RIP Radical Poet and Revolutionary Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti proclaimed on the wall of his City Lights bookstore, a San Francisco fixture since the poet, activist, and publisher founded the landmark with Peter D. Martin in 1953. Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday at age 101, was himself a fixture, a venerated steward of the counterculture. (See him read “Last Prayer,” above, in a clip from The Last Waltz). On his 100th birthday–on which the city instituted an annual “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day”–Chloe Veltman interviewed him, describing the poet as “frail and nearly blind… but his mind is still on fire.” It was the same mind that started a publishing house in the 50s with the intent to stir an “international dissident ferment.”
Ferlinghetti and Martin started their bookstore with a mission: “to break literature out of its stuffy, academic cage,” Veltman writes, out of “its self-centered focus on what he calls ‘the me me me,’ and make it accessible to all.” City Lights was the first all-paperback bookstore, opened at a time, he says, when “paperbacks weren’t considered real books.”





For Ferlinghetti, literature and democracy were not separate pursuits. The idea was radical, and so were his patrons. “A bookstore is a natural place for poets to hang out,” Ferlinghetti told NPR’s Tom Vitale, “and they started showing up there”–“They” being East Coast Beats like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the great, unsung Bob Kaufman.







Like a Northern California Shakespeare and Company, Ferlinghetti’s City Lights became the physical embodiment of a literary movement, especially after the infamous publication of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Other Poems, for which Ferlinghetti stood trial for obscenity, an event that “propelled the Beat generation into the international spotlight,” writes Evan Karp. “For the first and–arguably–only time, literature became a popular movement in the U.S.” Young people around the country realized that poetry was relevant to their politics (and lives), and vice versa.







Ferlinghetti published his own first book of poetry, Pictures of the Gone World, in the same year he published Ginsberg’s, but he has not received his critical due alongside the other Beats, despite the fact that his second book, 1958’s A Coney Island of the Mind, “sold more than 1 million copies over the year, ranking perhaps second to Howl as the most popular book of modern American poetry,” Fred Kaplan notes at Slate. (See him read the book’s first poem, “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See…,” from his City Lights office, above.)
Ferlinghetti himself never wanted to be identified with the movement. In a 2013 documentary, he emphatically says, “don’t call me a Beat. I was never a Beat poet.” He described his poetry as an “insurgent art”:
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of
apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words….
His purpose, he writes, was to pierce a culture he calls “a freeway fifty lanes wide / a concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.” From his Navy service in WWII–in which he saw the aftermath of Nagasaki weeks after the dropping of the atomic bombs–to the last days of the Trump administration, he kept his keen eye on America’s abuses. His “poetry is notoriously critical of politicians and the status quo,” Karp writes, and he was “unafraid to name names and take stances publicly” as a writer and a lifelong activist.







“Gerald Nicosia, the critic,” Vitale points out, “says Ferlinghetti’s two greatest accomplishments were fighting censorship, and inaugurating a small press revolution.” What did Ferlinghetti himself think of his place in the culture? “In Plato’s republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “I kind of relish that role.” As for what might finally shake the country out of the anti-democratic spirit that has held its people hostage to corporations and a hostile government, he was not sanguine: “It would take a whole new generation not devoted to the glorification of the capitalist system,” he said. “A generation not trapped in the me, me, me.”
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Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Manuscripts Now Digitized & Put Online, Revealing the Beat Poet’s Creative Process
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

RIP Radical Poet and Revolutionary Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

The phrase “opening of Japan” is a euphemism that has outlived its purpose, serving to cloud rather than explain how a country closed to outsiders suddenly, in the mid-19th century, became a major influence in art and design worldwide. Negotiations were carried out at gunpoint. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry presented the Japanese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to surrender. (The Japanese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innumerable historical ironies, we have this ugliness to thank for the explosion of Impressionist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japanese prints and owned a large collection) as well as much of the beauty of Art Nouveau and modernist architecture at the turn of the century.
We may know versions of this already, but we probably don’t know it from a Japanese point of view. “As our global society grows ever more connected,” writes Katie Barrett at the Internet Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human history is just one click away. Yet language barriers and physical access still present major obstacles to deeper knowledge and understanding of other cultures.”





