How To Make the Perfect Cappuccino According to the World Barista Champion (Almost NSFW)
What do I want for Christmas? I’ll settle for a little more insight into how to make the perfect cappuccino, the stuff that has reliably kept this site running day in, day out, for the past 9 years.
Enter Michael Phillips, Director for Education at Blue Bottle Coffee and the 2010 World Barista Champion, who, in this video produced by Munchies, offers a six minute primer on cappuccino-making. When all is said and done, what’s my takeaway? To achieve coffee Nirvana, maybe I need some better gear, like a La Marzocco. Or maybe, really, I need to take my love of coffee to another level, as Phillips clearly does in a nearly x‑rated moment at the very end. As with so many things, it’s not the gear, but the love and dedication, that makes the difference.
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Read More...Stan Lee Reads “The Night Before Christmas,” Telling the Tale of Santa Claus, the Greatest of Super Heroes
“He would turn over in his grave if he knew I’m about to read this,” says Stan Lee, Marvel Comics’ grand poo-bah, before launching into Clement Clarke Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” Moore’s 1823 poem helped solidify various ideas about Santa Claus and Christmas, especially in America, much like Lee and his co-creators forged the mutli-character Marvel Universe that now dominates 21st century mythology.
So who better to read the origin story of this costumed superhero than Stan the Man? Because we’re talking about Good St. Nick, a beloved non-human who is able to traverse the earth in the span of one night, squeeze down chimneys without getting stuck, burned, or even dirtying his clothes, gives presents freely, and whose sled is powered purely by magical reindeer, all with their own names. Plus he lives in a fortress of toymaking quasi-solitude at the North Pole.
Lee really gets into the carnival barker style in his reading from 2009, much like his own overheated prose in the pages of his comics. You can still hear the busy pulse of his native Manhattan in that gravelly voice. And if you’re wondering if Lee puts his own spin on things, wait till the end.
And for those looking for more Stan Lee Reading the Classics, here he is reading Poe’s “The Raven.”
You’ll find bother readings in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Bach’s Prélude N°1 Played on Boomwhacker Percussion Tubes
Since 1999, the French juggling group Les Objets Volants (The Flying Objects) have been entertaining audiences worldwide. Beyond juggling, their shows incorporate elements of theater, visual arts and even mathematics. And the group takes special pride in exploring new ways of handling and manipulating everyday objects. Which brings us to the performance above. There you can see Les Objets Volants perform Bach’s Prélude N°1. (which more typically sounds something like this) on “boomwhackers,” those hollow, color-coded, plastic percussion tubes, which are tuned to different musical pitches. Recorded last March, the clip is an outtake from a Les Objets Volants show called “Liaison Carbone,” which explores concepts in physics. Enjoy.
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Read More...John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Anything You Think Is Really Good”
So you want to be a rock and roll star? Or a writer, or a filmmaker, or a comedian, or what-have-you…. And yet, you don’t know where to start. You’ve heard you need to find your own voice, but it’s difficult to know what that is when you’re just beginning. You have too little experience to know what works for you and what doesn’t. So? “Steal,” as the great John Cleese advises above, “or borrow or, as the artists would say, ‘be influenced by’ anything that you think is really good and really funny and appeals to you. If you study that and try to reproduce it in some way, then it’ll have your own stamp on it. But you have a chance of getting off the ground with something like that.”
Cleese goes on to sensibly explain why it’s nearly impossible to start with something completely new and original; it’s like “trying to fly a plane without any lessons.” We all learn the rudiments of everything we know by imitating others at first, so this advice to the budding writer and artist shouldn’t sound too radical. But if you need more validation for it, consider William Faulkner’s exhortation to take whatever you need from other writers. The beginning writer, Faulkner told a class at the University of Virginia, “takes whatever he needs, wherever he needs, and he does that openly and honestly.” There’s no shame in it, unless you fail to ever make it your own. Or, says Faulkner, to make something so good that others will steal from you.
One theory of how this works in literature comes from critic Harold Bloom, who argued in The Anxiety of Influence that every major poet more or less stole from previous major poets; yet they so misread or misinterpreted their influences that they couldn’t help but produce original work. T.S. Eliot advanced a more conservative version of the claim in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” We have a “tendency to insist,” wrote Eliot, on “those aspects or parts of [a poet’s] work in which he least resembles anyone else.” (Both Eliot and Faulkner used the masculine as a universal pronoun; whatever their biases, no gender exclusion is implied here.) On the contrary, “if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”
It may have been a requirement for Eliot that his literary predecessors be long deceased, but John Cleese suggests no such thing. In fact, he worked closely with many of his favorite comedy writers. The point he makes is that one should “copy someone who’s really good” in order to “get off the ground.” In time—whether through becoming better than your influences, or misreading them, or combining their parts into a new whole—you will, Cleese and many other wise writers suggest, develop your own style.
