Playing in Toronto last week, Paul Simon did something, well, awesome. A fan asks him to play “Duncan,” his 1972 classic, and lets him know that she learned to play guitar to that song. So Simon agrees. And, even better, he invites her on stage to take over guitar and vocals. Nervous, almost hyperventilating, she hesitantly gets going, as does the crowd. From there, a big feelin’ groovy moment unfolds, and it just gets better as it goes along. Kudos to NPR’s All Songs Considered for making this great find …
Just last month, Bob Dylan played his first concert in China at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing. It wasn’t exactly a big show. Roughly 2,000 people attended, but it became a big affair at home when NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a caustic op-ed, accusing Dylan of playing a censored set stripped of his revolutionary anthems. In short, she declared, Dylan went to China and sold out his 60s soul:
Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a‑Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
Now, in a note to fans, Dylan took the rare step of responding to these (and other) accusations in a short letter published yesterday. He writes:
As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.
I’m guessing this response will only partly satisfy Dowd. Perhaps Dylan didn’t change his set to please the apparatchiks. But did he miss an opportunity to make the right statement? Just maybe. But no matter, we’re putting this behind us and getting ready for Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24. We still love him, warts and all…
There is no exact date for this silent home movie shot at the Reseda, CA home of Stan Laurel’s daughter, Lois. But the year must have been 1956, because, during that year, Oliver Hardy, the other member of the great comic duo, lost more than 150 pounds, resulting in a complete change of his outward appearance. Hardy had a mild heart attack in 1954 and started looking after his health. But letters by Stan Laurel indicate that Oliver was also suffering from cancer. In September 1956 — probably not long after this movie was made — Oliver suffered a major stroke, which left him unable to speak and confined to bed for several months. Then, at the beginning of August 1957, he had two more strokes and slipped into a coma from which he never recovered. He died on August 7 that year.
Exactly one week after Oliver’s death, Stan gave a rare radio interview and recounted the moment when he and Oliver met for the first time. The full, one-hour interview can be enjoyed here. Stan died on 23 February 1965 after suffering a heart attack of his own. He was buried at Forest Park Memorial Park in Burbank. Footage from the funeral shows celebrities such as Dick Van Dyke, Buster Keaton and George Chandler in attendance. Stan’s friend Dick Van Dyke delivered this moving eulogy.
In this superb time lapse video, Dominic Boudreault presents five urban cities — Montreal, Quebec City, Chicago, Toronto, and New York City — and what he calls the “the duality between city and nature.”
Most fascinating is the high vantage point from which much of the footage was shot: watch the colorful lights adorning the Empire State Building, and just a minute later, cars shooting down the freeway next to Lake Michigan in snowy Chicago. The City Limits was shot in late 2010, early 2011.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
For a certain kind of person (that means you, Dan C.), a straight hour of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards expounding on the rock n’ roll life is about as close to heaven as one can get without magically transforming into Richards’ favorite guitar. Here is the 66-year old legend being interviewed at the New York Public Library, following the publication of his critically-acclaimed memoir Life, which no less severe a judge than Michiko Kakutani called “electrifying.”
In the interview (see the remaining parts here,here and here) Richards comes off as witty, articulate, and especially eloquent when speaking about his passion for American blues, but one of the most charming early moments comes thanks to his interlocutor, Anthony DeCurtis. DeCurtis is something of a rock star in his own field, but he fights a losing battle with his natural fandom for the first 15 minutes of the conversation, then finally starts to implode at about the 22:2o mark. His mini-meltdown is immediately followed by Richards’ hilarious riff on the Stones’ early Beatles-envy, and it all just gets better from there, culminating in the expected wild applause at the end of the hour.
A footnote: Richards’ collaborator on Life is the respected British journalist named James Fox. Fox spent five years working with the guitarist, or rather, chasing him from continent to continent, recording hundreds of hours of their conversations, and then shaping those hours into a book that is not merely coherent or interesting but genuinely literary. He deserves a round of applause as well.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
There will be a day — maybe it’s already here; maybe it was always here — when the Kindle will look incredibly retro. Mike Matas, once a designer of user interfaces at Apple and now co-founder of Push Pop Press, may make that day of visual reckoning come sooner rather than later. The demo above (which is easily worth a thousand words) lets you peer into the near future.. Text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics — they’ll come together in a seamless reading experience, making the traditional ebook look entirely one dimensional. You can download the book on display, Al Gore’s “Our Choice,” on iTunes here.
