Julia Child Shows Fred Rogers How to Make a Quick & Delicious Pasta Dish (1974)
Julia Child and Fred Rogers were titans of public television, celebrated for their natural warmth, the ease with which they delivered important lessons to home viewers, and, for a certain sector of the viewing public, how readily their personalities lent themself to parody.
Child’s cooking program, The French Chef, debuted in 1963, and Roger’s much beloved children’s show, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, followed five years later.
Rogers occasionally invited accomplished celebrities to join him for segments wherein they demonstrated their particular talents:
With our guest’s help, I have been able to show a wide diversity of self-expression, the extraordinary range of human potential. I want children and their families to know that there are many constructive ways to express who they are and how they feel.
In 1974, Child paid a call to the neighborhood bakery presided over by “Chef” Don Brockett (whose later credits included a cameo as a “Friendly Psychopath” in Silence of the Lambs…)
The easy-to-prepare pasta dish she teaches Rogers — and, by extension, his “television friend” — to make takes a surprisingly optimistic view of the average pre-school palate.
Red sauce gets a hard pass, in favor of a more sophisticated blend of flavors stemming from tuna, black olives, and pimentos.
Brockett provides an assist with both the cooking and, more importantly, the child safety rules that aren’t always front and center with this celebrity guest.
Child, who had no offspring, comes off as a high-spirited, loosey-goosey, fun aunt, encouraging child viewers to toss the cooked spaghetti “fairly high” after adding butter and oil “because it’s dramatic” and talking as if they’ll be hitting the supermarket solo, a flattering notion to any tot whose refrain is “I do it mySELF!”
She wisely reframes tasks assigned to bigger, more experienced hand — boiling water, knife work — as less exciting than “the fancy business at the end”, and makes it stick by suggesting that the kids “order the grown ups to do what you want done,” a verb choice the ever-respectful Rogers likely would have avoided.
As with The French Chef, her off-the-cuff remarks are a major source of delight.
Watching his guest wipe a wooden cutting board with olive oil, Rogers observes that some of his friends “could do this very well,” to which she replies:
It’s also good for your hands ‘coz it keeps ‘em nice and soft, so rub any excess into your hands.
She shares a bit of stage set scuttlebutt regarding a letter from “some woman” who complained that the off-camera wastebasket made it appear that Child was discarding peels and stems onto the floor.
She said, “Do you think this is a nice way to show young people how to cook, to throw things on the floor!?” And I said, “Well, I have a self cleaning floor! …The self cleaning is me.”
(Rogers appears both amused and relieved when the ultimate punchline steers things back to the realm of good manners and personal responsibility.)
Transferring the slippery pre-cooked noodles from pot to serving bowl, Child reminisces about a wonderful old movie in which someone — “Charlie Chaplin or was it, I guess it was, uh, it wasn’t Mickey Rooney, maybe it was…” — eats spaghetti through a funnel.
If only the Internet had existed in 1974 so intrigued parents could have Googled their way to the Noodle Break at the Bull Pup Cafe sequence from 1918’s The Cook, starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Buster Keaton!
The funnel is but one of many inspired silent spaghetti gags in this surefire don’t‑try-this-at-home kid-pleaser.
We learn that Child named her dish Spaghetti Marco Polo in a nod to a widely circulated theory that pasta originated in China and was introduced to Italy by the explorer, a bit of lore food writer Tori Avey of The History Kitchen finds difficult to swallow:
A common belief about pasta is that it was brought to Italy from China by Marco Polo during the 13th century. In his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, there is a passage that briefly mentions his introduction to a plant that produced flour (possibly a breadfruit tree). The Chinese used this plant to create a meal similar to barley flour. The barley-like meal Polo mentioned was used to make several pasta-like dishes, including one described as lagana (lasagna). Since Polo’s original text no longer exists, the book relies heavily on retellings by various authors and experts. This, combined with the fact that pasta was already gaining popularity in other areas of Italy during the 13th-century, makes it very unlikely that Marco Polo was the first to introduce pasta to Italy.
