This weekend, Mike Wallace died at the age of 93. As The New York Times observes in its obit, Wallace was “a pioneer of American broadcasting who confronted leaders and liars for 60 Minutes over four decades.” But before he became a fixture on 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace hosted his own short-lived TV show in the late 1950s, The Mike Wallace Interview, which let Americans get an up-close and personal view of some legendary figures — Frank Lloyd Wright, Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Aldous Huxley, Erich Fromm, Ayn Rand and Gloria Swanson.
Above, we’re bringing back Mike Wallace’s memorable interview with Salvador Dali in 1958. For the better part of a half hour, Wallace tried to demystify “the enigma that is Salvador Dali,” and it didn’t go terribly well. It turns out that surrealist painters give surreal answers to conventional interview questions too. Pretty quickly, Wallace capitulates and says, “I must confess, you lost me halfway through.” Happily for us, the video makes for some good viewing more than 50 years later.
A few weeks back, we featured the pilot of The Muppet Show that first aired on ABC in 1975. When you watch it, you’ll be struck by two things — 1) the unexpected title, “Sex & Violence,” and the show’s somewhat jarring focus on an adult market. Today, we’re featuring another milestone in Muppet Show history — the original pitch reel Jim Henson made when trying to sell the series to CBS. The pitch confidently promises the moon and more, but it’s nothing Henson couldn’t deliver on. Enjoy, and don’t miss Henson’s 1969 Puppet-Making Primer. It’s a little gem.
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Say what you will about mid-eighties American culture, but how many historical moments could bring together a world-famous visual artist and rock star over a genuinely innovative consumer product? Maybe Apple could orchestrate something similar today; after all, we endure no drought of celebrity enthusiasm for iPods, iPads, iMacs, and iPhones. But could they come up with participants to match the iconic gravity of Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry? In the clip above, both of them arrive at the 1985 launch of the Commodore Amiga, and the silver-wigged one sits down to demonstrate the personal computer’s then-unparalleled graphical power by “painting” the Blondie frontwoman’s portrait. He tints it blue, clicks some red paint bucket here, clicks some yellow paint bucket there, and before we know it, we’re gazing upon a Warholian image ready for admiration, one we too could wield the digital power to create for a mere $1295 — in 1985 dollars.
To watch Warhol at the Amiga is to watch a man encounter a machine whose functions dovetail uncannily well with his own. The way he uses the computer casts a light on what people seem to find most brilliant and most infuriating about his work. “All he does is select fill and click on her hair and it turns yellow and its done?” types one YouTube commenter. “Her face is fucking blue.” Departing from the standard tone of YouTube discourse, another commenter tries to break it down: “As an artist myself, I find Andy Warhol a genius in making himself famous for art that anyone can do. I could take the same picture of Debra [sic] Harry and do the same thing in Photoshop. Andy Warhol was great at being Andy Warhol. His art was simply an extension of himself — simple and colorful.” Indeed, Warhol and Harry alike seem to understand that their work consists as much in the material they produce as in who they are, leaving no discernible boundary between the identity and value of the creator and the identity and value of the created.
Dedicated enthusiasts of Andy Warhol and/or the Commodore Amiga might also give his 1986 interview in Amiga World a look, despite its sketchy scan quality. It took place during the production of the MTV music- and talk-show Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, whose Amiga-enhanced promo spot (which features Debbie Harry) you can watch above. “Do you think [the Amiga] will push the artists?” Amiga World asks. “Do you think that people will be inclined to use all the different components of the art, music, video, etc.?” “That’s the best part about it,” Warhol replies. “An artist can really do the whole thing. Actually, he can make a film with everything on it, music and sound and art… everything.” “How do you feel about the fact that everyone’s work will now look like your own?” Amiga World asks. “But it doesn’t,” Warhol replies. Alas, Andy Warhol would not live to take advantage of the unprecedentedly rapid development of computer technology the nineties would bring, but that particular revolution has offered us all, in some sense, the chance to get Warholian.
