37 Hitchcock Cameo Appearances Over 50 Years: All in One Video

Ear­ly in his career, Alfred Hitch­cock began mak­ing small appear­ances in his own films. The cameos some­times last­ed just a few brief sec­onds, and some­times a lit­tle while longer. Either way, they became a sig­na­ture of Hitch­cock­’s film­mak­ing, and fans made a sport of see­ing whether they could spot the elu­sive direc­tor. From 1927 to 1976, Hitch­cock made 37 appear­ances in total, and they’re all nice­ly cat­a­logued in the clip above. Enjoy!

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Alfred Hitchcock’s Strict Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho in The­aters (1960)

Alfred Hitch­cock Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Sus­pense & Sur­prise: Give the Audi­ence Some Infor­ma­tion & Leave the Rest to Their Imag­i­na­tion

How Edward Hopper’s Paint­ings Inspired the Creepy Sus­pense of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Win­dow

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound

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Sex and Alcohol in Medieval Times: A Look into the Pleasures of the Middle Ages

Play­ing video games, road-trip­ping across Amer­i­ca, binge-lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, chat­ting with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: these are a few of our mod­ern plea­sures not just unknown to, but unimag­in­able by, human­i­ty in the Mid­dle Ages. Yet medieval peo­ple were, after all, peo­ple, and as Ter­ence put it more than a mil­len­ni­um before their time, humani nil a me alienum puto. For us mod­erns, it’s a com­mon blun­der to regard dis­tant eras through the lens of our own stan­dards and expec­ta­tions, which pre­vents us from tru­ly under­stand­ing how our lis­ten­ers lived and thought. But per­haps we can begin from a con­sid­er­able patch of com­mon ground: medievals, too, liked their sex and booze.

Such are the points empha­sized by medieval his­to­ri­an Eleanor Jane­ga in these episodes of His­to­ry Hit, which exam­ine the more-than-age-old enjoy­ments in which peo­ple indulged between antiq­ui­ty and moder­ni­ty. Our received image of Europe in the Mid­dle Ages may be one of Church-dom­i­nat­ed, dankly plea­sure-free soci­eties, but Jane­ga and his­to­ri­an of sex­u­al­i­ty Kate Lis­ter point out that, strict though the reli­gious dic­tates may have been about sex­u­al activ­i­ty and oth­er mat­ters besides, many sim­ply ignored them. (And though they may have lacked access to dai­ly hot show­ers, we can rest assured that they were much more con­cerned with how they smelled than we might imag­ine.) In any case, repro­duc­tion was one thing, and court­ly love — or indeed com­mer­cial love — quite anoth­er.

As Bil­ly Crys­tal famous­ly joked, “Women need a rea­son to have sex. Men just need a place.” In the Mid­dle Ages, the place was often a prob­lem for women as well as men, but also for nobles as well as com­mon­ers (though some roy­al­ty did enjoy the ben­e­fit of a cur­tain around their four-poster bed, which afford­ed at least the illu­sion of pri­va­cy). It seems to have been much eas­i­er to find some­where to drink, accord­ing to Jane­ga’s episode about alco­hol. In it, she vis­its a fine exam­ple of “the hum­ble pub,” where even medieval Brits would go to drink their ale, beer not yet hav­ing been invent­ed — and to tell their sto­ries, a prac­tice that would become so deeply ingrained in the cul­ture as to pro­vide a for­mal foun­da­tion for the Can­ter­bury Tales. Even if Chaucer, as a pub-own­er inter­vie­wee reminds us, invent­ed Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture as we know it, we should bear in mind that sex hard­ly began with Wife of Bath.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: His­to­ri­ans Look at How Peo­ple Got It On in the Dark Ages

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lecture Series (1975)

His­to­ry seems to have set­tled Buck­min­ster Fuller’s rep­u­ta­tion as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, wit­ty pop­u­lar videos like YouTu­ber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongo­ing lega­cy of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work con­tin­ue to influ­ence new gen­er­a­tions of design­ers, archi­tects, sci­en­tists and artists work­ing to cre­ate a sus­tain­able plan­et.”

