Download 834 Radical Zines From a Revolutionary Online Archive: Globalization, Punk Music, the Industrial Prison Complex & More

in Magazines, Music, Politics, Writing | April 18th, 2016

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Whatcha mean, “what’s a zine”?

Some say Thomas Paine orig­i­nat­ed the con­cept in 1776, when he self-pub­lished the pam­phlet, Com­mon Sense… an asser­tion author and cul­tur­al crit­ic Greil Mar­cus would like­ly find a “spu­ri­ous” attempt to con­fer legit­i­ma­cy on a move­ment that occu­pies the soci­etal fringes by def­i­n­i­tion.

No mat­ter how many read­ers they attract, the cre­ators of these small-cir­cu­la­tion labors of love take their agen­das very seri­ous­ly. Whether the ulti­mate goal is to inform, to agi­tate, to smear or to cel­e­brate, their con­tents are as raw as the cut-and-paste aes­thet­ic that pro­vid­ed their defac­to look, pre-Etsy.

zine archive

While some zinesters are good about pre­serv­ing mas­ter copies and donat­ing back issues to zine libraries, many oth­ers’ titles fall through the cracks of his­to­ry, as the mak­ers age out of the prac­tice, or move on to oth­er inter­ests.

Indi­vid­ual zines’ best chance at sur­vival lies in acad­e­mia, where expe­ri­enced archivists and fleets of interns have the time and resources to cat­a­logue and dig­i­tize thou­sands of poor­ly pho­to­copied, often hand­writ­ten pages.

Psycho Bunny

Duke University’s Sal­lie Bing­ham Cen­ter for Women’s His­to­ry and Cul­ture boasts over 4000 fem­i­nist zines.

Tem­ple University’s Sci­ence Fic­tion Fanzine Col­lec­tion takes up near­ly 100 box­es (or 46.5 lin­ear feet).

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The most recent archive is a 1000-title-strong rad­i­cal col­lec­tion that land­ed at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas. Donat­ed by the Sol­i­dar­i­ty! Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Cen­ter and Rad­i­cal Library, a still-active, non-hier­ar­chi­cal, infor­ma­tion-shar­ing col­lec­tive in Lawrence, these zines cov­er a wide spec­trum of activist his­to­ry and con­cerns. You can now find and down­load about 834 of these zines online.

Camp Trans Gender

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Titles such as Camp Trans: Gen­der Camp Zine, Hell Yeah! Con­sent Based Queer Porn and CoEx­ist were pro­vid­ing a clear, first-per­son win­dow on the LGBTQ world years before the main­stream media thought to fol­low suit.

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Sis­ter­hood is not just pow­er­ful, but pal­pa­ble in Fem­men­stru­a­tion Rites Rag, Herbal Abor­tion: The Fruit of the Tree of Knowl­edge, and The Invis­i­bil­i­ty of Women Pris­on­ers’ Resis­tance.

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Sus­tain­abil­i­ty starts at home with Urban Per­ma­cul­ture, Ten Steps to Deli­cious Soymilk! and Dear Motorist….

Oth­er top­ics include race, glob­al­iza­tion, veg­an­ism, ani­mal rights, and anar­chy.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the largest num­ber of titles falls into the Music cat­e­go­ry. Before the Inter­net, punk shows were the most reli­able chan­nel of zine­ly dis­tri­b­u­tion, and few of these fanzines are devoid of polit­i­cal con­tent.

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Below, Kansas Uni­ver­si­ty Eng­lish pro­fes­sor Frank Farmer (who arranged for the dona­tion) and archivist Becky Schulte dis­cuss the impor­tance of “counter-pub­lic doc­u­ments” and zine cul­ture.