Ah well.
We’re glad Child went with the China theory as it provides an excuse to eat spaghetti with chopsticks.
Nothing is more day-making than seeing Julia Child pop a small bundle of spaghetti directly into Fred Rogers’ mouth from the tips of her chopsticks…though after using the same implements to feed some to Chef Brockett too, she realizes that this wasn’t the best lesson in food hygiene.
In 2021, this sort of boo-boo would result in an automatic reshoot.
In the wilder, woolier 70s, a more pressing concern, at least as far as public television was concerned, was expanding little Americans’ worldview, in part by showing them how to get a commanding grip on their chopsticks. It’s never too late to learn.
Bon appétit!
JULIA CHILD’S SPAGHETTI MARCO POLO
There are a number of variations online, but this recipe, from Food.com, hews closely to Child’s original, while providing measurements for her eyeballed amounts.
Serves 4–6
INGREDIENTS
1 lb spaghetti
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt black pepper
1 6‑ounce can tuna packed in oil, flaked, undrained
2 tablespoons pimiento, diced or 2 tablespoons roasted red peppers, sliced into strips
2 tablespoons green onions with tops, sliced
2 tablespoons black olives, sliced
2 tablespoons walnuts, chopped
1 cup Swiss cheese, shredded
2 tablespoons fresh parsley or 2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped
Cook pasta according to package directions.
Drain pasta and return to pot, stirring in butter, olive oil, and salt and pepper.
Toss with remaining ingredients and serve, garnished with parsley or cilantro.
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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...Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: An Animated Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown of the Ancient Chinese Treatise
Though not a long book, The Art of War is nevertheless an intimidating one. Composed in the China of the fifth century BC, it comes down to us as perhaps the definitive analysis of military strategy, applicable equally to East, West, antiquity, and modernity alike. Hence the minor but still-productive industry that puts forth adaptations, extensions, and reinterpretations of The Art of War for non-military settings, transposing its lessons into law, business, sports, and other realms besides. But if you want a handle on what its author, the general and strategist Sun Tzu, actually wrote, watch the illustrated video above.
A production of Youtube channel Eudaimonia, previously featured here on Open Culture for a similarly animated exegesis of Machiavelli’s The Prince, it runs more than two and a half hours in full. Far though it exceeds the length of the average explainer video, it does reflect the tendency of Sun Tzu’s succinct observations to expand, when seriously considered, into much wider and more complex discussions. To each of the original text’s chapters the Eudaimonia video devotes a ten-to-fifteen-minute section, conveying not just the content of its lessons but also their relevance to the history of human conflict in the roughly two and a half millennia since they were written.
In chapter two, on waging war, Sun Tzu writes that “in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger.” It was in this spirit that, during the Second World War, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Information launched a media “anger campaign” meant to “increase resolve against the Germans, as until then, the British had little sense of real hostility towards the average German.” In the chapter on weaknesses and strengths, Sun Tzu recommends “the divine art of subtlety and secrecy” as a means of becoming invisible and inaudible to the enemy — much as Julius Caesar did in the Gallic Wars, when he sent scouting ships “painted in Venetian blue, which was a similar color to that of the sea.”
Other examples come from diverse chapters of history. These include the American Civil War, Gandhi’s negotiation of Indian independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the British defeat in Zululand, Joan of Arc’s siege of Orléans, the revolt against the Turkish led by T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), and even Steve Jobs’ turnaround of a nearly bankrupt Apple. Most of us will never find ourselves in situations of quite these stakes. But given that none of us can entirely avoid dealing with conflict, we’d could do worse than to keep the guidance of Sun Tzu on our side.
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Enter the Franz Kafka Caption Contest for a Chance to Win a New Book of the Author’s Drawings (Until June 13)
Imagine if Franz Kafka were charged with picking the winning entries in The New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest.
The punchlines might become a little more obscure.
