The Little Prince: Footage Gets Unearthed Of the Pop Star at Age 11

in History, Music, Television | April 5th, 2022

Prince left us a vast body of work, with much rumored still to be await­ing release in his vault. But among his many albums already avail­able, I still hold in espe­cial­ly high regard For You, the debut he record­ed while still a teenag­er. Not only did he put out this first LP at an unusu­al­ly young age, he pro­duced it and played near­ly all its instru­ments. Though Prince seemed to have emerged into the world as a ful­ly formed pop-music genius, he had to come from some­where. Indeed, he came from Min­neapo­lis, a city with which he remained asso­ci­at­ed all his life. Now, near­ly six years after his death, a Min­neapo­lis tele­vi­sion sta­tion has dis­cov­ered a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown arti­fact of the Pur­ple One’s ado­les­cence.

In April 1970 the teach­ers of Min­neapo­lis’ pub­lic schools went on strike, and a reporter on the scene asked a crowd of near­by school­child­ren whether they were in favor of the pick­et­ing. “Yup,” replies a par­tic­u­lar­ly small one who’d been jump­ing to catch the cam­er­a’s atten­tion. “I think they should get a bet­ter edu­ca­tion, too.”

Not only that, “they should get some more mon­ey ’cause they be workin’ extra hours for us and all that stuff.” None of this was audi­ble to the pro­duc­er at WCCO TV, a Min­neapo­lis-native Prince fan, who’d brought the half-cen­tu­ry-old footage out of the archive in order to con­tex­tu­al­ize anoth­er teach­ers strike just last month. But in the young inter­vie­wee’s face and man­ner­isms he saw not just a local boy, but one par­tic­u­lar local boy made enor­mous­ly good.

No one who’s seen Prince in action ear­ly in his career could fail to rec­og­nize him in this long-unseen footage. But it took more than fans to con­firm his iden­ti­ty, as you can see in the WCCO news broad­cast and behind-the-scenes seg­ment here. A local Prince his­to­ri­an could pro­vide high­ly sim­i­lar pho­tographs of the star-to-be in the same year, when he would have been eleven. Even­tu­al­ly the inves­ti­ga­tion turned up a child­hood neigh­bor and for­mer band­mate named Ter­ry Jack­son, who watch­es the clip and breaks at once into laugh­ter and tears of recog­ni­tion. “That’s Skip­per!” Jack­son cries, using the nick­name by which his fam­i­ly and friends once knew him. “I nev­er referred to him as Prince. He might even have got mad at me when he got famous.” Ascend to the pan­theon of pop music, it seems, and you still can’t quite make it out of the old neigh­bor­hood.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read Prince’s First Inter­view, Print­ed in His High School News­pa­per (1976)

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

The Life of Prince in a 24-Page Com­ic Book: A New Release

Aca­d­e­m­ic Jour­nal Devotes an Entire Issue to Prince’s Life & Music: Read and Down­load It for Free

Watch Prince Per­form “Pur­ple Rain” in the Rain in His Tran­scen­dent Super Bowl Half-Time Show (2007)

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.

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How To Build a 13th-Century Castle, Using Only Authentic Medieval Tools & Techniques

in Architecture, History, Television | March 31st, 2022

It’s the rare Eng­lish­man who will read­i­ly defer to a French­man — except, of course, in the field of cas­tle-build­ing. This was true after the Nor­man Con­quest of 1066, which intro­duced French cas­tles to Britain, and it remains so today, espe­cial­ly under the demands of peri­od accu­ra­cy. In order to learn first-hand just what mate­ri­als and tech­ni­cal skills went into those might­i­est struc­tures of the Mid­dle Ages, the BBC Two series Secrets of the Cas­tle had to go all the way to Bur­gundy. There Château de Guéde­lon has been under con­struc­tion for the past 25 years, with its builders adher­ing as close­ly as pos­si­ble to the way they would have done the job back in the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, the “gold­en age of cas­tle-build­ing.”

Host­ed by his­to­ri­an Ruth Good­man along with archae­ol­o­gists Peter Ginn and Tom Pin­fold, Secrets of the Cas­tle com­pris­es five episodes that cov­er a vari­ety of aspects of the medieval cas­tle: its tools, its defense, its archi­tec­ture, its stone­ma­son­ry, and its con­nec­tions to the rest of the world.

