This weekend, AMC aired episode 7 of Mad Men’s final season. The show will now take a break, until episodes 8–14 hit the airwaves early next year. Before you turn your attention elsewhere, you may want to spend some time with the Paris Review’s big interview with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. The interview covers a lot of ground.
We learn that Weiner is a particular fan of John Cheever. “[W]ith John Cheever, I recognized myself in the voice of the narrator.” “Cheever holds my attention more than any other writer. He is in every aspect of Mad Men, starting with the fact that Don lives in Ossining on Bullet Park Road.” (Find the Paris Review’s 1976 interview with Cheever here.)
We also discover that Weiner studied poetry in college with Christopher Reeve’s father, Frank Reeve, and there were a couple of years when Weiner considered T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land “the most interesting thing in the world.”
Then the conversation turns to Mad Men, where Weiner reveals what’s at the heart of the show: “I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.” “Don Draper knows he’s poor, very much in the model of [Lee] Iacocca or [Sam] Walton, who came out of the Great Depression, out of really humble beginnings. Or like Conrad Hilton, on the show. These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power.”
Viral video #1: In a new ad for the Science Channel’s series, Through the Wormhole, actorMorgan Freeman uses helium to entice viewers into thinking about how physicists are studying gravity in places where it acts quite strangely. It’s kind of a cryptic message, but it grabs your attention, doesn’t it? Through the Wormhole returns to the airwaves, with Season 5, on June 4th.
Viral Video #2 asks you to imagine what happens when you put the grass in Neil deGrasse Tyson. “Everything is star stuff. This pizza, this cheese, this pepperoni.” That’s a reboot of Cosmos that may actually get ratings.
We’ve all heard the musical fruits of audio synthesis, especially if we regularly listen to the pop of the 1980s. But how, exactly, does a synthesizer work? Ask a modern electronic-music enthusiast and the answer may come out too technical, and at too much length, to bear. But pioneeringly technology-minded singer-songwriter Thomas Dolby, he of “She Blinded Me with Science” (though I’ve always prefer his more elegiac numbers like “Airwaves”), can give you a clearer, more concise explanation.
In fact, he gets it simple to the point of child-friendliness — so simple that he gives it on a children’s television program. The Ghost of Faffner Hall, which ran in late 1989 in England and America, taught lessons about music with a gallery of famous performers — Bobby McFerrin, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Mark Knopfler — in a puppet-rich setting. Those puppets, the denizens (living and dead) of the titular Faffner Hall, came built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, known for their mastery of Muppet craft.
Dolby’s illustration of a synthesizer’s operation involves an unusual work of Muppetry: a fly in a matchbox. “A synthesizer consists of two things,” he says, “an oscillator and a filter. The oscillator controls the pitch of the sound, and the filter controls the tone.” Out, then, comes the box and its slightly unwilling (Muppet) inhabitant. “I want you to imagine the fly is an oscillator, and this box is a filter.” Dolby shakes the box, representing electrical current through an oscillator, which makes the frightened fly buzz. “The harder I shake the box, the higher the pitch!” To demonstrate filtration, he opens and closes the matchbox, harshening the fly’s wail (until, indeed, it turns into a cry of “Help!”). If you’d like to hear Dolby talk more about the intersection of his art and his technology at a higher, albeit Muppetless level, have a listen to his appearance last year on the Nerdist podcast. He long ago, in another context, stated his goal of teaching people that synthesizers “don’t have to sound like a crate of moribund wasps” — an interesting thing to accomplish with a matchbox and a superintelligent fly.
Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel, both trying to salvage careers after being blacklisted in the McCarthy period, starred as Vladimir and Estragon, in WNTA-TV’s Play of the Week series’ no-frills production. In contrast to the recent Broadway revival starring grizzled, grubby knights of the realm, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, Meredith and Mostel make a pretty harmless—and apparently unharmed—team. Vladimir’s prostate trouble was scrubbed from the shooting script, along with some 40 minutes of the stage version, five years after its disastrous American premiere.
Alan Schneider, who directed that production, returned to helm the Play of the Week, along with original American cast members Kurt Kaszner and Alvin Epstein, reprising their supporting turns as Pozzo and Lucky. Schneider appears to have had his hands full with the always-larger-than-life Mostel who chews plenty of scenery in addition to his carrot.
For his part, Mostel stated that he “wished to be re-blacklisted” if that would keep him from ever having to work with that director again.
Despite the tension, he and Meredith achieve a winsome Laurel and Hardy-like rapport as they plod up and down a painted road with choreographed aimlessness.
It’s still a bit hard for me to imagine American television audiences tuning-in in numbers sufficient to justify the effort.
To be fair, there were a lot fewer channels then. Play of the Week was a high brow project serving up serious theatrical work on the small screen. The first episode was Judith Anderson’s Medea. Compared to that, or Shakespeare, or Ibsen, a prostate-free Godot might be passed off as televised entertainment the whole family could tolerate for an hour and forty-nine minutes.
If you’re up for it, the entire production is yours for the viewing below.