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Earlier this month, we posted a pair of Wes Anderson-directed television commercials advertising the Hyundai Azera. While I understood that, at one time, a known auteur using his cinematic powers to pitch sensible sedans would have raised hackles, I didn’t realize that it could still spark a lively debate today. Seeing as Open Culture has already featured commercials by the likes of David Lynch, Frederico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard — and I couldn’t resist linking to Errol Morris’ when discussing El Wingador — I assumed any issues surrounding this sort of business had already been settled. On Twitter, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, author of a hefty tome on Godard, seemed to corroborate this conclusion: “Bergman made commercials, so did Godard; the more distinctive the artist, the less the artist need worry about it.” “Also,” the Chicago Sun-Times’ Jim Emerson tweeted, “the, concept of “sellout” no longer exists.”
From all the ensuing back-and-forth between critics and cinephiles emerged Brody’s New Yorker blog post, “Wes Anderson: Classics and Commercials.” Pointing out that “so many great paintings were made for popes and kings and patrons, and great buildings sponsored by tycoons and corporations,” Brody finds that “the better and stronger and more distinctive the artist, the more likely it is that anything he or she does will bear the artist’s mark and embody the artist’s essence. Those who are most endangered by the making of commercials (of whatever sort in whatever medium) are those whose abilities are more fragile, more precarious, more incipient, less developed.” But a dissenting voice appears in the comment section: “The reason that Godard and Anderson can make commercials that feel more like short films is not so much because their talents are more developed; it’s because their reputation is more secure. [ … ] It would be better to regard these commercials as short films financed by a company’s patronage (with a few strings attached) than as commercials proper.”
An even more forceful objection comes from Chris Michael in the Guardian: “Is it worth remaining sceptical about art made in the direct service of a sales pitch? I think it is. Does it cheapen your talent to consistently sell its actual goals to the highest bidder? I think it does. When the goal or persuasive intent does not ‘resonate with audience in meaningful way’, but rather ’employ style to conflate love for artist with love for product’, there’s a genuine, full-frontal, non-imaginary assault on the integrity of the art’s meaning. Better to ask: What meaning? What art? Taking it further, can a car ad ever be art?” When Slate’s Forrest Wickman entered the fray, he hauled a Darren Aronofsky-directed Kohl’s spot in with him to demonstrate that “that there is such a thing as selling out,” comparing it unfavorably with Anderson’s ads as “nothing more than a second-rate ripoff, a cheap copy of ads and music videos past.”
Michael remains unimpressed: “Aronofsky really sold out least: by not prostituting his style and delivery, by not wrapping anything of himself around a dull car or department store, by just doing the job for the money like a professional. That, I can respect.” Responding, Brody holds fast in defense of Anderson’s ads, one of which he calls “a feat of astonishing psychological complexity. “These little films, which happen to be commercials for a car,” he writes, “share not only the style but also the content, the theme, and the emotional and personal concerns, of Anderson’s feature films. Yes, they’re short. Yes, there’s a difference between what can be developed in two hours and what can be developed in thirty seconds—it’s the difference between a poem and a novel, between a song and an opera.” Has Wes Anderson sold out? Is selling out still be possible? As in everything, dear reader, the task of weighing the evidence and making the decision falls ultimately to you.
In this rare footage from 1975, a 26-year-old John Belushi warms up with some eyebrow calisthenics before doing his signature Marlon Brando impression in a screen test for a new late-night television program called Saturday Night Live. He got the part, of course, and his star rose rapidly along with the show’s. By 1978 Belushi could boast of having the number one late-night television show (SNL), the number one movie (Animal House) and the number one musical album (The Blues Brothers’ Briefcase Full of Blues). But sadly it all came crashing down 30 years ago this month–on March 5 1982–when he died of a drug overdose. In this clip we remember the young Belushi: cocky, talented, with a brilliant future ahead of him.
