A quick note: HBO recently premiered Vinyl, which takes a Goodfellas-style look at the seedy 1970s rock music and record-making scene. Here’s a quick snapshot of what the show’s all about:
Created by Mick Jagger & Martin Scorsese & Rich Cohen and Terence Winter, this new drama series is set in 1970s New York. A ride through the sex- and drug-addled music business at the dawn of punk, disco, and hip-hop, the show is seen through the eyes of a record label president, Richie Finestra, played by Bobby Cannavale, who is trying to save his company and his soul without destroying everyone in his path. Additional series regulars include Olivia Wilde, Ray Romano, Ato Essandoh, Max Casella, P.J. Byrne, J.C. MacKenzie, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Juno Temple, Jack Quaid, James Jagger and Paul Ben-Victor. Scorsese, Jagger and Winter executive produce along with Victoria Pearman, Rick Yorn, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, John Melfi, Allen Coulter and George Mastras. Winter serves as showrunner. The 10-episode first season debuts February 14th.
The first pilot episode–directly by Scorsese himself–is currently streaming free on HBO’s website. It runs two good hours. And if you want to watch the remaining episodes on the cheap, you can start a monthlong free trial of HBO NOW. Just look for the “Start Your Free Month” button at the top of HBO’s site.
Note: The video up top is only a trailer for Episode 1. To watch the complete episode, click here.
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Last year, we let you know that the first season of The Joy of Painting, the public-television paint-along show hosted by the neatly permed and persistently reassuring Bob Ross, had appeared free to watch online.
Produced by WNVC in Falls Church, Virginia, that season aired in 1983, and had some rough edges — the audible movements and murmurs of the crew in the background, the naturally improvisational Ross’ occasional stumble over one of his scripted lines — that would get thoroughly smoothed away as the program rapidly became an international TV institution, a process you can witness again for yourself now that Bob Ross’ Youtube channel has made available all 31 seasons free online.
Season Two
“Bob Ross died in 1995 at 52 after a battle with lymphoma,” writes the New York Times’ Foster Kamer, “but his cultural legacy has grown in his absence. He was around to witness the beginnings of his own cult status. In the early ’90s, he was big in Japan. And MTV, catering to the Gen X penchant for irony, ran a series of promotionaladvertisements that featured him.”
Gen Xers across America would surely all have caught glimpses of Ross — and more importantly, heard a few of his mesmerizingly delivered words — during late-night or midday channel-surfing sessions, but now, thanks to the increasing availability of The Joy of Painting’s archives on-demand and online, it’s made new fans even of those born after Ross had already departed.
Season Three
The show always made it easy for its viewers to paint as they watched, with Ross always taking the time to run down the short list of required tools, making tirelessly sure to emphasize that under no circumstances should they buy nylon brushes or clean those brushes with turpentine. As the production values increased, so did the number of colors on the palette, though they never expanded too far beyond the core set, which The Joy of Painting die-hards can rattle off like a mantra, of Bright Red, Phthalo Blue, Midnight Black, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow, Van Dyke Brown, Titanium White, Sap Green — and, as Ross himself might say, the “almighty” canvas-covering Magic White, the foundation of the “wet-on-wet” technique he learned from mentor, and later bitter rival, Bill Alexander.
Season Four
The New York Times article quotes Annette Kowalski, a onetime student of Ross who now helps run the Bob Ross, Inc. empire, on the host’s enduring appeal as a teacher: “If you listen closely to Bob’s programs, he never says ‘I’m going to teach you this. He never assumes that he knows more than you do. He says: ‘We’ll learn this together.’ And I think — even though people don’t realize it — I think that’s what his big turn-on is.” But it almost goes without saying that not everyone fascinated by the show, and maybe not even most people fascinated by the show, actually have any desire to paint themselves.
Season Five
So why do they still tune in, on whatever platform they might tune in on, and in such large numbers? The key must have something to do with Ross’ oft-repeated reminders to his viewers that, when it comes to the landscapes on their own canvases, “this is your world, your creation,” and in your world, “there are no set, firm rules — you find what works for you, and that’s what you do.” On The Joy of Painting, Ross created a world, or perhaps a reality, of his own, one where “anybody can paint; all you need is a dream in your heart and a little practice,” where “there are no mistakes, just happy accidents” (plentifully inhabited, of course, by “happy little trees”), and one which many found they enjoyed living in, brush in hand or not, even if only for 26 minutes at a time.