Robert Johnson, the legendary bluesman, would have turned 100 this week. That’s well beyond the age he actually lived to – a very young 27. During his short life (1911–1938), Johnson recorded 29 individual songs. But they could not have been more influential. Songs like Cross Road Blues, Sweet Home Chicago, and Kind Hearted Woman Blues (all found in this newly-released Centennial Collection) had a remarkable influence on musicians growing up generations later. Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Robert Plant – they all acknowledge a deep debt to Johnson.
Speaking of debts, you can’t talk about Robert Johnson without talking about the famous devil legend. The legend holds that Johnson made a Faustian bargain with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for boundless musical talent. It’s a great tale, and it all gets brought back to life in “Devilish Detail,” a new animated film (above) featuring illustrations by Christopher Darling. You can view it in a larger format on Nowness.com…
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
The 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival opens tonight, and the cineastes among you have probably already bookmarked the film site MUBI, where you can find all things Cannes (and all things international cinema, for that matter) at the site’s blog: the MUBI Daily.
Edited by Daniel Kasman, the MUBI Daily features stellar writers, including Glenn Kenny, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, and the wonderful David Hudson, whom you may recognize from his days at Greencine and IFC. You’ll find review round-ups, commentary, interviews, updates, trailers for many films at Cannes, and finally, quirky entries like this one: Contributor Adrian Curry’s commentary on a L’Expresscollection of 64 year’s worth of official Cannes Festival posters. Curry highlights the best and worst of the lot (along with a special wince d’or for 1995’s pastel nightmare of a seascape, to which designer Ryszard Horowitz may as well have added rainbows and unicorns).
The site is definitely worth keeping tabs on, especially this week, when they’ll be offering a virtual ticket to the south of France, minus the lines, mobs, and high likelihood of laptop theft.
A last note: you can find several prize-winning films from the Cannes Film Festival (including two by Andrei Tarkovksy) in our collection of Free Movies Online.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
In one of his very best early essays, David Lynch Keeps His Head (1996), the late novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace did his best to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes Lynch such an odd and wonderful director. The article is pure pleasure (and a reminder of just how fresh and original Wallace was, and how rarely his imitators ever do him justice). One line in particular stands out — the writer’s now-famous comparison between Lynch and Tarantino: “Quentin Tarantino,” wrote Wallace, “is interested in watching someone’s ear get cut off. David Lynch is interested in the ear.”
We’re not quite sure what that line has to do with the director’s latest production (a commercial advertising his new coffee line and starring a severed Barbie head) except that we couldn’t stop thinking of either the quote or the essay as we watched it — appalled, dismayed, perplexed, and, as always with the films of Mr. Lynch, completely incapable of looking away.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
Love and longing, hope and fear — these threads run throughout all literature, whether we’re talking about the great ancient epics, or contemporary novels written in the East or the West. That’s the main premise of Invitation to World Literature, a multimedia program organized by David Damrosch (Harvard University), and made with the backing of WGBH and Annenberg Media.
The program features 13 half-hour videos, which move from The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2500 BCE) through García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude(1967). And, collectively, these videos highlight over 100+ writers, scholars, artists, and performers with a personal connection to world literature. Philip Glass, Francine Prose, Harold Ramis, Robert Thurman, Kwame Anthony Appiah — they all make an appearance.
If you’ve ever had doubts about the impact of videogame aesthetics on contemporary cinema — not just action movies, but video and independent film as well — this romantic short from Spy Films might well dispel them. The plot is basic: A man and a woman lock eyes in the street, and dream of what might have been, while sweet notes fill the air. But director and cinematographer Arev Manoukian updates the familiar story with a compelling visual style which seems inspired by equal parts Matrix trilogy and PlayStation 3. For more information about the special effects, there’s a “making of” video for your viewing.
Francophones/francophiles of more luddite tendencies might find themselves immediately rushing to play Georges Brassens’ ode to ephemeral street romance, “Les Passantes.” We strongly encourage you to do so, preferably at sunset, while sipping a hot cup of longing-infused tea.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
