Bill Murray & Gilda Radner Deliver the Laughs in Two 1970s Skits for National Lampoon

in Comedy, Music, Radio, Television | December 23rd, 2016

Bill Mur­ray is Amer­i­ca’s kind­liest, most eccen­tric, best known sec­u­lar elf, spread­ing joy through­out the year, as he treats strangers to impromp­tu birth­day ser­e­nades, poet­ry read­ings, and bach­e­lor par­ty toasts.

How will younger fans, who’ve nev­er been exposed to the brash Mur­ray of yore, react to his late 70s San­ta, above, for the “Nation­al Lam­poon Radio Hour”? This Grinch is a spir­i­tu­al fore­fa­ther of such depart­ment store bad­dies as Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton and that guy from A Christ­mas Sto­ry.

For­get about Flexy the Pock­et Mon­key… Murray’s sham-Claus glee­ful­ly denies even the hum­blest of sweet-voiced lit­tle Gil­da Rad­ner’s requests — a Nerf Ball and a Pez dis­penser.

Sat­ur­day Night Live fans of a cer­tain vin­tage may detect more than a hint of Lisa Loopner’s boyfriend Todd De LaMu­ca in Murray’s vocal char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. Instead of Noo­gies, he sends Rad­ner gig­gling through “the trap door.”

Man, these two had chem­istry!

They revis­it­ed the sce­nario in a hol­i­day sketch for Sat­ur­day Night Live’s 3rd sea­son, with San­ta down­grad­ed from “evil” to “drunk­en.”

Murray’s “Kung Fu Christ­mas” for the Nation­al Lam­poon Radio Hour’s 1974 Christ­mas show, above, makes a smooth vin­tage chas­er.

In addi­tion to Rad­ner, col­lab­o­ra­tors here include Paul Shaf­fer, Christo­pher Guest, and Bil­l’s broth­er Bri­an Doyle-Mur­ray, a lily white line up unthink­able in 2016.

The lyrics and silky vocal stylings con­jure visions of a dis­co-grit­ty yule­tide New York, where “every race has a smile on its face.”

This time Rad­ner gets to do the reject­ing, in an extend­ed spo­ken word inter­lude that finds Christo­pher Guest show­er­ing her with offers rang­ing from a house in the South of France to a glass-bot­tomed boat. (“Didn’t you like that Palomi­no horse I bought you last year?”)

Mur­ray who con­tin­ued to explore his musi­cal urges with his SNL char­ac­ter, Nick the Lounge Singer, was replaced by David Hur­don when “Kung Fu Christ­mas” was record­ed for 1975’s Good-bye Pop album.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bill Mur­ray, the Strug­gling New SNL Cast Mem­ber, Apol­o­gize for Not Being Fun­ny (1977)

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

Stan Lee Reads “The Night Before Christ­mas,” Telling the Tale of San­ta Claus, the Great­est of Super Heroes

Bill Mur­ray Reads Great Poet­ry by Bil­ly Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Man­gu­so

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Radio Garden Lets You Instantly Tune into Radio Stations Across the Entire Globe

in Radio | December 22nd, 2016

radio-garden_0

A pret­ty cool project.

Pick a place on the globe. Any place. Then tune in and hear what’s play­ing on the radio in that loca­tion.

The ser­vice is called Radio Gar­den, and here’s what it’s essen­tial­ly all about:

By bring­ing dis­tant voic­es close, radio con­nects peo­ple and places. Radio Gar­den allows lis­ten­ers to explore process­es of broad­cast­ing and hear­ing iden­ti­ties across the entire globe. From its very begin­ning, radio sig­nals have crossed bor­ders. Radio mak­ers and lis­ten­ers have imag­ined both con­nect­ing with dis­tant cul­tures, as well as re-con­nect­ing with peo­ple from ‘home’ from thou­sands of miles away – or using local com­mu­ni­ty radio to make and enrich new homes.

While Radio Gar­den lets you tune into broad­casts across dif­fer­ent geo­gra­phies, anoth­er ser­vice pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on OC–Radiooooo–lets you hear radio broad­casts across time. That is, his­tor­i­cal broad­casts.

Between the two ser­vices, you’ll be cov­ered spa­tial­ly and tem­po­ral­ly. What more could you want?

