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Thursday, November 9th, 2017
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| 9:00a | 23-Year-Old Eric Clapton Demonstrates the Elements of His Guitar Sound (1968) [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<div [...] http://cdn8.openculture.com/>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] <div class="oc-video-container"http://cdn8.openculture.com/>
<p>In the fall of 1968, Eric Clapton was 23 years old and at the height of his creative powers. His band, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cream_of_Clapton">Cream</a>, was on its farewell tour of America when a film crew from the BBC caught up with the group and asked the young guitar virtuoso to show how he created his distinctive sound.</p>
<p>The result is a fascinating four-minute tour of Clapton’s technique. He begins by demonstrating the wide range of tones he could achieve by varying the settings on his psychedelically painted 1964 Gibson SG Standard guitar. His wah-wah pedal (an early Vox model) was critical to the sound of so many Cream classics, like “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8hLc_nqx8g">Tales of Brave Ulysses</a>.” In the film, Clapton really has to stomp on it to get it working.</p>
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<p>One of the most difficult skills to master, Clapton says, is the vibrato. In a <a href="http://www.guitarplayer.com/miscellaneous/1139/gp-flashback-eric-clapton-june-1970/12798">1970 interview with </a><em><a href="http://www.guitarplayer.com/article/flashback--/September-2010/120153">Guitar Player</a></em> magazine he goes into more detail: “When I stretch strings,” he says, “I hook my thumb around the neck of the guitar. A lot of guitarists stretch strings with just their hand free. The only way I can do it is if I have my whole hand around the neck—actually gripping onto it with my thumb. That somehow gives me more of a rocking action with my hand and wrist.” If you watch the BBC clip closely you will see this in action.</p>
<p>The interview was conducted with Clapton seated in front of his famous stack of Marshall amplifiers. In the <em>Guitar Player</em> interview, however, he admits he rarely used both at the same time. “I always had two Marshalls set up to play through,” he says, “but I think it was just so I could have one as a spare. I usually used only one 100-watt amp.”</p>
<p>Clapton’s demonstration (along with interviews of bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker) was incorporated into Tony Palmer’s film of <em><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tAE2K3YT_A">Cream's Farewell Concert</a></em>, which took place on November 21, 1968 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The original six-song version of <em>Cream's Farewell Concert</em> is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tAE2K3YT_A">available on YouTube</a>. An extended 14-song version is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000ANVQ6E?ie=UTF8&tag=openculture-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000ANVQ6E">available for purchase here</a>.</p>
<p>Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2011.</p>
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<p><strong>Related Content:</strong></p>
<p><a title="Permanent Link to Eric Clapton’s Isolated Guitar Track From the Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (1968)" href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/eric_claptons_isolated_guitar_track_from_the_classic_beatles_song_while_my_guitar_gently_weeps_1968.html" rel="bookmark">Eric Clapton’s Isolated Guitar Track From the Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (1968)</a></p>
<p><a title="Permanent Link to Eric Clapton Tries Out Guitars at Home and Talks About the Beatles, Cream, and His Musical Roots" href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/eric_clapton_tries_out_guitars_at_home_and_talks_about_the_beatles_cream_and_his_musical_roots.html" rel="bookmark">Eric Clapton Tries Out Guitars at Home and Talks About the Beatles, Cream, and His Musical Roots</a></p>
<p><a title="Permanent Link to Hear the Never Released Version of The Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” With Eric Clapton on Slide Guitar" href="http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/hear-the-version-of-brown-sugar-keith-richards-preferred-with-eric-clapton-on-slide-guitar.html" rel="bookmark">Hear the Never Released Version of The Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” With Eric Clapton on Slide Guitar</a></p>
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| 12:00p | The Internet Archive “Liberates” Books Published Between 1923 and 1941, and Will Put 10,000 Digitized Books Online
Here at Open Culture, we can never resist the chance to feature books free to read and download online. Books can become free in a number of different ways, one of the most reliable being reversion to the public domain after a certain amount of time has passed since its publication — usually a long time, with the result that the average age of the books freely available online skews quite old. Nothing wrong with old or even ancient reading material, of course, but sometimes one wishes copyright law didn't put quite such a delay on the process. The Internet Archive and its collaborators have recently made progress in that department, finding a legal means of "liberating" books of a less distant vintage than usual. "The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published [from] 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold," writes the site's founder Brewster Kahle. Tulane University copyright scholar Elizabeth Townsend Gard and her students "helped bring the first scanned books of this era available online in a collection named for the author of the bill making this necessary: The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection." Yes, that Sonny Sono, who after his music career (most memorably as half of Sonny and Cher) served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1994 until his death in 1998. At the moment, the Sonny Bono Memorial Collection offers such 94-to- 76-year-old pieces of reading material as varied as André Malraux's The Royal Way, Arnold Dresden's An Invitation to Mathematics, René Kraus' Winston Churchill: A Biography, Colonel S.P. Meek's Frog, the Horse that Knew No Master, and Donald Henderson Clarke's Impatient Virgin. Kahle assures us that "We will add another 10,000 books and other works in the near future," and reminds us that "if the Founding Fathers had their way, almost all works from the 20th century would be public domain by now." The intentions of the Founding Fathers may matter to you or they may not, but if you're an Open Culture reader, you can hardly quibble with the new availability of dozens of free books online — and the prospect of thousands more soon to come. Stay tuned and watch the collection grow. Related Content: 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices 2,000+ Architecture & Art Books You Can Read Free at the Internet Archive Download 200+ Free Modern Art Books from the Guggenheim Museum Free: You Can Now Read Classic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org British Library to Offer 65,000 Free eBooks 74 Free Banned Books (for Banned Books Week) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Internet Archive “Liberates” Books Published Between 1923 and 1941, and Will Put 10,000 Digitized Books Online 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.  |
