Humor, culture, observation and other good stuff from Brooklyn, New York–the real America!
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In 1988, his dreams dashed and reputation destroyed, John DeLorean was living in Manhattan, now a born-again Christian, still believing he would get another chance. He granted a rare interview to a local TV station from his old stomping grounds in Detroit. Funny to see him strolling through Central Park.
More DeLorean posts:
Tags: John Delorean
From an interview at 3:A.M. with P.D. Smith, author of City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, a passage about the way views of urban life have evolved:
“3:AM: There is a certain, largely religious, strand of thought that connects cities with evil, and the pastoral or rural with innocence and morality. One can see it now in the idea of middle America, opposed to the coastal cities, and one can also see it in Victorian proponents of city reform. Why do you think this strand of thought exists, and how does it affect cities?
P.D. Smith: The idea of the ‘sin city’, of Sodom and Gomorrah, is certainly a strand in Judeo-Christian thought. It’s interesting to note that the first city builders in Mesopotamia did not long for some lost Garden of Eden, a bucolic Golden Age. Instead they believed their gods gave them the city. It was their home and where they were meant to be. But, yes, Augustine condemned the City of Man and directed people’s gaze towards the City of God. These ideas have been very influential. In the US, long before gangsta rap the city was associated with crime, violence and moral corruption. The city, with all its attendant social problems, was seen as a reminder of the Old World. The New World was meant to be a land of opportunity, of wilderness and far horizons, not Dickensian slums and urban crime. These ideas feed a deep distrust of cities in America. It surfaces in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickle condemns New York’s crime: ‘This city here is like an open sewer, you know, it’s full of filth and scum.’ It’s a rich subject both in the US and in Britain. In fact, it’s something I would like to explore in another book.”
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“Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal”:
Tags: P.D. Smith
One more post about Jacqueline Susann and then I promise I’ll stop. This 1967 appearance by Susann on What’s My Line? isn’t particularly riveting, even though it was made in the wake of her jaw-dropping success as a debut novelist with Valley of the Dolls. What’s amusing is the cultural earthquake quietly occurring during this short segment. This brainy program had just been cancelled, a victim of a country’s changing mores. Susann was representative of a new America, a post-Pill society, one that was leaving literate panel shows in its wake. The “barbarians” had crashed the gate. It might seem like the trashy author’s rise and the classy show’s demise was a sad commentary on our nation, but it was really a sign of an improving America, one that was more open, more democratic, more inclusive and more honest. Sometimes I get weary of our in-your -face culture, but I’ll always opt for oversharing instead of no sharing, for too much information rather than not enough.
Tags: Jacqueline Susann
A thesis statement from the recent Global Future 2045 Congress in Moscow.
Marshall McLuhan, in 1977, before electricity truly started to flow, recognizing early how new media would fray secrecy and expose information. But what if we know about everything and we still don’t do anything? What then?
Tags: Marshall McLuhan
The Williams WASP X-Jet, 1974.
A very cool 1986 profile of Jim Whiting, the machine-friendly artist who invented the mechanical family for Herbie Hancock’s landmark Rockit video.
Tags: Herbie Hancock, Jim Whiting
The Russian city of Berezniki was built atop an undergound mine during the dark days of Soviet-era madness, so it’s constantly prone to rapidly forming sinkholes capable of swallowing people or buildings whole. In order to safeguard the more than 150,000 residents, scientists constantly monitor the situation with a dizzying array of surveillance cameras. But even that may not be enough to save the burg. From Andrew E. Kramer in the New York Times:
“Mining engineers first tried to maintain the supports by pumping in saltwater, intending to raise the salinity of the floodwater to the saturation point before the structure collapsed, but that did not work.
After that, the local government adopted the policy in effect today, of careful observation and early warning: geologists, surveyors and emergency personnel use a panoply of high-technology monitors. These include the video surveillance system, seismic sensors, regular surveys and satellite monitoring of the changes in altitude of roofs, sidewalks and streets.
‘We will fight the holes with science,’ the mayor, Sergei P. Dyakov, said in an interview. The city will not need to relocate, he said, because engineers believe that no new holes will open. Much of the mine was filled before the flood, he said, and the sinkholes occurred in an anomalous area that had not been filled in.
But federal officials and company executives are debating whether to relocate the entire city to the opposite bank of the Kama River, where the bedrock is solid.”
Tags: Andrew E. Kramer, Sergei P. Dyakov
Michel Gondry, who is never fully awake, talks to Beck about dreams.
Tags: Beck, Michel Gondry
All this stuff about Jacqueline Susann got me thinking about another author of popular trash from before my time, Harold Robbins, who was the best-selling novelist in the world about 40 years ago, specializing in literature that was most suitable for the beach or masturbation, though preferably not both at the same time. From 1971, a really fun portrait of the wet-dream merchant.
Tags: Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann
Mike McGrady, an ink-stained wretch from an era when it seemed like newsprint would flow forever, just passed away. More than his journalistic career, McGrady, to his horror, was best known for Naked Came the Stranger, a trashy 1969 hoax novel that he co-wrote with a couple dozen other Newsday reporters and editors. Meant as a satire of Jacqueline Susann and similar popular writers of the day, it was initially published earnestly under a nom de plume and sold quite well. From Margalit Fox’s New York Times obituary of the late scribe:
“Intended to be a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value, Naked Came the Stranger by all appearances succeeded estimably on both counts.
Originally issued by Lyle Stuart, an independent publisher known for subversive titles, the novel was a no-holds-barred chronicle of a suburban woman’s sexual liaisons, with each chapter recounting a different escapade:
She has sex with a mobster and sex with a rabbi. She has sex with a hippie and sex with at least one accountant. There is a scene involving a tollbooth, another involving ice cubes and still another featuring a Shetland pony.
The book’s cover — a nude woman seen from behind — left little to the imagination, as, in its way, did its prose:
‘Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt.’
The purported author was Penelope Ashe, who as the jacket copy told it was a ‘demure Long Island housewife.’ In reality, Mr. McGrady had dreamed up the book as ironic commentary on the public’s appetite for Jacqueline Susann and her ilk.”
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A 1975 adaptation from the director of The Opening of Misty Beethoven:
Tags: Jacqueline Susann, Margalit Fox, Mike McGrady, Penelope Ashe
Priggish Canadian interviewer Barbara Frum and pills-and-vulvae novelist Jacqueline Susann insult and irritate each other during the mid-1960s.
Slavoj Žižek, genius and fool, using questionable geological evidence to make a case for humans embracing technology over nature.
Tags: Slavoj Žižek
Disney research potentially turns all the world into a touchscreen.
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault have a bull session on Dutch TV in 1971.
Tags: Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky
Japan’s JR-Maglev is the fastest commuter train in the world. It uses a magnetic levitation system to clock in at up to 361 mph.
Zooey Deschanel can only have her darling discussions about tomato soup with Siri today because of pioneering work in computer voice recognition that was done decades ago. Amazing video from Stanford University, 1968.
I read in one of the books about Saturday Night Live that a rival show on ABC had been called Saturday Night Live when Lorne Michael’s creation debuted. It was a short-lived comedy-variety program hosted by Howard Cosell and featuring guests like Evel Knievel and Muhammad Ali and a cast member named Bill Murray. It aired live from the Ed Sullivan Theater. The Saturday Night Live on NBC that we all know was originally called Saturday Night to avoid conflict over the title. This is a promo that ran for the Cosell show.
Tags: Howard Cosell
Best known today for having kinky sex with Keira Knightley, Carl Jung was successor to Sigmund Freud as the most famous psychoanalyst on the planet. From 1959, two years before the doctor’s death.
Tags: Carl Jung
In a chilling scene from 1949′s The Third Man, Harry Lime makes abstractions of human beings, reducing them to dots. How can people not be expendable when time and history and population are considered? It’s enough to make the blood run cold, and it’s the kind of thinking that has been employed to commit atrocities.
But a similar type of thinking can be used to do great good. If you want to judge people objectively, if you want to remove prejudice, if you want to make decisions based on facts and not emotions, if your aim is to seek truth and not be prone to the delusions of narrative, it might not be bad to selectively see people as dots. Not to reduce the humanity of others but to diminish our own faulty decision-making processes.
Charles Fishman, author of The Big Thirst, nominates Las Vegas as the most water savvy area of the United States. It seems counterintuitive that a piece of desert crammed with swimming pools and gargantuan fountains could be considered water smart, but the city consistently makes it work despite meagre natural resources. An excerpt from his book at Marketplace:
“There is no two-mile stretch of ground anywhere in the United States that has such a density of water features, water attractions, and sheer water exuberance. Las Vegas, which can invest something as routine as breakfast with outlandish extravagance, has taken our most unassuming substance and unleashed it as the embodiment of glamour, mystery, power, and allure. In the way that only Las Vegas can, it has created a whole new category–ostentatious water.
The Las Vegas Strip is a demonstration of water imagination, of water mastery, and also of absolute water confidence.
It’s all the more remarkable because Las Vegas is the driest city in the United States. Of the 280 cities in the United States with at least 100,000 people, Las Vegas is No. 280 in precipitation and No. 280 in number of days each year that it rains. Las Vegas gets 4.49 inches of precipitation a year. And it rains or snows, on average, just nineteen days a year.
A metropolis with 2 million residents and 36 million visitors a year, Las Vegas gets ninety percent of its water from a single source, Lake Mead, the spectacular, man-made reservoir created on the Colorado River by Hoover Dam. When Lake Mead is full, it holds a sixty-year supply of water for Las Vegas.
But Las Vegas is legally allowed to take only a tiny sliver of Lake Mead water — 300,000 acre-feet a year, 98 billion gallons. All the water Las Vegas is allowed lowers the lake between two and three feet. Las Vegas’s allocation is about 4 percent of what everybody else gets to take from Lake Mead — 96 percent of the water people use from Lake Mead goes to either California or Arizona. And Las Vegas’s allocation is fixed in law, just as the allocations of California and Arizona are fixed — so the amount of water Las Vegas has access to hasn’t changed even as Las Vegas’s population has doubled, and doubled again, even as the city has added 100,000 new hotel rooms, along with fountains and waterfalls, swimming pools and shark tanks.”
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Evel Knievel’s failed attempt at jumping the fountains at Caesars Palace, 1967:
Tags: Charles Fishman, Evel Knievel
Gary Numan questioning the fealty of his social network, 1979.
Tags: Gary Numan
In 1961, newly crowned Indianapolis 500 champ A.J. Foyt appeared on I’ve Got a Secret with Ray Harroun, who won the inaugural Indy 500 in 1911.
Tags: A.J. Foyt, Ray Harroun
Michelangelo Antonioni, in 1982, thinking about a “future with no end,” knowing that film–and everything else–would soon change greatly. The rise of the machines and the fall of communism altered the landscape, as movies became more non-verbal for a truly global, multilingual market.
Tags: Michelangelo Antonioni
Mark Bittman at the New York Times mentions Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 futuristic novel, Ecotopia, in his most recent column. Callenbach, who also founded Film Quarterly, recently passed away. The book fantasizes that Northern California, Washington and Oregon secede to create a green paradise in which fossil fuels are banned. I’ve always meant to read it but never have. I must correct this. From a TomDispatch post about the late writer:
“Callenbach once called that book ‘my bet with the future,’ and in publishing terms it would prove a pure winner. To date it has sold nearly a million copies and been translated into many languages. On second look, it proved to be a book not only ahead of its time but (sadly) of ours as well. For me, it was a unique rereading experience, in part because every page of that original edition came off in my hands as I turned it. How appropriate to finish Ecotopia with a loose-leaf pile of paper in a New York City where paper can now be recycled and so returned to the elements.
Callenbach would have appreciated that. After all, his novel, about how Washington, Oregon, and Northern California seceded from the union in 1979 in the midst of a terrible economic crisis, creating an environmentally sound, stable-state, eco-sustainable country, hasn’t stumbled at all. It’s we who have stumbled. His vision of a land that banned the internal combustion engine and the car culture that went with it, turned in oil for solar power (and other inventive forms of alternative energy), recycled everything, grew its food locally and cleanly, and in the process created clean skies, rivers, and forests (as well as a host of new relationships, political, social, and sexual) remains amazingly lively, and somehow almost imaginable — an approximation, that is, of the country we don’t have but should or even could have.
Callenbach’s imagination was prodigious. Back in 1975, he conjured up something like C-SPAN and something like the cell phone, among many ingenious inventions on the page. Ecotopia remains a thoroughly winning book and a remarkable feat of the imagination, even if, in the present American context, the author also dreamed of certain things that do now seem painfully utopian, like a society with relative income equality.”
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Callenbach discussing Ecotopia in 1982:
Tags: Ernest Callenbach, Mark Bittman