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As you can tell by the latest Google Doodle, Maria Callas would have been 90 today. Two classic interviews with the titanic and troubled singer.
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Barbara Walters with Callas on Today, 1974:
Mike Wallace with Callas on 60 Minutes, 1973, at the 2:30 mark:
Tags: Barbara Walters, Maria Callas, Mike Wallace
Reports about two new uses for the domestic drone, hunting feral pigs and delivering Amazon goods, from, respectively, the Economist and 60 Minutes.
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“WILD pigs are rooting around in a field in the dark. Partly hidden by tall grass, their tails wag happily as they snuffle around for roots and insects. A shot rings out and the biggest pig is down. The rest scatter quickly; yet a shooter picks them off one by one with uncanny accuracy.
Pigs are clever and hard to hunt; it can take a day to stalk one. But they are no match for an aerial drone such as the ‘dehogaflier’ operated by Louisiana Hog Control, a pest-extermination firm. It is a remote-controlled aircraft with a thermal-imaging camera and a laser pointer. It easily spots the pigs’ warm bodies from 400 feet and points them out to a hunter on the ground wearing night-vision goggles, who then shoots them.”
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Tags: Charlie Rose
George Carlin is my favorite comic of all time, and Russell Brand has a lot of Carlin in his brain. In a new Guardian piece, Brand eviscerates Rupert Murdoch, the Scrooge McDuck of media titans who has the gall to fancy himself as a champion of the people while protecting the interests of those who despise them. An excerpt:
“Rupert Murdoch, an animatronic al-Qaida recruitment poster, in his private letter to Sun staff, after the News of the World was briefly closed for a makeover (not through remorse, or shame, no, because they couldn’t sell advertising space and because he wanted to launch the Sun on Sunday anyway because it’s cheaper to run one title than two – some guys get all the luck) referred consistently to his pride in the Sun as ‘a trusted news source’. Trusted is the word he used, not trustworthy. We know the Sun is not trustworthy and so does he. He uses the word ‘trusted’ deliberately. Hitler was trusted, it transpired he was not trustworthy. He also said of the arrested journalists, ‘everyone is innocent until proven guilty.’ Well, yes, that is the law of our country, not however a nicety often afforded to the victims of his titles, and here I refer not only to hacking but the vituperative portrayal of weak and vulnerable members of our society, relentlessly attacked by Murdoch’s ink jackals. Immigrants, folk with non-straight sexual identities, anyone in fact living in the margins of the Sun‘s cleansed utopia.”•
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Rupert Murdoch, in 1968, about to gain control of News of the World:
Tags: Rupert Murdoch, Russell Brand
The great writer Katherine Anne Porter, in her eighties, making a rare talk-show appearance with James Day in 1974. She nearly died during the flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed at least 50 million people, but squeaked by after all hope seemed lost.
Tags: James Day, Katherine Anne Porter
Tiny robots drifting in the air is the ultimate goal of an experiment in jellyfish design at NYU. From Sandrine Ceurstemont at New Scientist: “Tiny flying robots usually mimic nature’s flyers, like birds and insects – but perhaps that’s due to a lack of imagination. A four-winged design created by Leif Ristroph and colleagues at New York University, which boasts a body plan reminiscent of a jellyfish, is more stable in the air than insect-like machines.”
This movie is the one I want to see this weekend. Michel Gondry, who’s most comfortable in a dream state, walks into one with Noam Chomsky. The score in the trailer sounds too much like Philip Glass’ work for Errol Morris, but I’ll let that slide.
Tags: Michel Gondry, Noam Chomsky
What place and time to do you most idealize? I think for me it’s recent: Los Angeles, from 1968-75. Maybe I would have hated it in reality, but I love the version in my head. In this news clip from that city of (roughly) that era, Tom Brokaw, everybody’s favorite middlebrow uncle, interviews the great Joan Didion.
Howard Stern is a funny guy with a rare facility for psychology, but he lives within a bubble of wealth and self-absorption so he’s not always particularly attuned to current events. He did, however, recently point out astutely, when discussing the disappointing sales of Lady Gaga’s new record, that the music business clings to the past the same way the film industry did during the 1980s when it unsuccessfully sued VCR makers. You can’t ignore or legislate progress away. Some foresaw the end of record stores more than 30 years ago, so it’s not like the future sneaked up on record execs.
A newer company like Netflix realizes that a portable computing culture demands that you bring entertainment to people wherever they are, while more traditional companies like Blockbuster, weighed down by bricks and mortar, go out of business. When you’re an institution, it’s difficult to avoid oncoming doom even if you can see it racing towards you.
