Here at Open Culture, we can't get enough of the Chelsea Hotel, which means we can't get enough of the Chelsea Hotel in a certain era, at the height of a certain cultural moment in New York history.
Subscribe on iTunes. Patti Smith, musical icon and National Book Award winner, hero to aesthetes and rebels, is an NYPL favorite. The last time Smith visited, she told us about her lifelong love affair with libraries. This week, in celebration of her new book M Train , the New York Public Library is proud to present Patti Smith discussing the authors she loves.
"Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?" philosopher Rebecca Goldstein asked in contemplating how Einstein and Gödel shaped our experience of time.
Three years ago, Sam Gilliam was living in obscurity and his money was running out. He was nearing 80, his health was bad and he had no pension. But there was one thing he still had, one thing he had never given up on: the studio near his apartment in Washington DC.
In a 2012 interview, Laurie Anderson advised artists to "call themselves multimedia artists. Then no one can criticise you when you do something else, when you make a film or a book." In another piece, she added, " Genres are for bins".
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future.
Bibbe and friend Love him or hate him, Beck Hansen's family tree is jaw-droppingly cool. Not only was his maternal grandfather Fluxus artist Al Hansen, his grandmother was actress and poet Audrey Ostlin Hansen, and his mother Bibbe Hansen was, among her many incarnations, one of Warhol's youngest Factory "Superstars" as well as an artist, actress, and musician in her own right.
RealityStudio is a thriving community of fans, writers, and scholars interested in William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, cut-ups, etc.
The beauty of digitization really sinks in at 30,000 feet. In-flight woes - that seat leaned to within an inch of your face, the unshowered over-sharer, the wailing toddler - all fade with Claude Bessy rants and Melanie Nissen pics in view.
It looks like Vodun had more devotees in the CBGB set than I would have guessed, because I would have guessed zero.