Update: Radio Gar­den is now appar­ent­ly avail­able as an app on Google and Apple.

via Boing Boing

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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George Orwell’s Life & Literature Presented in a 3‑Hour Radio Documentary: Features Interviews with Those Who Knew Orwell Best

in History, Literature, Politics, Radio | December 20th, 2016

via Wikimedia Commons

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Say you find your­self in a one-par­ty state that promis­es to dis­man­tle every civ­il insti­tu­tion you believe in and tram­ple every eth­i­cal prin­ci­ple you hold dear. You may feel a lit­tle despon­dent. While a “this too shall pass” atti­tude may help you gain per­spec­tive, the prob­lem isn’t sim­ply that you’re on the los­ing side of a polit­i­cal con­test. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, total author­i­tar­i­an con­trol means that “Who con­trols the past con­trols the future. Who con­trols the present con­trols the past.” The epis­temic base­line you took for grant­ed may become increas­ing­ly, fright­en­ing­ly elu­sive as the rul­ing par­ty reshapes all of real­i­ty to its designs.

With more vivid clar­i­ty than per­haps any­one since, Orwell char­ac­ter­ized the mech­a­nisms by which total­i­tar­i­an­ism takes hold. His 1948 nov­el has not only giv­en us a near-uni­ver­sal set of terms to describe the phe­nom­e­non, but it also gives us a met­ric: when our soci­ety begins to resem­ble Orwell’s dystopia in per­va­sive and alarm­ing ways, we should know with­out ques­tion things have gone bad­ly wrong. Whether we can do much about it is anoth­er ques­tion, but we should remem­ber that Orwell him­self was not sim­ply an arm­chair observ­er of Fas­cism, Sovi­et total­i­tar­i­an­ism, or oppres­sive Eng­lish colo­nial rule. He fought Franco’s forces in Spain dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War and as a jour­nal­ist wrote crit­i­cal arti­cles and essays expos­ing hypocrisies and abus­es of law and lan­guage. The impact of his work on lat­er gen­er­a­tions speaks for itself.

In the CBC radio doc­u­men­tary The Orwell Tapes, in three parts here, we have a com­pre­hen­sive intro­duc­tion to Orwell’s work, thought, and life. It opens with alarm­ing sound­bites from light­ning rods (and vil­lains or heroes, depend­ing on who you ask) Julian Assange and Edward Snow­den. But it doesn’t stray into the clichéd ter­ri­to­ry of over­heat­ed con­spir­a­cy those names often inspire. Instead we’re large­ly treat­ed through­out each episode to first­hand accounts of the sub­ject from those who knew him well.

“CBC is the only media orga­ni­za­tion in the world,” says host Paul Kennedy, “with a com­pre­hen­sive archive of record­ings fea­tur­ing peo­ple who knew Orwell, from his ear­li­est days, to his final moments. 75 peo­ple, 50 hours of record­ings.” Edit­ed snip­pets of these audio record­ings make up the bulk of The Orwell Tapes, hence the title, mak­ing the pro­gram oral his­to­ry rather than sen­sa­tion­al­ism. The inter­vie­wees include friends, for­mer girl­friends, com­rades-in-arms, and crit­i­cal oppo­nents. Each episode’s page on the CBC site fea­tures a list of names and rela­tions to Orwell at the bot­tom.

But of course, accu­sa­tions of sen­sa­tion­al­ism always fol­low those who warn of Orwellian trends and ten­den­cies. Like many of our con­tem­po­raries, Orwell was a con­tra­dic­to­ry fig­ure. He served as a colo­nial police­man in Bur­ma even as he grew dis­gust­ed with Empire; he con­sid­ered him­self a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist, but he nev­er looked away from the author­i­tar­i­an hor­rors of state com­mu­nism; and he has been held up as a pil­lar of resis­tance to state sur­veil­lance and con­trol, even as he also stands accused of “nam­ing names.” But the over­all impres­sion we get from Orwell’s friends and col­leagues is that he was ful­ly committed—to writ­ing, to polit­i­cal engage­ment, to telling the truth as he saw it.

