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5 episodes with toy soldiers
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2 episodes with toy soldiers
2 episodes with toy soldiers
2 episodes with toy soldiers
2 episodes with toy soldiers
2 episodes with toy soldiers
2 episodes with toy soldiers
Send us a textEpisode 214 of the Hey You Guys Podcast is here, and this week we look back a movie that Liam, well, he thought it was a movie about actual toy soldiers that come to life and cause havoc in 90s American suburbia. Turns out, 1991's, Toy Soldiers is actually something of a coming-of-age action movie caught somewhere between Die Hard and Red Dawn. That of course sounds awesome on paper, but does this relatively unknown boarding school-based hostage thriller stand the test of time, or should it be banished to the bin marked 'Die Hard-lite'? Listen in and find out via the link in the bio.
Let me know what you thought of the episode!On this episode I talk about anime episodes 650-652 where we learn about the mysterious gladiator Rebecca and her past with the Toy Soldier as they prepare for the D Block round. Hope you enjoy!Support the show
Khai Krepela is known for his prowess on rails, he made a career out of it, but really, he had a pro ski career because he realized what he was good at and he went all in on that aspect of the sport. But Khai didn't stop at pro athlete, while he still had a little gas left in the tank, Khai found himself behind a desk at K2 for the beginning of his post pro ski career. On the podcast, we talk about inline skating, Park City, Detroit, filming, the X Games and more. Olympic Head Judge Jason Arens asks the Inappropriate Questions. Khai Krepela Show Notes: 4:00: His name, growing up in Park City, getting sponsored for elementary school, finding blading and skiing through McRae Williams and getting sponsored by Louie Zamora personally for Deshi 13:00: From blading to skiing, rail skiing is easy, Vice Skis, Surface, 20:00: Stanley: The brand that invented the category! Only the best for Powell Movement listeners. Check out Stanley1913.com Best Day Brewing: All of the flavor of your favorite IPA or Kolsch, without alcohol, the calories or sugar. 22:00: Toy Soldiers, contests, SIA, money, PBP, Detroit, Will Wesson, and Level 1, 40:00: Elan Skis: Over 75 years of innovation that makes you better. Outdoor Research: Click here for 25% off Outdoor Research products (not valid on sale items or pro products) 42:30: Line Skis, X-Games, K2, 51:00: Inappropriate Questions with Jason Arens
The kids are alright…or are they? This week, the guys welcome special guest Ray Harkins (100 Words or Less podcast) for a chaotic ride through bizarre Oreo and Dr Pepper flavors, a heartfelt RIP to the one and only Gene Hackman, and a debate that has plagued mankind for centuries: Ska vs. Swing.
Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. (May 27, 1936 – March 29, 2024) was an American actor. He made his stage debut at the age of 17. Shortly thereafter, he successfully auditioned for the Broadway play Take a Giant Step. Gossett continued acting onstage in critically acclaimed plays including A Raisin in the Sun (1959), The Blacks (1961), Tambourines to Glory (1963), and The Zulu and the Zayda (1965). In 1977, Gossett appeared in the popular miniseries Roots, for which he won Outstanding Lead Actor for a Single Appearance in a Drama or Comedy Series at the Emmy Awards.Gossett continued acting in high-profile films, television, plays, and video games. In 1982, for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman, he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and became the first African-American actor to win in this category. At the Emmy Awards, Gossett continued to receive recognition, with nominations for The Sentry Collection Presents Ben Vereen: His Roots (1978), Backstairs at the White House (1979), Palmerstown, U.S.A. (1981), Sadat (1983), A Gathering of Old Men (1987), Touched by an Angel (1997), and Watchmen (2019). He won and was nominated at other ceremonies including the Golden Globe Awards, Black Reel Awards, and NAACP Image Awards. Gossett was also well known for his role as Colonel Chappy Sinclair in the Iron Eagle film series (1986–1995).Gossett's other film appearances include Hal Ashby's The Landlord (1970), Paul Bogart's Skin Game (1971), George Cukor's Travels with My Aunt (1972), Stuart Rosenberg's The Laughing Policeman (1974), Philip Kaufman's The White Dawn (1974), Peter Yates's The Deep (1977), Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine (1985), Christopher Cain's The Principal (1987), Mark Goldblatt's The Punisher (1989), Daniel Petrie's Toy Soldiers (1991), and Blitz Bazawule's The Color Purple (2023), his television appearances include Bonanza (1971), The Jeffersons (1975), American Playhouse (1990), Stargate SG-1 (2005), Boardwalk Empire (2013), The Book of Negroes (2015).PICTURE: By Los Angeles Times - https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/13030/hb40000626, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146890888
On this episode, we dig into a chilling tale of a young girl whose life was shadowed—literally—by an enigmatic figure in her childhood home. Living in an old apartment with her parents, she endured unexplained disturbances, including a featureless shadow that seemed to watch her every move. Was it a guardian, a figment of imagination, or something far more sinister? As we unravel the story, we explore the emotional weight of growing up with these experiences and the haunting echoes that followed her family long after they moved away. This is one story that will leave you questioning the unseen forces in your own life.
