After reading some of the encyclopedic comments on this NPR site featuring author and professor John McMillian—who has written a new book on The Beatles vs. The Stones—and after hearing McMillan himself tell his “revealing, behind the scenes stories” in the interview below, I’m fairly certain we’re in good historical hands for a reappraisal of the two bands’ friendly rivalry. McMillan discusses their first meeting and earliest collaboration, the track above, 1963’s “I Wanna Be Your Man,” written by, and credited to, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The song was the result of a chance encounter, we learn from Stones historian Bill Janowitz: “[Stones manager Andrew Loog] Oldham had almost literally bumped into Lennon and McCartney as they stepped out of a cab.” Oldham brought The Beatles into the studio and the song was born from a McCartney fragment. The Stones had to this point only released American R&B or blues covers, though they also turned this track into a bluesy stomper. Hear The Beatles decidedly less gritty version of the song below, over a montage of their early sixties British comedy act that the Monkees stole so well. They released this three weeks later, giving the lead vocal to Ringo.
Despite Tom Wolfe’s quip that “The Beatles want to hold your hand but the Stones want to burn down your town,” the early sixties versions of both bands looked very much alike. Until the late sixties, the Stones were often a step behind The Beatles’ image. They appear on the cover of 1965’s Out of My Head in modish dress with modish haircuts looking almost exactly like their counterparts. 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, for its occasional beauty, was an obvious and slightly ridiculous attempt to capitalize on Sgt. Pepper’s psychedelic success.
But even during those times, the bands diverged sharply in musical terms, and the Stones’ path led in a darker direction. The budding image of the band as arsonists may have contributed to their targeting by the authorities. After a 1967 drug bust, Lennon and McCartney came to their aid, then sang (uncredited) backing vocals for the Stones track “We Love You,” a song written to the band’s dedicated fans and to The Beatles. Purportedly, Allen Ginsberg sat in on the sessions. “They looked like little angels,“ he later wrote, “like Botticelli Graces singing together for the first time.”
Quentin Tarantino has never been one to shy away from sharing his views on filmmaking with the public, and we’ve previously written about his 2008 and 2012 lists of the greatest movies ever made. Even a casual comparison of his 2008 and 2012 picks, however, shows that the onetime video store clerk’s tastes are liable to change over time. When making his directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs(1992), Tarantino made another list; on the second page of the script, under a heading marked “Dedicated to:” Tarantino enumerated the actors and directors who had inspired him to make what Empire Magazine would rank the greatest independent film of all time.
In the video above, which was shot some years after Reservoir Dogs’ release, Tarantino revisits this list and gives his latest thoughts on its constituents. Some are scarcely-remembered figures, such as the king of ‘60s and ’70s misfit roles Timothy Carey whom Tarantino wryly remembers treating flatulence “almost like a religion.” Others include then obscure actors on their way to becoming internationally-recognized names, such as Chow Yun Fat. Although Tarantino initially saw something effortlessly cool about Fat, reminiscent of trenchcoat-wearing French star Alain Delon, he claims to have since downgraded his opinion of the Hong Kong actor. And don’t even get him started on Jean-Luc Godard. For the full list accompanied by Tarantino’s colorful commentary, check out the video.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Let’s now head 600 miles south, to the Riviera city of Nice, where some café owners opted for another way to keep bad behavior in check. At the Petite Syrah, they’ve implemented a simple pricing scheme that works like this:
If you ask for “a coffee” (it’s most likely an espresso), it will run you 7 euros, or $9.50.
If you ask for a “coffee please,” the charge drops to €4.25/$5.80.
But if you start your order by saying “Hello, may I have a coffee, please,” the bill becomes a manageable €1.40.
Now, truth be told, the pricing scheme is more carrot than stick. The café’s manager readily admits that he has never actually charged any of the punitive higher prices. But that’s not to say that the scheme doesn’t work. According to manager/owner Fabrice Pepino, regular customers quickly took note of the sign and began to “say, ‘Hello, your highness, will you serve me one of your beautiful coffees.” Eh voilà, no more coffee jerks.
James Joyce completed his novel, Ulysses, on October 30, 1921. Ninety years later, on October 30, 2011, Charlene Matthews, the Los Angeles-based book artist and bookbinder recently the subject of a profile in Studios magazine, began work on an extraordinary edition of the book, based upon Sylvia Beach’s true first edition with all its typos included.
Two years later, on October 30, 2013, she completed it: the entire text of Ulysses — all of its approximately 265,000 words in eighteen episodes — transcribed by hand onto thirty-eight seven-foot tall, two-inch diameter poles: Ulysses as a landscape to physically move through; the novel as literary grove, Ulysses as trees of of life with language as fragrant, hallucinatory bark, and trunks reaching toward the sky.
