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Tuesday, November 19th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | 82 Animated Interviews with Living, Dead, Celebrated & Sometimes Disgraced Celebrities
Were Ebert alive today would he still express himself thusly in a recorded interview? His remarks are specific to his cinematic passion, but still. As a smart Midwesterner, he would have realized that the corn has ears and the potatoes have eyes. Remarks can be taken out of context. (Witness the above.) Recent history has shown that not everyone is keen to roll back the clock—women, people of color, and gender non-conforming individuals have been reclaiming their narratives in record numbers, airing secrets, exposing injustice, and articulating offenses that can no longer stand. If powerful, older, white heterosexual men in the entertainment business are exercising verbal caution these days when speaking as a matter of public record, there’s some goodly cause for that.
It also makes the archival celebrity interviews excerpted for Quoted Studios' animated series, Blank on Blank, feel very vibrant and uncensored, though be forewarned that your blood may boil a bit just reviewing the celebrity line up—Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood holding forth on the Pussy Generation 10 years before the Pussyhat Project legitimized common usage of that charged word…. (In full disclosure, Blank on Blank is an oft-reported favorite here at Open Culture.)
Here’s rapper Tupac Skakur, a year and a half before he was killed in a drive by shooting, casting himself as a tragic Shakespearean hero, His musings on how differently the public would have viewed him had he been born white seem even more relevant today. Readers who are only passingly acquainted with his artistic output and legend may be surprised to hear him tracing his allegiance to “thug life” to the positive role he saw the Black Panthers playing in his single mother’s life when he was a child. On the other hand, Shakur’s lavish and freely expressed self pity at the way the press reported on his rape charge (for which he eventually served 9 months) does not sit at all well in 2019, nor did it in 1994. Like the majority of Blank on Blank entries, the recording was not the interview’s final form, but rather a journalistic reference. Animator Patrick Smith may add a layer of visual editorial, but in terms of narration, every subject is telling their own undiluted truth. It is interesting to keep in mind that this was one of the first interviews the Blank on Blank team tackled, in 2013. Six years later, it’s hard to imagine they would risk choosing that portion of the interview to animate. Had Shakur lived, would he be cancelled?
Guess who was the star of the very first Blank on Blank to air on PBS back in 2013? Broadcaster and television host Larry King. While King has steadfastly rebutted accusations of groping, we suspect that if the Blank on Blank team was just now getting around to this subject, they’d focus on a different part of his 2001 Esquire profile than the part where he regales interviewer Cal Fussman with tales of pre-cellphone “seduction.” It’s only been six years since the series’ debut, but it’s a different world for sure.
If you’re among the easily triggered, living legend Meryl Streep’s thoughts on beauty, harvested in 2014 from a 2008 conversation with Entertainment Weekly’s Christine Spines, won’t offer total respite, but any indignation you feel will be in support of, not because of this celebrity subject. It’s actually pretty rousing to hear her merrily exposing Hollywood players’ piggishness, several years before the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke.