If that idea fills you with perverse pleasure, perhaps you should toddle over to Yale University Press’s Instagram to contribute some possible captions for eight of the inky drawings the tortured author made in a black notebook between 1901 and 1907.
The intended meaning of these images, included in the new book, Franz Kafka: The Drawings, are as up for grabs as any uncaptioned cartoon on the back page of The New Yorker.
In Conversations with Kafka, author Gustav Janouch recalled how their significance proved elusive even to their creator, and also the frustration his friend expressed regarding his artistic abilities:
I should so like to be able to draw. As a matter of fact, I am always trying to. But nothing comes of it. My drawings are purely personal picture writing, whose meaning even I cannot discover after a time.
Kafka seems to have gone easier on himself in a 1913 letter to fiancée Felice Bauer:
I was once a great draftsman, you know… These drawings gave me greater satisfaction in those days—it’s years ago—than anything else.
Artist Philip Hartigan, who referenced the drawings in a journal and sketchbook class for writing students nails it when he describes how Kafka’s “quick minimum movements … convey the typical despairing mood of his fiction in just a few lines.”
You have until June 13 to make explicit what Kafka did not by leaving your proposed caption for each drawing as a comment on Yale University Press’s Instagram, along the hashtag #KafkaCaptionContest.
Winners will receive a copy of Franz Kafka: The Drawings. Entries will be judged by editor Andreas Kilcher of and theorist Judith Butler, who contributed an essay that you might consider mining for material:
Was it a muffled death? Or perhaps it was no death at all, just a tumbling of intercourse, a sexual flurry?
Yes, that might go nicely with Kafka’s drawing of a seated figure collapsed over a table, below.
https://images.app.goo.gl/mGfZzLcpRXuyqqU68
Some alternate proposals from contest hopefuls:
I needed to bathe my battered knuckles with my tears.
He studied his newly acquired rare stamp with a powerful loupe.
How can I make sure that all my letters and papers will be destroyed after my death? I know — I’ll ask my closest friend to take care of it!
This last is a reference to Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, who defied Kafka’s explicit wish that all of his work be burned upon his death, save The Metamorphosis, and five short stories: The Judgment, The Stoker, In the Penal Colony, A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist.
Brod cut Kafka’s drawing of the standing figure, above, from his sketchbook and kept in an envelope with a few others. Some of the current caption suggestions for this haunting, never before seen image:
my face is an umbrella to my tears
I couldn’t face myself.
I am the Walrus goo goo g’joob
https://images.app.goo.gl/e6v8xbuRin3qWcS56
Of the eight drawings in the caption contest, Drinker, may offer the most narrative possibilities. A representative sampling of the inventiveness that’s come over the transom thusfar:
I, period
Angered by the impudence of the cabernet, i had only the courage to berate its shadow
Waiter! There’s a roach in my wine.
Enter Yale University Press’ Kafka Caption Contest (or get a feel for the competition) here. Entries will be accepted through June 13. Full contest rules are here. Good luck!
Explore the drawings and other contents of Franz Kafka’s black notebook here.
Purchase Franz Kafka: The Drawings, the first book to publish the entirety of the author’s graphic output, here.
- 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...Werner Herzog’s New Novel, The Twilight World, Tells the Story of the WWII Japanese Soldier Who Famously Refused to Surrender
As everyone knows, Japan conceded defeat in the Second World War on August 15, 1945. But as many also know, certain individual Japanese soldiers refused to surrender, each continuing to fight the war for decades in his own way. The most famous was Lieutenant Onoda Hiroo, who hid out in the Philippines mounting guerrilla attacks — at first with a few fellow soldiers, and finally alone — until 1974. Onoda became a celebrity upon retuning to his homeland, and his admirers weren’t only Japanese. In Tokyo to direct an opera in 1997, Werner Herzog requested an introduction to one man only: the soldier who’d fought the war for 30 years.
Now Onoda has become the subject of one of Herzog’s latest projects: not a film, but a novel called The Twilight World. In his native German (brought into English by translator-critic Michael Hofmann), Herzog has written of not just his own meeting with Onoda but narrated Onoda’s own long experience in the Philippines.
“Onoda’s war is of no meaning for the cosmos, for history, for the course of the war,” goes one passage quoted by A. O. Scott in The Atlantic. “Onoda’s war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream, but Onoda’s war, sired by nothing, is nevertheless overwhelming, an event extorted from eternity.”
One thinks of the protagonists of Herzog’s films, both imagined and real: the steamship-dragging rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, the downed Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, the deluded conquistador Lope de Aguirre, the ill-fated wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell. In Onoda’s case as well, Scott writes, “Herzog declines to treat him as a joke. He is clearly fascinated by the absurdity of this hero’s situation, and also determined to defend the dignity of a man who had no choice but to persevere in an impossible mission.” Anyone familiar with Herzog’s career, full of harrowing encounters and unpredictable turns but clearly operating by an iron logic all its own, can imagine why he saw in Onoda a kindred spirit.
Eight years after his death at the age of 91, Onoda remains a figure of general fascination, the subject of history videos viewed by millions as well as last year’s Onoda: 10,000 Nights of the Jungle, a feature by French director Arthur Harari. Of course, “the guy who stays in the field long after the war is over is, to modern eyes, a comical, cautionary figure, an avatar of patriotism carried to ridiculous extremes,” writes Scott. “We rarely pause to look for motives other than blind obedience, or to imagine what those years of phantom combat in the wilderness must have felt like.” Perhaps we twenty-first century Westerners simply lack the imaginative power necessary to do so — all of us, that, is except Werner Herzog. You can pre-order his novel, The Twilight World, now. It hits the shelves next week, on June 14th.
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...What Happened to the Missing Half of the Roman Colosseum?
What happened to the missing half of the Colosseum? It may be a question about ancient Rome you were afraid to ask in school, as the title of Dr. Garret Ryan’s video above suggests. Or maybe, after seeing the massive ancient ruin’s jagged profile all your life on pizza boxes and softball t‑shirts sponsored by your local Italian eatery, you never thought much of the Colosseum’ shape at all. You could spend hundreds of dollars and build a LEGO Colosseum, hundreds more and visit it yourself, or drive past it every day on your commute, and never think much about it.
Despite currently hosting more visitors per year than Trevi Fountain and the Sistine Chapel combined, the monument to bread and circus imperial Rome suffered from severe neglect in the millennia and a‑half after it was used as a gladiator arena – “some 1,500 years of neglect and haphazard construction projects,” Tom Mueller writes at Smithsonian, “layered one upon another.” Used as a quarry after the 6th century, for most of its long, decaying life, the amphitheater and its “hypogeum” (the intricate system of tunnels and earthworks underneath) went fully to seed.
For most of its history, that is to say, humans mostly ignored the Colosseum. But curiosity about its history pays:
Down through the centuries, people filled the hypogeum with dirt and rubble, planted vegetable gardens, stored hay and dumped animal dung. In the amphitheater above, the enormous vaulted passages sheltered cobblers, blacksmiths, priests, glue-makers and money-changers, not to mention a fortress of the Frangipane, 12th-century warlords. By then, local legends and pilgrim guidebooks described the crumbling ring of the amphitheater’s walls as a former temple to the sun. Necromancers went there at night to summon demons.
In the late 16th century — before popes paraded through the arena to honor Christians fed to wild beasts — “Pope Sixtus V, the builder of Renaissance Rome, tried to transform the Colosseum into a wool factory.” The venture failed, and soon after the huge variety of wild plant life began to attract botanists, who catalogued some 337 different species. The hypogeum, the architectural mechanism that once powered spectacles on the floor above, was only cleared in the 1930s by Benito Mussolini in his glorification of classical Rome.
Restoration on the Colosseum did not begin until the 1990s and visitors have only been allowed to see the ruin’s inner workings since 2011, almost 2000 years since it was first constructed between 72 and 80 AD. Originally called the Flavian Amphitheatre, the building’s name was changed to reflect its proximity to the Colossus of Nero, a monument to imperial hubris that has itself long disappeared. So, what about that missing half? “The short answer,” writes Dr. Ryan, “is: earthquakes and popes, in that order.”
