If you warbled “02134” without hesitation, you probably grew up watching a beloved children’s television show of the 70s.
It turns out Zoom wasn’t the only cool program WGBH hatched in 1972. On March 13, just a couple of months after Zoom’s debut, the station aired Between Time and Timbuktu, a 90-minute special inspired by the work of Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut also wrote the introduction to the published script, a paperback quickie enhanced by production stills and photos taken by Vonnegut’s wife, Jill Krementz. It was as good a forum as any for him to announce his retirement from film, which he cited as a medium “too clanking and real” for his comfort.
The show itself is likely to cause nostalgia for television’s freewheeling, Monty Python era.
Though 1972 wasn’t an entirely silly period, if you’ll recall. The Vietnam War was raging, with Walter Cronkite holding down the CBS Evening News desk.
Between Time and Timbuktu capitalizes on the veteran broadcaster’s ubiquity by casting comedian Ray Goulding of Bob and Ray fame, as an appropriately grave Walter Gesundheit. Bob joined him at the news desk as a fictitious former astronaut. Vonnegut was appreciative of their efforts, stating that American comedians had probably done more to shape his thinking than any other writer.
Also look for William Hickey, who played Prizzi’s Honor’s genial, aged mafia don, in the lead role of Stony Stevenson—now there’s a period character name! If you’ll remember, Stony is also the first civilian in space, at least according to the Sirens of Titan.
Attention sulky art school students! Next time you’re stocking up on pre-smashed TVs, baby doll parts, riot cop stencils and mannequins, be sure to say hello to Shepard Fairey.
Fairey’s real, but the store, a brightly lit emporium catering to those seeking to make subversive statements with their art, is the invention of Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia. (The full episode aired last week on IFC.)
Meanwhile, Fairey wins laughs by leaving the comedy to the comedians. Though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Shocking Art Supply employee Shepard F is an admirer of Henry Rollins. You can read all sorts of things into a performance that deadpan.
The segment was filmed in a Portland store where Fairey remembered purchasing art supplies a few years back. As he notes on his website:
I’m no actor, but this part, along with maybe “jaded art student” or “jaded skate shop employee,” are the closest I’ll ever get to method acting.
- Ayun Halliday is an author whose last sting in Portland involved making final edits to the Zinester’s Guide to NYC in a broken down vintage camper infested with flying ants. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Ah, the joys of dining at a new friend’s home, knowing sooner or later, one’s hostess’ bladder or some bit of last minute meal preparation will dictate that one will be left alone to rifle the titles on her bookshelf with abandon. No medicine cabinet can compete with this peek into the psyche.
Pity that some of the people whose bookshelves I’d be most curious to see are the least likely to open their homes to me. That’s why I’d like to thank The Strand bookstore for providing a virtual peek at the shelves of filmmakers-cum-authors Miranda July and Lena Dunham. (Previous participants in the Authors Bookshelf series include just-plain-regular authors George Saunders, Edwidge Danticat and the late David Foster Wallace whose contributions were selected by biographer D.T. Max.)
I wish Dunham and July had offered up some personal commentary to explain their hand-picked titles. (Surely their homes are lined with books. Surely each list is but a representative sampling, one shelf from hundreds. Hmm. Interesting. Did they run back and forth between various rooms, curating with a vengeance, or is this a case of whatever happened to be in the case closest at hand when deadline loomed?)
Which book’s a longtime favorite?
Which the literary equivalent of comfort food?
Are there things that only made the cut because the author is a friend?
Both women are celebrated storytellers. Surely, there are stories here beyond the ones contained between two covers.
But no matter. The lack of accompanying anecdotes means we now have the fun of inventing imaginary dinner parties:
ME: (flustered) Oh, ha ha, yes! Alex! … I sent him a Facebook request and he accepted.
LENA DUNHAM: (mutters under her breath)
ME: Design Sponge? Really? What’s someone in your shoes doing with a bunch of DIY decorating books?
LENA DUNHAM: (coldly) Research.
Actually, maybe it is better to admire one’s idols’ bookshelves from afar.
I’m chagrined that I don’t recognize more of their modern fiction picks. That wasn’t such a problem when I was measuring myself against the 430 books on Marilyn Monroe’s reading list.
Thank heaven for old standbys like Madame Bovary.