In releas­ing The Orwell Tapes this month, the CBC gives us five rea­sons why Orwell “is still very much with us today.” Some of these—modern sur­veil­lance, the cor­rup­tions of pow­er (and the pow­er of corruption)—will be famil­iar, as will num­ber 3, a vari­a­tion on what we’ve come to call “empa­thy” for one’s oppo­nent. The 4th rea­son, CBC notes, is the renewed rel­e­vance of social­ism as a viable alter­na­tive to cap­i­tal­ist pre­da­tion. And final­ly, we have the con­tin­ued dan­ger of speak­ing truth to pow­er, and to those who serve it reli­gious­ly, uncrit­i­cal­ly, and often vio­lent­ly. As Orwell wrote in the pref­ace to Ani­mal Farm, “If lib­er­ty means any­thing at all, it means the right to tell peo­ple what they don’t want to hear.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

George Orwell Tries to Iden­ti­fy Who Is Real­ly a “Fas­cist” and Define the Mean­ing of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writ­ing Clear and Tight Prose

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

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Hear a Great 4‑Hour Radio Documentary on the Life & Music of Jimi Hendrix: Features Rare Recordings & Interviews

in Music, Radio | December 15th, 2016

The lega­cy of Jimi Hendrix’s estate has been in con­flict in recent years. Since his father’s death in 2002, his sib­lings have squab­bled over his mon­ey and bat­tled unli­censed and boot­leg venders. But Hendrix’s musi­cal lega­cy con­tin­ues to amaze and inspire, as Janie Hen­drix—his step­sis­ter and CEO of the com­pa­ny that man­ages his music—has released album after album of rar­i­ties over the last cou­ple decades. Not all of these releas­es have pleased Hen­drix fans, who have called some of them mer­ce­nary and thought­less. But it is always a joy to dis­cov­er an unheard record­ing, whether a live per­for­mance, wob­bly stu­dio out­take, or semi-pol­ished demo, so many of which reveal the ter­ri­to­ry Hen­drix intend­ed to chart before he died.

In 1982, some of that unre­leased mate­r­i­al made it into a four-hour Paci­fi­ca Radio doc­u­men­tary, which you can hear in four parts here. Pro­duced by what the sta­tion calls “some of Pacifica’s finest” at its Berke­ley “flag­ship sta­tion 94.1 FM,” the doc­u­men­tary does an excel­lent job of plac­ing these record­ings in con­text.

With help from Hen­drix biog­ra­ph­er David Hen­der­son, the pro­duc­ers com­piled “pre­vi­ous­ly unheard and rare record­ings” and inter­views from Hen­drix, his fam­i­ly, Noel Red­ding, Ornette Cole­man, Ste­vie Won­der, John Lee Hook­er, John McLaugh­lin, Chas Chan­dler, and more. After a new­ly-record­ed intro­duc­tion and a col­lage of Hen­drix inter­view sound­bites, Part 1 gets right down to it with a live ver­sion of “Are You Expe­ri­enced?” that puls­es from the speak­ers in hyp­not­ic waves (lis­ten to it on a sol­id pair of head­phones if you can).

“I want to have stereo where the sound goes up,” says Hen­drix in a sound­bite, “and behind and under­neath, you know? But all you can get now is across and across.” Some­how, even in ordi­nary stereo, Hen­drix had a way of mak­ing sound sur­round his lis­ten­ers, envelop­ing them in warm fuzzy waves of feed­back and reverb. But he also had an equal­ly cap­ti­vat­ing way with lan­guage, and not only in his song lyrics. Though the received por­trait of Hen­drix is of a shy, retir­ing per­son who expressed him­self bet­ter with music, in many of these inter­views he weaves togeth­er detailed mem­o­ries and whim­si­cal dreams and fan­tasies, com­pos­ing imag­i­na­tive nar­ra­tives on the spot. Sev­er­al extem­po­ra­ne­ous lines could have eas­i­ly flow­ered into new songs.

Hen­drix briefly tells the sto­ry of his rise through the R&B and soul cir­cuit as an almost effort­less glide from the ranks of strug­gling side­men, to play­ing behind Sam Cooke, Lit­tle Richard, and Ike and Tina Turn­er to start­ing his solo career. We move through the most famous stages of Hen­drix’s life, with its icon­ic moments and cau­tion­ary tales, and by the time we get to Part 4, we start hear­ing a Hen­drix most peo­ple nev­er do, a pre­view of where his music might have gone into the seventies—with jazzy pro­gres­sions and long, wind­ing instru­men­tal pas­sages pow­ered by the shuf­fling beats of Bud­dy Miles.

