When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978–82)

in Music, Television | August 17th, 2016

“This is not a test!” the host shouts into his microphone. “This is an actual show!” If you lived in New York and had cable in the late 1970s, you may have witnessed it yourself — and you may well have needed the reminder, because this show neither looked nor felt like anything that ever aired before. A fixture on public access Channel D and Channel J from 1972 to 1982, it threw down a redefinition of televisual possibilities that hasn’t just survived as a time capsule of the downtown Manhattan scene at its creative rolling boil, but retains its anarchic charge to this day. Welcome, whether you first tuned in back then or have only just tuned in on the internet now, to Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.

O’Brien, who co-created and presided over the show, didn’t always shout, but when he did, he managed to retain his deadpan self-possession. He even kept his cool when hanging out, live on the air, with the regulars of a guest list including “David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, the B‑52s, Chris Burden, George Clinton, Iggy Pop, Steven Meisel, Mick Jones, James Chance, John Lurie, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, the Screamers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nile Rodgers, Kid Creole, the Offs, Alex Chilton, the Brides of Funkenstein, Arthur Russell, David McDermott, and Charles Rocket, just to name a few.” At its height, TV Party let its audience hang out with such luminaries almost every week as well — literally, if they managed to find their way to the studio.

Having attained subcultural fame as the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, the Cleveland-born O’Brien also engaged in such straightforwardly countercultural efforts as writing for, and later editing, the infamous journal of the cannabis lifestyle High Times.

That bit of status drew an invitation to appear on the early public-access variety program The Coca Crystal Show. The experience immediately inspired him to create one of his own, a strike against the threat to free speech he sensed when mass media meant just a few mainstream television channels. And so O’Brien, along with Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, launched TV Party, a drug-fueled re-interpretation of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark, “the TV show that’s a party,” as he put it in a memorably askew phrasing on its very first broadcast, “but which could be a political party.”

Here we have a few particularly memorable TV Party evenings, including a performance by the not-of-this-earth proto-glam-rocker Klaus Nomi, an interview of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (who became a regular presence on the show and a “little brother” figure to the crew), and an episode with Blondie. Vice put up a TV Party best-of a couple years ago, which has let a new generation experience what now seems strikingly like a predecessor of the shows created for the internet video platforms they frequent today. It also includes a 90-minute documentary about the history of TV Party, which provides the necessary historical and cultural context for those unfamiliar with the New York O’Brien describes as “like a third-world country.” Shot in the ghostly black-and-white one associates with 1970s video artists, its visual elements either psychedelically bleeding into or jaggedly cutting between one another, “the show could get abstract quickly,” remembers O’Brien.

But in upholding its mission to erase the distinction between performer and audience, TV Party belongs as much to the late 70s as it does to the 21st century. It used to the fullest extent possible the freedom of public-access television, very much the Youtube of its day. (Certainly the callers-in could sound just as abusive as Youtube commenters.) It even ended in the highly modern fashion of not getting canceled, but simply fading away, the stretches between episodes growing longer and longer. “Maybe Chris and I will start it up again,” O’Brien speculates in the documentary, but he presumably has his hands full with his latest talk show: Tea at the Beatrice with Glenn O’Brien, created especially for the internet. The sensibility may have changed — nobody fires up a joint on camera anymore — but the excitement of exploring uncharted media territory remains.

Klaus Nomi: The Brilliant Performance of a Dying Man

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The Odd Couple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

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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Marie Osmond Performs the Dadaist Poem “Karawane” on the TV Show, Ripley’s Believe It or Not (1985)

in Life, Literature, Music, Poetry, Television | July 15th, 2016

Remember Donny and Marie Osmond, the toothy, teenage Mormon siblings whose eponymous television variety show was a wholesome 70’s mix of skits, songs, and ice skating?

Their surprisingly enduring theme song reduced their popularity to an easily graspable binary formula:

She was a little bit country. He was a little bit rock and roll.

Turns out Marie was also more than a little bit Dada.

From 1985 to 1986, Marie served as actor Jack Palance’s cohost on Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a TV series exploring strange occurrences, bizarre historical facts, and other such crowd-pleasing oddities… one of which was apparently the aforementioned European avant-garde art movement, founded a hundred years ago this week.

