Back in 2002, Stanford University mathematics professor Robert Osserman chatted with comedian and banjo player extraordinaire Steve Martin in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. The event was called “Funny Numbers” and it was intended to deliver an off-kilter discussion on math. Boy did it deliver.
The first half of the discussion was loose and relaxed. Martin talked about his writing, banjos and his childhood interest in math. “In high school, I used to be able to make magic squares,” said Martin. “I like anything kind of ‘jumbly.’ I like anagrams. What else do I like? I like sex.”
Then Robin Williams, that manic ball of energy, showed up. As you can see from the five videos throughout this post, the night quickly spiraled into comic madness. They riffed on the Osbournes, Henry Kissinger, number theory, and physics. “Schrödinger, pick up your cat,” barks Williams at the end of a particularly inspired tear. “He’s alive. He’s dead. What a pet!”
When Martin and Williams read passages from Martin’s hit play, Picasso at the Lapin AgileWilliams read his part at different points as if he were Marlon Brando, Peter Lorre and Elmer Fudd. At another time, Williams and Martin riffed on the number zero. Williams, for once acting as the straight man, asked Osserman, “I have one quick question, up to the Crusades, the number zero didn’t exist, right? In Western civilization.” To which Martin bellowed, “That is a lie! How dare you imply that the number zero…oh, I think he’s right.”
The videos are weirdly glitchy, though the audio is just fine. And the comedy is completely hilarious and surprisingly thought provoking.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Isaac Asimov’s hugely influential science fiction classic The Foundation Trilogy will soon, it seems, become an HBO series, reaching the same audiences who were won over by the Game of Thrones adaptations. We can expect favorite character arcs to emerge, perhaps distorting the original narrative; we can expect plenty of internet memes and new ripples of influence through successive generations. In fact, if the series becomes a reality, and catches on the way most HBO shows do—either with a mass audience or a later devoted cult following—I think we can expect much renewed interest in the field of “psychohistory,” the futuristic science practiced by the novels’ hero Hari Seldon.
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This is no small thing. Foundation has inspired a great many science fiction writers, from Douglas Adams to George Lucas. But it has also guided the careers of people whose work has more immediate real-world consequences, like economist Paul Krugman and fervent advocate of positive psychology Martin Seligman. “The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece,” writes Krugman,” there has never been anything quite like it.” The fictional science of psychohistory inspired the experimental predictive techniques Seligman developed and described in his book Learned Optimism:
In his impossible-to-put-down Foundation Trilogy—I read it in one thirty-hour burst of adolescent excitement—Asimov invents a great hero for pimply, intellectual kids…. “Wow!” thought this impressionable adolescent…. That “Wow!” has stayed with me all my life.
If you’re thinking that the epic scale of Asimov’s sprawling trilogy—one he explicitly modeled after Edward Gibbon’s multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—will prove impossible to realize on the screen, you may be right. On the other hand, Asimov’s prose has lent itself particularly well to an older dramatic medium: the radio play. As we noted in an earlier post on a popular 1973 BBC adaptation of the trilogy, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card once described the books as “all talk, no action.” This may sound like a disparagement, except, Card went on to say, “Asimov’s talk is action.”
Today, we bring you several different radio adaptations of Asimov’s fiction, and you can hear the many ways his fascinating concepts, translated into equally fascinating, and yes, talky, fiction, have inspired writers, scientists, filmmakers, and “pimply, intellectual kids” alike for decades. At the top of the post, hear the entire, eight-hour BBC adaptation of Foundation from start to finish. You can also stream and download individual episodes on Spotify and at Youtube and the Internet Archive. Below it, we have classic sci-fi radio drama series Dimension X’s dramatizations of “Pebble in the Sky” and “Nightfall,” both from 1951.
Also hear two Asimov’s stories “The ‘C’ Chute” and “Hostess”—both produced by Dimension X successor X Minus One. These series, wrote Colin Marshall in a previous post, “showcase American culture at its mid-20th-century finest: forward-looking, temperamentally bold, technologically adept, and saturated with earnestness but for the occasional surprisingly knowing irony or bleak edge of darkness.”
Not to be outdone by these two programs, Mutual Broadcasting System created Exploring Tomorrow, a “science fiction show of science-fictioneers, by science-fictioneers and for science-fictioneers” that ran briefly from 1957 to 1958. Below, they adapt Asimov’s story “The Liar.”
These old-time radio dramas will certainly appeal to the nostalgia of people who were alive to hear them when they first aired. But while their production values will never come close to matching those of HBO, they offer something for younger listeners as well—an opportunity to get lost in Asimov’s complex ideas, and to engage the imagination in ways television doesn’t allow. Whether or not Foundation ever successfully makes it to the small screen, I would love to see Asimov’s fiction—in print, on the radio, on screen, or on the internet—continue to inspire new scientific and social visionaries for generations to come.
A generation grew up watching and re-watching Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Now, their fond memories of that musical fantasy—featuring not just Henson’s signature puppets but live actors like Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie—have got them trying to turn their own children on to the movie’s wonders. Some now regard Labyrinth as a goofy, flamboyant novelty suitable for no other audience but children, but that gives short shrift to the considerable craft that went into it. To get a sense of that, we need only take a look at Jim Henson’s Red Book.
Henson kept the Red Book, a kind of diary written one line at a time, until 1988, not long after Labyrinth’s release, and it captures intriguing details of the film’s production. On its site, the Jim Henson Company has supplemented the Red Book’s entries with other materials, such as the making-of clip above, which shows what went into the scene where “Bowie’s character Jareth taunts Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) as she tries to get to her brother Toby (Toby Froud) in an elaborate set inspired by the art of Dutch artist and illustrator M.C. Escher.”
