Producer, songwriter, DJ, and actor extraordinaire Questlove is not short of accomplishments. As the frontman and drummer of the band, The Roots, you may know Ahmir Thompson from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Night after night, his personality shines through, leading his band and cracking jokes with the host himself. Questlove has become such an industry stand-out his fans hang onto his every word- whether it be waiting for his quips with Jimmy, listening to his podcast, Questlove Supreme, or through his music.
The Philadelphia native's prolific career includes six GRAMMY awards, a BAFTA, and an Academy Award...producing for the likes of Amy Winehouse, John Legend, and Elvis Costello. Questlove is an enigma- a vat of knowledge in the music industry that can provide unique insights and witty commentary without bias.
Now, Questlove sits inside Electric Lady Studios- the studio commissioned by Jimi Hendrix where David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and Led Zeppelin have recorded- alongside a glass of The Balvenie Scotch whisky to talk with some of the greatest in the entertainment industry for his digital series, "Quest For Craft."
Available exclusively on The Balvenie's YouTube, Questlove brings a refreshing take on creativity. He talks to stars in their industries to delve into how they got to where they are today. Running since 2021, "Quest For Craft" has hosted an impressive crowd: Mark Ronson, Michael Che, Misty Copeland, and many more. Questlove says,
“I’ve been an obsessive student of creativity my whole life,” explained Questlove. “I’m interested in how people make things, how creators move from one medium to another, what makes work better -- and what allows creators to hold onto the passion that inspired them in the first place. And surprisingly, it turns out I have a lot in common with a 131-year-old whisky based in rural Scotland."
It's continually exciting to watch how Questlove wiggles into the mind of some of our favorites in the entertainment industry. You can watch the trailer below:
Here's a preview of some of Questlove's iconic digital series, "Quest For Craft", out now!
Chapter 9, Craft and Joy with 8-time GRAMMY Award-Winning Artist, Songwriter, and Record Producer AndersonPaak - The musical duo explores how they each bring happiness to their fans through their craft and creativity.
Chapter 10, Craft and Connection with American Cellist Yo-Yo Ma - Questlove and Yo-Yo Ma discuss how seeking to make a genuine connection with their audience affects the act of creation.
Chapter 11, Craft and Voice with Emmy Award-Winning Writer, Actress, and Producer Lena Waithe - The history-making creator and Questlove delve deep into the topic of infusing their work with their individual perspectives and points of view.
Chapter 12, Craft and Commitment with Actor and Peabody Award-Winning Comedian Fred Armisen - Fred Armisen and Questlove explore the comedian’s commitment to the surprising, unexpected characters he has crafted throughout his career.
Prior to his tragic death from liver cancer in 2016, he cemented his legacy as one of the 20th century's most iconic musical voices with classic albums like Hunky Dory, "Heroes", and Let's Dance. But his musical talent was only part of what made him a living legend. His best work was intertwined with his talent for mythmaking.
Stardust - Official Trailer (David Bowie Movie)www.youtube.com
Adopting the personas of Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, Bowie performed stories of fame and madness. The rcent biopic Stardust, from director Gabriel Range, purported to tell the story of how a young, insecure Bowie developed the Ziggy persona as a means to project confidence and overcome his anxiety.
The film premiered over the winter at the San Diego International Film Festival, to a mixed response, largely because the film was produced without the approval of Bowie's family. As such, it features none of Bowie's original music, and exists more in the category of an unauthorized film tribute, like 1998's Velvet Goldmine.
It may be that David Bowie never wanted the "truth" of his life story shared with the public, preferring to operate through persona and performance. With that in mind, if fans of the late glam rock icon want to experience the official, authorized film version of David Bowie, the man himself lent his talent to the silver screen in an acting career that was almost as impressive as his contribution to music.
These eight roles represent the best of his acting work. And while they may not show us the "real" Bowie, they reveal his range as a performer, and offer insight into how he chose to present himself to the world.
"Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" (1992) - Agent Phillip Jeffries
In the early '90s eccentric director David Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost introduced America to the fictional small town of Twin Peaks, Washington, where a cast of strange characters and cheerful Americana concealed dark mysteries.
Despite it's cult fandom, the Twin Peaks TV show was canceled after just two seasons on ABC, and Lynch and Frost resorted to making a film to (sort of) resolve the series' mysteries and loose ends. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me functioned as both a prequel and a sequel to the series, and David Bowie played the role of long-lost FBI agent Phillip Jeffries, who appears to some of his fellow agents in an erratic and cryptic vision before being transported back in time.
While Lynch was pleased with Bowie's performance, Bowie himself was seemingly unhappy with his attempt at a Louisiana accent, and insisted, before his death, that Lynch dub the scene over with a true Louisianan actor for 2017's Twin Peaks: The Return.
"The Prestige" (2006) - Nikola Tesla
Another Bowie role with an interesting accent choice, Bowie played the role of Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's 2006 film, The Prestige. Depicted as a wise and enigmatic figure with an almost godlike mastery of science, Bowie walks through lightning, invents an electrical cloning device, and attempts to advise magician Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) against his dangerous obsession, all while battling Thomas Edison.
"The Hunger" (1983) - John Blaylock
The Hunger is a 1983 horror movie about youth, mortality, and love. David Bowie plays "young" vampire John Blaylock, whose ancient lover Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) turned him in the 1800s with the promise of eternal life, as long as he feeds regularly on human blood. But now he has started aging rapidly, and seeks a scientific cure for his curse.
While largely overlooked in its time, the film later gained a following for its cinematography and tense atmospheric horror, and—of course—for featuring David Bowie as the seductive vampire we always knew he was. In 1997 the film inspired an anthology horror series of the same name which aired on Showtime. The second season featured Bowie, as both self-destructive artist Julian Priest and as the show's host, delivering eerie musings on the horror of each episode.
"Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" (1983) - Major Jack Celliers
Also released in 1983, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a film by Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima, based on the writings of Laurens van der Post, based on his experience as a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II. Bowie played the lead in the film as Major Jack Celliers, a defiant POW from New Zealand who is met with hostility and violence by captors who eventually come to respect his rebellious will.
Nearly 40 years later, Bowie's portrayal of indomitable spirit under dire circumstances remains moving and inspirational to this day.
"The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988) - Pontius Pilate
Martin Scorsese's 1988 depiction of Jesus of Nazareth's final days, starring Willem Dafoe, is remembered largely for controversy over the portrayal of an alternate reality in which Jesus chose a mortal life and married Mary Magdalene. But it should also be remembered for David Bowie's role as Pontius Pilate, the coldly pragmatic governor of Judea, who comes to Jesus in prison, where he is awaiting his crucifixion.
Though Bowie's role in the movie is limited, his embodiment of an anti-revolutionary bureaucrat trying to reason Jesus out of changing the world is chilling.
"Labyrinth" (1986) - Jareth the Goblin King
His role as Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson's 1986 classic, Labyrinth, is no doubt Bowie's most recognizable film role. In addition to lending his music to the movie in a series of sequences that amount to high-budget music videos,
Bowie's iconic makeup, explosive hair, and flamboyant outfits—all ruffles and leather and prominent bulges—make him an alluring and disturbing villain as he attempts to seduce a teenage girl into abandoning her baby brother. Truly unforgettable.
"The Man Who Fell to Earth" (1976) - The Visitor
The Man Who Fell to Earth is the film that proved David Bowie's bona fides as a movie star. Bowie plays "the visitor," also known as Thomas Jerome Newton. A possible alien driven mad by life on earth, and also a cold, wealthy aristocrat in business-like attire, Newton operated as a blend of Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, allowing Bowie to tap into his the fragile power of his personas.
It's a disjointed sci-fi narrative that only works because it centers David Bowie's strange charisma.