If you don’t know as much about Dada as you’d like, Ms. Osmond’s brief primer is a surprisingly sturdy introduction.

No cutesy bootsy, easy references to melting clocks here.

The highlight is her performance of Dada poet and manifesto author Hugo Ball’s nonsensical 1916 sound poem “Karawane.”

Lose the yellow bathrobe and she could be a captive warrior princess on Game of Thrones, fiercely petitioning the Mother of Dragons on behalf of her people. (Invent some subtitles for extra Dada-inflected fun!)

A sharp eyed young art student named Ethan Bates did catch one error in Marie’s lesson. The ’13’ costume she pulls from a handy dressing room niche was not worn by Hugo Ball, but rather Dutch painter Theo Van Doesburg, one of the founders of the De Stijl movement.

Still you’ve got to hand it to Marie, who was slated to perform just a single line of the poem. When it came time to tape, she abandoned the cue cards, blowing producers’ and crew’s minds by delivering the poem in its unhinged entirety from memory.

Now that’s rock and roll.

Below you’ll find footage of Ball himself performing the work in 1916.

Marie’s version was eventually released by Rough Trade Records as a track on Lipstick Traces, a companion soundtrack to Greil Marcus’ seminal book.

Hear the Experimental Music of the Dada Movement: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Century Ago

Download All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Journal That Publicized the Avant-Garde Movement a Century Ago (1917–21)

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Aaron Sorkin, Creator of The West Wing & The Social Network, Teaches Screenwriting in an Online Class

in Film, Online Courses, Television, Writing | July 14th, 2016

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

Sports Night, The West Wing, The American President, The Social Network — hardly shameful items to appear on anyone’s résumé. Sure, people disagree about the likes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom, but we’ve all got to admit that when Aaron Sorkin writes, he hits more than he misses, and even the supposed misses have more of interest about them than many others’ hits. How does this master of the modern American scene — its concerns, its personalities, its conversations, its politics — do it? You can find out in his Screenwriting course on MasterClass, the new platform for online instruction as given by big-name doers of high-profile work.

Back in May, we featured MasterClass’s offering of Werner Herzog on filmmaking, and though most everyone can enjoy hearing the man behind Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Grizzly Man talk for five hours, not everyone can summon the will to make movies like those. Sorkin, by contrast, uses his also considerable creative vitality to a different end entirely, writing snappy scripts that bring his own compelling idiosyncrasies to mainstream film and television.

But he started, according to MasterClass, by writing his first screenplay on the humble medium of cocktail napkins — cocktail napkins that became A Few Good Men. Since then, he’s come up with “rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell,” now ready to share with his online students.

In fact, he gives one away for free in the trailer above: “No one in real life starts a sentence with, ‘Damn it.’ ” That alone may get you writing your own Oscar-winning screenplay, thus saving you the $90 fee for the whole five-hour course, but Sorkin goes on to tease his methods for breaking through his “constant state of writer’s block” to craft dialogue as he conceives of that process: “Taking something someone has just said, holding them in your hand, and then punching them in the face with it.” He also makes reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, making his own lecturing sound like the very same high-and-low, intellectual and visceral cocktail that his fans so enjoy in the dialogue he writes. “The worst crime you can commit,” he warns, “is telling the audience something they already know,” and it sounds as if, in teacher mode to his audience of aspiring screenwriters, he plans on following his own advice.

Note: You can get a year-long pass to all Masterclass courses for $180. Or give any individual course as a gift.

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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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Helen Mirren Holds Her Own (and Then Some) in a Cringe-Inducingly Sexist TV Interview, 1975

in Film, Television, Theatre | June 10th, 2016

Say what you will about Kim Kardashian. (Go ahead, I’ll wait.)

Yes, she may only be famous for being rich and famous—not a particularly admirable cultural achievement. But, “and this is the big word: B‑U-T-T‑,” says Helen Mirren, “it’s wonderful that you’re allowed to have a butt nowadays… Thanks to Madame Kardashian.” Should you think Madame Kardashian’s butt-baring shameful, you’ll have Dame Helen to deal with, and she may not deal with you kindly.