The longer answer, as you might imagine, is far more colorful, and far bloodier, involving events like the Emperor Trajan’s 123-day celebration of his victory in Dacia, “in the course of which 5,000 pairs of gladiators fought and 11,000 animals were killed.” After around 500 years of this kind of bloodsport (and other amusements) and another 1,500 years of deterioration, I’d say the Colosseum has held up remarkably well, a tribute to Roman architectural engineering, the one thing the Roman Empire seemed to love more than violent death.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...When David Bowie & Brian Eno Made a Twin Peaks-Inspired Album, Outside (1995)
By any measure, David Bowie was a superstar. He first rose to fame in the nineteen-seventies, a process galvanized by his creation and assumption of the rocker-from-Mars persona Ziggy Stardust. In the following decade came Let’s Dance, on the back of which he sold out stadiums and dominated the still-new MTV. Yet through it all, and indeed up until his death in 2016, he kept at least one foot outside the mainstream. It was in the nineties, after his aesthetically cleansing stint with guitar-rock outfit Tin Machine, that Bowie made use of his stardom to explore his full spectrum of interests, which ranged from the basic to the bizarre, the mundane to the macabre.
This suggests a good deal in common between Bowie and another high-profile David of his generation: David Lynch, long one of the most famous film directors alive. “There are many obvious, surface connections and intersections between Lynch and Bowie,” write film critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. “Both have dabbled in film and music, as well as painting, theatre and performance art. Both are actors — Bowie slightly more conventionally so than Lynch.” Lynch would no doubt agree with Bowie’s insistence that “my interpretation of my work is really immaterial,” that “it’s the interpretation of the listener, or the viewer, which is all-important.”
These words appear in López and Martin’s analysis of Twin Peaks, the television series Lynch created in collaboration with Mark Frost, and Outside, the album Bowie created in collaboration with Brian Eno. When it premiered on ABC in the spring of 1990, Twin Peaks became a minor sensation by conjuring a familiar yet deeply strange atmosphere such as no one had never seen on television before. It also pioneered what López and Adrian Martin call “the Dead Girl/Woman genre, which traces out a labyrinthine mystery from the discovery of a young female corpse.” What brings Special Agent Dale Cooper to Twin Peaks, Washington, we recall, is the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer.
What brings Nathan Adler, a detective in the Art Crimes unit, to Oxford Town, New Jersey is the murder of the fourteen-year-old Baby Grace Blue. Thus begins the Twin Peaks-inspired storyline of Outside, Bowie’s own 1995 entry into the genre of the Dead Girl/Woman. Like Lynch and Frost’s show, Bowie’s album has a cast of eccentrics: Adler and Baby Grace, but also the likes of criminal “outsider” Leon Blank; Algeria Touchshriek, dealer in “art-drugs and DNA prints”; and a sinister figure known as both the Artist and the Minotaur. All are played by Bowie himself, who makes use of various accents (a technique practiced with his appearance in the 1992 Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me) and voice-processing techniques.
At the time this 75-minute “non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle,” as Bowie labeled it, gave his listeners a lot to take in, to say nothing of the major media outlets attempting to publicize it. “This new project is all about sex, violence, and death,” says the CBC’s Laurie Brown in a typical piece of television coverage. But it also deals with the merging of those human eternals with art and popular culture, a process that fascinated Bowie more and more as the nineties progressed — as did “the re-emergence of Neo-Paganism, ritual body art, and the fragmentation of society,” as he puts it in Outside’s official making-of video.
