Self-Encounter: The 10-Episode TV Show That Introduced Existentialism to Americans in 1961

in Philosophy, Television | May 6th, 2022

“Exis­ten­tial­ism is both a phi­los­o­phy and a mood,” says Hazel Barnes by way of open­ing the tele­vi­sion series Self-Encounter: A Study in Exis­ten­tial­ism. “As a mood, I think we could say that it is the mood of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry — or, at least, of those peo­ple in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry who are dis­con­tent with things as they are. It express­es the feel­ing that, some­how or oth­er, all of those sys­tems — whether they be social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, or sci­en­tif­ic — which have attempt­ed to define and explain and deter­mine man, have some­how missed the liv­ing indi­vid­ual per­son.”

Exis­ten­tial­ism was on the rise in 1961, when Barnes spoke those words, and the sub­se­quent six decades have arguably done lit­tle to assuage its dis­con­tent. By the time of Self-Encounter’s broad­cast in ’61, Barnes was already well-known in philo­soph­i­cal cir­cles for her Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Noth­ing­ness. When she took on that job, with what she lat­er described as “three years of bad­ly taught high school French and one year­long course in col­lege, and a bare min­i­mum of back­ground in phi­los­o­phy,” she could­n’t have known that it would set her on the road to becom­ing the most famous pop­u­lar­iz­er of exis­ten­tial­ism in Amer­i­ca.

Five years after the pub­li­ca­tion of Barnes’ Sartre trans­la­tion, along came the oppor­tu­ni­ty to host a ten-part series on Nation­al Pub­lic Edu­ca­tion­al Tele­vi­sion (a pre­de­ces­sor of PBS) explain­ing Sartre’s thought as well as that of oth­er writ­ers like Simone de Beau­voir, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright, between drama­ti­za­tions of scenes drawn from exis­ten­tial­ist lit­er­a­ture. Self-Encounter was once “thought to be entire­ly lost, the orig­i­nal tapes hav­ing been report­ed record­ed over,” writes Nick Nielsen. But after the series’ unex­pect­ed redis­cov­ery in 2017, all of its episodes grad­u­al­ly made their way to the web. You can watch all ten of them straight through in the near­ly five-hour video at the top of the post, or view them one-by-one at the Amer­i­can Archive of Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing.

“Self Encounter was pro­duced in 1961 and first broad­cast in 1962,” Nielsen writes. “I can­not help but note that Route 66 aired from 1960 to 1964, The Out­er Lim­its aired from 1963 to 1965, Rawhide aired from 1959 to 1965, and Per­ry Mason aired from 1957 to 1966” — not to men­tion The Twi­light Zone, from 1959 to 1964. “It would be dif­fi­cult to name anoth­er tele­vi­sion milieu of com­pa­ra­ble depth. Our men­tal image of this peri­od of Amer­i­can his­to­ry as being one of sti­fling con­for­mi­ty is belied by these dark per­spec­tives on human nature.” And as for the social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, and of course tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems in effect today, the exis­ten­tial­ists would sure­ly take a dim view of their poten­tial to lib­er­ate us from con­for­mi­ty — or any oth­er aspect of the human con­di­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Exis­ten­tial­ism with Hubert Drey­fus: Five Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Albert Camus’ Exis­ten­tial­ism, a Phi­los­o­phy Mak­ing a Come­back in Our Dys­func­tion­al Times

The Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist Philoso­pher, Revis­it­ed in 1984 Doc­u­men­tary

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Exis­ten­tial­ist Phi­los­o­phy of Jean-Paul Sartre… and How It Can Open Our Eyes to Life’s Pos­si­bil­i­ties

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Experience Seinfeld’s Famous “Soup Nazi” Scenes With & Without Laugh Tracks

in History, Television | May 2nd, 2022

For a twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry tele­vi­sion fan, watch­ing old net­work sit­coms can take some get­ting used to. Noth­ing about them takes more get­ting used to than their laugh tracks, which must strike any­one who did­n’t grow up hear­ing them as utter­ly bizarre. But was it real­ly so long ago that we took for grant­ed — nay, expect­ed — an erup­tion of pre-record­ed laugh­ter after each and every punch line? As late as the nine­teen-nineties, even sit­coms well-regard­ed for their sophis­ti­ca­tion and sub­ver­sive­ness added “canned laugh­ter” to their sound­tracks. Take Sein­feld, the show famous­ly “about noth­ing,” scenes from one of whose episodes you can watch with­out a laugh track in the video above.