The work of “exper­i­men­tal archae­ol­o­gy” that is Guéde­lon demands mas­tery of near­ly mil­len­nia-old build­ing meth­ods, the sim­ple inge­nious­ness of some of which remains impres­sive today. So, in our increas­ing­ly dis­em­bod­ied age, does their sheer phys­i­cal­i­ty of it all: apart from the hors­es cart­ing stone in from the quar­ry (itself a strong deter­mi­nant in the sit­ing of a cas­tle), every­thing was accom­plished with sheer human mus­cle.

Much of that man­pow­er was lever­aged with machines, often elab­o­rate and some­times amus­ing: take, for exam­ple, the pair of human-sized ham­ster wheels in which Gill and Pin­fold run in order to oper­ate a crane. Such a hard day’s work can only be fueled by a hearty meal, and so Good­man learns how to cook a sim­ple veg­etable stew. Same with how to clean and indeed craft the cook­ing pots need­ed to do so. For a cas­tle was­n’t just a for­ti­fied sym­bol of a king­dom’s strength, but a place where all man­ner of life went on, as well as a stone embod­i­ment of human knowl­edge in the Mid­dle Ages. Secrets of the Cas­tle orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2014, and since then a great deal more peri­od-accu­rate work has gone into Guéde­lon. Sched­uled for com­ple­tion next year, the cas­tle will pre­sum­ably — as long as the skills of its builders prove equal to those of their fore­bears — still be stand­ing in the 29th cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Time-Lapse Recre­ation of the Build­ing of Notre Dame (1160)

An Ani­mat­ed Video Shows the Build­ing of a Medieval Bridge: 45 Years of Con­struc­tion in 3 Min­utes

What Did Peo­ple Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cook­book Explain

A 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cook­book Fea­tur­ing 475 Recipes from Moor­ish Spain Gets Pub­lished in a New Trans­lat­ed Edi­tion

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Cen­turies: Watch the Very Painstak­ing Process Get Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Recre­at­ed

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

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.

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Watch David Hockney Paint with Light, Using the Quantel Paintbox Graphics System (1986)

in Art, Technology, Television | March 24th, 2022

Think of the tele­vi­sion graph­ics you remem­ber from the nine­teen-eight­ies — or, per­haps more like­ly, the nine­teen-eight­ies tele­vi­sion graph­ics you’ve seen late­ly on Youtube. Much of it looks cheesy today, but some exam­ples have become appeal­ing­ly retro over the decades, and cer­tain works remain gen­uine­ly impres­sive as pieces of dig­i­tal art. Nowa­days we can, in the­o­ry, repli­cate and even out­do the finest TV imagery of the eight­ies on our com­put­ers, or even our phones. But in the days before high-pow­ered per­son­al com­put­ing, let alone smart­phones, how did such bril­liant­ly col­ored, ener­get­i­cal­ly ani­mat­ed, and some­times gen­uine­ly artis­tic graph­ics get made? The answer, nine times out of ten, was on the Quan­tel Paint­box.

Intro­duced in 1981, the Paint­box was a cus­tom-designed dig­i­tal graph­ic work­sta­tion that cost about $250,000 USD, or more than $623,000 today. To major tele­vi­sion sta­tions and net­works that mon­ey was well spent, buy­ing as it did the unprece­dent­ed­ly fast pro­duc­tion of images and ani­ma­tions for broad­cast. ”It used to be that we had a staff of artists who drew and drew,” the New York Times quotes ABC’s direc­tor of pro­duc­tion devel­op­ment as say­ing in an arti­cle on graph­ics for the 1984 Olympics.

“But with the Paint­box an artist can come up with a graph­ic in fif­teen min­utes that used to take two days.” Its capa­bil­i­ties did much to influ­ence the look and feel of that decade, for bet­ter or for worse: look­ing back, design­er Steven Heller rues its prop­a­ga­tion of “shad­ow-rid­den, faux-hand­made eight­ies aes­thet­ics.”

