Beat Writer William S. Burroughs Spreads Counterculture Cool on Nike Sneakers, 1994

in Business, Literature, Television | February 14th, 2013

Nike footwear and celebri­ty ath­letes usu­al­ly go hand-in-hand. When you think Nike, you think of Michael Jor­dan, Bo Jack­son and Mia Hamm. And let’s not for­get the now trou­bled duo of Tiger Woods and Lance Arm­strong too. Fit, lithe bod­ies gen­er­al­ly sell sneak­ers, we know that.

But then there’s the bizarre, odd excep­tion. Let’s rewind the video­tape to 1994, when Nike enlist­ed William S. Bur­roughs to sell its Air Max shoes. That’s right a decrepit 79-year-old Beat writer, known for his hero­in addic­tion, manslaugh­ter con­vic­tion and cut up writ­ing. William S. Bur­roughs is pret­ty much the anti-Mia Hamm. And yet the ad works in its own way. Just like the Gap could use Jack Ker­ouac to lend hip­ster cred to its stodgy khakis, so Bur­roughs could bring a main­streamed coun­ter­cul­ture cool to Nike shoes as his head, appear­ing in a TV set pro­claims, “The pur­pose of tech­nol­o­gy is not to con­fuse the brain, but to serve the body, to make life eas­i­er, to make any­thing pos­si­ble. It’s the com­ing of the new tech­nol­o­gy.” That new tech­nol­o­gy being, I guess, the cut­ting edge cush­ions in Nike’s shoes?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs on Sat­ur­day Night Live, 1981

How Spike Lee Got His First Big Break: From She’s Got­ta Have It to That Icon­ic Air Jor­dan Ad

William S. Bur­roughs Reads His First Nov­el, Junky (find it also in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books)

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From the Annals of Optimism: The Newspaper Industry in 1981 Imagines its Digital Future

in Technology, Television | February 14th, 2013

“Imag­ine, if you will, sit­ting down to your morn­ing cof­fee, turn­ing on your home com­put­er to read the day’s news­pa­per.” A flam­boy­ant­ly spec­u­la­tive-sound­ing notion, no doubt, were you watch­ing this tele­vi­sion news broad­cast back when it aired in 1981. A pro­duc­tion of San Fran­cis­co’s KRON, the seg­ment takes a look at how the city’s news­pa­pers, dis­play­ing admirable far­sight­ed­ness, were then “invest­ing a lot of mon­ey to try and get a ser­vice just like that start­ed.” We see North Beach res­i­dent Richard Hal­lo­ran (he of  the immor­tal­ly meme-wor­thy onscreen iden­ti­fi­er, “Owns Home Com­put­er”) dial­ing, on his rotary tele­phone, “a local num­ber that will con­nect him with a com­put­er in Colum­bus, Ohio.” We also see the edi­tors of the San Fran­cis­co Exam­in­er “pro­gram­ming today’s copy of the paper into that same Ohio com­put­er.” Hal­lo­ran plops the phone’s receiv­er into his modem’s acoustic cou­pler, pre­sum­ably pours his morn­ing cof­fee, and down­loads the day’s paper — which takes two hours, at a cost of five dol­lars an hour.

“This is only the first step in news­pa­pers by com­put­er,” says KRON sci­ence reporter Steve New­man. “Engi­neers now pre­dict the day will come when we get all out news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines by home com­put­er.” We see footage of a tra­di­tion­al news­pa­per ven­dor: “But that’s a few years off, so for the moment, at least, this fel­low isn’t wor­ried about being out of a job.” That day came over a decade ago, and that fel­low sure­ly wor­ries now, as do the pub­lish­ers of his wares. We who start each day read­ing the news on our “home com­put­ers” laugh at the news­pa­per indus­try’s evi­dent hubris­tic self-destruc­tion by its fail­ure to under­stand the inter­net, much less engage with it. But this report shows us that cer­tain papers — the eight that Hal­lo­ran’s menu offered him, at least — seem­ing­ly had their eyes on the ball long before we did. Do we see here an indus­try sow­ing the seeds of its own inevitable destruc­tion, or evi­dence that things could have turned out dif­fer­ent­ly?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Clay Shirky on the Demise of the News­pa­per

