Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) Talks Death Penalty with William F. Buckley (1968)

in Law, Television | August 31st, 2012


“Tru­man Capote did­n’t study to become expert in cap­i­tal crime and its pun­ish­ment,” says William F. Buck­ley on the Fir­ing Line broad­cast of Sep­tem­ber 3, 1968, “but his five and one half year engage­ment of the slaugh­ter of the Clut­ter fam­i­ly, which went into the writ­ing of In Cold Blood, left him with high­ly set­tled impres­sions in the mat­ter.” You can hear Buck­ley elic­it and Capote con­cise­ly lay out the posi­tion to which these impres­sions brought him in the clip above. Though remem­bered for his own con­ser­v­a­tive views, Buck­ley seemed ever eager to invite onto his show, fre­quent­ly and with­out hes­i­ta­tion, pub­lic fig­ures who strong­ly dis­agreed with him. This sense of con­tro­ver­sy gen­er­at­ed a stream of clas­si­cal­ly com­pelling tele­vi­su­al moments over Fir­ing Line’s 33-year run, but for my mon­ey, all the direct con­flicts have less to offer than the times a guest — or even the host — broke from stan­dard ide­o­log­i­cal posi­tions, as Capote does here.

Buck­ley opens by ask­ing whether “sys­tem­at­ic exe­cu­tion of killers over the pre­ced­ing gen­er­a­tion might have stayed the hand of the mur­der­ers of the Cut­ter fam­i­ly.” Capote replies that “cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — which I’m opposed to, but for quite dif­fer­ent rea­sons than are usu­al­ly advanced — would in itself be a sin­gu­lar­ly effec­tive deter­rent, if it were, in fact, sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly applied. But because pub­lic sen­ti­ment is very much opposed to it and the courts have allowed this end­less pol­i­cy of appeal — to such a degree that a per­son can be eleven, twelve, thir­teen, four­teen years under a sen­tence of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — it becomes, in effect, an extreme, unusu­al, and cru­el pun­ish­ment. If peo­ple real­ly were sen­tenced to be exe­cut­ed and were with­in a rea­son­able peri­od of time, the pro­fes­sion­al mur­der­er knew the absolute, pos­i­tive end of their actions would be their own death, I think it would cer­tain­ly give them sec­ond thoughts.” This per­haps lends itself poor­ly to a sound bite, but Fir­ing Line at its best nev­er dealt in those.

Relat­ed con­tent:

William F. Buck­ley Meets (Pos­si­bly Drunk) Jack Ker­ouac, Tries to Make Sense of Hip­pies, 1968

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Allen Gins­berg Reads a Poem He Wrote on LSD to William F. Buck­ley

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Jim Henson’s Animated Film, Limbo, the Organized Mind, Presented by Johnny Carson (1974)

in Animation, Film, Television | August 24th, 2012

Not hav­ing grown up dur­ing the Mup­pets’ first and high­est wave of pop­u­lar­i­ty, I’ve always won­dered how some­thing like The Mup­pet Show could pos­si­bly have attained such main­stream cul­tur­al pri­ma­cy. A friend of mine who did spend his child­hood watch­ing pup­peteer Jim Hen­son’s array of crea­tures do their thing on nation­al tele­vi­sion offers a sim­ple expla­na­tion: “It was the sev­en­ties.” Though Hen­son began his pup­petry career twen­ty years before The Mup­pet Show’s 1974 pilot episode, his dis­tinc­tive­ly earnest yet pre­scient­ly post-psy­che­del­ic vision seemed made for that decade. Amer­i­ca respond­ed by ele­vat­ing his work into the zeit­geist, and not just the stuff prop­er­ly involv­ing Mup­pets. Above, you can watch a 1974 clip from The Tonight Show fea­tur­ing a short per­for­mance from Hen­son and fel­low Mup­peteer Dave Goelz called Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind.

