
Related Content:
Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life
David Bowie Became Ziggy Stardust 48 Years Ago This Week: Watch Original Footage
David Bowie’s Final Gig as Ziggy Stardust Documented in 1973 Concert Film
David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Anyway (1998)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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