Last month, we featured Woody Allen answering thirteen unusual questions from Robert B. Weide’s film Woody Allen: A Documentary. Well, it turns out that it wasn’t the only unusual footage the documentary had to offer. During the 1960s, the young comic did whatever his managers (Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins) thought would enhance his public profile. Some of his early performances and stunts were genius. Others flopped. You decide where this one falls. In 1966, Allen appeared on Hippodrome, a British variety TV show that showcased jumping dogs, trapeze acts, musical acts and … kangaroo boxing matches. This match went one round, with the Australian light heavyweight champion landing the only punches.
Michael David Murphy created Tuning ’77, a “seamless audio supercut of an entire year of the Grateful Dead tuning their instruments, live on stage.” The mix uses every publicly available recording from 1977, and it’s really all a prelude to this: 8,976 Free Grateful Dead Concert Recordings in the Internet Archive. You can listen to Tuning ’77here or below. It runs 92 minutes.
Here’s an amazing film that captures the excitement and raw energy of James Brown in his prime.
The footage was taken on March 8, 1971, during a series of concerts Brown and his band gave at the Olympia theater in Paris. It offers a rare glimpse of the original lineup of the J.B.‘s, the group Brown formed in 1970, about two years after the breakup of the Famous Flames.
The lineup includes William “Bootsy” Collins on bass and his older brother Phelps “Catfish” Collins on lead guitar, both of whom would leave the band a few months later. Famous Flames founder Bobby Byrd, who essentially discovered Brown in 1952, serves as organist, backup singer and master of ceremonies. The rest of the band are: Hearlon “Cheese” Martin on guitar, St. Clair Pinckney on tenor saxophone, Darryl “Hasaan” Jamison and Clayton “Chicken” Gunnells on trumpet, Fred Wesley on trombone, and John “Jabo” Starks and Don Juan “Tiger” Martin on drums.
The film was apparently shot during one performance, even though Brown is introduced twice and wears different clothing. According to reports, Brown took a break between “Sunny” and “It’s a New Day” while Byrd’s wife, Vicki Anderson, sang two songs that were cut from the film. Audio from the concert was released in 1992 as Love Power Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris 1971. Here’s the set list from the film version, which differs slightly from the LP:
Introduction
Brother Rapp
Ain’t It Funky Now
Georgia On My Mind
Sunny
It’s a New Day
Bewildered
Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine
Try Me
Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag/I Got You (I Feel Good)/I Got the Feelin’ (medley)
Give It Up or Turn It a Loose
It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World
Please, Please, Please
Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine (reprise)
Not only does the documentary Eraserhead Storiesoffer as much information as you’ll find anywhere on the making of David Lynch’s first feature film, it has a few Lynchian qualities of its own. For almost an hour and a half, David Lynch sits down behind a microphone and reminisces about the six years his ragtag team spent putting the movie together. But he does it in black-and-white, in front of a curtain, smoking, like something out of an early-1950s television broadcast. The ambient dull roar of an ill wind appears, intermittently and inexplicably, on the soundtrack. Photographs flash by, supporting some of Lynch’s inspiring, arduous, and bizarre recollections. Many of his stories deal with the nuts and bolts of bringing one’s financially impoverished but creatively overflowing early movies into reality. Others involve tubs filled with milk, sets covered in peas, dead cats impregnated with tar, and the ghost of oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny.
Lynch’s fans, and even his detractors — perhaps especially his detractors — will tell you that his films could have come from the mind of no other director. But Eraserhead Stories gives you a clear idea about the kind of dedicated, familial production atmosphere it takes to get an ideasuccessfully out of Lynch’s brain and onto celluloid. On Eraserhead’s intermittently active, often-moving shoot, everyone had to work several jobs: Lynch chucklingly remembers troweling a great deal of plaster alongside star Jack Nance, and he gives collaborator Catherine Coulson a call to talk about all the myriad tasks she handled. Though the unusual visual, aural, and narrative requirements of Eraserhead meant nobody had any easy work, Lynch and his team managed to finish the picture and live every creative filmmaker’s dream: to make a movie which doesn’t compromise, which no viewer forgets, and toward which nobody feels neutral. H/T Biblioklept
D.A. Pennebaker’s cinéma vérité documentary Dont Look Back [sic] followed Bob Dylan on his celebrated 1965 tour through England, letting viewers see what happened along the way — the good, the bad and everything between. Today, it’s considered both a classic documentary and a pop-cultural artifact, something Dylan fans can’t afford to miss.
The same can’t be said for Eat the Document, Pennebaker’s follow-up documentary that captured Dylan’s return to the UK in 1966. The premise had promise. Bob Dylan had just gone electric and boos followed him wherever he went. In Manchester, they famously called him “Judas.” That could have made for an intriguing film. But, according to Dylan’s most recent biographer Daniel Mark Epstein, the singer-songwriter was personally unraveling. He had toured to the point of exhaustion, and taken far too many amphetamines. During one moment filmed by Pennebaker, Dylan shared an incoherent taxi ride with John Lennon. Their rambling conversation touched on Johnny Cash, The Mamas & the Papas, Dylan’s homesickness, and how the Thames River supposedly saved Britain from Hitler. And, once we get 20 minutes into the footage, we find Dylan slumped forward in the backseat, seemingly staving off nausea.