| 3:09p | Yale Presents a Free Online Course on Miguel de Cervantes’ Masterpiece Don Quixote 
Among the literary works that emerged in the so-called Golden Age of Spanish culture in the 16th and 17th centuries, one shines so brightly that it seems to eclipse all others, and indeed is said to not only be the foundation of modern Spanish writing, but of the modern novel itself. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote synthesized the Medieval and Renaissance literature that had come before it in a brilliantly satirical work, writes popular academic Harold Bloom, with “cosmological scope and reverberation.” But in such high praise of a great work, we can lose sight of the work itself. Don Quixote is hardly an exception. “The notion of ‘literary classic,’” Simon Leys writes at the New York Review of Books, “has a solemn ring about it. But Don Quixote, which is the classic par excellence, was written for a flatly practical purpose: to amuse the largest possible number of readers, in order to make a lot of money for the author (who needed it badly).” To mention these intentions is not to diminish the work, but perhaps even to burnish it further. To have created, as Yale’s Roberto González Echevarría says in his introductory lecture above, “one of the unquestioned masterpieces of world literature, let alone the Western Canon,” while seeking primarily to entertain and make a buck says quite a lot about Cervantes’ considerable talents, and, perhaps, about his modernism. Rather than write for a feudal patron, monarch, or deity, he wrote for what he hoped would be a profitable mass-market. In so doing, says Professor González, quoting Gabriel García Márquez, Cervantes wrote “a novel in which there is already everything that novelists would attempt to do in the future until today.” González’s course, “Cervantes’ Don Quixote,” is now available online in a series of 24 lectures, available on YouTube and iTunes. (Stream all 24 lectures below.) You can download all of the course materials, including the syllabus and overview of each class, here. There is a good deal of reading involved, and you’ll need to get your hands on a few extra books. In addition to the weighty Quixote, “students are also expected to read four of Cervantes’ Exemplary Stories, Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook, and J.H. Elliott’s Imperial Spain.” It would seem well worth the effort. Professor González goes on in his introduction to discuss the novel’s importance to such figures as Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, and British scholar Ian Watt, who called Don Quixote “one of four myths of modern individualism, the others being Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe.” The novel’s historical resume is tremendously impressive, but the most important thing about it, says González, is that it has been read and enjoyed by millions of people around the world for hundreds of years. Just why is that? The professor quotes from his own introduction to the Penguin Classics edition he asks students to read in providing his answer: “Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s masterpiece has endured because it focuses on literature’s foremost appeal: to become another, to leave a typically embattled self for another closer to one’s desires and aspirations. This is why Don Quixote has often been read as a children’s book, and continues to be read by and to children.” Critics might be prone to dismiss such enjoyable wish fulfilment as trivial, but the centuries-long success of Don Quixote shows it may be the foundation of all modern literary writing. Don Quixote will be added to our collection of Free Online Literature courses, a subset of our larger collection, 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: Gustave Doré’s Exquisite Engravings of Cervantes’ Don Quixote Salvador Dalí Sketches Five Spanish Immortals: Cervantes, Don Quixote, El Cid, El Greco & Velázquez Free Online Literature Courses Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Yale Presents a Free Online Course on Miguel de Cervantes’ Masterpiece <i>Don Quixote</i> 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. |
| 6:00p | Bryan Cranston Gives Advice to the Young: Find Yourself by Traveling and Getting Lost
I don’t know what time you’re reading this post but “What do you really want to do in life?” is a question that can wake you up right fast, or make you want to pack it in and sleep on it. It’s also a question asked maybe a bit too early of our young people, which starts with fantasy (“What do you want to be when you grow up?” “A spaceman!”) and by our teens it turns into a more serious, fate-deciding inquiry by people who may not be happy with their station in life. Actor Bryan Cranston takes on this question in this Big Think video, and extolls the virtues of travel and wandering. “Traveling forces you to be social,” Cranston says. “You have to get directions.You have to learn where things are. You’re attuned to your environment.” Cranston thought he was going to be a policeman when he entered college. Then he took an acting class. So, at 19, Cranston explored America for two years by motorcycle with his brother, in essence to find themselves by getting lost. He says he’s passed on this directionless wandering to his now 24 year-old daughter. That idea of letting go and just wandering also dovetails nicely into his other advice about auditions. You don’t go there to get a job, you go to create a character and present it. The rest is out of your control. Now, Cranston says that the period between high school/college and the “real world” is the best time to do it, but there’s really no time like right now. To quote Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there,” and the boats are always leaving. Just jump on. Related Content: Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Anything You Think Is Really Good” Ursula Le Guin Gives Insightful Writing Advice in Her Free Online Workshop Akira Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspiring Filmmakers: Write, Write, Write and Read Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Bryan Cranston Gives Advice to the Young: Find Yourself by Traveling and Getting Lost 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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