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Years ago I was working in a place in Manhattan that was demonstrating a virtual-reality helmet. Lou Reed came in to try it and sat in the chair and had the Darth Vader-ish object placed over his head by the woman supervising the demo. He waited a beat and said, “Now what happens? Does someone pull my cock?” Rest in peace, Lou Reed.
Here’s my favorite Reed performance on tape, a 1974 version of “Sweet Jane” from Paris. Jane had a pretty exciting life for a clerk.
Tags: Lou Reed
Richard Brautigan, who died in 1984 despite being all watched over by machines of loving grace, in interviewed a year before his passing on German TV.
Tags: Richard Brautigan
Photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose amazing work I’m familiar with from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes, is interviewed by the Economist about his new book, Water, and the volume’s accompanying film, which he co-directed with Baichwal. Watch interview here.
UPDATE: This story seems to be based on a questionable reading of the data. See here.
Japan has a big fucking problem. No, I mean it has a big problem with fucking. A nation with an already graying population has many young people who’ve stopped having sex. No one knows exactly why. From Abigail Haworth in the Guardian:
“Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means ‘love’ in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did ‘all the usual things’ like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan‘s media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or ‘celibacy syndrome.’
Japan’s under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren’t even dating, and increasing numbers can’t be bothered with sex. For their government, ‘celibacy syndrome’ is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world’s lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing ‘a flight from human intimacy’– and it’s partly the government’s fault.”
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Reggie Watts decides if you’re fucking (very NSFW, unless your job involves a glory hole):
Tags: Abigail Haworth, Ai Aoyama, Reggie Watts
Watson is transitioning from Jeopardy champ to medical diagnostics and other tasks. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is promising big things for the computer’s third iteration.
Tags: Ginni Rometty
Two videos of that wonderful Harpo Marx, the first comedian I adored. The initial one is a 1958 Person to Person “interview” a studio-bound Edward R. Murrow conducted via long distance with the mute comic and his talkative family in their Palm Springs home. The second is a 1961 appearance on the Today show to promote the release of his now-classic biography, Harpo Speaks!
Tags: Harpo Marx
Orson Welles died in 1985, when the personal-computer revolution had begun in earnest but before the Internet had become accessible for all. I wonder what he would have thought of the Digital Age. Did he ever use a PC or a Mac? From a 1962 BBC interview about The Trial, in which he discusses marrying Kafka and computers–a seemingly perfect match–for a scene that never made the final cut:
“Huw Wheldon:
There exists a scene of a computer scientist, played by Katina Paxinou, that is no longer in the film. She tells K his most likely fate is that he will commit suicide.
Orson Welles:
Yes, that was a long scene that lasted ten minutes, which I cut on the eve of the Paris premiere. Joseph K has his fortune told by a computer–that’s what the scene amounted to. It was my invention. The computer tells him his fate. I only saw the film as a whole once. We were still in the process of doing the mixing, and then the premiere fell on us. At the last moment I abridged the scene. It should have been the best in the film and it wasn’t. Something went wrong, I don’t know why, but it didn’t succeed. The subject of that scene was free will. It was tinged with black humor; that was my main weapon. As you know, it is always directed against the machine and in favor of freedom.”•
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In 1978, Welles traded a piece of his name for a paycheck selling unimpressive-looking Vivitar cameras:
Tags: Franz Kafka, Huw Wheldon, Orson Welles
Some old-school clips of Germaine Greer, a ferociously brilliant person who has said some truly dumb things. Included in the first video of 1971 media appearances is some of her eviscerating righteousness from the Hegedus-Pennebaker film Town Bloody Hall. The second video contains a cut of her hanging out in 1972 with that group of feminists, Led Zeppelin.
Future Vice President Spiro Agnew, who smiled once and chipped a tooth, being interviewed by John Chancellor in 1968 about the Chicago riots and his running mate’s refusal to address the protests. Considering our current political climate, these were the good old days.
Fun thing: Natasha Lyonne, the very talented actress, guested this week on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. She said her Jewish ancestors left Europe to escape Nazism, arrived without much money or prospects in America, and eventually bettered themselves through selling Spiro Agnew watches, which were apparently a popular novelty a little more than four decades ago.
Tags: John Chancellor, Marc Maron, Natasha Lyonne, Spiro Agnew
When he wasn’t playing Pong or chain-smoking himself into an early grave, Rod Serling was crafting paranoid visions that were perfectly if improbably suited for American living rooms. Here he is in 1959 speaking about the outset of his TV opus with Mike Wallace, who was still a decade from reaching his own small-screen apex.
Tags: Mike Wallace, Rod Serling
In 1997, the cloning in Scotland of a sheep named Dolly was received with hyperbole and denunciation, as some envisioned a near-term future in which human doppelgangers would walk among us. In the short film “The Clone Named Dolly,” Nicholas Wade of the New York Times takes a sober look at the sensation and its aftermath. Watch here.
Tags: Nicholas Wade
In the end matter of a New York Times profile of Johnny Knoxville’s bruised, aging balls, I read this:
“Dave Itzkoff is a reporter at The Times. His book, Mad as Hell, about the making of the movie Network, will be published in February.”