On this episode, we dig into a chilling tale of a young girl whose life was shadowed—literally—by an enigmatic figure in her childhood home. Living in an old apartment with her parents, she endured unexplained disturbances, including a featureless shadow that seemed to watch her every move. Was it a guardian, a figment of imagination, or something far more sinister? As we unravel the story, we explore the emotional weight of growing up with these experiences and the haunting echoes that followed her family long after they moved away. This is one story that will leave you questioning the unseen forces in your own life.
As a child, Alex Kurzem faced a choice: be killed or join the killers.In the midst of the Second World War, he was separated from his family and taken in by a group of soldiers as one of their own. He was made a member of Hitler's army – a toy soldier with his own rifle and miniature SS uniform.But what the soldiers didn't know and what no one would know for decades: he was a Jewish boy masquerading as a Nazi to save his life.Alex lives with this false identity for so long, he no longer remembers who he was before – forgetting his parents' faces, his birthday, his own name. But before he dies, Alex is determined to find the identity and family stolen from him during the Holocaust. This is the story Alex would tell the world decades later, but doubts quickly took hold and wouldn't let go. Could a story so unbelievable be true? Or is this a con to profit from the Holocaust? Eighty years on, is it possible to uncover who Alex really is? Host Dan Goldberg unravels the true story.Get lost in someone else's life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time.More episodes of Personally: Toy Soldier are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/YNejJk
As a child, Alex Kurzem faced a choice: be killed or join the killers.In the midst of the Second World War, he was separated from his family and taken in by a group of soldiers as one of their own. He was made a member of Hitler's army – a toy soldier with his own rifle and miniature SS uniform.But what the soldiers didn't know and what no one would know for decades: he was a Jewish boy masquerading as a Nazi to save his life.Alex lives with this false identity for so long, he no longer remembers who he was before – forgetting his parents' faces, his birthday, his own name. But before he dies, Alex is determined to find the identity and family stolen from him during the Holocaust. This is the story Alex would tell the world decades later, but doubts quickly took hold and wouldn't let go. Could a story so unbelievable be true? Or is this a con to profit from the Holocaust? Eighty years on, is it possible to uncover who Alex really is? Host Dan Goldberg unravels the true story.Get lost in someone else's life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time.More episodes of Personally: Toy Soldier are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/QAh2Nz
The World of Eora: an Avowed & Pillars of Eternity Lore Podcast
This ancient [podcast episode] is [recorded on] silver thread[s]. The broken [vocal patterns sound like] the shape of an eye. The [audio] at first appears to be gibberish, a collection of symbols and characters with no apparent connection between them. As you study [], however, you could swear that the [audio] begin[s] to move. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, they shift and [merge] and realign, and you are able to [understand the content]: "jALSj3!508fAjdurslsdk7&*#$%%&lsdffjaoeofjda'dlrkem"
A listener pick, Adam and Jared dissect the early 90's 'Die Hard in a school' film, Toy Soldiers. The decision making of the bad guys comes under scruitiny as does the amount of action cred you have when you are constanly seen in your underwear. And just how underrated is Louis Gossett Jr? Also, the watch list is brimming with plenty of new films to discuss. Big thanks to Ben for suggesting this movie.
In this conclusion to the story, the Toy Soldier gets a some peace of mind while Fluff McTide contemplates a career change and crafts his own new Sea Chanty.Enjoying Maked Up Stories? Please rate and review us and share your child's favorite episode on social media and in parenting and school groups. This is the best way for new listeners to find the podcast.Maked Up Stories is a daily children's bedtime stories podcast. Perfect for your bedtime routine, your commute, or for some high quality screen-free entertainment at home. Our interactive format will ignite your imagination. Rich vocabulary with plenty of context clues supports your child's language development. To submit an into, outro or story request visit makedupstories.com. For questions, feedback or to submit your child's answer to a question we ask in the show email us at Amanda.e.waldo@gmail.com. The easiest way to record your child's contribution is with the voice memo app on your smartphone.
In this conclusion to the story, the Toy Soldier gets a some peace of mind while Fluff McTide contemplates a career change and crafts his own new Sea Chanty.Enjoying Maked Up Stories? Please rate and review us and share your child's favorite episode on social media and in parenting and school groups. This is the best way for new listeners to find the podcast.Maked Up Stories is a daily children's bedtime stories podcast. Perfect for your bedtime routine, your commute, or for some high quality screen-free entertainment at home. Our interactive format will ignite your imagination. Rich vocabulary with plenty of context clues supports your child's language development. To submit an into, outro or story request visit makedupstories.com. For questions, feedback or to submit your child's answer to a question we ask in the show email us at Amanda.e.waldo@gmail.com. The easiest way to record your child's contribution is with the voice memo app on your smartphone.
