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Wednesday, September 18th, 2019
- “Nielsen Releases In-Depth Statistics on Live Music Behavior” by Dan Rys
- “7 Predications on the Future of Live Music” by Jason Donnelly
- “Live at Home: how to see concerts every day without leaving your couch” by Noel Murray
- “Broadcasts Of ‘Live’ Theater And Opera Are Terrific In Their Own Way” by Maureen Dezell
| Time | Event |
| 7:07a | Is the Live Music Experience Irreplaceable? Pretty Much Pop #11 
Surely technological advances have made it unnecessary to ever leave the house, right? Is there still a point in seeing live people actually doing things right in front of you? Dave Hamilton (Host of Gig Gab, Mac Geek Gab) joins Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss what’s so damn cool about live music (and theater), the alternatives (live-streamed-to-theaters or devices, recorded for TV, VR), why tickets are so expensive, whether tribute bands fulfill our needs, the connection between live music and drugs, singing along to the band, and more. We touch on Rush (and their tribute Lotus Land), Damien Rice, Todd Rundgren, The Who, Cop Rock, Bat out of Hell: The Musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the filmed Shrek The Musical, and Rifftrax Live. We used some articles to feed this episode, though we didn’t really bring them up: You know Mark also runs a music podcast, right? Check out Erica doin’ her fiddlin’ and singin’. Listen to Mark’s mass of tunes. Here’s Dave singing and drumming some Badfinger live with his band Fling, and here’s Mark live singing “The Grinch.” This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network. Pretty Much Pop is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode. Is the Live Music Experience Irreplaceable? Pretty Much Pop #11 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.  |
| 8:00a | Visit the Homes That Great Architects Designed for Themselves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius & Frank Gehry
However impressive the buildings they design in the eminence of middle- and old age, most architects start their careers with private houses. Some architects, if they come into money early in life or simply can't sell themselves to any other clients, start with their own private house. But most have to put in a few years' or even decades' work before they possess the wealth, the stability, or the aesthetic assurance needed to quite literally make a home for themselves. No such hesitance, however, for Frank Lloyd Wright, who when still in his early twenties built a home for his young family in Oak Park, Illinois, which became his studio and later an American National Historic Landmark. You can get a wintertime tour of Wright's Oak Park home and studio — complete with snow falling outside and a tall Christmas tree inside — in the video above. A veritable catalog of all the nineteenth-century movements that influenced the young architect, from the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to the English Arts and Crafts movement to philosophies that held interior decoration to be a tool of moral improvement, the house still stands in bold contrast to all those around it. Wright lived and worked in the Oak Park house for twenty years, designed more than 150 projects in the studio, giving it a fair claim to be the birthplace of his still-influential early conception of a truly American architecture.
Just a few decades into the twentieth century, it started to seem that the most inspiring American architecture would come drawn up by European hands. The Austrian architect Richard Neutra moved to the United States in 1923, and after briefly working for Wright headed out to Los Angeles at the invitation of his compatriot Rudolf Schindler. There he worked on projects whose combination of rigorous geometry and openness to their surroundings would define what we still think of as mid-century modern residential architecture. A few years after designing the famous Lovell Health House, completed in 1929, he took a loan from architecture-loving Dutch industrialist Cees H. Van der Leeuw and got to work on his own home, dubbed the VDL Research House.  Even without a wealthy client like the eccentric health guru Philip Lovell, Neutra built a house that would nevertheless keep its residents — he and his family — in contact with air, light, and nature. The result, as explained in the Dwell video on the VDL Research House above, is a version of European-style international Modernism "adapted to the California climate, adapted to the California lifestyle," whose twelve exterior doors ensure that "no matter where you are, you can walk outside," and none of whose aesthetic features try to compete with its natural surroundings. Neutra, who lived in the house until his death in 1932 (with a period away after its destruction by fire in 1963 and subsequent reconstruction) wrote that he "wanted to demonstrate that human beings, brought together in close proximity, can be accommodated in very satisfying circumstances, taking in that precious amenity called privacy."