Hen­son and Goelz treat John­ny Car­son and the Tonight Show audi­ence to a jour­ney through the brain, as an abstract­ed, hand-oper­at­ed face nar­rates the pas­sage through organ­ic struc­tures like his medul­la oblon­ga­ta, and cere­brum, and the seats of things less defin­able, like thoughts of his fam­i­ly, thoughts of his ene­mies, his “extra-spe­cial sec­tion of good thoughts,” his evil thoughts, and his fears. The score comes from elec­tron­ic com­po­si­tion pio­neer Ray­mond Scott, whose 1964 album Sooth­ing Sounds for Baby has won great respect among enthu­si­asts of ambi­ent music. Watch­ing Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind in 2012 brings one obvi­ous lament to mind: why don’t they make such delight­ful­ly eccen­tric and artis­tic tele­vi­sion any­more? But of course they do make it, in stranger and less pre­dictable ways than even Hen­son did, but main­ly in the count­less frag­ment­ed, com­par­a­tive­ly mar­gin­al venues of mod­ern media. Lim­bo aired on a show that half the peo­ple you knew would have seen. It was the sev­en­ties.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jim Henson’s Vio­lent Wilkins Cof­fee Com­mer­cials (1957–1961)

Jim Henson’s Zany 1963 Robot Film Uncov­ered by AT&T: Watch Online

Jim Hen­son’s Short, Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Film (1965)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Do Yourself a Favor and Watch Stress: Portrait of a Killer (with Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky)

in Psychology, Science, Stanford, Television | August 22nd, 2012

Intel­li­gence comes at a price. The human species, despite its tal­ent for solv­ing prob­lems, has man­aged over the mil­len­nia to turn one of its most basic sur­vival mechanisms–the stress response–against itself. “Essen­tial­ly,” says Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky, “we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make our­selves sick.”

In the 2008 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (above), Sapol­sky and fel­low sci­en­tists explain the dead­ly con­se­quences of pro­longed stress. “If you’re a nor­mal mam­mal,” Sapol­sky says, “what stress is about is three min­utes of scream­ing ter­ror on the savan­nah, after which either it’s over with or you’re over with.” Dur­ing those three min­utes of ter­ror the body responds to immi­nent dan­ger by deploy­ing stress hor­mones that stim­u­late the heart rate and blood pres­sure while inhibit­ing oth­er func­tions, like diges­tion, growth and repro­duc­tion.

The prob­lem is, human beings tend to secrete these hor­mones con­stant­ly in response to the pres­sures of every­day life. “If you turn on the stress response chron­i­cal­ly for pure­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons,” Sapol­sky told Mark Shwartz in a 2007 inter­view for the Stan­ford News Ser­vice, “you increase your risk of adult onset dia­betes and high blood pres­sure. If you’re chron­i­cal­ly shut­ting down the diges­tive sys­tem, there’s a bunch of gas­troin­testi­nal dis­or­ders you’re more at risk for as well.”

Chron­ic stress has also been shown in sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies to dimin­ish brain cells need­ed for mem­o­ry and learn­ing, and to adverse­ly affect the way fat is dis­trib­uted in the body. It has even been shown to mea­sur­ably accel­er­ate the aging process in chro­mo­somes, a result that con­firms our intu­itive sense that peo­ple who live stress­ful lives grow old faster.

By study­ing baboon pop­u­la­tions in East Africa, Sapol­sky has found that indi­vid­u­als low­er down in the social hier­ar­chy suf­fer more stress, and con­se­quent­ly more stress-relat­ed health prob­lems, than dom­i­nant indi­vid­u­als. The same trend in human pop­u­la­tions was dis­cov­ered in the British White­hall Study. Peo­ple with more con­trol in work envi­ron­ments have low­er stress, and bet­ter health, than sub­or­di­nates.

Stress: Por­trait of a Killer is a fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant documentary–well worth the 52 min­utes it takes to watch.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sapol­sky Breaks Down Depres­sion

Dopamine Jack­pot! Robert Sapol­sky on the Sci­ence of Plea­sure

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

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Julia Child Shows David Letterman How to Cook Meat with a Blow Torch

in Comedy, Television | August 15th, 2012

Julia Child would have turned 100 years old today. As an author and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty, Child intro­duced French cui­sine to the main­stream Amer­i­can pub­lic and turned cook­ing into a dai­ly adven­ture.