You can explore 830 dig­i­tized exam­ples from the Sol­i­dar­i­ty archives online here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Whole Earth Cat­a­log Online: Stew­art Brand’s “Bible” of the 60s Gen­er­a­tion

The Online Knit­ting Ref­er­ence Library: Down­load 300 Knit­ting Books Pub­lished From 1849 to 2012

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. A large por­tion of her zine col­lec­tion and papers are being processed by the Sal­lie Bing­ham Cen­ter at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty and will be avail­able for research lat­er this year. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Spike Lee Directs, “Wake Up,” a Five-Minute Campaign Film for Bernie Sanders

in Current Affairs, Film, Politics | April 17th, 2016

Ear­li­er this month Spike Lee and Bernie Sanders, two Brook­lyn natives, sat down and talked about pol­i­tics and the state of our nation. Now, with the New York pri­ma­ry right around the cor­ner, Spike drew on his film­mak­ing tal­ents and direct­ed a five-minute polit­i­cal cam­paign film for Bernie. It’s called sim­ply “Wake Up,” and it fea­tures cameos by Dr. Cor­nel West, Susan Saran­don, and Har­ry Bela­fonte.

I can’t recall anoth­er instance where a major film­mak­er shot an ad for a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. If we’re over­look­ing some­thing obvi­ous (or less obvi­ous), let us know in the com­ments and we’ll maybe fea­ture it dur­ing this cam­paign sea­son.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Spike Lee Inter­views Bernie Sanders: Two Guys from Brook­lyn Talk About Edu­ca­tion, Inequal­i­ty & More

Bernie Sanders: I Will Be an Arts Pres­i­dent

Spike Lee’s List of 95 Essen­tial Movies – Now with Women Film­mak­ers

Bernie Sanders Sings “This Land is Your Land” on the Endear­ing­ly Bad Spo­ken Word Album, We Shall Over­come

Allen Ginsberg’s Hand­writ­ten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burling­ton Snow” (1986)

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John Cage Performs His Avant-Garde Piano Piece 4′33″ … in 1′22″ (Harvard Square, 1973)

in Music | April 15th, 2016

We’ve seen var­i­ous per­for­mances of John Cage’s famous silent piece 4′33″. But nev­er dur­ing our decade dig­ging up cul­tur­al curiosi­ties have we encoun­tered 4′33″ per­formed by Cage him­self. That is, until now. Above you can watch a video out­take from Nam June Paik’s Trib­ute to John Cage, filmed in 1973, in Har­vard Square. Boston’s WBGH describes the scene:

In the video he is seat­ed at a piano, with spec­ta­tors sur­round­ing him. He toys with his viewer’s expec­ta­tions by not play­ing the piano, which is what the gen­er­al pop­u­lace would expect from a per­for­mance involv­ing a piano. On the piano shelf there are a pock­et watch and a slip of paper. He keeps touch­ing and look­ing at the pock­et watch which draws the audience’s atten­tion to the idea of time, and that they are wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen, and he also rais­es and low­ers the piano fall­board. There is also text that appears in this par­tic­u­lar video that says “This is Zen for TV. Open your win­dow and count the stars. If rainy count the rain­drops on the pud­dle. Do you hear a crick­et? …or a mouse.”

Anoth­er uncon­ven­tion­al item to add to the list: Cage per­forms 4′33″ in 1′22″!

For a clos­er look at 4′33″ read Josh Jones’ ear­li­er post on the Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33.” For more music by Cage, stream this free 65-hour playlist.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See the Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

Stream a Free 65-Hour Playlist of John Cage Music and Dis­cov­er the Full Scope of His Avant-Garde Com­po­si­tions

How to Get Start­ed: John Cage’s Approach to Start­ing the Dif­fi­cult Cre­ative Process

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The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemian Coffee Bars Documented in a Vintage 1959 Newsreel

in Food & Drink, History | April 15th, 2016

I live in Seoul, by some mea­sures the most cof­fee shop-sat­u­rat­ed city in the world. But mod­ern cof­fee life here (which I recent­ly wrote about for the Los Ange­les Review of Books) only real­ly devel­oped after Star­bucks came to town around the turn of the 21st cen­tu­ry. We’ve now got more Star­bucks loca­tions per capi­ta than any­where else, and even so, the home­grown Kore­an chains well out­num­ber those under the green mer­maid. To under­stand how the cof­fee-house cul­ture we know across the world today took its shape, we have to look back to Lon­don in the late 1950s, specif­i­cal­ly as cap­tured in the Look at Life news­reel on the city’s bohemi­an cof­fee house boom just above.