As a cut­ting-edge piece of hard­ware, the Paint­box was beyond the reach of most artists, due not just to its cost but also the con­sid­er­able kn0w-how required to use it. (Skilled “oper­a­tors,” as they were called, could in the eight­ies com­mand a wage of $500 per hour.) But for David Hock­ney, who was already famous, suc­cess­ful, and known for his inter­est in bright col­ors as well as new tech­nol­o­gy, the chance came in 1986 when the BBC invit­ed him to par­tic­i­pate in a tele­vi­sion series called Paint­ing with Light.  A show­case for the cre­ative poten­tial of the Paint­box, it also brought on such lumi­nar­ies as col­lage artist Richard Hamil­ton and “grand­fa­ther of Pop Art” Lar­ry Rivers, sit­ting them down at the work­sta­tion and film­ing as they exper­i­ment­ed with its pos­si­bil­i­ties.

“You’re not draw­ing on a piece of paper,” Hock­ney explains in his episode. “You’re draw­ing, actu­al­ly, direct­ly onto this TV screen where you’re see­ing it now.” By now we’ve all done the same in one way or anoth­er, but in the eight­ies the con­cept was nov­el enough to be hard to artic­u­late. Hock­ney empha­sizes that the Paint­box pro­duces “hon­est” images, in that the elec­tron­ic medi­um in which the artist works is the very same medi­um through which the view­er per­ceives that work. The eager­ness with which he takes up its ground­break­ing pres­sure-sen­si­tive sty­lus (“a bit like a kind of old-fash­ioned ball­point pen”), some­times with a cig­a­rette in the oth­er hand, shows that Hock­ney’s pen­chant for draw­ing on the iPhone and iPad over the past decade or so is hard­ly an iso­lat­ed late-career lark. Even in 1986 he under­stood what you could do with dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, and could also sense one of its prime dan­gers: you’re nev­er sure when to stop doing it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Hockney’s iPad Art Goes on Dis­play

David Hock­ney Shows Us His Sketch Book, Page by Page

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Make Art in Some Rare Vin­tage Video

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

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.

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Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road: The Only Known Footage of the Beat Icon Reading His Work (1959)

in History, Literature, Television | March 17th, 2022

The video above shows us Jack Ker­ouac giv­ing a read­ing, accom­pa­nied by the jazz piano stylings of evening tele­vi­sion vari­ety-show host Steve Allen. In oth­er words, if you’ve been look­ing for the most late-nine­teen-fifties clip in exis­tence, your jour­ney may have come to an end. Ear­li­er in that decade, Allen says (sprin­kling his mono­logue with a few notes here and there), “the nation rec­og­nized in its midst a social move­ment called the Beat Gen­er­a­tion. A nov­el titled On the Road became a best­seller, and its author, Jack Ker­ouac, became a celebri­ty: part­ly because he’d writ­ten a pow­er­ful and suc­cess­ful book, but part­ly because he seemed to be the embod­i­ment of this new gen­er­a­tion.”

As the nov­el­ists and poets of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion were grad­u­al­ly gain­ing renown, Allen was fast becom­ing a nation­al celebri­ty. In 1954, his co-cre­ation The Tonight Show made him the first late-night tele­vi­sion talk show host, and con­se­quent­ly applied pres­sure to stay atop the cul­tur­al cur­rents of the day. Not only did he know of the Beats, he joined them, at least for one col­lab­o­ra­tion: “Jack and I made an album togeth­er a few months back in which I played back­ground piano for his poet­ry read­ing.” That was Poet­ry for the Beat Gen­er­a­tion, the first of Ker­ouac’s tril­o­gy of spo­ken-word albums that we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture back in 2015.

“At that time I made a note to book him on this show,” Allen says, “because I thought you would enjoy meet­ing him.” After answer­ing a few “square ques­tions” by way of intro­duc­tion — it took him three weeks to write On the Road, he spent sev­en years on the road itself, he did indeed type on a con­tin­u­ous “scroll’ of paper, and he would define “Beat” as “sym­pa­thet­ic” — Ker­ouac reads from the nov­el that made his name, accom­pa­nied by Allen’s piano. “A lot of peo­ple have asked me, why did I write that book, or any book,” he begins. “All the sto­ries I wrote were true, because I believed in what I saw.” This is, of course, not poet­ry but prose, and prac­ti­cal­ly essay­is­tic prose at that, but here it sounds like a lit­er­ary form all its own.