Head over to Booktryst to look over a gallery of images and learn more about Matthews’ grand undertaking. And if you’d like a nice introduction to Ulysses, please see some of the instructive material we’ve listed below.
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To write an obituary for Peter O’Toole, who died this past Sunday, I would pick no other writer than New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. Luckily, the New Yorker had the same inclination. In his “postscript” piece on O’Toole, Lane references one of my favorite pieces of television talk, viewable above. “To watch O’Toole and Orson Welles on the BBC’s Monitor program, in 1963, as they ruminate at length on Hamlet and his father’s ghost,” he writes, “is to realize what a real talk show is, or what it could be, when the airwaves were still haunted by the grand talkers. What takes you slightly aback, however, is not that O’Toole seems willing and able to discuss seventeenth-century Catholic doctrines of the afterlife but that, with his dicky bow, dark shirt, and thick-rimmed black spectacles, he looks like a man in disguise.” Lane points out what even some of us O’Toole fans never quite realized: “scan his filmography and you see how seldom he made an impact in modern garb, and what elegant shelter he sought in period dress.”
Even filmgoers who’ve seen only O’Toole’s most famous performances in lavish, wider-than-widescreen historical films — Lane highlights his title role, a master work of tensely focused flamboyance, in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and his turn as gentle Reginald Johnson, tutor of the title character in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor — recognize the strength he drew from stepping into the past and its haze of myth. O’Toole enjoyed some of his finest performative hours, his most dedicated followers say, when he stepped all the way back into the sixteenth century, to the time of Shakespeare. Remarking on his tendency to play other nationalities — the English Lawrence, the Scottish Johnson — Lane observes that “he was Irish, as tall and slim and unsnappable as a Malacca cane, and one regret, for his moviegoing fans, was that they saw and heard far less of O’Toole the Celt than their theatre-loving counterparts were privileged to enjoy.” Just above, you can at least hear one more instance of the theatrical, and Shakespearean, O’Toole in action — not, alas, as an Irishman, but as an Italian: Petruchio, the strong-willed (and feminist-loathed) suitor at the heart of The Taming of the Shrew. Note that this performance, a production of Living Shakespeare in 1986, uses an abridged version of the play, but O’Toole himself certainly sounds in full form.
Some of the prints, like the one below, certainly have a foreign quality to them. They feel far away in terms of time and place. But others (like the shot above) feel remarkably close, something we can all relate to today.
According to the PDR, the pictures came to reside in the Dutch National Archive as a result of the centuries-long commercial relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese. More vintage pix can be viewed here.
Nelson Mandela, who died on December 5, 2013, had spent more than a quarter of his life serving time in various jails. While behind bars for the 18-year period between 1962 and 1980, the anti-apartheid revolutionary educated both himself and others to prepare for the advent of multiracial equality in South Africa. During his confinement at the Robben Island prison, Mandela studied law by correspondence at the University of London, learned Afrikaans to foster a rapport with jailhouse wardens, and was instrumental in launching the “University of Robben Island”, where prisoners possessing expertise in particular fields presented lectures to their fellow inmates.
Mandela’s stay, however, was frequently marred by demeaning and deplorable treatment. Initially, black prisoners were humiliated by being given shorts, commonly worn by children, rather than full-length pants as uniforms. Mandela was also forbidden from wearing sunglasses when forced to labor at a limestone quarry, and the harsh reflections from the rocks damaged his vision. The quarry dust also damaged his tear ducts, which made it impossible for him to cry until receiving corrective surgery in 1994. Perhaps the most painful moments arrived in the late 1960s, when Mandela lost his mother and firstborn son, and was denied permission to attend their funerals.
“That poem was his favorite… When he lost courage, when he felt like just giving up — just lie down and not get up again — he would recite it. And it would give him what he needed to keep going.”
Freeman, who played Mandela in the 2009 film Invictus, also provides a solemn and dignified recitation of the poem beginning at 3:51. Although the poem is best known for providing succour to Mandela in times of despair, its words of courage have served as inspiration to countless others. Famous figures who have drawn hope from “Invictus” include the father of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during his struggle for Burmese independence and tennis champion Andre Agassi. Rumor has it that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was also quite fond of it. We’ve included the full text for “Invictus” below:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
H/T to Bruno, one of our readers, for sending this video our way.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Yesterday, John McMillian, assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, appeared on KQED’s Forum in San Francisco (listen here) to talk about his new book Beatles vs. Stones. It offers a new look at how the two British bands co-existed, often helped one another, and strategically defined themselves against each other. The Beatles were everyman’s band. Wholesome, clean-cut, witty, the Fab Four appealed to the young and the old, the rich and the poor. The Stones, trying to make a name for themselves in the wake of Beatlemania, positioned themselves as the anti-Beatles. As the journalist Tom Wolfe once wrote, “The Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Stones want to burn down your town.”
