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Wednesday, July 31st, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 11:00a | David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs: Listen to Them Online
Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Digging deep into the crates will yield many an overlooked surprise, many a subtle sleeper, cut-up classic, and electronic experiment. But if all you’ve got is Changesbowie—the 1990 compilation that became, for some generations, a definitive statement of his career—you’ve still got a collection of songs the likes of which have never been heard before or since in modern pop. Completists may grouch, but even resident Bowie scholars/local record store clerks have an “Ashes to Ashes,” “’Heroes’,” “Changes,” or “Modern Love” in their top ten. Whether ardent or casual fans, we connect with Bowie’s music through milestones, both in his career and in our own lives. This truth has been exploited. In 2008, Mike Schiller at Popmatters bemoaned the fact that almost 20 Bowie compilation albums had been released, a few of which “don’t really seem to court any greater purpose whatsoever.” Given this surfeit of Bowie compilations on the market, Schiller's initial groaning reaction to news of yet another (“Oh, good Lord. Another David Bowie collection?”) seems apposite. Except this collection, iSELECT: BOWIE, released in 2008 to readers of the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday, then later in an official CD and digital edition, “is actually something special.” Bowie "picked the tracklist himself. Even more than that, the tracklist actually looks like something he’d have picked himself, rather than having a manager or publicist pick it for him.”
See the full tracklist above and hear a playlist of his picks at the top. If we put all our lists of favorites together, we might see a very high percentage of “Life on Mars?” picks. We’re in excellent company; it’s Bowie’s number one favorite song of his. But how many of his other picks might we choose? The eight-and-a-half minute “Sweet Thing”/”Candidate”/”Sweet Thing (Reprise)” from Diamond Dogs? “Win” from Young Americans or “The Bewlay Brothers” from Hunky Dory? Aside from “Life on Mars?” and the far lesser-collected “Loving the Alien” and “Time Will Crawl,” none of his twelve selections were released as singles. There are no songs from two of the most acclaimed Bowie albums, Low and ’Heroes’, unless we count “Some Are” a bonus track included on the Low 1991 rerelease. There are two tracks from, Lodger, the third and least accessible of his vaunted Berlin trilogy, and only one selection from Ziggy Stardust, and it ain’t “Ziggy Stardust.” If anyone else handed you this list of favorite Bowie tracks, you’d be skeptical. Who puts “Hang On to Yourself” (Live in Santa Monica ’72) above any of the studio tracks on that classic 1972 breakout album? David Bowie, that’s who. And who knows, if you’d asked him the day before or after, he might have picked twelve different songs. There’s no telling how seriously he took the exercise, but in the newspaper release, he did “casually [pen] his inspirations for the songs and the recorded processes behind them,” notes Allmusic’s Jason Lymangrover. On his choice of “Teenage Wildlife,” for example, Bowie commented: “So it’s late morning and I’m thinking, ‘New song and a fresh approach. I know. I’m going to do a Ronnie Spector. Oh yes I am. Ersatz just for one day.’ And I did and here it is. Bless. I’m still very enamoured of this song and would give you two ‘Modern Love’s for it anytime…” Bowie got to experience his own music in a way no one else could. iSELECT: BOWIE gets behind the greatest hits collections for a glimpse at the way he heard and remembered his catalogue. via Rolling Stone/FarOutMagazine Related Content: How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unforgettable Lyrics Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs: Listen to Them 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.  |
| 2:00p | An Introduction to Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda: Romantic, Radical & Revolutionary
Does politics belong in art? The question arouses heated debate about creative freedom and moral responsibility. Assumptions include the idea that politics cheapens film, music, or literature, or that political art should abandon traditional ideas about beauty and technique. As engaging as such discussions might be in the abstract, they mean little to nothing if they don't account for artists who show us that choosing between politics and art can be as much a false dilemma as choosing between art and love. In the work of writers as varied as William Blake, Muriel Rukeyser, James Baldwin, and James Joyce, for example, themes of protest, power, privilege, and poverty are inseparable from the sublimely erotic—all of them essential aspects of human experience, and hence, of literature. Foremost among such political artists stands Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who—as the TED-Ed video above from Ilan Stavans informs us—was a romantic stylist, and also a fearless political activist and revolutionary. Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and, among his many other literary accomplishments, he “rescued 2,000 refugees, spent three years in political exile, and ran for president of Chile.” Neruda used “straightforward language and everyday experience to create lasting impact." He began his career writing odes and love poems filled with candid sexuality and sensuous description that resonated with readers around the world. Neruda’s fame spread internationally. He took a series of diplomatic posts, and eventually landed in Spain, where he served as consul in the mid-1930s during the Spanish Civil War. He became a committed communist, and helped relocate hundreds of fleeing Spaniards to Chile. Neruda came to believe that “the work of art” is “inseparable from historical and political context,” writes author Salvatore Bizzarro, and he “felt that the belief that one could write solely for eternity was romantic posturing.” Yet his lifelong devotion to “revolutionary ideals,” as Stavans says, did not undermine his devotion to poetry, nor did it blinker his writing with what we might call political correctness. Instead, Neruda became more expansive, taking on such subjects as the “entire history of Latin America” in his 1950 epic Canto General. Neruda died of cancer just months after fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet seized power from elected president Salvador Allende in 1973. Today, he remains a beloved figure for activists, his lines “recited at protests and marches worldwide.” And he remains a literary giant, respected, admired, and adored worldwide for work in which he engaged the struggles of the people with the same passionate intensity and imaginative breadth he brought to personal poems of love, loss, and desire. Related Content: Pablo Neruda’s Historic First Reading in the US (1966) Pablo Neruda’s Poem, “The Me Bird,” Becomes a Short, Beautifully Animated Film The Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda: Help Bring Them to the English Speaking World for the First Time Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. An Introduction to Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda: Romantic, Radical & Revolutionary 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 | How Quentin Tarantino Steals from Other Movies: A Video Essay
"Good artists copy, great artists steal," goes a line we often attribute to Pablo Picasso — even those of us who know little of Picasso's work and nothing of the work from which he may or may not have stolen. Quentin Tarantino's version of the line adds another observation about great artists: "They don't do homages." The director of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown may well have spoken those words in frustration, the frustration of having his every picture described as an "homage" to some element or other of cinema history. He puts it more bluntly: "I steal from every single movie ever made." A bold claim, to be sure, but if anyone is likely to have seen every film ever made, surely it's him. "How Quentin Tarantino Steals from Other Movies," the INSIDER video essay above, surveys the range of his cinematic sources, from The Searchers to The Warriors, Band of Outsiders to City on Fire, Metropolis to The Flintstones. In each of his ten features so far, Tarantino has bundled all this material into packages describable most succinctly with the adjective Tarantinoesque, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "characterized by graphic and stylized violence, non-linear storylines, cineliterate references, satirical themes, and sharp dialogue." Tarantino's latest film Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (subject of its own INSIDER video essay) exhibits all those qualities, and both critical and audience response so far suggests that we have yet to tire of the Tarantinoesque. How has Tarantino's cinematic sensibility, practically textbook in its postmodernism, worn so well? As this video's narrator puts it, Tarantino "never steals from one source. He rather steals from multiple sources spanning decades, and then stitches them together to create something new," fortifying the process with his strong understanding of the source material (honed during his pre-fame days as a video-store clerk) and his "unique vision and writing." Roger Ebert once wrote of Lars Von Trier, another notable filmmaker of Tarantino's generation, that "he takes chances, and that's rare in a world where most films seem to have been banged together out of other films." But Tarantino takes his chances precisely by making films out of other films, and as even his detractors have to admit, it's paid off so far. Related Content: The Films of Quentin Tarantino: Watch Video Essays on Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill & More Does Quentin Tarantino’s First Film, Reservoir Dogs, Hold Up 25 Years Later?: A Video Essay Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram. How Quentin Tarantino Steals from Other Movies: A Video Essay 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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