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

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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Walter Cronkite Imagines the Home of the 21st Century … Back in 1967

in Design, Technology, Television | February 8th, 2013

Liv­ing room, 2001:

In 1967, exec­u­tives at CBS tele­vi­sion made a bold move and changed the net­work’s long-run­ning doc­u­men­tary series, The 20th Cen­tu­ry, from a pro­gram look­ing back at the past to one look­ing ahead to the future. The 21st Cen­tu­ry, as it was renamed, was host­ed by Wal­ter Cronkite and ran for three sea­sons. In one of the ear­ly episodes, “At Home, 2001,” which aired on March 12, 1967, Cronkite cites a gov­ern­ment report pre­dict­ing that by the year 2000, tech­nol­o­gy will have low­ered the aver­age Amer­i­can work week to 30 hours, with a one-month vaca­tion. What will peo­ple do with all that free time? In the scene above, Cronkite makes a fair­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tion of today’s state-of-the-art home enter­tain­ment sys­tems. Although the knobs and dials look a bit archa­ic, the basic prin­ci­ple is there. But what­ev­er hap­pened to that 30-hour work week?

Home office, 2001:

“Now this is where a man might spend most of his time in the 21st cen­tu­ry,” says Cronkite as he walks into the home office of the future, above. “This equip­ment will allow him to car­ry on nor­mal busi­ness activ­i­ties with­out ever going to an office away from home.”

In envi­sion­ing the office of the future as a mas­cu­line domain, Cronkite makes the same mis­take as Stan­ley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke of imag­in­ing tech­no­log­i­cal change with­out social change. (Remem­ber the moon shut­tle stew­ardess in 2001: A Space Odyssey?) But he oth­er­wise offers a fair­ly pre­scient vision of some of the home com­put­ing, Inter­net and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions advances that have indeed come to pass.

Kitchen, 2001:

Cronkite’s pow­ers of pre­dic­tion fail him when he reach­es the Rube Gold­ber­gian “kitchen of 2001,” which mis­takes gra­tu­itous automa­tion for con­ve­nience. As one YouTube com­men­ta­tor said of the clip above, the only thing that resem­bles the kitchen of today is the microwave oven–and microwaves already exist­ed in 1967.

But “At Home, 2001,” is much more thought-pro­vok­ing than a few “gee whiz” pre­dic­tions about the gad­gets of the future. Cronkite inter­views the archi­tect Philip John­son and oth­er lead­ing design­ers of his day for a deep­er dis­cus­sion about the ten­sion that exists between our deep-seat­ed, basi­cal­ly agrar­i­an expec­ta­tions for a home and the real­i­ties of urban con­ges­tion and sub­ur­ban sprawl. You can watch the com­plete 25-minute pro­gram at A/V Geeks. And to read more about it, see Matt Novak’s piece at Pale­o­Fu­ture. “Can we find a com­pro­mise between our increas­ing­ly urban way of liv­ing and the pride and pri­va­cy of the indi­vid­ual home?” asks Cronkite at the end of the pro­gram. “It will take deci­sions that go beyond tech­nol­o­gy, deci­sions about the qual­i­ty of the life we want to lead, to answer the ques­tion ‘How will we live in the 21st cen­tu­ry?’ ”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan: The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Imag­ine How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

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Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Religious Satire, Political Satire, or Blasphemy?

