The poet Wallace Stevens‘ reclusiveness would have made him an unlikely candidate for karaoke, but death is a great leveler. One who’s shuffled off this mortal coil can no longer claim to be publicity shy or highly protective of his privacy. Nor can he object if a living author—Rob Sheffield, say—selects a song for him to hypothetically butcher.
This is how a quiet poet-accountant of Stevens’ stature finds himself holding the mic in a beyond-the grave karaoke suite, facing the scrolling lyrics of The Velvet Underground’s“Sunday Morning” (above).
It’s all in fun, naturally, but Sheffield, the music journalist and karaoke convert, is not just having an ironic laugh at his favorite poet’s expense. (Though no doubt Stevens’ poem, “Sunday Morning,” factored heavily into the decision-making process.)
Here’s how we know Sheffield is sincere. Karaoke became his unlikely emotional rescuer following the untimely death of his first wife, and helped forge bonds with a new romantic partner. Listen to his passionate description of its transformative effects in the video below. He could be a poet describing his muse. Even die hard karaoke resistors may be moved to give it a whirl after hearing him speak.
May we suggest “Sunday Morning” for your first outing? If you’re feeling nervous, dedicate it to Wallace Stevens. There in spirit, surely.
Some of the greatest rock and roll songs are also dire apocalyptic warnings. When rock stars pull their heads out of their hedonistic you-know-whats and look around, things can look pretty grim indeed. Think, for example, of The Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” or CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising.” Neither is either band’s scariest song, but they’re both chock full of disaster, natural and otherwise, speaking to the sense of doom most everyone seemed to feel in 1969 when both tracks were released.
Fast forward ten years and rock and roll is mostly dead, punk has peaked, and The Clash are trying to make it all new, injecting their music with reggae and rockabilly and a lot of righteous outrage (tempered by a healthy sense of humor). In 1979, the band released their seminal double album London Calling, with its dire, apocalyptic title track (above), warning of an ice age, the sun’s end, and a “nuclear error.” (Read the lyrics here.) No longer are we just dealing with ho-hum war and murder or Biblical plagues. Joe Strummer and company took on the end of the world, initiating the late cold-war nuclear anxiety in 80s punk and new wave lyrics from The Dead Kennedys to The Smiths.
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, the three surviving members of the band, all nearing 60, looked back on the writing and recording of that anthemic song, dissecting the line about “phony Beatlemania” and recalling the ecological and economic crises that angered and frightened them into inspiration. Co-writer and guitarist Mick Jones discusses the influence of sixties rock on the song’s composition, saying, “As musicians, you take the past with you, don’t you? The Beatles, Stones, Kinks and Small Faces had done something new and different and I wanted us to do that, too.” Bassist Paul Simonon, whose iconic bass-smashing photo graced the cover of the album, talks about the band’s history and context:
In the ’70s, when we formed the band, there was a lot of tension in Britain, lots of strikes, and the country was an economic mess. There also was aggression toward anyone who looked different—especially the punks. So the name the Clash seemed appropriate for the band’s name.
Drummer Topper Headon talks technique, and all three members are open about their influences and inspirations for the song. The interview comes along just as the band prepares to release a 13-disc box set, Sound System that Mick Jones—in a Rolling Stone interview—promises will be the band’s final statement. “This is it for me,” says Jones, “and I say that with an exclamation mark.” Read about his intentions for the collection and more Clash history in that excellent short interview here.
One day Lenny Kravitz was sitting with some friends on a terrace in New Orleans when he heard a familiar sound. A group of high school students from a baptist church in Texas was performing his hit “Fly Away” on the steps across Decatur Street from Jackson Square in the French Quarter.
Kravitz decided he wanted to join in. One of his friends went down and asked the group’s director if that would be alright. He said yes, it would. So when the famous musician arrived, the group started playing the song again from the top. “It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced,” Kelvin Reed, director of the Voice of Praise choir from the First Baptist Church in Lewisville, Texas, told the Dallas Morning News afterward. “All of my students said, ‘Kelvin, did you plan that?’ That was just one of those unique experiences.”