Bril­liant futur­ist though he was, Fuller might also be called the man who saw the present and the past—as much as a sin­gle indi­vid­ual could seem­ing­ly hold in their mind at once. He was “a man who is intense­ly inter­est­ed in almost every­thing,” wrote Calvin Tomkins at The New York­er in 1965, the year of Fuller’s 70th birth­day. Fuller was as eager to pass on as much knowl­edge as he could col­lect in his long, pro­duc­tive career, span­ning his ear­ly epipha­nies in the 1920s to his final pub­lic talks in the ear­ly 80s.

“The some­what over­whelm­ing effect of a Fuller mono­logue,” wrote Tomkins, “is well known today in many parts of the world.” His lec­tures leapt from sub­ject to sub­ject, incor­po­rat­ing ancient and mod­ern his­to­ry, math­e­mat­ics, lin­guis­tics, archi­tec­ture, archae­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, and—in the exam­ple Tomkins gives—“irrefutable data on tides, pre­vail­ing winds,” and “boat design.” His dis­cours­es issue forth in wave after wave of infor­ma­tion.

Fuller could talk at length and with author­i­ty about vir­tu­al­ly anything—especially about him­self and his own work, in his own spe­cial jar­gon of “unique Bucky-isms: spe­cial phras­es, ter­mi­nol­o­gy, unusu­al sen­tence struc­tures, etc.,” writes BFI. He may not always have been par­tic­u­lar­ly hum­ble, yet he spoke and wrote with a lack of prej­u­dice and an open curios­i­ty and that is the oppo­site of arro­gance. Such is the impres­sion we get of Fuller in the series of talks he record­ed ten years after Tomkin’s New York­er por­trait.

Made in Jan­u­ary of 1975, Buck­min­ster Fuller: Every­thing I Know cap­tured Fuller’s “entire life’s work” in 42 hours of “think­ing out loud lec­tures [that exam­ine] in depth all of Fuller’s major inven­tions and dis­cov­er­ies from the 1927 Dymax­ion car, house, car and bath­room, through the Wichi­ta House, geo­des­ic domes, and tenseg­ri­ty struc­tures, as well as the con­tents of Syn­er­get­ics. Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal in parts, Fuller recounts his own per­son­al his­to­ry in the con­text of the his­to­ry of sci­ence and indus­tri­al­iza­tion.”

He begins, how­ev­er, in his first lec­ture at the top, not with him­self, but with his pri­ma­ry sub­ject of con­cern: “all human­i­ty,” a species that begins always in naked­ness and igno­rance and man­ages to fig­ure it out “entire­ly by tri­al and error,” he says. Fuller mar­vels at the advances of “ear­ly Hin­du and Chi­nese” civilizations—as he had at the Maori in Tomkin’s anec­dote, who “had been among the first peo­ples to dis­cov­er the prin­ci­ples of celes­tial nav­i­ga­tion” and “found a way of sail­ing around the world… at least ten thou­sand years ago.”

The leap from ancient civ­i­liza­tions to “what is called World War I” is “just a lit­tle jump in infor­ma­tion,” he says in his first lec­ture, but when Fuller comes to his own life­time, he shows how many “lit­tle jumps” one human being could wit­ness in a life­time in the 20th cen­tu­ry. “The year I was born Mar­coni invent­ed the wire­less,” says Fuller. “When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole.”

When Fuller was 7, “the Wright broth­ers sud­den­ly flew,” he says, “and my mem­o­ry is vivid enough of sev­en to remem­ber that for about a year the engi­neer­ing soci­eties were try­ing to prove it was a hoax because it was absolute­ly impos­si­ble for man to do that.” What it showed young Bucky Fuller was that “impos­si­bles are hap­pen­ing.” If Fuller was a vision­ary, he rede­fined the word—as a term for those with an expan­sive, infi­nite­ly curi­ous vision of a pos­si­ble world that already exists all around us.

See Fuller’s com­plete lec­ture series, Every­thing I Know, at the Inter­net Archive, and read edit­ed tran­scripts of his talks at the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute.

Every­thing I Know will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Buck­min­ster Fuller Doc­u­ment­ed His Life Every 15 Min­utes, from 1920 Until 1983

Buck­min­ster Fuller, Isaac Asi­mov & Oth­er Futur­ists Make Pre­dic­tions About the 21st Cen­tu­ry in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

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

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Meet Madame Inès Decourcelle, One of the Very First Female Taxi Drivers in Paris (Circa 1908)

If you can read this, you almost cer­tain­ly know the French word for a pro­fes­sion­al auto­mo­bile dri­ver. That’s because we use the same word in Eng­lish: chauf­feur. French nouns, unlike Eng­lish ones, come in mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine vari­eties, and that -eur end­ing unmis­tak­ably indi­cates one of the for­mer. What, then, to call a woman who works behind the wheel? Chauf­feuse would be the nat­ur­al option, if it did­n’t already refer to a kind of fire­side lounge chair. One could also fem­i­nize cocher, anoth­er word for dri­ver, but cochère, too, is already tak­en by an arched entry­way (which archi­tec­tur­al detail, notably, meets the vehic­u­lar realm in the form of the porte-cochère).

As often, the dif­fi­cul­ty of pin­ning down the right term here reflects the scarci­ty of the under­ly­ing con­cept. In much of the world today, dri­ving isn’t con­sid­ered the most fem­i­nine of occu­pa­tions. That was even truer in the Paris of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when the first woman to get her taxi license made his­to­ry — or rather, when the first women to get their taxi licens­es made his­to­ry. A 1908 dis­patch from the Motor-Car Jour­nal’s Paris cor­re­spon­dent describes a cer­tain Made­moi­selle Gaby Pohlen as hav­ing “obtained her dri­ver’s license to dri­ve a motor taxi­cab from the Pre­fec­ture of Police.” Even at the time of writ­ing, “her exam­ple has already been fol­lowed by Madame Decour­celle.”

Accord­ing to Jeroen Booij at PreWarCar.com, how­ev­er, “three ladies sup­pos­ed­ly began an appren­tice­ship in 1906 to dri­ve a motor­ized car­riage in the City of Light. A lady named Madame Dufaut-Charnier sup­pos­ed­ly got her degree as ear­ly as Feb­ru­ary 1907.” But Madame Inès Decour­celle “is believed to be the first to receive her full taxi licence in April 1908, mak­ing her the first woman in his­to­ry to dri­ve a taxi in the streets of Paris. The fact is that she became the sub­ject of a num­ber of dai­ly news­pa­per arti­cles claim­ing this, as she was seen on so many post­cards from Paris nam­ing her the first ‘femme chauf­feur.’ ” After see­ing one such sto­ry in Le Jour­nal, anoth­er woman “wrote to the paper in a par­tic­u­lar­ly irri­tat­ed way, claim­ing that not Madame Decour­celle but she, Made­moi­selle Gaby Pohlen, earned the title,” hav­ing start­ed dri­ving back in 1906.

The com­menters at PreWarCar.com have put some thought toward clar­i­fy­ing the mat­ter. Giv­en the era, when the auto­mo­bile itself was still a nov­el­ty, one of them sus­pects con­fu­sion about “whether all those named were licensed horse-drawn or motor cab dri­vers,” explain­ing that Pohlen and Decour­celles “both report­ed­ly obtained licens­es to dri­ve motor taxi-cabs in spring 1908.” While the pho­to­genic and some­what eccen­tric Pohlen may have start­ed out first, “Mme. Decour­celles’ claim to fame was that she was the first to get “diplo­mas” as both a horse ‘cochère’ and a motor ‘chauf­feuse.’ ” This, anoth­er com­menter adds, was “an incred­i­ble achieve­ment at the time,” no mat­ter which word — or words — the Académie Française approves to describe it.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

Take a Vir­tu­al Dri­ve through Lon­don, Tokyo, Los Ange­les & 45 Oth­er World Cities

Robert De Niro’s Taxi Cab License Used to Pre­pare for Taxi Dri­ver (1976)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When the Grateful Dead Played at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978)

In Sep­tem­ber of 1978, the Grate­ful Dead trav­eled to Egypt and played three shows at the Great Pyra­mid of Giza, with the Great Sphinx look­ing over their shoul­ders. It was­n’t the first time a rock band played in an ancient set­ting. Pink Floyd per­formed songs in the mid­dle of the Amphithe­atre of Pom­peii in Octo­ber 1971. But Floyd per­formed to an “emp­ty” house, play­ing to no live fans, only ghosts. (Watch footage here.) The Dead­’s shows, on the oth­er hand, were real gigs, attend­ed by Dead­heads who made the jour­ney over, and they could thank Phil Lesh for putting it all in motion. Lesh lat­er said, “it sort of became my project because I was one of the first peo­ple in the band who was on the trip of play­ing at places of pow­er. You know, pow­er that’s been pre­served from the ancient world. The pyra­mids are like the obvi­ous num­ber one choice because no mat­ter what any­one thinks they might be, there is def­i­nite­ly some kind of mojo about the pyra­mids.”

Logis­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, the con­certs weren’t the eas­i­est to stage. Rolling Stone report­ed that an “equip­ment truck got stuck in sand and had to be towed by camels.” Because the elec­tric­i­ty in Egypt was an “a winkin’, blinkin’ affair,” Bob Weir lat­er recalled, the jet­lagged band had dif­fi­cul­ties record­ing the first of the three shows. But, as with most adven­tures, the incon­ve­niences were off­set by the won­drous nature of the expe­ri­ence.

Weir cap­tured it well when he said: “I got to a point where the head of the Sphinx was lined up with the top of the Great Pyra­mid, all lit up. All of a sud­den, I went to this time­less place. The sounds from the stage — they could have been from any time. It was as if I went into eter­ni­ty.” The Sphinx and Great Pyra­mid date back to rough­ly 2560 BC.

The Dead were joined on this trip by the coun­ter­cul­ture author Ken Kesey (not to men­tion Bill Gra­ham and Bill Wal­ton) who appar­ent­ly cap­tured footage on Super‑8 reels. (Watch it above.) Kesey him­self lat­er tried to explain the sym­bol­ism of the vis­it, say­ing: “The peo­ple who were there rec­og­nized this as a respect­ful and holy event that went back to some­thing we can all just bare­ly glimpse, them and us both. Our rela­tion­ship to ancient humans. To this place on the plan­et. To the plan­et’s place in the uni­verse. All that cos­mic stuff is what the Dead are based on. The Egyp­tians could under­stand that.”

At the very top of the post, you can see the Dead per­form­ing “Ollin Arageed,” with Egypt­ian oud­ist Hamza el-Din and oth­er local musi­cians, before segu­ing into “Fire on the Moun­tain.” The clip gives you a good feel for the awe-inspir­ing scene. Just above, we have a longer playlist of per­for­mances that took place on Sep­tem­ber 16, 1978 — the same night there was a lunar eclipse. The com­plete 9/16/78 show can be streamed on Archive.org, as can the shows from 9/14 and 9/15. A 2CD/1 DVD pack­age (Rock­ing the Cra­dle: Egypt 1978) cap­tures the Dead­’s vis­it and can be pur­chased online.

To get more on the Pyra­mid con­certs, read Chap­ter 43 of Den­nis McNal­ly’s book, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside His­to­ry of the Grate­ful Dead. And here you can see Dead & Co’s homage to the Egypt adven­ture at the Sphere in Vegas. Enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pom­peii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Louis Arm­strong Plays Trum­pet at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids; Dizzy Gille­spie Charms a Snake in Pak­istan

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

Who Built the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids & How Did They Do It?: New Arche­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Busts Ancient Myths

Isaac New­ton The­o­rized That the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Revealed the Tim­ing of the Apoc­a­lypse: See His Burnt Man­u­script from the 1680s

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The Page That Changed Comics Forever: Discover the Innovative 1950s Comic Book That Almost Went Unpublished

If you grew up read­ing Amer­i­can com­ic books dur­ing the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, you’ll be famil­iar with the seal of the Comics Code Author­i­ty. I remem­ber see­ing it stamped onto the upper-right cor­ner of issues of titles from The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man to reprints of Carl Barks’ Scrooge McDuck sto­ries to Jug­head Dou­ble Digest, but I can’t say I paid it much mind at the time. This was in the nine­teen-nineties, by which time the Comics Code itself has lost much of its force. But back when it was cre­at­ed, in 1954, it had as much restric­tive pow­er over the con­tent of com­ic books as the “Hays Code” once had over motion pic­tures.

Accord­ing to the video from Youtu­ber matttt above, the Comics Code was imple­ment­ed in response to one pub­lish­er above all: EC Comics, whose grim and graph­ic titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Hor­ror made both a big impact on pop­u­lar cul­ture and a dent in the rep­u­ta­tion of the comics indus­try. Clos­ing ranks, that indus­try formed the Comics Code Author­i­ty to enforce a regime of self-cen­sor­ship, man­gling EC in its gears just as it was about to pub­lish one of the most inno­v­a­tive sto­ries in its form: “Mas­ter Race,” the tale of an ex-SS offi­cer in mod­ern-day New York, by an artist named Bernard Krig­stein.

At its height, EC was a ver­i­ta­ble comics fac­to­ry, with a set of pro­ce­dures in place that ensured the effi­cient pro­duc­tion of cheap thrills — often at con­sid­er­able cost to the poten­tial of the medi­um. Krig­stein, who’d always har­bored high­er artis­tic aspi­ra­tions, chafed at these lim­i­ta­tions, find­ing such workarounds as sub­di­vid­ing rigid­ly defined pan­el spaces into sets of sequen­tial images, the bet­ter to con­vey move­ment and action. Nowhere did this tech­nique prove more effec­tive than in “Mas­ter Race,” with its prac­ti­cal­ly cin­e­mat­ic tour de force sequence in which the haunt­ed Carl Reiss­man slips under the wheels of a pass­ing sub­way train.

Qual­i­ty takes time, and Krig­stein missed the sto­ry’s dead­line just before the Comics Code went into force. “Mas­ter Race” was pub­lished a few months lat­er, albeit in one of EC’s new, san­i­tized, and thus much less pop­u­lar titles. The meth­ods of visu­al sto­ry­telling he refined have now become stan­dard ele­ments of com­ic art, but the medi­um’s enthu­si­asts can sense how far Krig­stein could have gone, if not for the frus­tra­tion that ulti­mate­ly caused him to aban­don comics for a career as a high-school teacher: “Some­thing tremen­dous could have been done,” he said, “if only they’d let me do it.” With the Comics Code long since defunct — and now that EC’s most dis­turb­ing comics look tame — con­tent has become a free-for-all. But what artist dares to be as bold as Krig­stein in push­ing for­ward the form?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

1950s Pulp Com­ic Adap­ta­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries Get­ting Repub­lished

Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influ­en­tial Com­ic Strips

How Art Spiegel­man Designs Com­ic Books: A Break­down of His Mas­ter­piece, Maus

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Great­est Com­ic Strip of All Time, Gets Dig­i­tized as Ear­ly Install­ments Enter the Pub­lic Domain

“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Pho­to Satir­i­cal­ly Mocks Every Vice & Sin Cen­sored by the Hays Movie Cen­sor­ship Code

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson Debated Capitalism Versus Marxism

Karl Marx was a Ger­man philoso­pher-his­to­ri­an (with a few oth­er pur­suits besides) who wrote in pur­suit of an under­stand­ing of indus­tri­al soci­ety as he knew it in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and what its future evo­lu­tion held in store. There are good rea­sons to read his work still today, espe­cial­ly if you have an inter­est in the his­to­ry of eco­nom­ic and soci­o­log­i­cal the­o­ry, or in the time and places he lived. But in the almost cen­tu­ry-and-a-half since his death — and more so dur­ing the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, dur­ing which the osten­si­bly Marx­ist project of the Sovi­et Union rose and fell — he’s turned from a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure into an icon­ic specter, rep­re­sent­ing either pen­e­trat­ing insight into or cat­a­stroph­ic delu­sion about the orga­ni­za­tion of human soci­ety.

It was sure­ly Marx’s ten­den­cy to inflame strong opin­ions that got him placed at the cen­ter of a debate between the psychologist/cultural com­men­ta­tor Jor­dan Peter­son and the philosopher/cultural the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek. The event took place in 2019, at Toron­to’s Sony Cen­ter, billed as a clash of the titans on the sub­ject of “Hap­pi­ness: Cap­i­tal­ism vs. Marx­ism.”

In fact, it end­ed up cov­er­ing a wide range of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry issues, with each of the two unortho­dox, high­ly rec­og­niz­able pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als giv­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic per­for­mances on the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies of the day. Yet they aren’t as opposed as one might have imag­ined: “I can­not but notice the irony of how Peter­son and I, the par­tic­i­pants in this duel of the cen­tu­ry, are both mar­gin­al­ized by the offi­cial aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty,” Žižek remarks ear­ly on.

