Watch Jeff Beck (RIP) Smash His Guitar: A Classic Scene from Antonioni’s Blowup (1966)
Note: With the passing of Jeff Beck, we’re bringing back a vintage post from our archive featuring the early years of the legendary guitarist. You can read his obituary here.
Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soulmates of a kind, with many an acclaimed director turning to musicians as actors, commissioning rock stars as soundtrack artists, and filming scenes with bands. Before Nicolas Roeg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and other rock-loving auteurs did all of the above, there was Michelangelo Antonioni, who barreled into the English-language market, under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a trilogy of films steeped in the sights and sounds of sixties counterculture.
Blowup, the first and by far the best of these, though scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, prominently featured the Yardbirds—with both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. In the memorable scene above, Beck smashes his guitar to bits after his amp goes on the fritz. The Italian director “envisioned a scene similar to that of Pete Townshend’s famous ritual of smashing his guitar on stage,” notes Guitarworld’s Jonathan Graham. “Antonioni had even asked The Who to appear in the film,” but they refused.
In stepped the Yardbirds, during a pivotal moment in their career. The year before, they released mega-hit “For Your Love,” and said goodbye to lead guitarist Eric Clapton. Beck, his replacement, heralded a much wilder, more experimental phase for the band. Jeff Beck, it seemed, could play anything, but what he didn’t do much of onstage is emote. Next to the guitar-smashing Townshend or the fire-setting Hendrix (see both below), he was a pretty reserved performer, though no less thrilling to watch for his virtuosity and style.
But as he tells it, Antonioni wouldn’t let the band do their “most exciting thing,” a cover of “Smokestack Lightning” that “had this incredible buildup in the middle which was just pow!” That moment would have been the natural pretext for a good guitar smashing.
Instead, the set piece with the broken amp gives the introverted Beck a reason to get agitated. As Graham describes it, he also played a guitar specially designated as a prop:
Due to issues over publishing, the Yardbirds classic “Train Kept A‑Rollin’,” was reworked as “Stroll On” for the performance, and as the scene involved the destruction of an instrument, Beck’s usual choice of his iconic Esquire or Les Paul was swapped for a cheap, hollow-body stand-in that he was directed to smash at the song’s conclusion.
The scene is more a tantrum than the orgiastic onstage freak-out Townshend would probably have delivered. Its chief virtue for Yardbird’s fans lies not in the funny, out-of-character moment (which SF Gate film critic Mick LaSalle calls “one of the weirdest scenes in the movie”). Rather, it was “the chance,” as one fan tells LaSalle, “in the days before MTV and YouTube, to see the Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.” Antonioni had seized the moment. In addition to firing “the opening salvo of the emerging ‘film generation,’” as Roger Ebert wrote, he gave contemporary fans a reason (in addition to explicit sex and nudity), to go see Blowup again and again.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Wooden Artwork That Beautifully Unfolds into a Functional Desk
Robert van Embricqs, a designer based in Amsterdam, has created The Flow Wall Desk–a wooden decoration that “transforms from a piece of art on the wall into a functional desk by showing off its unique aesthetic.” On his site, he writes:
The Flow Wall Desk acknowledges the potential how to combine functionality with art. This results in creating a desk inside one’s indoor environment. And only with one twist, it becomes a true joy to have a separate working area when needed. It can be subscribed as a piece of functional art that builds on the design track record of transformations in space. However, this one offers a part of the interior that shifts with time: a cozy workspace during the day becomes a compact wall hanging after being used.
Inspired by recent global events and the longer-term trends that precede them, to devise a statement piece that lends dignity to the digital workspace through craft, warm textures, and durably engineered fastenings. The Flow Wall Desk is adaptable and with the contemporary design elements, it can be used throughout homes, libraries, hotels, and many other inside designations. During the design process, van Embricqs strove to merge the desk’s execution with its design formula by creating a cohesive whole.
Usability demands that an everyday object such as this should be created with a generalized user’s psychology in mind. Vertical element emerges from the wall like a caterpillar with the help of specifically placed hinges. These exposed brass hinges establish a visual rhythm and ensure that the form can follow its function. This led to the notion of a transformation in form and purpose achieved through a single, simple gesture that everyone can familiarize themselves with. With a single turn by hand around its axis, a tabletop is created and once in its horizontal position, the tabletop is supported by wooden slats, creating a more natural look and organic effect that also serves as a screen for more privacy.
