The Outspoken Ayn Rand Interviewed by Mike Wallace (1959)

in Philosophy, Television | June 6th, 2013

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured Alain de Bot­ton’s tele­vi­sion broad­cast on the phi­los­o­phy of Friedrich Niet­zsche. Today, we fea­ture anoth­er, ear­li­er tele­vi­sion broad­cast on a much more recent­ly active philoso­pher: Mike Wal­lace’s 1959 inter­view of Ayn Rand, writer and founder of the school of thought known as Objec­tivism. But should we real­ly call Rand, who achieved most of her fame with nov­els like The Foun­tain­head and Atlas Shrugged, a philoso­pher? Most of us come to know her through her fic­tion, and many of us form our opin­ions of her based on the divi­sive, cap­i­tal­ism-lov­ing, reli­gion-hat­ing pub­lic per­sona she care­ful­ly craft­ed. Just as Niet­zsche had his ideas about how indi­vid­ual human beings could real­ize their poten­tial by endur­ing hard­ship, Rand has hers, all to do with using applied rea­son to pur­sue one’s own inter­ests.

Main­stream, CBS-watch­ing Amer­i­ca got quite an intro­duc­tion to this and oth­er tenets of Objec­tivism from this install­ment in what Mike Wal­lace calls a “gallery of col­or­ful peo­ple.” The inter­view­er, in the allot­ted half-hour, probes as many Ran­di­an prin­ci­ples as pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly those against altru­ism and self-sac­ri­fice. “What’s wrong with lov­ing your fel­low man?” Wal­lace asks, and Rand responds with argu­ments the likes of which view­ers may nev­er have heard before: “When you are asked to love every­body indis­crim­i­nate­ly, that is to love peo­ple with­out any stan­dard, to love them regard­less of whether they have any val­ue or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.” Does Ayn Rand still offer the brac­ing cure for a rud­der­less, mealy-mouthed Amer­i­ca which has for­got­ten what’s what? Or does her phi­los­o­phy ulti­mate­ly turn out to be too sim­ple — too sim­ple to engage with, and too sim­ple to improve our soci­ety? The debate con­tin­ues today, with no sign of res­o­lu­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ayn Rand’s Phi­los­o­phy and Her Resur­gence in 2012: A Quick Primer by Stan­ford His­to­ri­an Jen­nifer Burns

Ayn Rand Talks Athe­ism with Phil Don­ahue

The Ayn Rand Guide to Romance

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Alfred Hitchcock Talks with Dick Cavett About Sabotage, Foreign Correspondent & Laxatives (1972)

in Film, Television | June 3rd, 2013

On the list of the most inter­view­able auteurs in film his­to­ry, Alfred Hitch­cock must rank par­tic­u­lar­ly high. I would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want to find myself on the busi­ness end of that sar­don­ical­ly stern gaze myself, but when Hitch­cock agreed to sit down and talk, he real­ly sat down and talked. For the ulti­mate case in point, we have his big inter­view with cin­e­mat­ic col­league François Truf­faut, avail­able both as twelve hours of MP3s and, in book form, as that main­stay of the cinephile’s shelf, Hitchcock/Truffaut. Those two film­mak­ers had their immor­tal series of inter­views in 1962; a decade lat­er, Hitch­cock would turn up on nation­al tele­vi­sion for a chat with that auteur of the nation­al chat show, Dick Cavett. You can watch choice seg­ments of their con­ver­sa­tion on Youtube.

