Budding science-fiction authors today know that, to get their start, they should probably go online and publish themselves. But even before the advent of the modern internet, many writers eager to tell speculative tales of humanity’s future struggle with technology, knowledge, and its own nature showed a similar self-starting bent. They made especially advantageous use of photocopiers and staplers in the seventies and eighties, the decades commonly considered the heyday of those low-circulation publications known as zines. But long before before that, the format already incubated serious science-fiction talent. Take Futuria Fantasia, which published four issues between 1939 and 1940. Its editor? A certain Ray Bradbury, before Fahrenheit 451, before The Martian Chronicles — before everything.
“Released in 1939 shortly after Bradbury graduated from high school,” says Zinewiki’s entry on the magazine, “Futuria Fantasia was published with the help of [sci-fi promoter] Forrest J. Ackerman, who lent Bradbury $90.00 for the fanzine.” The first issue, available free from Project Gutenberg, includes Bradbury’s story “Let’s Get Technatal” (written under the pseudonym “Ron Reynolds”) and poem “Thought and Space.”
The second issue includes an article he wrote under “Guy Amory” and his story “The Pendulum.” The third includes a Bradbury editorial, the fourth another editorial and the pseudonymous stories “The Piper” and “The Flight of the Good Ship Clarissa.” “I hope you like this brain-child, spawned from the womb of a year long inanimation,” the ambitious young Bradbury writes in his introduction to the summer 1939 issue. “This is only the first issue of FuFa … if it succeeds there will be more, better issues coming up.” Three more would, indeed, emerge, but surely even such a predictive mind as Bradbury’s couldn’t imagine what his career really held in store.
You can hear all ten stories from the Spring 1940 edition of Futuria Fantasia in the playlist below. It includes “Gorgono and Slith” by Ray Bradbury:
Billed and sold as the ninth and final studio album by The Doors, An American Prayer tends to divide Jim Morrison fans. On the one hand, it’s a captivating document of the late singer reading his free-associative poetry: dark, weirdly beautiful psychedelic lyrical fugues. On the other hand, it’s only a “Doors album” in that the three remaining members convened in 1978 to record original music over the deceased Morrison’s solo readings. While the resulting product is both a haunting tribute and an immersive late-night listen, many have felt that the band’s rendering did violence to the departed singer’s original intentions. (Listen to and download it here for free.)
An American Prayer’s readings were recorded unaccompanied in March 1969 and December 1970. In 1971, Morrison joined his long-time lover Pamela Courson in Paris. That same year, Jim Morrison died, under some rather mysterious circumstances, at the age of 27.
Before his death, however, he made what is said to be his final studio recording, a poetry reading/performance with a couple of unknown Parisian street musicians. Although Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek allegedly dismissed this recording as “drunken gibberish,” Doors fans have circulated it since 1994—combined with a 37-minute poetry reading from 1968—as a bootleg called The Lost Paris Tapes.
While it’s true that An American Prayer is a powerful and haunting album, it’s also true that The Lost Paris Tapes represents the unadorned, unedited Morrison, in full control of how his voice sounds, and without his famous band. I cannot help you find a copy of The Lost Paris Tapes, but many of the tracks are on Youtube, such as “Orange County Suite” (top), an affecting piece written for Pamela Courson. Other excerpts from the bootleg, such as “Hitler Poem” (above) show Morrison in a very strange mood indeed, and show off his unsetting sense of humor. While the work on The Lost Paris Tapes ranges in quality, all of it preserves the seductive voice and cryptic imagination that Jim Morrison never lost, even as he began to slip away into alcoholism.
Librarians are breaking the mold lately and flirting with the world of hip hop and punk. Courtesy of The New York Public Library Tumblr, we have Chicago librarians paying homage to The Beastie Boys’s 1994 video, “Sabotage,” directed by Spike Jonze. Of course, the original 1994 video paid comedic tribute to TV crime shows of the 1970s, shows like Hawaii Five‑O and Starsky and Hutch. So what we have above is a tribute to a tribute.
The way people read on the internet has encouraged the provision of “tips,” especially presented as short sentences collected in lists. While we here at Open Culture seldom ride that current, we make exceptions for lists of tips by authors best known for their long-form textual achievements. Richard Ford (The Sportswriter books), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections and Freedom), and Anne Enright (The Portable Virgin, The Gathering) here offer ten suggestions each to guide your own writing habits. Though presumably learned in the process of writing novels, many of these lessons apply just as well to other forms. I, for example, write mostly essays, but still find great value in Franzen’s instruction to treat the reader as a friend, Enright’s point that description conveys opinion, and Ford’s injunction not to write reviews (or at least, as I read it, not reviews as so narrowly defined).