The episode in ques­tion is one of Sein­feld’s best-known: “The Soup Nazi,” orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast on NBC on Novem­ber 2, 1995. These scenes por­tray Jer­ry, George and Elaine’s encoun­ters with the title fig­ure, a harsh soup-restau­rant pro­pri­etor based on Ali “Al” Yeganeh, own­er of Soup Kitchen Inter­na­tion­al in New York. (Unaware of the char­ac­ter’s real-life coun­ter­part, actor Lar­ry Thomas based his per­for­mance on that of Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Ara­bia.)

With the laugh track cut out, the main char­ac­ters’ inter­ac­tions with each oth­er reach heights of near-sur­re­al awk­ward­ness, to say noth­ing of their con­fronta­tions with the Soup Nazi and his rigid order­ing rules.

The resul­tant ten­sion, unbro­ken by the trans­plant­ed guf­faws heard in the orig­i­nal scenes above, would become the stock in trade of lat­er sit­coms like the impro­vi­sa­tion-based Curb Your Enthu­si­asm, star­ring Sein­feld co-cre­ator Lar­ry David. But that show could only have exist­ed under the per­mis­sive­ness of a pre­mi­um cable chan­nel like HBO; on NBC, the lega­cy of the laugh track would be upheld for some years. After all, laugh tracks had been in use since the ear­ly nine­teen-fifties, dur­ing tele­vi­sion’s tran­si­tion away from all-live broad­cast­ing to the meth­ods of pre-pro­duc­tion used for prac­ti­cal­ly all dra­ma and com­e­dy still today. Even then, live stu­dio audi­ences were becom­ing a thing of the past — but the exploita­tion of tele­vi­sion’s pow­er to gen­er­ate arti­fi­cial feel­ings of com­mu­ni­ty had only just begun.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sein­feld & Noth­ing­ness: A Super­cut of the Show’s Emp­ti­est Moments

How Sein­feld, the Sit­com Famous­ly “About Noth­ing,” Is Like Gus­tave Flaubert’s Nov­els About Noth­ing

Jacques Der­ri­da on Sein­feld: “Decon­struc­tion Doesn’t Pro­duce Any Sit­com”

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Theme Song Gets the Sein­feld Treat­ment

David Lynch Made a Dis­turb­ing Web Sit­com Called Rab­bits: It’s Now Used by Psy­chol­o­gists to Induce a Sense of Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis in Research Sub­jects

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Birth of the Blues Brothers: How Dan Aykroyd & John Belushi Started Introducing a New Generation to the Blues

in Comedy, Music, Television | April 20th, 2022

What were the Blues Broth­ers? A com­e­dy sketch? A par­o­dy act? A real band? A celebri­ty soul artist trib­ute? All of the above, yes. The musi­cal-comedic duo of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi turned a ludi­crous begin­ning in bum­ble bee cos­tumes — not dark suits, fedo­ras, and Ray-Bans — into a musi­cal act that “exposed a gen­er­a­tion to the bril­liance of blues and soul leg­ends like John Lee Hook­er and Aretha Franklin,” as Dar­ren Weale writes at Loud­er­sound.

That’s quite an accom­plish­ment for a cou­ple of improv come­di­ans on a fledg­ling late-night com­e­dy show that did not seem, in its first year, like it would stick around long. It was dur­ing that anar­chic peri­od when the Killer Bees became recur­ring char­ac­ters on the show, appear­ing 11 times (despite the stu­dio note, “Cut the bees,” which Lorne Michaels point­ed­ly ignored).

The bees were the first incar­na­tion of the Blues Broth­ers, two years before their actu­al debut in Sea­son 4. (See a lat­er appear­ance from that sea­son, intro­duced by Gar­rett Mor­ris, just above).

A Jan­u­ary 17, 1976 appear­ance of the bees fea­tured “Howard Shore and his All Bee Band,” con­sist­ing of “Aykroyd on the har­mon­i­ca and Belushi on vocals belt­ing out a blues clas­sic very much in the style of the future Elwood and ‘Joli­et’ Jake Blues,” notes History.com. They had the begin­nings of an act, but the look and the per­sonas would come lat­er, “dur­ing the hia­tus between SNL sea­sons two and three” in 1977, while Belushi filmed Ani­mal House in Eugene, Ore­gon and fell under the spell of local blues­man Cur­tis Sal­ga­do, future har­mon­i­ca play­er for Robert Cray.