As has become abun­dant­ly clear in the almost four decades since Hen­drix’s death, he had a tremen­dous amount of new music left in him, stretch­ing in direc­tions he nev­er got to pur­sue. But the bit of it he left behind offers proof of just how influ­en­tial he was not only on rock gui­tarists but also on blues and jazz fusion play­ers of the fol­low­ing decade. His pio­neer­ing record­ing style (best heard on Elec­tric Lady­land) also drove for­ward, and in some cas­es invent­ed, many of the stu­dio tech­niques in use today. Process­es that can now be auto­mat­ed in min­utes might took hours to orches­trate in the late six­ties. Watch­ing Hen­drix mix in the stu­dio “was like watch­ing a bal­let,” says pro­duc­er Elliot Maz­er.

This doc­u­men­tary keeps its focus square­ly on Hen­drix’s work, phe­nom­e­nal tal­ent, and unique­ly inno­v­a­tive cre­ative thought, and as such it pro­vides the per­fect set­ting for the rare and then-unre­leased record­ings you may not have heard before. Paci­fi­ca re-released the doc­u­men­tary last year as part of its annu­al fundrais­ing cam­paign. The sta­tion is again solic­it­ing funds to help main­tain its impres­sive archives and dig­i­tize many more hours of tape like the Hen­drix pro­gram, so stop by and make a dona­tion if you can.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band” for The Bea­t­les, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)

Jimi Hen­drix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Gui­tar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Bud­dy Guy & B.B. King

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view on Sep­tem­ber 11, 1970: Lis­ten to the Com­plete Audio

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

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A Complete Reading of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Pacifica Radio, 1975

in Audio Books, Literature, Radio | December 8th, 2016

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were strik­ing thir­teen.” Thus, with one of the best-known open­ing sen­tences in all Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, begins George Orwell’s 1984, the nov­el that even 67 years after its pub­li­ca­tion remains per­haps the most oft-ref­er­enced vision of total­i­tar­i­an­is­m’s takeover of the mod­ern West­ern world. Its fable-like pow­er has, in fact, only inten­si­fied over the decades, which have seen it adapt­ed into var­i­ous forms for film, tele­vi­sion, the stage (David Bowie even dreamed of putting on a 1984 musi­cal), and, most often, the radio.

In recent years we’ve fea­tured radio pro­duc­tions of 1984 from 1949, 1953, and 1965. On their pro­gram From the Vault, the Paci­fi­ca Radio net­work has just fin­ished bring­ing out of the archives their own 1975 broad­cast of the nov­el as read by morn­ing-show host Charles Mor­gan.

Nei­ther an all-out radio dra­ma nor a straight-ahead audio­book-style read­ing, Paci­fi­ca’s 1984 uses sound effects and voice act­ing (some con­tributed by June For­ay, of Rocky and Bull­win­kle fame) to tell the sto­ry of Win­ston Smith and his inner and out­er strug­gle with the repres­sive, all-see­ing, lan­guage-dis­tort­ing gov­ern­ment of the super­state of Ocea­nia (and the city of Airstrip One, for­mer­ly known as Eng­land) that sur­rounds him.

It makes sense that Paci­fi­ca would put the whole of Orwell’s dire nov­el­is­tic warn­ing on the air­waves. Found­ed just after World War II by a group of for­mer con­sci­en­tious objec­tors, its first sta­tion, KPFA in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, began broad­cast­ing in the year of 1984’s pub­li­ca­tion. As it grew over sub­se­quent decades, the lis­ten­er-fund­ed Paci­fi­ca radio net­work gained a rep­u­ta­tion for both its polit­i­cal engage­ment and its uncon­ven­tion­al uses of the medi­um. (The Fire­sign The­ater, the troupe that arguably per­fect­ed the art of the dense, mul­ti-lay­ered stu­dio com­e­dy album, got their start at Paci­fi­ca’s Los Ange­les sta­tion KPFK.) Every era, it seems, pro­duces its own 1984, and this one sounds as res­o­nant in the 21st cen­tu­ry — a time even Orwell dared not imag­ine — as it must have in the 1970s.

You can hear Part 1 of Paci­fi­ca’s 1984 at the top of the post, then fol­low these links to all ten parts on their Sound­cloud page: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Hear George Orwell’s 1984 Adapt­ed as a Radio Play at the Height of McCarthy­ism & The Red Scare (1953)

Hear a Radio Dra­ma of George Orwell’s 1984, Star­ring Patrick Troughton, of Doc­tor Who Fame (1965)

George Orwell’s 1984 Staged as an Opera: Watch Scenes from the 2005 Pro­duc­tion in Lon­don

David Bowie Dreamed of Turn­ing George Orwell’s 1984 Into a Musi­cal: Hear the Songs That Sur­vived the Aban­doned Project

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear J.G. Ballard Stories Adapted as Surreal Soundscapes That Put You Inside the Heads of His Characters

in Literature, Radio, Sci Fi | October 24th, 2016

ballard_02

Image by Thier­ry Erhmann via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“This enor­mous nov­el we’re liv­ing inside thrives on sen­sa­tion,” J.G. Bal­lard once said. “It needs sen­sa­tion to sus­tain itself.” The author of nov­els like High-Rise, Crash, and Empire of the Sun knew how to deliv­er a cer­tain kind of tex­tu­al sen­sa­tion, and he often under­scored (as first evi­denced by his exper­i­men­tal text col­lages) that he pos­sessed a com­mand of visu­al sen­sa­tion as well. Bal­lard’s use of son­ic sen­sa­tion has tak­en longer to gain a wide appre­ci­a­tion, but the BBC has fur­thered that cause with two new radio dra­mas adapt­ing his sto­ries “Track 12” and “Venus Smiles.”

These pro­duc­tions debuted togeth­er this past week­end on “Between Bal­lard’s Ears,” an episode of the pro­gram Between the Ears, which for twen­ty years has show­cased “inno­v­a­tive and thought-pro­vok­ing fea­tures that make adven­tur­ous use of sound and explore a wide vari­ety of sub­jects.” They both make use of a tech­nol­o­gy called bin­au­r­al audio, sound record­ed just as humans hear it. The process involves an arti­fi­cial head with micro­phones embed­ded in each ear, the indus­try-stan­dard mod­el of which comes from a com­pa­ny called Neu­mann. (You can see a gallery of the cast and crew of “Between Bal­lard’s Ears” using, and hang­ing out with, their own Neu­mann head here.)

All this has the effect of putting you, the head­phone-wear­ing radio-dra­ma lis­ten­er, right into not just the set­ting of the sto­ry but into the very head of the char­ac­ter — in the case of J.G. Bal­lard, as any of his fans know, a trou­bling place indeed. We hear 1958’s “Track 12” from with­in the head of Maxted, a for­mer ath­lete turned com­pa­ny man invit­ed over to the home of Sher­ing­ham, the bio­chem­istry pro­fes­sor he’s been cuck­old­ing. Sher­ing­ham sits Maxted, and us, down to lis­ten to his great­ly slowed and ampli­fied “microson­ic” record­ings of cells divid­ing and pins drop­ping. We won­der, as Maxted won­ders, when the inevitable con­fronta­tion will come, though none of us can fore­see what form Sher­ing­ham’s revenge will take.

“Venus Smiles,” which Bal­lard first wrote in 1957 and rewrote in 1971, takes place in his fic­tion­al desert resort town of Ver­mil­lion Sands. This sto­ry opens with the instal­la­tion of a new piece of pub­lic art, a “musi­cal sculp­ture” that makes me think of the Tri­fo­ri­um in Los Ange­les. But unlike the lone­ly Tri­fo­ri­um, neglect­ed and ignored for most of its his­to­ry, this sculp­ture caus­es pan­de­mo­ni­um from day one, pip­ing out quar­ter-tone com­po­si­tions pleas­ing to the ears of the Mid­dle East, but appar­ent­ly not to those of Ver­mil­lion Sands. When one com­mis­sion­er trans­plants the hat­ed sculp­ture to his back­yard, it reveals its true nature: much more com­pli­cat­ed than that of a big music box, and much more inter­est­ing to hear besides. As much as the bin­au­r­al pro­duc­tion will make you feel like you’re stand­ing right there beside it, Bal­lard makes you feel relieved, as the sto­ry goes on, that you’re actu­al­ly not.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Very First Film of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Star­ring Bal­lard Him­self (1971)