Bowie and Eno intended Outside (officially 1. Outside) as the first in a series that would ultimately constitute “a diary in music and in texture of what it felt like to be around at the end of the Millennium.” In one press conference, Bowie hinted that “the narrative might fall by the wayside,” much as Lynch and Frost originally intended to leave Laura Palmer’s death unsolved. That the second volume never appeared only underscores the tantalizing incompleteness of Outside, which López and Martin highlight as another similarity to Twin Peaks: “Both works are serial and multiple, existing in various official and unofficial forms, in spin-offs, outtakes” — not least the never-properly-released “Leon suites” Bowie and Eno recorded before the album itself — “and in numerous fan commentaries.”
A kind of circle closed in 1997 when Outside’s “I’m Deranged” soundtracked the opening credits of Lynch’s Lost Highway. But the work continued to hold out possibilities until the end of Bowie’s life: “We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks,” Eno said. “We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new.” Despite his Lynchian resistance to interpretation, Bowie did acknowledge even in 1995 the thematic importance of mortality itself. Outside’s first single was called “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” and “the filthy lesson in question is the fact that life is finite.” For him, “knowing that I’ve got a finite time in life on Earth actually clarifies things and makes me feel quite buoyant.” Bowie knew — or learned — that life is too short not to follow your fascinations to their limits.
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Kate Bush Enjoys a (Long-Overdue) Revival, Sparked by Season 4 of Stranger Things
There’s never been a bad time for a Kate Bush revival. Those who lived through the 1980s may always associate her biggest songs with their memories. Fans who only know the 80s by way of Netflix know it by proxy and don’t suffer from nostalgia. But whatever Kate’s big, reverb-soaked drums, big Fairlight synths, big hair, and enormous vocals evoke for audiences now, one thing is certain: Kate Bush’s music is timeless.
Rebecca Nicholson sums up the sentiment in a Guardian post on the renaissance Bush is now enjoying, thanks to the use of her 1985 hit, “Running Up That Hill (Deal With God)” in the new season of Netflix hit series, Stranger Things: “If any song can steel itself against over familiarity, it’s ‘Running Up That Hill.’ Whether it is for the first time or the 500th time, you still hear it now and think, what the hell was that? And then you play it again.”
Not to spoil, but the love of a perfect pop song after innumerable repetitions plays a significant role in the plot of Stranger Things’ Season 4, just one of the winking critical touches in the show’s use of 80s culture as commentary on the present. (If you haven’t seen the show yet, maybe skip the clip below.) Can we find the same comforts in our disposable pop culture, the show seems to ask? Maybe we need musical guidance from an icon like Kate Bush now more than ever.
When the show’s producers approached Bush about using the song, she displayed her usual reticence. Since her breakout debut single, “Wuthering Heights” and the resulting album and tour, she has shunned the press and stage, preferring to communicate with videos and taking several years off, only to return onstage recently after 35 years, to the delight of stalwart fans worldwide. Now, since Stranger Things’ new release, “a new generation is tapping ‘who is Kate Bush?’ into the search bar,” Nicholson writes.
The song is already back in the UK top 10 (where it hit no. 3 originally), and it should “at least give its original chart peak a run for its money” in the US, where it only reached no. 30, Billboard comments. For those who need an introduction, the Trash Theory video at the top, “Running Up That Hill: How Kate Bush Became the Queen of Alt-Pop,” will get you caught up on one of the most brilliant — and underrated, in the US — pop stars of the past forty years.
Despite showing her usual caution, however, when the show’s producers sent Bush a script and an explanation of how “Running Up That Hill” would be used, she revealed that she was already a fan of the show and agreed to the song’s licensing, something the 63-year-old singer almost never does. Then, she made a rare public statement on her website:
You might’ve heard that the first part of the fantastic, gripping new series of ‘Stranger Things’ has recently been released on Netflix. It features the song, ‘Running Up That Hill’ which is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show — I love it too! Because of this, Running Up That Hill is charting around the world and has entered the UK chart at No. 8. It’s all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song.
I wait with bated breath for the rest of the series in July.