At the top of the post, Hitch­cock tells Cavett about the for­ma­tive trau­ma vis­it­ed upon him by his moth­er. “I think my moth­er scared me when I was 3 months old,” he recalls. “You see, she said, ‘Boo!’ It gave me the hic­cups. And she appar­ent­ly was very sat­is­fied.” (No prizes for guess­ing what effect it made this mas­ter of sus­pense want his work to have on audi­ences.) Just above, you can hear Hitch­cock­’s thoughts on a lax­a­tive com­mer­cial that ran dur­ing one of the show’s breaks: “I won­der why all those peo­ple doing sports and all that sort of thing — where they would need a lax­a­tive after such vig­or­ous move­ment all over the place.” Rest assured that he does get around to talk­ing film­mak­ing, specif­i­cal­ly about the process­es behind For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent (below) and Sab­o­tage, but per­haps noth­ing here reveals the work­ings of Hitch­cock­’s mind more than his con­vic­tion that “puns are the high­est form of lit­er­a­ture.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock: The Secret Sauce for Cre­at­ing Sus­pense

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho (1960)

Ing­mar Bergman Vis­its The Dick Cavett Show, 1971

Woody Allen on The Dick Cavett Show Cir­ca 1970

Alfred Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Tilda Swinton Recites Poem by Rumi While Reeking of Vetiver, Heliotrope & Musk

in Film, Poetry, Television | May 31st, 2013

If any­one should ask you how to pro­mote a celebri­ty fra­grance with­out los­ing face, click play and whis­per, “Like This.”

It helps if the celeb in ques­tion is gen­er­al­ly acknowl­edged to be a class act. Imag­ine a drunk­en star­let emerg­ing from her limo sans-draw­ers to stum­ble through her favorite poem by a 13th cen­tu­ry Sufi mys­tic. Which would you rather smell like?

(Per­son­al­ly, I’d go with Team Swin­ton! )

Some schol­ars quib­ble with the accu­ra­cy of this Til­da Swin­ton-approved trans­la­tion, but there’s no deny­ing that Cole­man Barks’ “per­fect sat­is­fac­tion of all our sex­u­al want­i­ng” stands to move a lot more scent than A.J. Arber­ry’s terse ref­er­ence to Houris, virig­i­nal and numer­ous though they may  be.

Speak­ing of com­par­isons, take a peek at how anoth­er celebri­ty pro­motes her fra­grance in a video of sim­i­lar length.

Team Swin­ton for the win. Def­i­nite­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Moby Dick Big Read: Celebri­ties and Every­day Folk Read a Chap­ter a Day from the Great Amer­i­can Nov­el

Til­da Swin­ton and Bar­ry White Lead 1500 Peo­ple in Dance-Along to Hon­or Roger Ebert

Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fif­teen Poems From Her Final Col­lec­tion, Ariel, in 1962 Record­ing

Ayun Hal­l­i­day marks her ter­ri­to­ry @AyunHalliday

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Black Coffee: Documentary Covers the History, Politics & Economics of the “Most Widely Taken Legal Drug”

in Food & Drink, Television | May 28th, 2013

“It’s not hard to brew a great cup of cof­fee,” writes Kele­fa San­neh in a recent New York­er post on the Mel­bourne Inter­na­tion­al Cof­fee Expo. “At least, it shouldn’t be.” He adds that “there’s no such thing as a fool­proof process though: even cof­fee pro­fes­sion­als are for­ev­er tweak­ing and rethink­ing their brew meth­ods, as they get bet­ter at iden­ti­fy­ing, in each cup, what went wrong and what went right.” Even casu­al cof­fee drinkers, includ­ing those who have nev­er made a cup for them­selves, know how com­pli­cat­ed the prepa­ra­tion process can become when one real­ly starts to think about it. But the field of cof­fee stud­ies boasts even more infor­ma­tion to mas­ter when it comes to the his­to­ry of the cul­ti­va­tion and usage of the beans them­selves. You can begin your own cof­fee edu­ca­tion with this tri­par­tite tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary, Black Cof­fee.

A Cana­di­an pro­duc­tion aired on PBS, Black Cof­fee (pur­chase on DVD here) exam­ines “the world’s most wide­ly tak­en legal drug,” a bev­er­age whose intel­lec­tu­al­ly intense die-hard enthu­si­asts give wine’s a run for their mon­ey, from his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, social, and eco­nom­ic angles.