The horizontal work surface is comfortable yet functional due to its depth and width for the seated user and making it perfect for typing and handwriting. Finally, a unique opportunity is created for a temporary work surface and ergonomically adjustable desk in a sunny corner which invites the user to fold that desk away when work is over.
With the finished design appearance, more sustainable material developments are being examined and analyzed for production. And when it comes to functionality, each part of the Flow Wall desk has been specifically engineered without losing the appeal to attract, just like a folding magic trick with a well-kept secret.
You can purchase your own Flow Wall desk (for about $2850) via Robert’s webshop here. And find more of his work on Instagram here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...How to Make Ancient Mesopotamian Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brewing Method Put to the Test
The philosopher Giambattista Vico had quite a few ideas, but we remember him for one above all: Verum esse ipsum factum, often shortened to the principle of verum factum. It means, in essence, that we understand what we make. In accordance with verum factum, then, if you want to understand, say, ancient Mesopotamian beer, you should make some ancient Mesopotamian beer yourself. Such is the path taken in the video above by Max Miller, host of the Youtube series Tasting History.
We previously featured Tasting History here on Open Culture for its humorous and as-faithful-as-possible re-creations of dishes from the past, including periods as recent as the nineteenth century and as distant as the dawn of civilization. No matter the era, humanity has always been eating and drinking — and, just as soon as the necessary technology became available, getting drunk. That we were doing it 4,000 years ago is evidenced by the recipe Miller follows in his quest to re-create Mesopotamian beer, for which even the research proves to be no simple matter.
In fact, he begins with not a recipe at all, but a hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer. But this holy text constitutes only a starting point: Miller goes on to consult not just other information preserved on archaeological artifacts, but at least one expert in the field. The resulting beer-making procedure isn’t without its ambiguity, but you can certainly try it at home. You can try it at home if you’ve got about a week to do so, that is; even ancient beer needed to ferment. (If you’re anything like Miller, you’ll use the waiting time to research more about Mesopotamian society and the significant place of beer within it.)
How does the final product taste? Miller describes it as not carbonated but “effervescent,” with a “nuttiness” to its flavor: “I’m getting, like, a little bit of a cardamom.” (Moderns who prefer a sweeter beer will want to add date syrup.) Perhaps it would go well with a Babylonian lamb stew, or one of the other ancient dishes Miller has re-created on Tasting History. Such a meal would provide a fine occasion to test the principle of verum factum — or an even finer way to test the Sumerian proverb “He who does not know beer, does not know what is good.”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...Joni Mitchell’s Catalog of Albums Now on YouTube: Stream Them Online
2022 — another difficult year for so many — has drawn to a close.
While not a remedy for all the hardships and privations we’ve been privy to, Joni Mitchell’s music remains good medicine. Listening to her always makes us feel more connected, reflective and calm for at least an hour or two.
Lucky us. The beloved singer-songwriter has given us a New Year’s gift — all her albums posted to her official Youtube channel.
What a lovely way to usher the old year offstage, and quietly welcome the new.
We all have our allegiances, though many who identify as fans may discover they’ve missed a couple releases along the way.
She has, to date, released 19 studio albums, 5 live albums, and an EP, as well as inspiring 2 tribute albums. A recent remark on Elton John’s Rocket Hour left us hopeful that more may be in the offing.
Sir Elton is but one of many well known musicians who are unabashed Mitchell fans. Artists as diverse as Harry Styles, k.d. lang, and Herbie Hancock have written songs in response to their favorite Joni cuts.
And the internet teems with covers from both heavy hitters and unknowns. (See them organized by song title on Mitchell’s website, where “Both Sides Now” remains the champ with a whopping 1576 renditions.)
Her fourth album, 1971’s Blue, seems to garner the most fervent praise…
Taylor Swift: She wrote it about her deepest pains and most haunting demons. Songs like ‘River,’ which is just about her regrets and doubts of herself – I think this album is my favorite because it explores somebody’s soul so deeply.”
