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Friday, November 17th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | A Touching Animated Documentary About the Rise, Fall & Second Coming of the 60s Psych-Folk Musician Richard Atkins
One wonders what might have become of Richard Atkins’ musical career had he come of age in this millennium, when youngsters suffering from acute stage fright regularly attract stadium-sized followings on Youtube. This was most definitely not the case in 1968, when Atkins, aged 19, took the stage in a small Hollywood club filled with music industry brass, there specifically to see him. Unfortunately, talent could only take him so far. Having learned to play guitar only a couple of years earlier in the wake of a disfiguring motorcycle accident, he and partner Richard Manning had recorded an album, Richard Twice, for Mercury Records. The presence on that record of several members of the Wrecking Crew, an informal, but legendary group of LA session musicians, conferred extra pop pedigree. The Acid Archives later called it "a virtually perfect pop album, the kind of thing that would have ruled the charts if the wind had been blowing the right way that month." Alas, one tiny technical difficulty at the start of the gig caused Manning to flee, leaving the freaked out and frighteningly ill equipped Atkins to deal with the yawning chasm that had opened between him and the audience. The only fix that occurred to him was a Bugs Bunny-inspired soft shoe, a move that apparently went over big with his Mom, prior to the accident, when he had two legs and could balance without a crutch. As recounted in Matthew Salton’s animated documentary, above, this soul crushing moment is not without humor. Atkins, affably narrating his own story, has had 50 years to mull that night over, and realizes that blown opportunities are probably more universal than successfully snagged brass rings (American Idol, anyone?) Over the ensuing years, Atkins found fulfillment as a woodworker and family man, but music remained a painful what-if, addressed largely through avoidance. Salton’s exuberantly scratchy animation comes as Atkins is taking steps to conquer his stage fright, performing out at small cafes, festivals, and potluck suppers near his Pacific Northwest home.
He’s been posting old songs, gently reminding listeners, “before I'm judged too harshly, remember that I was 18 and living in North Hollywood, probably raging hormones and in the music business to boot!”
He’s also writing and sharing new songs, including the touching “Life Is A Rollercoaster,” above. Performing on Facebook Live in conjunction with Salton’s New York Times Op-Doc essay, he tears up when the interviewer informs him that his daughter has just posted an encouraging comment, and eagerly confirms his availability when another commenter asks if he’d be up for a gig. It’s only too late when you’re in the grave. Travel back in time with a couple more psych-folk cuts from Richard Twice, above, or buy the album in digital form on Amazon. Related Content: Syd Barrett’s “Effervescing Elephant” Comes to Life in a New Retro-Style Animation Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. A Touching Animated Documentary About the Rise, Fall & Second Coming of the 60s Psych-Folk Musician Richard Atkins 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.  |
| 3:00p | Hear a Complete Chronological Discography of Patti Smith’s Fiercely Poetic Rock and Roll: 13 Hours and 142 Tracks
Patti Smith has always aligned herself with artists who were outsiders and experimentalists in their time, but who have since moved to the center of the culture, where they are often reduced to a few biographical notes. Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, William Blake…. As much motivated by art and poetry as by the aggression of rock and roll, Smith’s 1975 debut album reached out to people on the margins of popular culture. “I was speaking to the disenfranchised, to people outside society, people like myself,” she says, “I didn’t know these people, but I knew they were out there. I think Horses did what I hoped it would do. It spoke to the people who needed to hear it.” It’s hard to imagine who those people were. In the process of its canonization, unfortunately, punk has come to be seen as a rejection of culture, a form of anti-art. But Smith’s amalgam of loose, rangy garage rock brims with artiness, making it “the natural link between the Velvet Underground and the Ramones,” writes Jillian Mapes at Pitchfork, “in the continuum of downtown New York rock.” Pitchfork situates Smith’s first record at the top of their “Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs,” more “influential in its attitude” perhaps than in its particular style. “Her presence at the forefront of the scene was a statement in itself,” but a statement of what, exactly? One of the fascinating things about Smith was her subversion of gendered expectations and identities. In the epic medley “Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mar (De),” her protagonist is an abused boy named Johnny. She slides into a sinuous androgynous vamp, portraying a “sweet young thing. Humping on a parking meter” with the dangerous sexual energy she appropriated from idols like Mick Jagger. Yet in her twist on the performance of a classically masculine sexuality, vulnerability becomes dangerous, survival a fierce act of defiance: “Life is filled with holes,” she sings, “Johnny’s laying there, his sperm coffin, angel looks down at him and says, ‘Oh, pretty boy, can’t you show me nothing but surrender?” Johnny shows the angel, in gritty West Side Story-like scene that illustrates the razor edges at the heart of Smith’s musical poetry. He gets up, “takes off his leather jacket, taped to his chest there’s the answer, you got pen knives and jack knives and switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred.” Horses is so foundational—to punk rock, feminist punk, and a whole host of other countercultural terms that didn’t exist in 1975—that it’s unfair to expect Smith’s subsequent albums to reach the same heights and depths with the same raw, unbridled energy. Her 1976 follow-up, Radio Ethiopia, disappointed many critics and fans, though it has since become a classic. As William Ruhlmann writes at Allmusic, “her band encountered the same development problem the punks would—as they learned their craft and competence set in, they lost some of the unself-consciousness that had made their music so appealing." The music may have become mannered, but Smith was a profoundly self-conscious artist