Part one, “The Irre­sistible Bean,” fol­lows cof­fee’s spread from Ethiopa out across the entire world. Part two, “Gold in Your Cup,” looks at the “cof­fee barons” of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and the rise of cof­fee-house cul­ture.

Part three, “The Per­fect Cup,” brings us up to date with the mod­ern “roman­tic age of cof­fee” and what entre­pre­neurs (such as Star­bucks’ Howard Schultz, who appears in the doc­u­men­tary) have done to, depend­ing on your incli­na­tion, either democ­ra­tize or cheap­en the pur­suit of a worth­while sip. While a bit of knowl­edge always enrich­es the enjoy­ment of even some­thing as com­mon as cof­fee — and, in this case, also rais­es occa­sion­al thorny moral and agri­cul­tur­al ques­tions — let us nev­er lose sight of the sim­ple sen­ti­ment expressed in expressed in Bach’s Cof­fee Can­ta­ta:

Love­li­er than a thou­sand kiss­es,
smoother than mus­ca­tel wine.
Cof­fee, I must have cof­fee,
and if any­one wants to give me a treat,
ah!, just give me some cof­fee!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Cof­fee in Three Min­utes

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Cre­ates Ad for Cof­fee in the 1650s

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

This is Cof­fee!: A 1961 Trib­ute to Our Favorite Stim­u­lant

The Fine Art of Paint­ing Por­traits on Cof­fee Foam

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Watch Another Green World, a Hypnotic Portrait of Brian Eno (2010)

in Art, Music, Television | May 24th, 2013

In Sep­tem­ber 1975, Bri­an Eno released his album Anoth­er Green World. The fol­low­ing month, the BBC’s acclaimed doc­u­men­tary series Are­na first aired, using Anoth­er Green World’s title track as its theme music. 35 years lat­er, the show final­ly got around to doc­u­ment­ing Eno him­self. This 2010 episode, also called Anoth­er Green World, cap­tures the “intel­lec­tu­al guru of the rock world” (as a Desert Island Discs DJ calls him) at work in his stu­dio, in con­ver­sa­tion with a vari­ety of interlocutors—including jour­nal­ist Mal­colm Glad­well, record pro­duc­er Steve Lil­ly­white, and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins—and cycling around the green hills that roll around his neigh­bor­hood. Bono from U2, sev­er­al of whose records Eno pro­duced, calls the man “a mind-expand­ing drug,” and lis­ten­ing to Eno expound here upon his var­i­ous ideas about and expe­ri­ences with art, music, tech­nol­o­gy, jour­nal­ing, and his native Eng­land, I’d have to agree.

The faint­ly hyp­not­ic tone and pace of the episode — a sen­si­bil­i­ty not far removed from Eno’s famous “ambi­ent” records like Dis­creet Music and Music for Air­ports — might also have some­thing to do with that. We learn about Eno’s school days, his love of singing, his descent from a long line of “post­men with pas­sion,” his get­ting more girls than Bryan Fer­ry in their days with Roxy Music, his pref­er­ence for incon­sis­tent instru­ments, his his­to­ry with Catholi­cism, his enthu­si­asm for Stafford Beer’s man­age­ment book Brain of the Firm, his work with audio­vi­su­al instal­la­tions, and his ever-present inter­est in how com­plex­i­ty aris­es from sim­plic­i­ty. But we also feel like we’ve seen some­thing not just about Eno, but Eno-like, where form meets func­tion as close­ly as in all of Are­na’s most mem­o­rable episodes and all of Eno’s most mem­o­rable projects. Or maybe I just like the sound of the rain out­side dur­ing the stu­dio seg­ments — a sound which had a lot to do with Eno’s devel­op­ment of ambi­ent music in the first place.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Genius of Bri­an Eno On Dis­play in 80 Minute Q&A: Talks Art, iPad Apps, ABBA, & More

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Keith Moon’s Last Interview, 1978

in Music, Television | May 20th, 2013

Here’s a sad lit­tle piece of rock and roll his­to­ry: the last tele­vi­sion inter­view of Kei­th Moon, mer­cu­r­ial drum­mer for The Who. It was broad­cast live on the morn­ing of August 7, 1978, exact­ly one month before Moon’s death from a drug over­dose at the age of 32.