While Neutra was enjoying his realized vision of a new domestic life in California, Le Corbusier was hard at work realizing his own back in Europe. Designing an apartment block for a private developer in Paris' 16th arrondissement, the Swiss-French architect negotiated the seventh and eighth floors for himself. His home in the building, named Immeuble Molitorat when completed in 1934, includes an art studio, a rooftop garden, plenty of skylights and glass bricks to let in light, and a bedroom modeled after an ocean liner cabin with a bed raised high enough to take in the view of Boulogne over the balcony. Named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016, Immeuble Molitorat also underwent a thorough restoration project beginning that year, chronicled in the documentary Chez Le Corbusier above.
Le Courbusier didn't get quite as much traction in the New World as he did in the Old, unlike some European architects of his generation whose work attained full bloom only after crossing the ocean. Bauhaus school founder Walter Gropius surely falls into the latter group, and it didn't take him long to establish himself in America, where he'd arrived with his wife Ise in 1937, with a house of his own that looked like nothing most Americans had ever seen before. Nor, as Gropius later wrote, had Europeans: "I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate. This fusion of the regional spirit with a contemporary approach to design produced a house that I would never have built in Europe." "My husband was always charmed by the natural curiosity of Americans," says Ise in her narration of Walter Gropius: His New World Home, the short film above made the year after the architect's death. Located in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which Ise describes as "very near Walden Pond" in the "heart of the Puritan New England countryside," both the house and the landscape around it were planned with a Bauhaus interest in maximum efficiency and simplicity. Filled with furniture made in Bauhaus workshops in the 1920s, the house also became a party space twice a year for Gropius graduate students at Harvard, "to give them a chance to see a modern house in operation, because they couldn't see it any place else except in the Middle West, where houses by Frank Lloyd Wright had been built, or in California, where houses by Mr. Neutra had been built."
After the Second World War, industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames brought into the world a new kind of Californian indoor-outdoor Modernism with their 1949 Eames House, a kind of Mondrian painting made into a livable box filled with an idiosyncratic arrangements of artifacts from all over the world. In 1955 the Eamses made the film above, House: After Five Years of Living, a wordless collection set to music of views of and from the house. By then the Eames House had already become the most famous of the "Case Study Houses," all commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine in a challenge to well-known architects (Neutra was another participant) to "create ‘good’ living conditions" for postwar American families, all of which"must be capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual ‘performance.'”
But unless you count recreations in reverential museum exhibits, none of the 25 Case Study Houses were ever replicated, and the Eames House strikes modern observers as an individual performance as much as does Philip Johnson's also-boxlike Glass House, built the same year in New Canaan, Connecticut. With its every wall, window, and door made out of the material in its name, the house provided the architect a living experience, until his death in 2005, that he described as "a permanent camping trip." Built with industrial materials and German ideas — ideas a bit too similar, some say, to those of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Illinois — the Glass House's fame, as New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff puts it, "may have done more to make Modernism palatable to the country's social elites than any other structure of the 20th century."