From Stern:
“Nowadays isn’t every album a flop? The record business…you know I read this guy Bob Lefsetz and he made a point, he was saying that when computers came about, and we all use our computer for typing, the typewriter companies didn’t get out there and go, ‘Fuck the computer business, I’m gonna sue them.’ They either created a computer or a keyboard or something. They didn’t say we’re gonna fight progress and stop the computer from stealing out business. Now the music business unfortunately reacted in way that was like that. They were like, ‘Hey, we love the way we’re doing business. We like record stores, and the Internet is coming about and we’re going to sue it and fight it’ instead of adapting to the business and finding a new way of selling music. And what it’s going to take is some brilliant executive in the music business who figures out how to market things in today’s environment, who figures out how to use the Internet almost like it’s a radio station. You know, record companies thrived even though AM and FM were playing the music for free. But they figured out how to make that a marketing thing. I’m not in the music business, but there are ways to sell music. Maybe the whole concept of an album is completely outdated. Yes, artists have a hard-on for putting out an album like the Beatles would put out Sgt. Pepper’s and have a whole statement to make. Maybe in terms of selling music that has all passed us by, and that opportunity doesn’t exist. Maybe an artist has to figure out that they’ll put out a song once a month as opposed to putting out an entire album and let people put together their collection. I don’t know what the new paradigm should be. You used to put out an album and go out and promote it for a year and there was a way of doing business. Now that’s out the window. They’ve got to figure out a new way of doing business. The album might be a thing of the past. Life is progress. Things are going to change and you must adapt.”
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“Always searching for records?”
Tags: Bob Lefsetz, Howard Stern
I haven’t owned a TV for awhile so I’m not up on the latest commercials, but this ad for Goldie Blox toys, which encourage girls to develop engineering skills, is amazing. It exhorts girls into tech the way the 1990s Nike “If You Let Me Play” campaign invited them to get in the game. And it joins Rube Goldberg to the Beastie Boys!
In 2010, the last year of Benoit Mandelbrot’s life, Errol Morris pointed his Interrotron at the mathematician who recognized patterns in nature that nobody else did and gave us fractals. Morris himself often deals in fractals, chipping away pieces of his subject’s minds that perfectly represent the greater self. (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Benoit Mandelbro, Errol Morris
Robert Evans, the kid who really stayed in the picture his whole life, was featured on the CBS morning show. He has so many amazing stories, and some of them are even true.
Tags: Robert Evans
There are reasons to dislike Lance Armstrong. For instance, he’s a bully and a liar. That’s enough. But while he broke the rules of his sport with PEDs, labeling him a cheat is problematic. It’s even hypocritical. From students to classical musicians to truck drivers, people are using drugs to aid them in their endeavors. But for some reason, athletes are held to a higher standard. In fact, in sometimes they’re denied legitimate medical treatments because the rules of their games are so arbitrary. We’ll all be relying on enhanced performance more and more in the future, so perhaps we should have an honest discussion about what “cheating” means. I think we avoid that conversation in the name of maintaining some sense of “purity” that never existed. Athletes have always cheated and so have the rest of us. For some reason, some of it is considered permissible and some isn’t. We need to sort that out.
From an excellent interview that Grantland’s Bill Simmons conducted with Alex Gibney, The Armstrong Lie director:
“Bill Simmons:
What about the part when people talk about what is cheating and what isn’t cheating and what is performance enhancement and what isn’t? So, I’m a pitcher, I blow out my arm, they pull a ligament out of some dead guy, they sew it into my arm and I can pitch again. That’s legal. I can’t write anything in the morning unless I have 20 ounces of coffee. Caffeine. That’s legal. That’s fine. We like coffee, all of us like coffee. Let’s say Lance takes HGH which is given from patients aged 60 and older to help them recover faster from surgeries or just feel better, whatever.
Alex Gibney:
Well, they use to give EPO to cancer patients to regenerate blood cells.
Bill Simmons:
Right, these are things given to people to make them feel better, but with athletes we draw the line. No, they can’t do that. That’s bad, they can’t do that. If Lance blew out his knee, he could put a dead guy’s ligament in his knee and that’s fine. Think about it. We’ve never really made sense of what makes sense and we doesn’t make sense.
Alex Gibney:
That’s what led somebody like [Armstrong’s coach Michele] Ferrari to be totally cynical. They keep making up these rules. You can sleep in an altitude tent, but you can’t take EPO. What’s sense does that make? But on the other hand, I think we can say that cheating is breaking the rules.”
Tags: Alex Gibney, Bill Simmons, Lance Armstrong
Economist Tyler Cowen suggests that video games are the low-hanging fruit of education, and that’s probably true. There are financial hurdles to overcome, but it would be great if textbooks were interactive and engaging. Game isn’t bad because they’re games, and we should probably stop resisting their allure on an institutional level and make them work for us. Of course the limitation of history books applies to gaming as well: The education is only good as the veracity and objectivity of the story being told.
A small step into the educational camp is being attempted by Navid Khonsari, a Grand Theft Auto veteran who’s trying to raise money to create a video game about the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He acknowledges it’s still mostly about entertainment, but it is ambitious and aims to show people what Iran wasactually like in the 1970s before the veil was lowered.
Brief aside: I can’t help but think that Iran is worse for the Revolution, for all the smart people who fled, for the assault on cultural modernity, for the repression of women, for the way it’s become isolated from many corners of the world. Of course, the U.S. should never have been sabotaging any foreign government and installing leaders friendly to us, but it feels like Iran lost decades of progress to its uprising. Of course, my version of the video game might differ from yours.
From Amanda Holpuch’s Guardian article about Khonsari’s project:
“One of the people behind some of the most popular – and violent – video games has left the world of Grand Theft Auto and developed a game prototype based on the Iranian revolution.
Since Navid Khonsari began work on the game, called 1979 Revolution, it has been labeled Western propaganda by an Iran government-run newspaper and some members of his team still use aliases to protect themselves from the repercussions of creating a video game based on a controversial event that has persistent reverberations today. Khonsari launched a Kickstarter on Wednesday, hoping to take the game from a prototype to tablet-ready, episodic series.
‘I wanted people to feel the passion and the elation of being in the revolution – of feeling that you could possibly make a change,’ said Khonsari, who moved from Iran to Canada at age 10, just after the revolution. He remembers his grandfather walking him through the early protests in Tehran.”•
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Life in Tehran just before the revolution:
Tags: Navid Khonsari
In 1979, Steve Martin, nearing the pinnacle of his fame, visits Merv Griffin. The comic was already winding down his stand-up career.
Tags: Merv Griffin, Steve Martin
Never knew this until now: In the 1970s, AMF, the sporting-goods manufacturer, sold a computer system and printer that would tabulate rankings of bowling leagues with the push of a button–the DataMagic Bowling Data Computer. It seems a stunning waste of computing power and coincided with the company going into a decline, so I doubt it was a big seller. But as this commercial makes clear, it was a declaration of war on the pencil.
With Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Alex Gibney made one of the most heartbreaking films ever about the American Dream. In the most essential ways, it’s reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ film, Fargo, which lamented that streak of American competitiveness that says that doing well isn’t good enough–you have to dominate. As if we can somehow grow enough ego to shroud our unhappiness and fear. There are parallels in Gibney’s new film about Lance Armstrong, the cyclist who just had to be the best. From a new Economist interview with Gibney:
“Question:
The final film has a lot in common with Enron, in that it dispels a myth that people really wanted to believe in. Do you find it tough shaking people’s belief systems?
Alex Gibney:
Yes, that’s why I originally wanted to do a redemption story. He comes back clean in 2009 and wins? How awesome would that be? The problem with both Enron and Lance was that the myth they created became too big. Both Jeff Skilling [Enron’s CEO] and Lance were motivated by this strange purity of vision; Enron couldn’t just be a successful company, it had to be the future of capitalism. Lance wasn’t just a cyclist, he was campaigning for cancer survivors. It’s noble-cause corruption. It gave them both the sense of righteousness they needed to lie.
Question:
In your interviews with Lance after the Oprah show, he admits to doping and using blood transfusions up until 2005, but not during the 2009 tour, when you were filming. Was it disappointing not to get a further confession?
Alex Gibney:
Yes, very disappointing but also revealing. I find his body language in that interview interesting. Slumped in a chair, he’s not a towering figure anymore.
Question:
You don’t think that’s theatre?
Alex Gibney:
I think it was defeat mainly.•
Tags: Alex Gibney, Lance Armstrong
Kurt Vonnegut, who was pained by the inequalities of life–both the natural and man-made varieties–raises the specter of mass extinction during a 2005 interview with Jon Stewart.
Tags: Jon Stewart, Kurt Vonnegut
A brief and wordless look at a secretarial pool in a 1970s computerized office in the UK.
