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Monday, March 8th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | A Short Biography of Keith Haring Told with Comic Book Illustrations & Music
Singer-songwriter-cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis is a worthy exemplar of NYC street cred. Born, raised, and still residing on New York City’s Lower East Side, he draws comics under the “judgmental” gaze of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist and writes songs beneath a poster of The Terminator onto which he grafted the face of Lou Reed from a stolen Time Out New York promo. Billing himself as “among NYC’s top slingers of folk / garagerock / antifolk,” Lewis pairs his songs with comics during live shows, projecting original illustrations or flipping the pages of a sketchbook large enough for the audience to see, a practice he refers to as “low budget films.” He’s also an amateur historian, as evidenced by his eight-minute opus The History of Punk on the Lower East Side, 1950-1975 and a series of extremely “low budget films” for the History channel, on topics such as the French Revolution, Marco Polo, and the fall of the Soviet Union. His latest effort is a 3-minute biography of artist Keith Haring, above, for the Museum of Modern Art Magazine’s new Illustrated Lives series. While Lewis isn’t a contemporary of Haring’s, they definitely breathed the same air:
Lewis gives then-rising stars Jean-Michel Basquiat and performance artist Klaus Nomi cameo appearances, before escorting Haring down into the subway for a literal lightbulb moment. In Haring’s own words:
Towards the end of his jam-packed, 22-page “low budget film,” Lewis wanders from his traditional approach to cartooning, revealing himself to be a keen student of Haring’s bold graphic style. The final image, to the lyric, “Keith’s explosive short lifetime and generous heart speak like an infinite fountain from some deep wellspring of art,” is breathtaking. Spend time with some other New York City icons that have cropped up in Jeffrey Lewis’ music, including the Chelsea Hotel, the subway, the bridges, and St. Mark’s Place. Watch his low budget films for the History Channel here. Related Content: Keith Haring’s Eclectic Journal Entries Go Online An Animated History of Dogs, Inspired by Keith Haring The Story of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graphic Novel Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. A Short Biography of Keith Haring Told with Comic Book Illustrations & Music 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 | Metallica Plays Antarctica, Setting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Continents: Watch the Full Concert Online
Unless they’ve got fans among penguins, there’s no practical reason for a band to make the journey to Antarctica to play. So why did Metallica do exactly that in 2013? Because they could, and because it made them the first musical act to play all seven continents — a Guinness World Record — doing it all in the same calendar year, no less. They’re also the only rock band to travel to Antarctica. (With the exception of Nunatak, an indie rock band made up of British climate scientists, who played a “sold-out” show to 17 people at the Rothera Research Station where they worked in 2007.) If those aren’t reasons enough, the concert was a dream realized for the 120 fans in attendance, including research station scientists and Coca Cola contest winners from all over Latin America who were able to see Metallica in a transparent dome near the heliport of Argentina’s Carlini Base after a week-long cruise. “Due to the continent’s fragile environment,” notes Guinness, the band’s amps were placed in “isolation cabinets” and the audience heard everything through headphones, sort of like a silent rave. Called “Freeze ‘Em All,” the show was live-streamed and is now fully available online (see it above). “The energy in the little dome was amazing!” the band writes on their Facebook page. “Words can not describe how happy everyone was.” But how cold were they? More sponsorship, in the form of outerwear from snowboard and ski giant Burton, kept the band bundled up throughout. Metallica has uploaded the audio of “Freeze ‘Em All” in MP3 and various high-end lossless formats at LiveMetallica.com. It’s a very cool idea, but is the concert video an hour-long Coke Zero ad? I don’t know…. I am a little curious about what might have happened if their amps had been at full blast in the Antarctic wild…. Here’s the full setlist, with timestamps, of the record-setting gig:
You too, like many a commenting fan, may feel betrayed by the lack of “Trapped Under Ice” in the setlist. Maybe too on-the-nose, they thought, too cute. But surely a missed opportunity that won’t come again. Fill in the gap yourself with the live take below.