Cleese has liberally discussed his influences, in his recent autobiography and elsewhere, and one can clearly see in his work the impression comedic forbears like Laurel and Hardy and the writer/actors of The Goon Show had on him. But whatever he stole or borrowed from those comedians he also made entirely his own through practice and perseverance. Just above, see a television special on Cleese’s comedy heroes, with interviews from Cleese, legends who followed him, like Rik Mayall and Steve Martin, and those who worked side-by-side with him on Monty Python and other classic shows.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rocking & Swinging Christmas Albums: From James Brown and Johnny Cash to Christopher Lee & The Ventures
When you think Christmas, you probably think recently deceased Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland, no? No, you probably don’t, but he made a Christmas record all the same in 2011 (see his “Winter Wonderland” video above). You might say critics didn’t love it, but that’s not really the point. Artists often record Christmas records as novelty items for shoppers on a tear to snatch up and shove in the basket with other last-minute detritus. It seems like common wisdom that if you get your Christmas album on a Starbucks or Target product display, you’ll probably have a pretty happy new year.
But then there are the rare exceptions, Christmas albums made with care, by artists who surely wanted to make money, but who also made something uniquely great of well-worn holiday classics, or penned new ones of their own. There is, of course, the mostly instrumental jazz greatness of Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. But have you heard instrumental surf-rock legends The Ventures Christmas album? It’s outstanding. You’re intimately familiar with The Jackson 5’s brilliant soul renditions of songs like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” but you haven’t yet begun to yuletide, I say, until you’ve put on James Brown’s Funky Christmas, featuring such original tunes as “Go Power at Christmas Time” and the heartfelt plea on behalf of impoverished kids, “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto.”
We’ve got these albums and many more greats—from Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, Willie Nelson, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley etc.—compiled in the Spotify playlist above, where they rub shoulders with unexpected gems from indie band Low, punk rockers Bad Religion, and horror legend Christopher Lee, whose Heavy Metal Christmas and Heavy Metal Christmas Too should be required listening at every holiday party. Hosting one of your own? Pull up our playlist of Christmas music worth hearing, hit play, and enjoy many quality hours of jazz, funk, country, soul, and rock and roll cheer and tidings. These suggestions come to us via Rolling Stone, Complex, and our readers on Twitter. If you need to download Spotify’s software, get it here. You can find a complete list of the albums below, with links to purchase them, should you need a last minute gift.
James Brown’s Funky Christmas
Johnny Cash — The Classic Christmas Album
The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album
Louis Armstrong and Friends — What a Wonderful Christmas
A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector
Bob Dylan, Christmas in the Heart
We Wish You a Metal Xmas … And a Headbanging New Year
The Ventures’ Christmas Album
Jacob Miller, Natty Christmas
A Very Special Christmas Volume 1
A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra
Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas
Bing Crosby, White Christmas
The Jackson 5 Christmas Album
Sufjan Stevens, Songs for Christmas
Emmylou Harris, Light of the Stable
James Brown, Soulful Christmas
Carpenters’ Christmas Collection
Bad Religion, Christmas Songs
Christopher Lee, Heavy Metal Christmas and Heavy Metal Christmas Too
Squirrel Nut Zippers, Christmas Caravan
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Jane Austen Writes a Letter to Her Sister While Hung Over: “I Believe I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night”
In a time when people offer up every gesture as fodder for their adoring social media public, it’s a little difficult to imagine living a life as private as Jane Austen (1775–1817) did. And yet, the impression we have of her as shy and retiring is misleading. She did not achieve literary fame during her lifetime, it’s true, and it’s not clear that she desired it. As her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote in the Memoir of Jane Austen, the 1870 biographical sketch that helped popularize Austen in the 19th century, “her talents did not introduce her to the notice of other writers, or connect her with the literary world, or in any degree pierce through the obscurity of her domestic retirement.” Yet, reducing Austen’s personality, as Austen-Leigh does, to “the moral rectitude, the correct taste, and the warm affections with which she invested her ideal characters” misses her fierce intelligence and complexity.