Sal­ga­do “sure turned John on to blues music,” says Aykroyd. “He steeped him in blues cul­ture.” Sal­ga­do him­self describes how Belushi won him over on their first meet­ing: “I’m pack­ing up my harps, try­ing to break free, when he says, ‘I’m going to have Ray Charles on the show.’ ” Sal­ga­do also gave Belushi a les­son in play­ing it straight, even when he played the blues for laughs. When the com­ic per­formed the song “Hey Bar­tender” to a packed house one night, in char­ac­ter as Joe Cock­er, his men­tor gave him a post-show dress­ing down.

“He asks me, ‘What did you think?’”
“I say, ‘John, it’s Joe Cock­er.’”
‘Yes, I do Joe on Sat­ur­day Night Live.’
“I punch his chest and say, ‘You need to do this from here [point­ing at his heart] and be your­self.’ After that he didn’t mim­ic any more. He was him­self.”

Tak­ing the look of Jake and Elwood from Sal­ga­do, but devel­op­ing the char­ac­ter as his swag­ger­ing self, Belushi “came back from Ore­gon with a lust for the blues,” his wid­ow, Judith, recalls. “He had tapes in his pock­ets and went to clubs.” (See the duo play “Hey Bar­tender” at the Uni­ver­sal Amphithe­ater in 1978, below.)

The name was the brain­child of SNL musi­cal direc­tor Howard Shore (who would go on to write the Lord of the Rings film scores), who hap­pened to be present when the two con­ceived the char­ac­ters at a bar. Their 1978 debut — made over the protests of Lorne Michaels (who did­n’t get it) — made them instant stars.

Paul Shaf­fer spun their ori­gin sto­ry in his intro­duc­tion, “claim­ing that they had been dis­cov­ered in 1969 by the fic­tion­al ‘Mar­shall Check­er,” writes Men­tal Floss. He went on:

Today they are no longer an authen­tic blues act, but have man­aged to become a viable com­mer­cial prod­uct. So now, let’s join “Joli­et” Jake and his silent broth­er Elwood — the Blues Broth­ers.

With that, the nev­er-authen­tic blues act did, indeed, become a viable com­mer­cial prod­uct. “Things start­ed to move quick­ly,” Weale writes. “Record exec­u­tive Michael Klenfn­er took John and Dan to see Ahmet Ertegün at Atlantic Records. He signed the Blues Broth­ers up.” They were a real act, and two years lat­er, real movie stars with the release of John Lan­dis’ The Blues Broth­ers, a film that ful­ly deliv­ered on the duo’s com­ic promis­es, while glee­ful­ly giv­ing the spot­light away to its huge cast of soul and blues leg­ends

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aretha Franklin’s Pitch-Per­fect Per­for­mance in The Blues Broth­ers, the Film That Rein­vig­o­rat­ed Her Career (1980)

Sat­ur­day Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in Octo­ber, 1975

The Night John Belushi Cart­wheeled Onstage Dur­ing a Grate­ful Dead Show & Sang “U.S. Blues” with the Band (1980)

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

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Watch a Television Station Switch From Black & White to Color for First Time (1967)

in History, Television | April 12th, 2022

The his­to­ry of tele­vi­sion is a murky, con­vo­lut­ed affair, filled with patent wars, cor­po­rate back­stab­bing, and sto­ries of thwart­ed genius found in many such tales. The sto­ry of col­or TV can seem no less com­pli­cat­ed, with patents stretch­ing all the way back to 1904 (filed by a Ger­man inven­tor), decades before the mag­ic box appeared in any liv­ing room. The first mechan­i­cal col­or sys­tem was designed by Scot­tish inven­tor John Logie Baird in 1928.

Attempts to broad­cast col­or TV would­n’t be made until the 1950s, with the first com­mer­cial broad­cast made by CBS air­ing in 1951 on five sta­tions. Hard­ly any­one could see it. When NBC broad­cast the Tour­na­ment of Ros­es Parade in 1954, few­er than 8,500 Amer­i­can house­holds owned a col­or TV set. By April 1961, an edi­to­r­i­al in Tele­vi­sion mag­a­zine argued that col­or “is still in the egg, and only skill­ful and expen­sive han­dling will get it out of the egg and on its feet.” Need­less to say, the adop­tion of the new tech­nol­o­gy was exceed­ing­ly slow.

