We all know that Michelangelo sculpted in marble. What’s less well known is that he worked in bronze too. The historical record shows that Michelangelo once made a David in bronze for a French aristocrat, and a bronze statue of Pope Julius II. But the David disappeared during the French Revolution, and the Julius was later melted down for military purposes in Italy. For years, scholars thought that Michelangelo’s bronze creations were all irretrievably lost to history. And then came the big discovery.
A team of international experts (from Cambridge, the Rijksmuseum and the University of Warwick) recently gathered evidence suggesting that two bronze male nudes “are early works by Michelangelo, made just after he completed the marble David and as he was about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling,” reports a Cambridge blog post. Although the statues aren’t signed by Michelangelo, *****@****ac.uk”>Prof Paul Joannides (Emeritus Professor of Art History at Cambridge) “connected them to a drawing by one of Michelangelo’s apprentices now in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France,” and it turns out that the drawing contains figures that closely resemble the statues. What’s more, Cambridge reports, the “bronzes were compared with other works by Michelangelo and found to be very similar in style and anatomy to his works of 1500–1510.” The Cambridge video above gives you a further introduction to this important discovery.
In a logocentric culture—as Jacques Derrida defined it—such as has existed in the West for hundreds of years, writing occupies a hallowed space, and literary or philosophical writing all the more so. The rhythms of everyday speech, the gestures and significant looks that characterize our quotidian interactions are deemed less important than the presumably indelible marks on the page. Of course, before the written word, or at least the printed word and widespread literacy, speech was primary, and no literary culture existed without it. From philosophers conducting peripatetic dialogues, to priests reciting scripture, to bards reciting poetry in taverns, the nuances of voice and gesture were inseparable from the text.
Of the many revolutionary qualities of the internet, one of them has been to restore to literature its voice, as literary readings (previously the preserve of a privileged few able to attend specialized events and conferences) become available to all. Whether through Youtube video and audio or mp3, lovers of literature around the world can access the voices and visages of authors like Maya Angelou (top, reading “Still I Rise,” with some ad libs), whose totally distinctive face and voice don’t simply supplement her work but seem to complete it. We can hear W.H. Auden himself read “As I Walked Out One Evening” (above, from a 1937 recording) in his deep baritone. We can hear Sylvia Plath read “Ariel” (below) and many more poems from her final collection of the same name.
We also have the pleasure of hearing, and seeing, other readers interpret the work of authors we love, such as the perfect confluence of text and voice in the Tom Waits’ reading of Charles Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart,” below. Other notable poetry readings by someone other than the author include James Earl Jones’ rendition of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and Allen Ginsberg’s reading—or singing, rather—of the poetry of William Blake. And while poetry should always be read aloud, it can be equally revelatory to hear great prose works read, by their authors and others.
In the list of 90 readings below, excerpted from our collection of 630 Free Audio Books, you can find works by Faulkner and Hemingway, read by Faulkner and Hemingway, and Melville’s Moby Dick, read by a host of celebrity voices. And much, much more. So take some time and reconnect with the voices and faces of literature, which are as important as the words they produce. And if you know of any readings online that aren’t on our list, feel free to leave a link to them in the comments.
Angelou, Maya – Still I Rise & On the Pulse of the Morning (read by author) – YouTube
Apollinaire, Guillaume – Le pont Mirabeau (Read by author in 1913) – Free MP3
Auden, W.H. - As I Walked Out One Evening (read by author) – YouTube
Auster, Paul – Free MP3 – The Red Notebook (read by the author)
Barthelme, Donald - “Concerning the Bodyguard” (read by Salman Rushdie) – Free MP3
Blake, William - Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, as read by Allen Ginsberg — Free Stream/MP3
Borges, Jorge Luis – The Gospel According to Mark (read by Paul Theroux) – Free MP3
Bradbury, Ray – If Only We Had Taller Been (read by the author) – YouTube
Bradbury, Ray – The Veldt (Read by Stephen Colbert) – YouTube
Bradbury, Ray – Stories Read by Leonard Nimoy – YouTube
Brodkey, Harold – Spring Fugue (read by Jeffrey Eugenides) – Free MP3
Brodkey, Harold – The State of Grace (read by Richard Ford ) – Free Stream
Brown, Margaret Wise – Good Night Moon (Read by Susan Sarandon) – YouTube
Bukowski, Charles – The Laughing Heart (read by Tom Waits) – YouTube Audio
Bukowski, Charles – The Crunch and Roll The Dice (read by Bono) – YouTube Audio
Bukowski, Charles – The Secret to My Endurance (read by the author) – YouTube Audio
Whitman, Walt – Song of Myself (read by James Earl Jones) – Free Stream/Download
Wilde, Oscar – The Happy Prince read by Stephen Fry – YouTube
Williams, Willam Carlos – The Red Wheelbarrow, Tract, The Defective Record, To a Poor Old Woman, A Coronal, To Elsie, The Wind Increases, Classic Scene (read by poet 1954) – Free
I am applying for the position of Assistant Professor in Philosophy. I am an advanced doctoral candidate in Philosophy (with minors in Urban Studies and English), and expect to defend my dissertation in May, 2015.