Moon and gui­tarist Pete Town­shend had flown into New York the pre­vi­ous day to pro­mote The Who’s eighth stu­dio album, Who Are You. In addi­tion to a cou­ple of radio inter­views, Moon and Town­shend stopped by the stu­dios of Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca for a TV inter­view with a stiff and humor­less David Hart­man. Moon appears bloat­ed and unhealthy. At one point he makes a joke about not being in con­trol of his life.

“Are you in con­trol of your life at all?” Hart­man asks.

“On cer­tain days,” says Moon.

“Cer­tain days.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you like the oth­er days?”

“Quite out of con­trol. Amazingly…ah…drunk.”

Moon’s var­i­ous addic­tions had caught up with him by 1978. “Musi­cal­ly,” writes Town­shend in Who I Am: A Mem­oir, “his drum­ming was get­ting so uneven that record­ing was almost impos­si­ble, so much so that work on the Who Are You album had ground to a halt.…[The Who] had just about enough tracks for a record, with very lit­tle addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al to spare. ‘Music Must Change’ was com­plet­ed with foot­steps replac­ing drums.”

On the night of Sep­tem­ber 6, 1978, Moon and his girl­friend Annette Wal­ter-Lax attend­ed a par­ty in Lon­don, host­ed by Paul McCart­ney. Dur­ing the par­ty, and at the mid­night pre­mier of The Bud­dy Hol­ly Sto­ry that fol­lowed, Moon took Clome­thi­a­zole, a seda­tive pre­scribed to help him cope with alco­hol with­draw­al. When he got home, he took more. Wal­ter-Lax found his life­less body when she checked on him on the after­noon of Sep­tem­ber 7. An autop­sy showed that Moon had tak­en 32 tablets of Clome­thi­a­zole. His doc­tor had told him not to exceed three per day.

In a pub­lic state­ment fol­low­ing Moon’s death, Town­shend wrote: “We have lost our great come­di­an, our supreme melo­drama­tist, the man, who apart from being the most unpre­dictable and spon­ta­neous drum­mer in rock, would have set him­self alight if he thought it would make the audi­ence laugh or jump out of its seats. We have lost our drum­mer but also our alter-ego. He drove us hard many times but his love of every one of us always ulti­mate­ly came through.… We loved him and he’s gone.”

For some­thing to help us remem­ber Moon’s con­tri­bu­tion to The Who–both his musi­cian­ship and his personality–here is a video fea­tur­ing his iso­lat­ed drum track from “Who Are You,” the title track on Moon’s final album:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kei­th Moon’s Final Per­for­mance with The Who (1978)

Kei­th Moon, Drum­mer of The Who, Pass­es Out at 1973 Con­cert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over

Good­night Kei­th Moon: “The Most Inap­pro­pri­ate Bed­time Sto­ry Ever”

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Ten Buildings That Changed America: Watch the Debut Episode from the New PBS Series