Child became fas­ci­nat­ed with French food after mov­ing to Paris in 1948. She stud­ied cook­ing at the renowned Cor­don Bleu school, and in 1961 co-authored the two-vol­ume Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing. More than 2 mil­lion copies of the book have been sold, but Child is best known for her tele­vi­sion appear­ances on a suc­ces­sion of pro­grams, start­ing with The French Chef in 1962 and end­ing with Juli­a’s Casu­al Din­ners in 1999, just three years before her death in 2002 at the age of 92.

In 2009 she was the sub­ject of the film Julie & Julia, star­ring Meryl Streep. The movie is based on the real-life adven­tures of Julie Pow­ell, who was great­ly inspired by Child. “Some­thing came out of Julia on tele­vi­sion that was unex­pect­ed,” says Pow­ell in a video at Biography.com. “She’s not a beau­ti­ful woman, but her voice and her atti­tude and her playfulness–it’s just mag­i­cal. You can’t fake that. You can’t take class­es to learn how to be won­der­ful. She just want­ed to enter­tain and edu­cate peo­ple at the same time. Our food cul­ture is bet­ter for it.”

For a quick reminder of Child’s voice, atti­tude and playfulness–not to men­tion her con­sid­er­able skill with a blowtorch–we bring you her mem­o­rable late-1980s appear­ance on Late Night with David Let­ter­man, in which the resource­ful Child adjusts to time con­straints by chang­ing a sim­ple Amer­i­can ham­burg­er into beef tartare grat­iné.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

in Literature, Television | August 15th, 2012

“But it’s f****d, because the man got to where he need­ed to be, and she was­n’t even worth it. Daisy was­n’t noth­in’ past any oth­er b***h any­where, you know? He did all that for her, and in the end, it ain’t amount to s**t.” So begins a scene of book-club dis­cus­sion of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s nov­el The Great Gats­by (find in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) in David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series The Wire. Being a dra­ma focused on crime, pun­ish­ment, and the dys­func­tion in soci­ety’s han­dling of both, The Wire sets this lit­er­ary analy­sis with­in prison walls. Being the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the 2000s, it per­haps seemed nat­ur­al to ref­er­ence the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the twen­ties — or, quite pos­si­bly, out of any decade. The fit turns out to be even clos­er than it seems: while Fitzger­ald has received acco­lades for his indict­ment of Amer­i­ca — specif­i­cal­ly, of the amor­phous promise, or the promise of amor­phous­ness, that is the “Amer­i­can Dream” — Simon and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have received acco­lades for theirs — specif­i­cal­ly, of the nature of near­ly every Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing.

The book club’s leader asks what Fitzger­ald meant when he said there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives. “He’s say­ing that the past is always with us,” replies D’An­ge­lo Barks­dale, a mid­dle man­ag­er in a drug-deal­ing empire and a char­ac­ter often sin­gled out for crit­i­cal praise. “Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that s**t mat­ters. [ … ] Like, at the end of the book? Boats and tides and all? It’s like, you can change up. You can say you some­body new. You can give your­self a whole new sto­ry. But what came first is who you real­ly are, and what hap­pened before is what real­ly hap­pened. It does­n’t mat­ter that some fool say you dif­fer­ent, ’cause the only thing that make you dif­fer­ent is what you real­ly do, or what you real­ly go through. Like all them books in his library. Now, he fron­tin’ with all them books. But if we pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read one of ’em. Gats­by, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and ’cause he was­n’t ready to get real with the sto­ry, that s**t caught up to him.” H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er - A Yale course in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online 

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Famous Actors & Actresses Answer Revealing Questions on Inside the Actors Studio: A Compilation

in Television | August 14th, 2012

Overt­ly or covert­ly, inter­view pro­grams all have tra­di­tions. James Lip­ton, host of Inside the Actors Stu­dio for the past eigh­teen years, has cham­pi­oned per­haps the most overt inter­view-pro­gram tra­di­tion of all: the Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire. Orig­i­nal­ly wield­ed by anoth­er host, Bernard Piv­ot of the French lit­er­ary talk show Apos­tro­phes, the renowned Ques­tion­naire demands of the inter­vie­wee ten sim­ple pieces of infor­ma­tion: their favorite word, their turn-on, their turn-off, the sound they love, the sound they hate, their favorite curse word, the pro­fes­sion oth­er than their own they would like to attempt, the pro­fes­sion they would­n’t like to attempt, and what they’d like to hear God say when they arrive at the pearly gates. You can watch com­pi­la­tions of Lip­ton’s Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire seg­ments on YouTube, includ­ing the one above with Hugh Lau­rie, Ralph Feinnes, and Rus­sell Crowe. Their turn-ons, respec­tive­ly: eye con­tact, Shake­speare, a well-con­struct­ed sen­tence. Their turn-offs: finan­cial advice, envi­ron­men­tal des­e­cra­tion, false accu­sa­tion.

Or have a look at this one, which bears sim­i­lar­ly pithy insights into the inner lives of Daniel Rad­cliffe, Angeli­na Jolie, and Will Smith. Rad­cliffe would like to try his hand at jour­nal­ism; Jolie, explo­ration; Smith, sci­ence. Though Lip­ton cred­its the Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire to Piv­ot on air every time, its ori­gins lay fur­ther back in time. Piv­ot devel­oped his ques­tion­naire in response to Mar­cel Proust’s, a list of prompts meant to reveal the recip­i­en­t’s per­son­al­i­ty, includ­ing “Your favorite qual­i­ties in a woman,” “Your favorite qual­i­ties in a man,” “Your idea of hap­pi­ness,” and “Your idea of mis­ery” — per­son­al­i­ty-reveal­ing ques­tion­naires being very much the rage in fin de siè­cle Europe. While the tra­di­tion thrives to this day in Lip­ton’s for­mal­ly strict prac­tice, part of me would enjoy the reac­tions to see him re-intro­duce a Prous­t­ian prompt like “The mil­i­tary event I admire the most.”

Four Inside the Actors Stu­dio Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire com­pi­la­tions on YouTube: Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., John­ny Depp; Robin Williams and Antho­ny Hop­kins; Hugh Lau­rie, Ralph Feinnes, Rus­sell Crowe; Daniel Rad­cliffe, Ange­line Jolie, Will Smith

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Ayn Rand (Paul Ryan’s Moral Heroine) Instructs Johnny Carson on the Virtue of Selfishness, 1967

in Philosophy, Politics, Television | August 14th, 2012

Since Wis­con­sin Sen­a­tor Paul Ryan may soon be only a heart­beat away from the pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States, it might be good to pause for a moment and con­sid­er the man’s val­ues. In par­tic­u­lar, it might make sense to get acquaint­ed with his stat­ed source of moral inspi­ra­tion.

“The rea­son I got involved in pub­lic ser­vice,” Ryan said in 2005, “by and large, if I had to cred­it one thinker, one per­son, it would be Ayn Rand.”

The Russ­ian émi­gré writer and philoso­pher Ayn Rand believed that self-inter­est was the great­est good and that altru­ism was unspeak­ably wicked. “Altru­ism is a mon­strous notion,” she said in 1981. “It is the moral­i­ty of can­ni­bals devour­ing one anoth­er. It is a the­o­ry of pro­found hatred for man, for rea­son, for achieve­ment, for any form of human suc­cess and hap­pi­ness on earth.”

Ryan was deeply impressed when he first read Rand’s books as a young­ster. “I grew up read­ing Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my val­ue sys­tems are,” Rand told The Atlas Soci­ety in 2005. “It inspired me so much that it’s required read­ing in my office for all interns and my staff.”