In this conclusion to the story, the Toy Soldier gets a some peace of mind while Fluff McTide contemplates a career change and crafts his own new Sea Chanty.Enjoying Maked Up Stories? Please rate and review us and share your child's favorite episode on social media and in parenting and school groups. This is the best way for new listeners to find the podcast.Maked Up Stories is a daily children's bedtime stories podcast. Perfect for your bedtime routine, your commute, or for some high quality screen-free entertainment at home. Our interactive format will ignite your imagination. Rich vocabulary with plenty of context clues supports your child's language development. To submit an into, outro or story request visit makedupstories.com. For questions, feedback or to submit your child's answer to a question we ask in the show email us at Amanda.e.waldo@gmail.com. The easiest way to record your child's contribution is with the voice memo app on your smartphone.
Listen to this story on its own or as a part of a series with our past 3 episodes. A Toy Solider tells Jonah Moon and Bo the story of how he came to be real and watch over his boy each night.If you're enjoying Maked Up, please rate and review us and tell a friend - it's the best way for new listeners to find the podcast.
Information Morning Moncton from CBC Radio New Brunswick (Highlights)
David Makepeace and Dave Hughes are with the New Brunswick Miltary History Museum in Fredericton.
Send us a textIntro song: Count Your Blessings by Michelle Malone & The Hot Toddies10. Toy Soldiers by Luminare Christmas!9. Spirit of Christmas by Chapel Hart8. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Phil Wickham7. One Glove by Jimmy Fallon & Will Ferrell6. O Come O Come Emmanuel by RuelleOutro song: Christmas Blessings by Dave Barnes
Want to listen ad-free? Try it FREE for 7 days here: patreon.com/drnosleep Babbel: Get up to 60% off at babbel.com/dns * * * DISCLAIMER: This episode contains explicit content. Parental guidance is advised for children under the age of 18. Listen at your own discretion. #drnosleep #scarystories #horrorstories #doctornosleep #truescarystories #horrorpodcast #horror Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Luke leads the weekly roundup of current events, news and gossip with a particular focus on some of the unrest in the world unfolding. #podcast#uncensoredradio#news#gossip#politics#live
Send us a textRemember "Toy Soldiers" from 1991? The movie where terrorists take over a prep school with machine gun action and explosions galore. Did you also know that it was rated R? We didn't either. But we remember it was the guy who was a Hobbit, and it had the kid from "Stand By Me" who gets a leech stuck to his balls, and the kid from "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead" & "Adventures in Babysitting". Throw in the great Louis Gossett Jr. and we are more than excited to go back to 1991 and see why we remember liking this movie.Do You Remember Liking This Movie?
Like so many of the sitcoms we grew up watching, we have finally made our Very Special Episode. Dave Kitchen joins us for the 16th time and brings us “Toy Soldiers” by Martika. Step by step and heart to heart, we bring you everything we've got as we plum the depths of (goth?) dance pop and drug addiction. Official Video Mixtape You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and our website. You can email us at BandFGuiltFree@gmail.com, too. Feel free to rate and review us wherever you listen! Here is our Spotify playlist featuring every song we've featured. Our theme music is by the incredibly talented Ian McGlynn.
Welcome back to the wild and crazy world of the "WR? Podcast"! We present a brand new format this week. Due to some lovely "technical difficulties" (which cost us our first recording), we had to change things up for Episode 220. As opposed to our typically fully produced podcast this week is a "rapid fire" rendition. The guys cover episode 220's topics with no breaks. This week we talk "Deadpool & Wolverine", Pittsburgh Steelers, NFL preseason, "Hard Knocks", "Fridays At Midnight" ("Toy Soldiers" and "Massacre Mafia Style"), and of course, close out with our tradition ("Goofs R' Goofs)! Please enjoy responsibly! PRESENTED by CHURCHILL PICTURES No Timestamps This Week!
This week, Kenneth and Eugene examine the Space Above and Beyond episode “Toy Soldiers.” They ask the questions: Which is more honorable: going into the military during peacetime or in wartime? Did the writers of this episode actually ever read the Red Badge of Courage or just quote mine from it? And is it ever ... Read more
Brothers Pete and Paul Escarcega, are joined by Drew Stewart, to discuss "Beverly Hills Cop". With the release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, we're revisiting the film that transformed Eddie Murphy into a Superstar! Nominated for Best Screenplay, Beverly Hills Cop launched the Action comedy genre into another stratosphere. This is the first of seven Eddie Murphy movies in a row to open at #1 at the box office. Broke the 11-year record set by The Exorcist (1973) as the highest-grossing R-rated film domestically, and itself held the record for 19 years until surpassed by The Matrix Reloaded (2003). After adjusting for inflation, this is the third highest-grossing R-rated film domestically, after The Exorcist and The Godfather (1972). Included among the American Film Institute's 2000 list of the Top 100 Funniest American Movies.Nominated for Best Screenplay for ScreenBeverly Hills Cop (1984)DIRECTED BY: Martin Brest (Midnight Run, Scent of a Woman)WRITTEN BY: Daniel Petrie, Jr. (The Big Easy, Toy Soldiers), Danilo Bach(Story) (Beverly Hills Cop 2, 3, Axel F)STARRING: Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John AshtonA freewheeling Detroit cop pursuing a murder investigation finds himself dealing with the very different culture of Beverly Hills.BUDGET AND BOX OFFICE: $13 Million and grossed $316 MillionREVIEWS: 7.4 IMDB rating66 MetascoreThe group also picks their Top 5 Eddie Murphy Movies and Top 5 Best Cop Movies!To listen on Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aaaction-podcast/id1634666134To listen on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1L78fn3C6RlKKdUihtiLyR?si=f31450db95724290Please like and subscribe to the Aaaction podcast for more movie news and reviews!https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzJFoiUHvdbaHaiIfN37BaQ#aaactionpodcast #podcast #film #movie #moviereview #classicmovies #tombstone #rocky #moviepodcast #beverlyhillscop #axelf #axelfoley #copmovies #top5 #eddiemurphy #comedy #jerrybruckheimer #beverlyhills
A local institution is under threat. Lars Edman tells Gareth O'Callaghan the Prince August Toy Soldier factory may not survive the reduction in visitors caused by a new bypass. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We're back! Luke has a story to share about his headphones. Hawk-Tuah girl has something to say about it as well. What's your favorite yeah in a pop song? We got your emails! Mr. Pink is back in the house after a hiatus from emailing. His message is filled with show moments recalled over the last few months of listening. Plus Pink wants to thank the show for providing new media information sources beyond the mainstream. Was Pink able to stick with it or did life get too hard? Find out by listening you spoon-fed bozos. Does a rueben sandwich have a proper rating? Is Stoicism overrated? Is Brett Butler's Hey Nadine the apex of the show?! Louis Gossett Jr. is greatly missed & apparently everybody needs to see Diggstown. Distractions abound with Toy Soldiers & KIDS Incorporated taking over the show briefly. Donald Sutherland is no more & we all owe him a tip of the cap for his efforts during his life. John Candy as Orson Welles. You can thank us later. If you're crapping on floors, make sure you use paper towel. Luke does his very first impression on the show which may be an Irish accent or possibly anything else. Finn Gurrer goes DEEP with his latest email. Luke is not a fan anymore. Which Ice Cube album is his best & why is Westside Connection deserving of more love? Luke wants everybody to watch the new documentary about human rights catastrophes in Gaza called The Night Won't End. Steve followed through on his commitment to check out the prison drama Oz from 1997. Was it lame? Did it ring true? Is the truth somewhere in between? Luke rubbed elbows with some of the best actors in American film in over the last 30 years in his old life back in New York City. Zelijko Ivanek who everybody will know from his face on the cover of this episode & Frank Langella who has had a career filled with memorable roles. Steve's been around now for 33 episodes as a show mainstay. Never forget Yoda & Crypt Keeper! We love you all! This talk show is not the same without you listening and emailing us your highly entertaining thoughts. We close the show with Sharpshooter by From Monuments To Masses. If any of our nonsense provokes your thoughts, please share them with us at isitsafepod@gmail.com or check out our Discord:https://discord.gg/wXPdgujdSj
From the shelves of the video store rack, Brock and Dan bring you a double feature!
Somebody talk about they got goons and soldiers out in these streets so we go in little bit more in depth on that topic. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/charlie-dro/support
Things are ramping up and getting very tense around here! Yet again following some of the best action thriller movies to bring us our story! Holy intense, edge of your seat build up this week, as we wait with baited breath to see if the Batch can make it to that shuttle that's headed for Tantiss! It's a nailbiter, Mission Impossible style, and doesn't let you breathe for those final moments. Meanwhile, Omega is planning her second escape "Toy Soldiers" style as she rallies the kids to get ready after she finds tunnels behind her cell wall! We're down to two episodes left after this week....and then it will all be over. Where does the Batch go from here? Do they survive this mission? We'll have to wait and see... Send in your thoughts to the show! Send voicemail or email to: themandalorepodcast@gmail.com Tweet us @theMandaLorepod Join the Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheMandaLorePod
Join our PATREON for bonus episodes. This week we have singer/songwriter and overall sweetheart Ron Gallo on to talk about the Jonathan Richman album I, Jonathan. We also discuss: the intersection video, the Nashville bombing, musician small talk, getting Italian citizenship, the European mind and the Wild West, Nashville tourist traps, the run into the ground Darien gap express, Toy Soldiers, garage rock radicalization, the search for authenticity, the Mill Creek Tavern, Philly houses, Kill Rock Stars, Corin Tucker, Joan of Arc (revisited), Matt Caws, Medport Diner, you have to be cosigned, the super narcissist in the room, Levitation Fest, you have to see him live, the Jonathan Richman confidence, tangents and hyper focus, don't pass Richman the aux, Gallo builds a record, and so much more. ________ Order our Gatekeep Harder shirt here! // Follow us at @danbassini, @mysprocalledlife, @rongallo and @runintotheground.
Naz and Racheal want to talk Aliens with Limp Bizkit, watch all Louis Gossit Jr. movies especially Toy Soldiers and get Knighted so we can be SIRs. Plus we plug the Woody Woodpecker TV series titles. All that and more as we try to get money from George Lucas, aka Daddy Lucas. All that and more in this week's Machine Room Podcast.
