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Friday, June 9th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 7:53a | 10-Story High Mural of Muddy Waters Goes Up in Chicago  Image by Terence Faircloth, via Flickr Commons If you find yourself near State and Washington streets in Chicago, look up and you'll see a mural of bluesman Muddy Waters rising 10 stories high. It was painted, the Chicago Tribune tells us, by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra and fellow painters. And it was officially dedicated yesterday, at the beginning of the Chicago Blues Festival. Respect. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Muddy Waters and Friends on the Blues and Gospel Train, 1964 The History of the Blues in 50 Riffs: From Blind Lemon Jefferson (1928) to Joe Bonamassa (2009) 10-Story High Mural of Muddy Waters Goes Up in Chicago is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 8:30a | 7-Foot Tall Clown with a Golden Voice Sings Chris Cornell’s “When I’m Down:” A Tribute Filled with Raw Emotion
Back in April, Ayun Halliday gave you a glimpse into the world of "Puddles Pity Party," the 6’8” ‘Sad Clown with the Golden Voice,’ who makes his home in Atlanta, Georgia. And does all kinds of wonderful things--like sing “Pinball Wizard” in the style of Johnny Cash. Don't miss that one. It's pretty spectacular. In his latest video, Puddles joins up with Matthew Kaminski, organist for the Atlanta Braves, and delivers a tribute to Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, covering his 1999 song "When I'm Down," with a little bit of "What'll I Do" by Irving Berlin mixed in. You won't find another tribute like it. That we can assure you. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Large Choir Sings “Black Hole Sun”: A Moving Tribute to Chris Cornell 7-Foot Tall Clown with a Golden Voice Sings Chris Cornell’s “When I’m Down:” A Tribute Filled with Raw Emotion is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 2:00p | Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” Is the Perfect Song to End Any Movie: The Graduate, Psycho, Easy Rider & 50+ Other Films
It’s hard to conceive of director Stanley Kubrick choosing a more perfect song for Dr. Strangelove’s final mushroom cloud montage than Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” Ditto Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Can you imagine Ben and Elaine making their existential getaway to the tune of anything other than “The Sound of Silence"? Freelance video editor Peter Salomone can (see above). If he had his druthers, all films would end with Dire Straits’ 1985 hit, ”Walk of Life” a tune Rolling Stone described upon its release as a “bouncy Fifties rock & roll song about cool Fifties rock & roll songs,” noting its “cheesy organ sound.” More recently, the New Zealand-based music blog Off the Tracks proclaimed it “god-awful,” suggesting that the CIA could surgically implant its “obnoxious” keyboard riff to trigger assassins, and asserting that it (“and those fucking sweatbands”) were the demise of Dire Straits.
Such critical evaluations are immaterial where Salomone’s The Walk of Life Project is concerned. Over the course of a couple months, he has gleefully applied it to the final minutes of over five dozen films, leaving the visuals unmolested. There are no sacred cows in this realm. Casablanca and The Godfather are subjected to this aural experiment, as, somewhat mystifyingly, are Nanook of the North and Chaplin’s City Lights. Horror, Disney, musicals…Salomone dabbles in a wide variety of genres. For my money, the most successful outcomes are the ones that impose a commercial send-em-up-the-aisles-smiling sensibility on deliberately bleak endings. Director Danny Boyle may have allowed audiences to decompress a bit with heartwarming footage of the real life Aron Ralston, whose autobiographical account of a life-changing accident inspired the film 127 Hours, but Salomone’s choice to move the playhead to the moment shocked hikers encounter a dazed and dehydrated James Franco clutching his mutilated arm is sublime. That helicopter could not be more perfectly timed:
Some other dark gems:
Salomone told Gizmodo that he’s taking a break from the project, so if there’s a film you think would benefit from the Walk of Life treatment, you’ll have to do it yourself, with his blessing. Fan stabs at Scarface, The Silence of the Lambs and Gone with the Wind suggest that the trick is not quite as easy to pull off as one might think. You can view the complete collection on The Walk of Life Project’s website or YouTube channel. via Gizmodo Related Content: The Art of Film and TV Title Design Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Creative Mashup of Hitchcock and Gus Van Sant’s Psycho Films Hear 4+ Hours of Jazz Noir: A Soundtrack for Strolling Under Street Lights on Foggy Nights Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll is currently appearing as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3, opening this weekend in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” Is the Perfect Song to End Any Movie: The Graduate, Psycho, Easy Rider & 50+ Other Films is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:00p | 150 Songs from 100+ Rappers Get Artfully Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”
On what he deemed the 30th anniversary of hip hop, in 2004, Village Voice critic Greg Tate wrote that the music’s “ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide.” Its global reach, however, has made it a rich site for “corporate exploitation.” The complicated relationship of hip hop and capitalism is something of a “bitter trick.” The music “represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes.” And yet it “has now become a seller’s market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.” Tate’s argument that the music and culture of hip hop are inseparable from globalized capitalism may partly explain why it roared into life in the eighties as a “convergence of ex-slaves and ch-hing,” just as the global consumer marketplace began to take its modern shape. Young, artistic entrepreneurs begged, borrowed, and stole records and equipment, sensing the opportunity for fame and riches in the creative recuperation of old sounds with new technology. Theirs was a language of ambition and desire, a celebration of sex and power—the language of modernity written in complex rhyme and call-and-response. A language spoken over generations and nations, and—now over ten years after Tate’s essay—spoken for over forty years of ever-increasing market share. The origins of hip hop have provided ample material for entertaining fictionalizations like Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down and popular histories like the documentary Hip-Hip Evolution. These linear accounts present the genre to us in formats we find easily digestible. Even as Luhrmann’s series attempts to mimic the hyperkinetic pace of rap, it tells a story as conventional as they come. To experience the past 40 years of hip hop on the genre’s own terms—its perpetual callbacks to its ancestors, its seamless interweaving of past and present—it’s almost as though you’d need to experience it all at once. And so you can, in the incredible mash-up video above from The Hood Internet. Taking over 150 songs from over 100 artists, the video puts them all in conversation with each other “40 Years of Hip Hop” mashes up “rappers from different eras finishing each other’s rhymes over intersecting beats, all woven together to make one song.” It’s an impressive technical achievement, and one that throws into relief not only hip hop’s smooth, shiny hyper-capitalist embrace of technology but also, as theorist and Black Atlantic author Paul Gilroy wrote, its counter-cultural core as a “means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.” See all of the artists represented here at the video’s YouTube page and stream or download the audio here. Related Content: Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
150 Songs from 100+ Rappers Get Artfully Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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