Season Six
We will continuing adding seasons to this list as they become available.
Earlier this month, the world got news of the death of a man whose name many of us had never heard but whose act of innovation shaped what we do every day. “When historians of the future study the ways information technology affected people’s lives in the late 20th century,” said his Economist obituary, “they will surely recognise e‑mail as one of the most profound. Today, about 2.5m e‑mails are sent every second. The first e‑mail of all, though” — to be precise, “the first message between terminals attached to separate CPUs, albeit that these two computers stood side-by-side in the same room” — “was sent 45 years ago by Ray Tomlinson.”
Fifteen years after that quietly history-making transmission, e‑mail had evolved to the point that it had become a subject in the news. This 1984 segment of the Thames Television computer show Database shows how one early-adopting couple, Pat and Julian Green of north London, communicate with the world by connecting their computer to, of all things, the telephone line. “It’s simple, really,” says Julian, unplugging a British Telecom cable from one socket and plugging it into a modem, plugging a different wire from the modem into the first socket, switching on the modem, and then hand-dialing the number of a “main computer” — with his rotary phone. “Extremely simple,” he reiterates.
What can they do on Micronet, their service provider, once connected? They might read the news, have a look at “reviews of the software that’s currently available” and even download some of it, or use the feature that Pat (in addition to her use of the computer for “keeping household records, such as what I have in the freezer, and people’s telephone numbers and addresses,” as well as “a word processor for my letters, which always come out perfect now”) describes as most exciting of all: “the mailbox where I write to other people.” We see how she can use this new electronic mail to ask her doctor to refill a prescription, and even to send a message to the Database studio.
All this must have intrigued the viewers of the day, who, if they had their own computers at the ready, could even “download” software straight from the broadcast by recording the tone that plays over the show’s end credits. (As long as their computers were BBC Micros, that is, at least in this particular episode.) The past 32 years have seen enthusiasm for new technology spread all across the world, turning us all, in some sense, into Pat and Julian Greens. Today we marvel at all what we can do with our smartphones, devices that would’ve seemed magical in 1984, but in three decades from now, even our current technological lives will surely look quainter than anything in the Database archives.
“Now is the winter of our discontent….” If you know nothing else of Shakespeare’s Richard III, you’ll know this famous opening line, and it’s likely many of us know it through Laurence Olivier’s performance of Richard as a “melodramatic baddie” in the famous 1955 film. If not, take a look at the clip below to familiarize yourself with Olivier’s distinctive mannerisms and speech. The reference may largely be lost these days, but in 1965, at the very height of The Beatles’ fame, Olivier’s performance was still fresh in the minds of the TV viewing public. And the mercurial English comedian Peter Sellers put it to good use in a Beatles-tribute variety program called The Music of Lennon and McCartney that aired in the UK. In the clip above, Sellers recites the lyrics to “A Hard Day’s Night” in character as Olivier’s dandyish Richard.
Unsurprisingly, Sellers and the Beatles had hit it off right away when they were introduced by George Martin, and as we showed you in a recent post, the comedian milked their lyrics for more material, reading “She Loves You,” in a variety of accents. Sellers’ rendition of “A Hard Day’s Night” was hardly the first Shakespearean turn for the band.
The previous year, they appeared in another variety television special called Around the Beatles, “produced concurrently,” writes Dangerous Minds, “while A Hard Day’s Night was being shot.” (Around the Beatles was directed by producer and manager Jack Good, a “Shakespeare fan,” who also, it turns out, convinced rockabilly star Gene Vincent to dress up like Richard III.) In this earlier program, the band—always good sports about this kind of thing—dressed up in Shakespearean garb and staged a raucous performance of a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Twitch.tv is launching a new Food Channel. And it’s getting things going with a marathon streaming of all 201 episodes of Julia Child’s now legendary TV series “The French Chef.”