50 years later, The Beatles still have a nearly universal appeal. The Boomers and their now middle-aged children haven’t let dust gather on The Beatles’ discography. And, if you plunk the grandchildren in front of old Beatles’ videos, they’ll love what they see. Just watch above.
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Fans of bratty New York punk-turned-serious writer Richard Hell or schlocky German horror director Ulli Lommel or—why not—both, will likely know of Lommel’s 1980 Blank Generation, a film unremarkable except for its casting of Hell and his excellent Voidoids as feature players. (Their debut 1977 album and single are also called Blank Generation.) The movie, as a reviewer puts it, “seems as if each member of the production was under the impression they were working on a different film than the rest of their collaborators…. You can’t help but think that something more watchable could be produced out of the raw footage with a good editor.”
One might approach an earlier film, also called Blank Generation—the raw 1976 documentary about the budding New York punk scene above—with similar expectations of coherent production and narrative clarity. But this would be mistaken. The first Blank Generation is a film that rewards no expectations, except perhaps expecting to be constantly disoriented. But that would seem to me a given for a genuine document of what Lydia Lunch christened “No Wave,” the deliberately tasteless 70s hybrid of punk, rock, new wave, noise, free jazz, and jarring combination of amateur and professional experimentation that came to define the sound of downtown for decades to come.
Shot and directed by frequent Lunch and Patti Smith collaborator Ivan Kral and pioneering indie filmmaker Amos Poe, the documentary features Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, The Heartbreakers, Wayne/Jayne County, and pretty much everyone else on the CBGB’s scene at the time. The Austin Film Society sums it up well. Kral and Poe’s Blank Generation
exemplified a punkish attitude toward film structure with handheld zooms, angled compositions, floodlight lighting, extreme close-ups, elliptical editing, flash pans, and a general in-your-face and “up-yours” stance. Sound and image purposely do not synch. In many cases music and image were recorded on separate nights—more economical because of the high cost of raw film stock with sound, but also an aesthetic nod to Jean-Luc Godard who had slashed the umbilical cord uniting sound and image. Out of the French New Wave came the New York No Wave.
The influence is evident, though it’s not particularly useful context. Really, all you need to know is contained within the frame: in the lilting rasp of Patti Smith’s “Gloria,” in close-up shots of Joey Ramone’s crotch and filthy sneakers, in the youthful David Byrne’s jangly acoustic guitar and the sleazy lounge-punk of Television’s tribute to Iggy Pop, “Little Johnny Jewel.” Of course later No Wave stalwarts like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Swans, Sonic Youth, John Zorn, DNA, and Mars don’t appear—but some get their due elsewhere. And while the Hell/Lommel film might be worth a watch for curiosity’s sake, the first Blank Generation is a truly incredible historical document that deserves repeated viewing.
You’d expect a bit of strangeness from David Cronenberg‘s student films, but for most of its short length, From the Drain, which he made in 1967 while attending the University of Toronto, seems to deliver strangeness of an unexpected kind. Playing more like Waiting for Godot than his later vivid-to-the point of harrowing pictures like Crash, Videodrome, or The Fly, this thirteen-minute black-and-white film, only Cronenberg’s second, presents us with two fellows seated, fully clothed, in a bathtub. The situation looks bizarre, and as soon as the players start talking, it reveals itself as even more bizarre than we’d thought: evidently, one of these men has mistaken the tub for “the Disabled War Veterans’ Recreation Center.” The conversation continues without its participants leaving their porcelain confines, making a certain kind of sense on the surface but none at all beneath. This feels almost like the realm of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which wouldn’t debut and begin exerting its vast influence on young comedic filmmakers until 1969.
We’d feel more secure in our laughter if we didn’t know who its director would go on to become. These days, when you watch anything by Cronenberg, perhaps the best-known living auteur of technological menace, “body horror,” and formless dread, you can rest reasonably assured that something will sooner or later go horribly, viscerally awry onscreen. So it comes to pass in From the Drain, whose title gives some suggestion as to the nature of the ultimate malevolence. Don’t let the hyper-farcical dialogue, the goofy performances, or the classical guitar soundtrack mislead you; here we definitely have a project by the king of unsettlement, though at a time when he presumably had yet to earn even the title of prince of unsettlement, a point from which he could look forward to decades of more advanced and much creepier visual effects. At this point in his career, however, with the bleak-looking Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars due out in the near future, he seems to need nothing so elaborate, still unsettling us, but preferring to do it subtly.
