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Tuesday, September 19th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | The Sex Pistols Make a Scandalous Appearance on the Bill Grundy Show & Introduce Punk Rock to the Startled Masses (1976)
The brainlessness and hypocrisy of television has long been a source of fun and social commentary in punk rock—from Black Flag’s “TV Party” (“I don’t even bother to use my brain anymore”) to the Dead Kennedys’ “M.T.V. –Get Off the Air” (“… feeding you endless doses / of sugar-coated mindless garbage”). It’s fitting then that one of the seminal moments in punk history happened on television, orchestrated by Sex Pistols manager and arch provocateur Malcolm McLaren, who knew as well as anyone how to manipulate the media. The notorious Bill Grundy interview, which you can watch—likely not for the first or even second time—above, rocketed the Sex Pistols to national infamy overnight, simply because of a few swear words and some slightly rude behavior. Though the U.S. does its damndest to keep up these days, no one in 1976 could match the outrage machinery of the UK press. As rock photographer and manager Leee Black Childers put it in the oral history of punk, Please Kill Me, the tabloids "can work the populace into a frenzy.” McLaren goes on record to say, “I knew the Bill Grundy show was going to create a huge scandal. I genuinely believed it would be history in the making.” We might expect him to take credit after the fact, but in any case, it worked: the day after the band’s appearance on the Grundy-hosted Today show on Thames Television, every tabloid paper featured them on the front page. The Daily Mirror provided the title of Julien Temple’s 2000 documentary with their clever headline, “The Filth and the Fury.”
Even in 2008, a survey showed the Grundy interview as the most requested clip in UK television history. With all this hype, you might be disappointed if you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen it. Though f-bombs on TV can still cause a minor stir, a few mumbled curse words will hardly garner the kind of publicity it did forty years ago. McLaren claims punk rock began that day on the Today show, and that’s true, at least, for the viewing public who would have been treated to an appearance from Queen if Freddie Mercury hadn’t developed a crippling toothache. Instead, they were introduced to Paul Cook in a Vivienne Westwood naked breasts t-shirt, and Glen Matlock, Steve Jones, and Johnny Rotten tossing insults at Grundy, who egged them on, hit on the teenage Siouxsie Sioux, part of the band’s entourage, and may have been drunk, though he denied it. It may be one of the least witty exchanges in television history, and that’s saying a lot. But for all the pearl-clutching over the band's crudity, it's maybe Grundy who comes off looking the worse. More interesting than the interview itself is the hyperbolic fallout, as well as what happened immediately afterward. The station was flooded with complaints, and for some reason, its telephone system rerouted unanswered calls to the green room, where the band and their followers had decamped. “A producer on the programme ignored instructions to remain in the room," notes Jon Bennett at Team Rock. "The result? The group started answering the phones and dishing out even more abuse. How this evaded the press at the time remains a mystery.” Indeed. It’s doubtful McLaren could have planned it, but the image evokes the sneer of every punk who has ever spit on the pious insistence that TV spoonfeed its viewers middle-class decorum with their advertising, sports, wish-fulfilling fantasies, and infotainment. Related Content: Watch the Sex Pistols’ Very Last Concert (San Francisco, 1978) The Sex Pistols’ 1976 Manchester “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began The Sex Pistols Play in Dallas’ Longhorn Ballroom; Next Show Is Merle Haggard (1978) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Sex Pistols Make a Scandalous Appearance on the Bill Grundy Show & Introduce Punk Rock to the Startled Masses (1976) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 2:00p | New Study Reveals How the Neanderthals Made Super Glue 200,000 Years Ago: The World’s Oldest Known Synthetic Material
It's become increasingly clear how much we've underestimated the Neanderthals, the archaic humans who evolved in Europe and went extinct about 40,000 years ago. Though we've long used them as a byword for a lumbering, beast-like lack of development and intelligence — compared, of course, to we glorious examples of Homo sapiens — evidence has come to reveal a greater similarity between us and Homo neanderthalensis than we'd imagined. Not only did they develop stone tools, they even invented a kind of "super glue," one that, as you can see in the NOVA segment above, we have difficulty replicating even today. "Archaeologists first found tar-covered stones and black lumps at Neanderthal sites across Europe about two decades ago," writes the New York Times' Nicholas St. Fleur. "The tar was distilled from the bark of birch trees some 200,000 years ago, and seemed to have been used for hafting, or attaching handles to stone tools and weapons. But scientists did not know how Neanderthals produced the dark, sticky substance, more than 100,000 years before Homo sapiens in Africa used tree resin and ocher adhesives." But in a new study in Scientific Reports, "a team of archaeologists has used materials available during prehistoric times to demonstrate three possible ways Neanderthals could have deliberately made tar." The process might have looked something like that in the video above, an attempt by archaeologists Wil Roebroeks and Friedrich Palmer to make this of oldest known synthetic material just as the Neanderthals might have executed it. Their only materials: "an upturned animal skull to catch the pitch; a small stone on which the pitch would condense; some rolls of birch bark, the source of the pitch; and a layer of ash, to exclude oxygen and prevent the bark from burning."
Image by Paul Kozowyk They technically get it to work, managing to heat the bark to just the right temperature, but the experiment doesn't produce very much of this ancient super glue — certainly not as much as Neanderthals would have used to make spears, which might turn out to have been the very first industrial process in history. Innovation, in the 21st century as well as 250,000 years ago, does tend to come from unexpected places. You can read more about archeologists latest theories on the making of Neanderthal super glue over at Scientific Reports. Related Content: Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. New Study Reveals How the Neanderthals Made Super Glue 200,000 Years Ago: The World’s Oldest Known Synthetic Material is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:29p | How a Simple Email Survey Pulled Scripts Out of Hollywood Purgatory & Turned Them Into Award-Winning Films
How did the Black List get started? Not the Hollywood blacklist that ruined the careers of countless directors, actors and actresses during the 1940s and 1950s. No, we mean the Black List, created by Franklin Leonard in 2005, which has allowed more than 300 scripts, once stuck in Hollywood purgatory, to get turned into feature films--films like Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech, Argo and Spotlight. This all started when Leonard created a simple survey, asking nearly 100 movies executives to name their favorite scripts that had not yet been made as feature films. The new Vox video above tells the rest of the story. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958) When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland How Movie Studios Rejected Scripts During the Silent-Film Era: A Cold, 17-Point Checklist Circa 1915 How a Simple Email Survey Pulled Scripts Out of Hollywood Purgatory & Turned Them Into Award-Winning Films is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:10p | Watch Björk’s Hypnotic Music Video for Her New Song, “The Gate”
FYI. Björk has just released a new track, "The Gate," from her forthcoming album. And, with it, comes a hypnotic new video, the product of a collaboration between Björk, artist Andrew Thomas Huang, and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele. About the video, Andrew Thomas Huang has this to say:
Björk's new album, Utopia, is due out in November. The new video is made available by Nowness. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Björk Takes Us Inside Her Creative Process and Explains How She Writes a Song Hear the Album Björk Recorded as an 11-Year-Old: Features Cover Art Provided By Her Mom (1977) A Young Björk Deconstructs (Physically & Theoretically) a Television in a Delightful Retro Video Watch Björk’s 6 Favorite TED Talks, From the Mushroom Death Suit to the Virtual Choir Watch Björk’s Hypnotic Music Video for Her New Song, “The Gate” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:15p | Laurie Anderson Introduces Her Virtual Reality Installation That Lets You Fly Magically Through Stories
While the sci-fi dreams of virtual and “augmented” reality are now within the grasp of artists and game designers, the technology of the adult human brain remains rooted in the stone age—we still need a good story to accompany the flickering shadows on the cave wall. An artist as wise as Laurie Anderson understands this, but—given that it’s Laurie Anderson—she isn’t going to retread familiar narrative paths, especially when working in the vehicle of VR, as she has in her new piece Chalkroom, created in a collaboration with Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang. The piece allows viewers the opportunity to travel not only into the space of imagination a story creates, but into the very architecture of story itself—to walk, or rather float, through its passageways as words and letters drift by like tufts of dandelion, stars, or, as Anderson puts it, like snow. “They’re there to define the space and to show you a little bit about what it is,” says the artist in the interview above, “But they’re actually fractured languages, so it’s kind of exploded things.” She explains the “chalkroom” concept as resisting the “perfect, slick and shiny” aesthetic that characterizes most computer-generated images. “It has a certain tactility and made-by-hand kind of thing… this is gritty and drippy and filled with dust and dirt.” Chalkroom, she says, "is a library of stories, and no one will ever find them all.” It sounds to me, at least, more intriguing than the premise of most video games, but the audience for this piece will be limited, not only to those willing to give it a chance, but to those who can experience the piece firsthand, as it were, by visiting the physical space of one of Anderson’s exhibitions and strapping on the VR goggles. Once they do, she says, they will be able to fly, a disorienting experience that sends some people falling out of their chair. Last spring, Chalkroom became part of an ongoing exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a “Laurie Anderson pilgrimage,” as Mass MoCA director Joseph C. Thompson describes it, that also features a VR experience called Aloft. In August, Chalkroom appeared at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, where the interview above took place. Watching it, you’ll see why the piece has generated so much buzz, winning “Best VR Experience” at the Venice Film Festival and visiting major museums around Europe and the U.S. “Mostly VR is kind of task-oriented,” she says, “you get that, you do that, you shoot that.” Chalkroom feels more like navigating catacombs, traversing dark labyrinths punctuated by brilliant constellations of light made out of words, as Anderson’s voice provides enigmatic narration against a backdrop of three-dimensional sound design. It’s an immersive journey that seems, as promised, like the one we take as readers, pursuing elusive meanings that can seem tantalizingly just out of reach. Related Content: Laurie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island Go Inside the First 30 Minutes of Kubrick’s The Shining with This 360º Virtual Reality Video Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Laurie Anderson Introduces Her Virtual Reality Installation That Lets You Fly Magically Through Stories is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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