Today, Twitch Creative is celebrating the joy of cooking with the launch of a brand new channel dedicated to all things food! Twitch.tv/Food will showcase cooking content 24/7 on Twitch Creative, and we’re kicking things off with an almighty marathon of all 201 episodes of Julia Child’s classic PBS cooking show, The French Chef.
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Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated humankind for centuries upon centuries; long before the X‑Files popularized the declaration, we’ve wanted to believe. But this curiosity-driven desire goes hand-in-hand with mortal fear: what if intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe, and it decides to come to Earth and exterminate us? Turn-of-the-century sci-fi master H.G. Wells tapped into that emotional current with The War of the Worlds; forty years later, Orson Welles tapped it deeper still with his adaptation of Wells’ novel, “a certain notorious radio broadcast which some of you may remember.”
That’s how Welles puts it from the narrator’s seat of Who’s Out There?, a half-hour television documentary originally broadcast in 1971. “It starts off strong with its Doctor Who-esque credits sequence,” writes io9’s Katharine Trendacosta. “Then Welles talks about becoming friends with H.G. Wells after his infamous War of the Worlds radio play. Then they interview people who had been scared by the broadcast. It gets barely more normal as it goes on. Once Carl Sagan showed up, my head exploded.”
I listened to Welles’ War of the Worlds over and over again on tape as a kid, but by that time it had already passed into the realm of historical artifact. When Who’s Out There? debuted, however, that infamous Halloween broadcast had aired less than 35 years before (Who’s Out There? itself, by comparison, aired 45 years ago), so the fright it caused remained in living memory. Even more recently, David Bowie had capitalized artistically on a new wave of outer-space fascination with “Space Oddity” in 1969 and, more directly, “Life on Mars?” two years later.
“Life on Mars?” acts as more or less the animating question of this documentary, which both examines the then-current evidence for such a phenomenon, on the Red Planet or elsewhere, and ponders why we so often assume that visitors from outer space will come with malevolent intentions. (Welles wonders aloud if it has to do with our having named Mars after the Roman god of war, and I suppose he has a point.) Still, our curiosity hasn’t gone away, as evidenced by ExoMars, the joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency which today launches probes out to search for, yes, life on mars. If whoever’s out there won’t come to us, well then, we’ll just have to go to them.
Spend five minutes recording yourself recapping everything you know about Japanese history.
(International Studies majors and Japanese citizens, please sit this one out.)
Most of us will wind up with a pastiche that’s heavy on pop culture and relatively recent events. The average Japanese schoolchild should have no difficulty identifying the glaring holes and factual errors in our narratives.
If this idea amuses you, you’ll likely enjoy American History, above, South Park creator Trey Parker’s early animated short, a 1993 Student Academy Award silver medalist.
He also remembers the Alamo, proving one Reddit wag’s hypothesis: If there’s one thing people remember about the Alamo, it is to remember the Alamo…
And then….
Parker and another classmate, Chris Graves, his soon-to-be DP on Cannibal: The Musical, animated the results using the most rudimentary of paper cut outs. It’s easy to spot the fledgling South Park style, as well as Python animator Terry Gilliam’s influence. This may be American history, but the anonymous top hatted hordes bear an awfully close resemblance to South Park’s resident Canadians, Terrance and Phillip.
If the phonetic spellings of non-native speaker Nishimura’s pronunciation makes you uncomfortable, it’s worth noting that he not only worked as an animator on South Park, but also represented his country by playing “President” Hirohito on the extremely funny (and NSFW) “Chinpokomon” episode.
American History will be added to the Animation section of our collection,
Others have tried to offer up answers to those questions too. And we’d be remiss, a reader reminded us, if we didn’t give a little airtime to Star Trek: New Voyages, “the longest-running, Star Trek original series fan production in the world.” Here’s a little more information about the production from the show’s web site:
Created in 2003 by James Cawley, along with producer Jack Marshall, the show strives to complete the “five-year mission” of the Starship Enterprise, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” It’s celebration of Gene Roddenberry’s legacy has won critical acclaim and numerous accolades, as well as attracting the attention and participation of Star Trek alumni such as George Takei and Walter Koenig, who have returned to reprise their roles on NEW VOYAGES. We have even provided prop items for the actual STAR TREK franchise series “Enterprise”!
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