In all sincerity, I was glad that Dunham didn’t try to mask her love of home decor blog books.
One’s shelves, after all, are a matter of taste. So, celebrate the similarities, take their recommendations under advisement, see below and read what you like!
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing — Melissa Bank
A Little History of the World — E. H. Gombrich
Anne of Green Gables — L.M. Montgomery
Apartment Therapy Presents: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Real Design Solutions — Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan
Ariel: The Restored Edition — Sylvia Plath
Bad Feminist: Essays — Roxane Gay
Bastard Out of Carolina (20th Anniversary Edition) — Dorothy Allison
Blue is the Warmest Color — Julie Maroh
Brighton Rock — Graham Greene
Cavedweller - Dorothy Allison
Country Girl: A Memoir — Edna O’Brien
Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media — Nora Ephron
Design Sponge at Home — Grace Bonney
Dinner: A Love Story: It All Begins at the Family Table — Jenny Rosenstrach
Eleanor & Park — Rainbow Rowell
Eloise — Kay Thompson
Eloise In Moscow — Kay Thompson
Eloise In Paris — Kay Thompson
Fanny At Chez Panisse — Alice Waters
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories — Philip Roth
Holidays on Ice — David Sedaris
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry — Leanne Shapton
Lentil — Robert McCloskey
Love Poems — Nikki Giovanni
Love, an Index (McSweeney’s Poetry Series) — Rebecca Lindenberg
Perhaps rather than trying to identify the source, we should work toward being open to inspiration in whatever guise it presents itself. It’s an approach that certainly seems to be working for Patti Smith and David Lynch, aka the Godmother of Punk and Jimmy Stewart from Mars, both a shockingly youthful 69.
One of the most exciting things about their recent segment for the BBC’s Newsnight “Encounters” series is watching how appreciative these veterans are of each other’s process.
“I want a copy of what you just said,” Smith gasps, after Lynch likens the beginnings of a creative process to being in possession of a single, intriguing puzzle piece, knowing that a completed version exists in the adjacent room.
As artists, they’re committed to peeking beneath the veneer. “What’s more horrifying than normalcy?” Smith asks.
It does seem important to note how both of these longtime practitioners mention jotting their ideas down immediately following the muse’s visit.
Nobody likes the way an entire human life can get reduced to a sound bite, but even if you know absolutely nothing else about Carl Sagan, you know that he said the words “billions and billions.” Or rather, you think you know it; in reality (and in accordance with the “Play it again, Sam” principle), the famous astronomer and science popularizer never actually said quite those words on television. A posthumous essay collection used them as its title, but the public only latched on to the catchphrase — or catch half-phrase, anyway — in 1980, when Johnny Carson used it in a Tonight Show parody of Sagan’s broadcast persona. But if you want to hear the real Sagan invoking very large numbers in his characteristic intonation, have we got the video for you.
At the top of the post, you’ll find a supercut of each and every one of his uses of “million,” “billion,” “trillion,” and even “quadrillion” during the entirety of his acclaimed television series Cosmos — to a beat. Alternatively, using similar source material to an entirely different aesthetic end, the sound clip above contains just one instance of Sagan saying “billion” — but stretched out to an hour in length, which turns it into a sort of dronelike ambient music. A not just outward- but forward-thinking scientific visionary like Sagan surely understood more about what lies ahead for humanity than the rest of us do, but could he possibly have foreseen us using our technology for stuff like this? Still, he probably would’ve dug it.
Our vast media landscape feels grossly oversaturated with advertising, propaganda, and all manner of redundant noise. But the discerning eye, and ear, perceives just as much quality out there as crap. “Retired” auteur Steven Soderbergh, as fans of his will know, is just such a discerning customer — and an exacting, highly organized one at that. Soderbergh has sworn off directing film, turning his attention to television by directing the Cinemax series The Knick as well as—reports Indiewire—“producing, editing, and lensing Magic Mike XXL,” the second installment of the Channing Tatum-starring male stripper saga.
One might think all this work would keep Soderbergh busy from dawn to dusk, but he’s a man who “gets more done in a day than most do in a week.” A consummate consumer of culture high and low, Soderbergh assiduously documented his watching, reading, and listening experiences for the entire year previous. His list includes TV shows like Veep and Louie, and heavier fare like True Detective and House of Cards. He read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Karl Ove Gnausgaard’s laborious Proustian novel My Struggle (books one through three—in two months). In addition to recent films like Gone Girl, Soderbergh watched Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey three times and Jaws twice. He even found the time for Die Hard With a Vengeance.
The above represents but the tiniest sampling of Soderbergh’s voracious diet. You can see the full list, including his album purchases here. As Indiewire rightly observes, the list is “a lot to wade through.” Even more so the incredible range and diversity of creative works contained within. Soderbergh maintained a similar log for 2013, which you can see here. Scanning these may inspire you to step up your input, or maybe just to pull a manageable number of selections for future reading/viewing/listening of your own.
Season 5 of Downton Abbey will begin (in the US) on January 4th. But before the main course, we get a little appetizer, which comes in the form of a nine-minute parody starring George Clooney, Jeremy Piven and the cast of Downton Abbey. Borrowing from It’s a Wonderful Life, the fun film asks us to imagine daily life at the Abbey without Lord Grantham in the picture. That’s when we get to see Lady Grantham cavorting with George Clooney, the Marquis of Hollywood (who kind of resembles Gomez from the Addams Family). And then the rest of the family and staff letting their hair loose.
The parody was made for Text Santa, an initiative that supports UK charities during the Christmas period. You can learn how to donate here.
Thanks Kim L. for the tip!
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Remember when television was the big gorilla poised to put an end to all reading?
Then along came the miracle of the Internet. Blogs begat blogs, and thusly did the people start to read again!
Of course, many a great newspaper and magazine fell before its mighty engine. So it goes.
So did television in the old fashioned sense. So it goes.
Funny to think that these fast-moving developments weren’t even part of the landscape in 1991, when author Kurt Vonnegut swung by his hometown of Indianapolis to appear on the local program, Across Indiana.
Host Michael Atwood pointed out the irony of a television interviewer asking a writer if television was to blame for the decline in reading and writing. After which he listened politely while his guest answered at length, comparing reading to an acquired skill on par with “ice skating or playing the French horn.”
Gee… irony elicits a more frenetic approach in the age of BuzzFeed, Twitter, and YouTube. (Nailed it!)
Irony and humanity run neck and neck in Vonnegut’s work, but his appreciation for his Hoosier upbringing was never less than sincere:
When I was born in 1922, barely a hundred years after Indiana became the 19th state in the Union, the Middle West already boasted a constellation of cities with symphony orchestras and museums and libraries, and institutions of higher learning, and schools of music and art, reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. One could almost say that Chicago was our Vienna, Indianapolis our Prague, Cincinnati our Budapest and Cleveland our Bucharest.
To grow up in such a city, as I did, was to find cultural institutions as ordinary as police stations or fire houses. So it was reasonable for a young person to daydream of becoming some sort of artist or intellectual, if not a policeman or fireman. So I did. So did many like me.
Such provincial capitals, which is what they would have been called in Europe, were charmingly self-sufficient with respect to the fine arts. We sometimes had the director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to supper, or writers and painters, and architects like my father, of local renown.
I studied clarinet under the first chair clarinetist of our orchestra. I remember the orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, in which the cannons’ roars were supplied by a policeman firing blank cartridges into an empty garbage can. I knew the policeman. He sometimes guarded street crossings used by students on their way to or from School 43, my school, the James Whitcomb Riley School.
Vonnegut’s views were shaped at Shortridge High School, where he numbered among the many not-yet-renowned writers honing their craft on The Daily Echo. Thought he didn’t bring it up in the video above, the Echo also yielded his nickname: Snarf.
Vonnegut agreed with interviewer Atwood that the daily practice of keeping a journal is an excellent discipline for beginning writers. He also considered journalistic assignments a great training ground. He made a point of mentioning that Mark Twain and Ring Lardner got their starts as newspaper reporters. It may be harder for aspiring writers to find paying work these days, but the Internet is replete with opportunities for those who crave a daily assignment.
It’s also overflowing with bullet pointed lists on how to become a writer, but if you’re like me, you’ll prefer to receive this advice from Vonnegut, himself, on a set festooned with farming implements, quilts, and dipped candles.
The interview continues in the remaining parts:
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Like Vonnegut, she’s a native of Indianapolis, and her mother was the editor of the Short Ridge Daily Echo. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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