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Tuesday, January 25th, 2022
| Time | Event |
| 3:49a | The Queen’s Guard Pays Tribute to Meatloaf, Playing a Brass Version of “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”
Marvin Lee Aday, aka Meatloaf, died late last week, reportedly after falling ill with Covid. At Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s Guard paid tribute to the musician and his 1993 hit “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” on Sunday. It’s a nice touch. The Queen’s Guard Pays Tribute to Meatloaf, Playing a Brass Version of “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 9:00a | Lou Reed Turns Rock Critic, Sizing Up Everyone from the “Amazingly Talented” Beatles to the “Two Bit, Pretentious” Frank Zappa
A signal characteristic of powerful criticism is that it keeps people talking years after the death of the critic himself. Think, for example, of Lester Bangs, who despite having been gone for nearly 40 years left behind judgments that still resonate through the halls of rock and roll. The vitality of his work wasn’t hurt by a tendency to get unusually close to some of his subjects, especially Lou Reed. “The things he wrote and sang and played in the Velvet Underground were for me part of the beginning of a real revolution in the whole scheme between men and women, men and men, women and women, humans and humans,” Bangs wrote in 1980. Five years earlier, Bangs had called Reed “a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf,” as well as “a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh. A panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn’t have the energy to commit suicide.” All this he meant, of course, in praise. Reed, for his part, displayed such elaborate disdain for Bangs that it could only have been motivated by respect. “What other rock artist would put up with an interview by the author of this article,” Bangs rhetorically asked, “read the resultant vicious vitriol-spew with approval, and then invite me back for a second round because of course he’s such a masochist he loved the hatchet in his back?” A magazine page now circulating on Twitter collects Reed’s own opinions on a variety of other rock acts and countercultural figures of the 1960s and 70s. The Beatles, who’d just broken up? “The most incredible songwriters ever” (though Reed’s judgment of the Fab Four would change with time). The Rolling Stones? “If I had to pick my top ten, they’ve got at least five songs.” Creedence Clearwater Revival? “I like them a lot.” David Bowie? “The kid’s got everything… everything.” Fellow Velvets Doug Yule (“so cute”), Nico (“the kind of person that you meet, and you’re not quite the same afterwards”), and John Cale (“the next Beethoven or something”) get compliments; as for Andy Warhol, out of whose “factory” the band emerged, “I really love him.” (“Lou learned a lot from Andy,” wrote Bangs, “mainly about becoming a successful public personality by selling your own private quirks to an audience greedy for more and more geeks.”) But as a connoisseur of the hatchet, Reed also plants a few himself. Of “California bands” like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, he said “they can’t play and they certainly can’t write.” Nor, evidently, could the Who’s Pete Townshend: “as a lyricist he’s so profoundly untalented and, you know, philosophically boring to say the least.” Reed does “get off” on the Kinks, “then I just get bored after a while.” Alice Cooper represents “the worst, most disgusting aspect of rock music”; Roxy Music “don’t know what they’re talking about.” Frank Zappa is “the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s two-bit, pretentious, academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything.” Yet at Zappa’s posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, the laudatory speech was delivered by none other than… Lou Reed. In rock, as in the other arts, resentment can become the seed of admiration. Related Content: Lou Reed Creates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time Hear Ornette Coleman Collaborate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Greatest Moments” 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. Lou Reed Turns Rock Critic, Sizing Up Everyone from the “Amazingly Talented” Beatles to the “Two Bit, Pretentious” Frank Zappa is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 12:00p | An 8-Minute Animated Flight Over Ancient Rome
“At roof-top level, Rome may seem a city of spires and steeples and towers that reach up towards eternal truths,” said Anthony Burgess of the great city in which he lived in the mid-70s. “But this city is not built in the sky. It is built on dirt, earth, dung, copulation, death, humanity.” For all the city’s ancient grandeur, the real Rome is to be found in its brothels, bathhouses, and catacombs, a sentiment widely shared by writers in Rome since Lucilius, often credited as Rome’s first satirist, a genre invented to bring the lofty down to earth. “The Romans … proudly declared that satire was ‘totally ours,'” writes Robert Cowan, senior lecturer in classics at the University of Sydney. “Instead of heroes, noble deeds, and city-foundations recounted in elevated language,” ancient Romans constructed their literature from “a hodgepodge of scumbags, orgies, and the breakdown of urban society, spat out in words as filthy as the vices they describe.” Little wonder, perhaps, that the author of A Clockwork Orange found Rome so much to his liking. For all the Christianity overlaid atop the ruins, “the Romans are not a holy people; they are pagans.” In the video above, see an 8-minute rooftop-level flight above the ancient imperial city, “the most extensive, detailed and accurate virtual 3D reconstruction of Ancient Rome,” its creators, History in 3D, write. They are about halfway through the project, which currently includes such areas as the Forum, the Colosseum, Imperial Forums, “famous baths, theaters, temples and palaces” and the Trastevere, where Burgess made his home millennia after the period represented in the CGI reconstruction above and where, he wrote in the 1970s, antiquity had been preserved: “Trasteverini… regard themselves as the true Romans.” The language of this Rome, like that of Juvenal, the ancient city’s greatest satirist, offers “a ground-level view of a Rome we could barely guess at from the heroism of the Aeneid,” writes Cowan. “The language of the Trasteverini is rough,” writes Burgess, “scurrilous, blasphemous, obscene, the tongue of the gutter. Many of them are leaders of intensity, rebels agains the government. They have had two thousand years of bad government and they must look forward to two thousand more.” As we drift over the city’s rooftops in the impressively rendered animation above, we might imagine its streets below teeming with profane, disgruntled Romans of all kinds. It may be impossible to recreate Ancient Rome at street level, with all of its many sights, smells, and sounds. But if we’ve been to Rome, or ever get the chance to visit, we may marvel, along with Burgess, at its “continuity of culture…. Probably Rome has changed less in two thousand years than Manhattan has in twenty years.” The Empire may have been fated to collapse under its own weight, but Rome, the Eternal City, may indeed endure forever. Related Content: The History of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Minutes: A Primer Narrated by Brian Cox What Did the Roman Emperors Look Like?: See Photorealistic Portraits Created with Machine Learning Josh Jones is a writer based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An 8-Minute Animated Flight Over Ancient Rome is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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 | How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays
More than two decades ago, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross published a piece on Bob Dylan in what many would then have considered his “late” period. “In the verbal jungle of rock criticism, Dylan is seldom talked about in musical terms,” Ross writes. “His work is analyzed instead as poetry, punditry, or mystification.” Despite having long possessed exalted cultural status, and been subject to the attendant intensity of scrutiny and exegesis that comes along with it, “Dylan himself declines the highbrow treatment — though you get the sense that he wouldn’t mind picking up a Nobel Prize.” As it happened, he picked one up seventeen years later, in a clear institutional affirmation of his work’s being, indeed, literature. But what (as many have asked about the work itself) does that mean?