This news is exciting because of my feelings for that film, arguably America’s best film satire, and because Itzkoff is such a good reporter and graceful writer, one of the few journalists who can interest me in reading about popular culture. The following video is one I’ve previously posted in which Paddy Chayefsky appears on a talk show in the 1970s to discuss Network and the coming global, technocratic, interconnected culture.
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Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, holding forth spectacularly on the Mike Douglas Show in 1969. It starts with polite chatter about the success of his script for Marty but quickly transitions into a much more serious and futuristic discussion. The writer is full of doom and gloom, of course, during the tumult of the Vietnam Era; his best-case scenario for humankind to live more peacefully is a computer-friendly “new society” that yields to globalization and technocracy, one in which citizens are merely producers and consumers, free of nationalism and disparate identity. Well, some of that came true. All the while, he wears a fun, red lei because one of his fellow guests is Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. Gwen Verdon, Lionel Hampton and Cy Coleman share the panel.
Chayefsky joins the show at the 7:45 mark.
Tags: Dave Itzkoff, Paddy Chayefsky
We were prisoners then, not so long ago, chained to bricks and mortar. It seemed like convenience until we knew the truth, until the trip was no longer necessary. It’s an improvement, sure, but was anything about the trip important?
From Mika Taanila’s 2002 film about philosopher and electronic music composer Erkki Kurenniemi, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, an explanation of what life was and what it increasingly is now.
Tags: Erkki Kurenniemi, Mika Taanila
I don’t follow celebrity news very closely, but I believe it was recently revealed that Woody Allen once impregnated Frank Sinatra. Mazel tov to the whole family! Here’s Allen in 1979, before all the eeeew!, being interviewed in his Manhattan apartment by a French journalist. The piece opens with a discussion of the filmmaker landing on the cover of Time, when that was still the most-coveted real estate in media.
Tags: Woody Allen
Philip K. Dick wasn’t widely thought of as an important novelist during his brief life, even though he was speaking as profoundly about the human condition as any of his contemporaries. And he was saying things about consciousness that most of us hadn’t even begun considering. What great things in the culture are we missing right now? Who is being undervalued?
A 1977 interview in France with the author.
Tags: Philip K. Dick
I know it makes me a killjoy, but I feel like any adult who plays in a fantasy football league has failed on some level, has never fully matured. Whenever I hear someone excitedly discussing “their team,” I feel sad. What makes it so bad, of course, is that the players suffer devastating brain damage (and other serious injuries) as part of this entertainment. And the “fantasy” aspect of the game, where teams are imaginary and players merely statistics, has moved us a further distance from this horrifying reality. The NFL has marketed the car-crash violence on Monday Night Football, in video games, and in every way imaginable, only feigning concern for its on-field personnel occasionally for PR purposes, attacking the credibility of those who’ve spoken the truth, like neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu.
Make sure to watch the Frontline episode, “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis,” which takes its impetus from the new book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru about the NFL’s terrible record in regard to brain injuries. That it focuses in part on the Pittsburgh Steelers team of the 1970s makes it that much more poignant. It was those Steel Curtain teams partly responsible for pioneering steroid abuse in the NFL.
Tags: Mark Fainaru-Wada, Steve Fainaru
From your friends at Boston Dynamics, with warmest regards: “Atlas is an anthropomorphic robot designed to operate on rough terrain. The video shows Atlas balancing as it walks on rocky terrain and when pushed from the side.”
Mercedes Benz’ S 500 Intelligent Drive autonomous vehicle goes on a long-distance trip.
Atlanta-based voice actor Susan Bennett is apparently the sound behind Siri, though Apple is too secretive about it to confirm. Bennett has previous similar experience, having been the voice of the first ATM machine. Oddly, she recorded the Siri sounds in 2005 with no idea what they’d be used for.
Tags: Susan Bennett
Before hipsterism became the useless fashion statement and indulged lifestyle choice it is now, it was considered by Norman Mailer, in his White Negro days, to be a type of existentialism, a politicized stance. I can’t figure out which is worse.
Tags: Norman Mailer
Two John DeLorean videos made at the time of his fall from grace. The first is a 1984 report on the sad remains of the car company that barely was. The second, from the following year, sees the automaker appear on some sort of local San Francisco gabfest. The female co-host seems as if she would be most comfortable interviewing a poltergeist or homeowners who believe their walls are bleeding. DeLorean all but calls her a simpleton (if politely).
Tags: John DeLorean
In 1973, Radio Times asked British science historian James Burke to predict life twenty years into the future. He did a pretty good job of it. Here’s a new BBC report in which he tries to guess what the world will be like in 2100. Watch here.
Tags: James Burke
An update on Alpha Dog (LS3), the canine-ish robot from Boston Dynamics and DARPA which is being field-tested on the cracked earth of Twentynine Palms, California, and snowy grounds of Boston. They are your servants, for now. From Endgadget: “The humanoid machine can now negotiate a rocky walkway with relative ease, adding another party trick to its already impressive repertoire.”
Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller and writer William Peter Blatty, collaborators on the 1973 horror classic of The Exorcist, reunited for some unknown reason in 1984 for Good Morning America. According to legend, Blatty pretended to be an Arabian prince in the 1950s to get booked on the game show You Bet Your Life. He didn’t fool Groucho but did win $10,000, which helped him jump-start his writing career. I’ve never seen the footage online.
Tags: Ellen Burstyn, Groucho Marx, Jason Miller, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow, William Peter Blatty