in Comedy, Film, Religion, Television | February 6th, 2013

Before I saw Mon­ty Python’s Life of Bri­an, I only knew that reli­gious peo­ple did­n’t like it, which intrigued me. Then I found out that some reli­gious peo­ple like it very much indeed, which real­ly intrigued me. Build­ing its sto­ry on a satir­i­cal par­al­lel of the life of Jesus Christ, Life of Bri­an could nev­er have helped draw­ing fire. But the Pythons knew how to use it: “So fun­ny it was banned in Nor­way!” read one of the film’s posters, and indeed, the Nor­we­gian gov­ern­ment put the kibosh on its screen­ings, as did Ire­land’s, as did a num­ber of town coun­cils in Eng­land. “As a satire on reli­gion, this film might well be con­sid­ered a rather slight pro­duc­tion,” writes Richard Web­ster in A Brief His­to­ry of Blas­phemy. “As blas­phe­my it was, even in its orig­i­nal ver­sion, extreme­ly mild. Yet the film was sur­round­ed from its incep­tion by intense anx­i­ety, in some quar­ters of the Estab­lish­ment, about the offence it might cause. As a result it gained a cer­tifi­cate for gen­er­al release only after some cuts had been made. Per­haps more impor­tant­ly still, the film was shunned by the BBC and ITV, who declined to show it for fear of offend­ing Chris­tians in this coun­try.”

All this con­tro­ver­sy came to a now-infa­mous 1979 tele­vi­sion debate: In one cor­ner, we have Python’s John Cleese and Michael Palin. In the oth­er, we have con­trar­i­an satirist Mal­colm Mug­geridge and Bish­op of South­wark Mervyn Stock­wood. You can watch the whole broad­cast on Youtube (part one, part two, part three, part four). In the extract above, you can hear Cleese argue that the film does not, in fact, ridicule Jesus Christ, but instead indicts “closed sys­tems of thought” of the type drilled into his con­scious­ness dur­ing his board­ing school years. Palin takes pains to under­score its nature as not whol­ly a reli­gious satire, but more of a jab at mod­ern Eng­lish soci­ety and pol­i­tics trans­posed into the Bib­li­cal past. Mug­geridge and Stock­wood, while den­i­grat­ing Life of Bri­an’s cin­e­mat­ic mer­it all the while, nonethe­less see in it a dan­ger­ous poten­tial to cor­rupt the youth. But it turns out that they’d shown up at their screen­ing fif­teen min­utes late, miss­ing the scenes which would have told them that Jesus Christ and the hap­less Bri­an of the title are two dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Indeed, Bri­an is not the mes­si­ah. The les­son here: watch Life of Bri­an in full, as many times as it takes to get you draw­ing your own non-received con­clu­sions about reli­gion, soci­ety, and com­e­dy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

Mon­ty Python’s Away From it All: A Twist­ed Trav­el­ogue with John Cleese

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 the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the Classic Jazz 625 Show, 1964

in Music, Television | January 31st, 2013

The great jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, who died in Decem­ber only a day short of his 92nd birth­day, pulled off a rare feat: He made music that was at once exper­i­men­tal and high­ly pop­u­lar. His quar­tet’s 1959 album Time Out, with its uncon­ven­tion­al time sig­na­tures and unique blend­ing of exot­ic and clas­si­cal influ­ences, is a land­mark in jazz his­to­ry.

On June 9, 1964 the Dave Brubeck Quar­tet played a pair of half-hour sets for the Jazz 625 show in Lon­don. We’re hap­py to bring you one of those two episodes in its com­plete form. It’s an excel­lent show, fea­tur­ing per­for­mances of five num­bers, famous and obscure, and a dis­cus­sion between Brubeck and host Steve Race about Brubeck­’s com­pos­ing meth­ods. The quar­tet is made up of Brubeck on piano, Paul Desmond on alto sax­o­phone, Eugene Wright on bass, and Joe Morel­lo on drums. Here’s the set list:

  1. Dan­ny’s Lon­don Blues (D. Brubeck)
  2. Dia­logues for Jazz Com­bo & Orches­tra, 2nd Move­ment (H. Brubeck)
  3. The Wright Groove (E. Wright)
  4. Take Five (P. Desmond)
  5. Sounds of the Loop (D. Brubeck)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Remem­ber­ing Jazz Leg­end Dave Brubeck (RIP) with a Very Touch­ing Musi­cal Moment

