Russell Harty, who in British parlance was a “world-class prat,” interviews David Bowie via TV remote in 1975. Harty was in Britain while Bowie was in Los Angeles, having just shot The Man Who Fell To Earth. Nobody was more meant to be a disembodied head on a television screen than Bowie. He was the original Max Headroom.
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Tags: David Bowie, Russell Harty
The Hillary Clinton portion of the famous campaign appearance that Bubba made with Arsenio Hall in 1992, when the future President played sax.
I think if you look at their first terms side by side, President Obama has been a far more sure-handed leader than Bill Clinton with far fewer miscues–and during a much more challenging time. Hillary herself, as Secretary of State, has been more commanding than her husband was in foreign affairs. But during this appearance, she was in a supporting role.
I often think of how different relations between the sexes would be in America if at this point in our nation’s history roughly half the Presidents had been men and half women. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, I know, but I don’t think the disconnect is merely because of some celestial difference. I think when you live in an unequal society, things become weird for all involved.
Tags: Arsenio Hall, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton
Didn’t realize until spying The Electric Typewriter that “The Taste Makers,” Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent 2009 New Yorker article about the clandestine food flavor industry, is online for free. A brief excerpt:
“Flavor is a cognitive figment. The brain fuses into a single experience the results of different stimuli registered by the tongue, nose, eyes, and ears, in addition to memories of previously consumed meals. For reasons that are not fully understood, we perceive flavor as occurring in our mouths, and that illusion is nearly unshakable, as is made clear by our difficulty identifying, with any reasonable specificity, the way each of our various senses contributes to the experience. In 2006, Jelly Belly, the candy manufacturer, produced a jellybean that mimicked the flavor of an ice-cream sandwich. When the company manufactured a prototype with a brown exterior and a white interior, people identified the flavor accurately during a trial, and said that it was a good representation of an ice-cream sandwich. Jelly Belly then made an all-white prototype; many trial respondents found it confusing, misidentifying its flavor as vanilla or marshmallow. As Hagen told me, ‘Color can play tricks on your mind, for sure.'”
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Inside the Jelly Belly factory:
Tags: Raffi Khatchadourian
Bucky Fuller exhibiting the design for his Dymaxion House, apparently in 1929.
Tags: Buckminster Fuller
I’m always stunned that water technology hasn’t grown more sophisticated, that we haven’t figured out a better way–or several. What economics are working against securing our most necessary solution? The opening of Karen DeYoung’s recent Washington Post report about the fears U.S. Intelligence experts have about water access being used as a weapon:
“Fresh-water shortages and more droughts and floods will increase the likelihood that water will be used as a weapon between states or to further terrorist aims in key strategic areas, including the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, a U.S. intelligence assessment released Thursday said.
Although ‘water-related state conflict’ is unlikely in the next 10 years, the assessment said, continued shortages after that might begin to affect U.S. national security interests.
The assessment is drawn from a classified National Intelligence Estimate distributed to policymakers in October. Although the unclassified version does not mention problems in specific countries, it describes “strategically important water basins” tied to rivers in several regions. These include the Nile, which runs through 10 countries in central and northeastern Africa before traveling through Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea; the Tigris-Euphrates in Turkey, Syria and Iraq; the Jordan, long the subject of dispute among Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians; and the Indus, whose catchment area includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet.
‘As water problems become more acute, the likelihood . . . is that states will use them as leverage,’ said a senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. As the midpoint of the century nears, he said, there is an increasing likelihood that water will be ‘potentially used as a weapon, where one state denies access to another.'”
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“Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water”:
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Tags: Karen DeYoung
No one fully knows how our technological revolution will change the landscape of higher education, but it’s clear that things will be different in the coming decades. Perhaps markedly different. Sebastian Thrun departed from a tenured position at Stanford to become a Google fellow and to begin the online university Udacity. If all attempts to alter higher learning are this intelligent and enlightened, we will be very blessed. The opening of Steven Leckert’s new Wired article about the technologist’s experiment, in which the author enrolls in a Thrun class:
“Stanford doesn’t want me. I can say that because it’s a documented fact: I was once denied admission in writing. I took my last math class back in high school. Which probably explains why this quiz on how to get a computer to calculate an ideal itinerary is making my brain hurt. I’m staring at a crude map of Romania on my MacBook. Twenty cities are connected in a network of straight black lines. My goal is to determine the best route from Arad to Bucharest. A handful of search algorithms with names like breadth-first, depth-first, uniform-cost, and A* can be used. Each employs a different strategy for scanning the map and considering various paths. I’ve never heard of these algorithms or considered how a computer determines a route. But I’ll learn, because despite the utter lack of qualifications I just mentioned, I’m enrolled in CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a graduate- level course taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.
Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.
People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Fully two-thirds of my 160,000 classmates live outside the US. There are students in 190 countries—from India and South Korea to New Zealand and the Republic of Azerbaijan. More than 100 volunteers have signed up to translate the lectures into 44 languages, including Bengali. In Iran, where YouTube is blocked, one student cloned the CS221 class website and—with the professors’ permission—began reposting the video files for 1,000 students.”
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Thrun talking self-driving cars:
Tags: Sebastian Thrun, Steven Leckert'
Rare Buckminster Fuller interview from some sort of 1980s parapsychology talk show. Odd.
James Day talking to sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles, 1974.
Tags: James Day, Ray Bradbury
A 1967 urban planning propaganda film touting I.M. Pei’s top-down vision for Oklahoma City’s downtown. Never fully realized, the project was something of a fiasco which resulted in the demolition of some really cool historic buildings. Even though contemporary China does it at will, imposing order from on high onto cities doesn’t really work in America. Sometimes viral is mistaken for toxic.
Tags: I.M. Pei
Robotic jellyfish, powered by hydrogen, can be used for underwater search and rescue. From the BBC: “The robot is powered by heat-producing chemical reactions between the oxygen and hydrogen in water and the platinum on its surface. The heat from the reactions is transferred to the artificial muscles of the robot, and reshapes them. This means Robojelly can regenerate fuel from its surroundings rather than running off an external power source or batteries.”
Nuclear physicist Edward Teller was best known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and claimed to have no regrets about it. James Day interviewed the controversial scientist, 1974.
From Teller’s 2003 obit in the Stanford Report: “The model for the title character of Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr. Strangelove, Teller became in the last half of his life the leading proponent of major weapons systems, the guiding inspiration for the Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) and an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear energy. He became arguably the most influential scientist of the Reagan Administration.”
Tags: Edward Teller, James Day
Jaguar likes to compliment well-heeled consumers, telling them that no machine could ever be a match for such special human specimens, that the Singularity will never arrive for those of a certain status. How irreplaceable you are. Actually the automaker thinks one machine is as superior as a human with a lot of money–the Jaguar. Campaign by Spark44.
The participant tries to usurp the routine and turn the workaday world into upsetting, absurd art. No discrete stage required, none wanted.
Amazon just acquired Kiva Systems robotics for $775 million to automate its warehouses. From IEEE Spectrum: “What does Kiva do that got Amazon so interested? Basically, Kiva has reinvented the centuries-old warehouse business, transforming distribution centers — which previously relied on slow-moving humans to walk around picking and packing goods — into a buzzing hive of superefficient, tireless robotic workers.”
Salon has a provocative excerpt from Dick Teresi’s new book, The Undead, which examines the difficulty of establishing when life has truly ceased, an issue that will only become infinitely thornier in the coming decades. The opening of “The Evolution of Death“:
“Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at a student teaching hospital with his interns in tow when he remembered that he had a patient upstairs who was near death. He sent a few of the young doctors ‘to check on Mr. Smith’ in Room 301 and to report back on whether he was dead yet. DeVita continued rounds with the remainder of the interns, but after some time had passed he wondered what happened to his emissaries of death. Trotting up to Mr. Smith’s room, he found them all paging through ‘The Washington Manual,’ the traditional handbook given to interns. But there is nothing in the manual that tells new doctors how to determine which patients are alive and which are dead.
Most of us would agree that King Tut and the other mummified ancient Egyptians are dead, and that you and I are alive. Somewhere in between these two states lies the moment of death. But where is that? The old standby — and not such a bad standard — is the stopping of the heart. But the stopping of a heart is anything but irreversible. We’ve seen hearts start up again on their own inside the body, outside the body, even in someone else’s body. Christian Barnard was the first to show us that a heart could stop in one body and be fired up in another. Due to the mountain of evidence to the contrary, it is comical to consider that “brain death” marks the moment of legal death in all fifty states.
The search for the moment of death continues, though hampered by the considerable legal apparatus that insists that it has already been found.”
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Bernie, reborn, doing conga:
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Tags: Dick Teresi, Michael DeVita
The opening of “Versailles, the Would-Be Biggest House in America,” Susan Berfield’s stomach-turning yet amusing Businessweek account of David and Jackie Siegel’s attempt to realize their most ostentatious fantasies, to build a fun-house mirror version of the American Dream:
“‘Our house is like a convention center compared to the other houses here,’ says David Siegel as he drives through The Reserve at Lake Butler Sound, a gated community in Orlando. The other houses here are not small: They average 10,000 square feet. But his home will be nine times as large. Siegel stops at the end of Kirkstone Lane, pulls into his driveway, and looks around. ‘Next door is a 12,000-square-foot house. That could be my maid’s quarters one day,’ he says lightly. Then he catches himself and adds, ‘No, I shouldn’t say that, it sounds like an insult.’
David and Jackie Siegel’s dream house sits on 10 acres of lakefront property. Built on a custom-made hill, it occupies one full acre and, when finished, will be the largest home in the country. David, the founder and chief executive officer of the biggest private time-share company in the world, Westgate Resorts, designed it. He and Jackie named it Versailles.”
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Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about the building of Versailles:
Tags: David Siegel, Jackie Siegel, Lauren Greenfield, Susan Berfield
Pretty rare Christopher Isherwood interview from 1974, with the writer in Los Angeles talking about the film version of Cabaret. James Day interviews.
Tags: Christopher Isherwood, James Day
"Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events." (Image by Weegee.)
Even in the 1930s, Nathanael West could see that media was becoming mass, that the Horatio Alger myth, a cruel hoax that pretended the exception was the rule, would soon be oppressively disseminated to all of America–to all of the world. From “He Foresaw History,” David Ulin’s 1997 Los Angeles Times article about West’s prescient prose:
“For West, the very substance of modern life exists in the place where the medium and the audience connect. His aesthetic was firmly rooted in the idea of mass communication, which by the 1930s, he recognized, had begun to change American culture in unpredictable ways. It’s one of the things that sets him apart from his contemporaries, and, as such, may have contributed to his marginal status.
‘In the 1930s,’ Veitch suggests, ‘American literature was dominated by icons of the left, like Ma Joad, but West wrote against that; he was a writer on the left who didn’t write about leftist themes. Instead, he wrote about consumerism. He wrote about the America that was emerging, the America of mass culture. At a time when the left had disdain for that, West homed in on it, using cliches, cartoons, comics, Tin Pan Alley songs. Miss Lonelyhearts is a slap in the face to the left’s fascination with folk culture, as is The Day of the Locust.”
His take on popular culture emerges not just in the substance of his writing, but in its style. Miss Lonelyhearts, for instance, was conceived as a ‘novel in the form of a comic strip’; ‘I abandoned this idea,’ West wrote in 1933, ‘but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter, instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events.’
Writing in a voice that is deliberately flat, West portrays a newspaper advice columnist, caught between the cynicism of his editor, Shrike, and the despair of his readers, who, in a society where God has been replaced by the manufactured images of mass imagination, have nowhere else to turn for meaning. As Shrike declares, ‘The Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of 20th century America.’ Miss Lonelyhearts becomes a counterpart for Christ, and his column a modern source of communion.
The Day of the Locust focuses the same perspective on the desperate dreams of Hollywood. And A Cool Million--a broad farce that, in tracing the disasters that befall a young man named Lemuel Pitkin when he sets out to seek his fortune, turns the Horatio Alger formula on its ear–touches on this issue. What these books have in common is a sense of mass illusion, of image somehow substituted for reality until there is little difference between the two.
‘West’s subject,’ says Library of America Publisher Max Rudin, ‘is the selling of mass fantasy, the American business of dreams.’
Elaborates Bercovitch: “There’s a sense in West of public life having a stage set quality, of the marketplace as a giant betrayal not just of America but of all human dreams. Yet while he understands this, he remains susceptible to the pathos of human need.'”
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“Isn’t it romantic?”:
Tags: David L. Ulin, Nathanael West
Science has proven that reading novels, unsurprisingly, makes us more empathetic people, but it’s a little startling that the brain apparently makes no distinction between actual experience and the experiences we read about in a novel. From Annie Murphy Paul in the NYT:
“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that ‘runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.’ Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”
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Novelist Henry Miller takes a swim:
Tags: Annie Murphy Paul, Keith Oatley
Public TV pioneer James Day interviews legendary New Yorker humorist S.J. Perelman in 1974. The two decried that young comedy writers had shifted from working in print to TV. But within three years both SNL and SCTV debuted.
Tags: James Day, S.J. Perelman
Ray and Charles Eames, that wonderful huband-and-wife design team, who were ahead of their time in understanding that industrial materials could be beautiful, also knew a thing or two about communications. Their 1953 short, “A Communications Primer.”
Tags: Charles Eames, Ray Eames
Tobii EyeAsteroids 3D allows you to blast space junk sans fingers.
Noël Coward (three years before his death), Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne visit Dick Cavett, 1970.
Tags: Alfred Lunt, Dick Cavett, Lynn Fontanne, Noel Coward
It would make sense that the lingua franca becomes simpler and flatter as people communicate more widely, as they need to find common ground with others from a variety of backgrounds and locations. And what has spellcheck, texting, etc. wrought for language? From Charles Choi at Discovery:
“The investigators found words began dying more often in the past 10 to 20 years than they had in all the time measured before. At the same time, they discovered languages were seeing fewer entirely new words emerging. They suggest that automatic spell-checkers may be partly responsible, killing misspelled or unusual counterparts of accepted words before they see print.”
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Speaking Ubbi Dubbi, back when pencils were still in use:
Tags: Charles Choi
Self-help books are usually so much slop, but I’m not opposed to them provided they’re not injurious–maybe some morsel of enlightenment will reach someone. Perhaps it will be a lesson that seems obvious to some, but different people have different blind spots. And before the Internet and its overflow of information recently arrived, there was a real dearth of accessible knowledge.
Cosmetic surgeon/self-help guru Maxwell Maltz’s 1960 book, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way To Get More Living Out of Life, was power-of-positive-thinking hooey, although it was important that the doctor stressed that getting noses altered or butts lifted wouldn’t necessarily improve anyone’s self-image.
An ur-infomercial for Psycho-Cybernetics:
Tags: Maxwell Maltz