James Taylor: I said it probably too many times that Joni is like, you tap the tree, and you know, it’s like maple syrup. This stuff, this nectar comes out of the most unusual places.
Jewel: On Blue, you hear everything she experienced, the highs and the lows. It’s such a lonely album — not in the “I don’t have any friends” sense but in the sense that you’re a little bit removed, and always watching. It takes a lot of courage to be that honest, especially as a woman.
Prince on The Hissing of Summer Lawns:
It was the last album I loved all the way through.
Boy George on Court and Spark:
I’ve bought this for many people because it is probably her most accessible [album]. I love unusual voices and I’ve sat and cried to so many of her songs. My favorite is Car On A Hill because I’ve done what it’s about: waited for the boyfriend to turn up as the cars go by.
Björk on 1977’s double album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Hejira:
I think it was that accidental thing in Iceland, where the wrong albums arrive to shore, because I was obsessed with Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Hejira as a teenager. I hear much more of her in those albums. She almost made her own type of music style with those, it’s more a woman’s world.”
Sisters Danielle and Este Haim on 1974’s live album Miles of Aisles:
There’s a little bit of everything. Songs from all her albums up until then, and she’s playing them with the L.A. Express, which was this amazing jazz band… a reimagining of a lot of her early work through this jazz lens.
Enjoy a lovely wander through Joni Mitchell’s oeuvre here. When you click on this page, scroll down to the “Albums & Singles” section, and then move (from left to right) through the entire discography.
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- 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.
Read More...Paul McCartney Explains How Bach Influenced “Blackbird”
If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
For most of humanity, this might mean nabbing a lick or two from Paul McCartney’s playbook.
For Paul McCartney, it meant borrowing from Bach — the fifth movement from Suite in E minor for Lute, to be specific.
As he explained during the above 2005 appearance on the Parkinson Show, when he and his buddy, George Harrison, used to sit around teaching themselves basic rock n’ roll chords, their show off move was a bit of semi-classical fingerpicking that Sir Paul modestly claimed to be “not very good at:”
It was actually classical but we made it semi.
Thusly did the chord progressions of Bach’s Bourree in E minor — a piece which “I never knew the title of, which George and I had learned to play at an early age; he better than me actually” — inspire Blackbird:
Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favorite composers; we felt we had a lot in common with him. For some reason we thought his music was very similar to ours and we latched on to him amazingly quickly. We also liked the stories of him being the church organist and wopping this stuff out weekly, which was rather similar to what we were doing. We were very pleased to hear that…The fingerpicking style was something we admired in Chet Atkins, particularly in a piece called Trambone, though it was also played by Colin Manley, from a group called The Remo Four. They’d started out in Liverpool around the same time as The Beatles.
This deceptively slow burn, now a staple of Sir Paul’s setlists, debuted as a solo acoustic track on the White Album.
Bach’s Bourree in E minor also inspired Jethro Tull and, hilariously, Tenacious D.
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- 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.
Read More...Miley Cyrus & David Byrne Perform David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on New Year’s Eve
Last night, Miley Cyrus and David Byrne performed David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the NBC holiday special Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party. And they also treated viewers to a performance of “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. Not a bad way to send off 2022.
Before leaving 2022 behind, we’ll also flag another Miley Cyrus collaboration–a performance from this summer’s celebration of the life of Taylor Hawkins. Below, watch her take the stage with Def Leppard and perform “Photograph” at the 3:45. No doubt, she can sing.
Happy 2023.
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Read More...The Book of Leaves: A Beautiful Stop Motion Film Featuring 12,000 Pressed Leaves
Brett Foxwell meticulously collected over 12,000 leaves while walking through forests and parks. Then he carefully arranged the leaves, many at different stage of development, into a stop motion sequence. He says:
While collecting leaves, I conceived that the leaf shape [of] every single plant type I could find would fit somewhere into a continuous animated sequence of leaves if that sequence were expansive enough. If I didn’t have the perfect shape, it meant I just had to collect more leaves.