For even more evidence of “a different world,” check out interviewer Howard Smith’s remark to Janis Joplin in her final interview-cum-Blank-on-Blank episode, four days before here 1970 death:
Joplin, stung, unleashes a string of invectives against feminists and women, in general. One has to wonder if this reaction was Smith’s goal all along. Or maybe I’m just having flashbacks to middle school, when the popular girls would always send a delegate disguised as a concerned friend to tell you why you were being shunned, preferably in a highly public gladiatorial arena such as the lunchroom. I presume that sort of stuff occurs primarily over social media these days. Good on the Blank on Blank staff for picking up on the tenor of this interview and titling it “Janis Joplin on Rejection.” You can binge watch a playlist of 82 Blank on Blank episodes, featuring many thoughts few express so openly anymore, here or right below. When you’re done with that, you’ll find even more Blank on Blank entries on the creators’ website. Related Content: Alfred Hitchcock Meditates on Suspense & Dark Humor in a New Animated Video Joni Mitchell Talks About Life as a Reluctant Star in a New Animated Interview Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, December 9 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates Dennison’s Christmas Book (1921). Follow her @AyunHalliday. 82 Animated Interviews with Living, Dead, Celebrated & Sometimes Disgraced Celebrities 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.  |
| 12:00p | Watch Klaus Nomi Debut His New Wave Vaudeville Show: The Birth of the Opera-Singing Space Alien (1978)
Given the history of New York’s East Village as the first foreign language neighborhood in the country after waves of European immigration, perhaps it’s only natural that Klaus Nomi, opera-singing German performance artist who made a name for himself in the punk clubs of the late 70s, would find a home there. By his time, the tenements had given way to other demographic waves: including Beatniks, writers, actors, Warholian Factory superstars, and punk and New Wave scenesters, whom Dangerous Mind’s Richard Metzger calls a “second generation” after Warhol, “drawn in by that Warhol myth but doing their own things.” Even amidst the thriving DIY experimentalism of Post-Warholian art, fashion, and music, of a scene including Talking Heads, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, Nomi stood out. It was the way he seemed to inhabit two time periods at once. He arrived both as a cabaret performer from Weimar Germany—a tragic clown with the voice of an angel—and as a thoroughly convincing intergalactic traveler, teleporting in briefly from the future. No one was prepared for this when he made his New York debut at Irving Plaza’s New Wave Vaudeville show in 1978, evoking an even earlier era by singing “Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix,” from Camille Saint-Saëns' 1877 opera Samson et Dalila. After his stunning performance, he would disappear from the stage in a confusion of strobe lights and smoke. East Village artist Joey Arias remembers, “It was like he was from a different planet and his parents were calling him home.” Other acts at New Wave Vaudeville, a four-night East Village variety show, were “doing a punk version of Mickey Rooney, ‘We’re going to do a goofy show,’” says Kristian Hoffman, the musician who became Nomi’s musical director. In came Nomi with “a whole different level of accomplishment.” MC David McDermott was obliged to announce that he was not singing to a recording. You can see Nomi debut at New Wave Vaudeville above, in a clip from the 2004 film The Nomi Song. The significance of these early performances goes far beyond the immediate shock of their first audiences. At these shows, Nomi met Hoffman, who would form his band and write the songs for which he became best known. Producer and director of the New Wave Vaudeville show Susan Hannaford and Ann Magnuson were also the owner and bartender at Club 57, where Nomi would help them organize exhibits by artists like Kenny Scharf. Seeing Nomi’s debut can still feel a bit like watching a visitor arrive from both the past and the future at once. And it is lucky we have this early footage of an artist who would to on to perform with David Bowie and become a gay icon and pioneer of theatrical New Wave. But we should also see his arrival on the scene as an essential document of the history of the East Village, and its transformation into “a playground,” as Messy Nessy writes, “for artistic misanthropes, anarchists, exhibitionists, queers, poets, punks and everything in between,” including opera-singing aliens from West Berlin. via Messy Nessy Related Content: The Enchanting Opera Performances of Klaus Nomi Klaus Nomi Performs with Kraftwerk on German Television (1982) David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hypnotic Performance on SNL (1979) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Klaus Nomi Debut His New Wave Vaudeville Show: The Birth of the Opera-Singing Space Alien (1978) 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. |
| 3:00p | Quentin Tarantino’s World War II Reading List
Image by Georges Biard, via Wikimedia Commons With his first three features Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino claimed 1990s Los Angeles as his own. Then he struck boldly out into not just new geographical and cultural territories, but other time periods. With his first full-on period piece, 2009's Inglourious Basterds, he showed audiences just how he intended to use history: twisting it for his own cinematic purposes, of course, but only making his departures after steeping himself in accounts of the time in which he envisioned his story taking place. This naturally involves plenty of reading, and Tarantino recently provided HistoryNet with a few titles that helped him properly situate Inglourious Basterds in the Europe of the Second World War. Tarantino calls Ian Ousby's Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940–1944 "a very good overview that answered all of my questions about life in Nazi-occupied France." Ulysses Lee's The