But Bowie remained a great admirer of Warhol, whose play Pork was a major source of inspiration for much of Bowie's work as he entered his glam rock phase. And that admiration was never more evident than in 1996 when Bowie was brought in to play the artist in director Julian Schnabel's biopic of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
In the role of Basquiat's mentor, Bowie donned the artist's iconic wig, and disappeared Warhol's subdued, idiosyncratic mannerisms. As unmistakable as Bowie is, it becomes easy to forget you're not watching the real Warhol.
Nearly five years after David Bowie's death, a movie like Stardust may not be able to bring him back to life, but fans looking to resurrect the icon can find him in all his shocking variety, not just in his music, but in these memorable film roles.
David Blaine Endurance Event - Tower Bridge. After A Night Of Torment Whenhis Cage Was Rocked Violently By An Attacker David Blaine Goes Back To His Stretching Routine.
Photo by Glenn Copus/Evening Standard/Shutterstock
This week, magician and death-defying early-2000s icon David Blaine failed to escape our planet's inexorable hold.
In April of 1999, Blaine performed his first public feat of endurance along riverside drive in New York City, being buried alive in a see-through coffin beneath a three-ton tank of water. On the surface it was like a flashy publicity stunt to get his name out, but it seems Blaine's true intention was to amplify the latent mystical abilities he had previously displayed by performing card tricks for stranger on the street.
After seven days shut off from the world—subsisting on a liquid diet, with no means to communicate and barely enough room to scratch his nose, he emerged from his coffin and announced to the world that he had succeeded. He had induced in himself a prophetic insight.
According to Blaine, he had "a vision of every race, every religion, every age group banding together." But he has since made it clear that this statement was either pure fabrication or a lie of overwhelming omission—he saw what was coming, and has been trying to get away.
Two decades later, our society is more divided than ever, and tearing itself apart along the very lines Blaine noted. If there is a ray of hope for the survival of our species, it remains a faint pinprick at the end of a long, dark tunnel, and David Blaine is doing his best to find himself a shortcut—or perhaps just to give up on humanity altogether.
Frozen in Time (2000)
In November of 2000—the year following his epiphanic dream—Blaine attempted to freeze himself alive in a block of ice in Times Square in a "stunt" called Frozen in Time. Perhaps inspired by the show Futurama—wherein the main character is frozen in the year 2000, and revived 1,000 years in the future—Blaine remained encased in ice for two-and-a-half days.
If he hadn't been extracted to avoid the risk of shock and death, perhaps he could have survived in cryogenic stasis while the world crumbled around him. Maybe he would have lived to see that harmonious distant future of his vision.
Drowned Alive (2006)
In may of 2006, Blaine may have taken notes from Kevin Kostner's ability to survive as a fish-man in the climate collapse of 1995's Waterworld and focused on escaping the apocalyptic fate on the surface by developing his ability to live beneath the ocean. In Drowned Alive, Blaine spent a full week living a bubble of salt water in the middle of Lincoln Square.
Afterwards, researchers at Yale studied him to assess the physiological effects of living underwater. He did not develop gills.
Revolution (2006)
In November of that year, Blaine may have seen a DVD copy of 1997's Contact, in which Jodie Foster is teleported through space and time after being suspended from a crane and dropped into a mysterious device comprised of concentric spinning rings.
In Revolution, David Blaine returned to the Times Square area, where he was suspended from a crane within a device comprised of concentric spinning rings. He remained suspended for more than two days, but failed to teleport through time and space.
The Oprah Winfrey Show (2008)
Having failed to open a portal to a better world, David Blaine returned to his oceanic ambitions. On an April 2008 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, he broke a world record by holding his breath for more than 17 minutes.
It was an impressive achievement, but still a good deal shy of his ultimate goal of living underwater permanently.
Dive of Death (2008)
In September of 2008, in a last ditch effort to warn humanity of the darkness that was coming, Blaine collaborated with Donald Trump on a "stunt" tellingly given the dual name The Upside Down Man and Dive of Death. It involved Blaine hanging upside down for 60 hours over Central Park's Wollman Rink.