Above, you can see the result of his painstaking work. You can also watch another exacting Foxwell animation, The Woodswimmer, here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
via Petapixel/Laughing Squid
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Read More...How to Make Roman Concrete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Lasting Building Materials
More than a millennium and a half after its fall, we still look back with wonder on the accomplishments of the ancient Roman Empire. Few elements of its legacy impress us as much as its built environment — or in any case, what’s left of its built environment. Still, the fact that anything remains at all of the structures built by the Romans tells us that they were doing something right: specifically, they were doing concrete right. Just how they made that astonishingly durable building material has been a subject of research even in recent years, and we even featured it here on Open Culture back in 2017. But could we make Roman concrete today?
Such is the task of Shawn Kelly, host of the Youtube channel Corporal’s Corner, in the video above. Using materials like volcanic ash, pumice and limestone, he makes a brick that looks more than solid enough to go up against any modern concrete.
As of this writing, this simple video has racked up more than three million views, a number that reflects our enduring fascination with the question of how the ancient Romans created their world — as well as the question addressed in the higher-tech Practical Engineering video below, “Was Roman Concrete Better?”
The fact of the matter is that, despite possessing technologies the Romans could hardly have imagined, their concrete lasts longer than ours. Why that should be the case comes down, in large part, to water: we put a great deal more of it into our concrete than the Romans did, in order to pour it more cheaply and easily. But this makes it more fragile and subject to deterioration over time (as seen in the early dilapidation of certain Brutalist buildings), even despite our use of chemical additives and steel reinforcement. Roman concrete was also mixed with seawater, which caused the formation of crystals within the material that actually strengthened it as it aged — thus cementing, as one wag in the comments puts it, the Romans’ place in history.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...Dave Grohl, Jack Black & Greg Kurstin Sing Rush’s “The Spirit Of Radio” for Hanukkah
Once again, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl and producer Greg Kurstin have teamed up to celebrate Hanukkah by performing songs created by musicians with Jewish roots. Above, they perform–along with Jack Black–Rush’s “The Spirit Of Radio.” (Geddy Lee’s parents were both Jews who survived Auschwitz and Dachau. Lee tells their story below.) Other songs featured in this year’s celebration include Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat & Tears, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” and more. Find performances from prior Hanukkah celebrations in the Relateds below.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...Tom Lehrer Puts His Songs into the Public Domain & Makes Them Free to Download (for a Limited Time)
“Christmas time is here, by golly / Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / Fill the cup and don’t say ‘when.’ ” So sings musical satirist Tom Lehrer on his hit 1959 album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer — which was recorded in March of that year, not that it stopped him from taking an out-of-season jab at the holidays. “Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens / Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens / Even though the prospect sickens / Brother, here we go again.” If it seems to you that he takes a dim view of Christmas, you should hear how he sings about everything else.
Now, more easily than ever, you can hear how Lehrer sings about everything else, by simply downloading his music from his web site. “All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain,” he writes. “All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.” In short, he adds, “I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.” We posted about the release of those songs themselves into the Public Domain a couple years ago, but last month Lehrer made the songs available online–for a limited time.
Not only is An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer free to stream or download on TomLehrerSongs.com — complete with tracks not available even on Spotify — so is its follow-up Revisited, That Was the Year That Was (featuring performances of the songs he wrote for the American version of That Was the Week That Was) and the three-disc collection The Remains of Tom Lehrer. Together these albums contain all the music Lehrer recorded before he stood up from the piano and became a professor, first of political science and later of mathematics (though he did teach some musical theater as well.)
Given his secular Jewish origins and his obvious disdain for the Mammonistic holiday season (at least “as we celebrate it in the United States”) Lehrer would surely get a laugh from us taking this free release of all his music as a Christmas gift. And yet, like all the best Christmas gifts, it has both a surface value and a deeper one. Despite their topical late-fifties-early-sixties references to things like “new math” and Vatican II, his songs can still make us laugh today. But they can also show younger generations a satirical sensibility they’ve never known: culturally literate, dry with well-placed plunges into the lowbrow, transgressive without cheap crudity, all supported by musical aplomb. Maybe Lehrer decided to make his music free because now, in his tenth decade, he can be sure that nobody will surpass him. Find his music here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
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