If you’d like to hear the music of Ker­ouac’s prose with­out actu­al musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment, have a lis­ten to his acetate record­ing of a half-hour selec­tion from On the Road that we post­ed last week­end. The occa­sion was the 100th anniver­sary of his birth, which else­where brought forth all man­ner of trib­utes and re-eval­u­a­tions of his work and lega­cy. 65 years after On the Road’s pub­li­ca­tion, how much resem­blance does today’s Amer­i­ca bear to the one criss­crossed by Sal Par­adise and Dean Mori­ar­ty? It’s worth con­sid­er­ing why the coun­try no longer inspires writ­ers quite like Jack Ker­ouac — or for that mat­ter, giv­en the pas­sage of his own lit­tle-not­ed cen­te­nary last Decem­ber, tele­vi­sion hosts like Steve Allen.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spo­ken-World Albums: A Sub­lime Union of Beat Lit­er­a­ture and 1950s Jazz

Jack Ker­ouac Reads Amer­i­can Haikus, Backed by Jazz Sax­o­phon­ists Al Cohn & Zoot Sims (1958)

Free: Hours of Jack Ker­ouac Read­ing Beat Poems & Verse

Jack Kerouac’s Poet­ry & Prose Read/Performed by 20 Icons: Hunter S. Thomp­son, Pat­ti Smith, William S. Bur­roughs, John­ny Depp & More

Young Frank Zap­pa Plays the Bicy­cle on The Steven Allen Show (1963)

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.

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When Oliver Stone & Vladimir Putin Chillingly Watched Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Together

in Current Affairs, Film, Television | March 16th, 2022

Hav­ing by now seen Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb (1964) more times than I can remem­ber, it sur­pris­es me to meet some­one who’s nev­er seen it at all. When I do, my first impulse is always to sug­gest a screen­ing right then and there. This would seem to put me in com­pa­ny with Oliv­er Stone, who in recent years has been doc­u­ment­ed engag­ing in at least one instance of high-pro­file Strangelove evan­ge­lism. As for the new inductee into the Strangelove view­er­ship, he went more than 60 years with­out hav­ing seen the film, but for the last cou­ple of decades had the cred­i­ble excuse of busy­ness: it isn’t just a part-time gig, after all, being the pres­i­dent of Rus­sia.

Stone seized the oppor­tu­ni­ty to watch Dr. Strangelove with Vladimir Putin in the course of film­ing The Putin Inter­views, a four-part doc­u­men­tary series broad­cast on Show­time in 2017. This was­n’t the first time Stone had made a sub­ject of his own inter­ac­tions with a head of state whom many Amer­i­cans con­sid­er malev­o­lent: in 2008’s South of the Bor­der, for exam­ple, he attempt­ed a human­iz­ing cin­e­mat­ic por­trait of Venezue­lan pres­i­dent Hugo Chávez. At Show­time’s Youtube chan­nel, you can watch a vari­ety of clips from The Putin Inter­views, includ­ing Putin giv­ing Stone a tour of his offices, Putin’s reac­tion to the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump, and Putin check­ing in with Stone before skat­ing out onto the ice for a game of hock­ey.

The view­ing of Dr. Strangelove comes at the series’ very end, which is pre­sum­ably an effort on Stone’s part to save the “best” for last — and as Cold War Amer­i­can cin­e­ma goes, one could hard­ly hope for a bet­ter selec­tion. Based on Peter George’s Red Alert, a straight­for­ward thriller nov­el about Amer­i­can and Sovi­et pro­to­cols of nuclear-defense man­age­ment gone dis­as­trous­ly wrong, the film only took shape when Kubrick real­ized it had to be a com­e­dy. As he lat­er recalled, “I found that in try­ing to put meat on the bones and to imag­ine the scenes ful­ly, one had to keep leav­ing out of it things which were either absurd or para­dox­i­cal, in order to keep it from being fun­ny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in ques­tion.”