Henson and his team wanted to bring into three dimensions “Escher’s images of seemingly impossible architecture where stairs seemed to lead both up and down at the same time. The inability of the viewer to recognize what is and is not real was a theme the permeated some of Jim’s experimental works in the 1960s and was explored at length in the film.” You can watch the still-convincing final product, in which Bowie sings the song “Within You” while stepping and leaping from one perspective-defying platform or stairway to another, just above. Special credit for pulling all this off goes to the film’s production designer Elliot Scott. But from which member of the team should we demand an explanation for, by far, the most bizarre visual aspect of Labyrinth — David Bowie’s hair?
Pity the man who has everything. Satisfaction is but fleeting.
One wonders if rock god Mick Jagger might know a thing or two about the condition. He doesn’t seem to know all that much about acting, as evidenced by his turn in The Nightingale episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series.
No matter. His artlessness is part of the charm. As the spoiled emperor of Cathay, he makes no effort to alter his Mockney accent. He also keeps his famous strut under wraps, weighted down by his royal robes (and top knot!).
The emperor demands an audience with a nightingale, after hearing tell of its song, but the toadies who comprise his court are too rarified to locate one in the forest.
A lowly kitchen maid (Barbara Hershey, on the brink of stardom) is the only one with the know how to deliver.
But the emperor is fickle — it isn’t long before his head is turned by a jewel encrusted, mechanics facsimile…a common enough rock n’ roll pitfall.
A large part of Faerie Tale Theater’s magic was the juxtaposition of high wattage stars and extremely low production budgets. There’s an element of student film to the proceedings. The videotape on which it was shot flattens rather than flatters. This is not a criticism. It makes me awfully fond of the big shots who agreed to participate.
In addition to Jagger and Hershey, look for Angelica Huston, Edward James Olmos, and Jagger’s then girlfriend, Jerry Hall, in smaller roles. There’s also Bud Cort of Harold and Maude, flapping around the sparsely decorated forest like a visitor from an entirely different story, nay, planet.
It’s less clear how the great observer of “the Modern Age” would’ve responded to the proliferation of Mommy bloggers.
Their sheer numbers suggest that perhaps female writers do not need a “room of one’s own” (though presumably all of them would be in favor of such a development.)
Ergo, it’s possible for the general public to know of her, without knowing much of anything about her and her work. (Find her major works on our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books).
The latest animated installment in The School of Life humanities series seeks to remedy that situation in ten minutes with the video above, which offers insight into her place in both the Western canon and the ever-glamorous Bloomsbury Group, and celebrates her as a keen observer of life’s daily routine. And that by-now-familiar cut-out animation style takes full advantage of the author’s best known head shots.
If you’re from a fading rock n roll generation, here’s maybe a way to make peace with today’s pop music scene. Just take Taylor Swift hits and hear them sung in the style of The Velvet Underground.
From the Future Of StoryTelling video series comes an animation featuring Margaret Atwood meditating on how technology shapes the way we tell stories. Just like the Gutenberg Press did almost 600 years ago, the recent advent of digital platforms (the internet, ebooks, etc.) has created new ways for us to tell, distribute and share stories. And Atwood hasn’t been afraid to explore it all, writing stories on Wattpad and Twitter. Atwood will appear at The Future of Storytelling Summit on October 7 and 8.
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Many of us keep a record of the movies we watch. Few of us, however, lead the free world. As the reliable sales numbers of presidential biographies (no matter how thick) attest, the actions of the President of the United States of America, no matter who that President may be and no matter what sort of actions that President takes, always draw interest. For instance, you may have seen that Paleofuture’s Matt Novak recently went through Jimmy Carter’s diaries to draw up a list of every single movie Carter watched during his Presidency.
“Part of my fascination with the movies that presidents watch is just cheap voyeurism,” Novak writes. “But the other part is an earnest belief that popular culture influences things in the real world. President Nixon was obsessed with the film Patton during the Vietnam War. President Reagan urged Congress to take computer security seriously after seeing War Games in 1983.” And you can learn what else they watched by pulling up What Nixon Saw and When He Saw It by Nixon at the Movies author Mark Feeney, and the list of films Mr. and Mrs. Reagan viewed from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Nixon watched several depictions of hard-bitten heroes (and antiheroes) toughing out their troubles: not just Patton, but Bullitt, True Grit, Ice Station Zebra, Our Man in Havana, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Spartacus, and Lawrence of Arabia— with the occasional Paint Your Wagon or Auntie Mame thrown in there as well. Carter hewed a bit closer to the overall American cinematic zeitgeist, watching such era-defining films as Rocky, Network, Star Wars, Airport ’77, Annie Hall, Animal House, The Last Picture Show, Apocalypse Now, Alien, and 10.
Reagan, famously a film actor himself, watched all sorts movies, though his list shows a certain preference for military-themed spectacles like Gallipoli, Inchon, Das Boot, Firefox, Red Dawn, Iron Eagle, and Top Gun, as well as sports pictures like Breaking Away, The Winning Team, and even Knute Rockne, All American, in which he himself portrayed football player George Gipp, a role that anointed him with the nickname that would stick until the end.
The Freedom of Information act assures us that we’ll have the chance to study the in-office viewing habits of many presidents to come. Novak, in fact, has already put in a request for the lists from George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush: “They said I can expect the list in 46 months.” Well, the wheels of government do grind slowly, after all — we’ve learned that from the movies.
Below you can find a list of the first 10 films each president watched upon taking office. The difference in their cultural sensibilities immediately leaps out.
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