Some of these tips have to do with technique: Ford advises against drinking while writing, Franzen advises against using “then” as a conjunction, and Enright advises you simply to keep putting words on the page. Others have more to do with maintaining a certain temperament: “Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night,” says Ford; “You have to love before you can be relentless,” says Franzen; “Have fun,” says Enright. And as any successful writer knows, you can’t pull it off at all without a strong dose of practicality, as exemplified by Enright’s “Try to be accurate about stuff,” Franzen’s doubt that “anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,” and Ford’s “Don’t have children.” Can we draw out an overarching guideline? Avoid distraction, perhaps. But you really have to read these authors’ lists in full, like you would their novels, to grasp them. The lists below originally appeared in The Guardian, along with tips from various other esteemed writers.
Richard Ford
1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.
7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.
9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10 Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.
Jonathan Franzen
1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3 Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.
Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
There’s a new film coming out about the rise of CBGB as the premier site of New York punk, new wave, and art rock. And I have to agree with Dangerous Minds, it looks like this might just be “AWFUL.” But then again, maybe not. Who am I to make a critical appraisal of a work I haven’t seen yet? Watch the trailer and make your own pre-judgments.
No matter how this fictionalized version of the CBGB story turns out, we are lucky to have copious footage from the real heyday of the dirty Bowery club that made the careers of The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Blondie, the Talking Heads and countless other New York bands who rose to semi-stardom, or local notoriety, from CBGB’s famous, filthy bowels. Although Alan Rickman must surely do a fine job as CBGB’s owner Hillel Kristal, there’s nothing like hearing from the real thing, and you can, in the documentary CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk (part one above, part two below).
Kristal, who intended to create a space for “Country, BlueGrass, and Blues,” ended up managing a very different beast when he realized that no one in lower Manhattan cared about his tastes. Instead, to keep the lights on, he was forced to let the lowlifes in, the “derelicts, lost souls… hookers and pimps and junkies,” who came from the flophouses and tenements to hear music that spoke to them.
Sometimes they got it, sometimes they didn’t, but for the musicians who used Kristal’s dive bar as a live rehearsal space, the opportunity to play, night after night, and create their own sounds and identities, the CBGB’s experience was invaluable. You’ll hear a few of them reflect on those heady times in the film, but mostly, CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk is a carnival of vintage performances from New York’s seminal punk bands. Maybe the Hollywood version won’t be so bad, eh? Even so, I’d rather watch, and listen to, the real thing.
Alexander Calder’s Calder’s Circus, a toy theater piece the artist constructed between 1926 and 1931, and performed for decades, has the rag bag appeal of a much-repaired stuffed animal who’s loved into a state of baldness. This charm presented conservators at the Whitney Museum of American Art with a unique set of challenges. Not only were the cloth and wire structures fragile with age, they’d taken a beating during the period when they were on active duty. Should the work be restored to its pristine state or should the artist’s clumsy, on-the-fly patch jobs be preserved as evidence of use?
As part of the restoration effort, the Whitney’s team of conservators, archivists and historians delved into circus history, learning that Calder’s ringmaster, tightrope dancer, bareback rider, and lion tamer were all based on circus stars of the period.
They also leaned on two films depicting the work in motion, Jean Painleve’s Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927 andLe Cirque de Calderby Carlos Vilardebo. But with more than two hundred live performances, it seemed a good bet that the characters could be manipulated in ways other than the ones captured on film. An acrobat who was consulted agreed, but also concluded that some of the moves of which these little wire figures were capable would be impossible for human beings.
As archivist Anita Duquette notes above, even in its restored state the Circus will now be a static affair, partly from the ongoing effort to conserve its delicate materials, but more because the master who apparently took such pleasure in bringing it to life is not available for an encore performance.