As Joseph Heller real­ized while writ­ing Catch-22, cer­tain ridicu­lous truths about war sim­ply can’t be por­trayed non-comed­ical­ly. As real­ized through the painstak­ing­ly exact film­mak­ing of Kubrick and his col­lab­o­ra­tors, Dr. Strangelove is the black­est of black come­dies. “There are cer­tain things in this film that indeed make us think,” Putin says to Stone after the clos­ing mon­tage of mush­room clouds. He even cred­its Kubrick with tech­ni­cal fore­sight: “Mod­ern weapon sys­tems have become more sophis­ti­cat­ed, more com­plex. But this idea of a retal­ia­to­ry weapon and the inabil­i­ty to con­trol such weapon sys­tems still hold true today.” Not much has changed since the days of Dr. Strangelove, he admits, and now that he’s under­gone his own bout of geopo­lit­i­cal brazen­ness, let’s hope that he remem­bers how the movie ends.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Min­utes

Inside the Mak­ing of Dr. Strangelove: Doc­u­men­tary Reveals How a Cold War Sto­ry Became a Kubrick Clas­sic

The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Title Sequences and Trail­ers Cre­at­ed by Pablo Fer­ro: Dr. Strangelove, A Clock­work Orange, Stop Mak­ing Sense, Bul­litt & Oth­er Films

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

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.

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When Rod Serling Turned TV Pitchman: See His Post-Twilight Zone Ads for Ford, Mazda, Gulf Oil & Smokey Bear

in Television | March 7th, 2022

The Twi­light Zone ran from 1959 to 1964, this con­clud­ing in a dif­fer­ent cul­ture than the one in which it had pre­miered. CBS broad­cast the series’ first episode to an Amer­i­ca that had nei­ther heard of the Bea­t­les nor elect­ed John F. Kennedy to the pres­i­den­cy; its final episode went out to an Amer­i­ca that had buried JFK and launched into a youth-ori­ent­ed cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion just months before. But Rod Ser­ling, The Twi­light Zone’s cre­ator and host, man­aged to retain a degree of the rec­og­niz­abil­i­ty and author­i­ty he’d enjoyed in the era we call the “long 1950s” well into the sharply con­trast­ing one we call “the 60s.”

At the end of the 1950s, Amer­i­can net­work tele­vi­sion offered a steady, bland diet of sit­coms, West­erns, and cop shows. The Twi­light Zone appeared as some­thing new, an anthol­o­gy series not so genre-bound — or rather, per­mit­ted to switch genre every episode — because Ser­ling set its lim­its at those of the human imag­i­na­tion.

Ghost sto­ries, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nar­ios, tales of alien inva­sion, super­pow­er fan­tasies both com­ic and trag­ic: all of these nar­ra­tive forms and more fell with­in the show’s purview. No mat­ter how brazen­ly unre­al­is­tic their premis­es, most of these sto­ries had some­thing to say about con­tem­po­rary soci­ety, and all were teth­ered to real­i­ty by the pres­ence of Ser­ling him­self.

Even if you’ve some­how nev­er seen an episode of The Twi­light Zone, you’ll have a ready men­tal image of Ser­ling him­self, or at least of the dark-suit­ed, cig­a­rette-pinch­ing per­sona he took on in the open­ing of most broad­casts. His dis­tinc­tive man­ner of speech, still oft-imi­tat­ed but sel­dom quite nailed, has become a short­hand for a cer­tain stripe of steady mid­cen­tu­ry tele­vi­su­al author­i­ty in the midst of sur­re­al or fright­en­ing cir­cum­stances. As this became a rare and thus in-demand qual­i­ty in post-Twi­light Zone Amer­i­ca, no few cor­po­ra­tions as well as gov­ern­ment agen­cies must have seen in Ser­ling a desir­able spokesman indeed.

Ser­ling, “tele­vi­sion’s last angry man,” was noto­ri­ous for writ­ing scripts from his social and civic con­science. This made him an ide­al human face to accom­pa­ny the ursine one of Smokey Bear in the U.S. For­est Ser­vice’s “Only You Can Pre­vent For­est Fires” pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment of 1968. Its Ser­ling-nar­rat­ed intro­duc­tion of Ed Mor­gan and his fam­i­ly as they motor through the woods, plays for all the world like the open­ing of a clas­sic Twi­light Zone episode, albeit in col­or. “They’ve dri­ven this road a dozen times before, and noth­ing ever hap­pened,” he says, “but today’s dif­fer­ent: today, Ed will become a killer, and here’s his weapon”: a lit cig­a­rette tossed unthink­ing­ly out the win­dow. Such a dire warn­ing may sound a bit rich com­ing from a man who not only smoked onscreen in so many of his appear­ances, but per­son­al­ly endorsed Chester­field Kings on air.