Justin and Paul are back! This week they send love to the recently departed Louis Gossett Jr. Six more wildcards including four Lou Gossett flicks Diggstown, The Deep, Toy Soldiers, and Iron Eagle.
Joey Ford was a mild-mannered kid getting accustomed to living in Las Vegas till he sneaks into a casino backroom wearing a fake mustache and inadvertently discovers a secret world of super spies and international crime. After lying his way onto a spy agency's team, Joey becomes the key piece in a plot to take down a crime lord and stop a powerful new street drug by befriending a mafioso's shy son. Can Joey and the agents of CEC take down the Don and his goons, or will the ultra-violent assassins from HEART beat them to the bust? Scripts start at 01:07:13StarringHobert ThompsonJared Narter-SlezakLaura PetroJake Steelman And Maddy Morningstar as Joey Ford
Your favorite podcast hosts Jason A. Coombs and Samantha Tuozzolo are back with the first episode in the brand new season three featuring with the extremely talented, charming and hilarious Jonathan Bennett who is currently portraying the roles of ‘Sir Robin' in the Broadway revival of “Monty Python's Spamalot”, at the St. James Theatre. Jonathan shares where he was when he found out he booked his first Broadway show, how the Broadway community has embraced him as he transitioned back to theatre from film and television, and why Spamalot is a must see show before its limited engagement ends on April 7! Before closing out the episode with a fun game of “Mean Girls: Movie or Musical”, Jonathan shares what survival job he was working when he found out he booked ‘Aaron Samuels' in “Mean Girls” back in 2004 and advice for anyone feeling uninspired during their creative journeys. Tickets for “Spamalot” are currently available online and at the box office! Episode 81 opens with Samantha and Jason sharing a mic check discussing how excited they are to be back recording new episodes after an extended hiatus and all about their season three launch party at the gorgeous restaurant BEA in Midtown Manhattan this past weekend! Lastly, the exclusive video can be found here on Broadway World and an audio only version is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible or any of your other favorite podcast apps. You can support the podcast and the hosts at www.buymeacoffee.com/SurvivalJobsPod and on Instagram at @surivaljobspod | @SammyTutz | @JasonACoombs. Info on Your Hosts: Broadway World Article on our Season 3 Launch Party Follow Samantha: Instagram. | Samantha's Official Website here Follow Jason on Instagram | Twitter. Check out Jason's Official Website here Check out and support The Bridgeport Film Fest Mic Check Links BEA Restaurant Raven Hollow Guild Angela Mia Bakery in Norwalk, CT Baked By Melissa Levain Bakery Neeko Booths The Round Table with Robert Bannon Backstage Bite with Katie Lynch Important Links: Support the citizens of Gaza Native Land Map US Interior Indian Affairs NPR: "How To Help Puerto Rico" Article How to Help the People of Florida Article Abortion Funds Website Plan C Pills Website National Write Your Congressman Link How to help Uvalde families NPR Article Where to Donate to Support Access to Abortions Right Now Support Us... Please! If you're feeling generous, Buy Us A Coffee HERE! Please don't become complacent: Support the Black Mamas Matter Alliance Support Families Detained and Separated at the Border. Support the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund. Support Black Trans Folx here Donate to the Community League of the Heights (CLOTH) Support the People of Palestine How to be an Ally to the AAPI Community 168 Ways to Donate in Support of Black Lives and Communities of Color The New York Times: On Mexico's Border With U.S., Desperation as Migrant Traffic Piles Up PBS: How to help India during its COVID surge — 12 places you can donate Covid quarantine didn't stop antisemitic attacks from rising to near-historic highs Opening and Closing Theme Music: "One Love" by Beats by Danny | Game Music: "Wake Up" by MBB. If you enjoy Survival Jobs: A Podcast be sure to subscribe and follow us on your preferred podcast listening app! Also, feel free to follow us on Instagram and Twitter! Thank you!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week Jims Anti-Dairy-Biotics tribulations continue, Elton has trouble whacking off a tyre so gets someone else to grab his tool and whack it off for him, Darren feels like Madam Web might not be all that, and Lee watches a few films ranging from Wonka to The Beekeeper, all the while fighting to keep himself awake after being up since 5am. Then after a touch of feedback its on to this weeks film... Either a glorious evocation of 90s nostalgia action flicks or a misguided coke fuelled excuse to get a bunch of teen boys in their pants and throw Lou Gossett Jnr through a window? Who can say? But we'll try and find out as we review Toy Soldiers... Media discussed this week The Stanley Parable (PC / Xbox / Playstation) Toy Soldiers (Amazon Prime) Wonka (Amazon Prime - Paid rental) The Beekeeper (Cinema release) The Accountant (Netflix) Argylle (Cinema Release) Madam Web (Cinema Release) Borderlands (Cinema Release) Music"Boogie Party" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Murder on the Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis Bextor and Toy Soldiers by Martika Used for illustrative purposes under UK Copyright (Fair Use exception pertaining to criticism & reviews)
Surviving their battle with American Ninja, Mike and Christian become Toy Soldiers and take refuge in an all-male boarding school to fight a bunch of terrorists.
