Instead of milk, Jimmy Breslin added Piels to his Grape-Nuts. From the 1970s.
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Tags: Jimmy Breslin
Decades before he was a reality show caricature who swam in the shallow end of American pop culture, Hugh Hefner was a trailblazer politically and socially, even if his taste in art was meh. At the tail end of his cultural prominence, in 1974, he was interviewed by James Day.
Tags: Hugh Hefner, James Day
I’ve posted before about British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who brings a technologist’s approach to Ponce de León’s quest. (Thanks Next Big Future.)
SEALAB 1 was the U.S. Navy vessel created to conduct underwater exploration. In addition to doing deep-sea experiments, the psychological strain of isolation on humans was also investigated. Shaped like a ginormous dildo, the craft and its four crewmen were lowered into the waters off the coast of the Bahamas in 1964. Embedded is a short Navy doc about a voyage that would have delighted Jules Verne. Jackie Cooper hosts.
Tags: Jackie Cooper
Technologists knew for the longest time that the world was going to be much more connected, that we would become a global hive. But what form would it take? Before Apple perfected ideas hatched at Xerox and brought them to the marketplace, a lot of people believed that television would be the medium that would unite us (with help from a phone connection, of course). TVs were already in every home, so even though it never came to pass, it made some sense.
From Bell Labs, a 1979 look at TVs and PCs connecting us:
Braniff was fashion forward but not so progressive socially in the 1960s.
The great Gene Wilder is the star of what’s probably my third favorite film comedy, Young Frankenstein. (1. Kubrick’s Lolita, 2. Duck Soup.) Here’s Wilder in 1979 in a closed studio discussing his life and career with Merv Griffin.
Tags: Gene Wilder, Merv Grifffin
Fun short about computer operations at NASA during the 1960s.
Comments from the 1970s by Randolph Hearst about his daughter Patty, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then, perhaps brainwashed, joined in the group’s acts of domestic terrorism.
Tags: Patty Hearst, Randolph Hearst
In 1981, Tom Snyder questions Gore Vidal about his numerous famous feuds.
Tags: Gore Vidal, Tom Snyder, William F. Buckley
The opening of a Venkat Rao post, in which he updates the country mouse-city mouse divide for our Digital Age:
“The fable of the town mouse and the country mouse is probably the oldest exploration of the tensions involved in urbanization, but it seems curiously dated today. The tensions explored in the fable — the simple, rustic pleasures and securities of country life versus the varied, refined pleasures and fears of town life – seem irrelevant today. In America at least, the ‘country’ such as it is, has turned into a geography occupied by industrial forces. The countryside is a sparsely populated, mechanized food-and-resource cloud. A system of national parks, and a scattering of ‘charming’ small towns and villages pickled in nostalgia, are all that liven up a landscape otherwise swallowed up by automated modernity.
In America, larger provincial towns and cities that are just a little too large and unwieldy to be nostalgically pickled, but not large enough to be grown into metropolitan regions, appear to be mostly degenerating into meth-lab economies or ossifying into enclaves of a retreating rich.
So the entire canvas of the town mouse/country mouse fable is being gradually emptied out. If there is a divide today, it is between two new species of mice: metro mice and cloud mice.”
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Jerry Mouse leaves the sticks to visit Manhattan, 1945:
Tags: Venkat Rao
New flexible batteries and OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) may lead to foldable computing. From Dani Fankhauser at Mashable: “Innovation in lighting is great, but the real game-changer is when OLED is used on a flexible surface for a bendable device. ‘The first benefit will be thinner and lightweight, less breakable displays,’ say Janice Mahon, VP of Technology Commercialization at Universal Display Corporation.
She describes what industry insiders call a ‘universal communication device,’ which is essentially a pen, but with a display that rolls in and out. It seems our aspirations are towards forever smaller devices.”
