“Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert is a two-disclive album by Bob Dylan, released in 1998. It is the second installment in the ongoing Bob Dylan Bootleg Series on Legacy Recordings, and has been certified a gold record by the RIAA. It was recorded at the ManchesterFree Trade Hall during Dylan’s world tour in 1966, though early bootlegs attributed the recording to the Royal Albert Hall so it became known as the Royal Albert Hall Concert. Extensively bootlegged for decades, it is an important document in the development of popular music during the 1960s. The set list consisted of two parts, with the first half of the concert being Dylan alone on stage performing an entirely acoustic set of songs, while the second half of the concert has Dylan playing an ‘electric’ set of songs alongside his band the Hawks. The…

“After an early false start as a poet and a substantial career as a composer, Paul Bowles began his career as a short story writer in his mid-thirties, when he was asked to edit an issue of a magazine on Central and South American culture and felt an urge to invent some myths of his own. He hoped to inhabit the primitive mind, and resolved to adopt ‘the old Surrealist method of abandoning conscious control and writing whatever words came from the pen.’ In ‘By the Water,’ for instance, a young man enters the baths of a strange and unfriendly town, and after following the long dark corridors to the pools, happens to run into the proprietor of the place: ‘The creature’s head was large; its body was small and it had no legs or arms. The lower part of the trunk ended in two flipper-like pieces of flesh. From…

“Camera Lucida (French: La chambre claire) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopherRoland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes’ late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the ‘spectrum’). In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. Camera…

Collage made as a proposed cover for “Memorial Day,” a long poem by Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan.

“Ted Berrigan was the first in the circle of poets around the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church to ask me to design an announcement mailer for one of his readings. He encouraged others to do the same. In the late sixties, I designed a number of flyers and covers for mimeographed poetry books. These gave me the first public exposure for my work. Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette’s loft on East Fourteenth Street while they summered in Maine. Ted stayed with me for a number of…

“Ohhh…Alright… is a 1964 pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It formerly held the record for highest auction price for a Lichtenstein painting. In November 2010, Ohhh…Alright…, previously owned by Steve Martin and later by Steve Wynn, was sold at a record US $42.6 million (£26.7 million) at a sale at Christie’s in New York, which surpassed the 2005 $16.2 million Lichtenstein record set when In the Car sold. The hammer price was $38 million.^[3] It was surpassed in the following year by I Can See the Whole Room…and There’s Nobody in It!, which sold for $43.2 million. Measuring 91.4 cm × 96.5 cm (36 in × 38 in), Ohhh…Alright… is derived from the June 1963 edition of Secret Hearts #88 by Arleigh Publishing Corp. (now part of D. C. Comics). After 1963, Lichtenstein’s comics-based women ‘…look hard, crisp, brittle, and uniformly modish in appearance…

“It is no secret that the late Alfred Hitchcock was—and still is—not only one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, but also the ‘Master of Suspense.’ After having started his career as a silent film title designer and art director, the London-born auteur had his directorial debut with the 1925 (silent) movie The Pleasure Garden and subsequently went on to make a number of films that would, after a mere few shots, become instantly recognizable as his. Dramatic shadows, unpredictable visual revelations and odd camera angles were all part of his repertoire, with the narrative of wrongfully accused people becoming a pervasive one throughout his career. … One of them is, of course, the 1959 noir Vertigo (with the other three being Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960)). But the now-adored film was not always considered one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, quite the…

The Last Poets in 1970; half a century later—and counting—Oyewole is keeping poetry in the moment.

“A founding member of the American music and spoken-word group The Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole is also known as a founding father of hip hop. Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, Erykah Badu, and countless others cite The Last Poets as a major influence. ‘When The Revolution Comes,’ from the Last Poets’ eponymous 1970 debut album, has been sampled in ‘Party and Bullshit,’ by The Notorious B.I.G.; ‘Concerto in X Minor,’ by Brand Nubian; and ‘Prolly,’ by Sevyn Streeter, featuring Gucci Mane. Samples of ‘On the Subway,’ from the same album, have been used by Digable Planets. The list goes on. Oyewole was born Charles Davis, in Cincinnati, but grew up in Queens and regularly attended church in Harlem, a place of congregation, inspiration, and social measurement. His mother encouraged him to…

The Greensboro Four: (left to right) David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair, Jr., and Joseph McNeil.

“The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in February to July 1960, primarily in the Woolworth store—now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum—in Greensboro, North Carolina, which led to the F. W. Woolworth Company department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. While not the first sit-in of the civil rights movement, the Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action, and also the best-known sit-ins of the civil rights movement. They are considered a catalyst to the subsequent sit-in movement, in which 70,000 people participated. This sit-in was a contributing factor in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In August 1939, African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized the Alexandria Library sit-in in Virginia…

“Captain Archibald Haddock … is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. He is one of Tintin’s best friends, a seafaring pipe-smoking Merchant MarineCaptain. Haddock is initially depicted as a weak and alcoholic character under the control of his treacherous first mate Allan, who keeps him drunk and runs his freighter. He regains his command and his dignity, even rising to president of the Society of Sober Sailors (The Shooting Star), but never gives up his love for rum and whisky, especially Loch Lomond, until the final Tintin adventure, Tintin and the Picaros, when Professor Calculus ‘cures’ him of his taste for alcohol. In the adventure Secret of the Unicorn (and continuing in Red Rackham’s Treasure) he and Tintin travel to find a pirate’s treasure captured by his ancestor, Sir…