Ed Ward on the live albums that revived Jerry Lee Lewis’ career in the mid-late 1960s:

The resulting album, Live at the Hamburg Star-Club, is 37 minutes long, and, because it features a man playing as if his life depended on it in front of a rioting crowd, is widely considered one of the greatest live rock and roll albums ever. Smash decided not to release it. Instead, until it got an official U.S. release in 1980, imported copies were eagerly sought out. What Smash did instead was to record another show, this time with Jerry Lee’s regular band, in July in Birmingham, Alabama. The set list is almost identical, but with a bit more country.

Above, Jerry Lee Lewis performing on Shindig in 1965. If this doesn’t make you want to get up and dance on out of the office and into Friday night then we don’t know what will.

Sarah Polley talks to Terry Gross about how she got to know her her mother — who died when Polley was 11 — while making Stories We Tell:

Having the opportunity to sit with for many hours with most of the people that your mother was close to in her life and get to hear them talk about her ends up forming a much more full picture than the one I had before. At the same time, even though I wasn’t an adult and didn’t get to know the complexity of who she was, I had somebody say to me once, years ago, they were asking me, ‘What was your mother like?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. She died when I was 11.’ And she said, ‘Well, what did she feel like?’

And that was an amazing window for me into the idea that … you don’t actually have to be able to articulate or intellectually know who somebody is to really know them, and that 11 years is actually a really long time — especially to have a really good mother — and it’s more than most people get in a lifetime. And I had, until I was 11 years old, a mother who made me feel like life was really exciting, that the world was really exciting, that she loved us, that she could find joy even when life had been tragic and that’s so much more than most people get. I feel incredibly grateful for that and then — obviously — so privileged to have been able to add all this new information to that picture.

Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions Publicity

Surreal Images Made from Elaborate Sets By Sandy Skoglund:

Decades before Photoshop was available, American photographer and installation artist Sandy Skoglund started creating surreal images by building amazingly elaborate sets, a process which took months to complete. Her works are characterized by an incredible amount of objects settled against contrasting colours or on a monochromatic colour scheme.

via Lost At E Minor

Bill Hader — who is leaving Saturday Night Live after eight years this weekend — on his audition for the show:

I remember getting in the elevator for my audition and there was a guy next to me who had a backpack full of props and wigs and things, and I went, ‘Oh, my God, that guy is so prepared, I have nothing, I have no props.’ And that was Andy Samberg. And Andy Samberg said he was looking at me going, ‘Oh, that guy has no props. He doesn’t need props.’ And that was the first time we met, was in that elevator.

Q: Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

A: I’m a self-help queen, dedicated to continuous improvement. I read books about problems I don’t have, just in case I develop obsessive-compulsive disorder or crippling phobias. Of course there’s nothing I recommend. If I ever found anything useful, I’d keep it to myself, to steal a mean advantage.

This interview with Hilary Mantel in the New York Times Magazine is delightful, funny and smart.

An interview with Mantel here.

This song, that played last night on the final episode of The Office is apparently a Creed Bratton original. It is so pretty. Creed, we hardly knew ye! And we’ll miss ye.

Interviews with Office castmates, past and … well, past: Steve Carrell, Mindy Kaling, Rainn Wilson, and Jenna Fischer.

(via James Poniewozik)

David Edelstein on the cast of J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek Into Darkness:

The movie doesn’t hold up to post-viewing scrutiny — which matters if you want to see it again. But I found it so much fun to see its variations on an old theme that I found myself having a good time. I surrendered to the bombardment. The new cast is still disconcerting. By the end of the original Trek, the actors were a collection of paunches and hairpieces; these guys are so trim and tender-skinned, they’re like the Baby Looney Tunes.

It’s really a losing battle, a losing proposition for all of us. … The fundamental problem is that we’re on our own and all the risk of retirement — whether it’s this risk of the market going up and down or picking the wrong investments or even outliving our savings — the risk is all on us and that’s just fundamentally not a fair arrangement, not a fair proposition.

— Robert Hiltonsmith talks to Terry Gross about the risks of 401K retirement plans and the tricky business of saving for old age.

Kevin Whitehead pays tribute to clarinetist and bandleader Woody Herman on what would have been his 100th birthday:

In the late ’30s, he never rivaled bandleading clarinetists Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. But then came that late blooming. In 1944, not long before the swing era collapsed, Woody Herman put together a stupendous band known as his First Herd. It was popping with talent, starting with hotdog bassist Chubby Jackson, whose added fifth string made him sound speeded up. The brass included young trumpeter Sonny Berman with his antic bebop solos, and the lyrical but shouting trombonist Bill Harris. Igor Stravinsky wrote his “Ebony Concerto” for them. Herman famously said later, “We had no more right to play it than the man on the moon had.”

Above, Eleanor Powell with Woody Herman and His Orchestra

Sarah Polley, the director of the new documentary Stories We Tell, tells Terry Gross about including footage of retakes in the film:

I think that, for me, it was really important to not leave the construction of the film out because it’s a film about storytelling and how we tell stories and why we tell stories. I thought it was really important to include the process of making this film itself in the film and some of that involves some rather unflattering and ruthless moments for me like directing my dad when he’s … pouring his heart out, basically. And, you know, you do get into this mode, I think, when you’re telling a story — or certainly when you’re making a film — where you can kind of lose your sense or your barometer for what’s human or humane and certainly I think there are a few moments in the film where I’m directing my dad where I don’t come off that well, but I certainly come off as somebody who’s trying to tell a story above all else.

Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions Publicity

Actor Greta Gerwig talks to Terry Gross about on weight and her character, Florence, in the Noah Baumbach film Greenberg:

Right before my senior year I lost an incredible amount of weight due to chain smoking and really poor personal behavior and I felt so wonderful and I wished it didn’t feel as wonderful as it does and it felt liberating and I felt great about myself and people asked me, ‘Did you get a haircut?’ and I was like, ‘No, I lost 25 pounds, you idiot.’ … I think it also gave me the confidence to kind of go make these movies and do all this stuff because I was high on some kind of thinness. And then when I read the part of Florence I almost felt ashamed because I felt like had been trying to run away from being that person because I thought that that’s what I had to do to make movies and then when I read that part I gained 15, 17, 20 pounds for the part because I knew that was right and I’ve never really lost it. I’ve just kind of stayed that weight. But I think it was like when I read the script I understood it and I also felt like, ‘Oh, you didn’t have to try to be another person to make art or to be an actress. You can be this person and someone will want to tell that story.’”

Maureen Corrigan on the new novel Americanahby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Ifemelu does make it over to America on a student visa and, ultimately, she becomes a very successful blogger. Ifemelu’s blog is called: Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. The name of her blog should give you a sense of the subjects as well as the tart smarts of her posts, many of which are included in this novel. But, before Ifemelu strikes the blogger bonanza, she must endure the new immigrant initiation rite of looking for work. Ifemelu answers ads for home health aides in apartments that stink of urine and she works as “the nanny” in the Philadelphia suburbs. At one point, desperate for rent money, Ifemelu accepts a sexual job offer.

“Flag” by Brent Godfrey via Artdoxa

Robert Caro, who has spent the past 37 years, writing his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, tells Dave Davies about how Johnson was a “great reader of men”:

When a new aide, a young aide [arrived] … he’d tell them how to talk to someone. He’d say, ‘Watch their eyes. Watch their hands. What they’re telling you with their eyes or their hands is more important than what they’re telling you with their mouth.’ He used to say, ‘Never let a conversation end because there’s always something that the man doesn’t want to tell you and the longer a conversation goes on, the easier it is for you to figure out what it is he doesn’t want to tell you.’ He had a unique ability to know what a man really wanted, what a man really was afraid of and of playing on those fears and those desires.”

LBJLibrary photo by Yoichi Okakmoto

Ken Tucker reviews Stories Don’t End, the third album from the LA-based, West Coast folk rock-influenced band Dawes:

If you heard the Dawes song “Just Beneath the Surface” and said, “Somebody’s been listening to their old Jackson Browne albums!,” you’re not exactly insulting Dawes. This band has actually backed Browne on tour and Browne has sung back-up on at least one of their songs, and so you could say they come by their riffs, licks and phrasing honestly. You could, that is, if you want to pigeon-hole this quartet as a throwback to Southern California ’70s soft-rock, which would be a mistake. Why, on the very next cut on their new album Stories Don’t End, they sound like East Coast ’70s soft-rock, on the Steely Dan-ish “From a Window Seat.”

Sarah Polley talks to Terry Gross about how she her father that he was not her biological father:

I was sort of, at that stage, filled with regret that I had ever investigated this at all and felt enormously guilty in a way that almost sank me and it took a friend of mine to point out to me that by discovering this information I hadn’t actually created the situation or, you know, done anything particularly wrong. But it was hard to come to terms with that because I felt that I was in possession of information that would be really traumatic and hurtful for him and would destroy him and so I just told him as honestly and clearly as I could and then was completely staggered and stunned by his response to it, which was so full of compassion for my mother and gentleness and graciousness and, I think, in a way his response to this information was for me what made it a really interesting story.