As with everything that Donald Trump touches, the whole thing turned out to be largely a sham—with Blaine taking a break every hour. Unfortunately, America failed to take the clear message from this and went on to elect a president for whom up is down—a man who is currently propelling our nation's full-speed dive of death.
Electrified: One Million Volts Always On (2012)
In October of 2012—after Donald Trump had achieved political prominence through the "birtherism" movement questioning Barack Obama's origins—it was clear that the path forward was unavoidable. David Blaine turned once again to movies from the previous decade, and was inspired by Christopher Nolan's 2006 film The Prestige, in which Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie) invents a method for cloning/teleporting a human being by placing them in the middle of a powerful electrical field.
So Blaine took another shot at teleportation, with Electrified: One Million Volts Always On, surrounding himself with high-voltage Tesla coils for three straight days. He even had musicians like Pharrell Williams, Reggie Watts, and Andrew W.K. play with the coils in an effort to find the right resonant frequency to warp the fabric of space. It may turn out that there is a storage unit packed full of drowned Blaine-clones, but it seems he did not succeed in teleporting anywhere.
Ascension (2020)
Which brings us to September of 2020. With the disastrous end times unfolding all around us, David Blaine is becoming truly desperate to escape. No longer drawing inspiration from his collection of sci-fi DVDs, he seems to be turning to Pixar—with 2009's Up! seemingly providing the seed for Ascension. Hanging on to a colorful bouquet of enormous helium balloons, Blaine lifted off from the surface of the earth, floating toward space.
Helium is famously so lightweight that, when released, it escapes the Earth's atmosphere entirely and floats into the void. As a result, the planet's supply of the gas—vital for various medical purposes—is quickly running out. From that perspective, it might seem like a waste to use an enormous volume of Helium just to float above an Arizona desert. But not if Blaine was trying to join the helium in its aimless journey.
Was he hoping to float in isolation through the galaxy like Le Petit Prince? With an estimated net worth of $40 million, could David Blaine not afford a SpaceX trip to the moon? What did he witness in his prophecy back in 1999 that would drive him to such lengths to escape? How much worse are things going to get?
Whatever the case may be, Blaine once again failed to escape humanity's doom. At 24,900 feet—in the troposphere, far short of the edge of space—Earth's surly bonds reasserted themselves, and he would go no higher. Blaine was left with no choice but to release the balloons and skydive back down to our increasingly hellish planet.
Maybe, at long last, Blaine has given up on escaping. Maybe he has resigned himself to watching his dark, secret prophecy come true. And maybe, if we're all very lucky, we will manage to survive 2020 and live to see the Utopian vision he claims to have seen in that coffin back in 1999. Fingers crossed...
Swinton, who stars in acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's short film The Human Voice—premiering Thursday at the Venice Film Festival—has said that she doesn't think of herself as an actor. Despite a long career of "saying 'Yes, I'll dress up and be in your film,'" she says that "when I hear proper actors talking about their lives and how they approach their work, I feel like I'm up another tree."
Venezia 77: il discorso di Tilda Swinton Leone d'Oro alla Carrierawww.youtube.com
Swinton opened her acceptance speech for the prestigious award with similar humility, noting what a challenge it was "to accept this overwhelming honor with a straight face." She went on to thank the event's organizers for holding the festival amid the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting to "inevitable ch-ch-changes" (a reference to David Bowie's "changes"), and closed with the statement, "Wakanda Forever. Nothing but love."
In a masterclass session as part of the festival on Thursday morning, Swinton praised the Berlin Film Festival's recent decision to drop gendered awards from their 2021 schedule, saying, "It just makes me sad to call yourself definitively heterosexual, definitively homosexual, definitively male, definitively female. It makes me want to go to sleep. So bravo, Berlin."
Swinton, who has played a number of characters who do not conform to heteronormative standards—including her breakout role was as the androgynous lead in 1992's Orlando—added that "the whole idea of being fixed in any way, it just makes me claustrophobic."