Best wishes,
Kate
Fans of the show all wait, with Kate, for its return, but not nearly as eagerly as fans of Kate Bush awaited a sign from their idol for decades, a self-made artist who defined her era by never bowing to its dictates. Now, we hope, she’s come back to stay for a while.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch Ella Fitzgerald Put Her Extraordinary Vocal Agility on Display, in a Live Rendition of “Summertime” (1968)
“I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” — Ira Gershwin
No one ever gave Ella Fitzgerald faint praise. We could point to cuts from nearly any one of her over 200 albums as evidence for why she is the undisputed “Queen of Jazz,” a title for which she worked hard in her nearly 60-year career. But she’s better known by another name, “The First Lady of Song,” for definitive interpretations of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and, of course, George and Ira Gershwin. Fitzgerald’s recordings of their songs played “an essential role in the broader transformation of the Gershwin’s music from show tunes to American Songbook standards,” writes the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative.
What’s fascinating about that transformation is the way in which Fitzgerald’s renditions of popular songs elevated them to eternal mainstream status by drawing on the rhythmic and melodic resources of jazz, a distinctly Black American music sometimes cast as a threat to the U.S. establishment when Fitzgerald began her career. (We need look no further than the vicious persecution of Billie Holiday by the country’s first drug czar, Henry Anslinger, as case in point.) America may not always have been eager to embrace Fitzgerald, but she was happy nonetheless to gift the country its greatest music.
Fitzgerald’s 5‑LP set of Gershwin songs, produced by Norman Granz in 1959, continues to be “the most ambitious of the celebrated song books recorded by Ella,” Jazz Messengers writes, “and one of the best vocal jazz albums ever made.” Recorded two years earlier by Granz in Los Angeles, her Porgy and Bess with Louis Armstrong “remains one of the true gems in jazz history.” Fitzgerald’s voice is unparalleled. She could do almost anything with it, from reaching down low to imitate Armstrong’s growl to breaking a glass with her high C for a Memorex ad twenty years later.
Dizzy Gillespie once said that Fitzgerald could sing back anything he played for her, and she cited horns as her primary vocal inspiration. “She sang like an instrument,” says pianist Billy Taylor, who played with her in the 1940s, “like a clarinet or like a trombone or like a whatever.” The irony, of course, is that horns and many other melodic instruments achieved their timbre by trying to imitate the human voice. Fitzgerald had the original; she needed no accompaniment — she was the music, with “impeccable timing and perfect pitch,” NPR writes. “In fact, band musicians said they would tune up to her voice.”
In the video at the top from a performance in Berlin in 1968, you can see Fitzgerald “destroy” the harmonic minor scale, as the YouTube uploader puts it, while pianist Tee Carson looks on in awe. The song, from Porgy and Bess (see the full performance further up), is just one of many written by the Gershwins that “transcends its musical theatre origins” due to Fitzgerald’s improvisatory brilliance and musical sensitivity. Just above, you can hear that live vocal track stripped of instrumentation except Ella’s voice in a Wings of Pegasus analysis video of the “depth of her expression” and vocal perfection.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Ray Liotta (RIP) Talks About His Most Memorable Performances: Something Wild, Goodfellas, Field of Dreams, and More
Over the nearly four decades he acted in motion pictures, Ray Liotta worked with auteurs from Jonathan Demme to Martin Scorsese to Noah Baumbach — and also appeared in the likes of Operation Dumbo Drop, and Muppets from Space, and Street Kings 2: Motor City. But whether in an acclaimed Hollywood masterwork, a goofy comedy, or a direct-to-video thriller, Liotta’s characters always seem wholly to belong there, exuding his signature mixture of half-bluffing gravitas and erratically magnetic suavity. His death last month has sent many of us back to his varied filmography, some highlights of which the man himself discusses in the GQ video above.
After a few years in the soap-opera trenches, Liotta became a star in 1986 with his portrayal of a rough-hewn ex-convict in Demme’s modern screwball comedy Something Wild. But the chance to play that breakout part, as he explains in the video, only came his way after he worked up the nerve to ask Melanie Griffith — a connection he’d made in acting classes — to get him into the audition.
