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Friday, December 8th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | Meet the Characters Immortalized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”: The Stars and Gay Rights Icons from Andy Warhol’s Factory Scene
Lou Reed weathered his share of bad press in the decades after leaving one of the most influential bands in rock history—either for his famed irascibility or his spells of lackluster songwriting. Somehow, he always had a way of bouncing back, proving again and again his cultural relevance. For example, when it seemed like he had cashed in all his credibility with the godawful “Original Rapper” in the mid-eighties, he returned in 1989 with the gritty classic rock and roll of New York (and played the White House at the request of his longtime fan and friend Vaclav Havel). Reed was a true survivor of a downtown scene that claimed more casualties than it made stars, and he mostly made survival look pretty good. When he released his first solo album after quitting the Velvet Underground in 1972, however, it seemed likely Reed was headed for obscurity. Lou Reed is mostly a great collection of (mostly overproduced) songs, “but it isn’t a terribly interesting” record, writes Mark Deming at Allmusic, “and it stands today more as a historical curiosity than anything else” for its early versions of songs like "Berlin." Not so the follow-up, Transformer, an album boasting what may well be some of the best recordings Reed ever made, like “Perfect Day” and “Satellite of Love.” What made the difference? The influence of David Bowie, who produced with Mick Ronson, didn’t hurt one bit. Transformer also happens to contain the only song that broke Reed “through to the mainstream,” notes the Polyphonic video above, the “rock classic” hit, “Walk on the Wild Side.” The song draws its narrative strength and its “incredibly subversive” nature from its subject: the 60s Factory scene surrounding Andy Warhol, which, in effect, made Lou Reed, Lou Reed when Warhol took the Velvet Underground under his wing. The song reminds us that Reed was at his strongest when he told the tales of his milieu, whether that be the world of junkies, hustlers, and sexual outsiders, or of fringe downtown artists unafraid to experiment with new identities and personas. These were shared worlds, and Reed knew them well enough to capture them in a literary frame provided by Nelson Algren’s novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). Rather than create an adaptation of the book as he first intended, Reed wrote about six compelling Factory characters, “Superstars” in Warhol’s coterie, who embodied the edgy, courageous cool Reed made his theme. First up is Holly Woodlawn, a transgender woman who moved to New York from Miami to escape discrimination. Warhol discovered Woodlawn working the streets, and put her in films, “where she thrived,” the video notes, becoming “an important figure in LGBTQ history and, thanks to Lou Reed, in music history, too.” The next verse introduces us to another important member of Warhol’s inner circle, Candy Darling, who was also transgender and a star of Warhol’s films, and who inspired not only “Walk on the Wild Side” but “Candy Says” and, quite possibly, the Kinks’ “Lola.” Darling is already familiar to those who know the Factory scene, as is the subject of the third vignette, Joe Dallesandro, whom Warhol turned into a cult star in films like Flesh, and who—unlike most of the Factory artists—actually achieved mainstream success, with roles in The Cotton Club and The Limey. (He also served as the crotch model on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and the “topless torso” on the cover of The Smiths’ debut album.) As the video outlines brief biographies of each “Walk on the Wild Side” muse, we see that Reed wasn’t only paying homage to his artistic community of origin, he also was also preserving a pantheon of cultural figures who were important to the gay rights movement in one way or another, as well as to the 60s Warhol aesthetic and the birth of glam rock in the 70s. “Walk on the Wild Side,” notes Polyphonic, “gives us a great little glimpse into a historical scene, and it helps us understand the people around Lou Reed that influenced the great artist he was.” Without a doubt, Reed’s most enduring work comes from his sympathetic portraits of the artists and hangers-on who made the world he wrote of so sexy, dangerous, complex, and intriguing. Related Content: Lou Reed Creates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schnabel Films It (2006) Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Three Rules for Living Well: A Short and Succinct Life Philosophy Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Meet the Characters Immortalized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”: The Stars and Gay Rights Icons from Andy Warhol’s Factory Scene 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 | Meet Mandy Harvey, the Deaf Singer Songwriter Who Performs Barefoot & Feels the Music Through Vibrations in the Ground
Attractive young female singer-songwriters who shuck their shoes onstage sometimes find that this small attempt to pass themselves off as folksy and “real” has the opposite effect. Mandy Harvey, however, is above reproach. The deaf singer-songwriter performs barefoot out of necessity, using her unclad soles to pick up on the vibrations of various instruments through the floorboards. It allows her to keep time and, in so doing, helps her to stay emotionally connected to the other musicians with whom she’s performing, as she told NPR earlier this year, when she was one of 10 finalists on America's Got Talent.
“I’ll feel and concentrate on the drums through the floor, through my feet and then the bass through your chest,” she said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio. “And then if a saxophone player is next to me then it will be on my arm. So you just designate different parts of your body so you can concentrate on who’s playing what and when.” Born with near perfect pitch and a connective tissue disorder that impaired her hearing, she was able to pursue her love of music by relying on hearing aids and lip reading until 18, when she finally lost her hearing for good, as a freshman Vocal Music Education major at Colorado State University. While she has never heard fellow songbirds Adele or Taylor Swift, she has gotten over the stage fright that plagued her when she still retained some hearing. Vocally, she turns to muscle memory and visual tuners to see her through. Her talent is such that some listeners are convinced her deafness is a publicity stunt, a misperception that eats at Wayne Connell, founder of the Invisible Disabilities Association, a non-profit with whom Harvey is active: We've created an idea [of] how people are supposed to look when they're broken and so when you don't fit that imaginary mold, then it's a trick, or you're a liar — or you're not really broken, so you shouldn't be doing certain things. See Harvey performing barefoot at the Kennedy Center on the 23rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, below.
