[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Monday, August 7th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 7:27a | People Are Planting Flowers in Potholes Worldwide: See the Creative Protest Taking Place in Montreal, Ukraine & Beyond
In 2015, Paige Breithart, an artist and student living in Hamtramck, Michigan, had grown tired of the countless potholes marring Hamtramck's streets. So she took matters into her own hands, and drove around town, filling the potholes with flowers, replacing the decay with symbols of growth and beauty. The story went viral, and Breithart's aesthetic treatment has since caught on. Look around Twitter, and you'll find stories about flowers filling potholes around the United States, and indeed around the world. In some cases, these guerilla projects aren't just decorative, a simple way to spruce up a neighborhood. There's an activist element to them. In Bath, England, one flower pot vigilante said:
And local governments are taking notice, though not always happily. Concerned that drivers might get surprised or distracted by flowers suddenly appearing in the middle of a road, politicians are discouraging this form of protest. But you can't argue with the results. Once protesters call attention to them, the potholes have a magical way of getting properly paved and filled. Quickly. Below you can see a gallery of potholes around the world that have gotten the flower treatment--from Missoula, Montana, to Montreal, Bath, Bosnia and Ukraine. Maybe the artist from Chicago (see image at bottom) is the one who got it right?
via Twisted Sifter/My Modern Met 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. People Are Planting Flowers in Potholes Worldwide: See the Creative Protest Taking Place in Montreal, Ukraine & Beyond 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 | What Happens When the Books in William S. Burroughs’ Personal Library Get Artistically Arranged — with His Own “Cut-Up” Method
If your Facebook news feed looks anything like mine, you wake up each morning to a stream of not just food snapshots and selfies but pictures of books, whether stacked up, dumped into a pile, or arranged neatly on shelves. Why do we post digital photos of our printed matter? Almost certainly for the same reason we do anything on social media: to send a message about ourselves. We want to tell our friends who we are, or who we think we are, but not in so many words, or rather not in so few; a few of the books we've read (or intend to read), carefully selected and arranged, does the job. But what if, instead of assembling a self-portrait through books, someone else entered your personal library and did it for you?
Artist Nina Katchadourian (she of, among many other endeavors, the airplane-bathroom 17th-century Flemish portraiture) recently took on that task in the Lawrence, Kansas home of famously hard-living and furiously creative beat writer William S. Burroughs. She did it as part of her long-running Sorted Books project, in which, in her words, "I sort through a collection of books, pull particular titles, and eventually group the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Taken as a whole, the clusters are a cross-section of that library's holdings that reflect that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies."
Kansas Cut-Up, the Burroughs chapter of Sorted Books, features such arrangements as How Did Sex Begin? / Uninvited Guests / Human Error, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel / A Night of Serious Drinking / A Little Original Sin, and American Diplomacy / Physical Interrogation Techniques / In the Secret State. Thom Robinson of the European Beat Studies Network describes Burroughs' book collection as "a selection of largely European works whose contents include paranoia, theories of language, pseudoscience, mordant humour and drugs: in retrospect, it’s easy to imagine the owner of such an idiosyncratic library producing the melange of Naked Lunch. Perhaps for this reason, it seems hard to resist reordering the books which Burroughs owned in 1944 in order to emphasise the most recognisable elements of the later Burroughs persona."
Sometimes Katchadourian seems to do just that and sometimes she doesn't, but her method of book-sorting, which she explains in the episode of John and Sarah Green's series The Art Assignment at the top of the post, bears more than a little resemblance to Burroughs' own "cut-up" method of literary composition. "Take a page," as Burroughs himself explained it. "Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 ... one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different." And just as a rearranged book can speak in a new and strange voice, so can a rearranged library. via Austin Kleon's newsletter (which you should subscribe to here) Related Content: The Art Assignment: Learn About Art & the Creative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green How to Jumpstart Your Creative Process with William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique 115 Books on Lena Dunham & Miranda July’s Bookshelves at Home (Plus a Bonus Short Play) The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read? Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. What Happens When the Books in William S. Burroughs’ Personal Library Get Artistically Arranged — with His Own “Cut-Up” Method 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 | Senator Al Franken Does a Pitch Perfect Imitation of Mick Jagger (1982)
If Senator Al Franken won’t run for President in 2020, perhaps he’d temper fans’ disappointment with a repeat of his early 80’s turn as Mick Jagger, above. The performance took place at Stockton State, a public university conveniently located in New Jersey–what the late Tom Davis, Franken’s long time Saturday Night Live writing partner and Keith Richards to his Jagger called “the Blair Witch scrub forests twenty-five miles north of Atlantic City.” Franken’s performance is an immersive triumph, especially for those who remember his best known SNL character, the lispingly upbeat Stuart Smalley. His Jagger is the opposite of Stuart–butch, preening, athletic … a less than sober student fan in the Stockton State crowd might have drunkenly wondered if he or she had accidentally bought tickets to the Tattoo You tour. Those lips are pretty convincing. The costuming is dead on too, and Franken did not take the route Chris Farley would later take, lampooning the male strippers of Chippendales. He may not be Jagger-rangy, but he’s certainly fit in an outfit that leaves no room to hide. As Davis recalled in his 2010 memoir, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There: As we started “Under My Thumb,” Franken came running out as Mick Jagger, wearing yellow football pants and Capezios and was so good, it was scary. Unfortunately, Franken and Davis at Stockton State never sold very well… maybe it would be re-released if one of us became president, or shot a president. Knowing that Davis, who died five years ago, would likely never have predicted the outcome of the recent election, and that Senator Franken, outspoken as he is, is in no position to joke about the second option, we suggest truffling up a used copy, if you’d like to see more. And for comparison’s sake, here are the originals performing to an arena-sized crowd in Arizona in 1981:
Related Content: Mick Jagger Defends the Rights of the Individual After His Legendary 1967 Drug Bust When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Senator Al Franken Does a Pitch Perfect Imitation of Mick Jagger (1982) 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. |
| 7:01p | When Mistakes/Studio Glitches Give Famous Songs Their Personality: Pink Floyd, Metallica, The Breeders, Steely Dan & More
Before the advent of digital studio technology, a degree of imprecision naturally resulted from the recording process. It may now be too easy to erase and correct perceived errors. As Brian Eno has pointed out, “the temptation of the technology is to smooth everything out.” Perhaps that’s why so many of the famous songs containing mistakes in pop culture lore come from a pre-digital age. In any case, such lore abounds. Some of it speculative, some anecdotal, some apocryphal, and much of it clearly evident in close listens and confirmed by the musicians, engineers, and producers themselves.
A recent Reddit thread compiled 500 comments worth of discussion on the subject. One prominent example is Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 “Mack the Knife,” in which she forgets the lyrics to the chorus and improvises. “Talk about failing gracefully,” writes user Bleue22. The album, they note, went on to win a Grammy. But this example, you may object, comes from a live album—no second takes allowed. And Fitzgerald sets up the error by saying beforehand, “we hope we remember all the words.” (I’d guess she’s using the royal “we,” to which she’s fully entitled.) Nonetheless, her “Mack the Knife” may have no equal.
Still, we don’t lack for studio examples of mistakes in great recordings. If you’re a metal fan, Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All likely holds a special place of honor in your collection. As Kirk Hammett revealed in a 2002 interview with Guitar World after his induction into the magazine’s hall of fame, his solo on the track was only a second or third take, with little rehearsal. “There were no frills, no contemplation, no overintellectualizing,” he says. The result? Amazing, right? But, Hammett continues, “On a couple of notes in that solo, I bend the notes out of pitch; for 18 years, every time I’ve heard that guitar solo, those sour notes come back to haunt me!”
Every guitarist has suffered through this experience while listening back to their records. Few make Guitar World’s hall of fame. The point is that greatness and perfection are not always the best of friends. Another example of the kind of thing that might only haunt a musician: In Steely Dan’s “Aja” from the 1977 Grammy-winning album of the same name, drummer Steve Gadd plays “one of the best drum solos ever recorded,” writes Michael Duncan as Sonic Scoop. Drummers for decades have sought to replicate the moment, especially an idiosyncratic click at 4:57. Turns out, it was “actually a slip of his stick; albeit a well-timed one.” The solo, Duncan notes, was done in one take.
Other examples may have had life-changing consequences for the musician in question. It’s rumored that David Gilmour’s faintly recorded coughing on Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” bothered him so much that he quit smoking. In some cases, the mistake can turn into a hook or a musical statement, such as Cindy Wilson’s shout of “Tiiiiiiin Roof! Rusted” in the B-52’s “Love Shack,” apparently a mistake on Wilson’s part. The phenomenon, granted, tends to manifest in genres that accommodate all varieties of looseness—rock, blues, jazz, etc.—and the great bulk of examples in the Reddit mistake thread come from such recordings. I couldn’t say whether it’s possible to compile such a list in music with far stricter arrangements or reliance on electronic instrumentation.
I also couldn’t say whether mistakes in, say classical or electronic music, would produce such desirable results. What often emerges in these discussions is the degree to which mistakes, unplanned improvisations, or happy accidents can become essential features of a song. Take The Breeder’s “Cannonball,” which intentionally incorporates a mistake bassist Josephine Wiggs repeatedly made in rehearsals, sliding to the wrong note in the solo bass intro, then correcting when the guitars came in. “We all just thought it was hilarious and thought it sounded really great,” she remembered. “It was clear to us at that moment that that was the right thing to do, to keep the wrong note in there.” Does it matter that some recorded mistakes are intentional and others are not? That question may be fodder for another 500-comment-long discussion. Or we could heed the wisdom of Brian Eno or Miles Davis and just go with it either way. Related Content: Brian Eno Explains the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music Jump Start Your Creative Process with Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” Deck of Cards (1975) John Cleese on The Importance of Making and Embracing Mistakes Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness When Mistakes/Studio Glitches Give Famous Songs Their Personality: Pink Floyd, Metallica, The Breeders, Steely Dan & More 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. |
| << Previous Day |
2017/08/07 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |