Why The Wire is One of the Most Brilliant TV Shows Ever

in Television | September 21st, 2020

There were a lot of moments dur­ing my first view of The Wire when I real­ized I wasn’t watch­ing the usu­al cop pro­ce­dur­al. But the one that sticks in my head was when an obvi­ous­ly blitzed and blast­ed McNul­ty, the Irish-Amer­i­can detec­tive that you *might* think is the hero of the show, leaves a bar, gets into his car and prompt­ly totals it. In any oth­er show this would have been the turn­ing point for the char­ac­ter, either as a wake-up call, a rea­son for his boss to throw him off the case, or to gin up some sus­pense. But no. McNul­ty walks away from the acci­dent and…it’s nev­er real­ly spo­ken about. The cops took care of their own.

Life does not fol­low the con­tours of a tele­vi­sion dra­ma, and nei­ther did David Simon’s ground­break­ing HBO series. Beloved char­ac­ters get killed, or not, or they just trans­fer out of the show as in life. Nobody real­ly gets what they want. Nei­ther good nor evil wins.

As Simon told an audi­ence at Loy­ola Uni­ver­si­ty, Bal­ti­more in 2007: ““What we were try­ing to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fat­ed and doomed peo­ple, and instead of these Olympian gods, indif­fer­ent, venal, self­ish, hurl­ing light­ning bolts and hit­ting peo­ple in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whip­ping it on Oedi­pus or Achilles, it’s the post­mod­ern insti­tu­tions … those are the indif­fer­ent gods.”

The Wire still feels recent despite pre­mier­ing in 2002 and in 4:3 ratio, no widescreen HD here. It feels recent because the prob­lems depict­ed in the show still exist: cor­rup­tion at all lev­els of city gov­ern­ment and gov­er­nance, insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism, failed schools, a col­laps­ing fourth estate, a gut­ted econ­o­my, weak­ened unions, and a gen­er­al nihilism and despon­den­cy. Simon may not have seen the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment com­ing, but the recipe for it, the warn­ing of it, is there in the show.

So there’s def­i­nite­ly a rea­son to give it a re-watch to see how we’ve changed. The above essay from 2019 makes the case for The Wire as a sub­ver­sion of the usu­al cop show, with Thomas Flight not­ing it “doesn’t try to grab and keep your atten­tion. It requires it. And if you give it your atten­tion it will reward you.”

It also reminds us of the lit­er­ary giants in the writ­ers’ room: crime nov­el­ists Den­nis Lehane, George Pele­canos, and Richard Price were on the team, as was jour­nal­ist Rafael Alvarez, and William F. Zorzi. That com­bined with David Simon’s years in jour­nal­ism cov­er­ing Bal­ti­more and Ed Burns’ expe­ri­ence on the police force meant the show feels right, and the writ­ers did research and actu­al Bal­ti­more extras were encour­aged to speak up if some­thing didn’t.

If that video essay intrigues you, there’s more in the series, though with many more spoil­ers, such as this one on Char­ac­ter and Theme.

Not long after The Wire fin­ished its fifth and final sea­son, there were plen­ty of books pub­lished on the show. And now we’re near­ly two decades in from its pre­miere, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill and The Ringer’s Van Lath­an decid­ed to spend quar­an­tine kick­ing off a pod­cast where the two black cul­tur­al crit­ics give the show a spir­it­ed re-watch. Does the show fea­ture too much “copa­gan­da” as my left­ist crit­ics now con­tend? Does it hold up like white lib­er­als (its biggest fans, let’s be hon­est, despite Pres­i­dent Obama’s shout out) think it does? The hosts just wrapped up Sea­son Three, but if you’re ready to start the show again with com­men­tary, here’s their first episode:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma Chats with David Simon About Drugs, The Wire & Omar

Revis­it­ing The Wire Dur­ing 2020’s Black Lives Mat­ter Move­ment
“The Wire” @ Har­vard

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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The Pentagon Created a Plan to Defend the US Against a Zombie Apocalypse: Read It Online

in Film, Life, Television | September 16th, 2020

For keen observers of pop cul­ture, the flood­tide of zom­bie films and tele­vi­sion series over the past sev­er­al years has seemed like an espe­cial­ly omi­nous devel­op­ment. As social unrest spreads and increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple are uproot­ed from their homes by war, cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe, and, now, COVID-relat­ed evic­tion, one won­ders how advis­able it might have been to prime the pub­lic with so many sce­nar­ios in which heroes must fight off hordes of infec­tious dis­ease car­ri­ers? Zom­bie movies seem intent, after all, on turn­ing not only the dead but also oth­er liv­ing humans into objects of ter­ror.

Zom­bies them­selves have a com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry; like many New World mon­sters, their ori­gins are tied to slav­ery and colo­nial­ism. The first zom­bies were not flesh-eat­ing can­ni­bals; they were peo­ple robbed of free­dom and agency by Voodoo priests, at least in leg­ends that emerged dur­ing the bru­tal twen­ty-year Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion of Haiti in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. The first fea­ture-length Hol­ly­wood zom­bie film, 1932’s White Zom­bie, was based on occultist and explor­er William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Mag­ic Island and starred Bela Lugosi as a Hait­ian Voodoo mas­ter named “Mur­der,” who enslaves the hero­ine and turns her into an instru­ment of his will.

Sub­tle the film is not, but no zom­bie film ever war­rant­ed that adjec­tive. Zom­bie enter­tain­ment induces max­i­mum fear of a relent­less Oth­er, detached, after White Zom­bie, from its Hait­ian con­text, so that the undead horde can stand in for any kind of inva­sion. The genre’s his­to­ry may go some way toward explain­ing why the U.S. gov­ern­ment has an offi­cial zom­bie pre­pared­ness plan, called CONOP 8888. The doc­u­ment was writ­ten in April 2011 by junior mil­i­tary offi­cers at the U.S. Strate­gic Com­mand (USSTRATCOM), as a train­ing exer­cise to for­mu­late a non­spe­cif­ic inva­sion con­tin­gency plan.

Despite the use of a “fic­ti­tious sce­nario,” CONOP 8888 explic­it­ly states that it “was not actu­al­ly designed as a joke.” And “indeed, it’s not,” All that’s Inter­est­ing assures us, quot­ing the fol­low­ing from the plan’s intro­duc­tion:

Zom­bies are hor­ri­bly dan­ger­ous to all human life and zom­bie infec­tions have the poten­tial to seri­ous­ly under­mine nation­al secu­ri­ty and eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties that sus­tain our way of life. There­fore hav­ing a pop­u­la­tion that is not com­posed of zom­bies or at risk from their malign influ­ence is vital to U.S. and Allied Nation­al Inter­ests.

Sub­sti­tute “zom­bies” with any out­group and the ver­biage sounds alarm­ing­ly like the rhetoric of state ter­ror. The plan, as you might expect, details a mar­tial law sce­nario, not­ing that “U.S. and inter­na­tion­al law reg­u­late mil­i­tary oper­a­tions only inso­far as human and ani­mal life are con­cerned. There are almost no restric­tions on hos­tile actions… against path­o­gen­ic life forms, organ­ic-robot­ic enti­ties, or ‘tra­di­tion­al’ zom­bies,’” what­ev­er that means.

This all seems dead­ly seri­ous, until we get to the reports’ sub­sec­tions, which detail sce­nar­ios such as “Evil Mag­ic Zom­bies (EMZ),” “Space Zom­bies (SZ),” “Veg­e­tar­i­an Zom­bies (VZ),” and “Chick­en Zom­bies (CZ)” (in fact, “the only proven class of zom­bie that actu­al­ly exists”). It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to see a mil­i­tary doc­u­ment absorb the many com­ic per­mu­ta­tions of the genre, from George Romero’s sub­ver­sive satires to Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies. No mat­ter how fun­ny zom­bies are, how­ev­er, the genre seems to require hor­rif­ic vio­lence, gore, and siege-like sur­vival­ism as key the­mat­ic ele­ments.

Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Daniel W. Drezn­er, author of The­o­ries of Inter­na­tion­al Pol­i­tics and Zom­bies, has read the Pentagon’s zom­bie plan close­ly and dis­cov­ered some seri­ous prob­lems (and not only with its zom­bie clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem). While the plan assumes the neces­si­ty of “bar­ri­cad­ed counter-zom­bie oper­a­tions,” it also admits that “USSTRATCOM forces do not cur­rent­ly hold enough con­tin­gency stores (food, water) to sup­port” such oper­a­tions for even 30 days. “So… maybe 28 days lat­er,” Drezn­er quips, sup­plies run out? (We’ve all seen what hap­pens next….) Also, alarm­ing­ly, the plan is “trig­ger-hap­py about nuclear weapons,” adding the pos­si­bil­i­ty of radi­a­tion poi­son­ing to the like­li­hood of starv­ing (or being eat­en by the starv­ing).