in Architecture, History, Television | May 15th, 2013

Every­one on the inter­net knows the bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment of click­ing on lists that sound more inter­est­ing than they turn out to be, just as enthu­si­asts of Amer­i­can his­to­ry have grown weary of hear­ing claims about what has or has­n’t “changed Amer­i­ca.” (Last year, com­e­dy writer Ali­son Agosti ele­gant­ly smacked down both trends in one tweet.) But I have a feel­ing that PBS and sta­tion WTTW’s new series Ten Build­ings that Changed Amer­i­ca can pull the com­bi­na­tion off with snap­pi­ness and insight. Host­ed by Geof­frey Baer, tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty and not­ed enthu­si­ast of Chica­go (an Amer­i­can built envi­ron­ment if ever there was one), the show promis­es a look at, among oth­er archi­tec­tur­al win­dows onto the Amer­i­can spir­it, “a state capi­tol that Thomas Jef­fer­son designed to resem­ble a Roman tem­ple, the home of Hen­ry Ford’s first assem­bly line, the first indoor region­al shop­ping mall,” and “an air­port with a swoop­ing con­crete roof that seems to float on air.”

You can watch the debut episode of Ten Build­ings that Changed Amer­i­ca online. It begins the cross-coun­try archi­tec­tur­al road trip in Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, where Baer vis­its future Pres­i­dent Thomas Jef­fer­son­’s state capi­tol build­ing. “As a found­ing father of the Unit­ed States, Thomas Jef­fer­son was pas­sion­ate about America’s inde­pen­dence from Britain,” says the show’s page on the build­ing. “He was no fan of the king of Eng­land and, by exten­sion, no fan of the Geor­gian archi­tec­ture that bore the kings’ name,” an incli­na­tion which got him look­ing toward France for inspi­ra­tion. Sub­se­quent episodes will exam­ine oth­er strik­ing, inno­v­a­tive, influ­en­tial, and oft-imi­tat­ed Amer­i­can build­ings: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Baer’s beloved Chica­go, Mies van der Rohe’s Sea­gram Build­ing in New York City, and even Frank Gehry’s Dis­ney Con­cert Hall, the still-con­tro­ver­sial new icon of the down­town Los Ange­les where I type this very post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: From Ancient Greece to Roco­co (A Free Online Course)

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

An Ani­mat­ed Tour of Falling­wa­ter, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Cre­ations

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Poetry of Bruce Lee: Discover the Artistic Life of the Martial Arts Icon

in Film, Poetry, Sports, Television | May 14th, 2013

In the final months of his short life, Bruce Lee wrote a per­son­al essay, “In My Own Process” where he said, “Basi­cal­ly, I have always been a mar­tial artist by choice and actor by pro­fes­sion. But, above all, I am hop­ing to actu­al­ize myself to be an artist of life along the way.” If you’re famil­iar with Bruce Lee, you know that he stud­ied phi­los­o­phy at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, and even when he audi­tioned for The Green Hor­net in 1964 (and showed off his amaz­ing kung fu moves), he took pains to explain the phi­los­o­phy under­ly­ing the mar­tial arts.

Lee was­n’t just a philoso­pher. He was also a poet and a trans­la­tor of poet­ry. In the book, Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, John Lit­tle has pub­lished 21 orig­i­nal poems found with­in Lee’s per­son­al archive. The poems, Lit­tle writes, “are, by Amer­i­can stan­dards, rather dark — reflect­ing the deep­er, less exposed recess­es of the human psy­che… Many seem to express a return­ing sen­ti­ment of the fleet­ing nature of life, love and the pas­sion of human long­ing.” Above, you can see Shan­non Lee, the daugh­ter of Bruce Lee, read a poem pub­lished in Lit­tle’s col­lec­tion. It’s called “Boat­ing on Lake Wash­ing­ton.” Imme­di­ate­ly below, she reads “IF” by Rud­yard Kipling, a poem her father loved so much that he had it engraved on a plaque and mount­ed on the wall in his home.

Final­ly, we leave you with Lee’s trans­la­tion of anoth­er favorite poem, “The Frost” by Tzu Yeh. The video fea­tures pieces of his hand­writ­ten trans­la­tion.

http://youtu.be/PAektkXMxeg

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Lee: The Lost TV Inter­view

Watch 10-Year-Old Bruce Lee in His First Star­ring Role (1950)

Bruce Lee Plays Ping Pong with Nunchucks

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