Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s … John Lydon in a Butter Commercial?

in Comedy, Music, Television | July 13th, 2013

A few days ago we posted an expletive-laced letter that John Lydon, formerly known as “Johnny Rotten,” faxed to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006 to make it clear that the surviving members of the Sex Pistols would have nothing to do with their induction. “We’re not your monkey,” he wrote. At least one reader felt edified. “Thanks JR,” he said, “for not selling out.”

So we thought it would be a fun time to bring back Lydon’s 2008 commercial for Country Life Butter. The ad, which reportedly netted Lydon a cool $8 million, plays on the incongruity between two very British things: the iconic punk rocker and a rather bucolic-sounding brand of butter. The commercial places Lydon in a series of uncharacteristic situations — reading the newspaper in a gentlemen’s smoking room, waving the Union Jack as the Queen’s motorcade goes by, running from cows in the English countryside — as he says to the viewer, “Do I buy Country Life Butter because it’s British?” Do I buy Country Life because I yearn for the British countryside? Or because it’s made only from British milk? Nah. I buy Country Life because I think it’s the best.”

Lydon drew a great deal of criticism for his decision to appear in the ad, but he has been steadfastly unapologetic. “The advert was for a British product,” he told The Sun last year. “All Britain. Fantastic. We don’t seem to believe in ourselves as a country any more. And I found great empathy with that. Plus it was the most maddest thing to consider doing. I thought it was very anarchic of the dairy company to want to attach themselves to me. And they treated me with the utmost respect and I love them forever as it all allowed me to set up my record label and put out this record.”

Lydon was referring to This Is PiL, the first album in 20 years from his post-punk band Public Image Ltd. He reportedly used some of the money from the commercial to bring the group back together for rehearsals, record the album and launch their 2012 tour. “The money,” he said, “got us out of no end of troubles.” And anyway, Lydon has always had a sense of humor when it comes to the financial demands of life. His 1996 reunion with the Sex Pistols was officially named the “Filthy Lucre Tour.”

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Can Science Fiction Save the Liberal Arts? (Asks The New Republic)

in Education, Literature | July 12th, 2013

Both the literary and science fiction worlds have come out in the past few weeks with poignant tributes and accolades for recently deceased Scottish writer Iain Banks. The remembrances from both quarters are very well deserved, and very rare. Banks was an unusual kind of artist; he maintained a highly respected presence as both a writer of realist literary fiction (as Iain Banks) and superbly well-crafted, highly imaginative science fiction (as Iain M. Banks). In the brief video interview above, you can hear Banks recount the origin of the two names and make an impassioned case for science fiction as “the most important genre” of fiction.

Banks’ accomplishments are all the more extraordinary given that so-called literary fiction and so-called genre writing—sci-fi, horror, romance, etc.—have for so long occupied entirely different cultural spheres, worlds, to use the words of Thomas Pynchon, as different as “the hothouse and the street.” There were the obvious exceptions—the work of Franz Kafka, Dracula and Frankenstein, 1984, Fahrenheit 451—that slipped through the gates, grandfathered in as legacy cases or exemplars of “Speculative Fiction,” the respectable term for genre writing deemed “serious” by academics and the literati. Literary scholar Frederic Jameson has long been a fan of sci-fi. Critical theorist Felix Guatari once wrote a science fiction film script. Again, more exceptions.

All of this has changed. After the success of popular culture studies programs in the freewheeling postmodern 90s, even the most traditional departments have begun turning toward genre fiction—the current popular obsession with vampires and zombies, for example—as a means of re-invigorating the liberal arts and reclaiming relevance. (I myself once helped an academic press acquire and publish a fun collection called Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human.)

Is this a cynical piece of strategy to market struggling humanities programs to increasingly business- and science-minded students? A generational turnover in the professorate? An attempt to expand the market share of the humanities in the overall picture of university funding? In a recent article in the New Republic, science editor Judith Shulevitz argues, like Banks, that sci-fi is a genre of fiction that the academy should take more and more seriously on practical grounds—sci-fi writers show us the future of technology more accurately than any technologist. Shulavitz also writes that doing so will raise the profile, and funding, of humanities programs.

As you can see from the charts above, the arts and sciences have reached a dire funding asymmetry. Shulevitz quotes Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote, “There is no science without fancy and no art without fact” as part of her case for the importance of literature to the “practical arts” and vice-versa. I don’t know if I’m entirely convinced, but Shulevitz’s argument is worthy of consideration, unless you believe, with Oscar Wilde, that “all art is quite useless” and in no need of an apologetics or a defense to bureaucrats.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Mr. Rogers Takes Breakdancing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

in K-12, Television | July 12th, 2013

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February 13th, 1985 shall be remembered as a truly beautiful day in the neighborhood, for that is the date on which Fred Rogers learned to breakdance (sort of).

In no time at all, 12-year-old instructor Jermaine Vaughn had Mr. Rogers waving, moonwalking and learning how to press play on a boom box so he could demonstrate some “very fancy things” regarding the first pillar of hip hop. (“I’d never be able to do that,” his pupil says admiringly, and presumably truthfully.)

The television icon’s legendary sincerity is on display throughout, even in this pirated version, which swaps out the wimpy original track in favor of NWA’s 1989 “Fuck Tha Police,” a move that would’ve pleased Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson.

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Selling Cool: Lou Reed’s Classic Honda Scooter Commercial, 1984

in Film, Music, Television | July 11th, 2013

In the early 1980s the Honda Motor Company was trying to get people to think of its new Honda Elite scooters as a cool way of getting around. To that end, the company enlisted a series of celebrities, including Miles Davis, Grace Jones and Devo, to appear in its ad campaign. The most notable piece in the campaign, by far, was a one-minute TV commercial in 1984 starring former Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed.

The film was shot in what was then a very rough-and-tumble Lower East Side of Manhattan. Director Steve Horn, hired by the Portland, Oregon-based agency Wieden & Kennedy, underexposed and overdeveloped the film to give it a grainy, documentary appearance. Editor Lawrence Bridges, well-known for his work on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video, was hired to piece it all together.

Bridges found the task of setting the images to Reed’s classic 1972 song “Walk on the Wild Side” extremely daunting. The idea of using that song in a commercial seemed like a sacrilege. “The generation being advertised to at that point was probably the most cynical and suspicious toward the medium to date,” writes Bridges at Vimeo, “and, moreover, I had this monumental piece of music that I had to honor. For me, the answer was to make it into an ‘underground’ film.”

Bridges used techniques he had learned from French New Wave films and that he had experimented with in MTV videos. “I got to work and used the junk cuts,” says Bridges, “including flash frames and run outs and whip pans that would normally end up being left on the floor for an assistant to clean up. I did all the things I’d done in music videos, like taking a shot and dividing it randomly in jump cuts, and all other manner of post-production techniques we used in music videos when we had less footage than the length of the actual video.”

When it was finished, Bridges and his colleagues arranged a meeting with a marketing manager from Honda. It was a nerve-racking encounter. “The client was a very shrewd, practical person and I knew that he was averse to conspicuously daring creative work,” says Bridges. “This gritty, almost avant-garde spot, set in pre-gentrified Lower Manhattan with every art film trope you could imagine might have put considerable demands on his charm.” Instead, Bridges recalls, when the commercial was finished playing the man from Honda broke the tension by saying, “We need to be THAT scooter company.”

The spot made a huge splash on Madison Avenue. Its influence could be seen all over the next generation of commercials. But it didn’t sell many scooters. “For all its impact on the advertising industry,” writes Randall Rothenberg in Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign, “the Lou Reed commercial did little for Honda. Young Americans had little interest in scooters, no matter how hip they were made out to be.”

NOTE: To see some of the earlier scooter ads created for Honda by the Los Angeles-based Dailey & Associates, you can follow these links: Devo; Miles Davis; Grace Jones and Adam Ant.

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Virginia Woolf and Friends Dress Up as “Abyssinian Princes” and Fool the British Royal Navy (1910)

in History, Literature, Random | July 11th, 2013

Click image for larger version

On February 7th, 1910, Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and five of her Bloomsbury companions—painter Duncan Grant, Woolf’s brother Adrian, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, and Horace de Vere Cole—boarded the pride of the British Royal Navy, the HMS Dreadnought, dressed in blackface and outlandish stage costumes. (In the photo above, from left to right.) In what became known as “The Dreadnought Hoax,” the six convinced the Dreadnought’s officers that they were the “Emperor of Abyssinia” (now Ethiopia) and his entourage, and they were received with high honors.

The hoax, masterminded by Cole, began when he sent a telegram to the ship telling the crew to expect a visit from some North African dignitaries. Once on board, the group spoke in accented Latin (quoting the Aeneid) and gibberish. Woolf kept quiet so as to disguise her gender. One of the officers on the ship was a cousin of Virginia and Adrian, but he failed to recognize them. It wasn’t a flawless performance on either side: at one point, Buxton sneezed and almost lost his mustache, and the Navy, unable to find an Abyssinian flag, flew the flag of Zanzibar instead.

The “princes” asked for prayer mats, presented the officers with fake military honors, and exclaimed “bunga, bunga!” each time they were shown some marvel of the ship. The Dreadnought was then, in the words of Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, “the flagship of the Home Fleet, the most formidable, the most modern, and the most secret man o’ war then afloat.” (This incident is said to be the origin of the ludicrous phrase “bunga, bunga,” most associated with the exploits of the recently convicted Silvio Berlusconi.) The next day, Cole anonymously sent the photograph at the top to The Daily Mirror, revealing the hoax. According to Woolf scholar Mairead Case—who sees the incident as a precursor to Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando—the Mirror described the “Abyssinians” thus:

All the princes wore vari-coloured silk sashes as turbans, set off with diamond aigrettes, white gibbah tunics, over which were cast rich flowing robes and round their necks were suspended gold chains and jeweled necklaces … They also all wore patent leather boots which, Oriental fashion, tapered to a point, the ends projecting fully six inches beyond the toes. White gloves covered the princes’ hands, and over the gloved fingers, they wore gold wedding rings – heavy, plain circlets, which looked very impressive.

In a recently discovered letter, Cole wrote to a friend that the hoax was “glorious” and “shriekingly funny.” The group intended to mock what they saw as an outmoded Victorian imperialism, and they succeeded, at least in the popular press. The Mirror published the cartoon above and the Royal Navy was a laughingstock for weeks afterward. None of this pseudo-racist pranksterism (which reflected just as badly on the officers) struck the actual Emperor of Ethiopia—Menelik II—as particularly funny. When he visited England later that year, he was taunted in the streets by children shouting “Bunga! Bunga!” and denied permission to inspect the navy’s fleet for fear that his visit might cause further embarrassment.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Two Scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Recreated in Lego

in Film | July 11th, 2013

Stanley Kubrick, among the many other skills that made him perhaps the best-known auteur of the second half of the twentieth century, could craft an immediately memorable scene. Moreover, he could construct entire films out of nothing but immediately memorable scenes. This goes especially for his Cold War black comedy Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, whose fans tend to quote to each other not individual lines but entire five‑, ten‑, fifteen-minute stretches from the movie. One such oft-reenacted scene, the phone conversation in which President Merkin Muffley warns inebriated Premier Dimitri Kisov of the U.S. bombers headed toward Russia appears at the top of the post, in the original black-and-white, with the original voices of Peter Sellers, Peter Bull, and George C. Scott, and — with nothing in front of the camera but Lego bricks and Lego men.

Just above, you can see Sellers’ performance as the titular eccentric, alien hand-syndrome-suffering doctor physically rendered in Lego. Dr. Strangelove fans know the scene comes late in the film, when a long series of errors and acts of unreason on all sides has made imminent the moment of mutually assured destruction. “I had to take out the famous scene of Slim Pickens riding the bomb and the nuclear holocaust credits to have this video viewable, because those scenes were taken directly from the movie,” explains these videos’ creator, a Youtube user by the name of XXxOPRIMExXX. “I was hoping to have the Slim Pickens scene done in Lego by now but I just never had enough time or effort to do it, maybe some time in the future.” Let me say that, if I have confidence in anyone to get that job done, I have confidence in someone with the stamina to successfully build a Lego War Room.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Annotated Photographs of Beat Writers Featured in The Allen Ginsberg Festival, Starting Today

in Literature, Photography | July 11th, 2013

Starting today, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) begins its four-day celebration of Allen Ginsberg with The Allen Ginsberg Festival in San Francisco, produced in cooperation with The Beat Museum, City Lights Bookstore, and several other organizations. The festival, which runs from the 11thto the 14th of this month, celebrates Ginsberg’s life and art with a host of events (some free, some ranging from $10 to $15 for admission). While the literary tours, panel discussions, and lectures promise to be a treat for those lucky enough to attend, perhaps the centerpiece of the Ginsberg Festival is an exhibition of the poet’s annotated photographs, on view at CJM until September 8th.

The photos, which moved through NYU’s Grey Art Gallery earlier this year, show Ginsberg and his beat buddies in intimate and unguarded moments, such as the snap above of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. In his tidy script handwriting, Ginsberg writes below the photo:

“Now Jack as I warned you far back as 1945, if you keep going home to live with your ‘Memère’ you’ll find yourself wound tighter and tighter in her apron strings till you’re an old man and can’t escape…” William Seward Burroughs camping as an André Gide-ian sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac who listens soberly dead-pan to “the most intelligent man in America” for a funny second’s charade in my living room 206 East 7th Street Apt 16, Manhattan, one evening Fall 1953

Flavorwire has compiled 25 of these photos, including the portrait of the young merchant marine, Allen Ginsberg, below, which he annotates as, “Allen Ginsberg, utility man S.S. John Blair just back from Galveston-Dakar doldrums trip, I handed my camera to the radio-man on the ship’s fantail, smoking what? In New York harbor, circa October 30, 1947.”

As the CJM page notes, “the late 1940s and early 1950s marked a crucial period for Allen Ginsberg as he found his poetic and sexual voices simultaneously.” The photos in this exhibit document not only Ginsberg finding himself, but also finding himself among a group of men—Burroughs, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso—whose restlessness and erudite enthusiasm changed the course of twentieth century literature.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Johnny Rotten’s Cordial Letter to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Next to the Sex Pistols, You’re ‘a Piss Stain’

in Letters, Music | July 10th, 2013

The Sex Pistols certainly weren’t the first to balk at showing up to receive a trophy at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. They were, however, notable for the style in which they declined to attend. When word came in early 2006 that the Pistols would be inducted, the band’s singer John Lydon, whose stage name was “Johnny Rotten,” faxed the Hall of Fame a handwritten note. “Next to the SEX-PISTOLS rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain,” wrote Lydon. “Your museum. Urine in wine. Were not coming. Were not your monkey and so what?” You can read the rest above, or watch below as a bemused Jann Wenner, co-founder of the museum, reads the letter out loud during the ceremony.