In the video essay at the top of the post, Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, examines Dylan’s literary powers through the microcosm of one song. “All Along the Watchtower” first appeared on the austere 1967 album John Wesley Harding, a seeming repudiation of both the increasingly psychedelic pop-cultural zeitgeist and his own persona as a prophetic folk singer-turned-rocker. “Dylan spent much of his early career fighting off the label of prophet,” says Puschak, “but here he seems to accept the role, laying down an apprehensive, apocalyptic scenario, as if to say, ‘You want a prophecy? Okay, I’ll give you a prophecy, but it comes at a price: the price is mystery and entrapment, a prophecy the meaning of which is forever out of reach.” A short folk ballad, “All Along the Watchtower” is told “as a conversation that aims to convey a message. But the fingerprints of the blues are everywhere on this song: namely, of one of Dylan’s heroes, Robert Johnson, who, the legend has it, sold his sold to the Devil for musical genius.” In addition to dealing with longer musical traditions, the song also finds Dylan employing timeless archetypes like the joker and the thief, drawing as well from the Bible (to which John Wesley Harding contains some 70 references) as he tells their story. These sound like the qualities of a literary enterprise, but as PBS Idea Channel host Mike Rugnetta argues in the video above, “When we label something literature, we’re not making a simple factual statement about the characteristics of a work of art. We’re communicating about what we consider worthwhile.”
In considering whether Dylan’s work is “really literature,” Rugnetta cites literary theorist Terry Eagleton’s essay “What Is Literature?” In it Eagleton writes that “literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech” — but also that “one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing, all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing.” Participated in by critics, academics, and amateurs, the ever-growing industry of “Dylanology” attests to a particularly intimate and long-lasting relationship between Dylan’s music and its listeners. The adjective literary, here, seems to imply the existence of ambition, complexity, ambiguity, and extended cultural centrality. Nothing evidences cultural centrality like parody, and as the Polyphonic video above shows, Dylan has inspired more than a few astute send-ups over the decades. “With so much conversation around him and such a distinct style,” says its narrator, “it’s perhaps unsurprising that he’s been a frequent target of satire.” That includes songs by other famous and well-regarded musicians. In “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission),” Paul Simon “mocks Dylan’s lyrical habits and proclivity for referencing historical and fictional figures in his music.” In addition to its “nasal folk-rock style,” Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” uses “the archetypal figures of the clown and the joker,” much like “All Along the Watchtower.” (To say nothing of Weird Al’s palindromic “Bob.”)
Like many a literary master, Dylan has dished it out as well as taken it. But his best-known acts of mockery seem to have been directed not toward his peers but the press, whose ravenousness in the 20th century of ever-more-mass media did so much to both build him up and cramp his style. “In his early days, Dylan used the media as a tool for self-mythmaking,” says Polyphonic’s narrator in the video above. But “soon enough, be became the icon for a growing counterculture,” and the title of “voice of a generation” began to weigh heavily. Throwing it off required getting adversarial, not least through songs like “Ballad of a Thin Man,” a j’accuse against an unspecified “Mr. Jones,” representative — so it’s been proposed — of the legions of badgering squares sent by newspapers, television, and so on. Dylan could also have intended Mr. Jones to stand more broadly for “people out of touch with him and his movement, people who pestered him for his beliefs without truly understanding where they came from,” members of “old society, trying to pass blanket moralistic judgments on his culture and lifestyle.” Like a character out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “inauthentic on all levels,” Mr. Jones is “faking his way through intellectual circles while fetishizing the counterculture.” 57 years after “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the now-octogenarian Dylan continues to record and perform, and to engage with the media when and how he sees fit. He’s somehow avoided joining the establishment, let alone becoming a Mr. Jones; he remains the joker who, asked in a 1960s press conference whether he considered himself a songwriter or a poet, replied, “Oh, I consider myself more of a song and dance man.” Related Content: “Tangled Up in Blue”: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land Hear Bob Dylan’s Newly Released Nobel Lecture: A Meditation on Music, Literature & Lyrics Bob Dylan’s Famous Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965) Kurt Vonnegut on Bob Dylan: He “Is the Worst Poet Alive” 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 Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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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