Debuting in 1989, MTV’s Unplugged promised to cure the culture’s slick 80s hangover with acoustic guitars and earnest, coffee-shop intimacy from the 90s biggest stars (Mariah Carey) and a select few classic giants (McCartney, Clapton, Dylan, a reformed Kiss). In a series documenting some iconic last or near-last performances—from 10,000 Maniacs, Alice in Chains—perhaps the most iconic was the November, 1993 appearance of Nirvana (below), whose troubled singer/guitarist overdosed just weeks into the band’s 1994 European tour, then took his life in April of that year. For children of the decade, Nirvana’s Unplugged appearance, though hard to watch in hindsight, perhaps defines the 90s more than any other TV moment. And yet, writes Andrew Wallace Chamings in The Atlantic, “it’s worth considering the performance as a work of music, not mythology. Because as music, it’s incredible.”
You want intimacy? “Parts of the Nirvana set,” writes Chamings, “feel so personal it’s awkward.” Cobain is cranky in between-song banter, hunched over his guitar in his puke green thrift-store cardigan, snapping at his bandmates and the audience. His performances are intense and eerie, particularly his cover of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” the last song of the evening, which Neil Young described as “unearthly, like a werewolf.” The band never hid behind a pre-fabricated mystique, but their acoustic set highlights just how emotionally invested Cobain was in music—his own and others. Joined by Germs (and later Foo Fighers) guitarist Pat Smear, they mostly eschewed the hits, and played covers by Cobain’s favorite bands: Meat Puppets, Bowie, The Vaselines. You want even more intimacy? Watch the Unplugged rehearsal sessions at the top of the post.
Where the televised Unplugged episode has the loose, informal vibe of band practice with an audience, this rehearsal footage is more of a soundcheck, but with some truly beautiful performances. Cobain tweaks technical details and gets snippy with the engineer. According to several people involved, the rehearsal sessions were especially difficult, with Cobain suffering from withdrawal and generally nervous and unhappy, almost bailing on the show at the last minute. Cobain biographer Charles Cross quotes one observer as saying “There was no joking, no smiles, no fun coming from him.” Cobain’s request that the studio be decorated with black candles and stargazer lilies prompted the producer to ask, “You mean like a funeral?” “Exactly,” he said, “like a funeral.” But it’s the band’s insistence that the show be tailored to their anti-rock star personality that makes the performances so memorable. “We’d seen the other Unpluggeds and didn’t like many of them,” recalled Dave Grohl, “because most bands would treat them like rock shows… except with acoustic guitars.” Nirvana’s Unplugged was something entirely different. A televised swan song that was also, in Chaming’s words, “the prettiest noise the band has ever made.”
Like many in the Honeycomb Kids generation, I didn’t properly appreciate children’s television icon Gumby until Eddie Murphy parodied him on Saturday Night Live. This sparked a revival. Watching Gumby episodes in the company of other merry young adults reframed my previously held view of him as a relic from a time when TV was boring. Turns out that Gumby and his equine sidekick Pokey were actually pretty funny, weird-in-a-good-way, and far more soulful than the witless flat animation jamming the airwaves of my 70s childhood.
I decided to take the kids, gambling that they might respond to Gumby as I did now, not the way I did when I was their age. Their screen time was pretty limited back then, and as a result, they’d avidly watch just about anything.
The first video we encountered was Gumbasia, the experimental, character-free, stop motion riff above that Clokey made as a student at USC. It was produced in 1953 and released in 1955.
Not exactly what I’d been priming the children to expect on the subway ride over.
“That’s Gumby?” they cried in dismay. “That cube?”
No. But those morphing cubes and squiggles did give birth to an empire, after producer and president of the Motion Picture Producers Association, Sam Engel, offered to bankroll a pilot, declaring Gumbasia the most exciting film he’d ever seen in his life. Clokey was teaching English at the Harvard Military Academy. Engel’s sole wish was to improve the quality of children’s television programming. He asked Clokey if he could “make little clay figures out of that clay and animate them.”
Clokey did just that, with Engel bankrolling the pilot, “Gumby on the Moon.” The producer was so pleased with the result, he refused to take a cut when Gumby was given a seven year contract at NBC.
Imagine a Cinderella story like that happening today!
If this small morsel of Gumby history leaves you craving more, book your flight for the inaugural Gumby Fest in Glendora, California, where Gumby grew to maturity in “an unassuming industrial building.”
Experimental electronic musician and inventor Bruce Haack’s compositions expanded many a young consciousness, and taught kids to dance, move, meditate, and to be endlessly curious about the technology of sound. All of this makes him the perfect guest for Fred Rogers, who despite his totally square demeanor loved bringing his audience unusual artists of all kinds. In the clips above and below from the first, 1968 season of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Haack introduces Rogers and a group of youngsters to the “musical computer,” a homemade analog synthesizer of his own invention—one of many he created from household items, most of which integrated human touch and movement into their controls, as you’ll see above. In both clips, Haack and longtime collaborator Esther Nelson sing and play charming songs as Nelson leads them in various movement exercises. (The remainder of the second video mostly features Mr. Roger’s cat.)