10 Great Per­for­mances From 10 Leg­endary Jazz Artists: Brubeck, Coltrane, Miles and More

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Alistair Cooke’s Historic Letter From America (1946 – 2004) Now Online, Thanks to the BBC

in History, Radio, Television | January 31st, 2013

http://youtu.be/GP2UPZ8k4ec?t=4m2s

Think of Mas­ter­piece The­ater and you might think of Down­ton Abbey, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, or even the Cook­ie Mon­ster. But the man who real­ly made the series famous was broad­cast­er Alis­tair Cooke, the series’ crisp, avun­cu­lar host. Seat­ed in a leather chair, sur­round­ed by bound vol­umes, Cooke intro­duced all of the great British pro­gram­ming brought to the States by WGBH—I, Claudius and Upstairs, Down­stairs and The Six Wives of Hen­ry VIII—and brought a cozy grav­i­tas to Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion.

Cooke died in 2004 and left a lega­cy as a broad­cast essay­ist: Let­ter from Amer­i­ca, a series of 15-minute radio pieces now col­lect­ed into an exten­sive dig­i­tal archive by BBC Radio 4. The essays aired week­ly through­out the world for 58 years, begin­ning in 1946, send­ing Cooke’s slight­ly amused voice over the air­waves. He gave us his ex-pat take on every­thing from Amer­i­can hol­i­days (includ­ing his per­son­al involve­ment in mak­ing George Washington’s birth­day a nation­al hol­i­day), to the ways Amer­i­can Eng­lish varies from British Eng­lish, to major events in Amer­i­can his­to­ry.

Cooke cap­tured America’s grief after John F. Kennedy was assas­si­nat­ed, but his eye­wit­ness account of Bob­by Kennedy’s death would become one of his most pow­er­ful reports. Cooke was in the lob­by of the Ambas­sador Hotel when Kennedy was shot and used scratch paper to scrib­ble down his impres­sions of the chaos.

He was bril­liant at craft­ing char­ac­ter-dri­ven sto­ries about issues. His piece about John Lennon’s death (above) segued neat­ly into an explo­ration of gun vio­lence in Amer­i­ca. He report­ed on the sui­cide of actress Jean Seberg and used the obit­u­ary as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss the excess­es of FBI sur­veil­lance and witch-hunt­ing.

Cooke wasn’t as good a writer as he was a reporter (view his orig­i­nal scripts in the Boston Uni­ver­si­ty archive) and he audi­bly sighs dur­ing some broad­casts, as if he is either tired or bored. But his point of view is price­less: an obser­vant, charm­ing out­sider who fell in love with his adopt­ed coun­try, warts and all.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Mon­ster­piece The­ater Presents Wait­ing for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beck­ett

Watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Appear­ances on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and 72

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at .

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James Taylor Performs Live in 1970, Thanks to a Little Help from His Friends, The Beatles

in Music, Television | January 29th, 2013

James Tay­lor Sings James Tay­lor, a BBC broad­cast from Novem­ber 1970, appears above. Though the near­ly 40-minute solo per­for­mance show­cas­es a play­er who has devel­oped and mas­tered his dis­tinc­tive musi­cal per­sona, it also show­cas­es one who has only reached a mere 22 years of age. But don’t let his aw-shucks youth­ful­ness fool you; by this point, Tay­lor had already endured a life­time’s worth of for­ma­tive trou­bles. He’d fall­en into deep depres­sion while still in high school, spent nine months in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal, tak­en up and quit hero­in, bot­tomed out and spent six months in recov­ery, under­went vocal cord surgery, tak­en up methedrine, gone into methadone treat­ment, had an album flop, and bro­ken his hands and feet in a motor­cy­cle wreck. Fire and rain indeed. But he’d also found favor with the Bea­t­les, becom­ing the first Amer­i­can signed on their Apple label and recruit­ing Paul McCart­ney and George Har­ri­son to play on his “Car­oli­na in My Mind.” At the end of the six­ties, the world at large did­n’t know the name James Tay­lor, but his fel­low musi­cians knew it soon would.