- Ayun Halliday will take a cork-wire-and-fabric-scrap tabletop circus over a 3D CGI any old day. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Last fall Sherry Turkle, an MIT psychologist who explores how technology shapes modern relationships, published Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. The third in a trilogy of books, Alone Together tries to make sense of a paradox. The more friends and acquaintances we gather on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the more we feel alone. We’re connected to other people more than ever, and yet we feel isolated in a new solitude. If you’re looking for a primer on Turkle’s thinking, you can watch a new animation (above) created by Shimi Cohen. It was made as a final project for a course taken at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv. Another way to get up to speed on Turkle’s thinking is to watch Turkle’s own TED Talk recorded in February, 2012. Find it right below. And, of course, you could always read her book, Alone Together, in print or digital format. A novel idea that.
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!
What’s an example of such a collaboration? Beauchesne writes: “If a UCLA researcher published a paper with a colleague at the University of Tokyo, this would create an instance of collaboration between Los Angeles and Tokyo.” By checking out this cool zoomable map, you can see thousands of these collaborations taking place worldwide between 2005 and 2009, and pretty soon you realize the extent to which modern science is an international affair. The data was pulled from Science-Metrix database.
I vividly remember learning the first song my high school garage band covered, The Clash’s “Clash City Rockers.” We spent hours deciphering the lyrics, and never got them right. This was, if you can believe it, a pre-Google age. While the exercise was frustrating, I never resented Joe Strummer’s slurred, gravelly vocals for making us work hard at getting his meaning. For one thing, I loved his voice, and as a student of the blues and Dylan, never really cared if rock singers could actually sing. For another, Strummer never seemed to care much himself if you could understand him, though his lyrics blasted through mountains of BS. This is not because he was an egotist but quite the opposite: he passionately hated rock clichés and wasn’t making pop records.
The first scene in the documentary above, Viva Joe Strummer (later released as Get Up, Stand Up), gives us The Clash frontman deconstructing the genre. “Well, hi everybody, ain’t it groovy,” he says to a cheering crowd, followed by, “ain’t you sick of hearing that for the last 150 years?” The documentary’s narrator describes Strummer as “the man who put credible rock and roll into the bastard cultural orphan that was called punk,” but this seems an inaccurate description.
For one thing, rock and roll is itself a bastard genre, something Strummer always recognized, and for another The Clash, fueled by Strummer’s ecumenical interest in world cultures, drew liberally from other kinds of music and stuck their middle fingers up at establishment rock and everything it came to represent.
Viva Joe Strummer gives us loads of concert footage and interviews with band members and close friends like the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock. The focus remains on Strummer, a frontman with tremendous charisma but also, paradoxically, with a tremendous amount of humility. One reviewer of the film says as much:
Joe Strummer always projected himself as a humble man. Even at the height of The Clash‘s megalomania, when he fired guitarist Mick Jones, Strummer came across like a better read, more worldly Bruce Springsteen. The everyman image has made eulogizing the singer difficult.
This suggests that Strummer’s everyman persona may have been part of his showmanship, but even so, he was respected and admired by nearly everyone who knew him. And his proletarian politics were genuine. As one interviewee says above, “he always had a corner to fight in. He always had someone to stick up for.”
The original DVD included a CD with interview clips from 1979 to 2001, such as the 1981 Tom Snyder Show interview above. Viva Joe Strummer lacks the powerful dramatic arc and tight direction of Julian Temple’s 2007 The Future is Unwritten, but it’s still well worth watching for interview footage you won’t see anywhere else. Despite the film’s original subtitle, The Story of The Clash, the documentary follows Strummer’s career all the way through the dissolution of the band that made him famous and through his successive musical endeavors with Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros. And it documents the reactions to his sudden, tragic death in 2002. I still remember getting the news. I happened, oddly enough, to be drinking at the bar where the Joe Strummer mural would go up in New York’s East Village in 2003. I walked outside and lit a cigarette, put on my headphones, cued up “Clash City Rockers,” and shed a tear for the punk rock everyman who everybody loved.
What can philosophy do for you? The question is perhaps better asked this way. What can’t it do for you?
Head over to this web site created by Tomás Bogardus, a philosophy professor at Pepperdine, and you’ll learn why philosophy can answer big questions (we all know that), but also improve your test scores on the LSAT, GRE and GMAT, and then make you more employable and better compensated in the workplace. Yes, rigorous thinking can do that.
If you’re wondering which philosophy grads have actually made a dent in the world, here’s a list of players and yet another list. They include names like: George Soros, the Karl Popper disciple who singlehandedly broke the Bank of England (missed the course on ethics, I guess); Phil Jackson, the zen master who led 11 basketball teams to NBA championships; Carly Fiorina, the first woman to become the CEO of a Fortune 20 company; and Vaclav Havel, the playwright who later became president of Czechoslovakia.