Austen’s nephew’s portrait of her seems concerned with preserving those canons of propriety that she scrupulously documented and satirized in her novels. Perhaps this is partly why he characterizes her as a very shy person. But we know that Austen maintained a lively social life and kept up regular correspondence with family and friends. Her letter-writing, some of it excerpted in Austen-Leigh’s biography, gives us the distinct impression that she used her letters to practice the sharp portraits she drew in the novels of the mores and strictures of her social class. Thus it is surprising when her nephew tells us we are “not to expect too much from them.” “The style is always clear,” he opined, “and generally animated, while a vein of humour continually gleams through the whole; but the materials may be thought inferior to the execution, for they treat only of the details of domestic life. There is in them no notice of politics or public events; scarcely any discussions on literature, or other subjects of general interest.”
What Austen’s nephew seems not to understand is what her legions of adoring readers and critics have since come to see in her work: in Austen, the “details of domestic life” are revealed as microcosms of her society’s politics, public events, literature, and “subjects of general interest.” Austen-Leigh almost admits as much, despite himself, when he compares his aunt’s letters to “the nest some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand, of the twigs and mosses supplied by the tree in which it is placed; curiously constructed out of the simplest matters.” In Austen’s hands, however, the small domestic dramas proceeding on the country estates around her were anything but simple matters. Letter-writing plays a central role in novels like Pride and Prejudice, as in most fiction of the period. The surviving Austen letters are worth reading as source material for the novels—or worth reading for their own sake, so enjoyable are their turns of phrase and withering characterizations.
Take a November, 1800 letter Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra (preserved in the so-called “Brabourne edition” of her letters). Austen begins by confessing, “I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day.” To the “venial error” of her hangover she attributes “any indistinctness of writing.” She then goes on to describe in vivid and very witty detail the ball she’d attended the night previous, taking the risk of boring her sister “because one is prone to think much more of such things the morning after they happen, than when time has entirely driven them out of one’s recollection.” Read an excerpt of her description below and see if the scene doesn’t come alive before your eyes:
There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck. The two Miss Coxes were there: I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad-featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago; the other is refined into a nice, composed-looking girl, like Catherine Bigg. I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys and thought of poor Rosalie; I looked at his daughter, and thought her a queer animal with a white neck. Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think, a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She has got rid of some part of her child, and danced away with great activity looking by no means very large. Her husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so very old. The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish, very like Anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose. The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice. Miss Debary, Susan, and Sally, all in black, but without any stature, made their appearance, and I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.
You can read the letter in full at Letters of Note, who have included it in their excellent follow-up correspondence collection, More Letters of Note. For more context and other letters to Cassandra from this period, see this section of the Brabourne Austen letters.
via Letters of Note
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...CBGB is Reborn … As a Restaurant in Newark Airport
CBGB, the birthplace of New York’s 1970s punk scene, closed in 2006, with Patti Smith headlining the final show. It was the end of an era, another great New York institution shutting its doors.
Since then, if you wanted to re-live the CBGB experience, you could take a virtual tour of the grungy digs online, or watch vintage videos of 197s0s CBGB shows featuring The Ramones, the Talking Heads, Blondie, and even a young Patti Smith. And now you can seemingly try to recapture the Bowery vibe in Newark, New Jersey.
As the tweet above from indie radio station WFMU suggests, CBGB will be reincarnated apparently as a restaurant in a Newark Airport terminal, with a menu offering Cheeseburgers, Chicken Wings, Caprese Salads, Seared Togarashi Tuna, and Kobe Chili Dogs. The menu doesn’t seem to be shooting for authenticity, but maybe, hopefully the bathrooms will.
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Read More...Shot-By-Shot Breakdowns of Spielberg’s Filmmaking in Jaws, Scorsese’s in Cape Fear, and De Palma’s in The Untouchables
This past summer, we featured a shot-by-shot breakdown of several sequences in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris by filmmaker and video essayist Antonios Papantoniou. Solaris, as well as the rest of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, has given and will continue to give detail-oriented cinephiles a seemingly infinite amount of material to break down, scrutinize, and explain the genius of.
But what of big Hollywood films? Do they have nothing of interest to offer? Papantoniou clearly doesn’t think so: his other Shot by Shot video essays include looks, and very close looks indeed, at Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear, and even the mother of all blockbusters, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
These three auteurs, all of the same generation, came up in the 1970s cohort of filmmakers who brought about the “New Hollywood,” a movement wherein young directors like Spielberg, De Palma, and Scorsese (as well as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, and many others) changed the rules of classical cinema, introducing a host of subjects and techniques previously unheard of in mainstream American films. Yet they still did make mainstream American films, which required a kind of hybridization of cutting-edge sensibilities with silver-screen expectations. Papantoniou specifically examines how these directors accomplish it through the kind of shots they capture and how they cut them together.