Today's episode is “おもちゃの兵隊 (omocha no heetai)《The Toy Soldier》. This work was inspired by Andersen's fairy tale 'The Steadfast Tin Soldier.' It's a somewhat sad tale, but I believe it prompts contemplation about love. As Valentine's Day approaches, I've created this video. This episode is at the JLPT-N4 level. I've also prepared a quiz based on this episode. After listening, please take the quiz! Please use this audio for listening and shadowing practices. ☆Words ／ Conjugation of verbs Starting from now, I'm publishing this information on my website. The content is available on the script page of this video. ☆Script for this episode https://meg-smile.com/54-the-toy-soldier-n4/ ☆Quiz for this episode I used to publish quizzes on a different site, but starting from this time, I've decided to release quizzes on my own website. The quiz is now available on the same page as the script. ☆Would you like to take my class? If you haven't used italki, click the link below. https://promos.italki.com/learnanylanguage-en/?ref=meg-smile&utm_source=meg-smile&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=kol&hl=en (This is the italki page. You can receive $10 USD italki Credits in your Student Wallet within 48 hours after you make your first purchase.) ☆Love my content? Consider supporting my work on Ko-fi! Your generosity helps me create more engaging Japanese learning resources for you. Every contribution is greatly appreciated! ☕️
Howard, Lloyd and Ahsan look at Klopp's shock exit, Kalvin Phillips, an historic win at Spurs, Kimmich, the 5th round draw and more! *This is the first 15 minutes of the show. For the full episode, and all our other content on the 93:20 player, you can join below - for less than the price of a pint of beer each month.* ninetythreetwenty.com/9320-player/about-9320-player/
Today, we'll be discussing Episode 15 of Mr. Queen, the hit K Drama on Netflix starring Shin Hye-sun as Kim So-yong, Kim Jyung-hun as King Cheoljong, Seol In-ah as Jo Hwa-jin, Na In-woo as Kim Byeong-in, and Choi Jin-hyuk as Jang Bong-hwan. We discuss:The songs we featured during the recap: Toy Soldier by Kim Deuk-su and Keep Going by DINDIN.How this was a laugh out loud episode; the queen is showing everyone who's boss!How Dam-hyang is safe and the king planned it all! As a result, the queen is looking at him differently, even if she thinks he's an idiot who will get killed for his idealistic values.How it was the king's turn to send a secret message, this time through his crossed fingers, that Dam-hyang is alive. The king and queen are starting to understand each other better!How the king and queen form an alliance. The queen has decided to go all in with the king, even if Jang Bong-hwan knows the king is on the losing side of history.How the queen has decided to become the biggest bitch in the palace. She goes after the Grand Dowager Queen, the Dowager Queen and Jo Hwa-jin.The king is ruling the country with great confidence, although the court assembly does appoint Kim Byeong-in as the new Minister of War; Kim Byeon-in makes a deal with both families.Jo Hwa-jin's secrets are out because Prince Yeonpyeong saw her give the ledger to the Dowager Queen, and the queen's father knows she gave the ledger to the Dowager Queen.The lighthearted moments in this episode, including when Captain Hong asks the king to ask the Dowager Queen to join their team since she found the ledger.The K Drama elements in this episode, including the scene when the queen walks in on the king while he is getting dressed and we catch a glimpse of the king's impressive abs.How we think there are two additional K Drama elements to add to our list: a butterfly and a confession.The shows we're watching now, including Destined With You and A Time Called You.The shows we're looking forward to watching, including Vigilante and Welcome to Samdarli.ReferencesKeep Going by DINDIN, with English lyricsDestined With You on IMDBA Time Called You on IMDB
Back in February of 2022, anyone who knew anything thought the War in Ukraine would be over in a few weeks. Russia simply had more bodies to fight with and more steel to kill with.Fast-forward to today, however, and the war is anything but over. Ukraine has held and regained territory with shocking resilience. Stranger still, a small, cheap gadget that up until now was little more than a toy, has been central to their success.Today on Radiolab, we track the deployment of this weapon and wonder what happens when you have to look your enemy in the eye before you pull the trigger. Special thanks to Anna Kaliusna and her team for her footage from the frontline, Yulia Tarisuk for her help with all things Ukrainian language related. And Hanna Rose Shell for her helping us understand the history of camouflage. EPISODE CREDITS:Reported by - Simon AdlerProduced by - Simon AdlerOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Simon Adler and Jeremy Bloomwith mixing by - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Natalie Middletonand Edited by - Becca Bressler EPISODE CITATIONS:AUDIO:On the Media, “The Fog of War” (https://zpr.io/8NKDM2xHWzRp)Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Prepare for an exciting bonus episode featuring a true 80s legend. You might remember him from iconic films like "Adventures in Babysitting" (1987), "Hiding Out" (1987), "Toy Soldiers" (1991), and "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead" (1991). He dove deep into the nostalgia, reminiscing about his early 80s TV appearances, sharing