Rand called the Unit­ed States a “nation of mon­ey,” and she meant it as a com­pli­ment. “The words ‘to make mon­ey’ hold the essence of human moral­i­ty,” she wrote in a famous pas­sage in her 1957 nov­el, Atlas Shrugged. In Rand’s hier­ar­chy of virtue the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al­ist is “the high­est type of human being” and the needy are rab­ble. “Par­a­sites, moochers, loot­ers, brutes and thugs can be of no val­ue to a human being,” Rand wrote in 1963. “Nor can he gain any ben­e­fit from liv­ing in a soci­ety geared to their needs, demands and pro­tec­tion, a soci­ety that treats him as a sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mal and penal­izes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a soci­ety based on the ethics of altru­ism.”

If Rand taught Ryan “quite a bit” about who he is and what his val­ue sys­tems are, then per­haps Rand’s state­ment above should tell us some­thing about Ryan’s cur­rent bud­get pro­pos­al, which would slash $3.3 tril­lion from pro­grams for low-income earn­ers over the next decade while pro­vid­ing a wind­fall for the wealthy in the form of tax cuts that would net an aver­age $265,000 a year for those with incomes greater than $1 million–over and above the $129,000 they would already receive from Ryan’s exten­sion of the Bush tax cuts. In Ryan’s bud­get the rich are released from their unjust bur­den as “sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mals” while the “par­a­sites,” “moochers” and “looters”–i.e. the elder­ly, the dis­abled and the poor–are taught a les­son in virtue.

For a quick primer on Rand’s philosophy–straight from the horse’s mouth–watch her 1967 appear­ance (above) on The Tonight Show Star­ring John­ny Car­son.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Col­bert on Ayn Rand

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

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Al Jazeera Travel Show Explores World Cities Through Their Street Food

in Television, Travel | August 13th, 2012

The Japan­ese have a word for it: kuidaore, “to eat one­self bank­rupt.” This has risen to some com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tion and aspi­ra­tion in Osa­ka, Japan’s sec­ond-largest city, a for­mer mer­chant enclave once referred to as the coun­try’s “kitchen.” You can see exact­ly what emp­ties Osakan bank accounts on Al Jazeera Eng­lish’s series Street Food. Its episode on the city (part one, part two), embed­ded above, seeks out the stands that most effi­cient­ly cater to the cit­i­zen­ry’s char­ac­ter­is­tic busy­ness, the source of the fresh­est sushi around, the bar­be­cue coun­ters of Kore­atown, the poi­so­nous­ly-liv­ered fugu fish, the ide­al­ly con­tro­ver­sial dish that is whale meat, and a range of food writ­ers and crit­ics to lay down some culi­nary insight. The pro­gram fin­ish­es its jour­ney with one vis­it to a culi­nary acad­e­my and anoth­er to the poor­er side of this Japan­ese metrop­o­lis. Being a Japa­neese metrop­o­lis with more pover­ty than most but also one a greater love of eat­ing than most, Osa­ka has pro­duced street food even among its street peo­ple.

There you have the basic form of a Street Food broad­cast, each of which takes on a dif­fer­ent world city, all of which oper­ate under the the­o­ry that the best path into a cul­ture runs through its alleys most dense with comestible com­merce. In the episode just above (part one, part two), Mon­tre­al’s meet­ing of Eng­lish and French sen­si­bil­i­ties, a slight­ly uneasy coex­is­tence in the best of times, turns into an all-out ide­o­log­i­cal con­flict on the sub­ject of how to eat. One par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant skir­mish occurs over pou­tine, the French fry, cheese curd, and gravy dish essen­tial to any inves­ti­ga­tion of Mon­tre­al cui­sine. In the episode below (part one, part two), we see the ele­ments of Span­ish and Andean eat­ing final­ly con­verg­ing on the streets of Lima — aid­ed, in a big way, by fla­vors brought in by the Peru’s many immi­grants from Asian. Admit­ted­ly, the con­ver­gence isn’t com­plete, not will it be until Limeños not of native descent come to enjoy the city’s most pop­u­lar item of street food, with 65 mil­lion eat­en every year: the guinea pig.

All episodes of Al Jazeera Eng­lish’s Street Food on YouTube:

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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