As an art exhibit featuring Neil Young‘s watercolors opens in Los Angeles this week, we rounded up paintings by the venerable rocker and nine other famous musicians, including Marilyn Manson, Paul Stanley, Ronnie Wood, Tony Bennett, Neil Young, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Paul Simonon and Ringo Starr.
Can you guess who painted what? After viewing each image, click to the next slide to reveal the artist.
Neil Young doesn’t just sing about painters — he’s also a painter himself. In his new memoir, Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, the musician shares watercolors and prints, all depicting one of his greatest passions: cars.
Young’s artwork is also on display in an exhibit at Los Angeles’s Robert Berman Gallery, now through the end of November. One of the paintings even serves as the cover art for Young’s latest album, Storytone, which debuted this week:
Here are a few of the other works that illustrate Young’s memoir:
“I started with photographs, then I started thinking that photographs didn’t really go anywhere — they’re just photographs,” Young told the Los Angeles Times about his foray into painting. So he tested out some watercolor and charcoal paintings — and ended up with around two dozen works illustrating his memoir.
For decades, Led Zeppelin has faced claims that they plagiarized their iconic 1971 hit “Stairway to Heaven” from the rock band Spirit. Now it looks like Zeppelin is headed for a difficult legal battle.
Back in May, family members of Spirit frontman Randy Craig Wolfe (a.k.a Randy California) filed the suit against Zeppelin, seeking monetary damages and a writing credit for the now-deceased Wolfe, NBC Philadelphia reports. Wolfe’s family claims that Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page ripped off the chords for “Stairway to Heaven” from Spirit’s 1968 tune “Taurus.” (The two bands at one point toured together and had thus become familiar with each other’s music.)
Now, Zeppelin and their music companies have requested that the case be dismissed, as the “individual defendants are British citizens residing in England, own no property in Pennsylvania and have no contacts with Pennsylvania, let alone ties sufficient to render them essentially at home here,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The judge, however, said no to that request — so the band will now be forced to move forward with the suit.
In the meantime, if you’ve never heard the song that Zeppelin allegedly ripped off, listen to it here, followed by “Stairway to Heaven” for comparison’s sake:
Read next: Led Zeppelin Is Getting Sued Over ‘Stairway to Heaven’
The Metropolitan Opera House’s opening night of 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer received a standing ovation in New York City Monday. But the noise made by crowds outside of Lincoln Center before the curtain rose may have rivaled the cheers inside the opera house.
Hundreds of protesters, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, railed against the John Adams opera about the 1985 murder of disabled cruise passenger Leon Klinghoffer by four members of the Palestinian Liberation Front, on charges that it is anti-Semitic and glorifies terrorists who shot a 69-year-old Jewish man in his wheelchair and then pushed him overboard.
“If you listen, you will see that the emotional context of the opera truly romanticizes terrorism,” Giuliani told crowds across the street from Lincoln Center. “And romanticizing terrorism has only made it a greater threat.”
The Met disagreed that the opera, which premiered in Brussels more than 20 years ago, glorifies terrorism.
“There’s no doubt for anyone who sees this opera that… it’s not anti-Semitic,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, told the BBC. “It does not glorify terrorism in any way. It is a brilliant work of art that must be performed… At the end of the day, anyone with any sense of moral understanding knows this opera is about the murder of an innocent man.”
The AP reports that there were a some orchestrated disruptions, including shouts of, “The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgotten!” from the balcony, during the show, though the heckling was muffled by cheers when the cast took a bow.
Less than a year after nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square, a Russian artist cut off his earlobe Sunday in protest of the Russian government’s treatment of dissidents.
The artist, Pyotr Pavlensky, was hospitalized following the incident and will be released from the hospital soon, The Guardian reported.
In a Facebook post, Pavlensky said that he was protesting the government’s alleged detention of dissidents under the false pretense of insanity.
“Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, the bureaucrat in a white lab coat cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone,” he wrote, according to the Guardian.
[Guardian]
Hello Kitty lovers, grab a writing implement from your Hello Kitty pencil case, and mark your calendars. The first large-scale exhibition of objects from the Sanrio archives and original art inspired by the iconic character opens Oct. 11 at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles. The show, pegged to the 40th anniversary of the brand, will run through April 26, 2015.
The art on display ranges from a sculpture of the character covered in desserts, illustrating her reputation for being sweet, to “Kittypatra,” a sculpture of Hello Kitty as Cleopatra that’s reminiscent of cats’ religious significance in ancient Egypt (but, remember, she’s a girl, not a cat). Jamie Rivadeneira, one of the exhibit’s curators and owner of Japan LA, a boutique that sells Japanese pop culture merchandise, argues there are endless ways for artists to depict Hello Kitty because “she’s a blank canvas. She doesn’t have a mouth, so she can be whatever you want her to be.”
Pop culture fans will recognize Katy Perry’s Hello Kitty-inspired corset, Lady Gaga’s dress made out of Hello Kitty plush dolls and a skirt decorated with Hello Kitty lunch boxes featured on America’s Next Top Model. Other unusual objects on display include Hello Kitty motor oil, Hello Kitty toilet paper and the infamous Hello Kitty body “massager,” which went viral on the Internet because many people thought Sanrio had released a vibrator.
Christine Yano, an anthropologist and one of the exhibit’s curators, describes the massager controversy and other unexpected appropriations of the cutesy character on display as the kind of “OMG moments” that have made the brand last for 40 years: “It became a sensation. Even if there might be some controversy, that’s more people paying attention and maybe more people buying the product.”
Before Allen Ginsberg invoked the ire of authorities with the frank (and frequent) depiction of sexual acts in “Howl” — “in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too” — he stunned a crowd of drunk poetry fans at San Francisco’s Six Gallery.
On this evening in 1955, Oct. 7, Ginsberg performed the piece in public for the first time at a poetry reading which had been advertised by a postcard proclaiming: “Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori.”
The wine and the satori — deep understanding, in the zen sense — went hand in hand. In his novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac fictionalized the event with a description of circulating gallon jugs of California burgundy among the increasingly raucous crowd, “getting them all piffed so that by eleven o’clock when Alvah Goldbrook [Ginsberg's stand-in in the novel] was reading his wailing poem ‘Wail’ ['Howl'] drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling ‘Go! Go! Go!’”
Those who were there said the reading felt like a revolution — poet Michael McClure said that it pushed the art form past the “point of no return” — but critics gave the poem mixed reviews. The poet James Dickey called it “a whipped-up state of excitement,” but scolded that “it takes more than this to make poetry.” Poet and critic Paul Zweig was more reverential, saying that “Howl,” “almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the 1950s.”
Government officials, meanwhile, found it intolerably vulgar. When it was published about the year after that first reading, U.S. Customs agents seized Howl and Other Poems when it arrived from its London-based printer on grounds that it was indecent and obscene; San Francisco police arrested Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published it, and Shigeyoshi Murao, manager of City Lights Books, who sold it.
Mid-century America simply wasn’t ready yet for Ginsberg’s offer of free satori, it seemed. In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the poem’s obscenity trial, Ferlinghetti told the New York Times he believed the charges were related less to the poem’s four-letter words than to the revolutionary ideas it expressed.
A San Francisco judge (and Sunday school teacher) later exonerated both the men and the poem, ruling that Howl had “redeeming social importance.” He may not have supported its ideas, but he was a stickler for self-expression: “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemism?” the Times story quotes from Judge Horn’s 1957 opinion. “An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words.”
Hindsight would confirm the judge’s wisdom. In 1985, TIME’s R.Z. Sheppard noted that, “the man once feared as a weevil in the nation’s moral fiber is in a disarming state of equilibrium. Cultural norms have adjusted in Ginsberg’s favor since 1956, when he disturbed the peace with Howl.”
Read the 1985 piece about the poet, here in TIME’s archives: Mainstreaming Allen Ginsberg
Munich’s Deutscher Kaiser hotel looks like any sleek modern building. But re-imagined through the mind (and lens) of artist Víctor Enrich, the structure becomes something mind-bendingly crazy — Salvador Dali meets Inception.
The Spanish native spent months turning out these 88 startling computer-aided distortions of the four-star urban lodging. Why? Recent emigrant Enrich had passed the Deutscher Kaiser daily while job-hunting in the German city and quickly tired of looking at it. What started off as novel way to motivate himself, turned into a fully realized passion project.
Speaking to TIME from Barcelona, Enrich says “I always try to express myself as much as I can. If I’m not having fun, I will never do anything!”
We’ve picked some of our favorites, but you can see Víctor’s full series here.
This new GoPro video shows two dancers suspended in the air, performing perpendicular to Oakland’s City Hall.
These daring dancers are Amelia Rudolph and Roel Seeber and are part of BANDALOOP, a group that specializes in vertical dance performance
They move so gracefully that you almost forget how scary this must have been.
MORE: Watch a Toddler Expertly Choreograph a Dance to Sia’s ‘Chandelier’
MORE: Dad and Daughter’s Goofy Dance to ‘All About That Bass’ Will Make You Smile
(h/t Mashable)
Dr. Seuss fans will have a chance to read four of the famed cartoonist’s long-forgotten stories in a new volume, Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories, out today. The book features beloved characters as Seuss (whose real name is Theodor Geisel) rendered them for Redbook magazine in the 1950s. Though Seuss died in 1991, a collector and biographer, Charles Cohen, helped catalyze the new Horton after finding archival material in the magazine.
In “Marco Comes Late,” Marco, from his first children’s book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, makes up a fantastical story to explain why he was really late to school.
In “Horton and the Kwuggerbug,” a demanding insect called a Kwuggerbug sends Horton, the elephant best known for hearing a Who, on a wild mission that involves climbing mountains and standing up to crocodiles to find Beezlenuts—a delicious, sought-after dessert.
The Grinch is still as grouchy as ever and preaches about the pitfalls of consumerism in “The Hoobub and the Grinch,” reflecting the author’s “feelings about his history in advertising,” according to the book’s introduction written by Charles D. Cohen, a dentist who collects Dr. Seuss memorabilia.
And the extremely paranoid policeman Officer Pat from “How Officer Pat Saved the Whole Town” was meant to be a book unto himself, but Random House opted to publish Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories instead.
The original illustrations live in the archives of the Dr. Seuss Collection at the University of California at San Diego.