My dissertation, Both Sides Now applies a bilateral, hylomorphic analysis to the phenomenon that is described by the signifier “clouds.” Having been constituted in Western discourse both positively as “rows and flows of angel hair,” “ice cream castles in the air,” “feather canyons everywhere,” and negatively as objects that exist solely to obscure the sun, express rain and snow, and hinder the achievement of various goals, we can conclude that after the application of this bilateral, hylomorphic analysis that due to these contradictory “up” and “down” epistemologies of cloud tropes, the reality of clouds is somehow still understudied, having been ignored in favor of their Platonic form/sign, and that we really don’t “know” clouds at all.
You can read the rest of her “application” here and then spend the evening dreaming about taking Joni’s classes on Plato, Existentialism, and Urban Development. I know I will.
You can find more great Joni Mitchell material below.
Most film fans I know have played this game: which movie, if you called the shots over there, would you bring into the Criterion Collection? While the fun conversations that result necessarily elide all the difficulties — acquiring the rights, finding restorable materials, design, distribution — of actually getting a film onto Criterion’s roster of high-quality, feature-intensive home video releases, they do illuminate one’s own cinematic values, even if only with idle talk.
Japan-based filmmaker, artist, designer, and gallerist Robert Nishimura plays the game too, but he doesn’t do it idly. On his blog, he features the highly convincing DVD cases he’s designed for such dream Criterion releases as Kim Ki-young’sThe Housemaid, Akio Jissoji’s Life of a Court Lady, and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. He also has a Vimeo channel called For Criterion Consideration, where he goes so far as to craft new “trailers” of the films he’d like to see in the Collection, each offering three reasons why they qualify. His pitch for Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1997 Men in Blackcites its status as a “galactically funny blockbuster,” visuals enhanced by “Rick Baker’s special FX,” and a script even more enhanced with “Ed Solomon’s one-liners.”
Evidently a lover of lesser-seen Japanese pictures and the idiosyncratic quasi-Hollywood releases of the 1970s (but then again, aren’t all cinephiles?), he’s also made videos arguing for films like Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Kobo Abe novel adaptation The Man Without a Map (the logical follow-up to Criterions’s real box set of Teshigahara-Abe collaborations) and Michael Cimino’s faintly homoerotic heist picture Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. And all the way on the other end of the spectrum from Men in Black, he advocates for the likes of Perfumed Nightmare, Kidlat Tahimik’s “playful critique of American cultural dominance,” “exercise in magical realism,” “semi-autobiographical exploration of innocence,” and cornerstone of independent Philippine cinema.
Nishimura’s output of videos and cover designs seems to have slowed in recent years, and I hope for one explanation and one explanation only: that he’s spent the time negotiating a healthy salary from people at Criterion eager to hire him.
The latest installment from PBS’ BrainCraft video series introduces us to two scientific studies that teach us a thing or two about what brings us happiness. One set of results comes from Dr. John Gottman’s Family Research Laboratory (a.k.a. the “Love Lab”); the other from the Harvard Grant Study, a 75-year study that has traced the lives and development of 268 Harvard sophomores from the classes of 1939–1944. Although the study focuses on privileged white men (the demographic that attended Harvard College during the 1930s and 40s), the Harvard Grant Study has yielded conclusions that apply to a broader population.
One of the longest-running studies of adult development, the study has found, for example, that alcoholism has some of the most ruinous effects on marriages, family finances and personal health. Likewise, it reveals that liberals have sex much further into old age than their conservative peers.