Dylan personally edited the film and gave ABC television the option to air it. The network declined, saying it wouldn’t be comprehensible to a mainstream audience. Because the film was never released, it has been passed around in various bootlegged versions. You can watch a 52-minute version on DylanTube.
As a quick footnote, it’s worth mentioning that, according to Epstein’s biography, Lennon later told Rolling Stone magazine that he and Dylan were doing “junk” (aka heroin) that day, and that Lennon thought Dylan was close to OD’ing. It’s all discussed in The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait.
In 1958, legendary director John Huston decided to make a film about the life of Sigmund Freud. Having met Jean-Paul Sarte in 1952 during the filming of Moulin Rouge, Huston felt the philosopher would be the ideal person to script the Freud film, since Sartre knew Freud’s work so well and since Huston surmised that he would have “an objective and logical approach.” Despite Sartre’s obvious talents, this still seems like an odd choice on its face, given the specific demands of screenwriting versus philosophical or literary work. But Sartre had some experience writing for the screen by that time—like most literary screenwriters, he’d mostly done it for the money and disavowed most of this work in hindsight–and he loved the movies and respected Huston. The director and the existentialist philosopher also had very similar views of their biographical subject:
Ironically both Sartre and Huston considered themselves anti-Freud for largely the same reason: Sartre because as a Communist he believed the role of the psychoanalyst was limited and of little social importance. For his part Huston felt that psychoanalysis was an indulgence for bored house wives and the problem children of the rich while the “movers and shakers”’ were too busy for it and those that most needed it couldn’t afford it.
Huston and Sartre’s treatment of Freud promised to be critical, but the partnership soon soured due to Sartre’s inability to keep his script at feature length. First, he delivered a modest 95-page treatment. This, however, became a 300-page draft in 1959 that Huston calculated would produce an unacceptable five-hour-long film (see an image from Sartre’s draft screenplay below, and click it to read it in a larger format).
When Huston and Sartre met in person in Galway to find a way to cut the screenplay down to a reasonable length, their working relationship was less than cordial. In Huston’s recollection, Sartre never stopped talking long enough for anyone else to get a word in. The director also remembered that Sartre was “as ugly as a human being can be.” Sartre’s remembrance is hardly more flattering of Huston, if somewhat more comic; he described the director in a letter to his wife Simone de Beauvoir as a pretentious, thoughtless character.…
…in moments of childish vanity, when he puts on a red dinner jacket or rides a horse (not very well) or counts his paintings or tells workmen what to do. Impossible to hold his attention five minutes: he can no longer work, he runs away from thinking.
After their Galway meeting, during which Huston tried and failed to hypnotize Sartre, the philosopher attempted another revision, but this time, he sent Huston an even longer draft, for an eight-hour film. At this point, Huston gave up on Sartre and salvaged what he could, eventually enlisting the help of German screenwriter Wolfgang Reinhardt to finish the script. Huston finally made his Freud film, released in 1962 as Freud: The Secret Passion, with Montgomery Clift as the doctor (see the trailer for the film above).
Unsurprisingly, Sartre had his name removed from the final film. For a fuller account of the meeting of Huston and Sartre, see the second chapter of Elizabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times, where you’ll find other fascinating details like Sartre’s desire to cast Marilyn Monroe as Anna O and Huston’s bemusement at Sartre’s dental hygiene.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
In April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students and one teacher in Columbine, Colorado, while injuring 21 others. Michael Moore documented the tragedy in his 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine,which sits on YouTube, available for everyone to see. It’s heartbreaking to think that a decade later, students are no safer at their schools. If anything, gun control has slackened during the intervening years (thanks partly to the Supreme Court) and mass murders have become more commonplace, if not a monthly occurrence. 12 were killed and 52 injured in Aurora, CO in July. 10 killed in a Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin this August. Five gunned down at Accent Signage Systems in Minnesota in October. Two shot dead at a mall in Portland, Oregon earlier this week. And now 20 youngsters and seven adults killed at an elementary school today in Connecticut.
First thing you need to know: Before doing anything else, you should simply click “play” and start watching the video above. It doesn’t take long for Robert Sapolsky, one of Stanford’s finest teachers, to pull you right into his course. Better to watch him than listen to me.
Second thing to know: Sapolsky is a MacArthur Fellow, a world renowned neurobiologist, and an adept science writer best known for his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Much of his research focuses on the interplay between the mind and body (how biology affects the mind, and the mind, the body), and that relationship lies at the heart of this course called “Human Behavioral Biology.”
Now the third: Human Behavioral Biology is available on YouTube and iTunes for free. The course, consisting of 25 videos spanning 36 hours, is otherwise listed in the Biology section of our big list of Free Online Courses (now 575 courses in total).