The 90-year-old Frank Gehry, in collaboration with his architect son Sam, recently finished a new house in Santa Monica for himself and his family. But the old house he'd designed for himself and his family in Santa Monica must have served him well, since he'd occupied it for more than 40 years. It began as an existing, unremarkable Dutch Colonial structure, yet when Gehry realized he needed more space, he simply designed another house to build not over but around it. He drew inspiration from the industrial materials he saw around him, deliberately incorporating great quantities of glass, plywood, corrugated metal, and chain-link fencing. "I had just been through a study of chain-link fencing," Gehry recalls in the video above, produced for the Gehry Residence's reception of an award from the American Institute of Architects. Because chain-link fencing was so ubiquitous, he says, "and because it was so universally hated, the denial thing interested me." Though his mixture of "fragment and whole, raw and refined, new and old" angered his neighbors at first, it has come to stand as a statement not just of Gehry's aesthetic sensibility — the one that has shaped the likes of the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Bilbao — but of another strong possibility for what American architecture can be. "I was responding to time and place and budget, and character of the neighborhood and context and what was going on in the world at that time," Gehry says. "That's the best thing to do when you're a student, is not to try to be somebody else. Don't try to be Frank Gehry. Don't try to be Frank Lloyd Wright." Related Content: Watch 50+ Documentaries on Famous Architects & Buildings: Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Hadid & Many More Take 360° Virtual Tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Masterpieces, Taliesin & Taliesin West 1,300 Photos of Famous Modern American Homes Now Online, Courtesy of USC A Quick Animated Tour of Iconic Modernist Houses The Modernist Gas Stations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe 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 or on Facebook. Visit the Homes That Great Architects Designed for Themselves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius & Frank Gehry 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. |
| 11:00a | Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From the BBC (1969) Can you imagine Jimi Hendrix singing a duet with Lulu? Well, neither could Hendrix. So when the iconoclastic guitar player showed up with his band at the BBC studios in London on January 4, 1969 to appear on Happening for Lulu, he was horrified to learn that the show's producer wanted him to sing with the winsome star of To Sir, With Love. The plan called for The Jimi Hendrix Experience to open their set with "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" and then play their early hit "Hey Joe," with Lulu joining Hendrix onstage at the end to sing the final bars with him before segueing into her regular show-closing number. "We cringed," writes bassist Noel Redding in his memoir, Are You Experienced? The Inside Story of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Redding describes the scene that he, Hendrix, and drummer Mitch Mitchell walked into that day as being "so straight it was only natural that we would try to combat that atmosphere by having a smoke in our dressing room." He continues: In our haste, the lump of hash got away and slipped down the sink drainpipe. Panic! We just couldn't do this show straight--Lulu didn't approve of smoking! She was then married to Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, whom I'd visited and shared a smoke with. I could always tell Lulu was due home when Maurice started throwing open all the windows. Anyway, I found a maintenance man and begged tools from him with the story of a lost ring. He was too helpful, offering to dismantle the drain for us. It took ages to dissuade him, but we succeeded in our task and had a great smoke. When it was time for The Jimi Hendrix Experience to go on camera, they were feeling fairly loose. They tore through "Voodoo Child" and then the program cut to Lulu, who was squeezed awkwardly into a chair next to an audience member in the front row. "That was really hot," she said. "Yeah. Well ladies and gentlemen, in case you didn't know, Jimi and the boys won in a big American magazine called Billboard the group of the year." As Lulu spoke a loud shriek of feedback threw her off balance. Was it an accident? Hendrix, of course, was a pioneer in the intentional use of feedback. A bit flustered, she continued: "And they're gonna sing for you now the song that absolutely made them in this country, and I'd love to hear them sing it: 'Hey Joe.'" The band launched into the song, but midway through--before Lulu had a chance to join them onstage--Hendrix signaled to the others to quit playing. "We'd like to stop playing this rubbish," he said, "and dedicate a song to the Cream, regardless of what kind of group they may be in. We dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce." With that the band veered off into an instrumental version of "Sunshine of Your Love" by the recently disbanded Cream. Noel Redding continues the story: This was fun for us, but producer Stanley Dorfman didn't take it at all well as the minutes ticked by on his live show. Short of running onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was nothing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talking at the end, played through Stanley tearing his hair, pointing to his watch and silently screaming at us. We played out the show. Afterwards, Dorfman refused to speak to us but the result is one of the most widely used bits of film we ever did. Certainly, it's the most relaxed. The stunt reportedly got Hendrix banned from the BBC--but it made rock and roll history. Years later, Elvis Costello paid homage to Hendrix's antics when he performed on Saturday Night Live. You can watch The Stunt That Got Elvis Costello Banned From SNL here. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Related content: The Stunt That Got Elvis Costello Banned From Saturday Night Live (1977) Jimi Hendrix Unplugged: Two Great Recordings of Hendrix Playing Acoustic Guitar Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From the BBC (1969) 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. |
| 3:45p | What Did People Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cookbook Explain
A couple days ago, Open Culture’s Ayun Halliday brought us the delightfully amusing medieval comics of artist Tyler Gunther. With references to Game of Thrones and a piece of women’s headgear called “Planetary Realness,” the single-panel gags use seemingly-period-correct imagery to play with our presentist biases. The “Medieval Peasant Food Pyramid,” for example, shows a diet based on copious amounts of ale, bread, and cheese, with goose pie once a year and nary a fruit or vegetable in sight. Stereotypes of medieval European nutrition seem comparatively benign, derived as much from fantasy entertainment as from misunderstandings of history. But while it’s true people in Europe hundreds of years ago died young and in huge numbers from plague, famine, war, and, yes, bad food, they also survived long enough to pass on genes and build cities and towns that still exist today. They didn’t do so strictly on a diet of beer and bread.
If we want to know what people really ate in, say, 12th century England, we’ll find that their diets varied widely from region to region, depending on what cooks could grow, forage, or purchase from other locals. Everyone, in other words, was a localvore. Each region had its recipes for breads and cheeses, and each its own dishes made with its own animals, herbs, spices, and roughage. And we’ll find that major historical events could radically alter diets, as foods—and arable land—became scarcer or more plentiful. Such were the findings of non-profit volunteer history group Iron Shepherds, who used primary texts, images, and cooking methods to reconstruct ten 12th-century recipes from their native “home county of Cumbria, in the North of England,” reports Atlas Obscura. “[W]hile the country became embroiled in a bloody civil war” over succession during a time known as The Anarchy, Cumbria became a part of Scotland, and lived in relative stability, "home to cultures ranging from the invading Flemish and Frenchman to Celts and even Norse Vikings.”
Needless to say, this diversity of cultures contributed to a diversity of tastes, and a colorful range of dishes with names like frumenty, plumentum, and tardpolene. “Cumbria’s peasants, it turns out, ate much as we strive to today—though for vastly different reasons….." The peasants’ "diets consisted of plant-based, low-sugar meals of locally-sourced, if not home-grown ingredients.” Involuntary fasting might have been a feature for many peasants, but so too was “voluntary, intermittent fasting…. In the name of religious self-discipline.” What about the upper classes? How might, say, a landed knight eat, once he finished roaming his demesne and rested safe at home with his staff and entourage? In the video at the top, Modern History TV’s Jason Kingsley and food historian Chris Carr discuss the dietary practices of the privileged in medieval times. Again, here we find more surprisingly forward-thinking preventative nutrition, though limited by the medicine of the time. Cooks would consult with the knight’s personal physician, who himself would monitor his patient’s vitals—going so far as to taste the knight’s urine, a way of detecting what we now know as diabetes. Too sweet? Cut out the sugar.
Iron Shepherd’s Medieval Meals cookbook has proven so popular that it’s currently sold out, but you can see many more episodes of Modern History TV’s medieval series devoted to food at their channel on YouTube, including the videos above on the diets of peasants, nobles, and knight’s vassals. There are also vlogs on “Hearty Food vs. Posh Food,” “Good Eating,” and—in answer to that age-old question—“What did medieval peasants use instead of plastic wrap” to store their leftovers? Come for the food, stay for the lively videos on weaponry, hoods, and hay making. via Atlas Obscura Related Content: How to Bake Ancient Roman Bread Dating Back to 79 AD: A Video Primer An Archive of 3,000 Vintage Cookbooks Lets You Travel Back Through Culinary Time Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness What Did People Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cookbook Explain 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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