Though the Kardashians are “a phenomenon I just don’t find interesting,” Mirren said recently, she admires Kim and other women in pop culture for their body positivity: “When I was growing up, it was thought to be unbelievably sluttish to even have a bra strap showing. Everything was about women conforming…. Women were controlled by being shamed…. I love shameless women. Shameless and proud.”

Mirren knows well of what she speaks. Though an accomplished stage actress since the mid-sixties, she has been pigeonholed by critics as a sex symbol throughout her career in theatre and film. While performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, one paper dubbed her “Stratford’s very own sex queen.” Mirren’s early film work included nude scenes in 1969’s Age of Consent and the 1979 Bob Guccione-produced Caligula, and she has called the decade between those two films the most sexist time in recent history, “worse than the 1940s or 50s,” she says, “It was horrible. That decade, after the sexual revolution but before feminism, was perilous for women.”

Some evidence is on display in the clips above from an infamous 1975 interview Mirren gave with a leering Michael Parkinson. The interview begins, at the top, with Parkinson quoting several critics on Mirren’s “sluttish eroticism,” among other things. It quickly goes downhill from there. Mirren shrugs off the sexist lingo; Parkinson can’t shut up about it, asking if “what can best be described as your ‘equipment’ hinders you, perhaps, in that pursuit” of being, he says, “in quotes a ‘serious actress.’” Asked to clarify, he stumbles, then says that her body “might detract from the performance, if you know what I mean.” She doesn’t.

Mirren doesn’t make this belittling sexism easy for Parkinson, but he can’t seem to stop himself. It’s hard to watch, but also inspiring to see her poise and confidence in the face of his boorishness. (She calls his questions “boring” and he finally vows to “leave off this sexy image thing,” though he comes back to it.) Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian calls the interview “far from unusual,” and the kind of thing that “gave Jimmy Savile his cover.” She also says that though “Mirren is right on the impact of the sexual revolution,” she is “wrong on chronology. The 70s was the decade when feminism took hold—and perhaps that’s why sexism became still more marked.” Pronounced backlash always follows social change, a phenomenon we’ve seen so often that it seems inevitable.

The Parkinson interview was Mirren’s first talk show appearance, and she remembers being “terrified” at the time. On re-watching the interview in 2011, she said, “I actually thought, bloody hell! I did really well. I was so young and inexperienced. And he was such a f***ing sexist old fart. He was.” She remembers him as “an extremely creepy interviewer” and told BUST magazine in 2010 she was “far more polite than I should have been.” Mirren got the chance to confront Parkinson about that creepy 1975 appearance when she returned as a guest on his show in 2006 to talk about her title role in The Queen.

In the clip above from that appearance, Parkinson returns to the subject of Mirren’s breasts in discussing her lead part in the BBC police procedural series Prime Suspect. She forthrightly takes him to task. “I’m glad you mentioned that, Michael,” she says, “because you can’t resist, can you?” Of the 1975 interview, she says, “I hated you. I thought you were a sexist person.” Parkinson hasn’t changed, it’s clear, but Mirren says she’s “mellowed.” The exchange is a lot less awkward, perhaps because Parkinson knows he can’t bully Mirren the movie star as he did the young stage actress.

Though Mirren now says she’s happy to no longer be a sex symbol, she also expresses admiration for “women who have claimed their own bodies…. They all raise their middle fingers to this epithet of ‘slut.’ They wear what they want to wear, behave as they want to behave.” Though she did not have children, she tells BUST she would have taught her daughter to “say ‘f*ck off’ in the face of sexism”: “It’s quite valuable to have the courage and the confidence to say, ‘No, f*ck off, leave me alone, thank you very much.” Sadly, as we see again and again, in a culture that still shames and devalues women, and enables rape and sexual violence, that courage and confidence, incredibly valuable as it is, isn’t enough to stop continued rampant sexism and abuse in the entertainment industry and everywhere else.