“I just heard his voice and his gui­tar,” said McCart­ney, “and I thought he was great.” Ear­li­er in 1970, many lis­ten­ers sure­ly felt the same thing after drop­ping the nee­dle onto Tay­lor’s break­through sec­ond album Sweet Baby James. By the time James Tay­lor Sings James Tay­lor went to air, he’d accrued enough of an inter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion to guar­an­tee appre­ci­a­tion from even non-Bea­t­les on the oth­er side of the pond. Know­ing his audi­ence, Tay­lor opens with a ren­di­tion of Lennon and McCart­ney’s “With a Lit­tle Help from My Friends.” The Bea­t­les con­nec­tions don’t stop there: Song­facts reports that Tay­lor’s “Some­thing in the Way She Moves,” the first sin­gle from his pre-Sweet Baby James Apple debut, may have inspired George Har­ri­son to write “Some­thing.” What’s more, Tay­lor had orig­i­nal­ly titled his song “I Feel Fine,” before real­iz­ing that the Bea­t­les had record­ed a song by that name. Though more trou­bled times lay ahead for the hum­ble (if already well on his way to wealth and fame) young singer-song­writer, this pro­duc­tion cap­tures Tay­lor just before super­star­dom kicked in.

Relat­ed con­tent

James Tay­lor Gives Free Acoustic Gui­tar Lessons Online

‘The Nee­dle and the Dam­age Done’: Neil Young Plays Two Songs on The John­ny Cash Show, 1971

Joni Mitchell: Singer, Song­writer, Artist, Smok­ing Grand­ma

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 Bill Murray Perform a Satirical Anti-Technology Rant (1982)

in Comedy, Technology, Television | January 23rd, 2013

Above you’ll find find a clip from Wired In, a tele­vi­sion show pro­duced in the ear­ly eight­ies meant to ori­ent view­ers in the midst of that heady era of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. Alas, the pro­gram nev­er aired; only a demo reel and some raw footage sur­vive. But those remains fea­ture no less a comedic lumi­nary than Bill Mur­ray, who even 32 years ago must have been quite a catch for a pilot like this. Though not known for his tech savvy, he has built a rep­u­ta­tion for mak­ing any­thing sound hilar­i­ous by virtue of his per­sona alone. This skill he applies to a par­o­dy of the every­man’s anti-tech­nol­o­gy dia­tribe, as com­mon­ly heard then as it is today — or as it no doubt was 32 years before the shoot, or will be 32 years from now. “Who thinks up all this high-tech stuff any­way?” Mur­ray demands. “They start with the dig­i­tal watch­es. Tells you the time in num­bers, the exact time to the sec­ond. 3:12 and 42 sec­onds. Who needs to know that stuff? I don’t!”

Keep watch­ing, and that Wired In clip heads to Las Vegas to demon­strate for us the won­der of sol­id-state car­tridge soft­ware for the Texas Instru­ments Home Com­put­er. But if you’d rather mar­vel at more of Mur­ray’s par­tic­u­lar kind of craft, watch the full sev­en min­utes of rant takes above. His riffs, seem­ing­ly script­ed as well as impro­vised, of vary­ing moods and pitched at vary­ing ener­gy lev­els, take him from those dig­i­tal watch­es to auto­mat­ed car fac­to­ries to R2-D2 to talk­ing dash­boards to the one idea he does like, robots that ride along­side you in your car’s pas­sen­ger’s seat. “You know what?” he con­cludes, “They’ll nev­er do it — because it makes too much sense.” The mak­ers of Wired In clear­ly had a pre­scient­ly sar­don­ic atti­tude about the com­ing waves of tech-relat­ed anx­i­ety; the pilot also includes a jab at the notion of video game addic­tion from “Pac-Man freak” Lily Tom­lin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Mur­ray Reads Wal­lace Stevens Poems — “The Plan­et on The Table” and “A Rab­bit as King of the Ghosts”

Fact Check­ing Bill Mur­ray: A Short, Com­ic Film from Sun­dance 2008

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site

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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