Rat­ings wars and adver­tis­ing wars forced col­or to come of age in the mid-60s, and as a result “col­or TV trans­formed the way Amer­i­cans saw the world, writes his­to­ri­an Susan Mur­ray at Smith­son­ian, as well as the way “the world saw Amer­i­ca.” Col­or tele­vi­sion “was, in fact, often dis­cussed by its pro­po­nents as an ide­al form of Amer­i­can post­war con­sumer vision: a way of see­ing the world (and all of its bright­ly hued goods) in a spec­tac­u­lar form of ‘liv­ing col­or.’” Col­or was explic­it­ly talked up as spec­ta­cle, though sold to con­sumers as a truer rep­re­sen­ta­tion of real­i­ty.

“Net­work exec­u­tives pitched [col­or TV] to adver­tis­ers as a unique medi­um that would inspire atten­tive­ness and emo­tion­al engage­ment,” writes Mur­ray, “mak­ing [view­ers] more like­ly to pur­chase adver­tised prod­ucts, a grow­ing myr­i­ad of con­sumer goods and appli­ances that were now avail­able in a wider set of vibrant col­ors like turquoise and pink flamin­go.” (Thanks, of course, to the advent of space-age poly­mers.) Such his­to­ry pro­vides us with more con­text for the puz­zle­ment of news­man Bob Bruner in 1967 (above), intro­duc­ing view­ers to Iowa’s Chan­nel 2 switch-over to col­or.

“I feel dou­bly hon­ored to have been cho­sen to be the first one involved in our big change,” says Bruner after chat­ting with sta­tion man­ag­er Doug Grant, “because there are so many much more col­or­ful char­ac­ters around here than this report in the news.” That year, there were char­ac­ters like Pink Floyd appear­ing for the first time on Amer­i­can Band­stand (see that footage col­orized here), their psy­che­del­ic vibran­cy mut­ed in mono­chrome.

Bruner had already been upstaged near­ly ten years ear­li­er, when NBC’s WRC-TV in Wash­ing­ton, DC intro­duced its first col­or broad­cast with Pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­how­er, who extolls the virtues of the medi­um above, in the old­est sur­viv­ing col­or video­tape record­ing. Even so, only around 25% of Amer­i­can house­holds owned a col­or TV in 1967. It would be anoth­er decade before every Amer­i­can house­hold (or every “con­sumer house­hold”) had one, and not until the mid-80s until the medi­um reached full sat­u­ra­tion around the globe.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Rod Ser­ling Turned TV Pitch­man: See His Post-Twi­light Zone Ads for Ford, Maz­da, Gulf Oil & Smokey Bear

Pink Floyd’s Debut on Amer­i­can TV, Restored in Col­or (1967)

Elvis’ Three Appear­ances on The Ed Sul­li­van Show: Watch His­to­ry in the Mak­ing and from the Waist Up (1956)

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

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The Little Prince: Footage Gets Unearthed Of the Pop Star at Age 11

in History, Music, Television | April 5th, 2022

Prince left us a vast body of work, with much rumored still to be await­ing release in his vault. But among his many albums already avail­able, I still hold in espe­cial­ly high regard For You, the debut he record­ed while still a teenag­er. Not only did he put out this first LP at an unusu­al­ly young age, he pro­duced it and played near­ly all its instru­ments. Though Prince seemed to have emerged into the world as a ful­ly formed pop-music genius, he had to come from some­where. Indeed, he came from Min­neapo­lis, a city with which he remained asso­ci­at­ed all his life. Now, near­ly six years after his death, a Min­neapo­lis tele­vi­sion sta­tion has dis­cov­ered a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown arti­fact of the Pur­ple One’s ado­les­cence.

In April 1970 the teach­ers of Min­neapo­lis’ pub­lic schools went on strike, and a reporter on the scene asked a crowd of near­by school­child­ren whether they were in favor of the pick­et­ing. “Yup,” replies a par­tic­u­lar­ly small one who’d been jump­ing to catch the cam­er­a’s atten­tion. “I think they should get a bet­ter edu­ca­tion, too.”

