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Tuesday, November 16th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Documentary
Like many famous episodes in the lives of famous people, Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes quote turns out to be a garbling of what happened. Warhol simply said that everybody wants to be famous (and by implication, famous forever). To which the Factory’s “court photographer” Nat Finkelstein replied, “yeah, for 15 minutes.” Given the way the idea has come down to us, we’ve missed the ambiguity in this exchange. Do we all want to be famous for 15 minutes (and only 15 minutes), or do we only spend 15 minutes wanting to be famous before we move on and accept it as a fool’s game? Finkelstein himself might have felt the latter. He watched “pop die and punk being born,” as he said in a 2001 interview. This was the death of Warhol’s fame ideal, and the birth of something new: music that loudly declared open hostilities against the gatekeepers of popular culture. Not every punk band reserved its punches for those above them. California hardcore legends Fear — led by confrontational satirist Lee Ving — swing wildly in every direction, hitting their audience as often as the powers that be. When their first taste of Warholian fame came around — in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization — Ving used the moment in front of the cameras to taunt and abuse audience members until a few of them rushed the stage to fight him. Had NBC executives seen the footage, the casual violence, profanity, and worrisome ebullience on the set of Saturday Night Live would have come as no surprise when the network let returning guest John Belushi book Fear on Halloween night of that same year. The SNL appearance — for which Fear proudly earned a permanent ban — became the stuff of legend for a number of reasons. Not only did Ving and band get up to their usual antics onstage, but the show brought in a crew of about 80 DC punks (including Dischord Records/Fugazi founder Ian MacKaye), who smashed up the set and joined the band in solidarity against Warhol’s New York and its saxophones. The network cut the broadcast short when one punk (identified as either MacKaye or John Brannon of the band Negative Approach) yelled “F*ck New York!” into an open mic during the last song, “Let’s Start a War.” NBC shelved the footage for years. Though well-known in fan communities, the appearance might have faded from memory were it not for the internet, which not only has the Warholian power to make anyone famous (or “internet famous”) for no reason, but also routinely resurrects lost moments of fame and makes them last forever. Just so, the legend of Fear on SNL has grown over time on YouTube. It now warrants a short documentary — one made, no less, by Jeff Krulik, a filmmaker who, five years after the Fear appearance, documented another burgeoning Fear-like fandom in his cult short, “Heavy Metal Parking Lot.”
“Fear on SNL,” above, includes several interview clips from firsthand witnesses. DC “punk superfan” Bill MacKenzie listens to an old interview he gave about the show, in which he says the band asked him to come to the taping. As Ian MacKaye tells it, Lorne Michaels himself placed the call. (He must mean producer Dick Ebersol, as Michaels left the show in 1980 and wouldn’t return until 1985.) But both MacKaye and Ving remember that it was Belushi who really rounded up the audience of authentic punks, leveraging his own hard-won celebrity to stick it to the factory that made his fame. Related Content: The Stunt That Got Elvis Costello Banned From Saturday Night Live Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Documentary is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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 | Fred Armisen Teaches a Short Seminar on the History of Punk
Long before Fred Armisen became known as a SNL cast member or one half of the dynamic duo behind Portlandia, he was a drummer in a punk band called Trenchmouth. Based out of Chicago, the band released four albums between 1988 and 1996 before disbanding. In that time, Armisen did a lot of drumming and saw a *lot* of bands. Many would go on to grab the fame that seemed to constantly elude his band. In the above clip from The Tonight Show, Armisen’s experience is put to hilarious good use with a trip through indie and punk rock history based on rhythm guitar styles. He starts with a decent Lou Reed imitation to locate the original source at the Velvet Underground, then up through the Ramones and Sex Pistols, eventually winding its way through the ska-influenced pop-punk of Blink-182 and ending with the Strokes. Host Jimmy Fallon, as always, laughs non-stop throughout. And Armisen also name drops Sleater-Kinney as a knowing wink to his Portlandia mate Carrie Brownstein. If this sounds like a well-rehearsed bit, well, it is. But when Armisen does it live, it’s on the drum set. In the below clip, he makes almost the same stops along the way on his journey. And it helped confirm my suspicion that his post-punk guitar bit (“I am a neon light”) is his parody of Wire.
Armisen spoke to Sam Jones on his monochromatic Off Camera interview show about his years of punk struggle with Trenchmouth, which will help place his numerous band-based comedy skits in the correct context.
Don’t miss his classic punk music SNL skits in the Relateds below. And if you are jonesing for the punk stylings of the hot, young Armisen, here’s live footage of Trenchmouth from 1992:
Related Content: Classic Punk Rock Sketches from Saturday Night Live, Courtesy of Fred Armisen Ian Rubbish (aka Fred Armisen) Interviews the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mockumentary The Origins of Spinal Tap: Watch the 20 Minute Short Film Created to Pitch the Classic Mockumentary Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here. Fred Armisen Teaches a Short Seminar on the History of Punk is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 7:00p | Albert Einstein in Four Color Films
We all think we know just what Albert Einstein looked like — and broadly speaking, we’ve got it right. At least since his death in 1955, since which time generation after generation of children around the world have grown up closely associating his bristly mustache and semi-tamed gray hair with the very concept of scientific genius. His sartorial rumpledness and Teutonically hangdog look have long been the stuff of not just caricature, but (as in Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance) earnest tribute as well. Yet how many of us can say we’ve really taken a good look at Einstein?
These four pieces of film get us a little closer to that experience. At the top of the post we have a colorized newsreel clip (you can see the original here) showing Einstein in his office at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where he took up a post in 1933. Even earlier colorized newsreel footage appears in the video just above, taken from an episode of the Smithsonian Channel series America in Color. It depicts Einstein arriving in the United States in 1930, by which time he was already “the world’s most famous physicist” — a position then meriting a welcome not unlike that which the Beatles would receive 34 years later.
Einstein returned to his native Germany after that visit. The America in Color clip also shows him back at his cottage outside Berlin (and in his pajamas), but his time back in his homeland amounted only to a few years. The reason: Hitler. During Einstein’s visiting professorship at Cal Tech in 1933, the Gestapo raided his cottage and Berlin apartment, as well as confiscated his sailboat. Later the Nazi government banned Jews from holding official positions, including at universities, effectively cutting off his professional prospects and those of no few other German citizens besides. The 1943 color footage above offers a glimpse of Einstein a decade into his American life.
A couple of years thereafter, the end of the Second World War made Einstein even more famous. He became, in the minds of many Americans, the brilliant physicist who “helped discover the atom bomb.” So declares the announcer in that first newsreel, but in the decades since, the public has come to associate Einstein more instinctively with his theory of relativity — an achievement less immediately comprehensible than the apocalyptic explosion of the atomic bomb, but one whose scientific implications run much deeper. Many clear and lucid précis of Einstein’s theory exist, but why not first see it explained by the man himself, and in color at that? Related Content: Newly Unearthed Footage Shows Albert Einstein Driving a Flying Car (1931) Hear Albert Einstein Read “The Common Language of Science” (1941) Marilyn Monroe Explains Relativity to Albert Einstein (in a Nicolas Roeg Movie) When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930) Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Explained in One of the Earliest Science Films Ever Made (1923) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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. Albert Einstein in Four Color Films is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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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