Yet irony was even more inte­gral to The Twi­light Zone than, say, space trav­el, a theme with which many of its episodes dealt. It was pre­sum­ably Ser­ling’s result­ing sci-fi cred­i­bil­i­ty that brought him the offer, just months after the actu­al Moon land­ing, of a spot for We Came in Peace, “a per­ma­nent 75-page book with full-col­or illus­tra­tions” about the his­to­ry of “man’s quest in space,” avail­able for one dol­lar at all par­tic­i­pat­ing Gulf Oil gas sta­tions. In the fol­low­ing decade he would also adver­tise the cars you’d fill up at one, pro­mot­ing fea­tures like Ford LTD’s qui­et ride and the new Maz­das’ rotary engines. All these mod­els would also have come with ash­trays, of course, and a respon­si­ble mid­cen­tu­ry man like Ser­ling would have made sure to use them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Twi­light Zone’s Pilot Episode, Pitched by Rod Ser­ling Him­self (1959)

Rod Ser­ling: Where Do Ideas Come From? (1972)

Cig­a­rette Com­mer­cials from David Lynch, the Coen Broth­ers and Jean Luc Godard

An Anti, Anti-Smok­ing Announce­ment from John Waters

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.

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How Volodymyr Zelenskyy Went from Playing a President on a Comedy TV Show to Very Real Life

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Politics, Television | March 2nd, 2022

To the great dis­may of West Wing fans, Josi­ah Bart­let nev­er actu­al­ly became Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca. At some point, one sus­pects they’d even have set­tled for Mar­tin Sheen. Alas, play­ing the role of the pres­i­dent on tele­vi­sion has­n’t yet become a qual­i­fy­ing expe­ri­ence for play­ing it in real life — or at least not in the U.S. But things work dif­fer­ent­ly in Ukraine, which in 2019 elect­ed to its pres­i­den­cy the star of Ser­vant of the Peo­ple (Слуга народу), a com­e­dy series about a high-school teacher who becomes pres­i­dent on the back of an anti-estab­lish­ment rant gone viral. His name, Volodymyr Zelen­skyy, is one we’ve all become famil­iar with indeed since last week, when Russ­ian pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin ordered an inva­sion of his coun­try.

For as unlike­ly a head of state as Zelen­skyy, a more for­mi­da­ble test could hard­ly be imag­ined. The seri­ous­ness of the con­flict con­trasts stark­ly with the tone of Ser­vant of the Peo­ple, in light of which Zelen­skyy’s ascen­dance looks less like Mar­tin Sheen becom­ing Pres­i­dent than Veep’s Julia Louis-Drey­fus becom­ing Vice Pres­i­dent, or Yes Min­is­ter’s Paul Edding­ton becom­ing Prime Min­is­ter.

Still, the past decade’s fur­ther blur­ring of the lines between tele­vi­su­al fic­tion and polit­i­cal fact made the Zelen­skyy can­di­da­cy look less like a stunt than a gen­uine­ly viable cam­paign. Dur­ing that cam­paign the BBC pro­duced the seg­ment at the top of the post, which calls him “the come­di­an who could be Pres­i­dent”; Vice pub­lished the more detailed view above as elec­tion day approached.

Most offi­cials of Zelen­skyy’s rank are famous by def­i­n­i­tion. He had the advan­tage of already being well-known and well-liked in his home­land, but his per­for­mance so far under the har­row­ing con­di­tions of Putin’s inva­sion has won him respect across the world. There is now, in addi­tion to the fas­ci­na­tion about his rise to pow­er, an equal­ly great fas­ci­na­tion about that of Vasyl Holoborod­ko, the thir­ty-some­thing his­to­ry teacher he plays on Ser­vant of the Peo­ple. This Youtube playlist offers 23 episodes of the show, com­plete with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles. Give it a watch, and you’ll bet­ter under­stand not just Zelen­skyy’s appeal to the Ukrain­ian peo­ple, but that peo­ple’s dis­tinc­tive sense of humor — a vital strate­gic asset indeed in such try­ing times.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Rus­sia Invad­ed Ukraine: A Use­ful Primer

West Point Expert Gives Ukraini­ans Advice on Con­duct­ing Effec­tive Urban War­fare Against Russ­ian Troops

Why is Ukraine in Cri­sis?: A Quick Primer For Those Too Embar­rassed to Ask (2014)

“Borat” on Pol­i­tics and Embar­rass­ment — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast Dis­cus­sion #67

Come­di­ans Speak­ing Truth to Pow­er: Lenny Bruce, George Car­lin & Richard Pry­or (NSFW)

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.