But those aren’t the big takeaways — the conclusions that talk about happiness. If you watch the interview below with George Vaillant, the longtime director of the study, you will hear him conclude that happiness isn’t about “conforming, keeping up with the Joneses. It is about playing, and working, and loving. And loving is probably the most important. Happiness is love.”
According to Vaillant, “warmth of relationships throughout life have the greatest positive impact on ‘life satisfaction.’ ” When we have warm relationships with our parents, spouses, friends and family, we experience less daily anxiety and a greater sense of overall pleasure; we have better health (including lower levels of dementia later in life); and we’re more effective at work and make more money.
Essentially The Beatles had it right, “All you need is love. Love is all you need.”
You can read more about the Harvard study over at The Atlantic.
In between clips of Curry’s Frank-n-Furter sashaying through such destined-to-become cult favorites as “Sweet Transvestite” and “The Time Warp,” in fishnets, merry widow, and maquillage designed by David Bowie’s personal makeup artist, the actor entertained questions…in luscious black and white!
Kudos to the young interviewer, Mark Caldwell, for never interrupting or trying to elbow his way into the spotlight with jokey asides or double entendres. The reward is a serious consideration of the filmmaking process and the actor’s craft.
(Bear in mind that it would be at least a year until midnight audiences at New York’s Waverly Theater started throwing toast, rice, and toilet paper at the screen, thus initiating an entire script’s worth of audience participation.)
Having originated the role on the London stage (he auditioned with Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”) and reprised it in L.A., Curry was clearly ready to put some space between himself and his iconic creation, announcing—correctly, as it turns out—that any sequels would have to proceed without him.
Then he clammed up for three decades, refusing to discuss his most iconic role until 2005, when he broke the silence during an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air .
It’s clear that Curry saw the making of the film as a serious business, but Rocky Horror fans will find plenty of juicy morsels to feed their obsession. Even virgins will enjoy the story of Frank’s evolving accent —from middle European to “Belgravia Hostess with the Mostest.”
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
570 millions years of evolution. That’s a lot of ground to cover. And it could be like watching paint dry. But not when it flies by in 60 seconds, with a groovy soundtrack by I‑Konic. First come the arthropods. Next some friendly fish, all followed by land plants, flying insects, amphibians, and reptiles. Way down the line, at the very end, the first humans arrive on the scene. But don’t blink, you might miss it.
George Harrison had a beloved guitar named Lucy. B.B. King has one named Lucille. Curious, that.
Above, in a new animated video by Blank on Blank, B.B. explains the story behind the naming of his legendary guitar, and then answers the big question: Do you really need to endure hard times to play the blues? No spoilers here.
The audio was recorded in September, 1985 by Warner Bros. A&R manager Joe Smith. While writing a book on the music industry, Smith taped interviews with legendary figures like Dave Brubeck, Lou Reed, Paul McCartney, Joan Baez, Herbie Hancock, David Bowie, George Harrison, Yoko Ono, James Brown, Bo Diddley, Jerry Garcia, Christine McVie, Mick Jagger, Linda Ronstadt and more. Each interview runs 30–60 good minutes. They’re fascinating to listen to, and you can find them on iTunes and the web.
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Giving Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy a re-watch a couple of weeks ago, I found I especially enjoyed William S. Burroughs’ appearance toward the end as — what else? — an aged but wise drug user in whose benevolent presence Matt Dillon’s protagonist comes to life-changing conclusions. That picture represented a break into the mainstream, or close to it, for Van Sant, a director previously known for Mala Noche, a stark black-and-white take on street hustlers on Portland’s Skid Row.
But Burroughs’ presence, among other things, allowedDrugstore Cowboy to keep a certain raw edge. If you really want to see Burroughs’ in a context of cinematic rawness, though, have a look at these home movies. We’ve pulled them out of the internet’s attic as a celebration of the Naked Lunch author’s 101st birthday. Only lightly and tastefully edited, these VHS gems (part one, part two) candidly depict Burroughs at home in Lawrence, Kansas in 1996, just a year before his death.