Although he’s seen a revival among electronic musicians and DJs, Haack became best known in his career as a composer of children’s music, and for good reason. His 1962 debut kid’s record Dance, Sing & Listen is an absolute classic of the genre, combining a dizzying range of musical styles—country, classical, pop, medieval, and experimental electronic—with far-out spoken word from Haack and Nelson. They followed this up with two more iterations of Dance, Sing & Listen, then The Way Out Record for Children, The Electronic Record for Children, the amazing Dance to the Music, and several more, all them weirder and more wonderful than maybe anything you’ve ever heard. (Don’t believe me? Take a listen to “Soul Transportation,” “EIO (New MacDonald),” or the absolutely enchanting “Saint Basil,” with its Doors‑y organ outro.)
A psychedelic genius, Haack also made grown-up acid rock in the form of 1970’s The Electric Lucifer, which is a bit like if Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had written Jesus Christ Superstar on heavy doses of LSD and banks of analog synthesizers.
While Haack’s Mr. Rogers appearance may not have seemed like much at the time, in hindsight this is a fascinating document of an artist who’s been called “The King of Techno” for his forward-looking sounds meeting the cutting edge in children’s programming. It’s a testament to how much the counterculture influenced early childhood education. Many of the progressive educational experiments of the sixties have since become historical curiosities, replaced by insipid corporate merchandising. What Haack and Nelson’s musical approach tells me is that we’d do well to revisit the educational climate of that day and take a few lessons from its freeform experimentation and openness. I’ll certainly be playing these records for my daughter.
Carl Sagan, the turtleneck-sporting astrophysicist from Cornell, was the greatest communicator of science of his generation. Not only did he publish hundreds of scientific papers and was instrumental in putting together that golden record on the Voyager spacecrafts but he also wrote twenty critically praised best sellers on science, appeared regularly on the Tonight Show, and even had a catch phrase — “billions and billions.” But Sagan is perhaps best known for his landmark 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage(watch it here). He took viewers through a tour of the universe, showing them things from the mind-boggling big to the infinitesimally small and everything in between. The show proved to be a huge hit; close to a half-billion people tuned in worldwide.
Even before the reboot of Cosmos premiered on FOX in March, Neil deGrasse Tyson — who hosts the show — was already seen as Sagan’s successor. Not only does he serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and was instrumental in kicking Pluto out of the brotherhood of planets, but he also authored numerous books, appears regularly on The Daily Show, and frequently hosts AMAs on Reddit. He’s also one of America’s most vocal defenders of science at a time, unlike Sagan’s heyday, when Creationism, climate change denial, and anti-vaccination hysteria seem to be making inroads in our culture.
Anyone who saw Tyson’s heart felt tribute to Sagan at the beginning of the first episode of Cosmos knows that Sagan’s influence on his younger counterpart extended much further than his media appearances. It was personal. In 1975, Sagan, who was already famous at that time, was so impressed by Tyson’s college application that he personally reached out to him, hoping to convince the high school student to attend Cornell. He even offered to personally show Tyson around his lab.
You can read Sagan’s letter, dated November 12, 1975, below.
Dear Neil:
Thanks for your letter and most interesting resume. I was especially glad to see that, for a career in astronomy, you intend to do your undergraduate work in physics. In this way, you will acquire the essential tools for a wide range of subsequent astronomical endeavors.
I would guess from your resume that your interests in astronomy are sufficiently deep and your mathematical and physical background sufficiently strong that we could probably engage you in real astronomical research during your undergraduate career here, if the possibility interests you. For example, we hope to be bringing back to Ithaca in late calendar year 1976 an enormous array of Viking data on Mars both from the orbiters and from the landers.
I would be delighted to meet with you when you visit Ithaca. Please try and give as much advance notice of the date as you can because my travel schedule is quite hectic right now and I really would like to be in Ithaca when you drop by.
With all good wishes,
Carl Sagan
Tyson was deeply moved by Sagan’s kindness and sincerity. He did venture out to Ithaca from the Bronx on a snowy afternoon. As Tyson recalled years later, “I thought to myself, who am I? I’m just some high school kid.” In the end, Sagan’s personal plea wasn’t quite enough to convince young Tyson to attend his school. As you can read in his response below, dated April 30, 1976, Tyson decided to go to Harvard.
Dear Prof. Sagan
Thank you for your offer concerning the Viking Missions. After long thought and decision making I have chosen to attend Harvard University this September. I chose it not simply because of its “valuable” name but because they have a larger astronomy department in addition to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, so while I am majoring in physics I will have more surrounding me in the way of on-going research in astronomy.
I want to say that I did enjoy meeting you and I am very grateful for your hospitality and the time you spent with me while at Cornell. I will throughout my undergraduate years keep you informed on any noteworthy news concerning astronomy-related work that I’m involved in. I do plan to apply again for the Viking Internship next summer.
Thanks again
Neil D. Tyson
You can see Tyson talk about his afternoon with Sagan. 40 years later, he still seems incredulous that it happened.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
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