“Cof­fee is big busi­ness,” says its nar­ra­tor, over a mon­tage of neon signs adver­tis­ing places like The Cof­fee House, Las Vegas Cof­fee Bar, Heav­en & HELL Cof­fee Lounge, and La Roca. “The cof­fee bar boom in Britain began in 1952, when the first espres­so machine arrived from Italy and was set up here, in Lon­don’s Soho.” The city’s many entre­pre­neurs vig­or­ous­ly seized the oppor­tu­ni­ty — maybe too vig­or­ous­ly, since “for every three cof­fee bars that opened up, two closed down.” They had­n’t planned on a few dif­fer­ent fac­tors, includ­ing over­head high enough that “if a char­ac­ter sits for half an hour over one cup of cof­fee, his share of the rent, heat, light, and ser­vice mount to the point where the man­age­ment is pay­ing him.”

They should’ve count­ed them­selves lucky that the likes of me and my gen­er­a­tion weren’t alive back then to, on a sim­i­lar­ly sin­gle cof­fee, spend half the day typ­ing on our lap­tops. But Lon­don’s mid­cen­tu­ry cof­fee hous­es soon learned to diver­si­fy, offer­ing Look at Life plenty–in its vivid col­ors and with its broad sense of humor–of life to look at: we see cof­fee bars hop­ping with live music and those who dance to it; juke­box cof­fee bars geared toward pom­padoured hip­sters; the film indus­try-beloved cof­fee bar in which T.S. Eliot once wrote the immor­tal line, “I have mea­sured out my life with cof­fee spoons”; an “invis­i­ble cof­fee house” behind whose false news­stand front “curi­ous char­ac­ters con­gre­gate”; the Moka, which William S. Bur­roughs once shut down with his cut-up tech­niques; and even the famous Le Macabre, dec­o­rat­ed with count­less skele­tal memen­tos mori.

The news­reel also finds its way to a cof­fee shop estab­lished by a news­pa­per where “uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents and oth­er assort­ed eggheads meet to put the world right — or more often left,” which reminds me of Guardian Cof­fee, a pop-up cof­fee house in a ship­ping-con­tain­er com­plex in Lon­don’s Shored­itch (in some sense, the Soho of the 21st cen­tu­ry) co-run by the epony­mous news­pa­per, which I vis­it­ed on my last trip to Eng­land. The Guardian Cof­fee exper­i­ment has since end­ed, but the Guardian has retained its inter­est in the bev­er­age itself, as evi­denced by recent arti­cles like Rosie Spinks’ “The Caf­feine Curse: Why Cof­fee Shops Have Always Sig­naled Urban Change.”

“As the cof­fee shop has become a byword for what every­one hates about urban change and gen­tri­fi­ca­tion – first come the cre­atives and their cof­fee shops, then the young pro­fes­sion­als, then the lux­u­ry high-ris­es and cor­po­rate chains that push out orig­i­nal res­i­dents – it’s worth ask­ing if that charge is fair,” Spinks writes. “As the func­tion of the cof­fee house in Lon­don has evolved over time, was its ear­ly iter­a­tion so rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent than the ones many of us type and sip away in today?” And what­ev­er form they take, cof­fee hous­es remain, as Look at Life calls them, “bright — or dim — fan­ci­ful, imag­i­na­tive new addi­tions to the British scene.” Or the Amer­i­can scene, or the Kore­an scene, or indeed the glob­al scene.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Cre­ates Ad for Cof­fee in the 1650s

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

Hip­sters Order­ing Cof­fee

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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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Hear What It Sounds Like When Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Brain Activity Gets Turned into Music

in Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy | April 15th, 2016

The refine­ments of med­ical imag­ing tech­nolo­gies like fMRI have giv­en neu­ro­sci­en­tists, psy­chol­o­gists, and philoso­phers bet­ter tools with which to study how the brain responds to all sorts of stim­uli. We’ve seen stud­ies of the brain on Jane Austen, the brain on LSD, the brain on jazz improv…. Music, it seems, offers an espe­cial­ly rich field for brain research, what with its con­nec­tion to lan­guage, bod­i­ly coor­di­na­tion, math­e­mat­ics, and vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er area of human intel­li­gence. Sci­en­tists at MIT have even dis­cov­ered which spe­cif­ic regions of the brain respond to music.

And yet, though we might think of music as a dis­crete phe­nom­e­non that stim­u­lates iso­lat­ed parts of the brain, Brownell pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy Dan Lloyd has a much more rad­i­cal hypoth­e­sis, “that brain dynam­ics resem­ble the dynam­ics of music.”

He restates the idea in more poet­ic terms in an arti­cle for Trin­i­ty Col­lege: “All brains are musical—you and I are sym­phonies.” Plen­ty of peo­ple who can bare­ly whis­tle on key or clap to a beat might dis­agree. But Lloyd doesn’t mean to sug­gest that we all have musi­cal tal­ent, but that—as he says in his talk below—“everything that goes on in the brain can be inter­pret­ed as hav­ing musi­cal form.”

To demon­strate his the­o­ry, Lloyd chose not a musi­cian or com­pos­er as a test sub­ject, but anoth­er philosopher—and one whose brain he par­tic­u­lar­ly admires—Daniel Den­nett. And instead of giv­ing us yet more col­or­ful but baf­fling brain images to look at, he chose to con­vert fMRI scans of Dennett’s brain—“12 giga­bytes of 3‑d snap­shots of his cranium”—into music, turn­ing data into sound through a process called “soni­fi­ca­tion.” You can hear the result at the top of the post—the music of Dennett’s brain, which is appar­ent­ly, writes Dai­ly Nous, “a huge Eno fan.”

In his paper “Mind as Music,” Lloyd argues that the so-called “lan­guage of thought” is, in fact, music. As he puts it, “the lin­gua fran­ca of cog­ni­tion is not a lin­gua at all,” an idea that has “after­shocks for seman­tics, method, and more.” Sev­er­al ques­tions arise: I, for one, am won­der­ing if all our brains sound like Dennett’s abstract ambi­ent score, or if some play waltzes, some operas, some psy­che­del­ic blues.…

You can learn much more about Lloyd’s fas­ci­nat­ing research in his talk, which sim­pli­fies the tech­ni­cal lan­guage of his paper. Lloyd’s work goes much fur­ther, as he says, than study­ing “the brain on music”; instead he makes a sweep­ing­ly bold case for “the brain as music.”

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This is Your Brain on Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: The Neu­ro­science of Cre­ativ­i­ty

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

New Research Shows How Music Lessons Dur­ing Child­hood Ben­e­fit the Brain for a Life­time

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Act of Love: A Strange, Wonderful Visual Dictionary of Animal Courtship

in Biology, Comedy, Dance, Life, Science | April 15th, 2016

As var­i­ous nature doc­u­men­taries over the years have made explic­it, the ani­mal king­dom pos­sess­es courtship rit­u­als of such yearn­ing and grace, they can make the erot­ic fum­blings of our species seem a very clum­sy dance indeed.

The above spot for Japan’s first con­dom man­u­fac­tur­er, Saga­mi Indus­tries, offers a vision of how humans might bring a lit­tle ani­mal feel­ing to their ten­der moments.

(It’s worth not­ing that while this delight is spon­sored by a con­dom com­pa­ny, humans are the only ani­mal to take pro­phy­lac­tic mea­sures to ward off sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted dis­eases and unwant­ed preg­nan­cies.)

Like actress Isabel­la Rosselli­ni, cre­ator of the mar­velous Green Porno series, direc­tor Greg Brunk­alla has an eye for both the fas­ci­nat­ing and the absurd.

But with­out Rossellini’s plain­spo­ken nar­ra­tion, this Act of Love remains mys­te­ri­ous, until the end, when the iden­ti­ty of the crea­tures the human dancers are embody­ing is revealed. Those of us who aren’t zool­o­gists will like­ly find that their cloth­ing pro­vides the clear­est clues up until that point.

Bisex­u­al behav­ior is ram­pant in the ani­mal world, but out­side of a not par­tic­u­lar­ly kinky-seem­ing pink-clad group, the five cou­ples in the ad are all het­ero­sex­u­al.

Sagami’s Eng­lish web­site takes a broad­er view, with in-depth reports on the sex­u­al prac­tices of 73 dif­fer­ent beasts, birds and insects. Tax­on­o­my, habi­tat, and size range are not­ed — a sci­en­tif­ic approach to what could very well serve as non-human online dat­ing pro­files.

Australia’s Superb Fairy Wrens are into open rela­tion­ships.

Lioness­es’ unabashed pref­er­ence for vir­ile young males gets them dubbed “true cougars.”

And E.B. White fans may find them­selves shocked by the vig­or of cou­pling orb weavers, seem­ing­ly the one fact of spi­der life Char­lotte refrained from explain­ing to her piglet friend, Wilbur :

After mat­ing, the male sud­den­ly sev­ers the mat­ing thread so that both he and the female end up dan­gling at sep­a­rate ends. This may look like a very abrupt part­ing of ways, but not so fast! The male imme­di­ate­ly re-strings his mat­ing thread and resumes his strum­ming. And despite hav­ing been cast off so sud­den­ly, the female again falls under the spell of his courtship vibra­tions, trans­fer­ring to the new mat­ing thread to mate a sec­ond time. As soon as they do so, the male sev­ers the thread once more so that the two spi­ders can go through the whole rou­tine again…and again and again and again. 

Explore Sagami’s entire col­lec­tion of not-so-pri­vate ani­mal lives here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Isabel­la Rosselli­ni Embody the Ani­mal Kingdom’s Most Shock­ing Mater­nal Instincts in Mam­mas

Watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Tom Waits Makes a List of His Top 20 Favorite Albums of All Time

in Music | April 14th, 2016

Sinatra Hours

What’s that? Exile on Main Street’s in your top 20 favorite albums of all time? Yeah, me too. How about Trout Mask Repli­ca? A lit­tle weird, that one, right? The Base­ment Tapes? Cool… So, uh, how about Bohemi­an-Mora­vian Bands? No? Nev­er heard of it? Seri­ous­ly?

Me nei­ther.

But there it is, the music of “Czech-Bavar­i­an bands that land­ed in Texas… music both sour and bit­ter, and picante, and float­ing above itself like steam over the ket­tle… like a wheel about to go off the road all the time… the most lilt­ing lit­tle waltz… accor­dion, sopra­no sax, clar­inet, bass, ban­jo and per­cus­sion.”

Sounds like the kind of thing Tom Waits would lis­ten to.

And that’s because it is, num­ber 12 on his list of top 20, to be exact, described with just a tiny taste of his idio­syn­crat­ic music writ­ing cour­tesy of The Guardian, who pub­lished his list in 2005 as part of a series “in which the great­est record­ing artists reveal their favourite records.”

Sure, Exile is on Waits’ list, as is the Cap­tain Beef­heart and Bob Dylan. And also Frank Sina­tra, nat­u­ral­ly, and Thelo­nious Monk, Lounge Lizards, Lit­tle Richard, James Brown…

Waits com­pares the expe­ri­ence of see­ing the God­fa­ther of Soul live to a “mass at St. Patrick’s Cathe­dral on Christ­mas… You’d been changed, your life is changed now… every­body want­ed to step down, step for­ward, take com­mu­nion, take sacra­ment… get close to the stage and be anoint­ed with his sweat, his cold sweat.”