Indeed, writes the Guardian’s Stephen Marche, “the great sur­prise of this debate turned out to be how much in com­mon the old-school Marx­ist and the Cana­di­an iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics refusenik had. One hat­ed com­mu­nism. The oth­er hat­ed com­mu­nism but thought that cap­i­tal­ism pos­sessed inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions. The first one agreed that cap­i­tal­ism pos­sessed inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions.” Nev­er­the­less, as in many a debate, the sur­pris­ing com­mon ground is more inter­est­ing than the pre­dictable points of con­flict, espe­cial­ly on themes broad­er than any set of ‑isms. “My basic dog­ma is, hap­pi­ness should be treat­ed as a nec­es­sary by-prod­uct,” says Žižek. “If you focus on it, you are lost.” To this propo­si­tion Peter­son lat­er gives his hearty assent. As for what, exact­ly, to focus on instead of hap­pi­ness… well, that’s a mat­ter of debate.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Calls Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness a Form of “Mod­ern Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

Karl Marx & the Flaws of Cap­i­tal­ism: Lex Frid­man Talks with Pro­fes­sor Richard Wolff

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chom­sky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empir­i­cal­ly Wrong’

Mil­ton Fried­man & John Ken­neth Galbraith’s Present Their Oppos­ing Eco­nom­ic Philoso­phies on Two TV Series (1977–1980)

An AI Gen­er­at­ed, Nev­er-End­ing Dis­cus­sion Between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Cramps Play a Mental Health Hospital in Napa, California in 1978: The Punkest of Punk Concerts

“We’re The Cramps, and we’re from New York City, and we drove 3,000 miles to play for you peo­ple.” So begins one of the odd­est but also the punk­est of punk rock con­certs in his­to­ry, as The Cramps play for a crowd at a state men­tal hos­pi­tal in Napa, Cal­i­for­nia. The date was June 13, 1978, a time when Napa was more known for the hos­pi­tal than for its bur­geon­ing wine indus­try.

Lead vocal­ist Lux Inte­ri­or made this intro­duc­tion after the first num­ber, “Mys­tery Plane.” The band played on a patio, sev­er­al steps above the court­yard at the insti­tu­tion, while the band’s friends hung out with the 100 or so patients in atten­dance.

“And some­body told me you peo­ple are crazy, but I’m not so sure about that,” Lux con­tin­ues in the video. “You seem to be all right to me.” Indeed, most every­body seems to be hav­ing a hell of a time, some danc­ing as if they’re at a sock hop, oth­ers just com­plete­ly thrash­ing about.

This wasn’t the first band to have played at the insti­tu­tion, as the hospital’s Bart Swain, who invit­ed The Cramps to Napa, often brought in musi­cians to expand the patients’ hori­zons. But on that night a video cam­era was also brought along to record the set. (Swain wor­ried about pre­serv­ing the anonymi­ty of the res­i­dents.)

Anoth­er band on the bill, The Mutants, did­n’t get video­taped, pos­si­bly because the sun had gone down around this time. Either way, it is a very rare slice of punk his­to­ry, with few com­par­isons apart from the Sex Pis­tols play­ing Chelms­ford prison and when a lit­tle known thrash met­al band called Gob­stop­per played a Christ­mas par­ty at a home for devel­op­men­tal­ly dis­abled kids and adults.

Accord­ing to this arti­cle on the event, Napa State still stands but the chances of such a con­cert hap­pen­ing again are slim. The major­i­ty of its ten­ants are now both vio­lent offend­ers and men­tal­ly unsta­ble, too dan­ger­ous a venue for any­body to play, no mat­ter how punk.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

When the Sex Pis­tols Played at the Chelms­ford Top Secu­ri­ty Prison: Hear Vin­tage Tracks from the 1976 Gig

75 Post-Punk and Hard­core Con­certs from the 1980s Have Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Fugazi, GWAR, Lemon­heads, Dain Bra­m­age (with Dave Grohl) & More

The Sex Pis­tols Do Dal­las: A Strange Con­cert from the Strangest Tour in His­to­ry (Jan­u­ary 10, 1978)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.