Download All 239 Issues of Landmark UK Feminist Magazine Spare Rib Free Online

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Stream 23 Free Documentaries from PBS’ Award-Winning American Experience Series

in Film, History, Television | June 7th, 2016

How to understand a country as enormous, as culturally and economically productive, and as contradictory and frustrating as the United States of America? As an American myself, I’m here to tell you that there’s no shortcut. I live abroad, and distance has provided me a helpful new perspective, but my curiosity about how my homeland turned out like it did remains strong. That same curiosity possesses many an American and non-American alike, and they all can satiate at least some of it by watching episodes of the PBS documentary series American Experience available free online. Note: We have a list of streamable episodes down below.

Since premiering at The American Experience on October 4, 1988 with an episode on the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the article may have fallen away, but the in-depth exploration of U.S. history has continued apace. While hardly formulaic, the episodes do tend start with a particular event, place, or individual that time has rendered iconic. And so, at the top of the post, we have the American Experience portrait of Thomas Edison, the “holder of more patents than any other inventor in history” who grew rich and famous “as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light.”

Edison has indeed come to represent the American archetype of the self-made millionaire whose sheer ingenuity would improve lives across the country, and ultimately the world. But the coin has, as always, another side: how much of Edison’s success owes to his own hard work, and how much owes to his combination and marketing of the work of others? (Similar questions have continued to swirl around more recent larger-than-life figures in American business, not least Steve Jobs.) Another fascinatingly complicated legacy, as well as quite possibly America’s most scrutinized life and death, comes in for the American Experience treatment in the series’ four-hour episode on John F. Kennedy.

In addition to these stories of American personalities, the online archive also has stories of American places like Mount Rushmore, American achievements like space travel, American eras like the year 1964, and even pieces of American infrastructure like Penn Station. And of course, given the insatiable American appetite for presidential biographies, such commanders-in-chief as Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton also have their own episodes. But viewers outside America should note that, because of geographical rights restrictions, not all these videos may stream for them. Since I live outside America myself, I’ve got the same problem, but then again, I’ll also have some binge-watching (and cultural reintroduction) material on my next trip back.

The titles listed above will be added to our collection of Free Online Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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265 Free Documentaries Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Experimental Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

in Music, Television | May 17th, 2016

Last year, Colin Marshall highlighted for you the music of Xiu Xiu, the experimental post-punk band, which has traveled the world, playing their own interpretation of the music Angelo Badalamenti wrote for David Lynch’s early 1990s series, Twin Peaks. Our original post featured some of those live performances, and now comes a studio recording of those Twin Peaks interpretations.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that you can stream the new album–called Plays the Music of Twin Peaks– free online. Just click play above. Find a list of individual tracks below. And, if you like what you hear, consider purchasing your own copy of the album from the usual vendors. Enjoy.

1. Laura Palmer’s Theme (0:00)
2. Into The Night (5:03)
3. Audrey’s Dance (10:15)
4. Packard’s Vibration (14:41)
5. Nightsea Wind (18:31)
6. Blue Frank/Pink Room (25:37)
7. Sycamore Tree (31:28)
8. Harold’s Theme (38:16)
9. Dance of the Dream Man (42:12)
10. Falling (47:22)
11. Love Theme Farewell (54:20)
12. Josie’s Past (1:00:44)

via Welcome to Twin Peaks

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

John Lydon & Public Image Ltd. Sow Chaos on American Bandstand: The Show’s Best and Worst Moment (1980)

in Music, Television | May 12th, 2016

American Bandstand is best remembered these days not for doing the job it set out to do–presenting safe pop stars in the company of a studio audience to move units–but for when it ran headlong into the changing culture around it. Or at least that’s what Open Culture thinks. We’ve seen the beginnings of the Summer of Love with Jefferson Airplane and chipper Dick Clark trying to figure out why hippies wouldn’t cut their hair. We’ve also seen a bemused Clark attempting to interact with David Byrne when the Talking Heads played the show. But nothing really tops the time Public Image Ltd. brought true chaos to the Bandstand.

Dick Clark called it the worst moment in Bandstand history; Lydon, in his autobiography, said the opposite, saying Clark told him it was one of the best performances in the show’s history. Somewhere in between lies the truth–no doubt Clark knew it was great television.