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

J.G. Bal­lard on Sen­sa­tion

J.G. Ballard’s Exper­i­men­tal Text Col­lages: His 1958 For­ay into Avant-Garde Lit­er­a­ture

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming–Two Masters of Suspense–Talk with One Another in Rare 1958 Audio

in Literature, Radio | October 14th, 2016

In the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the red-blood­ed read­ing man in Amer­i­ca and Britain each had a char­ac­ter on whom he could rely to have vivid, in their sep­a­rate ways exot­ic, and on a cer­tain lev­el some­how relat­able adven­tures on the page: Philip Mar­lowe in the for­mer, and James Bond in the lat­ter. Ray­mond Chan­dler’s luck­less Los Ange­les pri­vate detec­tive and Ian Flem­ing’s always impec­ca­bly kit­ted-out agent on Her Majesty’s Secret Ser­vice would seem at first to have lit­tle in com­mon, but when their cre­ators got togeth­er on the BBC’s Third Pro­gramme in 1958, they had a lot to talk about.

Chan­dler, two decades Flem­ing’s senior and then in the final year of his life, had seen bet­ter days. “This once-hand­some man was, at the age of 66, a wreck,” says the announc­er in a pref­ace to this 1988 re-broad­cast, “depressed, alco­holic, writ­ten out. But he was lion­ized, and one of his new friends was Ian Flem­ing, whose Bond nov­els he’d been the first to appre­ci­ate. He reviewed Dia­monds Are For­ev­er in the Sun­day Times, pro­vid­ing the kind of seri­ous crit­i­cism he want­ed him­self, and in 1956, in a let­ter to Flem­ing, Chan­dler said, ‘I did not think that I did quite do you jus­tice in my review of your book, because any­one who writes as dash­ing­ly as you ought, I think, to try for a lit­tle high­er grade.”

This mix of praise and crit­i­cism from the elder writer invig­o­rat­ed Flem­ing, who prompt­ly redou­bled his efforts in Bond­craft. Two years lat­er, osten­si­bly to pro­mote his sev­enth nov­el (and, it turned out, his last) Play­back, the Lon­don-raised Chan­dler joined Flem­ing on the air to talk about British and Amer­i­can thrillers. “In Amer­i­ca, a thriller or mys­tery sto­ry writer is slight­ly below the salt,” com­plains Chan­dler, who’d pre­ced­ed this morn­ing record­ing ses­sion with whisky. “You can write a very lousy, long his­tor­i­cal nov­el full of sex and it can be a best­seller, it can be treat­ed respect­ful­ly. But a very good thriller writer who writes far, far bet­ter just gets a lit­tle para­graph — that’s all.”

The two go on to dis­cuss where they get their mate­r­i­al, how to write vil­lains (“I don’t think I ever in my own mind think any­body is a vil­lain,” says Chan­dler when Flem­ing brings up the dif­fi­cul­ty of cre­at­ing such char­ac­ters), the emer­gence of heroes (Flem­ing first intend­ed Bond as “a sort of blank instru­ment wield­ed by a gov­ern­ment depart­ment”), the secrets of lit­er­ary pro­duc­tiv­i­ty (Flem­ing took two months off in Jamaica from his Sun­day Times job each year to write anoth­er book), the mechan­ics of gang­land killings, and whether they have any­body they per­son­al­ly want to shoot (Chan­dler does, reply­ing only that “I just thought they’d be bet­ter dead,” when Flem­ing asks why).

And what, at bot­tom, does Dia­monds Are For­ev­er’s kind of writ­ing and The Big Sleep’s kind of writ­ing real­ly have in com­mon? “We both like mak­ing fun­ny jokes,” says Flem­ing. Toward the end of this broad­cast, now the sole extant record­ing of Chan­dler’s voice, the cre­ator of Philip Mar­lowe leaves us with some wise words in addi­tion: “A solemn thriller is real­ly rather a bore.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray­mond Chandler’s Ten Com­mand­ments for Writ­ing a Detec­tive Nov­el

Ray­mond Chan­dler Denounces Strangers on a Train in Sharply-Word­ed Let­ter to Alfred Hitch­cock

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

Watch Ray­mond Chandler’s Long-Unno­ticed Cameo in Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty

James Bond: 50 Years in Film (and a Big Blu-Ray Release)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Marshall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buckminster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Modern Technology & Media (1971)

in Art, Radio, Television, Theatre | October 4th, 2016

45 years ago, four emi­nences took the stage at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to: Irish actor Jack Mac­Gowran, best known for his inter­pre­ta­tions of Samuel Beck­ett; Eng­lish poet and drama­tist W.H. Auden; Amer­i­can archi­tect and the­o­rist of human­i­ty’s way of life Buck­min­ster Fuller; and Cana­di­an lit­er­ary schol­ar turned media tech­nol­o­gy ora­cle Mar­shall McLuhan. Now only did all four men come from dif­fer­ent coun­tries, they came from very dif­fer­ent points on the intel­lec­tu­al and cul­tur­al map. The CBC record­ed them for broad­cast on its long-run­ning series Ideas, pref­ac­ing it with an announce­ment that “the osten­si­ble sub­ject of their dis­cus­sion is the­atre and the visu­al arts.”

Key word: osten­si­ble. “That top­ic is soon for­got­ten as two modes of per­cep­tion clash,” says the announc­er, “that of Pro­fes­sor McLuhan, who is one of the most famous inter­preters of con­tem­po­rary 20th-cen­tu­ry cul­tur­al trends, and that of W.H. Auden, who cheer­ful­ly admits to being ‘a 19th-cen­tu­ry man’ and sees no rea­son to change.” And so, though Fuller and Mac­Gowan do occa­sion­al­ly pro­vide their per­spec­tive, the pan­el turns into a rol­lick­ing debate between McLuhan and Auden, more or less from the point where the for­mer — mak­ing one of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly com­pelling procla­ma­tions — declares that mod­ern media brings us to a world in which “there is no audi­ence. There are only actors.” But the lat­ter objects: “I pro­found­ly dis­ap­prove of audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion.”

By the ear­ly 1970s, tele­vi­sion had long since found its way into homes all across Amer­i­ca, Cana­da, and Britain, but the thinkers of the time had only just begun to grap­ple with its con­se­quences. “We’ve just seen Apol­lo 14, which has some visu­al effects going with it. It’s a new type of the­ater, obvi­ous­ly,” says McLuhan, draw­ing one of many audi­ence laughs. On the sub­ject of tele­vi­sion’s con­fla­tion of fact and fic­tion, Auden does­n’t mince words: “I think TV is a very, very wicked medi­um. That’s all I can say.” McLuhan empha­sizes that, as a pro­fes­sion­al observ­er of these phe­nom­e­na, “I have stead­fast­ly reserved moral judg­ment on all media mat­ters.” Auden: “I don’t.”

Yet the author of The Age of Anx­i­ety and the author of The Guten­berg Galaxy turn out to have more in com­mon than their con­flict might sug­gest. Both in their 60s by the time of this dis­cus­sion (“Thank God I can remem­ber the world before World War I,” says the poet) and both 1930s con­verts to Catholi­cism, they also both har­bored deep sus­pi­cions of tech­nolo­gies like tele­vi­sion. Auden, who insists he would nev­er dream of owing a TV set him­self, seems to look down on it as mere­ly low­brow, but McLuhan has dark­er sus­pi­cions: “You are miss­ing the name of the game, sir. You are actu­al­ly imag­in­ing that those lit­tle images you see on TV are TV. They are not. What is TV is that fire stream pour­ing out of that tube into your gut.”

Even while pre­dict­ing still-unheard-of advances in tele­vi­su­al tech­nol­o­gy (at one point attempt­ing to engage Mac­Gowran on “the imme­di­ate prospect of four- and five-dimen­sion­al TV”), McLuhan also fore­sees it as the poten­tial spark for such cat­a­clysms as a glob­al race war, going so far as to sug­gest that “if you want to save a fan­tas­tic blood­bath on this plan­et, which will be very trau­mat­ic, very cathar­tic, and very trag­ic — in the Greek sense — we turn off TV total­ly. For good.” Auden, of course, actu­al­ly approves of that par­tic­u­lar idea of McLuhan’s, though he evinces lit­tle opti­mism about its fea­si­bil­i­ty. “Why won’t it hap­pen?” asks McLuhan. “Because peo­ple like the damn things,” he replies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing (1976)

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

W.H. Auden Recites His 1937 Poem, ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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