They also find him in the company of such notable friends as Patti Smith, Steve Buscemi, and Allen Ginsberg, smoking, drinking, and — in Smith’s case — busting out the guitar. Cats, as promised, roam through the frame. You might not call Burroughs himself, made somewhat less exuberant by time, the life of the party, but he does seem to have radiated a kind of askew animating spirit until the end. It certainly kept him surrounded by countercultural luminaries, all of them surely still as keen as that young pharmacy-robber to learn from him.
If you warbled “02134” without hesitation, you probably grew up watching a beloved children’s television show of the 70s.
It turns out Zoom wasn’t the only cool program WGBH hatched in 1972. On March 13, just a couple of months after Zoom’s debut, the station aired Between Time and Timbuktu, a 90-minute special inspired by the work of Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut also wrote the introduction to the published script, a paperback quickie enhanced by production stills and photos taken by Vonnegut’s wife, Jill Krementz. It was as good a forum as any for him to announce his retirement from film, which he cited as a medium “too clanking and real” for his comfort.
The show itself is likely to cause nostalgia for television’s freewheeling, Monty Python era.
Though 1972 wasn’t an entirely silly period, if you’ll recall. The Vietnam War was raging, with Walter Cronkite holding down the CBS Evening News desk.
Between Time and Timbuktu capitalizes on the veteran broadcaster’s ubiquity by casting comedian Ray Goulding of Bob and Ray fame, as an appropriately grave Walter Gesundheit. Bob joined him at the news desk as a fictitious former astronaut. Vonnegut was appreciative of their efforts, stating that American comedians had probably done more to shape his thinking than any other writer.
Also look for William Hickey, who played Prizzi’s Honor’s genial, aged mafia don, in the lead role of Stony Stevenson—now there’s a period character name! If you’ll remember, Stony is also the first civilian in space, at least according to the Sirens of Titan.
If you’ve spent any time at all on a college campus, you’ve heard Bob Marley and the Wailer’s 1984 compilation album Legend wafting from dorm rooms and frat house windows. The longest charting album in the history of Billboard magazine, it contains all of the band’s top 40 hits and more or less stands as every young American’s introduction to the iconic Jamaican singer, if not to reggae music itself. Before Legend, there was Eric Clapton’s cover of Marley’s 1973 single “I Shot the Sheriff.” Clapton’s version hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in ’74—his only number one hit in the U.S.—and introduced American audiences to Marley’s fiery politics, if not always to Marley himself. On what would have been Marley’s 70th birthday, we bring you some early footage of the man and his band.
While many Americans may been rather late to the Bob Marley party, and to reggae, the English have long had a fascination with West Indian music. Ska pioneers like Desmond Dekker drew huge crowds in the UK while remaining much less popular stateside (though Dekker had a number one hit in the U.S. in 1969). But even some Brits didn’t quite know what to do with Marley when he and the Wailers hit English shores in the spring of 1973. Playing the Sundown Theater in the London suburb of Edmonton in support of Dekker and a host of other acts (top), Marley, writes Dangerous Minds, “was still somewhat of an enigma and the Wailers were sonically much more adventurous than some of the other acts on the bill that day…. According to reports at the time, most of the audience at this Wailers gig didn’t ‘get’ the group.”
Nevertheless, that ’73 tour changed the band’s fortunes forever. After three albums, a previous UK tour, and several attempts to break into the pop charts, the Wailer’s fourth record, major label-debut Catch a Fire, finally made them international stars, if not yet every American college freshman’s favorite band. Just above, hear an FM broadcast of another date from the UK leg of the Catch a Firetour (see the Youtube page for the full setlist). After Britain, the band played a run of shows at Paul’s Mall in Boston, then four nights at New York’s Max’s Kansas City. Just a few months later, they hit major cities all over the U.S. before returning to England in November in support of Burnin’, and the song Clapton made famous.
While we tend to associate Marley with peace, love, and patchouli—an impression furthered by Legend, which leans rather heavily on the love songs—these early albums are fierce and militant, and do not hold back from explicit calls for violent revolution and condemnation of historical oppression. It’s a somewhat neglected side of Marley’s legend, but in these concerts, we see just how multifaceted a songwriter and performer he was. Charismatic and vibrant, and flanked by the talented Peter Tosh, Marley exudes star power. Today on his 70th birthday, it’s still as good a time as any to celebrate his life and remember his strident yet soulful calls for love and justice.
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