It turns out, then, that just as in so many mod­ern zom­bie sto­ries, the zom­bies may not actu­al­ly be the worst thing about a zom­bie apoc­a­lypse. Not to be out­done, the CDC decid­ed to cap­i­tal­ize on the zom­bie craze—rather late, we must say—releas­ing their own mate­ri­als for a zom­bie pan­dem­ic online in 2018. These include enter­tain­ing blogs, a poster (above), and a graph­ic nov­el full of use­ful dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness tips for ordi­nary cit­i­zens. The cam­paign might be judged in poor taste in the COVID era, but the agency assures us, in the event of a zom­bie apoc­a­lypse, “Nev­er Fear—CDC is Ready.” I leave it to you, dear read­er, to decide how com­fort­ing this promise sounds in 2020.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Where Zom­bies Come From: A Video Essay on the Ori­gin of the Hor­ri­fy­ing, Satir­i­cal Mon­sters

How to Sur­vive the Com­ing Zom­bie Apoc­a­lypse: An Online Course by Michi­gan State

Watch Night of the Liv­ing Dead, the Sem­i­nal Zom­bie Movie, Free Online

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

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Monty Python’s Michael Palin Is Also an Art Critic: Watch Him Explore His Favorite Paintings by Andrew Wyeth & Other Artists

in Art, Television | September 14th, 2020

Many a par­ent who caught their kid watch­ing Mon­ty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus in the 1970s felt, as one 70s Amer­i­can dad pro­claimed, that “it was the sin­gu­lar­ly dumb­est thing ever broad­cast on the tube.” Fans of the show know oth­er­wise. The Pythons cre­at­ed some of sharpest satire of con­ser­v­a­tive author­i­ty fig­ures and mid­dle-class mores. But they did it in the broad­ly sil­li­est of ways. The troupe, who met at Oxford and Cam­bridge, where they’d been study­ing for pro­fes­sion­al careers, decid­ed they pre­ferred to fol­low in the foot­steps of their heroes on The Goon Show. What must their par­ents have thought?

But the Pythons made good. They grew up to be avun­cu­lar author­i­ties them­selves, of the kind they might have skew­ered in their younger days. After sev­er­al decades of mak­ing high­ly regard­ed trav­el doc­u­men­taries, Michael Palin became pres­i­dent of the Roy­al Geo­graph­i­cal Soci­ety, an office one can imag­ine him occu­py­ing in the short-pants uni­form of a Bruce. Instead, pho­tographed in aca­d­e­m­ic casu­al hold­ing a globe, he was dubbed by The Inde­pen­dent as “a man with the world in his hands.”

Unlike fel­low accom­plished Python John Cleese, who can nev­er resist get­ting in a joke, Palin has most­ly played the straight man in his TV pre­sen­ter career. He brings to this role an earnest­ness that endeared view­ers for decades. It’s a qual­i­ty that shines through in his doc­u­men­taries on art for BBC Scot­land, in which he explores the worlds of his favorite painters with­out a hint of the pre­ten­tious­ness we would find in a Python car­i­ca­ture. Just above, Palin trav­els to Maine to learn about the life of Andrew Wyeth and the set­ting of his most famous work, Christina’s World.

Palin’s pas­sion for art and for trav­el are of a piece—driven not by ideas about what art or trav­el should be, but rather by what they were like for him. Palin brings this per­son­al approach to the con­ver­sa­tion above with Car­o­line Camp­bell, Head of Cura­to­r­i­al at the British Nation­al Gallery. Here, he dis­cuss­es “ten paint­ings which I can­not avoid when I’m going in the gallery. They always catch my eye, and each one means some­thing to me.” Artists includ­ed in his “rather eso­teric” col­lec­tion include the late-Medieval/ear­ly-Renais­sance pio­neer Duc­cio, Hans Hol­bein the Younger, William Hog­a­rth, and Joseph Mal­lord William Turn­er.

While these may be famil­iar names to any art lover, the works Palin choos­es from each artist may not be. His thought­ful, per­cep­tive respons­es to these works are not those of the pro­fes­sion­al crit­ic or of the pro­fes­sion­al come­di­an. They are the respons­es of a fre­quent trav­el­er who notices some­thing new on every trip.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mon­ty Python Pays Trib­ute to Ter­ry Jones: Watch Their Mon­tage of Jones’ Beloved Char­ac­ters in Action

John Cleese Revis­its His 20 Years as an Ivy League Pro­fes­sor in His New Book, Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years

New Ani­mat­ed Film Tells the Life Sto­ry of Mon­ty Python’s Gra­ham Chap­man

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

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David Lynch’s Popular Surrealism Considered on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #59

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | September 9th, 2020

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt–along with guest Mike Wilson–discuss the direc­tor’s films from Eraser­head to Inland Empire plus Twin Peaks and his recent short films. We get into the appeal and the styl­is­tic and sto­ry­telling hall­marks of his main­stays–Blue Vel­vet, Wild at Heart, Lost High­way, and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve–and also con­sid­er out­liers like Dune, The Ele­phant Man, and The Straight Sto­ry.

What’s with the campy act­ing and the weird atti­tudes toward women? Why make us stare at some­thing mov­ing very slow­ly for a long time? Are these films appeal­ing to young peo­ple inter­est­ed in some­thing dif­fer­ent but not on the whole actu­al­ly enjoy­able? Is there actu­al­ly a “solu­tion” to make sense of the sense­less, or are these wacky plots sup­posed to remain unas­sim­i­l­able and so not dis­mis­si­ble?

Some arti­cles we drew on includ­ed:

Also, read Roger Ebert’s reviews of Dune and Blue Vel­vet, and his sub­se­quent thoughts on the lat­ter. What did crit­ics say about “What Did Jack Do?” Watch “Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained.”  Check out his short films if you can sit through them.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. If you’re not sub­scribed to the pod­cast, then you missed last week’s aftertalk high­lights episode. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear 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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Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock & Other Jazz Musicians Sell Whisky & Spirits in Classic Japanese TV Commercials

in Food & Drink, Music, Television | August 21st, 2020

I like to think that, when the occa­sion aris­es, I can speak pass­able Japan­ese. But pride goeth before the fall, and I fell flat on my first attempt to order a whisky in Tokyo. To my request for a Sun­to­ry neat the bar­tender respond­ed only with embar­rassed incom­pre­hen­sion. I repeat­ed myself, push­ing my Japan­i­fied pro­nun­ci­a­tion to par­o­d­ic lim­its: saaan-to-riii nee-to. At some point the man deci­phered my lin­guis­tic flail­ing. “Ah,” he said, bright­en­ing, “suuu-to-raaay-to?” To think that I could have han­dled this sit­u­a­tion with dig­ni­ty had I but seen the Sun­to­ry com­mer­cial above, in which Her­bie Han­cock sug­gests hav­ing a drink “straight.”

Would even the mad­dest men of the Amer­i­can adver­tis­ing indus­try coun­te­nance the idea of putting a jazz musi­cian in a com­mer­cial? Japan thinks dif­fer­ent­ly, how­ev­er, and in its eco­nom­ic-bub­ble era of the 1970s and 80s thought more dif­fer­ent­ly still.

At that time, Japan­ese tele­vi­sion spots — at least those com­mis­sioned by suf­fi­cient­ly deep-pock­et­ed com­pa­nies — began fea­tur­ing Amer­i­can celebri­ties like James Brown, Woody Allen, Nico­las Cage, Paul New­man, and Den­nis Hop­per. A 1979 Sun­to­ry ad that put Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la along­side Aki­ra Kuro­sawa would, a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry on, inspire Cop­po­la’s daugh­ter Sofia to dra­ma­tize a sim­i­lar East-meets-West com­mer­cial sit­u­a­tion in her film Lost in Trans­la­tion.

Of all the things Amer­i­can embraced (and repur­posed) by Japan after its defeat in the Sec­ond World War, jazz music has main­tained the most intense­ly enthu­si­as­tic fan base. Japan­ese-made jazz has long been a for­mi­da­ble genre of its own, just as Japan­ese-made whisky has long held its own with the West­ern vari­eties. But when the mak­ers of Japan­ese whisky made an effort to sell their own prod­uct on tele­vi­sion to the new­ly wealthy Japan­ese peo­ple, they looked to Amer­i­can jazzmen to give it a shot of authen­tic­i­ty. Hav­ing recruit­ed Han­cock to pro­mote drink­ing their sin­gle-malt whisky at room tem­per­a­ture, Sun­to­ry got bassist Ron Carter as well as both Bran­ford and Ellis Marsalis to pro­mote drink­ing it hot.

Could the cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tion between jazz and whisky extend to oth­er liquors? That was the gam­bit of a 1987 com­mer­cial fea­tur­ing Miles Davis, recent­ly inves­ti­gat­ed by Insid­e­Hook’s Aaron Gold­farb. Its prod­uct: shōchū, “a col­or­less, odor­less, yet often chal­leng­ing spir­it typ­i­cal­ly dis­tilled from rice (known as kome-jochu), bar­ley (mugi-jochu) or sweet pota­toes (imo-jochu).” New­ly launched with an appar­ent intent to pitch that staid bev­er­age to mon­eyed younger peo­ple, the brand VAN hired Davis to play a few notes on his trum­pet, then take a sip of its shōchū and pro­nounce it a “mir­a­cle.” He also describes him­self as “always on the van­guard,” hence, pre­sum­ably, the name VAN (though its being rem­i­nis­cent of VAN JACKET, the com­pa­ny that had ear­li­er brought Ivy League style to the same tar­get demo­graph­ic, could­n’t have been unwel­come).

Though Davis’ brand of cool did its part for the suc­cess of Hon­da scoot­ers and TDK cas­sette tapes, it proved not to be enough for VAN shōchū. The brand “was a big flop and had a very short life,” Gold­farb quotes an indus­try expert as say­ing, “prob­a­bly because shōchū is so quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Japan­ese, and a for­eign-style shōchū just didn’t make sense to most.” Per­haps the com­mer­cial itself also lacked the plea­sur­able sim­plic­i­ty of Sun­to­ry’s many jazz-ori­ent­ed spots, none of which turned out sim­pler or more plea­sur­able than the one with Sam­my Davis Jr. per­form­ing a cap­pel­la just above. In the process of pour­ing him­self a drink Davis plays the part of an entire jazz com­bo, using only his mouth and the objects at hand, includ­ing the ice in his glass. The con­cept would­n’t have worked quite so well had he tak­en his Sun­to­ry neat — or rather, straight.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 30-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Japan­ese Jazz from the 1970s: Like Japan­ese Whisky, It’s Under­rat­ed, But Very High Qual­i­ty

Watch Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la in Japan­ese Whisky Ads from 1979: The Inspi­ra­tion for Lost in Trans­la­tion

The Best Com­mer­cial Ever? James Brown Sells Miso Soup (1992)

Nico­las Cage, Paul New­man & Den­nis Hop­per Bring Their Amer­i­can Style to Japan­ese Com­mer­cials

Woody Allen Lives the “Deli­cious Life” in Ear­ly-80s Japan­ese Com­mer­cials

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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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Gilda Radner Does a Comic Impersonation of Patti Smith: Watch the Classic SNL Skit, “Rock Against Yeast” (1979)

in Comedy, Music, Television | August 14th, 2020

Gimme Mick, gimme Mick
Baby’s hair, bulgin’ eyes, lips so thick
Are you woman, are you man
I’m your biggest funked-up fan
So rock me and roll meeee…
‘Til I’m sick

                                —(the fic­tion­al) Can­dy Slice, Sat­ur­day Night Live

Sir Michael Philip—aka Mick Jag­ger—cel­e­brat­ed his 77th birth­day ear­li­er this sum­mer, a mile­stone his fel­low Rolling Stones Kei­th Richards and Ron­nie Wood observed remote­ly, as befits seniors at par­tic­u­lar risk from COVID-19 infec­tion.

You, Mick Jag­ger, are Eng­lish and go out with a mod­el and get an incred­i­ble amount of pub­lic­i­ty

You, Mick Jag­ger, don’t keep reg­u­lar hours

You, Mick Jag­ger, have the great­est rock ‘n roll band in the his­to­ry of rock ‘n roll, and you don’t even play an instru­ment your­self

It’s a bit sober­ing, watch­ing the late Gil­da Rad­ner, expert­ly preen­ing and pranc­ing as the then-36-year-old, yet-to-be-knight­ed Mick in “Rock Against Yeast,” the star stud­ded Sat­ur­day Night Live Sketch from 1979, above.

Read­ers over the age of 36 who want to get seri­ous­ly bummed out, poll your under-35 friends to see who’s heard of the ver­sa­tile Gil­da, an orig­i­nal Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Play­er and one of America’s most com­pli­cat­ed sweet­hearts.

For­tu­nate­ly, she’s not entire­ly for­got­ten:

I can per­son­al­ly attest, and I feel com­fort­able speak­ing for Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch when I say that see­ing Gil­da as a kid…[she was] so authen­ti­cal­ly her­self and so reg­u­lar in so many ways. She was not a piece of cast­ing, she was who she was on TV. We all saw that and said, ‘I want to do that, and it’s pos­si­ble because I see her doing that. It was an ear­ly exam­ple for me of how impor­tant rep­re­sen­ta­tion is, for every­one from every walk of life. Gil­da was our equiv­a­lent of Michelle Oba­ma. —Tina Fey

Gilda’s not alone in hav­ing left us at a young age. Some of her “Rock Against Yeast” cast­mates and the celebri­ties they spoofed made sim­i­lar­ly shock­ing ear­ly exits:

John Belushi 

Bob Mar­ley

Guest host Ricky Nel­son, appear­ing as him­self

Music pro­duc­er Don Kir­sh­n­er—embod­ied here by musi­cian Paul Shaffer—made it to a ripe old age, ie: just a year younger than Sir Mick is now.

Actu­al­ly, Gilda’s Mick rou­tine was fil­tered through the fic­tion­al Can­dy Slice, a satir­i­cal take on God­moth­er of Punk Pat­ti Smith—now a ven­er­a­ble 73-year-old Nation­al Book award-win­ning mem­oirist, gear­ing up for next month’s “high-end mul­ti-cam­era visu­al and son­ic expe­ri­ence,” i.e. vir­tu­al book read­ing for last year’s Year Of The Mon­key.

Smith, who over the years has proved her­self to be a very good egg, admit­ted to NPR that while  her band found Gilda’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion “hilar­i­ous,” she took a while to warm up to it:

When I was younger, I—it sort of both­ered me because, you know, she makes a big thing about, you know, I think it’s like the white pow­der and the vast amounts of cocaine in the record­ing stu­dio. I had nev­er even had cocaine. It was­n’t how—it’s not how I work. But I thought it was actu­al­ly hilar­i­ous besides that. She was a great artist.

It was—actually, it was a priv­i­lege to be played—it was a priv­i­lege to have Gil­da Rad­ner project what she thought I might be like. And the fun­ni­est part was since there was a big con­tro­ver­sy over the armpit hair on the cov­er of “East­er,” she brushed the hair under her arms, and I think she had like a foot of hair com­ing from her armpit, and we were all laugh­ing so hard.

She was a great artist, and cocaine or not, I salute her. And I feel very lucky to have been, you know, por­trayed by Gil­da.

Read a full tran­script of “Rock Against Yeast” here, while heav­ing a sigh of relief that that singer Dol­ly Par­ton (Jane Curtin) con­tin­ues to walk so vig­or­ous­ly amongst us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Lorne Michaels Intro­duces Sat­ur­day Night Live and Its Bril­liant First Cast for the Very First Time (1975)

When William S. Bur­roughs Appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live: His First TV Appear­ance (1981)

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

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Errol Morris Makes His Groundbreaking Series, First Person, Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Interviews with Geniuses, Eccentrics, Obsessives & Other Unusual Types

in Television | August 14th, 2020

Who do we nor­mal­ly see inter­viewed on tele­vi­sion? Actors, pop singers, politi­cians, and oth­er famous fig­ures, many of whom have under­gone rig­or­ous media train­ing, few of whom have espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing per­son­al­ties in the first place, and none of whom could stand up to Errol Mor­ris’ Inter­ro­tron. Essen­tial­ly a teleprompter mod­i­fied to dis­play Mor­ris’ face on its screen, the Inter­ro­tron made a new kind of filmed inter­view pos­si­ble: “For the first time,” Mor­ris has said, “I could be talk­ing to some­one, and they could be talk­ing to me and at the same time look­ing direct­ly into the lens of the cam­era. Now, there was no look­ing off slight­ly to the side. No more faux first per­son. This was the true first per­son.”

Hence First Per­son, the Inter­ro­tron-cen­tered tele­vi­sion series Mor­ris pro­duced and direct­ed in the ear­ly 2000s. By that time Mor­ris had already become well known for his inter­view-based doc­u­men­taries, which went deep into unusu­al sub­jects like the pet ceme­tery busi­ness (Gates of Heav­en), a dubi­ous mur­der tri­al in Texas (The Thin Blue Line), and the mind of Stephen Hawk­ing (A Brief His­to­ry of Time). In 1997’s Fast, Cheap, and Out of Con­trol Mor­ris invit­ed into the Inter­ro­tron a lion tamer, a top­i­ary gar­den­er, a roboti­cist and a hair­less mole-rat expert, weav­ing the four inter­views togeth­er into threads to do with themes of emer­gence and con­trol. But what could tie togeth­er con­ver­sa­tions with a true-crime author, a cry­on­ics pro­mot­er, a lawyer to the mob, and an author­i­ty on giant squids?

Those are just four of First Per­son’s sev­en­teen sub­jects, each of whom has their uncom­mon knowl­edge, dis­tinc­tive abil­i­ty, har­row­ing expe­ri­ence, or dirty job — or some com­bi­na­tion there­of — probed by Mor­ris for an entire episode. Some of them, such as ani­mal-behav­ior expert and autism spokes­woman Tem­ple Grandin, have become much more well-known since appear­ing on the show. Oth­ers have been sen­tenced to serve 15 years in prison. And giv­en the two decades that have passed since the show first aired, some of them have since shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil: Den­nis Fitch, for instance, the pilot who assist­ed in the “impos­si­ble” crash-land­ing of Unit­ed Air­lines Flight 232 after its sud­den and com­plete loss of con­trol — and whose sto­ry is the most grip­ping hour in First Per­son’s entire run.

Mor­ris’ fans will sense in First Per­son themes the direc­tor explored before and has explored fur­ther since. Take the nature of intel­li­gence, at the fore­front of First Per­son’s two episodes on men with some of the high­est IQ-test scores on record. Mor­ris finds Chris Lan­gan think­ing his way toward some­thing called a “Cog­ni­tive-The­o­ret­ic Mod­el of the Uni­verse” and an intel­lec­tu­al priest­hood meant to gov­ern the world to come. Richard Ros­ner, despite his equal­ly for­mi­da­ble brain, divides his time between nude mod­el­ing and obses­sive­ly re-lit­i­gat­ing a failed Who Wants to Be a Mil­lon­aire? appear­ance. (At the time Mor­ris got them into the Inter­ro­tron, both men also worked as bar bounc­ers.) You may well come away from these episodes won­der­ing just what a high IQ gets a per­son. But if you watch the com­plete First Per­son, bro­ken into playlists of its first and sec­ond sea­son, on Errol Mor­ris’ Youtube chan­nel, that will be just one of the fas­ci­nat­ing and trou­bling ques­tions run­ning through your mind for years to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris Cap­tures Com­pet­i­tive Eat­ing Cham­pi­on “El Wingador”

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

How Benoit Man­del­brot Dis­cov­ered Frac­tals: A Short Film by Errol Mor­ris

Novem­ber 22, 1963: Watch Errol Mor­ris’ Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

Errol Mor­ris and Wern­er Her­zog in Con­ver­sa­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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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James Baldwin Talks About Racism in America & Civil Rights Activism on The Dick Cavett Show (1969)

in History, Politics, Television | August 4th, 2020

There are many rea­sons, some quite lit­er­al, that it can be painful to talk about racism in the U.S. For one thing, it often seems that writ­ers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, or James Bald­win, have already con­front­ed ques­tions of racial vio­lence with­out hedg­ing or equiv­o­ca­tion. Yet each time racist vio­lence hap­pens, there seems to be a deco­rous need in pol­i­tics and media to pre­tend to be sur­prised by what’s right in front of us, to pre­tend to have dis­cov­ered the place for the first time, and yet to already have a sup­ply of ready­made plat­i­tudes and denun­ci­a­tions at hand.

For exam­ple, just recent­ly, a for­mer white U.S. Pres­i­dent just dis­missed an impor­tant civ­il rights leader at the funer­al of anoth­er civ­il rights leader, while the oppres­sive con­di­tions both lead­ers fought against are ampli­fied to mil­i­tary grade in cities around the coun­try. Sports fans demand that elite Black ath­letes shut up and enter­tain them. The fans will be the ones to say what ges­tures are accept­able, like stand­ing for the nation­al anthem at a tele­vised for-prof­it sport­ing event that has more to do with gam­bling than patri­o­tism.

Maybe stand­ing and kneel­ing are both spec­ta­cles, but they do not car­ry equal weight. When New Orleans Saints quar­ter­back Drew Brees refused to sup­port his team­mates’ mild protest against mur­der, he tried to make it right by post­ing on social media a stock pho­to of a black hand and a white hand clasped togeth­er. In his N+1 essay “Such Things Have Done Harm,” a wor­thy appli­ca­tion of Baldwin’s furi­ous log­ic to the present, Blair McClen­don writes:

The spec­ta­cle of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion is irre­sistible. There may be a war in the streets, but from time to time there is a Christ­mas truce and we are to take those as visions of a bet­ter, calmer future. Here is the com­ing peace with­out all the gris­ly details that pre­vent us from get­ting there…. Hold­ing up a pic­ture of black and white peo­ple togeth­er inti­mate­ly, in cama­raderie, or even just mutu­al recog­ni­tion and respect, as proof of some­thing “pos­si­ble” implies an oth­er­wise bru­tal vision of the world “as it is”… We should be will­ing to demand more than fel­low feel­ing.

The fore­clo­sure of con­flict, the bypass­ing of real­i­ty with sen­ti­men­tal fan­tasies of har­mo­ny, lies at the heart of the excep­tion­al­ism argu­ment that seems to make so many peo­ple irra­tional­ly angry with Black ath­letes. You are high­ly paid, suc­cess­ful enter­tain­ers, and we con­sid­er that a sign of progress, there­fore we judge this protest ille­git­i­mate. For Bald­win, as Ellen Gutoskey writes at Men­tal Floss, this stan­dard mea­sure­ment of progress “is only progress as defined by white peo­ple of priv­i­lege.”

When Dick Cavett voiced the ques­tion to Bald­win in 1969—citing those who point to the suc­cess of “the ris­ing num­ber of Black Amer­i­cans in sports, pol­i­tics, and entertainment”—Baldwin explained the real prob­lem: No one has asked for this opin­ion, and cer­tain­ly not at that time, as Gutoskey points out, “with the vio­lence of 1968—Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tions, a riotous Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, count­less civ­il rights protests, and so on—still very fresh in the pub­lic con­scious­ness.” Bald­win puts is plain­ly:

Inso­far as the Amer­i­can pub­lic wants to think there has been progress, they over­look one very sim­ple thing: I don’t want to be giv­en any­thing by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself. And it also over­looks anoth­er very impor­tant thing: Per­haps I don’t think that this repub­lic is the sum­mit of human civ­i­liza­tion. Per­haps I don’t want to become like Ronald Rea­gan or like the pres­i­dent of Gen­er­al Motors. Per­haps I have anoth­er sense of life… Per­haps I don’t want what you think I want.

Repeat­ed­ly, the hal­lowed demo­c­ra­t­ic notion of self-deter­mi­na­tion has been denied Black Americans—perhaps the sin­gle most endur­ing thread that runs through the country’s his­to­ry. The denial of agency is com­pli­cat­ed, how­ev­er, by the neces­si­ty of assign­ing blame to peo­ple deemed not ful­ly human: “I have noth­ing to say about the idea that peo­ple who are the descen­dants of prop­er­ty are bound to respect the prop­er­ty rights of Guc­ci or CVS beyond the desire to point out its obscen­i­ty,” Blair McClen­don writes. “What was called vio­lence and chaos in any oth­er cir­cum­stance would be read as some­thing much sim­pler: self-defense.”

Again and again, those who resist the most bru­tal conditions—including out­right mur­der in the streets, in qui­et homes at night, in cars, at play­grounds, by agents of the state—are called vil­lains and insur­rec­tion­ists. Cavett asks Bald­win to explain rad­i­cal lead­ers like H. Rap Brown and Stoke­ly Carmichael, “who fright­en us the most” (mak­ing the word “us” do a lot of work here). Bald­win responds, “[When] any white man in the world says ‘Give me lib­er­ty, or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exact­ly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a crim­i­nal and treat­ed like one….”

I doubt the irony of quot­ing Patrick Hen­ry (also known for say­ing “If this be trea­son, make the most of it!”) was in any way lost on Bald­win. As one recent biog­ra­ph­er puts it, Hen­ry was the first Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion­ary “to call for inde­pen­dence, for rev­o­lu­tion against Britain, for a bill of rights, and for as much free­dom as pos­si­ble from government—American as well as British.” Patrick Hen­ry was also a slave­own­er, some­thing he con­sid­ered, in his own words, a “lam­en­ta­ble evil.”

Hen­ry wrote, “I will not, I can­not jus­ti­fy [own­ing slaves],” but he was “not con­flict­ed enough to actu­al­ly set any­one free,” writes Michael Schaub at NPR. Dec­la­ra­tions of high moral prin­ci­ples, while one open­ly com­mits, or ignores, what one admits is “evil,” still fea­ture promi­nent­ly in offi­cial sto­ries of the moment. Bald­win, writes McClen­don, “knew what a sto­ry was, he knew what a film was, he knew what a rev­o­lu­tion was and he may have known for­give­ness, too.”

Bald­win did not know will­ful for­get­ting, how­ev­er, except to call it out when he saw it used as a weapon. Raoul Peck­’s excel­lent, apt­ly-titled film I Am Not Your Negro begins with the Cavett inter­view, then unrav­els a “rad­i­cal, up-to-the-minute exam­i­na­tion of race in Amer­i­ca,” writes YouTube Movies, who offers the film free to screen online, “using Bald­win’s orig­i­nal words and a flood of rich archival mate­r­i­al” to recon­struct his last unfin­ished book, Remem­ber This House.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Famous James Bald­win-William F. Buck­ley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

Why James Baldwin’s Writ­ing Stays Pow­er­ful: An Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

W.E.B. Du Bois Dev­as­tates Apol­o­gists for Con­fed­er­ate Mon­u­ments and Robert E. Lee (1931)

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

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