Employment of Negro Troops is "the most profound thing I’ve ever read on both the war and racist America of the 1940s, commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the effectiveness of their employment of black soldiers." And for Tarantino, who doesn't just make films but lives and breathes them, understanding Nazi Germany means understanding its cinema, beginning with Eric Rentschler's Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, "a wonderful critical reexamination of German cinema under Joseph Goebbels" that "goes far beyond the demonizing approach employed by most writers on this subject," including even excerpts from Goebbels' diaries. Rentschler also "dares to make a fair appraisal of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan," who made antisemitic blockbusters as one of Goebbels' leading propaganda directors. But the work of no Nazi filmmaker had as much of an impact as that of Leni Riefenstahl, two books about whom Tarantino puts on his World War II reading list: Glenn B. Infield's Leni Riefenstahl: The Fallen Film Goddess, the first he ever read about her, as well as Riefenstahl's eponymous memoir, which he calls "mesmerizing. Though you can’t believe half of it. That still leaves half to ponder. Her descriptions of normal friendly conversations with Hitler are amazing and ring of truth" — and that praise comes from a filmmaker who made his own name with good dialogue. In a recent DGA Quarterly conversation with Martin Scorsese, Tarantino revealed that he's also at work on a book of his own about that era: "I've got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. Now he's back home, and it's like the '50s, and he doesn't respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he's been through. As far as he's concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini," thinking "maybe they might have something more than this phony Hollywood stuff." He soon finds himself drawn inexorably in: "Some of them he likes and some of them he doesn't like and some of them he doesn't understand, but he knows he's seeing something." This is hardly the kind of premise that leads straight to the kind of violent catharsis in which Tarantino specializes, but then, he's pulled off more unlikely artistic feats in his time. Related Content: Quentin Tarantino Explains How to Write & Direct Movies How Quentin Tarantino Steals from Other Movies: A Video Essay The Films of Quentin Tarantino: Watch Video Essays on Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill & More Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Quentin Tarantino’s World War II Reading List 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. |
| 6:31p | Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of the Internet & Smart Phone in 1926
Certain cult historical figures have served as prescient avatars for the techno-visionaries of the digital age. Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to the principles of brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who believed, as he told Liberty magazine in 1935, that “we suffer the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age.” Such an adjustment would come, Tesla believed, only in “mastering the machine”—and he seemed to have supreme confidence in human mastery—over food production, climate, and genetics. We would be freed from onerous labor by automation and the creation of “a thinking machine” he said, over a decade before the invention of the computer. Tesla did not anticipate the ways such machines would come to master us, even though he cannily foresaw the future of wireless technology, computing, and telephony, technologies that would radically reshape every aspect of human life. In an earlier, 1926, interview in Colliers magazine, Tesla predicted, as the editors wrote, communicating “instantly by simple vest-pocket equipment.” His actual words conveyed a much grander, and more accurate, picture of the future.
The complexity of smart phones far outstrips that of the telephone, but in every other respect, Tesla’s picture maps onto the reality of almost 100 years later. Other aspects of Tesla’s future scenario for wireless also seem to anticipate current technologies, like 3D printing, though the kind he describes still remains in the realm of science fiction: “Wireless will achieve the closer contact through transmission of intelligence, transport of our bodies and materials and conveyance of energy.” But Tesla’s vision had its limitations, and they lay precisely in his techno-optimism. He never met a problem that wouldn’t eventually have a technological solution (and like many other techno-visionaries of the time, he heartily endorsed state-sponsored eugenics). “The majority of the ills from which humanity suffers,” he said, “are due to the immense extent of the terrestrial globe and the inability of individuals and nations to come into close contact.” Wireless technology, thought Tesla, would help eradicate war, poverty, disease, pollution, and general discontent, when were are “able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a world series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present.” When international boundaries are “largely obliterated” by instant communication, he believed, “a great step will be made toward the unification and harmonious existence of the various races inhabiting the globe.” Tesla did not, and perhaps could not, foresee the ways in which technologies that bring us closer together than ever also, and at the same time, pull us ever further apart. Read Tesla's full interview here, in which he also predicts that women will become the "superior sex," not by virtue of "the shallow physical imitation of men" but through "the awakening of the intellect." Related Content: Electric Photo of Nikola Tesla, 1899 The Electric Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla: As Told by Technoillusionist Marco Tempest The Secret History of Silicon Valley Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of the Internet & Smart Phone in 1926 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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