I don’t pay attention to a lot of celebrity news, but I believe a new book recently revealed that Johnny Carson used to do the Tonight Show monologue with a loaded gun stashed in his underpants. Good for him. In 1994, Johnny, now in retirement and a little heavier, made a wordless appearance with David Letterman (after a brief Larry “Bud” Melman fake-out). Carson would never turn up again on television, falling into a complete silence. Letterman still gave a crap at this point. I always try to pinpoint when he exactly stopped caring, and I think it was 1998 or thereabouts. Still a great interviewer, though.
Tags: David Letterman, Johnny Carson
We look back on pioneers with admiration–awe, even–their foolhardiness forgotten, their sense of adventure and sacrifice appreciated. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about wagon-train Westerners, early aviators or Apollo astronauts who trusted in missions too difficult to comprehend–these are the heroes, the ones who’ve expanded the horizons. We look differently at the new pioneers, those who are taking a dangerous journey within, testing the human limits of biology and chemistry with the aid of drugs and implants. Just like their predecessors, they’re risking everything for a chance at a better life for them and for us. There will be casualties–there always are in pioneering.
A new video of biohacker Tim Cannon.
Tags: Tim Cannon
From a Singularity Hub piece about a flying robot that absorbs crashes, allowing it to learn by trial and error the way some insects do: “GimBall’s cage makes it mostly collision-proof and even informs its flight pattern. The robot evokes an insect repeatedly flying into a window until it finds open space and freedom.”
There’s a Warholian triumph in Norway called “Slow TV,” which is sort of a long-form staring contest, except that viewers spend eight or so hours staring at real-time knitting contests and train trips. Rights have been purchased by American producers, though no one knows yet if this antidote to instant gratification will translate. From Nancy Tartaglione at Deadline.com:
“Knit one, purl … eight-plus hours of live stitching? That’s what’s happening tonight on Norwegian public broadcaster NRK2 as folks around the country gather in viewing parties. The show is part of a phenomenon known as Slow TV which has increasingly captivated Norway. The overall gist of the concept, to which LMNO Productions recently acquired U.S. rights, is a hybrid of unhurried documentary coupled with hours and hours of continuous coverage provided by fixed cameras trained on a subject or an event. Prior to tonight, those have included a 7.5-hour train journey, a 134-hour coastal cruise, a stack of firewood and salmon. Tonight, NRK2 will turn its lens on National Knitting Evening. Four hours of discussion on the popular pastime will kick off at 8 PM local, before a sheep gets trotted out at midnight to be sheared and its wool spun into yarn.”
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Colbert celebrates Slow TV:
Tags: Nancy Tartaglione
I thought Jon Stewart handled his recent interview with conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer better than most so-called real journalists would. He almost always outdoes them, of course. But there was one point he let slide that I wished he would have jumped on. Krauthammer’s disdain for what Obamacare will do to policy in the course of granting affordable insurance to tens of millions led him down a dead-end alley–and a familiar one at that.
First, he claimed that Republicans really do want health care for all Americans. That may be true for Krauthammer personally, but it certainly isn’t of members of his party with voting power in Washington. But it’s not likely that the talking head wants health care for all, either, since he followed up with his contention by using the Ryan budgets of an example of how more Americans could be insured. That’s just an outright lie. First an excerpt from Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic and then the Stewart-Krauthammer meeting.
“Start with the federal budgets crafted by Paul Ryan. You remember those, right? Those proposals passed through the House with unanimous Republican support and were, in 2012, a basis of the Republican presidential platform. Those budgets called for dramatic funding cuts to Medicaid. If Republicans had swept into power and enacted such changes, according to projections prepared by Urban Institute scholars and published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 14 and 20 million Medicaid recipients would lose their insurance. And that doesn’t even include the people who are starting to get Medicaid coverage through Obamacare’s expansions of the program. That’s another 10 to 17 million people.”
Tags: Charles Krauthammer, Jon Stewart
About 12 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage of David Bowie during his 1973 Ziggy Stardust tour.
Tags: David Bowie
A very raw Rolling Stones performance of “Sympathy for the Devil” on a David Frost show in 1968. I’ve never read any books about the Stones so I always wondered if this song was inspired by Rasputin’s legend or if Mick Jagger had read Blaise Cendrars’ novel Moravagine, which has a similar storyline. But it actually sprang from Baudelaire and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I’m definitely in the minority, but I like Moravagine more than The Master and Margarita. The former cuts me to the core.
Tags: David Frost, Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones