This uncomfortable scene played out on CNBC in 2004.
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A New Series About A Young Crime-Fighting Sigmund Freud Is Coming to Netflix
A recently announced, as-yet-uncast Netflix series centering on the exploits of young, crimefighting Sigmund Freud, tracking a serial killer in 19th-century Vienna, has been causing great excitement.
Though as Chelsea Steiner points out in the Mary Sue, Freud’s equation of clitoral orgasms with sexual immaturity and mental illness could put a damper on any sex scene in which a female character takes an active role.
Perhaps the youthful Father of Psychology won’t be hooking up with his female sidekick—a medium (always so helpful in cases involving serial killers!)
Perhaps instead the real love interest will be the intriguingly named Kiss, a testy war veteran cop. As Freud wrote in a 1935 letter:
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime –and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.
The eight-part German-language series will be directed by a Marvin Kren, who seems, in the translated press release, as if he might be equal to the task.
I more or less grew up underneath Sigmund Freud’s original sofa, meaning: in the same district in Vienna where he had his office. The difference: When I was born the world already profited from Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking discoveries for almost a century. We, the modern human beings, live in post-Freudian times. It is very appealing and challenging for me to imagine a world in this series in which the ‘self’ was just a blind spot on the map of cognition, a world that hasn’t seen Sigmund Freud yet. I would like to emerge with ‘Freud’ into Vienna’s dark alleys before the turn of the century, to discover the reflection of the labyrinth of the human soul inspiring his life’s work. Abysmal, dubious and dangerous!
The series will debut on Austrian television. Netflix will control international streaming rights. Production is due to begin this fall.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Hunter S. Thompson’s Many Strange, Unpredictable Appearances on The David Letterman Show
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An old quote from Joseph de Maistre gets thrown around a lot lately: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite—“every nation gets the government it deserves.” As a historical claim it is impossible to verify. But the aphorism has an authoritative ring, the unmistakable sound of truism.
What if we put it another way? Every age gets the journalism it deserves. How does that sound?
I offer as exhibit one Hunter S. Thompson. Only a gonzo time like the late 60s and 70s could have produced the gonzo journalist, just as only such a time could have nurtured the journalistic writing of Tom Wolfe, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, etc.
Do we find our current crop of journalists lacking in moral courage, righteous fury, death-defying risk-taking, gallows humor, literary reach, thoroughgoing independence of thought? The failing industry may be to blame, one might argue, and with good reason.
Or perhaps, with deference to de Maistre, we have not deserved better.
The New Journalism from which Thompson emerged dispensed with any pretense to “polite neutrality,” as novelist Hari Kunzru writes at the London Review of Books. And “no one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself from doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson.” He exemplified Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg’s description of the sixties New Journalist as “a liberated army of one.”
Thompson’s “ability to articulate the undercurrent of ‘fear and loathing’ running through America”—not as a cynical spokesperson, but as somehow both an embodiment and a surprisingly lucid, moralistic observer—“ultimately led to his adoption as a kind of soothsaying holy fool for the counterculture.” In his later years, the legend turned his reputation for excess into a kind of schtick. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the culture changed but Hunter didn’t, for better or worse.
As Kunzru points out, “later in his career the ‘story’ as independent entity was to disappear almost entirely from his work, which became a fractured series of tales about Hunter (mad, bad and dangerous) and his behavior (inspired, erratic, paranoid).” While this shift (and his daily diet) may have dulled his journalistic edge, it made him an ideal late-night talk show guest, and such he remained, reliably, on the David Letterman show for many years.
In the clips here, you can see many of those appearances, first, at the top, from 1987, then below it, from 1988. Further up, see Letterman interview Thompson in an ‘87 episode inexplicably conducted in a Times Square hotel room. The show was “a strange beast,” writes Vulture’s Ramsey Ess. “For most of the episode it feels unruly, nerve-wracking, and a little dangerous,” all adjectives Thompson could have trademarked. Just above, Thompson meets Letterman to discuss his just-published The Rum Diary, the novel he worked on for forty years, “a hard-bitten story,” writes Kunzru, “of love, journalism and heavy drinking.”
All of Thompson’s appearances are unpredictable and slightly unnerving, and become more so in later years. “Thompson would become more dramatic and more twisted,” writes Jason Nawara. “Whatever led up to the moment Thompson stepped on stage was probably far more astonishing (or terrifying) than anything caught on camera. Why is his hand bandaged? Why is he so paranoid? What is happening? When have you slept last, Hunter?” If late night television has become safe and boring, full of pandering patter largely devoid of true surprises, perhaps it is because Hunter S. Thompson has passed on. And perhaps, as Nawara seems to suggest, every generation gets the late-night TV it deserves.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969
During a recent dinner a few friends and I found ourselves reminiscing about formative moments in our collective youth. The conversation took a decidedly downbeat turn when a nationally televised moment we all remembered all too well came up: the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Like millions of other schoolkids at the time we had been glued to the live broadcast, and became witnesses to horror. “It was NASA’s darkest tragedy,” writes Elizabeth Howell at Space.com, an accident that “changed the space program forever.”
The contrast with our parents’ indelible memories of a televised space broadcast from seventeen years earlier could not be starker. On July 20, 1969, the nation witnessed what could easily be called NASA’s greatest triumph, the Apollo 11 moon landing, which not only really happened, but was broadcast live on CBS, with commentary by Walter Cronkite and former astronaut Wally Schirra and live audio from Mission Control in Houston and Buzz Aldrin himself, “whose job during the landing,” Jason Kottke writes, “was to keep an eye on the LM (lunar module)’s altitude and speed.”
We don’t hear much from Neil Armstrong—“he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’” Kottke’s fascinating description of the events points out details that heighten the drama, such as the fact that Armstrong’s heartrate “peaked at 150 beats per minute at landing” (his resting heartrate was 60 bpm). At around 10 minutes to landing, the astronauts link to Mission Control cut out briefly, which must have been terrifying.
“Then there were the intermittent 1201 and 1202 program alarms, which neither the LM crew nor Houston had encountered in any of the training simulations.” These turn out “to be a simple case,” notes NASA, “of the computer trying to do too many things at once.” Given that the Lunar Module’s computer only had 4KB of memory, this is hardly a surprise. What is astonishing is that such a relatively primitive machine could handle the task at all.
The film viewers saw on their screens was not, of course, a live feed—CBS did not have cameras in space or on the moon—but rather an animation.
The CBS animation shows the fake LM landing on the fake Moon before the actual landing — when Buzz says “contact light” and then “engine stop”. The animation was based on the scheduled landing time and evidently couldn’t be adjusted. The scheduled time was overshot because of the crater and boulders situation mentioned above.
There were, however, cameras mounted on the Lunar Module, and that 16mm footage of the landing, which you can see above, was later released. And then there’s that moon walk (which really happened), which you can see below—blurry and indistinct but no less amazing.
Just a little over eight years “since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard,” NASA writes, “followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out,” it happened. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin walked around and collected samples for two hours, then returned safely to Earth. In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong called the successful mission “a beginning of a new age,” and it was, though his optimism would seem almost quaint when a couple decades later, the U.S. turned its sights on weaponizing space.
Read more about this extraordinary event at NASA and Kottke.
via Kottke
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Watch All of the Commercials That David Lynch Has Directed: A Big 30-Minute Compilation
Some filmmakers start in commercials, honing their chops in anticipation of making personal projects later. A select few go in the other direction, realizing their distinctive vision before fielding offers from companies who want a piece of that vision’s cultural currency. Anyone who’s seen David Lynch’s most acclaimed work will suspect, correctly, that Lynch belongs in the latter group. With 1977’s cult hit Eraserhead, he showed cinema what it means to be Lynchian. This brought him the attention of Hollywood, leading to the respectable success of The Elephant Man and the disaster that was Dune. Only in 1986, with Blue Velvet, could Lynch make a truly, even troublingly personal film that hit the zeitgeist at just the right moment.
Naturally, Madison Avenue came calling soon thereafter. “With the smash Blue Velvet, a Palme d’or at Cannes for Wild at Heart, and then the national phenomenon of Twin Peaks’ first season, David Lynch clearly established himself as the U.S.A.‘s foremost commercially viable avant-garde-‘offbeat’ director,” wrote David Foster Wallace in a 1997 piece on the filmmaker.
“For a while there it looked like he might be able to single-handedly broker a new marriage between art and commerce in U.S. movies, opening formula-frozen Hollywood to some of the eccentricity and vigor of art film.” Lynch’s fans in television advertising must have imagined that he could do the same for their industry, and you can watch the fruits of that hunch in the half-hour compilation of Lynch-directed commercials above.
Lynch has worked for some startlingly big brands, beginning with Calvin Klein: his trio of spots for the fragrance Obsession take as their basis the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and D.H. Lawrence. A few years later he directed a humorous mini-season of Twin Peaks to promote Georgia Coffee, one of the top brands of canned coffee in the Lynch-loving country of Japan. The New York Department of Sanitation engaged Lynch’s services to imbue their anti-littering campaign with his signature high-contrast ominousness, a mood also sought by fashion-industry titans like Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Dior. The marketers of humbler goods like Alka-Seltzer, Barilla Pasta (a seemingly auteur-aware brand that has also hired Wim Wenders and Fellini), and Clear Blue Easy home pregnancy tests have also gone in for a touch of the Lynchian.
Quite a few of these commercials originally aired only outside America, which may reflect the supposedly more enduring appreciation of Lynch’s work that exists in Europe and Asia. But for all Lynch’s artistic daring, the man himself has always come off as an enthusiast of unreconstructed American pleasures. To this day he remains a steadfast smoker, and in 1998 brought that personal credibility to the Swiss cigarette brand Parisienne. The resulting spot features men in ties, showers of sparks, dead fish, backwards talking, a forbiddingly illuminated shack, and apocalyptic flames: Parisienne, in other words, must have got exactly what they paid for.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.
The Rise and Fall of The Simpsons: An In-Depth Video Essay Explores What Made the Show Great, and When It All Came to an End
As an American man in his thirties, I can, if necessary, communicate entirely in Simpsons references. But however voluminous and close at hand my knowledge of the Simpson family and their hometown of Springfield, it doesn’t extend past the 1990s. Most of my demographic can surely say the same, as can quite a few outside it: take the Irishman behind the Youtube channel Super Eyepatch Wolf, author of the video essay “The Fall of The Simpsons: How It Happened.” We both remember tuning in to the show’s debut on December 14, 1989, and how it subsequently “transformed television as we knew it” — and we’ve both lamented how, in the nearly three decades since, “one of the best and most influential TV shows of all time became just another sitcom.”
So how did it happen? To understand what made The Simpsons fall, we have to understand what put it at the top of the zeitgeist in the first place. Not only did the counterculture still exist back in the 1990s, The Simpsons quickly came to constitute its most popular expression. And as with any powerful countercultural product, it was just as quickly labeled dangerous, as anyone who grew up describing each week’s episode of the show to friends not allowed to watch it remember. Yet its “rebellious satire” and all the consequent violations both subtle and blatant of the staid conventions of mainstream American culture (especially in its purest manifestation, the sitcom) came unfailingly accompanied by “comedy grounded in character and heart.”
The fact that The Simpsons’ first generation of writers might well revise a joke twenty or thirty times — creating the countless moments of intricately structured, multilayered verbal and visual comedy we still remember today — didn’t hurt. But even if current writers put in the same hours, they do it on a show that has long since lost touch with what made it great. While each of its characters once had “a very specific set of conflicting beliefs and motivations,” they now seem to do or say anything, no matter how implausible or absurd, that serves the gag of the moment. Celebrity guest stars stopped playing characters specially crafted for them but caricatures of themselves. Plots became bizarre. “The only thing that The Simpsons was a parody of now,” says Super Eyepatch Wolf bringing us to the present day, “was The Simpsons.”
While the show has been self-referentially acknowledging its own decline since about the turn of the millennium, that doesn’t make comparisons with its 1990s “golden age” any less dispiriting. One thinks of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, another generational touchstone, whose creator Bill Watterson ended it after just ten years: it still finds an audience today in part, he says, “because I chose not to run the wheels off it.” The Simpsons, by contrast, now draws its lowest ratings ever, and it would pain those of us who grew up with it as much to see it end as it does to see it keep going. But then, “entertainment isn’t meant to last forever. Rather, it’s an extension of the people and places that made it at a particular moment in time.” The Simpsons at its countercultural best will always define that moment, no matter how long it insists on running beyond it.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.
Glenn Gould Plays Bach on His U.S. TV Debut … After Leonard Bernstein Explains What Makes His Playing So Great (1960)
Why, 35 years after his death, do so many music lovers still respect Glenn Gould above all other pianists? One might assume that, since he played the work of such well-known composers as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Brahms, he would have acceptable substitutes among the most highly skilled pianists of each successive generation. But none have ever taken Gould’s place, and quite possibly none ever will. His distinctiveness owes both to sheer aptitude, and to something else besides: Leonard Bernstein attempts an explanation of that something in the clip above, from the CBS Ford Presents broadcast of January 31, 1960.
“Gould and Bach have become a kind of legendary combination, in spite of Gould’s extreme youth and Bach’s extreme age,” says Bernstein just before a 28-year-old Gould makes his American television debut playing Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor. He goes on to explain the special challenge of playing Bach, who “belonged to a time when composers weren’t being very generous with information about how to play their notes.”
Simply playing the notes on the page would result in an “unutterably dull” performance, but “to what extent can the pianist supply dynamic variety?” Gould imbued the pieces he played with variety, dynamic and otherwise, all of it reflecting his own “judgments, instincts, and highly individual personality.”
In the years after this broadcast (which you can see in full here), Gould’s personality would grow even more highly individual. Just two years later, Gould and the New York Philharmonic’s performance of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto came preceded by Bernstein’s infamous disclaimer: he found himself not in “total agreement” Gould’s performance, one “distinctly different from any I’ve ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms’ dynamic indications.” Two years after that, Gould would retire from live performance entirely, keeping a safe distance from his audience in the studio instead. We now remember him as the first classical pianist to truly inhabit the age of recording and broadcasting; did that habitation begin, in some sense, in the television studio with Bernstein?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.
How Innovative Jazz Pianist Vince Guaraldi Became the Composer of Beloved Charlie Brown Music
Nostalgia gets a bad rap these days, and for good reason. Too many people who pine for the past seem to want the very worst parts of it back. Sadly, even fun retreads—8‑bit video games, 90s cartoon kitsch—became dark harbingers, as the memes of “Remember when?” listicles turned into carriers of viral evil. What a bummer. Is there any pop culture from the past that survives untainted by cynicism, sappiness, or trolldom? Unequivocally yes—that purest of artifacts is A Charlie Brown Christmas, and its perfection of a soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi trio. Nothing can touch its sublime mix of joy, innocence, melancholy, and bossa nova-driven cool.
The 1965 movie, an earnest exploration of the holiday through the worldly-wise eyes of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts gang, has affected several generations since it first aired. But at first, the “unabashedly anti-consumerist story” met with disapproval from its sponsors, Coca-Cola and CBS, who “had no choice but to air it,” writes Liz Pelly at Rolling Stone, “they had already advertised it in TV Guide.”
Guaraldi trio drummer Jerry Granelli remembers that the corporate execs “really didn’t like that a little kid was going to come out and say what Christmas was all about, which wasn’t about shopping. And then the jazz music, which was improvised.”
Although each holiday season we’re supposed to believe there’s a war on Christmas, everyone, from every faith or none, loves A Charlie Brown Christmas. Its plainspoken piety is a big part of its appeal, but equally so is the music: the unalloyed delight of “Linus and Lucy” and its dance scene (top), the downbeat charm of “Christmastime is Here” and its children’s choir…. The story of how the special came to be is a fascinating one, a series of serendipitous encounters that begins in 1963 with producer Lee Mendelson at work on a documentary about Schulz.
While driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, he just happened to catch Guaraldi’s hit “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” (above). “It was melodic and open,” he thought, “and came in like a breeze off the bay. And it struck me that this might be the kind of music I was looking for.” He tracked the pianist and composer down to score his Schulz documentary. While that project fizzled, Coca-Cola liked it enough to enlist Mendelson for the Christmas special, and some of Guaraldi’s original music—including “Linus and Lucy”—migrated over, written, notes Derrick Bang, to “reflect Charlie Brown’s gentle, kid-oriented universe.” The whole soundtrack was laid down in three hours in the studio. “That’s just the way jazz records were recorded,” recalls Granelli.
“Christmastime is Here” was originally an instrumental (above), but at the last moment, Mendelson had the idea to “put some words to this.” Unable to find a lyricist in time, he penned those words himself. “We rushed it to the choir that Vince Guaraldi had been working with in San Francisco. And he recorded it, and we got it into the show about a week before it went on the air.” Guaraldi “probably would have loved to recycle much of the music from the never-aired documentary,” writes Bang, but the Christmas special called for a slightly different tone, so he wrote two additional compositions, including the bouncy “Skating,” below, “a lyrical jazz waltz highlighted by sparkling keyboard runs that sounded precisely like children ice-skating joyously on a frozen pond.”
The combined talents of Mendelson, Schulz, Guaraldi, and animator Bill Melendez have made A Charlie Brown Christmas an enduringly beloved classic, so critically successful at the time that the four collaborated on several other Peanuts films. In fact, Guaraldi composed music for a total of sixteen Peanuts movies, including the 1969 feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Guaraldi’s compositional and instrumental skills will be forever linked to Charles Schulz’s iconic characters, perhaps no more so than during the winter holidays.
But he should by no means be solely remembered as the Peanuts composer—any more than the similarly bossa-nova inspired Burt Bacharach should be forever tied to his film themes. Guaraldi’s work stands on its own, or as jazz writer Ted Gioia recently tweeted, “I’ll say it straight: Vince Guaraldi was a brilliant, underrated jazz musician. No one need feel any embarrassment about enjoying (or praising) his music.” If, for some reason, you happened to feel you needed permission to love Guaraldi, there you have it.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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