Related Content: Metallica Is Putting Free Concerts Online: 6 Now Streaming, with More to Come Buddhist Monk Covers Metallica’s ”Enter Sandman,” Then Meditates Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Metallica Plays Antarctica, Setting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Continents: Watch the Full Concert 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. |
| 5:00p | B.B. King Plays “The Thrill is Gone” with Slash, Ron Wood & Other Legends
How many generations of guitarists have come and gone since B.B. King emerged on the Beale Street blues scene in the late 1940s? 60s blues-rock giants, 70s hard rockers, 80s metal shredders… at least two generations between B.B. and Slash, who is probably himself a guitar grandfather by now. Whether they know it or not, every rock and blues player descends from the Kings of the blues (B.B., Albert, Freddie, and guitarists who bore the title but not the surname). Slash knows it well. We have three generations of guitar greats, and Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall, joining an 86-year-old King in the live performance above from 2011 at Royal Albert Hall with Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood, and Slash, who sits next to the great man and lends him his top hat for a few bars.
The Guns n Roses lead guitarist named B.B. his favorite bluesman when King died in 2015 and put “The Thrill is Gone” in an ultimate guitar mix he compiled for Q magazine in 2004. At the live jam session above, he gets to play it with his hero, “the only hit I ever had,” says King by way of self-deprecating introduction.
Slash keeps a low profile, fitting himself into the mix of six guitars onstage (see the longer jam session further up). Another guitarist, John Mayer, maybe three generations of players removed from King, got to spread out a bit more in his jam with B.B. at the Guitar Center King of the Blues event in 2006. “It’s like stealing something from someone right in front of them,” he says. It’s a good joke, and it’s the truth. Musicians have been following in B.B. King’s wake for over 60 years now. The best learn the same humbling lesson U2’s Bono did after his 1988 duet with King on “When Love Comes to Town” — “We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.” See more of King and Mayer just below.
Related Content: B.B. King Plays Live at Sing Sing Prison in One of His Greatest Performances (1972) B.B. King Explains in an Animated Video Whether You Need to Endure Hardship to Play the Blues Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness B.B. King Plays “The Thrill is Gone” with Slash, Ron Wood & Other Legends 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. |
| 8:00p | Alexander Calder’s Archive Goes Online: Explore 1400 Works of Art by the Modernist Sculptor
Like all great artists, Alexander Calder left his medium quite unlike he found it. Nearly 45 years after his death, Calder’s expansion of the realm of sculpture in new directions of form, color, and engineering remains a subject of voluminous discussion, including critic Jed Perl’s Calder: The Conquest of Time and Calder: The Conquest of Space, a two-part biography published in full last year. More recently, a wealth of material has come available that enables us to conduct Calderian investigations of our own: the Calder Foundation’s online research archive, which as Hyperallergic’s Valentina Di Liscia reports includes “over 1,300 Calder works across different media.” But wait, there’s more: the archive also offers “1,000 photographs and archival documents,” “48 historic and recent texts by the artist, his contemporaries, and present-day scholars,” and “over 40 microsites exploring Calder’s exhibition history.” (This in addition to the Calder Foundation’s Vimeo channel, where you’ll find the films seen here.) Pace Gallery, which represents Calder, highlights the “new interactive map feature called ‘Calder Around the World,’ which allows viewers to find public installations of his monumental sculpture in 20 states domestically and 21 countries internationally, including museums with important Calder holdings and permanent and temporary exhibitions dedicated to the artist.”
As that map reveals, much of Calder’s work currently resides in his homeland of the United States of America, primarily in the northeast where he spent most of his life, but also the California in which he did some growing up — not to mention the Paris where he lived for a time and met fellow artists like Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, information about whom also appears in the online archive. You may locate a Calder near you, even if you live in another region of the world, entirely: living in Seoul as I do, I now see I’ll have to pay a visit to 1963’s Le Cèpe and 1971’s Grand Crinkly. Though this ever-more-extensive Calder Archive can help us understand this most optimistic of all Modernists, there’s nothing quite like being in the presence of one of his sculptures. Related Content: Discover Alexander Calder’s Circus, One of the Beloved Works at the Whitney Museum of American Art 178 Beautifully-Illustrated Letters from Artists: Kahlo, Calder, Man Ray & More The Guggenheim Puts 109 Free Modern Art Books Online Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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. Alexander Calder’s Archive Goes Online: Explore 1400 Works of Art by the Modernist Sculptor 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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