Tags: Dani Fankhauser, Janice Mahon
I think from reading this blog you’re pretty familiar with my opinion of gurus. We all deserved to be caned, not worshipped. When I was looking for the phone phreak articles from Ramparts, I came across a 1973 piece from that same publication by Ken Kelly about a teenage guru named Maharaji Ji, a.k.a. “The Perfect Master,” who had become popular at the time with Rennie Davis and some other gullible members of the American counterculture. The opening:
“For an entire week, Berkeley buzzed in anticipation of the return of Rennie Davis. The incredible story of his conversion to the divine prodigy, Satguru Maharaj Ji, had been revealed in a 40-minute interview on the local FM rocker KSAN. Not only was he dedicating his entire life to Maharaj Ji, but by 1975 Mao Tse-tung himself would be bowing in homage before the teenage theomorphic guru. The reaction ranged from sympathy to Paul Krassner’s insistence that the entire enterprise was a CIA plot. In between were those who felt that Davis was bummed out by the abuse heaped on him as an active, white, male Movement heavy, disappointed by the disintegration of the anti-war movement and therefore open to the love-vibes and Telex technology which form the core of the Satguru’s appeal. Whatever the explanation, everyone was curious, and they itched to see the new Rennie Davis and hear him explain it all in the flesh.
He chose Pauley Ballroom on the U.C. campus to make his stand, a site which overlooks the famous Sproul Plaza. There, some eight years earlier, Mario Savio and his fellow students had marched to shut down the university, thereby unloosing a flood of campus protest which did not subside for five years. Rennie Davis had played a crucial role in that Movement. He had raised money, mapped strategy, given speeches, negotiated permits, written pamphlets-in short, he had done everything that the Movement had done and more. When others had grown tired and cynical, he had worked on and on, and it was only in recent months that he had begun to slacken his pace.
People had come to view Rennie Davis as better, more dedicated than the rest of us, and now, suddenly, he was telling us to surrender our hearts and minds to a barely pubescent self-proclaimed Perfect Master from India and waltz into Nirvana. It was as if Che Guevara had returned to recruit for the Campfire Girls: the anomaly was as profound as the amazement.
And so they packed the ballroom to hear Rennie Davis, and one sensed curiosity, a certain amount of hostility, and an undercurrent of fear. As he stood before the assemblage, the vultures descended. ‘Kiss my lotus ass.’ ‘All power to the Maharajah, huh?’ He took it in with smiles and good humor. ‘I’m really blissed out with a capital B,’ he proclaimed in the vernacular of his new calling. “I’m just here to make a report, and if you don’t want to check out what I’m saying, that’s cool. Sooner or later you’ll find out that we are operating under a new leadership, and it is Divine, that it’s literally going to transform the planet into what we’ve always hoped and dreamed for.'”
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Tags: Ken Kelly, Maharaji Ji, Rennie Davis
Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, the ego-driven Vegas oddsmaker who did as much to legitimize gambling in America as any, lived for decades on the edge before going over it. In addition to his casino and TV work, Snyder did public relations for Howard Hughes. From a 1974 People article:
People:
What do you do for a living?
Jimmy the Greek:
Basically, I’m a PR man. I have a firm called Jimmy the Greek’s Public Relations, Inc. We have offices in Las Vegas and Miami, 19 people on the staff, and we gross about $800,000 a year, representing companies like National Biscuit Company—the candy division—and Aurora Toys. For three-and-a-half years, I handled PR for Howard Hughes.
People:
What did you do for Hughes?
Jimmy the Greek:
Different things. Hughes was opposed to atomic testing so close to Las Vegas. Every time there was a megaton-plus test, the windows of the hotel shook, and there were already cracks in some of the buildings. He didn’t want the people he brought to Vegas hurt. Mostly, he was afraid of the radiation. Mr. Maheu, his manager, would call and say, ‘Mr. Hughes is against megaton-plus testing, Jimmy.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, what else?’ And he’d say, ‘That’s it, Jimmy.’ And you were on your own from there on. I was very happy working for him. And $175,000 a year isn’t hay.•
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“We are saddened that our 12-year association with him ended this way”:
That brilliant Stewart Brand knew forty years ago that the coming connectivity of computers would eventually bring dark days to newspapers and record stores. And the virtual businesses that are replacing them aren’t adequate to support the old model. The excellent indie band Grizzly Bear is living the new normal. From Nitsuh Abebe in New York:
“For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. ‘People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,’ says [Edward] Droste. ‘Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.’ Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with ‘a nice little ‘Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.’’ They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (‘Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage’), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. ‘I just think it’s inappropriate,’ says Droste. ‘Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.'”
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“It’s a fear, it is near”:
Tags: Edward Droste, Grizzly Bear, Nitsuh Abebe, Stewart Brand
Markus Kayser’s solar printer turns desert sand into glass. From Engadget: “Solar Sinter uses the sun’s rays in place of a laser and sand in place of resin, in a process that is perhaps more visually stunning than the results.”
Tags: Markus Kayser
I recently put up a post about transient electronics. Here’s a DARPA video demonstrating such technology dissolving when treated with a few drops of water. From the release: “DARPA hopes this advance will lead to biodegradable medical treatments for remote patient care that does not require extraction surgery while warfighters are deployed.”
A promo film for the Urbee, a cleaner, striking, printable auto.
From a recent Atlantic article by Ross Andersen about video artist Jason Silva, a passage recalling a meeting between Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary, when the latter was imprisoned:
When Timothy Leary was in prison he was visited by Marshall McLuhan, who told Leary “you can’t stay way out on the fringes if you want to compete in the marketplace of ideas—if your ideas are going to resonate, you need to refine your packaging.” And so they taught Leary to smile, and they taught him about charisma and aesthetic packaging, and ultimately Leary came to appreciate the power of media packaging for his work. According to the article, this is where Timothy Leary the performance philosopher was born, and when he came out of jail all of the sudden he was on all these talk shows, and he was waxing philosophical about virtual reality, and downloading our minds, and moving into cyberspace. All of these ideas became associated with this extremely charismatic guy who was considered equal parts rock star, poet and guru scientist—and that to me suggests the true power of media communications, because these guys were able to take these intergalactic sized ideas and spread them with the tools of media.•
· · ·
Leary in Folsom prison, 1978:
A sample of Silva’s work:
Tags: Jason Silva, Marshall McLuhan, Ross Andersen, Timothy Leary
From a 1975 “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker by Anthony Hiss about a trip to Los Angeles, a passage detailing his audience with Philip K. Dick, who wasn’t fully appreciated during his abbreviated lifetime (or in this brief article):
In the afternoon, we drove over to Fullerton to see Philip K. Dick, my favorite science-fiction writer, author of 33 novels and 170 short stories. Past the House of Egg Roll, past Moy’s Coffee Shop (Chop Suey, Hot Cakes), past Bowser Beautiful, through Bel Air. We drove to the end of Sunset Boulevard, where we saw seagulls, 18 surfers in wet suits, a blue suggestion of Catalina to the southwest, and an Indian girl in a green-and-gold sari on the beach. Then south, past a concrete wall painted ‘TOMMY SURKO SAYS FOR MY KIND OF GIRL THERE’S ONLY ONE! TOMMY SURKO!’ Behind the tall palms on Venice we could see snow on the mountains. Kids were skateboarding down a hill on Lincoln. Past Woody’s Smorgasburger, onto a freeway to Fullerton.
Philip K. Dick lives in an apartment full of books and records and photographs with his wife, Tessa; his small son, Christopher; and two cats, Harvey Wallbanger and Sasha. He is jolly and tubby and bearded. His books, which are hilarious, are popular in France, because the French think they are about how grim everything is. Dick showed us a French newspaper piece about him—the subtitles were “Le Chaos,” “L’Acide,” “Le Suicide,” “Les Machines” “La Société Totalitaire,” “La Paranoïa.” Dick has just finished a book about Tim Leary and the LSD crowd, and what happened to them.
We had stopped in to make a short call of homage, and wound up talking along for hours, drinking wine, and Tessa going out for some Chinese food, and then talking about cosmologies until it was almost time for our plane back to N.Y. The apartment also contains a two-foot-high metal rocket ship on a wooden base—this is his Hugo Award, the highest award in science fiction. The plaque is missing, though, because Dick once used the award to break up a fight. ‘It grabs good,’ he says. As for the cosmologies, this is what emerged from our discussions: cosmologies all seem to be based on repetition—you know, first the universe expands, then it contracts, then it expands again, etc.—but maybe that’s not so. Maybe this whole expansion business that the universe is currently embarked upon is going to happen only once. That would mean that every day really is a new day, right? Also, maybe it’s not true that Einstein was smarter than Newton. Maybe Newton’s laws accurately described the universe as it then existed. But since then it’s expanded and got more complicated, and can be accurately described only by Einstein physics. Which will eventually become outdated, maybe.”•
Tags: Anthony Hiss, Philip K. Dick
Umbraphiles, or sun worshippers, are apparently growing in numbers, perhaps because we are starstuff ourselves. Solar eclipses, infrequent though they are, have recently spawned a healthy tourist industry. From Martin Ince in the Financial Times:
“Tour operators report a surge in interest in eclipse viewing, sparked by the ‘eclipse of the century’ in July 2009. It was visible across large parts of India and China and lasted six minutes 39 seconds – the longest eclipse until 2132. It filled every hotel in the Yangtze Delta region, where over 30,000 eclipse watchers based themselves, and brought an extra 7,000 foreign tourists to Shanghai, mostly from the US and Japan. China Daily reported at the time that about 80 special flights were staged to allow passengers to see the eclipse even if clouds threatened: a good move, as it rained in Shanghai.
‘We’re finding this sort of holiday to be hugely popular since the China eclipse, and the trend continued for Easter Island the following year,’ says Simon Grove, head of product at the tour operator Explore. ‘I think the appeal of astronomical tourism in general has increased in recent years too. Last year’s spectacular Northern Lights helped to fuel interest that those well-publicised eclipses had ignited.’
Part of the joy of this hobby is that the moon’s shadow can fall anywhere on the earth’s surface. This means eclipse-chasing needs careful planning, but also that eclipse-lovers end up in places they would never visit otherwise, including Easter Island and the Antarctic in the past few years. This year’s eclipse will take me to Palm Cove, Queensland; the six others I have witnessed were in locations as diverse as the Greek islands, Siberia, and a tiny power station village in rural China.”
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The “eclipse of the century,” 2009:
Tags: Martin Ince
Fun 1984 doc about McLuhan that was scripted and “hosted” by Tom Wolfe.
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Tags: Marshall McLuhan, Tom Wolfe
The opening of what’s arguably Jimmy Breslin’s most famous column, his 1963 profile of the quiet, sober work of the gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery who attended to John F. Kennedy’s plot after the President was assassinated:
“Washington — Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. ‘Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?’ Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it’s for.’ Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him. ‘Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday,’ Metzler said. ‘Oh, don’t say that,’ Pollard said. ‘Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.’ Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging (Editor Note: At the bottom of the hill in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion).
Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it. ‘That’s nice soil,’ Metzler said. ‘I’d like to save a little of it,’ Pollard said. ‘The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I’d like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I’d like to have everything, you know, nice.'”
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“It’s a good drinkin’ beer”:
The avuncular crooner Andy Williams just passed away. From his New York Times obituary, a passage about the singer and his infamous wife Claudine Longet:
Mr. Williams married Ms. Longet in 1961, and they had two sons, Christian and Robert, and a daughter, Noelle. The couple divorced in 1975. That year Ms. Longet was charged with fatally shooting Spider Sabich, a ski racing champion, in Aspen, Colo. Mr. Williams stood by his ex-wife, who contended that the shooting was accidental, and accompanied her to court during her trial. She was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to 30 days in jail.•
Andy and Claudine, before it all went to hell, singing “Silent Night”:
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Tags: Andy Williams, Claudine Longet, Spider Sabich, Vladimir Sabich
Conclusive evidence that everyone in the 1970s was doing huge bowls of coke: A Cher special from ’79 in which she and a basketball-bouncing Andy Kaufman act out a Garden of Eden scenario. Not even Bob Mackie deserved this.
Tags: Andy Kaufman, Bob Mackie, Cher