The incident happened on June 25, 2010. Back then, Kravitz owned a Creole cottage in the French Quarter and lived in New Orleans part-time. “It was probably one of the most incredible things that’s ever happened to me,” choir member and lead guitarist Michael Smeaton told the Morning News. “This is a famous musician. He just comes down and wants to jam with us. It makes you realize as a musician you have this sense of kinship, and you all come from the same experiences.”
If certain well-known writers come off as a bit paranoid, they may have good cause. Then again, the Powers That Be conduct their surveillance in mysterious ways, never targeting quite whom you’d expect. William T. Vollmann, for instance, a novelist known less for his paranoia than his productivity, recently revealed in Harper’s that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the lookout for Unabomber suspects, built up quite a file on him. “Individuals this bright are capable of most anything,” reads one of its starkly typewritten pages. “By all accounts, VOLLMANN is exceedingly intelligent and possessed with an enormous ego.” Perhaps writerly ego, albeit of an entirely different stripe, also got post office-working poet Charles Bukowski in trouble. “In 1968 various branches of the U.S. government performed an investigation into the background of civil servant Charles Bukowski,” according to bukowski.net. “Apparently the FBI and the Postal Service took offense to some of his writing (mainly the Notes From a Dirty Old Man column he wrote for the Los Angeles hippie tabloid Open City),” the page continues, “and had their ‘informants’ report Bukowski to higher-ups in the post office.”
Bukowski.net offers 113 pages of Bukowski’s FBI file, directly scanned. “He stated that BUKOWSKI is an excellent tenant who never associates with any of his neighbors,” one page reports, apparently from an interview with the landlord of Bukowski’s now-famous bungalow at 5124 De Longpre in Los Angeles. And from an interrogation of the writer himself: “He explained that these articles are ‘an inter-mixture of fiction and fact’ and are ‘highly romanticized in order to give the story juice.’ ” Released FBI files of this type tend to give an impression of fruitlessness and ineptitude, but at least Bukowski’s did make one discovery that may fascinate avid fans: “Bukowski claimed he was married to Jane Cooney,” says bukowski.net. “Every Bukowski biography written thus far names Barbara Frye as his first wife. However, in 1952 (three years before his marriage to Barbara Frye) Bukowski stated that he was married to Jane Cooney Baker — the ‘Jane’ of many of his most heartfelt works.” Once America puts its terrorism problems behind it, perhaps the FBI can devote its resources to more literary research — albeit of a non-invasive variety.
What to do if someone one around you goes into cardiac arrest? The American Heart Association has two simple tips. Over at their web site, they write: “If you see a teen or adult suddenly collapse, call 9–1‑1 and push hard and fast in the center of the chest to the beat of the classic disco song ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ CPR can more than double a person’s chances of survival, and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ has the right beat for Hands-Only CPR.” The song also has the right title for the job at hand.
To help spread the word, the AHA produced a series of videos available on YouTube, including this one starring Ken Jeong, an actor and comedian who is also a licensed physician in California. You may well recognize him from Judd Apatow’s film Knocked Up, where, like here, he exhorts people to “focus, pay attention.”
A study by the University of Illinois College of Medicine has found that the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” has the utterly perfect beat for performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The 1977 disco hit contains 103 beats per minute. That’s close to the recommended chest compression rate of 100 beats every 60 seconds.
Below, you can find a very different version of the same campaign that aired in the UK. And thanks to this ad campaign, at least one life was actually saved.
Note: Another song to keep in mind in these life or death situations is Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” It has the right beat. But not so much the right title.
Demos for Hands-Only CPR can be found at the AHA web site.
Updated: 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.