It all took place on May 17, 1980, one full month before John Lydon and Keith Levene’s contentious appearance on Tom Snyder’s program, where Lydon insists that Public Image Ltd. is not a band. “It’s a company,” he shot back in his finest nasal cockney.

PIL was on American Bandstand to promote their album Second Edition, their dark dabbling into dub and post-punk. The first song may be called “Poptones” but there’s nothing poppy about it.

According to Cole Coonce in his book Sex & Travel & Vestiges of Metallic Fragments, Lydon told Clark that he had a cold. “He said that because he wasn’t feeling well he was just going to go up there and take the piss out of me. So I said, ‘Go ahead.’ And he did.’”

Lydon’s account is different, saying the show’s producers cut down “Poptones” and “Careering” (a total of 13 some minutes) down to a manageable length.

“I don’t know where the vocals are going to drop. What are we supposed to do?” Lydon thought.

What PIL did is what was broadcast. Adrift from their own song, Lydon starts “Poptones” sitting on the front of the stage, then grabs the microphone and wanders into the audience. He makes no attempt to lip sync. The audience isn’t sure what to do. Lydon isn’t sure. There’s an element of danger and excitement. Lydon grabs audience members and takes them onto the stage to dance. By the end of the first song the audience has taken over the stage and then Dick Clark has to introduce the band. It doesn’t last long, and “Careering” begins.

The danger of punk and post-punk that evening wasn’t in the performance of the band or of a volatile audience. It was in the breaking down of a television show’s artifice and the separation of band and audience. Check it out.

Some great photos of the show can be viewed over at Flashbak.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Learn Calligraphy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famously Inspiring Calligraphy Teacher

in Art, How to Learn for Free, Television | May 9th, 2016

The story has, over time, solidified into one of the columns of Steve Jobs lore: in the early 1970s, the man who would found Apple left for Reed College. But before long, not wanting to spend any more of his parents’ money on tuition (and perhaps not temperamentally compatible with the structure of higher education anyway), he officially dropped out, couch-surfed through friends’ pads, lived on free meals ladled out by Hare Krishnas, continued to audit a variety of classes, and generally lived the prototype techno-neo-hippie lifestyle Silicon Valley has continued relentlessly to refine.

Perhaps the least likely of those classes was one on calligraphy, taught by Trappist monk and calligrapher Robert Palladino. More than thirty years later, delivering a now-famous Stanford commencement speech, Jobs recalled his time in the calligraphy class: “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.”

And what of the calligraphy teacher who made that possible? “Palladino, who died in late February at 83, joined the Trappist order of monks in New Mexico in 1950, according to a 2003 profile in Reed Magazine,” writes the Washington Post’s Niraj Chokshi. “Just 17 at the time, his handwriting attracted the attention of the monastery scribe, who worked with him on his art. Five years later, Palladino moved to Lafayette, Ore., where local artists brought news of a skilled amateur to Lloyd Reynolds, an icon in the field and the creator of Reed’s calligraphy program.”

Now you, too, can receive instruction from Reynolds, who in 1968 starred in a series on the Oregon Education Television Service’s program Men Who Teach, shooting twenty half-hour broadcasts on italic calligraphy and handwriting. Eight years later — about the time Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak — he re-shot the series in color, and you can watch that version almost in its entirety with the playlist at the top of the post. (Reed has also made some related instructional materials available.) You may feel the temptation to turn all of Reynolds’ lessons on the art of writing toward your goal of becoming the next Steve Jobs. But try to resist that impulse and appreciate it for its own nature, which Jobs himself described as “beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.”

We’ll add these vintage lessons to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978–82)

Marie Osmond Performs the Dadaist Poem “Karawane” on the TV Show, Ripley’s Believe It or Not (1985)

Aaron Sorkin, Creator of The West Wing & The Social Network, Teaches Screenwriting in an Online Class

Helen Mirren Holds Her Own (and Then Some) in a Cringe-Inducingly Sexist TV Interview, 1975

Stream 23 Free Documentaries from PBS’ Award-Winning American Experience Series

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Experimental Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

John Lydon & Public Image Ltd. Sow Chaos on American Bandstand: The Show’s Best and Worst Moment (1980)

Learn Calligraphy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famously Inspiring Calligraphy Teacher

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