behind-the-scenes stories, and geeking out about his memorable roles from the 80s and the 90s. So join us as we take a trip down memory lane with the fantastic Keith Coogan on this special bonuse episode of the 80s Flick Flashback Podcast! We'd love to hear your thoughts on our podcast! You can share your feedback with us via email or social media. Your opinions are incredibly valuable to us, and we'd be so grateful to know what you enjoyed about our show. If we missed anything or if you have any suggestions for 80s movies, we'd love to hear them too! If you're feeling extra supportive, you can even become a subscription member through "Buy Me A Coffee". For more details and other fun extensions of our podcast, check out this link. Thank you for your support! https://linktr.ee/80sFlickFlashback --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/80sflickflashback/message
Today, we'll be discussing Episode 12 of Mr. Queen, the hit K Drama on Netflix starring Shin Hye-sun as Kim So-yong, Kim Jyung-hun as King Cheoljong, Seol In-ah as Jo Hwa-jin, Na In-woo as Kim Byeong-in, and Choi Jin-hyuk as Jang Bong-hwan. We discuss:The songs we feature during the recap: Toy Soldier by Kim Deuk-so and The Great Recipe by sEODo.How this episode started with danger, then both the king and queen are safe, then it gets funny, then the king is beaten by Kim Jwa-geun, then it ends on a cliffhanger, and what a cliffhanger it was!How Jang Bong-hwan saved the banquet with his inventive cooking and his experience that cooking and food are political in a place like the palace.During the banquet, for the first time ever, the king and queen are on the same page, working together to save the banquet.How the king beautifully interprets the queen's messages about each dish in the meal.Court Lady Choi's words that there are things that are constant in the palace: the secret feud between women, the war of governmental powers, and assassination by poisonThe amazing meal the queen made during the banquet, how clever it all was, and how meaningful every element was.How Kim Jwa-geun beats the king down by exposing the 7 king's guards who had false papers and ordering them beheaded, taking jurisdiction over the men away from Prince Yeonpyeong and the king.Why the episode is called Dancing Upon a Knife: because the king and queen are caught in a dangerous and delicate place and they have to act very carefully.The K Drama elements in this episode, including a piggyback ride that we almost missed (the royal chef gives Court Lady Choi a piggyback ride when she gets ill from the poisoned water).The crazy cliffhanger of an ending and the many questions left unanswered, like: Who was behind the bombing? How badly is the king hurt? What about the ledger that the Jo family was supposed to reveal during the banquet?Our favorite Korean dishes now that the season is changing and it's turning colder. Sung Hee likes Seolleongtang while Joanna loves sundubu jjigae.The shows we're watching now: Sung Hee is obsessed with A Time Called You while Joanna has just started watching Destined With You.ReferencesThe Great Recipe by sEODo with lyricsBeef Seolleongtang recipeLighthouse Tofu restaurant in Annandale, VA
The Ringer's Bill Simmons and Kyle Brandt sneak down to the basement for a shot of mouthwash before rewatching the 1991 action film ‘Toy Soldiers,' starring Sean Astin, Wil Wheaton, and Louis Gossett Jr. Producer: Craig Horlbeck Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Welcome aboard the USS Yum Yum in which we your intrepid hosts Ryan and Rachel Sliwinski try to break down episodes of the the overlooked sci-fi series "Space: Above and Beyond" On this week's Yum Yum and Beyond we're discussing “Toy Soldiers“ MUSIC BY:Donny PearsonSUPPORT US:patreon.com/yumyumpodEMAIL US:yumyumpod@gmail.comFOLLOW US:Twitter: @YumYumPodcastFacebook: @YumYumPodcastInstagram: @yumyumpodReddit: r/YumYumPodcastLISTEN ON:Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2NbEuaHSpotify: https://spoti.fi/2CjDLSsGoogle Podcasts: https://bit.ly/37NheZPSimplecast: https://bit.ly/2ASPib8RadioPublic: https://bit.ly/30WxQ01iHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/2VnKBgqStitcher: https://bit.ly/3hIryqFTuneIn: https://bit.ly/3dDzjuPYoutube: https://bit.ly/3dk7tDA
The Sweeties are back! (again!) I know we're a broken record but this time it was for good reason as we announced today the upcoming birth of a new Sweetie boy joining the family! Will he be called Sweetie II? Sweeti Jr? Sweetee? Only time will tell. Today however, we watched Toy Soldiers from 1991--a movie often confused with Small Soldiers (which is actually about toys), which takes place in a prep school that has been overtaken by Colombian drug terrorists. Following the classic 90s trope of giving kids way too many responsibilities for their own good, this movie features one of our faves: Sean Astin aka grown up Mikey from the Goonies as bad boy Billy and his posse of fellow bad boys. After a Colombian drug lord's son takes over the school, the boys must band together to save the day. Packed with action, boys in underwear, phone sex lines, and what can be classified as a pretty "cushy" hostage situation, this movie really delivers some thrills. Come join us as we talk about spotting our favorite 90s things (RIP Radio Shack!), and ask the hard hitting questions that have been plaguing us for years like: "Do boys really hang out in their underwear?" "Do kids in college today still put up posters?" We missed you! Come hang out with your Sweeties.
0:00 - Intro & Summary2:00 - Movie Discussion51:08 - Cast & Crew/Awards56:53 - Pop Culture 1:08:29 - Rankings & Ratings To see a full list of movies we will be watching and shows notes, please follow our website: https://www.1991movierewind.com/Follow us!https://linktr.ee/1991movierewind Theme: "sunrise-cardio," Jeremy Dinegan (via Storyblocks)Don't forget to rate/review/subscribe/tell your friends to listen to us!
Austin Petersen is a creative executive, producer and entrepreneur. Currently he is the host of the Wake Up America Show at WakeUpAmericaShow.com every Monday-Friday from 7-9am central time. Writing, video editing, producing, and managing massive social networks is his forte, as is building healthy communities, as well as fundraising. Petersen is a former 2016 Presidential and 2018 US Senate candidate. Petersen was Director of Production at FreedomWorks, and was also an Associate Producer for Judge Andrew Napolitano's show, “Freedom Watch” on the Fox Business Network. Owner and publisher of The Libertarian Republic, as well as CEO of Stonegait LLC. Mr. Petersen has been featured in Getty, Reuters, Fox News, Fox Business, the LA Times, NBC and Time Magazine, Reason, the Kansas City Star, Russia Today, al Jazeera and hundreds of local and nationally syndicated radio shows. Petersen has turned his website The Libertarian Republic into a powerful online news source for the public, with an average of 1 million unique visits monthly. As a publisher and professional pundit, Petersen grew The Freedom Report podcast into a top audio news source, with an average of one million monthly downloads. As a creative content producer, business executive, and successful political organizer, Stonegait's CEO has a lifetime of activism ahead, with decades of professional experience in a wide variety of industries. His work has appeared in Getty, Reuters, the LA Times, NBC and Time Magazine. His famous “Toy Gun March” and charity fundraiser was an international news story, raising thousands for the U.S. Marines charity Toys for Tots. Petersen made his feature film debut as an Executive Producer through Stonegait with the famous science fiction novel Alongside Night, starring Kevin Sorbo. As a product demonstrator and Toy Soldier at FAO Schwarz in Manhattan, Petersen moved from the sales floor to management in six months, and was again promoted to the corporate office's buying team less than six months later. He even appeared on the Conan O'Brien show. Find out more about Austin at: Website: https://wakeupamericashow.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-petersen-5b41353/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AP4Liberty Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ap4liberty/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP4Liberty YT Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AP4Liberty Check out our YouTube Channel:Jeremyryanslatebiz See the Show Notes:https://www.jeremyryanslate.com/1109 You may watch the FULL Video Episode also via my Rumble channel: https://rumble.com/c/JeremyRyanSlate
Austin Petersen is a creative executive, producer and entrepreneur. Currently he is the host of the Wake Up America Show at WakeUpAmericaShow.com every Monday-Friday from 7-9am central time. Writing, video editing, producing, and managing massive social networks is his forte, as is building healthy communities, as well as fundraising. Petersen is a former 2016 Presidential and 2018 US Senate candidate. Petersen was Director of Production at FreedomWorks, and was also an Associate Producer for Judge Andrew Napolitano's show, “Freedom Watch” on the Fox Business Network. Owner and publisher of The Libertarian Republic, as well as CEO of Stonegait LLC. Mr. Petersen has been featured in Getty, Reuters, Fox News, Fox Business, the LA Times, NBC and Time Magazine, Reason, the Kansas City Star, Russia Today, al Jazeera and hundreds of local and nationally syndicated radio shows. Petersen has turned his website The Libertarian Republic into a powerful online news source for the public, with an average of 1 million unique visits monthly. As a publisher and professional pundit, Petersen grew The Freedom Report podcast into a top audio news source, with an average of one million monthly downloads. As a creative content producer, business executive, and successful political organizer, Stonegait's CEO has a lifetime of activism ahead, with decades of professional experience in a wide variety of industries. His work has appeared in Getty, Reuters, the LA Times, NBC and Time Magazine. His famous “Toy Gun March” and charity fundraiser was an international news story, raising thousands for the U.S. Marines charity Toys for Tots. Petersen made his feature film debut as an Executive Producer through Stonegait with the famous science fiction novel Alongside Night, starring Kevin Sorbo. As a product demonstrator and Toy Soldier at FAO Schwarz in Manhattan, Petersen moved from the sales floor to management in six months, and was again promoted to the corporate office's buying team less than six months later. He even appeared on the Conan O'Brien show. Find out more about Austin at: Website: https://wakeupamericashow.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-petersen-5b41353/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AP4Liberty Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ap4liberty/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP4Liberty YT Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AP4Liberty Check out our YouTube Channel:Jeremyryanslatebiz See the Show Notes:https://www.jeremyryanslate.com/1109 You may watch the FULL Video Episode also via my Rumble channel: https://rumble.com/c/JeremyRyanSlate
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
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