Not only that, “they should get some more mon­ey ’cause they be workin’ extra hours for us and all that stuff.” None of this was audi­ble to the pro­duc­er at WCCO TV, a Min­neapo­lis-native Prince fan, who’d brought the half-cen­tu­ry-old footage out of the archive in order to con­tex­tu­al­ize anoth­er teach­ers strike just last month. But in the young inter­vie­wee’s face and man­ner­isms he saw not just a local boy, but one par­tic­u­lar local boy made enor­mous­ly good.

No one who’s seen Prince in action ear­ly in his career could fail to rec­og­nize him in this long-unseen footage. But it took more than fans to con­firm his iden­ti­ty, as you can see in the WCCO news broad­cast and behind-the-scenes seg­ment here. A local Prince his­to­ri­an could pro­vide high­ly sim­i­lar pho­tographs of the star-to-be in the same year, when he would have been eleven. Even­tu­al­ly the inves­ti­ga­tion turned up a child­hood neigh­bor and for­mer band­mate named Ter­ry Jack­son, who watch­es the clip and breaks at once into laugh­ter and tears of recog­ni­tion. “That’s Skip­per!” Jack­son cries, using the nick­name by which his fam­i­ly and friends once knew him. “I nev­er referred to him as Prince. He might even have got mad at me when he got famous.” Ascend to the pan­theon of pop music, it seems, and you still can’t quite make it out of the old neigh­bor­hood.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read Prince’s First Inter­view, Print­ed in His High School News­pa­per (1976)

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

The Life of Prince in a 24-Page Com­ic Book: A New Release

Aca­d­e­m­ic Jour­nal Devotes an Entire Issue to Prince’s Life & Music: Read and Down­load It for Free

Watch Prince Per­form “Pur­ple Rain” in the Rain in His Tran­scen­dent Super Bowl Half-Time Show (2007)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How To Build a 13th-Century Castle, Using Only Authentic Medieval Tools & Techniques

in Architecture, History, Television | March 31st, 2022

It’s the rare Eng­lish­man who will read­i­ly defer to a French­man — except, of course, in the field of cas­tle-build­ing. This was true after the Nor­man Con­quest of 1066, which intro­duced French cas­tles to Britain, and it remains so today, espe­cial­ly under the demands of peri­od accu­ra­cy. In order to learn first-hand just what mate­ri­als and tech­ni­cal skills went into those might­i­est struc­tures of the Mid­dle Ages, the BBC Two series Secrets of the Cas­tle had to go all the way to Bur­gundy. There Château de Guéde­lon has been under con­struc­tion for the past 25 years, with its builders adher­ing as close­ly as pos­si­ble to the way they would have done the job back in the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, the “gold­en age of cas­tle-build­ing.”

Host­ed by his­to­ri­an Ruth Good­man along with archae­ol­o­gists Peter Ginn and Tom Pin­fold, Secrets of the Cas­tle com­pris­es five episodes that cov­er a vari­ety of aspects of the medieval cas­tle: its tools, its defense, its archi­tec­ture, its stone­ma­son­ry, and its con­nec­tions to the rest of the world.

The work of “exper­i­men­tal archae­ol­o­gy” that is Guéde­lon demands mas­tery of near­ly mil­len­nia-old build­ing meth­ods, the sim­ple inge­nious­ness of some of which remains impres­sive today. So, in our increas­ing­ly dis­em­bod­ied age, does their sheer phys­i­cal­i­ty of it all: apart from the hors­es cart­ing stone in from the quar­ry (itself a strong deter­mi­nant in the sit­ing of a cas­tle), every­thing was accom­plished with sheer human mus­cle.

Much of that man­pow­er was lever­aged with machines, often elab­o­rate and some­times amus­ing: take, for exam­ple, the pair of human-sized ham­ster wheels in which Gill and Pin­fold run in order to oper­ate a crane. Such a hard day’s work can only be fueled by a hearty meal, and so Good­man learns how to cook a sim­ple veg­etable stew. Same with how to clean and indeed craft the cook­ing pots need­ed to do so. For a cas­tle was­n’t just a for­ti­fied sym­bol of a king­dom’s strength, but a place where all man­ner of life went on, as well as a stone embod­i­ment of human knowl­edge in the Mid­dle Ages. Secrets of the Cas­tle orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2014, and since then a great deal more peri­od-accu­rate work has gone into Guéde­lon. Sched­uled for com­ple­tion next year, the cas­tle will pre­sum­ably — as long as the skills of its builders prove equal to those of their fore­bears — still be stand­ing in the 29th cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Time-Lapse Recre­ation of the Build­ing of Notre Dame (1160)