If you want to start living the examined life too, we’d suggest getting started with our collection of 90 Free Philosophy Courses, and otherwise exploring related courses in our collection of 750 Free Courses Online.
Ask a group of guitarists to name their favorite guitar solo, and there’s a pretty good chance someone will mention Eric Clapton’s solo on the live recording of “Crossroads,” from Cream’s 1968 Wheel’s of Fire album. So then, whose solo does Eric Clapton like? On more than one occasion he has singled out Duane Allman’s breakthrough performance on Wilson Pickett’s R & B cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”
In late 1968 Allman was about 22 years old and had not yet formed the Allman Brothers Band. Eager to make a name for himself, he showed up at Rick Hall’s now-legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to offer his services as a session guitarist. Hall told Allman he already had more guitar players than he could use. Allman asked if he could just hang around the studio and help out if the need should ever arise. “I mean, this was Duane,” Hall said to Allman’s biographer Randy Poe. “He was hell-bent for stardom and nothing was going to stop him.”
Hall let the young guitarist hang around, and before long he was playing on a few sessions with Clarence Carter. Hall liked what he heard, and Allman’s crucial moment arrived shortly afterward, when the former Stax recording artist Wilson Pickett showed up at the studio unexpectedly. As Poe writes in his book Skydog: The Duane Allman Story,
“Pickett came into the studio,” says Hall, “and I said, ‘We don’t have anything to cut.’ We didn’t have a song. Duane was there, and he came up with an idea. By this time he’d kind of broken the ice and become my guy. So Duane said, ‘Why don’t we cut “Hey Jude”?’ I said, ‘That’s the most preposterous thing I ever heard. It’s insanity. We’re gonna cover the Beatles? That’s crazy!’ And Pickett said, ‘No, we’re not gonna do it.’ I said, ‘Their single’s gonna be Number 1. I mean, this is the biggest group in the world!’ And Duane said, ‘That’s exactly why we should do it — because [the Beatles single] will be Number 1 and they’re so big. The fact that we would cut the song with a black artist will get so much attention, it’ll be an automatic smash.’ That made all the sense in the world to me. So I said, ‘Well, okay. Let’s do it.’
The original Beatles version of “Hey Jude” is over seven minutes long. Pickett was determined to keep his version shorter, to make it suitable for radio play. At four minutes long, it was still more than a minute longer than the average popular song from that era. Most of the extra time is taken up by Allman’s explosive rock and roll-style guitar solo. “From the moment Duane plays the first lick ten seconds into the coda,” writes Poe, “until the song fades out over a minute later, it is entirely his show. The background vocalists are singing those familiar ‘na-na-na-na’s’ — but it’s all for naught. Rick Hall has pushed them so far down in the mix, they are merely ambiance. Absolutely nothing matters but Duane’s guitar.” When it was over, everyone rushed to hear the playback. Hall was so excited he picked up the telephone and called Atlantic Records producer and executive Jerry Wexler, who had sent Pickett to Muscle Shoals. Writes Poe:
Hall cranked up the volume, held the receiver near the speakers, and played the recording all the way through. The guitar player, naturally, blew Jerry Wexler away. “Who is he?” Wexler asked. Hall told Wexler that Pickett called him Sky Man. He said that Sky Man was a hippie from Florida who had talked Pickett into cutting the tune. Wexler persisted. “Who the hell is he?” “Name’s Duane Allman,” Rick replied.
Before Pickett christened Allman “Sky Man,” the guitarist already had a nickname he was fond of: “Dog.” In keeping with it, he always wore a dog collar wrapped around his right boot, like a spur. So the two nicknames were combined, and Allman was known thereafter as “Skydog.”
Although Pickett recorded “Hey Jude” against his will, he liked the result so much he made it the title song of his next album. And right about the time the Beatles’ version was coming down after nine weeks at number one on the American charts, Pickett’s version started going up. It peaked at number 15 on the R & B chart and number 23 on the pop chart. When Clapton first heard Allman’s solo on his car radio, he reportedly pulled over to the side of the road to listen. “I drove home and called Atlantic Records immediately,” Clapton said. “I had to know who that was playing guitar and I had to know now.”
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