Yakov Smirnoff has the distinction of being the most famous Russian comic in America. He’s also the only Russian comic in America (ba-dum-dum). But seriously: In his mid-80s heyday, he had the market cornered on Soviet humor in the U.S. Whatever demand there was, Smirnoff supplied it, singlehandedly, as a fixture in ads, TV show and film appearances, comedy specials, late-night talk shows…. His was the only face of Russian humor anyone knew in the 80s (unless we’re counting Ivan Drago). Smirnoff even warranted a Family Guy reference, which pretty much cements his reputation as endlessly recyclable pop culture syndication fodder.
And yet, post-Soviet Russia, it’s hard to imagine there’s a place for Yakov Smirnoff, since corny jokes at the expense of end-stage Russian communism were not only his bread and butter, but his whole comedic menu, such that Marc Maron introduces Smirnoff as a guest on his WTF Podcast above with: “that guy, with his hook, that certainly isn’t relevant anymore. How does a guy like that survive?” Ouch. But what a hook it was, says Maron: a wonderstruck immigrant exclaiming “What a country!” as he took in each new capitalist marvel. He was like a real-life version of one of Andy Kaufman’s characters, or a pre-Borat Eastern European innocent abroad. The act carried him beyond his mid-eighties 15 minutes of fame and through a 20-year career entertaining middle-class Americans in Branson, Missouri.
But was there much demand for Smirnoff’s brand of humor even at his peak? If you didn’t have the great fortune of living through the 80s, you might be surprised at just how popular his sort of thing could be—“a Russian comic talking about how great America was.” But it wasn’t only Smirnoff’s persona that flattered our sense of economic, political, and moral superiority. A whole genre of Soviet jokes had a prominent place in the discourse, with knee-slappers about KGB surveillance and bread lines and other privations commonly tossed around at dinner parties. Even Ronald Reagan tried his hand at it, as you can see here. Reagan’s delivery was never my cup of tea, but you can also see Smirnoff do his impression of Reagan telling the same joke in the video at the top of the post.
And while revisiting Smirnoff’s not exactly meteoric rise to fame in the U.S. is fun for its own sake, what’s even more interesting are Smirnoff’s serious reminiscences of his time growing up and working as a comic in Russia. The serious Smirnoff is full of psychological insights (he has a masters degree in the subject from Penn) and sociological anecdotes about life under a repressive communist regime—though he never misses a chance for some of the old Smirnoff material, complete with his honking, donkey-like laughter.
For example, about twenty minutes into his WTF interview, Smirnoff discuss the serious subject of joke approval in the Soviet Union. That’s right, in all seriousness, he tells us, comics were required to submit their material to a Department of Jokes. Smirnoff also once spoke expansively on the subject in a 1985 Chicago Tribune piece on him at his peak.
Yep. There’s a Department of Jokes. Actually, the Ministry of Culture has a very big department of humor. I’m serious now. Once a year they censor your material, and then you have to stay with what they have approved. You can‘t improvise or do anything like that. You write out your material and mail it to them, and they send it back to you with corrections. After that, you stay with it for a year.
It is perhaps for this reason that comics in Soviet Russia borrowed liberally from each other, rarely did original material, and never, ever improvised. Says Smirnoff: “I would do some original material, but that would be unusual. Also, it was OK for comedians to borrow—if one of the big comedians went on television and did a monolog, next day 10 or 20 other comedians would do the same thing in clubs. That wasn’t considered stealing.”
It also turns out that serious Yakov Smirnoff explains the comic stylings of his persona, the cornball character:
It was old jokes, more vaudeville type of humor. More like English-style comedy. Or like Henny Youngman. One-liners or stories that have been told over and over again but they’re still funny. No improvisation comedy. You don’t improvise. You don’t tell stories about yourself the way American comics do.
So it turns out that a lot of those bad jokes about Russia at the tail end of the Cold War actually descended from the source. Take this one from Smirnoff:
A funeral procession is going by, and they’re walking a goat behind the coffin. A guy comes over and says, “Why are you walking a goat behind the coffin?” The other guys says, “That goat killed my mother-in-law.” The first guy says, “Can I borrow this goat for a week?” The second guy says, “You see all these people in the procession? They’re all waiting. Get in line.”
See? It’s a joke about standing in line! Also, about mothers-in-law, which must be a truly universal subject. Find more of Smirnoff’s insights into Soviet humor and joke censorship at the full Chicago Tribune interview piece and on Maron’s WTF podcast.
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