from the start, and would remain so, exploring in album after album her sense of herself as the product of her influences, whom she always speaks of as though they are close personal friends or even aspects of her own mind. Who is Patti Smith speaking to? Her heroes, her friends, her family, her various selves, the men and women who form a community of voices in her work. We get to listen in on those conversations, and we find ourselves torn out of the familiar through Smith's detournment of classic rock swagger and beatnik poses. You can hear her many voices develop, refine, and sometimes stumble into creative missteps that are far more interesting than so many artists’ successes in the playlist above, a complete 13-hour chronological discography (save some rarities and live albums that aren't on Spotify) of Smith’s work—a lifetime of what her father called a “development of the country of the mind” as she remarked in a 1976 interview. “He believed that the mind was a country, and you had to develop it, you had to build and build and build the mind.” These are not the kinds of sentiments we might expect to hear from the so-called “Godmother of Punk.” Which might speak to how little we understand about what Smith and her motley compatriots were up to amid the grime and squalor of mid-seventies downtown New York. Related Content: 33 Songs That Document the History of Feminist Punk (1975-2015): A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork Patti Smith’s New Haunting Tribute to Nico: Hear Three Tracks Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear a Complete Chronological Discography of Patti Smith’s Fiercely Poetic Rock and Roll: 13 Hours and 142 Tracks 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. |
| 5:30p | How Seinfeld, the Sitcom Famously “About Nothing,” Is Like Gustave Flaubert’s Novels About Nothing
"A show about nothing": people have described Seinfeld that way for decades, but creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David didn't set out to create anything of the kind. In fact, with Seinfeld himself already established as a stand-up comedian, they originally pitched to NBC a show about how a comic finds material in his day-to-day life. But in its 43rd episode, when the series had become a major cultural phenomenon, Seinfeld's character and Jason Alexander's George Costanza (whom David based on himself) pitch a show to television executives where "nothing happens," and fans seized upon the truth about Seinfeld they saw reflected in that joke. In the video essay above, Evan Puschak, known as the Nerdwriter, figures out why. It's a cultural and intellectual journey that takes him back to the 19th-century novels of Gustave Flaubert. "Flaubert was a pioneer of literary realism, in large part responsible for raising the status of the novel to that of a high art," says Puschak. In 1852, Flaubert wrote a letter describing his ambition to write "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style." Instead of wanting to "string you along with multiple suspense-heightening narrative developments," in Puschak's view, "he wants to bring you into the text itself, to look there for the carefully constructed meanings that he's built for you." And so, in their own way, do Seinfeld and David in the sitcom that became and remains so beloved in large part with its numerous departures from the traditions the form had established over the past forty years. "It wasn't until Seinfeld that the conventions of the sitcom were deconstructed fully, when all forms of unity, familial and especially romantic, were wholeheartedly abandoned. For Seinfeld, these additional elements were just so much fluff," distractions from telling a story "held together by the internal strength of its comedy." The critic James Wood, quoted in this video, once wrote that "novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it really all begins with him." By the same token, two epochs exist for the writers of sitcoms: before Seinfeld and after. Not bad for a show about nothing — or not about nothing. Related Content: Jacques Derrida on Seinfeld: “Deconstruction Doesn’t Produce Any Sitcom” What’s the Deal with Pop Tarts? Jerry Seinfeld Explains How to Write a Joke Watch a New, “Original” Episode of Seinfeld Performed Live on Stage Seinfeld & Nothingness: A Supercut of the Show’s Emptiest Moments Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais Dissect the Craft of Comedy (NSFW) 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. How <i>Seinfeld</i>, the Sitcom Famously “About Nothing,” Is Like Gustave Flaubert’s Novels About Nothing 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. |
| 8:01p | Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Monet at Work in His Famous Garden at Giverny
Long ago, we showed you some startling footage of an elderly, arthritic Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painting with horribly deformed hands. Today we offer a more idyllic image of a French Impressionist painter in his golden years: Claude Monet on a sunny day in his beautiful garden at Giverny. Once again, the footage was produced by Sacha Guitry for his project Ceux de Chez Nous, or "Those of Our Land." It was shot in the summer of 1915, when Monet was 74 years old. It was not the best time in Monet's life. His second wife and eldest son had both died in the previous few years, and his eyesight was getting progressively worse due to cataracts. But despite the emotional and physical setbacks, Monet would soon rebound, making the last decade of his life (he died in 1926 at the age of 86) an extremely productive period in which he painted many of his most famous studies of water lilies. At the beginning of the film clip we see Guitry and Monet talking with each other. Then Monet paints on a large canvas beside a lily pond. It's a shame the camera doesn't show the painting Monet is working on, but it's fascinating to see the great artist all clad in white, a cigarette dangling from his lips, painting in his lovely garden. Note: This beautiful clip and post originally appeared on our site in 2012. Related Content: 1922 Photo: Claude Monet Stands on the Japanese Footbridge He Painted Through the Years Impressionist Painter Edgar Degas Takes a Stroll in Paris, 1915 Rare Film of Sculptor Auguste Rodin Working at His Studio in Paris (1915) Watch Henri Matisse Sketch and Make His Famous Cut-Outs (1946) Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Monet at Work in His Famous Garden at Giverny 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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