Unless we can read Japanese, our understanding of its history will always be informed by specialist scholars and translators. Now, at least, thanks to cooperation between the University of Tokyo General Library and the Internet Archive, we can access thousands more primary sources previously unavailable to “outsiders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Barrett, “our Collections team has worked in tandem with library staff to ingest thousands of digital files from the General Library’s servers, mapping the metadata for over 4,000 priceless scrolls, texts, and papers.” This material has been digitized over decades by Japanese scholars and “showcases hundreds of years of rich Japanese history expressed through prose, poetry, and artwork.” It will be primarily the artwork that concerns non-Japanese speakers, as it primarily concerned 19th-century Europeans and Americans who first encountered the country’s cultural products. Artwork like the humorous print above. Barrett provides context: 
In one satirical illustration, thought to date from shortly after the 1855 Edo earthquake, courtesans and others from the demimonde, who suffered greatly in the disaster, are shown beating the giant catfish that was believed to cause earthquakes. The men in the upper left-hand corner represent the construction trades; they are trying to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuilding from earthquakes was a profitable business for them.
There are many such depictions of “seismic destruction” in ukiyo-e prints dating from the same period and the later Mino-Owari earthquake of 1891: “They are a sobering reminder of the role that natural disasters have played in Japanese life.” 

You can see many more digitized artifacts, such as the charming book of Japanese ephemera above, at the Internet Archive’s University of Tokyo collection. Among the 4180 items currently available, you’ll also find many European prints and engravings held in the library’s 25 collections. All of this material “can be used freely without prior permission,” writes the University of Tokyo Library. “Among the highlights,” Barrett writes, “are manuscripts and annotated books from the personal collection of the novelist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an early manuscript of the Tale of Genji, [below] and a unique collection of Chinese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the collection here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The “Academic Tarot”: 22 Major Arcana Cards Representing Life in the Academic Humanities Under COVID-19

“Speculations about the creators of Tarot cards include the Sufis, the Cathars, the Egyptians, Kabbalists, and more,” writes “expert cartomancer” Joshua Hehe. All of these suppositions are wrong, it seems. “The actual historical evidence points to northern Italy sometime in the early part of the 1400s,” when the so-called “major arcana” came into being. “Contrary to what many have claimed, there is absolutely no proof of the Tarot having originated in any other time or place.”
A bold claim, yet there are precedents much older than tarot: “A few decades before the Tarot was born, ordinary playing cards came to Europe by way of Arabs, arriving in many different cities between 1375 and 1378. These cards were an adaptation of the Islamic Mamluk cards,” with suits of cups, swords, coins, and polo sticks, “the latter of which were seen by Europeans as staves.”





Whether the playing cards brought to Europe by the Mamluks were used for divination may be a matter of controversy. The history and art of the Mamluk sultanate itself is a subject worthy of study for the tarot historian. Originally a slave army (“mamluk” means “slave” in Arabic) under the Ayyubid sultans in Egypt and Syria, the Mamluks overthrew their rulers and created “the greatest Islamic empire of the later Middle Ages.”
What does this have to do with tarot reading? These are academic concerns, perhaps, of little interest to the average tarot enthusiast. But then, the average tarot enthusiast is not the audience for the “Academic Tarot,” a project of the Visionary Futures Collective, or VFC, a group of 22 scholars “fighting for what higher education needs most,” Stephanie Malak writes at Hyperallergic, “a bringing together of thinkers who ‘believe in the transformational power and vital importance of the humanities.’”

To that end, the Academic Tarot features exactly the kinds of characters who love to chase down abstruse historical questions—characters like the lowly, confused Grad Student, standing in here for The Fool. It also features those who can make academic life, with its endless rounds of meetings and committees, so difficult: figures like The President (see here), doing duty here as the Magician, and pictured shredding “campus-wide COVID results.”
The VFC, founded in the time of COVID-19 pandemic and “in the midst of the long-overdue national reckoning led by the Black Lives Matter movement,” aims to “trace the contours of things that define our shared human condition,” says Collective member Dr. Brian DeGrazia. In the case of the Academic Tarot, the conditions represented are shared by a specific subset of humans, many of whom responded to “feelings surveys” put out by the VFC in a biweekly newsletter.
The surveys have been used to make art that reflects the experiences of the grad students, professors, and professional staff working the academic humanities at this time:
VFC artist-in-residence Claire Chenette, a Grammy-nominated Knoxville Symphony Orchestra musician furloughed due to COVID-19, brought the tarot cards to life. What began as a three-card project to complement the VFC newsletter grew in spirit and in number. 
“In tarot, the cards read us,” the VFC writes, “telling a story about ourselves that can provide clarity, guidance and hope.” What story do the 22 Major Arcana cards in the Academic Tarot tell? That depends on who’s asking, as always, but one gets the sense that unless the querent is familiar with life in a higher-ed humanities department, these cards may not reveal much. For those who have seen themselves in the cards, however, “the images made them laugh out loud,” says Chenette, or “they hit hard. Or… they even made them cry, but… it needed to happen.”
Struggling through yet another pandemic semester of attempting to teach, research, write, and generally stay afloat? The Academic Tarot cards are currently sold out, but you can pre-order now for the second run.
via Hyperallergic
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The “Academic Tarot”: 22 Major Arcana Cards Representing Life in the Academic Humanities Under COVID-19 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

How Jazz Became the “Mother of Hip Hop”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Caxwob1iKX4





Jazz and hip hop have been in a lively conversation in recent years, breaking new ground for both forms, as the work of artists like Kendrick Lamar and his collaborators amply shows. Lamar created his majorly-acclaimed albums To Pimp a Butterfly and Damn with the indispensable playing and arranging of jazz-fusion saxophonist Kamasi Washington and his frequent sideman, bassist Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, who have contributed to the work of Flying Lotus. That’s the artist name of Stephen Ellison, nephew of Alice and John Coltrane, who has also been instrumental, no pun intended, in reshaping the sound of contemporary hip hop.
“The influence cuts both ways—from jazz to hip hop and back again,” writes John Lewis at The Guardian. Or as Washington puts it, “We’ve now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We’ve grown up alongside rappers and DJs, we’ve heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane.”





The fusion of avant-garde hip hop with live jazz improvisation, instrumentation, and arranging may seem like a new phenomenon, though one could date it at least as far back as the Roots’ early 90s debut.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_srvHOu75vM





“Hip hop’s love affair with jazz goes back more than 30 years,” Lewis writes. The music was everywhere in the 90s, in the foreground on the records of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Digable Planets and in more cut-and-paste ways in albums like Nas’ instant classic Illmatic, produced by Pete Rock, who crafted tracks like “N.Y. State of Mind” from layered samples of Ahmad Jamal, Donald Byrd, and little-known jazz-funk outfits like Jimmy Gordon & His Jazznpops Band. As pianist Robert Glasper shows above in the brief NPR Jazz Night in America video at the top, “Jazz is the mother of hip-hop.”
Both jazz and hip hop were born out of oppression, and both are forms of protest music, “going against the grain,” Glasper argues. But there’s more to it. Why do hip hop producers gravitate toward jazz, chopping and lifting classics and obscure rarities? For a wealth of melodic content—”for a mood, for a sonic timbre, for a unique rhythmic component,” writes interviewer Alex Ariff on YouTube; for a shared history of struggle and celebration and a desire to change the sound of music with each release. Glasper’s brief, three-minute demonstration is fascinating and it could, as one YouTube commenter points out, easily extend to three hours.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDga7tJL2UU





Until he makes that video, you can find jazz samples in hip hop records to your heart’s eternal content at Whosampled.com and consider how the influence of hip hop on jazz musicians has created new forms of fusion akin to Miles Davis’ experiments in the 70s. “I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip hop,” says Washington. “People like to compartmentalize music, especially African-American music, but it’s really one thing. One very wide thing…. When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the Pimp a Butterfly sessions, Kendrick got it immediately. ‘I want it to sound like it’s on fire,’ he’d say. That’s the kind of common ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.”
via The Kids Should See This
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

How Jazz Became the “Mother of Hip Hop” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SsozkaBtMw





“I enjoy poking fun at anything educated people do and civilized society perpetuates that is odd, frustrating, wacky, or hypocritical,” cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, above, recently told the New York Public Library’s Margo Moore.
Unsurprisingly, she’s been getting published in The New Yorker a lot of late.
The process for getting cartoons accepted there is the stuff of legend, though reportedly less grueling since Emma Allen, the magazine’s youngest and first-ever female cartoon editor, took over. Allen has made a point of seeking out fresh voices, and working with them to help mold their submissions into something in The New Yorker vein, rather than “this endless game of presenting work and then hearing ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”





Kurzweil has a fondness for literary themes (and the same brand of pencils that John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov preferred—Blackwings—whether in her hand or, conversing with Allen on Zoom, above, in her ears.)
Getting the joke of a New Yorker cartoon often depends on getting the reference, and while both women seem tickled at the first example, Kurzweil’s mash-up of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and the picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, it may go over many readers’ heads.
The thing that holds it all together?
Madeleines, of course, though outside France, not every Proust lover is able to identify an inked representation of this evocative cookie by shape.
Kurzweil states that she has never actually read the children’s book that supplies half the context.
(It’s okay. Like the idea that memories can be triggered by certain nostalgic scents, its concept is pretty easy to grasp.)
Nor has she read philosopher Derek Parfit’s whopping 1,928-page On What Matters. Her inspiration for using it in a cartoon is her personal connection to the massive, unread three-volume set in her family’s library. Because both the size and the title are part of the joke, she directs the viewer’s eye to the unwieldy tome with a light watercolor wash.
She also has a good tip for anyone drawing a library scene—go figurative, rather than literal, varying sizes and shapes until the eye is tricked into seeing what is merely suggested.
A all-too-true literary experience informs her second example at the 4:30 mark—that of a little known author giving a reading in a bookstore. Despite a preference for drawing “fleshy things like people and animals” she forgoes depicting the author or those in attendance, giving the punchline instead to the event posters in the store’s window.
As she told the NYPL’s Moore:
A cartoon is always an opportunity to showcase a contemporary phenomenon by exaggerating it or placing it in a different context.
Over the last year, a huge number of New Yorker cartoons have concerned themselves with the domestic dullness of the pandemic, but when Allen asked if she has a favorite New Yorker cartoon cliché, Kurzweil went with “the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unattainable.”
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Follow her @AyunHalliday.

A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Little Kid Merrily Grooves to ZZ Top While Waiting for the Bus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmWwEmKeSm0





A musician in Vancouver, British Columbia took to the streets and busked some ZZ Top, much to the delight of a young child waiting for the bus. From the moment he starts playing “La Grange,” the child bops up and down, then twirls in a circle, losing herself in the song. On YouTube he writes, “I don’t often see this, but when it happens it’s always 99% kids that are doing it. Before they become jaded (age 8), they still have that spontaneous spark, that reaction to music that we all used to have. Emotion is no.1 priority and they express it without shame.”
If this brightens your day, even a little, consider giving the busker a tip on Paypal or Patreon. As he explains on YouTube, he’s had–like many of us–a rough year. He writes:
1) I’m glad everyone is enjoying this video but I want to mention a few things.
Street playing is not all fun and games and dancing kids. Doing this for 7 years. I regularly face not only verbal abuse, but physical assault as I work a few blocks from downtown eastside Vancouver. I’m surrounded by addicts, drunks, and people who should be in mental homes.
2) I’m unemployed. All live music including busking, is banned. I lost all work last year and received ZERO compensation. I had a very bad year in 2020 and only recently came out of a depression.
3) I make ZERO from youtube no matter how many views I get. I don’t run ads. And more importantly, even if I did, most of my videos are instantly copyrighted and auto monetized by record labels because they are COVERS. If you see an ad, it’s the record label collecting. If you liked the performance, please think about supporting me on patreon/paypal tip/bandcamp.
4) I’m a musician that writes his own music and has been doing it for 20 years. Check out my bandcamp page to see what I can really do with a guitar.
5) It’s a lot of unpaid work to post these videos all the time so please try to help me keep the channel going. Many thanks to those that have supported me! It means a lot!
6) I get asked this 100 times a day so here’s the answer: I play on the street and not in a band because all the clubs closed years ago. I used to lead many bands from 2006 to 2018. That’s all gone. Live music is dead, as well as banned. It’s also a lot more hassle, and less money, to run a band than play by myself.
Anyone who has music work to offer can contact me at shatnershairpiece@yahoo.com
via Laughing Squid
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Little Kid Merrily Grooves to ZZ Top While Waiting for the Bus is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Tony Bennett Duets with Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse & Other Musicians, Passing on the Great American Songbook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPAmDULCVrU





I was possessed with a wonderful example of my Italian American family. They would come over and join us every Sunday, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them. I was 10 years old, and I was just saying, “Who am I? What am I supposed to do?” And they told me that they love the way I sang. It created a passion in my life that exists to this moment as I speak to you, that is stronger now at 89 than in my whole life. I still feel that I can get better somehow. And I search for it all of the time. —Tony Bennett, Weekend Edition interview, October 10, 2015
Tony Bennett “is not just an artist for the ages, but an artist for all ages,” the Library of Congress wrote in its announcement of the iconic singer as the 2017 Gershwin Prize Winner. Bennett’s life and career have truly been extraordinary. The golden-voiced crooner from Queens “has been on the front lines of history” as a World War II veteran who “fought in the Battle of the Bulge and participated in the liberation of a concentration camp.” He “marched with Martin Luther King in Selma to support civil rights,” then went on to win 19 Grammys, sell 10 million records, perform “for 11 U.S. presidents,” and become a prolific visual artist who “continues to paint every day, even as he tours internationally.”
When he received the Gershwin honor, Bennett had already been diagnosed with Alzhiemers disease, a diagnosis just revealed to the public by Bennett’s wife, Susan Benedetto. He had been showing signs all the way back in 2014 when he released Cheek to Cheek, an album of jazz standards recorded with Lady Gaga. When AARP’s John Colapinto visited him at his New York City apartment recently, “there was little doubt that the disease had progressed.”





But Bennett’s golden voice and insatiable desire to get better remain. He still paints every day and rehearses twice a week, and even as his symptoms worsened over the past few years, he performed and recorded with younger artists, determined to pass on the tradition of the “Great American Songbook” in the 21st century.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OFMkCeP6ok





Bennett’s advocacy for jazz singing through his duets with singers like Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse may turn out to be his most enduring legacy. 2011’s Duets II began the collaborations with Lady Gaga. During the recording of Cheek to Cheek, Bennet enthusiastically told NPR that “It’s the first time that young people that love [her] so much will fall in love with George Gershwin, with Cole Porter, with Irving Berlin.” She added, “Tony’s really opening up a whole new generation.” The two then got together again four years later, going into the studio between 2018 and 2020. “Tony was a considerably more muted presence during the recording of the new album,” writes Colapinto. “In raw documentary footage of the sessions, he speaks rarely, and when he does his words are halting; at times he seems lost and bewildered.” It may “very well be the last Tony Bennett record.”


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1OdWOLWeCM





This sense of finality is why Benedetto and their son Danny “have jointly decided to break the silence around his condition, a decision they have, necessarily, had to make without Tony’s input, since he is, Susan said, incapable of understanding the disease.” Nonetheless, the new album of duets, due out this spring, promises to show Bennett in the fine form he has maintained throughout the progression of his disease, exercising his voice to keep the worst symptoms at bay. “He is doing so many things, at 94, that many people without dementia cannot do,” says Bennett’s neurologist Gayatri Devi. “He really is the symbol of hope for someone with a cognitive disorder.” Benedetto is open about what’s been lost. “There’s a lot about him that I miss,” she says. “Because he’s not the old Tony anymore. … But when he sings, he’s the old Tony.”


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIoyTlfUPPU





See Bennett in classic duets with Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga above, including the stunning live version of “Anything Goes” with Gaga, just above, from 2014. “I feel very validated by this,” she said that year. “You know, he’s given my fans a gift by saying to them that he likes the way I sing jazz.” See those fans look on with rapt attention, absorbing the songs Bennett loved so much through a new generation of singers inspired by his incredible legacy. Just below, see several more career-capping duets from Duets II, and even more at the YouTube playlist here.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3i2F7eKoKQ







https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfPbe7w6nRI







https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_Fatuvp68





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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Tony Bennett Duets with Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse & Other Musicians, Passing on the Great American Songbook is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.