Papantoniou’s analyses identify the visual evidence of Spielberg’s “appetite for nonstop dynamic filmmaking,” De Palma’s “own unique post-modern style” expressed through techniques like point-of-view-shots, and of how “Scorsese distincts [sic] himself by adopting more rebellious techniques.” You might get the sense of a slight awkwardness in the language here, but the images selected speak for themselves — and besides, if you took film studies classes in college, you no doubt had at least one or two professors who compensated for their odd turns of phrase with their rigorous love of cinema, and from whom you ultimately learned a great deal. Video essays like these have increasingly made it possible for anyone, without going back to college or even going in the first place, to do that kind of learning — and, whether watching Tarkovsky or Spielberg, to never watch them inattentively again.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Art Exhibit on Bill Murray Opens in the UK
Somebody get us Bill Murray stat!
The actor and secular saint has no direct involvement with BILL MURRAY: A Story of Distance, Size, and Sincerity at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art but the interview with artist Brian Griffiths, above, suggests that he should.
The majority of creatives piggybacking on Murray’s popularity these days would seem to be entrepreneurial craftspeople, whereas Griffiths is a fine artist. Previous projects include a Romani wagon comprised of secondhand furniture and a series of historically costumed busts cast from actor Peter Lorre’s death mask.
BALTIC’s website provides some context for the current installation, a series of nine model buildings in various architectural styles, festooned with Murray’s face and other visual indicators from his considerable oeuvre:
Bill Murray is always authentic. He is consistently ‘BILL MURRAY’. His singularity breaks into irreducible ambiguities and contradictions – Bill the global superstar, the guy-next-door, anti-brand brand, irrepressible lothario, dignified clown and droll philosopher. This exhibition takes these and many other characteristics as an approach, turning them into a fantasy caricature and a poetic tableau of scaled down architecture and collections.
Perhaps Griffiths was having an off day when the camera crew showed up to interview him about BILL MURRAY: A Story of Distance, Size, and Sincerity. A Creative Art Practice student who attended his guest lecture at Sheffield Halam University earlier this year found him to be an entertaining and similarly unpretentious speaker.
The five minute talk above had the opposite effect.
I’d like to propose a reshoot, starring Bill Murray. Imagine what his particular comic genius could bring to the transcript above?
Saint Bill has demonstrated that he is willing to work below scale when he believes in a project. Perhaps he would accept an exhibition t‑shirt in return for livening up this limp artistic statement.
(Might be what the artist was angling for all along…)
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...The Auteurs of Christmas: Christmas Morning as Seen Through the Eyes of Kubrick, Tarantino, Scorsese & More
Whatever our set of beliefs, most of us sooner or later unite in the same celebratory pursuit on Christmas Day: the watching of movies. Going out to the theater to catch a holiday-season blockbuster or two after you’ve opened your presents (or after other people have finished opening their presents) has become a kind of tradition in itself, and enough of a tradition to permit variations. Maybe you’d rather use film to free yourself of the burdens of the Christmas season, going instead to the art house and catching the least commercial film possible in this increasingly commercial time of the year.
But even if you stick with the auteurs, you can’t get away from Christmas entirely. A couple Christmases ago, “The Auteurs of Christmas” shot a series of versions of this most anticipated morning in the style of directors Steven Spielberg, Sergei Eisenstein, Wes Anderson, Woody Allen, Lars von Trier, Martin Scorsese, Michael Moore, Stanley Kubrick, Werner Herzog, and Baz Luhrmann.
More recently, the follow-up above expanded the project to envision Christmas as envisioned by Charlie Chaplin, Quentin Tarantino, Terrence Malick, Christopher Nolan, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Morgan Spurlock, David Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan, and Michael Bay.
But just as the conclusion of one year’s Christmas can simply get you looking forward to the next year’s, so these two super-homages make you think about the possible auteurs for inclusion in a third: what would Yasujirō Ozu’s Christmas morning look like, shot just a couple feet off the tatami mat? Or Chantal Akerman’s, which, for proper pacing, might require a whole video by itself? Or a Coen Brothers Christmas? Gaspar Noé’s? Truly, this holiday keeps on giving.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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