When Was the Pinnacle of Saturday Night Live? A YouTuber Watches One Episode from Each Season & Reports Back

in Television | June 4th, 2021

How do we eval­u­ate a show like Sat­ur­day Night Live? And to what, exact­ly, can it be com­pared? Before its “lack­lus­ter” debut on Octo­ber 11,1975, noth­ing quite like it exist­ed on tele­vi­sion, and since that debut, every­thing resem­bling SNL exists because of SNL. The show has launched a few dozen careers, but it has also been a ver­i­ta­ble com­e­dy grave­yard. Co-founders Lorne Michaels and Dick Eber­sol both quit at dif­fer­ent times, both after beg­ging NBC to move to pre-record­ed con­tent because SNL’s pro­duc­tion sched­ule is so gru­el­ing. Whether or not its for­mu­la works dur­ing any giv­en episode, it’s tru­ly unlike any oth­er show on tele­vi­sion.

Giv­en its unique, and in recent decades, social­ly vaunt­ed, place in pop­u­lar cul­ture, we gen­er­al­ly judge Sat­ur­day Night Live by com­par­ing it to itself — or to ear­li­er iter­a­tions of itself, when it was fun­ner, edgi­er, less for­mu­la­ic, pan­der­ing, or what­ev­er the cur­rent crit­i­cism hap­pens to be. Is this a fair stan­dard? Are expec­ta­tions for the show’s polit­i­cal rel­e­vance or com­ic con­sis­ten­cy too high? The lack of any seri­ous com­pe­ti­tion for the time slot means that SNL exists in a league of its own. The stan­dards we apply to it are nec­es­sar­i­ly sub­jec­tive, and sub­ject to change giv­en chang­ing social cli­mate and the show’s increas­ing top­i­cal­i­ty.

“So much of what Sat­ur­day Night Live want­ed to be, or what I want­ed it to be when it began, was cool,” says Eber­sol. Try stay­ing cool for 45 years. So why do we still care? Maybe because every­one born in the last few decades has nos­tal­gic mem­o­ries of a gold­en age of SNL that just hap­pened to coin­cide with their ado­les­cence. But nos­tal­gia, says YouTu­ber Drew Good­en above, “is a drug that caus­es us to mis­con­strue our mem­o­ries.” We want Sat­ur­day Night Live to be “good again,” by which we mean fun­ny in ways it was. But mea­sur­ing its good­ness inde­pen­dent­ly of mem­o­ry proves dif­fi­cult.

Rather than assum­ing, as so many view­ers do, that the show peaked in the past (say the ear­ly 80s) and has steeply declined since then, Good­en hypoth­e­sizes that an accu­rate graph of its qual­i­ty might just as well look like a jagged line full of peaks and val­leys over the decades. Sat­ur­day Night Live, that is to say, has always been con­sis­tent­ly full of great moments and ter­ri­ble ones — with­in the same sea­son and often the same episode. It’s in the very nature of live TV that some ideas work and oth­ers don’t on the day, and the sketch­es and char­ac­ters we remem­ber from our youth may not hold up well ten, twen­ty, thir­ty, even forty years lat­er.

Good­en decid­ed to with­hold judg­ment on the over­all qual­i­ty curve of Sat­ur­day Night Live, his favorite show, before putting in the time and effort to watch at least one episode from every year in its run. See how the show comes out in his esti­ma­tion after the exper­i­ment. He may not change anyone’s mind about the best, and worst, sea­sons, episodes, cast mem­bers, and hosts. But he does demon­strate an admirable will­ing­ness to dig into SNL’s his­to­ry and give years of com­e­dy pos­i­tive­ly anti­quat­ed by 21st cen­tu­ry stan­dards a fair shake.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live: Behind-the Scenes Videos Reveal How the Icon­ic Com­e­dy Show Gets Made

Clas­sic Punk Rock Sketch­es from Sat­ur­day Night Live, Cour­tesy of Fred Armisen

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

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Why Do Tech Billionaires Make for Good TV Villains? Pretty Much Pop #93 Considers “Made for Love,” et al.

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | May 31st, 2021

The tech genius has become the go-to bad guy in recent films: They’re our mod­ern mad sci­en­tists with all imag­in­able resources and sci­ence at their com­mand, able to release dystopic tech­nol­o­gy to sur­veil, con­trol, and pos­si­bly mur­der us. Even Lex Luthor was made into a “tech bro” in Bat­man v. Super­man.

Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an dis­cuss the HBO Max series Made for Love star­ring Cristin Mil­i­oti, as well as Alex Gar­land’s Devs, Mike Judge’s Sil­i­con Val­ley, and Jed Rothestein’s doc­u­men­tary WeWork: Or the Mak­ing and Break­ing of a $47 Bil­lion Uni­corn. How does this trope work in com­e­dy vs. seri­ous media? How does it relate to real-life tech moguls? Can women be vil­lains of this sort, or is a cri­tique of tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty part of this sort of depic­tion?

To learn more, read what we read:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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How to Shop Online & Check Your E‑Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates

in History, Technology, Television | May 18th, 2021

“Links between com­put­ers and tele­vi­sion sets are, it is always threat­ened, about to her­ald in an age of unbe­liev­able con­ve­nience,” announces tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Tony Bastable in the 1984 clip above, “where all the socia­bil­i­ty of going down to your cor­ner shop to order the week’s gro­ceries will be replaced with an order over the air­waves.” Do tell. Live though we increas­ing­ly do with inter­net-con­nect­ed “smart TVs,” the only unfa­mil­iar-sound­ing part of that pre­dic­tion is its ref­er­ence to tele­vi­sion sets. But back then, most every home com­put­er used them as dis­plays, and when also plugged into the tele­phone line they grant­ed users the pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able abil­i­ty to make instant finan­cial trans­ac­tions at any hour of the day or night, with­out leav­ing the house.

Mun­dane though it sounds now that many of us both do all our work and get all our enter­tain­ment online, pay­ing bills was a draw for ear­ly adopters, who could come from unlike­ly places: Not­ting­ham, for instance, the Not­ting­ham Build­ing Soci­ety being one of the first finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the world to offer online bank­ing to its mem­bers.

Clos­er to Thames Head­quar­ters, North Lon­don cou­ple Pat and Julian Green appear in the clip above to demon­strate how to use some­thing called “e‑mail.” But first they must hook up their modem and con­nect to Pres­tel (a nation­al online net­work that in the Unit­ed King­dom played some­thing like the role Mini­tel did in France), an “extreme­ly sim­ple” process that will look ago­niz­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed to any­one who grew up in the age of wi-fi.

I myself grew up using the TRS-80 Mod­el 100, an ear­ly lap­top inher­it­ed from my technophile grand­fa­ther. Bastable whips out the very same com­put­er in the seg­ment above, shot dur­ing Data­base’s trip to Japan. “The big advan­tage of a piece of equip­ment like this is to be able to cou­ple it up back to my home base over the tele­phone line using one of these,” he says from his seat on a train, hold­ing up the acoustic cou­pler designed to con­nect the Mod­el 100 direct­ly to a stan­dard hand­set, in this case the pay phone in the front of the car­riage. Alas, Bastable finds that “none of us have got enough change to make the call to Eng­land,” forc­ing him to check his mes­sages from his hotel room instead. Would that I could send him a vision of my effort­less expe­ri­ence con­nect­ing to wi-fi onboard a train cross­ing South Korea just yes­ter­day. The future, to coin a phrase, is now.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

How France Invent­ed a Pop­u­lar, Prof­itable Inter­net of Its Own in the 80s: The Rise and Fall of Mini­tel

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

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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Rick Steves Tells the Story of Fascism’s Rise & Fall in Germany

in History, Politics, Television, Travel | May 14th, 2021

“Healthy, vig­or­ous, respectable: every­one’s favorite uncle.” How many of us hear these words and think of that most beloved of all Amer­i­can trav­el-tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ties, Rick Steves? Indeed, in the video above they’re spo­ken by Steves, though to describe a fig­ure very dif­fer­ent from him­self: Adolf Hitler, who con­vinced his peo­ple not to tour Europe but to invade it, spark­ing the dead­liest con­flict of all time. How and why this hap­pened has been a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion writ­ten about per­haps more volu­mi­nous­ly than any oth­er. But the Stevesian method of under­stand­ing demands first-hand expe­ri­ence of Ger­many, the land in which the Nazi par­ty came to pow­er.

Hence “Ger­many’s Fas­cist Sto­ry,” a 2020 episode of Rick Steves’ Europe whose itin­er­ary includes such des­ti­na­tions as Nurem­berg, site of the epony­mous Nazi ral­lies; Hitler’s moun­tain retreat in Bercht­es­gaden; the Gestapo and SS head­quar­ters in Berlin. We’re a long way indeed from Steves’ usu­al cir­cuit of cathe­drals, mar­kets, and bed-and-break­fasts.

Enriched with the his­tor­i­cal footage and the reflec­tions of Ger­man inter­vie­wees, this trav­el­ogue explains the rise in the 1930s and fall in the 1940s of a pow­er­ful Euro­pean strain of fas­cism. This man­i­fest­ed in pop­u­lar capit­u­la­tion to race-based, nation­al­is­tic, and ulti­mate­ly total­i­tar­i­an state pow­er, not just in Ger­many but oth­er coun­tries also once regard­ed as the cen­ter of Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion.

We all know how World War II end­ed, and the blue-jeaned Steves sums up the rel­e­vant chap­ter of the sto­ry while stand­ing atop the under­ground bunker in which Hitler killed him­self. But such a defeat can nev­er tru­ly be con­sid­ered final, an idea that under­lies the con­tin­u­ing encour­age­ment of tourism to places like Berlin’s Memo­r­i­al to the Mur­dered Jews of Europe and the con­cen­tra­tion camp of Auschwitz-Birke­nau, which fig­ures briefly into this episode despite being locat­ed in Poland. As any ded­i­cat­ed “Rick­nick” knows, the pur­suit of any giv­en cul­tur­al or his­tor­i­cal inter­est inevitably leads the trav­el­er through a vari­ety of lands. Hence a project like The Sto­ry of Fas­cism, Steves’ hour­long doc­u­men­tary on that ide­ol­o­gy’s traces as found all through­out his favorite con­ti­nent. As he him­self has put it, trav­el is a polit­i­cal act — and it’s one nec­es­sary to under­stand­ing both the pol­i­tics you like and the pol­i­tics you don’t.

For those inter­est­ed in how Steves built his trav­el empire, we’d rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to Guy Raz’s lengthy inter­view with Steves, one episode in his How I Built This pod­cast.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 9 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

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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Electronic Music Pioneer Wendy Carlos Demonstrates the Moog Synthesizer on the BBC (1970)

in Music, Technology, Television | May 6th, 2021


We can break pop­u­lar music into two peri­ods: before the Moog and after the Moog. Upon its debut in 1964, that syn­the­siz­er made a big splash in the small but long-estab­lished elec­tron­ic-music world by, among oth­er inno­v­a­tive qual­i­ties, being small­er than an entire room. Over the next few years, inven­tor Bob Moog (whose pre­vi­ous line was in theremins) refined his epony­mous brain­child to the point that it became acces­si­ble to com­posers not already on the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy. But for Wendy Car­los, the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy was where she’d spent most of her life; hence her abil­i­ty to cre­ate the first best­selling all-Moog album, 1968’s Switched-On Bach.

By the begin­ning of the 1970s, great pub­lic curios­i­ty had built up about these new music-mak­ing machines, thanks to Car­los’ work as well as that of com­posers like the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop’s Daphne Oram. It was the BBC that pro­duced the clip above, in which Car­los explains the fun­da­men­tals of not just the Moog but sound syn­the­sis itself.

She even plays a bit of the sec­ond move­ment of Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­to #4, Car­los’ ren­di­tion of which on Switch-On Bach’s fol­low-up The Well-Tem­pered Syn­the­siz­er moved no less an author­i­ty than Glenn Gould to call it “the finest per­for­mance of any of the Bran­den­burgs — live, canned, or intu­it­ed — I’ve ever heard.”

In this footage, more than half a cen­tu­ry old as it is, only an evi­dent skill at oper­at­ing the Moog and under­stand­ing of the prin­ci­ples of syn­the­siz­ers sug­gest Car­los’ iden­ti­ty. At that time in her career she was still known as Wal­ter Car­los, and she has since spo­ken of hav­ing main­tained that image by apply­ing a pair of fake side­burns for pub­lic appear­ances. (She would return to the BBC to do anoth­er Moog demon­stra­tion as Wendy nine­teen years lat­er.) Today one dares say those mut­ton chops look a bit obvi­ous, but it isn’t as a mas­ter of dis­guise that Car­los has gone down in his­to­ry. Rather, her work has showed the way for gen­er­a­tions of musi­cians, well out­side of cam­pus lab­o­ra­to­ries, to make use of elec­tron­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed sounds in a man­ner that res­onates, as it were, with the wider lis­ten­ing pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Com­pos­er Wendy Car­los Demo an Orig­i­nal Moog Syn­the­siz­er (1989)

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, “the Record of the Decade” (1968)

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Bob Moog Demon­strates His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Moog Mod­el D Syn­the­siz­er

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

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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Muhammad Ali Explains Why He Refused to Fight in Vietnam: “My Conscience Won’t Let Me Go Shoot My Brother… for Big Powerful America” (1970)

in History, Sports, Television | May 5th, 2021

In April of 1967, Muham­mad Ali arrived at the U.S. Armed Forces Exam­in­ing and Entrance Sta­tion in Hous­ton, Texas. “Stand­ing beside twen­ty-five oth­er nerve-racked young men called to the draft,” writes David Rem­nick at The New York­er, Ali “refused to respond to the call of ‘Cas­sius Clay!’” Offered the choice of going to Viet­nam or to jail, he chose the lat­ter “and was sen­tenced to five years in prison and released on bail.” Ali lost his title, his box­ing license, his pass­port, and — as far as he knew at the time — his career. He was new­ly mar­ried with his first child on the way.

When Ali refused to go to Viet­nam, he was “already one of America’s great­est heavy­weights ever,” notes USA Today. “He’d won an Olympic gold medal for the Unit­ed States in Rome when he was just 18 and four years lat­er, against all odds, defeat­ed Son­ny Lis­ton to win his first title as world cham­pi­on.” Ali, it seemed, could do no wrong, as long as he agreed to play a role that made Amer­i­cans com­fort­able. He refused to do that too, becom­ing a Mus­lim in 1961, chang­ing his name in 1964, and speak­ing out in his inim­itable style against racism and Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism.

Ali stood on prin­ci­ple as a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor at a time when resist­ing the Viet­nam War made him extreme­ly unpop­u­lar. Sports Illus­trat­ed called him “anoth­er dem­a­gogue and an apol­o­gist for his so-called reli­gion” and pro­nounced that “his views of Viet­nam don’t deserve rebut­tal.” Tele­vi­sion host David Susskind called him “a dis­grace to his coun­try” and even Jack­ie Robin­son felt Ali was “hurt­ing… the morale of a lot of young Negro sol­diers over in Viet­nam.”

Robin­son gave voice to a sen­ti­ment one hears often from crit­ics of polit­i­cal­ly out­spo­ken ath­letes: “Cas­sius has made mil­lions of dol­lars off of the Amer­i­can pub­lic, and now he’s not will­ing to show his appre­ci­a­tion to a coun­try that’s giv­ing him, in my view, a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty.” But the coun­try also gave Ali the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take his case to the Supreme Court, as his lawyer told Howard Cosell in the ABC news seg­ment at the top. “Ali had no inten­tion of flee­ing to Cana­da,” DeNeen L. Brown writes at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “but he also had no inten­tion of serv­ing in the Army.”

Ali strung togeth­er a liv­ing giv­ing speak­ing engage­ments at anti-war events around the coun­try for the next few years as he fought the ver­dict. It was hard­ly the liv­ing he’d made as cham­pi­on. But “my con­science won’t let me go shoot my broth­er, or some dark­er peo­ple, or some poor hun­gry peo­ple in the mud for big pow­er­ful Amer­i­ca,” he said. “And shoot them for what? They nev­er called me [the N word], they nev­er lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nation­al­i­ty, rape and kill my moth­er and father…. Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor peo­ple? Just take me to jail.”

Ali remained promi­nent­ly in the pub­lic eye through­out his appeal. He had become a “fix­ture on the TV talk show cir­cuit in the pre­ca­ble days of the 1960s and ‘70s,” writes Stephen Battaglio in a LA Times review of the recent doc­u­men­tary Ali & Cavett. He remained so dur­ing his hia­tus from box­ing thanks in no small part to Dick Cavett, who had Ali on fre­quent­ly for every­thing from “seri­ous dis­cus­sions of race rela­tions in the U.S. to play­ful con­fronta­tions aimed at pro­mot­ing fights.” Cavett’s show “pro­vid­ed a com­fort zone for Ali, espe­cial­ly before he became a beloved fig­ure.” And it gave Ali a forum to counter pub­lic slan­der. In the clip above from 1970, he talks about how his sac­ri­fices made him a cred­i­ble role mod­el for trou­bled young peo­ple.

He seems at first to com­pare him­self to ear­ly Amer­i­can pio­neers, Japan­ese kamikaze pilots, and the first astro­nauts when Cavett asks him about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of going to jail, but his point is that he thinks he’s pay­ing a small price com­pared to what oth­ers have giv­en up for progress — “We’ve been in jail 400 years,” he says. “The sys­tem is built on war.” The fol­low­ing year, the Supreme Court would dis­miss the case against him, swayed by the argu­ment that Ali opposed all war, not just the war in Viet­nam. He saw Cavett as a wor­thy spar­ring part­ner, help­ing the late-night host earn a place on Nixon’s list of ene­mies. It would become a place of hon­or in the com­ing years as Ali won back his career, his rep­u­ta­tion, and his title in the “Rum­ble in the Jun­gle” four years lat­er, and the Viet­nam War became a cause for nation­al shame.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Muham­mad Ali Gives a Dra­mat­ic Read­ing of His Poem on the Atti­ca Prison Upris­ing

“Muham­mad Ali, This Is Your Life!”: Cel­e­brate Ali’s Life & Times with This Touch­ing 1978 TV Trib­ute

When Jack John­son, the First Black Heavy­weight Cham­pi­on, Defeat­ed Jim Jef­fries & the Footage Was Banned Around the World (1910)

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

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Kermit the Frog Gives a TED Talk About Creativity & the Power of “Ridiculous Optimism”

in Creativity, TED Talks, Television | May 4th, 2021

In 2015, 3.8 bil­lion years after “cre­ativ­i­ty emerged” out of “sheer­est empti­ness,” Ker­mit the Frog was tapped to give a talk on cre­ativ­i­ty at TEDx­Jack­son.

How did a local, one-day event man­age to snag such a glob­al icon?

Roots.

The famed frog’s cre­ator, Jim Hen­son, spent his first decade in Mis­sis­sip­pi (though Ker­mit was born of a ping pong ball and Henson’s mother’s old coat after the fam­i­ly relo­cat­ed to Mary­land.)

The con­fer­ence took place 15 years after Henson’s untime­ly death, leav­ing Ker­mit to be ani­mat­ed by Steven Whit­mire, the first of two pup­peteers to tack­le a role wide­ly under­stood to be Henson’s alter ego.

The voice isn’t quite the same, but the man­ner­isms are, includ­ing the throat clear­ing and crum­pled facial expres­sions.

Also present are a num­ber of TED Talk tropes, the smart phone prompts, the dark stage, pro­jec­tions designed to empha­size pro­found points.

A num­ber of jokes fail to elic­it the expect­ed laughs … we’ll leave it up to you to deter­mine whether the fault lays with the live audi­ence or the mate­r­i­al. (It’s not easy being green and work­ing blue comes with chal­lenges, too.)

Were he to give his TED Talk now, in 2021, Ker­mit prob­a­bly wouldn’t describe the audience’s col­lec­tive deci­sion to “accept a premise, sus­pend our dis­be­lief and just enjoy the ride” as a “con­spir­a­cy of crazi­ness.”

He might bypass a bina­ry quote like “If neces­si­ty is the moth­er of inven­tion, then cre­ativ­i­ty is the father.”

He’d also be advised to steer clear of a pho­to of Miss Pig­gy dressed as a geisha, and secure her con­sent to share some of the raci­er anec­dotes… even though she is a known atten­tion hog.

He would “tran­scend and include” in the words of philoso­pher Ken Wilber, one of many inspi­ra­tions he cites over the course of his 23-minute con­sid­er­a­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty and its ori­gins, attempt­ing to answer the ques­tion, “Why are we here?”

Also ref­er­enced: Michelan­ge­lo, Albert Ein­stein, Sal­vador Dali, Charles Baude­laire, Zen mas­ter Shun­ryū Suzu­ki, math­e­mati­cian Alfred North White­head, author and edu­ca­tor, Sir Ken Robin­son (who appears, briefly) and of course, Hen­son, who applaud­ed the “ridicu­lous opti­mism” of fling­ing one­self into cre­ative explo­rations, unsure of what one might find.

He can’t wan­der freely about the stage, but he does share some stir­ring thoughts on col­lab­o­ra­tion, men­tors, and the impor­tance of main­tain­ing “beginner’s mind,” free of pre-con­cep­tions.

How to cul­ti­vate beginner’s mind?

Try fast for­ward­ing to the 11:11 mark. Watch for 20 sec­onds. It’s the purest invi­ta­tion to believe since Peter Pan begged us to clap Tin­ker Bell back to life.

Do you? Because Ker­mit believes in you.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Wit­ness the Birth of Ker­mit the Frog in Jim Henson’s Live TV Show, Sam and Friends (1955)

Watch Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Per­form “Rain­bow Con­nec­tion” with Ker­mit the Frog on The Mup­pet Show (1981)

Jim Henson’s Com­mer­cials for Wilkins Cof­fee: 15 Twist­ed Min­utes of Mup­pet Cof­fee Ads (1957–1961)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Has TV Rotted Our Minds? On Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast/Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Crossover)

in Philosophy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | April 29th, 2021

Mar­shall McLuhan famous­ly said “The medi­um is the mes­sage,” by which he meant that when we receive infor­ma­tion, its effect on us is deter­mined as much by the form of that infor­ma­tion as by the actu­al con­tent.

Neil Post­man, in his 1985 book Amus­ing Our­selves to Death: Pub­lic Dis­course in the Age of Show Busi­ness, ran with this idea, argu­ing that TV has con­di­tioned us to expect that every­thing must be enter­tain­ing, and that this has had a dis­as­trous effect on news, pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion, and think­ing in gen­er­al.

In this dis­cus­sion, your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Bri­an Hirt join with the rest of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life crew: Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey and Wes Alwan.

The result is much more philo­soph­i­cal con­text than you’d get in a typ­i­cal Pret­ty Much Pop dis­cus­sion. Pla­to, for exam­ple, argued (through the char­ac­ter of Socrates) in the Phae­drus against writ­ing, which he said amounts to off-load­ing thought to this inert thing, when it should be live­ly in our minds and our direct con­ver­sa­tions. Post­man’s book describes the Age of Print as high­ly con­ge­nial toward lengthy, abstract rea­son­ing. High lit­er­a­cy rates, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Amer­i­ca, con­di­tioned peo­ple to expect that this is how infor­ma­tion is to be received, and as such they were, for instance, pre­pared to lis­ten rapt­ly to the Lin­coln-Dou­glas debates in which the speak­ers pro­vid­ed lawyer­ly speech­es that might span mul­ti­ple hours.

Post­man, an edu­ca­tion­al the­o­rist, described tele­vi­sion as not just pro­vid­ing a no-con­text expe­ri­ence whose high lev­el of visu­al and audi­to­ry stim­u­la­tion beats its spec­ta­tors into thought­less pas­siv­i­ty, but that its pop­u­lar­i­ty pos­i­tive­ly infects all the oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels avail­able. Of course there is still in-per­son teach­ing, but tele­vi­sion short­ens atten­tion spans such that teach­ers now feel the need to con­stant­ly enter­tain instead of forc­ing stu­dents to make the effort required to attend care­ful­ly to what they have to teach. Of course there are still books, but they are less read, and the com­pe­ti­tion of tele­vi­sion for our time has changed the pre­sen­ta­tion with­in books so that they must be as imme­di­ate­ly and con­sis­tent­ly appeal­ing as tele­vi­sion.

McLuhan described tele­vi­sion as a “hot” medi­um due to its high lev­el of stim­u­la­tion, where a “cool” one like a text­book requires more active par­tic­i­pa­tion of the recip­i­ent. We dis­cuss how Post­man’s cri­tique fares in the Age of the Inter­net, which inter­est­ing­ly mix­es things up, with more inter­ac­tiv­i­ty (in that sense cool­er) yet even more pos­si­bil­i­ty for sen­so­ry dis­trac­tion (in that per­haps more impor­tant sense hot­ter). To sup­ple­ment Post­man, we also con­sult­ed a wide­ly read arti­cle from The Atlantic writ­ten by Nicholas Carr in 2008 called “Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid.”

For more philo­soph­i­cal touch­points, see the post for this dis­cus­sion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes an equal­ly long sec­ond part that you can access by sup­port­ing Pret­ty Much Pop at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by sup­port­ing The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life at partiallyexaminedlife.com/support. Lis­ten to a pre­view of part two.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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