On that March day, Zappa jumped into the fray and fought the culture wars of the 1980s. His main opponent wasn’t the often prickly conservative commentator Robert Novack. Instead, it was John Lofton, a right-wing columnist for The Washington Times, who argued that government should censor rock lyrics deemed unfriendly to families. Zappa, who considered himself a conservative too, took umbrage and you can watch the conversation unfold … and at times deteriorate. Also don’t miss Zappa’s testimony before Congress in 1985.
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We could call Alain de Botton, in the classical sense, a philosophical amateur: that is, one who loves philosophy. But not everybody loves the way he approaches the field. His 2000 book The Consolations of Philosophy drew a particularly sharp line through the critics: some found great refreshment in the accessibility he granted philosophers like Seneca and Schopenhauer by framing them in an unexpectedly sincere parody of a self-help book; others judged this method inadequate to deal with the thinkers’ true seriousness and complexity. This clicks right in with what seems like de Botton’s grand mission: taking Western civilization’s most respected words, written and spoken, and using them to adjust the nuts and bolts of our modern, everyday pursuit of happiness. He wrote another book called How Proust Can Change Your Life; he established a school which offers courses like “How to Balance Work with Life” and “How to Be Cool;” and his latest project involves adapting religion for use by atheists (watch related video here).
No surprise, then, that de Botton’s work would extend to that most common medium, television, with a series called Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. You can watch a number of episodes on YouTube, including but not limited to “Socrates on Self-Confidence.” Zipping through the streets of Athens on a canary-yellow Vespa, de Botton tells us of the life and methods of the fifth-century-BC philosopher who seems to remain the discipline’s most famous practitioner. Illustrating Socrates’ famous habit of public interrogation, de Botton strolls up to other visitors in the marketplace, asking them to define the idea of justice or their conception of their personal life. The answers don’t come easily: a Frenchwoman struggles to respond even when our intrepid host shifts into her language, and a religiously outfitted local blows him off without even slowing down. A few hearty Australian travelers — a breed found at every point on the map, cradles of philosophy and otherwise — do lay out their self-styled philosophies without hesitation, but de Botton has plenty more places to go and people to see, like a focus group whose volley of opinions would have summoned Socrates’ gravest reservations about democracy, and a potter who crafts a tangible metaphor for Socrates’ notion of the well-tested, watertight belief.
Those who’ve questioned whether de Botton knows how to handle philosophy may well come away from these programs convinced that he doesn’t. I, however, find something almost radical in the way his demeanor, unyieldingly straightforward and never forgetful of concerns others might dismiss as mundane, interacts with the great works of the philosophical canon. I sense an almost strategic naïveté at work, and it takes him places, intellectually and geographically, to which his closest peers in letters may never get around. The starkly divided reaction de Botton draws shows, to my mind, that he’s being just the right kind of provocative — in his gentle manner.
Forget about inclined planes and pulleys. In this series from the PBS program NOVA, physics is presented as an exotic, mind-bending realm.
The Fabric of the Cosmos, first broadcast in November, follows up on the 2003 Peabody Award-winning The Elegant Universe. Both series are adapted from the best-selling books of host Brian Greene, a mathematician and physicist at Columbia University.
Like the earlier series, which was centered around String Theory, The Fabric of the Cosmos deals with ideas that are on the cutting edge of scientific theory. “This is a report from the frontier of cosmic thought,” wrote Dennis Overbye last November in The New York Times, “as fresh as last month’s Nobel Prizes, uncompromising in its intellectual ambitions and discerning in its choice of compelling scientific issues. The action ranges from Times Square to the Grand Canyon, from bowling lanes and billiard tables to the limits of the imagination.”
The series is arranged in four parts of approximately 50 minutes each. The episodes are called “What is Space?;” ‘The Illusion of Time,’ ‘Quantum Leap,’ and ‘Universe or Multiverse?’
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