The organizers of Berlin International Film Festival, one of the "Big Five" festivals along with Venice, Cannes, Sundance, and TIFF, announced in late August that they would be opting for neutral "Best Leading Performance" and "Best Supporting Performance" awards in 2021. The decision won praise from actor Cate Blanchett and French director Claire Denis earlier this week.
The Australian actor—who played a version of Bob Dylan in 2007's I'm Not There, said on Wednesday, "I am of the generation where the word actress was used almost always in a pejorative sense. So I claim the other space." While Denis noted that the gendered awards preclude people who do not identify as either gender.
But, considering the fact that those gaps have persisted through more than 90 years of Best Actor and Best Actress awards at the Oscars, it's understandable that Swinton, Blanchett, and others are looking to the gender-neutral option as a next step in progress. As Swinton put it, "I think it's pretty much inevitable that everybody will follow. It's just obvious to me."
It was reported on Saturday that rock legend Little Richard had died in Tennessee at the age of 87.
Born Richard Penniman, Little Richard became famous as a pioneer of rock music in the 1950s, with a series of hits from "Tutti Frutti" to "Long Tall Sally" and "Good Golly Miss Molly." His gospel-inflected singing with energetic piano and gibberish lyrics became emblematic of the era's music, and the iconic rasp of his versatile voice has been emulated by many, but never matched.
Beyond his music, his flamboyant, gender-bending style (originally intended to make him non-threatening to white men) would go on to be a foundation of the Rock aesthetic, inspiring musicians from Prince to Elton John, David Bowie, and beyond.
Considered one of the first black musicians to become a crossover success—appealing to white audiences as well as black—Little Richard worked with musicians like Chuck Berry, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and he helped to launch the career of Jimi Hendrix—who played in his band, the Upsetters, and said, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice." Over multiple decades Penniman's Born Again Christianity—to which he converted in 1957—resulted in a complex relationship with music, drug use, and sexuality. At various points he defined himself as either gay or "omnisexual," while at other times he denounced homosexuality as "unnatural," and "contagious."
Through multiple departures and subsequent returns to the music world, Little Richard remained popular and influential and continued performing into his 80s. He was among the first group of inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it opened in 1986, and his contributions to music will live on for generations, both in his memorable hits and in his massive influence on icons like Otis Redding and James Brown.
Responding to his death, Mick Jagger wrote on Twitter, "When we were on tour with him I would watch his moves every night and learn from him how to entertain and involve the audience and he was always so generous with advice to me. He contributed so much to popular music. I will miss you Richard, God bless." And fellow early-rock icon Jerry Lee Lewis said of Penniman's passing, "It is with a heavy heart that I ask for prayers for the family of my lifelong friend and fellow rocker 'Little Richard. He will live on always in my heart with his amazing talent and his friendship! He was one of a kind and I will miss him dearly."
Space and music work quite well together (indeed, the space opera is a genre in and of itself).
Our desire to connect and commune with extraterrestrials—despite the many, many risks this entails—has frequently melted into our music, intertwining with our longing to connect with others and to find meaning in and beyond the limits of our world.
Now that we have proof of aliens via the Pentagon, and because signs of life were just detected on Venus, and particularly because we're all longing for escape during this terrifying time on Earth, could there be a better time to sing out in an attempt to reach the extraterrestrial realm?
In that spirit, this playlist is an adventure through space and time. Featuring everything from early cosmic psychedelic musings of Pink Floyd to modern moon and alien-themed ballads by luminaries like Grimes and FKA Twigs, these songs explore different aspects of humanity's desire to learn more about the cosmos and ourselves.
Through these songs, step on a UFO, fly to the moon and ultimately float all the way out to outer space itself. You might just find yourself changed when you touch back down to earth.
Tom DeLonge Talks Angels & Airwaves, Alien Existence with Kevin & Beanwww.youtube.com