Too bad there are no leopard seals on National Geographic’s payroll. Photographer Paul Nicklen’s intimate portraits of the one who took particular interest in him on a recent Antarctic expedition are delightful. Imagine how great it would be to have some reverse angle reaction shots of Nicklen as his new friend attempts to serve him a succession of live, dead, and mutilated penguins.
He may have turned up his nose at his subject’s cuisine, but Nicklen brings something else to the table, namely four days’ worth of up close and personal shots of an animal doing something other than going about its business. Without anthropomorphizing its intentions over much, this creature went out of its way to acclimate its strange guest to his new surroundings, sticking around when lesser hosts would have abandoned him alongside the buffet. Pretty cool when you consider that Nicklen’s entire head could — and briefly did — fit inside its massive, sharp fanged jaws.
In the mid 1960s Miles Davis responded to the form-breaking influence of free jazz by surrounding himself with a group of brilliant young musicians and encouraging them to push him in new directions.
The group was Davis’s last with all acoustic instruments, and came to be known as his “second great quintet.” It featured Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. Between 1964 and 1968 the quintet recorded a string of innovative albums, including E.S.P., Sorcerer and the transitional Miles in the Sky, in which Hancock introduces the electric Fender Rhodes piano.
For Guardian jazz critic John Fordham, the second great quintet was Davis’s best group ever. “Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing,” writes Fordham in a 2010 article. “The quintet’s method came to be dubbed ‘time, no changes’ because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band’s open-minded leader had recorded before.”
You can hear for yourself in these two concerts, shown back-to-back, recorded for television during the quintet’s 1967 tour of Europe. The first concert was recorded on October 31, 1967 at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden. Here’s the set list:
Agitation (Miles Davis)
Footprints (Wayne Shorter)
‘Round Midnight (Thelonius Monk)
Gingerbread Boy (Jimmy Heath)
Theme (Miles Davis)
The next concert was recorded one week later, on November 7, 1967, at the Stadhalle in Karlsruhe, Germany:
Agitation (Miles Davis)
Footprints (Wayne Shorter)
I Fall in Love Too Easily (Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne)
Every year from 1963 to 1969, the Beatles recorded a special Christmas greeting to their fans. It started when “Beatlemania” took off and the band found itself unable to answer all the fan mail. “I’d love to reply personally to everyone,” says Lennon in the 1963 message, “but I just haven’t enough pens.” The first message was intended to make their most loyal fans feel appreciated. Like those that followed, the 1963 message was mailed as a paper-thin vinyl “flexi disc” to members of the Beatles fan club. The recording features the Beatles’ trademark wit and whimsy, with a chorus of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Ringo” and a version of “Good King Wenceslas” that refers to Betty Grable. It was made on October 17, 1963 at Abbey Road Studios, just after the band recorded “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
The band recorded their next holiday greeting, Another Beatles Christmas Record, on October 26, 1964, the same day they recorded the song “Honey Don’t.” Lennon’s rebellious nature begins to show, as he pokes fun at the prepared script: “It’s somebody’s bad hand wroter.”
Recorded on November 8, 1965 during the Rubber Soul sessions at Abbey Road, the 1965 message features a re-working of “Yesterday,” with the refrain “Oh I believe on Christmas Day.” The band’s gift for free-associational role playing is becoming more apparent. One piece of dialogue near the end was eventually re-used by producer George Martin and his son Giles at the end of the re-mixed version of “All You Need is Love” on the 2006 album Love: “All right put the lights off. This is Johnny Rhythm saying good night to you all and God Blesses.”
You can sense the band’s creative powers growing in the 1966 message, Pantomime: Everywhere It’s Christmas. The recording was made at Abbey Road on November 25, 1966, during a break from working on “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Beatles were just beginning work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Instead of simply thanking their fans and recounting the events of the year, the Beatles use sound effects and dialogue to create a vaudeville play based around a song that goes, “Everywhere it’s Christmas, at the end of every year.” Paul McCartney designed the cover.
This was the last Christmas message recorded by the Beatles all together in one place. Titled Christmas Time (Is Here Again), it reveals the group’s continuing experimentation with sound effects and storytelling. The scenario, written by the band earlier on the day it was recorded (November 28, 1967), is about a group of people auditioning for a BBC radio play. Lennon and Ringo Starr designed the cover.
By the Christmas season of 1968, relations within the Beatles were becoming strained. The holiday message was produced around the time the “White Album” was released, in November of 1968. The four members’ voices were recorded separately, in various locations. There’s plenty of self-mockery. Perhaps the most striking moment comes when the American singer Tiny Tim (invited by George Harrison) strums a ukulele and sings “Nowhere Man” in a high falsetto.
The Beatles were in the process of breaking up when they recorded (separately) their final Christmas message in November and December of 1969. A couple of months earlier, just before the release of Abbey Road, Lennon had announced to the others that he was leaving the group. Yoko Ono appears prominently on the recording, singing and talking with Lennon about peace. Fittingly, the 1969 message incorporates a snippet from the Abbey Road recording of “The End.”
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