Related Content: How Did Beethoven Compose His 9th Symphony After He Went Completely Deaf? Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Meet Mandy Harvey, the Deaf Singer Songwriter Who Performs Barefoot & Feels the Music Through Vibrations in the Ground 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. |
| 5:45p | Why People So Many People Adore The Room, the Worst Movie Ever Made? A Video Explainer
Not since the height of the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s midnight screenings have I seen a crowd go so nuts for a film, but 2003’s The Room seems to have really hit a cultural nerve. And it’s only going to get bigger with the upcoming release of The Disaster Artist, James Franco and Seth Rogen’s retelling of how writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau made his so-bad-it’s-brilliant film, based on the book by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell. Whereas Rocky Horror was an adaptation of an already successful East End musical, and a knowingly camp one at that, The Room is sui generis. As The Disaster Artist’s co-author Tom Bissell describes it, “It’s like a movie made by an alien who has never seen a movie but had movies thoroughly explained to him.” The above video from Vox takes the uninitiated into the phenomenon of this piece of “paracinema”--any film that lies outside the mainstream--and tries to explain why The Room is so beloved while so many other bad films disappear into the ether. One reason is its campy nature, though never knowingly so--Wiseau thought he was making something great. And because it’s so hard to find somebody so driven, yet so unaware of the basics of acting, storytelling, and moviemaking, The Room stands out compared to other films that try to be intentionally bad. You just can't fake that kind of thing. The other reason is what critic Pierre Bourdieu would call cultural capital. That’s the shared joy between fans, and the importance placed on dressing up like the characters, going to midnight screenings, and seeing who knows the most lines.
The current trailer for The Disaster Artist reframes the story as a typical Hollywood story, where one follows their dreams no matter what, and hints at how The Room’s plot mirrored actual events in Wiseau’s life. Meanwhile, what is really getting the buzz is James Franco’s uncanny and spot-on portrayal of Wiseau and some of The Room’s recreated footage. It’s almost exact down to the second.
People’s love of The Room has led some to treat it like the work of art it so wanted to be. In YouTube essayist This Guy Edits' video, he examines Wiseau’s blocking of a scene much like The Nerdwriter broke down Hitchcock’s blocking of Vertigo. Camp in this instance has birthed irony, but in the most loving way.
If you are new to The Room, please follow Tom Bissell’s advice and watch it for the first time at home, not at a midnight screening when you won’t hear any dialog and spoons are thrown at the screen. Hell, don’t even watch The Disaster Artist until you’ve sat down and watched Wiseau’s...masterpiece. (Yeah, we said it.) Related Content: Meet the World’s Worst Orchestra, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Featuring Brian Eno Susan Sontag’s 50 Favorite Films (and Her Own Cinematic Creations) 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. Why People So Many People Adore <i>The Room</i>, the Worst Movie Ever Made? A Video Explainer 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. |
| 7:00p | The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Country (and Will Change Your Mental Picture of the World)
We all understand, on some level, that as adults we must go back and correct the oversimplifications we learned as schoolchildren. But for a sense of how large the scale of those quasi-truths, you must imagine the whole world: that is, you must imagine how you imagine the whole world, a mental picture probably taken straight from the map hung on the classroom wall. And the lines of that map came straight, in a sense, from the work of 16th-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Though Mercator's world-mapping method came as a revolution, it has also given generation after generation after generation very much the wrong idea about how big the world's countries actually are. Mercator Projection, as Citymetric describes it, "re-imagines the earth as the surface of a cylinder. When laid out flat, it’s pleasingly rectangular, and its eastern and western edges line up neatly." But while "in reality, lines of longitude converge at the poles; on the map, they're parallel. As a result, the closer you get to the poles, the more distorted the map becomes, and the bigger things look relative to their actual size."
Hence the need for such re-imaginings of the world map as The True Size, "a website that lets you compare the size of any nation or US state to other land masses, by allowing you to move them around to anywhere else on the map." Just search for any country in the box in the map's upper-left corner, and that country's borders will appear highlighted in color. When you click and drag those borders to another part of the world, specifically a part of the world at a different latitude, you'll notice that the shape of the dragged country seems to deform.
But that appearance of distortion is only relative to the shapes and sizes we've long internalized from the Mercator map: when you move Australia up and it covers a third of Russia, or when you move the vast-looking Greenland down and it doesn't even cover Argentina, you're looking — perhaps for the first time — at a geographically accurate size comparison. Does that (to quote the humorless representative of the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality in the West Wing episode cited as one inspiration for the True Size Map) blow your mind? Explore the True Size Map here.
Related Content: Japanese Designers May Have Created the Most Accurate Map of Our World: See the AuthaGraph The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection 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 “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Country (and Will Change Your Mental Picture of the World) 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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