An Ani­mat­ed Video Shows the Build­ing of a Medieval Bridge: 45 Years of Con­struc­tion in 3 Min­utes

What Did Peo­ple Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cook­book Explain

A 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cook­book Fea­tur­ing 475 Recipes from Moor­ish Spain Gets Pub­lished in a New Trans­lat­ed Edi­tion

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Cen­turies: Watch the Very Painstak­ing Process Get Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Recre­at­ed

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch David Hockney Paint with Light, Using the Quantel Paintbox Graphics System (1986)

in Art, Technology, Television | March 24th, 2022

Think of the tele­vi­sion graph­ics you remem­ber from the nine­teen-eight­ies — or, per­haps more like­ly, the nine­teen-eight­ies tele­vi­sion graph­ics you’ve seen late­ly on Youtube. Much of it looks cheesy today, but some exam­ples have become appeal­ing­ly retro over the decades, and cer­tain works remain gen­uine­ly impres­sive as pieces of dig­i­tal art. Nowa­days we can, in the­o­ry, repli­cate and even out­do the finest TV imagery of the eight­ies on our com­put­ers, or even our phones. But in the days before high-pow­ered per­son­al com­put­ing, let alone smart­phones, how did such bril­liant­ly col­ored, ener­get­i­cal­ly ani­mat­ed, and some­times gen­uine­ly artis­tic graph­ics get made? The answer, nine times out of ten, was on the Quan­tel Paint­box.

Intro­duced in 1981, the Paint­box was a cus­tom-designed dig­i­tal graph­ic work­sta­tion that cost about $250,000 USD, or more than $623,000 today. To major tele­vi­sion sta­tions and net­works that mon­ey was well spent, buy­ing as it did the unprece­dent­ed­ly fast pro­duc­tion of images and ani­ma­tions for broad­cast. ”It used to be that we had a staff of artists who drew and drew,” the New York Times quotes ABC’s direc­tor of pro­duc­tion devel­op­ment as say­ing in an arti­cle on graph­ics for the 1984 Olympics.

“But with the Paint­box an artist can come up with a graph­ic in fif­teen min­utes that used to take two days.” Its capa­bil­i­ties did much to influ­ence the look and feel of that decade, for bet­ter or for worse: look­ing back, design­er Steven Heller rues its prop­a­ga­tion of “shad­ow-rid­den, faux-hand­made eight­ies aes­thet­ics.”

As a cut­ting-edge piece of hard­ware, the Paint­box was beyond the reach of most artists, due not just to its cost but also the con­sid­er­able kn0w-how required to use it. (Skilled “oper­a­tors,” as they were called, could in the eight­ies com­mand a wage of $500 per hour.) But for David Hock­ney, who was already famous, suc­cess­ful, and known for his inter­est in bright col­ors as well as new tech­nol­o­gy, the chance came in 1986 when the BBC invit­ed him to par­tic­i­pate in a tele­vi­sion series called Paint­ing with Light.  A show­case for the cre­ative poten­tial of the Paint­box, it also brought on such lumi­nar­ies as col­lage artist Richard Hamil­ton and “grand­fa­ther of Pop Art” Lar­ry Rivers, sit­ting them down at the work­sta­tion and film­ing as they exper­i­ment­ed with its pos­si­bil­i­ties.

“You’re not draw­ing on a piece of paper,” Hock­ney explains in his episode. “You’re draw­ing, actu­al­ly, direct­ly onto this TV screen where you’re see­ing it now.” By now we’ve all done the same in one way or anoth­er, but in the eight­ies the con­cept was nov­el enough to be hard to artic­u­late. Hock­ney empha­sizes that the Paint­box pro­duces “hon­est” images, in that the elec­tron­ic medi­um in which the artist works is the very same medi­um through which the view­er per­ceives that work. The eager­ness with which he takes up its ground­break­ing pres­sure-sen­si­tive sty­lus (“a bit like a kind of old-fash­ioned ball­point pen”), some­times with a cig­a­rette in the oth­er hand, shows that Hock­ney’s pen­chant for draw­ing on the iPhone and iPad over the past decade or so is hard­ly an iso­lat­ed late-career lark. Even in 1986 he under­stood what you could do with dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, and could also sense one of its prime dan­gers: you’re nev­er sure when to stop doing it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Hockney’s iPad Art Goes on Dis­play