“I was just ready and wanting it,” he remembers, and surely these feelings stoked the characteristic intensity, sometimes menacing and sometimes comic, that would come through in that role, and for which he would soon become well known. Just three years later, Liotta was playing Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams (a beloved picture he admits to never having seen).
The year after that, Liotta put in perhaps his best-known performance as the eager but doomed mafia associate Henry Hill in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Though he could play everyone from a bartender to a commercial jingle-writer to Frank Sinatra, his roles thereafter would include no small number of criminals, police officers, military men, and special agents: each an authority figure in his way, each made vivid by Liotta’s paradoxical air of unstable solidity. It seems that he especially savored the recent NBC crime drama Shades of Blue, in which he played “a bisexual cop that is on the take, but also loves his group of cops that he works with.” With Liotta’s death, we lost one of the very few working performers who could bring such a character to leering, convincing life.
Related content:
How Martin Scorsese Directs a Movie: The Techniques Behind Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and More
Orson Welles on the Art of Acting: “There is a Villain in Each of Us”
14 Actors Acting: A Gallery of Classic Screen Types
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Susan Sontag’s Commencement Address Advice: “Pay Attention. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.”
Image by Lynn Gilbert, via Wikimedia Commons
“The times we live in are indeed alarming. It is a time of the most appalling escalation of violence — violence to the environment, both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’; violence to all living beings.” But “it is also a time of a vertiginous drop in cultural standards, of virulent anti-intellectualism, and of triumphant mediocrity.” You may, at this point, already find yourself in agreement with these words. But they’re the words of Susan Sontag, now seventeen years dead, and as such can’t actually be describing our present moment. In fact she spoke them in, and about, 1983, during her first commencement address at Wellesley College.
Characteristically unsparing, Sontag extended her charge of mediocrity even to “the educational system that you have just passed through, or has passed you through.” In her view, “trivializing standards, using as their justification the ideal of democracy, have made the very idea of a serious humanist education virtually unintelligible to most people.” If it is to happen at all, resistance to this mediocrity must happen at the level of the individual. “Perhaps the most useful suggestion I can make on the day when most of you are ceasing to be students,” Sontag says, “is that you go on being students — for the rest of your lives. Don’t move to a mental slum.”
This point returned, somewhat altered, in Sontag’s last commencement address, delivered twenty years later at Vassar College. “Try not to live in a linguistic slum,” she advised the class of 2003. Indeed, “try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American,” or “that you belong to the vast, the overwhelming majority of people on this planet who don’t have passports, don’t live in dwellings equipped with both refrigerators and telephones, who have never even once flown in a plane.” Though celebrated primarily as a critic, Sontag was also a novelist, and like Vladimir Nabokov understood full well the necessity of imagination to a proper intellectual life.
Elsewhere in her Vassar address, Sontag also makes the highly Nabokovian point that “no book is worth reading that isn’t worth re-reading.” Though the full text of the speech isn’t online, you’ll find these and other choice quotes from it at Vassar Quarterly. Sontag’s key theme seems to have been attention. “Pay attention,” she says in a passage still circulated on social media today. “It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. (Two years later, David Foster Wallace would make a similar point about being ” “conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to” in his famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.)
When we develop and retain the habit of paying attention, we see things others don’t, especially those truths that run counter even to our own professed beliefs. “Our society does not censor as totalitarian societies do; on the contrary, our society promises liberty, self-fulfillment, and self-expression,” Sontag says. But pay attention, and you’ll notice that “many features of our so-called culture have as their goal and result the reduction of our mental life, or our mental operation; and this is precisely, I would argue, what censorship is about.” Nearly two decades have passed since Sontag said this, and as she might have expected, we tune out at greater peril than ever.
Related content:
John Berger (RIP) and Susan Sontag Take Us Inside the Art of Storytelling (1983)
Susan Sontag’s List of 10 Parenting Rules
Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995)
David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech “This is Water” Visualized in a Short Film
‘Never Be Afraid’: William Faulkner’s Speech to His Daughter’s Graduating Class in 1951
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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