Permanently housed in the Literature section of our collection of 1,300 Free Online Courses, Invitation to World Literature features the following lectures:
Between 1979 and 1981, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould collaborated on a series of documentary films with the French violinist, writer and filmmaker Bruno Mansaingeon. In the scenes presented here, Gould plays a pair of movements from Johann Sebastian Bach’sThe Art of Fugue.
Gould was nearing the end of his life when he gave these performances. He died of a stroke on October 4, 1982, only a few days after his 50th birthday. Similarly, The Art of Fugue was one of Bach’s final projects. He worked on it over the last decade of his life, and the unfinished manuscript was published after his death, perhaps also from a stroke, in 1750 at the age of 65.
The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, is made up of 14 fugues and 4 canons, each exploring the contrapuntal possibilities of a single musical subject. Gould plays “Contrapunctus I” in the video above. Below, he plays “Contrapunctus IV.”
We were among millions deeply saddened to learn today that Seamus Heaney had passed away at age 74. Called the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, Heaney was not only a national treasure to his home country but to the global poetry community. The 1995 Nobel laureate worked in a rich bardic tradition that mined mythic language and imagery, Celtic and otherwise, to get at primeval human verities that transcend culture and nation.
One prominent theme in Heaney’s work—connected to the Irish struggle, but accessible to anyone—is the persistence of tribalism and its damaging effects on future generations. In one of his darker poems, “Punishment,” one I’ve often taught to undergraduates, Heaney’s speaker implicates himself in the execution of a woman found buried in a bog many centuries later. In the last two stanzas, the speaker betrays empathy clothed in helpless recognition of the tribal violence and hypocrisy at the heart of all systems of justice.
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
The theme of tribal violence and its consequences is central to the Old English poem Beowulf, which Heaney famously translated into a rich new idiom suited for a post-colonial age but still consonant with the distinctive poetic rhythms of its language. You can hear Heaney read his translation of Beowulf online. Above, we have the Prologue. (Apologies in advance for the irritating ad that precedes it.) The remainder of the reading appears on YouTube — listen to Part 1 and Part 2. Plus find more of Heaney’s work at the Poetry Foundation.
Finally, you can also listen to his Nobel lecture delivered on 7 December 1995. It was posted on YouTube today, and we thought it worth your while. It’s presented in full below.
What’s the difference between borscht and alt-country music?
Uh, pretty much everything, except for singer-songwriter, Neko Case, the most recent in a long list of celebrities to share Ukrainian beet soup recipes with an adoring public.
Filmed at the behest of Rookie, an online magazine by and for teenage girls, Neko’s videotaped lesson is both basic and refreshingly unexacting. Her status as the child of Ukrainian immigrants affords her the street cred to tell viewers they should take it as a sign they’re on the right track should someone of eastern European extraction insist they’re doing it wrong. (Her on-camera version is gluten-free, and—prior to the addition of sour cream and chicken stock—lactose-free and vegan, as well.)
Interested in sampling her version? Put the laptop on the counter. You won’t miss anything if you commence chopping right away. The demo is as casual as her lack of styling, clocking in at nearly twenty minutes, including tips for tear-free onion cutting, celery leaf usage, and the making of mirepoix.
Here at Open Culture, we’ve often featured the many sides of Tom Waits: actor, poetry reader, favored David Letterman guest. More rarely, we’ve posted material dedicated to showcasing him practicing his primary craft, writing songs and singing them. But when a full-fledged Tom Waits concert does surface here, prepare to settle in for an unrelentingly (and entertainingly) askew musical experience. In March, we posted Burma Shave, an hour-long performance from the late seventies in which Waits took on “the persona of a down-and-out barfly with the soul of a Beat poet.” Today, we fast-forward a decade to Big Time, by which point Waits could express the essences of “avant-garde composer Harry Partch, Howlin’ Wolf, Frank Sinatra, Astor Piazzolla, Irish tenor John McCormack, Kurt Weill, Louis Prima, Mexican norteño bands and Vegas lounge singers.” That evocative quote comes from Big Time’s own press notes, as excerpted by Dangerous Minds, which calls the viewing experience “like entering a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain.”
Watch the 90-minute concert film in its entirety, though, and you may not find it evocative enough. In 1987, Waits had just put out the album Franks Wild Years, which explores the experience of his alter-ego Frank O’Brien, whom Waits called “a combination of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, playing accordion — but without the wisdom they possessed.” The year before, the singer actually wrote and produced a stage play built around the character, and the Franks Wild Years tour through North America and Europe made thorough use of Waits’ theatrical bent in that era. Its final two shows, at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre and Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre, along with footage from gigs in Dublin, Stockholm and Berlin, make up the bulk of Big Time’s material. As for its sensibility, well, even Waits fans may feel insecure, and happily so, about quite what to expect. (Fans of The Wire, I should note, will find something familiar indeed in this show’s rendition of “Way Down in the Hole.”)
“Many of Mondrian’s pieces explore the relationships between adjacent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in particular the formative role of each on the boundaries and possibilities of the other. I based this painting [see above] off of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in which he develops a theory of meaning grounded in the idea that propositions have meaning only insofar as they constrain the ways the world could be; a meaningful proposition is thus very like one of Mondrian’s color squares, forming a boundary and limiting the possible configurations of the adjacent spaces.”
A second-year PhD student in the philosophy program at the University of Southern California, Bolinger studied painting a Biola University before making philosophy her second major. “I actually came to philosophy quite late in my college career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was fortunate to have two particularly excellent and philosophic art teachers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Anderson, who convinced me that my two passions were not mutually exclusive, and encouraged me to pursue both as I began my graduate education.”
Bolinger now works primarily on the philosophy of language, with side interests in logic, epistemology, mind and political philosophy. She continues to paint. We asked her how she reconciles her two passions, which seem to occupy opposite sides of the mind. “I do work in analytic philosophy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that philosophy and painting engage opposite sides of the mind. The sort of realist drawing and painting that I do is all about analyzing the relationships between the lines, shapes and color tones, and so still very left-brain. Nevertheless, it engages the mind in a different way than do the syllogisms of analytic philosophy. I find that the two types of mental exertion complement each other well, each serving as a productive break from the other.”
Bolinger has created a series of philosopher portraits, each one pairing a philosopher with an artist, or art style, in an intriguing way. In addition to Wittgenstein, she painted ten philosophers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her Web site, where high quality prints can be ordered.
G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pollock:
Bolinger says she paired the British analytic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe with the American abstract painter Jackson Pollock for two reasons: “First, the loose style of Pollock’s action painting fits the argumentative (and organizational) style of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instrumental in publishing. Second, her primary field of work, in which she wrote a seminal text, is philosophy of action, which has obvious connections to the themes present in any of Pollock’s action paintings.”
Gottlob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:
Bolinger paired the German logician, mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege with the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night and Frege’s puzzle concerning identity statements such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus,” or “the evening star is identical to the morning star.”
Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:
Bolinger painted the British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell in the Art Deco style. “This pairing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit harder to articulate,” says Bolinger. “The simplification of form and reduction to angled planes that takes place in the background of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Russell’s locial atomism (the reduction of complex logical propositions to their fundamental logical ‘atoms’).”
Kurt Gödel/Art Nouveau:
Bolinger paired the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel with Art Nouveau. “The Art Nouveau movement developed around the theme of mechanization and the repetition of forms,” says Bolinger, “and centrally involves a delicate balance between organic shapes — typically a figure that dominates the portrait — and schematized or abstracted patterns, often derived from organic shapes, but made uniform and repetitive (often seen in the flower motifs that ornament most Art Nouveau portraits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was dedicated to defining computability in terms of recursive functions, and using the notion to prove the Completeness and Incompleteness theorems.”
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