David Hock­ney Shows Us His Sketch Book, Page by Page

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Make Art in Some Rare Vin­tage Video

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road: The Only Known Footage of the Beat Icon Reading His Work (1959)

in History, Literature, Television | March 17th, 2022

The video above shows us Jack Ker­ouac giv­ing a read­ing, accom­pa­nied by the jazz piano stylings of evening tele­vi­sion vari­ety-show host Steve Allen. In oth­er words, if you’ve been look­ing for the most late-nine­teen-fifties clip in exis­tence, your jour­ney may have come to an end. Ear­li­er in that decade, Allen says (sprin­kling his mono­logue with a few notes here and there), “the nation rec­og­nized in its midst a social move­ment called the Beat Gen­er­a­tion. A nov­el titled On the Road became a best­seller, and its author, Jack Ker­ouac, became a celebri­ty: part­ly because he’d writ­ten a pow­er­ful and suc­cess­ful book, but part­ly because he seemed to be the embod­i­ment of this new gen­er­a­tion.”

As the nov­el­ists and poets of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion were grad­u­al­ly gain­ing renown, Allen was fast becom­ing a nation­al celebri­ty. In 1954, his co-cre­ation The Tonight Show made him the first late-night tele­vi­sion talk show host, and con­se­quent­ly applied pres­sure to stay atop the cul­tur­al cur­rents of the day. Not only did he know of the Beats, he joined them, at least for one col­lab­o­ra­tion: “Jack and I made an album togeth­er a few months back in which I played back­ground piano for his poet­ry read­ing.” That was Poet­ry for the Beat Gen­er­a­tion, the first of Ker­ouac’s tril­o­gy of spo­ken-word albums that we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture back in 2015.

“At that time I made a note to book him on this show,” Allen says, “because I thought you would enjoy meet­ing him.” After answer­ing a few “square ques­tions” by way of intro­duc­tion — it took him three weeks to write On the Road, he spent sev­en years on the road itself, he did indeed type on a con­tin­u­ous “scroll’ of paper, and he would define “Beat” as “sym­pa­thet­ic” — Ker­ouac reads from the nov­el that made his name, accom­pa­nied by Allen’s piano. “A lot of peo­ple have asked me, why did I write that book, or any book,” he begins. “All the sto­ries I wrote were true, because I believed in what I saw.” This is, of course, not poet­ry but prose, and prac­ti­cal­ly essay­is­tic prose at that, but here it sounds like a lit­er­ary form all its own.

If you’d like to hear the music of Ker­ouac’s prose with­out actu­al musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment, have a lis­ten to his acetate record­ing of a half-hour selec­tion from On the Road that we post­ed last week­end. The occa­sion was the 100th anniver­sary of his birth, which else­where brought forth all man­ner of trib­utes and re-eval­u­a­tions of his work and lega­cy. 65 years after On the Road’s pub­li­ca­tion, how much resem­blance does today’s Amer­i­ca bear to the one criss­crossed by Sal Par­adise and Dean Mori­ar­ty? It’s worth con­sid­er­ing why the coun­try no longer inspires writ­ers quite like Jack Ker­ouac — or for that mat­ter, giv­en the pas­sage of his own lit­tle-not­ed cen­te­nary last Decem­ber, tele­vi­sion hosts like Steve Allen.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spo­ken-World Albums: A Sub­lime Union of Beat Lit­er­a­ture and 1950s Jazz

Jack Ker­ouac Reads Amer­i­can Haikus, Backed by Jazz Sax­o­phon­ists Al Cohn & Zoot Sims (1958)

Free: Hours of Jack Ker­ouac Read­ing Beat Poems & Verse

Jack Kerouac’s Poet­ry & Prose Read/Performed by 20 Icons: Hunter S. Thomp­son, Pat­ti Smith, William S. Bur­roughs, John­ny Depp & More

Young Frank Zap­pa Plays the Bicy­cle on The Steven Allen Show (1963)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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