He names a com­e­dy album by the late, great Bill Hicks, who was “like a rev­erend wav­ing a gun around.” Leonard Cohen “is a poet, an Extra Large one.” Marc Ribot is “a pros­thet­ic Cuban.” The Pogues “play like sol­diers on leave… whim­si­cal and blas­phe­mous, sea­sick and sac­ri­le­gious….” Sound like some­one you know? It sounds a bit like Tom Waits.

Put his top 20 in a blender and out comes Real Gone. Sort of.

In giv­ing us his list, he gives a dou­ble gift—an inspired col­lec­tion of music root­sy, avant-garde, jazz/blues/Americana, and Oth­er; and a series of mini-essays on the mer­its of each album, each one a mas­ter­ful exer­cise in con­ci­sion and ellip­ti­cal wit. See the full list below, and stop by The Guardian to read Waits’ com­men­tary on each album.

1 In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sina­tra
2 Solo Monk by Thelo­nious Monk
3 Trout Mask Repli­ca by Cap­tain Beef­heart
4 Exile On Main Street by the Rolling Stones
5 The Sink­ing of the Titan­ic by Gavin Bry­ers
6 The Base­ment Tapes by Bob Dylan
7 Lounge Lizards by Lounge Lizards
8 Rum Sodomy and the Lash by the Pogues
9 I’m Your Man by Leonard Cohen
10 The Spe­cial­ty Ses­sions by Lit­tle Richard
11 Star­time by James Brown
12 Bohemi­an-Mora­vian Bands by Texas-Czech
13 The Yel­low Shark by Frank Zap­pa
14 Pas­sion for Opera Aria
15 Rant in E Minor by Bill Hicks
16 Prison Songs: Mur­der­ous Home Alan Lomax Col­lec­tion
17 Cubanos Pos­ti­zos by Marc Ribot
18 Houndog by Houndog
19 Pur­ple Onion by Les Clay­pool
20 The Deliv­ery Man by Elvis Costel­lo

We’ve added a Spo­ti­fy playlist with many of his favorite albums below. And if you dig Waits’ musi­cal taste, check out this list of his favorite art films.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tom Waits, Play­ing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Clas­sic 1978 TV Per­for­mance

The Tom Waits Map: A Map­ping of Every Place Waits Has Sung About, From L.A. to Africa’s Jun­gles

Tom Waits Names 14 of His Favorite Art Films: Felli­ni, David Lynch & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Radiooooo: A Musical Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Different Times & Places

in Music, Radio | April 14th, 2016

The con­cept is pret­ty self explana­to­ry. Go to Radiooooo.com, pick a coun­try, pick a decade (from 1900 to Now), and then Radiooooo.com will rev up its time machine and serve up songs from that time and place. Instant­ly you can hear the radio music of 1930s Sudan, 1970s Rus­sia, and 1990s Brazil.

To learn more about Radiooooo.com, read the Indiegogo page that helped fund the orig­i­nal project. And one word of cau­tion, Radiooooo.com can take a lit­tle time to load and process things. So if you make your selec­tions and noth­ing hap­pens, give things a few moments, and all should work out.

via Boing Boing

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Iggy Pop & Josh Homme Walk You Through How They Wrote Their New Song, “American Valhalla”

in Music, Podcasts | April 14th, 2016

For those who love to explore the minu­tia of song writ­ing and pro­duc­tion, Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder pod­cast is a god­send, and shows off the poten­tial and pow­er of this new media. Where else could one song get a 15 minute explo­ration of its mean­ing, writ­ing, and record­ing, and from–as per this episode–Iggy Pop and Josh Homme them­selves?

Iggy Pop, now 68 years old and with a voice more sepul­chral than ever, has returned with Post Pop Depres­sion, his 23rd album, his 17th as a solo artist. And accord­ing to this inter­view, it might just be his last. Homme, Queens of the Stone Age’s front­man, co-wrote and pro­duced the album with Pop, and it is fair to say the col­lab­o­ra­tion is sim­i­lar to those between David Bowie and Pop dur­ing the ‘70s. The instru­ment choice is odd and cre­ative, with rock clichés avoid­ed by two musi­cians who know them well.

In this episode, the two walk through the cre­ation of the album’s cen­ter­piece track “Amer­i­can Val­hal­la,” start­ing with Homme’s “Shit­ty Demo” (lit­er­al­ly the title of the instru­men­tal he sent to Pop) and delv­ing into the lyric writ­ing, Pop’s thoughts about vet­er­ans, mor­tal­i­ty, the after­life, and that final line, “I’ve noth­ing but my name.” Sure, Pop says it’s a char­ac­ter speak­ing, but it sounds a bit like an epi­taph.

There’s many more sur­pris­es in this mini doc that we won’t spoil. Be sure to check out Song Exploder’s oth­er episodes as well. Even if you’ve nev­er heard of the song at the begin­ning, you’ll know it inside out by the end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From The Stooges to Iggy Pop: 1986 Doc­u­men­tary Charts the Rise of Punk’s God­fa­ther

Iggy Pop Reads Walt Whit­man in Col­lab­o­ra­tions With Elec­tron­ic Artists Alva Noto and Tar­wa­ter

Iggy Pop Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ry, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

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.

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Vincent Price Reads the Poetry of Shelley; Ralph Richardson Reads the Poetry of Coleridge

in Poetry | April 14th, 2016

Many of us today think of Vin­cent Price as the face, and an even more so the voice, of mod­est­ly bud­get­ed mid­cen­tu­ry hor­ror movies. But over his long and pro­lif­ic career, he showed just what mul­ti­tudes he could con­tain. Price could ele­vate schlock, of course, but he could also rise to the chal­lenge of mas­ter­pieces: here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his read­ings, on record and on cam­era, of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the orig­i­nal mas­ter of the psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly trou­bling tale. Today, we have for you a set of recita­tions well out­side the realm of the scary: Price read­ing the poet­ry of Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley, free on Spo­ti­fy (whose soft­ware you can down­load here).

Shel­ley, as any­one inter­est­ed in 19th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish poet­ry knows, did­n’t have a long career, but the can­dle that burns quick­ly, as they say, burns bright. Before his death at the age of 29 in a storm on the Gulf of Spezia, he man­aged to write such immor­tal works as Music, When Soft Voic­es Die, Ozy­man­dias, To a Sky­lark, Ode to the West Wind, and the dra­ma Prometheus Unbound, all of which we hear Price read whole, or in part, in this playlist. And for its final four tracks, we hear famed Eng­lish stage actor Ralph Richard­son deliv­er four poems from the equal­ly endur­ing lega­cy of Shel­ley’s rough con­tem­po­rary Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, includ­ing Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The vivid­ness of the imagery and the time­less res­o­nance of the themes in both poets’ work hold up well on the page, but no mat­ter how many times you’ve read it, hear­ing it inter­pret­ed by per­form­ers like Price and Richard­son can let you expe­ri­ence it in a new way. Their dra­mat­ic back­grounds empow­er them to bring out lev­els of emo­tion you might nev­er have felt in your own read­ing; cer­tain­ly Price’s world-weary yet faint­ly arch tone does well with Ozy­man­dias’ gaze-into-the-abyss evo­ca­tion of hubris, imper­ma­nence, and the ulti­mate fate in obliv­ion of all things great and small. Maybe the man who starred in The Pit and the Pen­du­lum nev­er real­ly strayed far from hor­ror after all.

The Price/Richardson read­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Vin­cent Price & Basil Rath­bone

Watch Vin­cent, Tim Burton’s Ani­mat­ed Trib­ute to Vin­cent Price & Edgar Allan Poe (1982)

Watch Vin­cent Price Turn Into Edgar Allan Poe & Read Four Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries (1970)

Bryan Cranston Reads Shelley’s Son­net “Ozy­man­dias” in Omi­nous Teas­er for Break­ing Bad’s Last Sea­son

Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Roman­tic Poets: Shel­ley, Byron, Keats

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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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Watch 50+ Documentaries on Famous Architects & Buildings: Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Hadid & Many More

in Architecture, Film | April 13th, 2016


At its best, archi­tec­ture can show us a way out of the rigid, rou­tinized think­ing that keeps us pac­ing the same social and cul­tur­al mazes decade after decade. A rad­i­cal redesign of the way we use space can her­ald a re-imag­in­ing of our inter­re­la­tions, hier­ar­chies, and polit­i­cal dynam­ics. Con­sid­er the inspir­ing work, for exam­ple, of vision­ary futur­ist Buck­min­ster Fuller. (Or con­sid­er the very dif­fer­ent career of recent­ly depart­ed Zaha Hadid, who “built the unbuild­able,” writes one for­mer stu­dent, and “defied grav­i­ty.”) At its worst, archi­tec­ture impris­ons us, lit­er­al­ly and oth­er­wise, mind­less­ly pop­u­lat­ing the built envi­ron­ment with drab, pre­fab­ri­cat­ed box­es, and repro­duc­ing con­di­tions of repres­sion, pover­ty, and medi­oc­rity. The way we build deter­mines in great degree the way we live.

But the influ­ence of an indi­vid­ual archi­tect or school will always exceed the design­ers’ inten­tions. Per­haps the most famous of 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ern archi­tec­ture and design move­ments, Wal­ter Gropius’ Bauhaus school, con­tributed a vocab­u­lary of sim­pli­fied geo­met­ri­cal designs and pri­ma­ry col­or schemes that pushed Euro­pean aes­thet­ics out of a sti­fling tra­di­tion­al­ism.

And yet, their mod­ernist insis­tence on box­i­ness, on mate­ri­als like steel, con­crete, and glass, and on a near total lack of orna­ment, helped bring into being the strip mall and the office park. Like­wise, the urban utopi­an archi­tect Le Cor­busier delib­er­ate­ly sought to engi­neer social improve­ment through build­ing design, and also helped birth a depress­ing­ly bleak land­scape of hous­ing projects and “struc­tures that rein­force dete­ri­o­rat­ing social effects.”

So what dis­tin­guish­es good archi­tec­ture from bad? And where did the post­mod­ern mélange of styles that make up the typ­i­cal urban envi­ron­ment come from? Ask 100 archi­tects the first ques­tion, and you might get 100 dif­fer­ent answers. But you can go a long way toward answer­ing the sec­ond ques­tion by learn­ing the his­to­ry of the many great build­ings that have direct­ly or indi­rect­ly inspired mil­lions of imi­ta­tors world­wide. And you can do that for free at the Youtube chan­nel ACB (Art and Cul­ture Bureau), which fea­tures over 50 doc­u­men­taries, writes Arch Dai­ly, “devot­ed to the most sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ments of archi­tec­ture, its begin­nings, and the lat­est cre­ations of the great archi­tects of today.”

Maybe begin with the Bauhaus film, at the top of the post, an almost thir­ty-minute his­to­ry of the fas­ci­nat­ing post-WWI move­ment, school, and build­ing in Dessau, Ger­many. Be sure to also catch films on Paris’ Georges Pom­pi­dou Cen­tre, the 17th cen­tu­ry Tomb of Iti­mad-ud-Daulah (called the “baby Taj Mahal”), Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Con­vent of La Tourette, and Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno sci­ence cen­ter, among many, many more. All of the films are direct­ed by Richard Copans and some of them have inter­views with the archi­tects them­selves. See the full list of doc­u­men­taries here.

These films will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Arch Dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: From Ancient Greece to Roco­co (A Free Online Course)

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times 

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandin­sky, Moholy-Nagy & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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