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Dick Van Dyke Still Dancing at 96!

in Dance, Film, Life, Television | March 1st, 2022

Beloved com­ic actress Bet­ty White left some big shoes to fill last New Year’s Eve when she shocked the world by dying at the ten­der age of 99.

Who could pos­si­bly match her zest for life so many years into it?

Pag­ing Dick Van Dyke…

The nim­ble-foot­ed 96-year-old has yet to host Sat­ur­day Night Live, but remains cul­tur­al­ly rel­e­vant nonethe­less, thanks to the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of his ear­ly work.

His ear­ly 60s sit­com, The Dick Van Dyke Show, was a sta­ple of ‘90s-era Nick at Nite.

Even Gen­er­a­tion Alpha knows who he is, thanks to his ever­green turn as Bert, the danc­ing chim­neysweep in Mary Pop­pins (1964).

The phys­i­cal grace he brought to such musi­cal fare as Bye Bye Birdie and Chit­ty Chit­ty Bang Bang is some­thing he delib­er­ate­ly strived for as a fan of silent com­e­dy’s greats, and at 96, it’s not some­thing he takes for grant­ed. He began strength train­ing many decades ago, after observ­ing Broad­way dancers’ work outs, and main­tains a dai­ly reg­i­men of crunch­es, leg lifts, and hip open­ers.

Like White, he thrives in the com­pa­ny of younger peo­ple.

He’s by far the old­est mem­ber of The Van­tastix, a bar­ber­shop quar­tet he formed in 2020.

And for those keep­ing score, he’s 46 years old­er than his bride of ten years, Arlene Sil­ver, who sings and dances with him in the above video (and directs, too.)

Yes, Van Dyke’s shoul­ders and tor­so may have stiff­ened a bit in the four years since Mary Pop­pins Returns  found him hop­ping atop a desk for a sprite­ly soft shoe, but the ease with which he pro­pels him­self from a low slung wing­back chair at the one-minute mark will strike many view­ers as noth­ing short of mirac­u­lous.

(For those admir­ing the decor, Fall­en Fruit’s recent SUPERSHOW instal­la­tion pro­vid­ed the video’s younger-than-spring­time set.)

Van Dyke’s loose limbed appeal is accom­pa­nied by a refresh­ing­ly flex­i­ble atti­tude, anoth­er way in which he mod­els health aging.

A year into his mar­riage to Sil­ver, he told Parade that they’re so well suit­ed because “she’s very mature for her age, and I’m very imma­ture for my age.”

“Imma­ture in a good way, Sil­ver clar­i­fied to Huff­Post, “with the won­der of a child”:

He’s just fun, he’s open mind­ed. He’s not stuck in his ways at all.

We take very good care of each oth­er. But, I’m very aware that I have a nation­al trea­sure on my hands.

No won­der peo­ple love him. As proof, wit­ness the twen­ty-some­thing leap­ing to their feet to give him an ova­tion, as he makes his entrance in Disneyland’s 60th-anniver­sary spe­cial six years ago.

12 sec­onds lat­er, the 90-year-old Van Dyke was also leap­ing.

“When peo­ple tell you you look good in your 90s, what they mean is you don’t look dead,” Van Dyke con­fid­ed in the late Carl Rein­er’s 2017 doc­u­men­tary, If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Break­fast:

At 30, I exer­cised to look good. In my 50s, I exer­cised to stay fit. In my 70s, to stay ambu­la­to­ry. In my 80s, to avoid assist­ed liv­ing. Now, in my 90s, I’m just doing it out of pure defi­ance.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Pow­er of Pulp Fiction’s Dance Scene, Explained by Chore­o­g­ra­phers and Even John Tra­vol­ta Him­self

One of the Great­est Dances Sequences Ever Cap­tured on Film Gets Restored in Col­or by AI: Watch the Clas­sic Scene from Stormy Weath­er

The Icon­ic Dance Scene from Hel­lza­pop­pin’ Pre­sent­ed in Liv­ing Col­or with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (1941)

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

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