Take Virtual Tours of Every Star Trek Enterprise Bridge: A New Interactive Web Portal Created by The Roddenberry Archive

in Sci Fi, Television | May 8th, 2023

It’s a rare young Star Trek fan indeed who doesn’t fantasize about sitting on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. That has gone for every generation of fan, every Star Trek series, and every Enterprise, whose bridges you can see in the new video above from the Roddenberry Archive. It begins, naturally, with the original Star Trek, the show with which creator Gene Roddenberry started it all — and for which art director Matt Jefferies designed a bridge that would become a model not just for all subsequent Enterprises, but real-life command centers as well. As the narrator says, “Jefferies’ bridge made such an impression that engineers from NASA, the U.S. Navy, and private industry have studied it as a model for an advanced, efficient control room.”

That narrator happens to be John de Lancie, whom viewers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and subsequent series will know as the all-powerful extra-dimensional being Q. He’s not the only familiar performer to participate in this retrospective project: in the video above appears a certain William Shatner, who as James Tiberius Kirk occupied the captain’s chair of the very first Enterprise.

Even those who prefer the later, more complex Star Treks have surely wondered what that position would feel like, and now they can get a virtual sense of it at the Roddenbery Archive’s web site, which is now offering virtual tours of the bridge of every series’ central ship.

“T he site features 360-degree, 3D models of the various versions of the Enterprise, as well as a timeline of the ship’s evolution throughout the franchise’s history,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Fans of the show can also read detailed information about each version of the ship’s design, its significance to the Star Trek storyline and its production backstory.” All this comes online to mark the end of Star Trek: Picard, the recent series built around Patrick Stewart’s Enterprise captain from The Next Generation, whose final episode went up last month on the streaming service Paramount+. For that grand finale, production designer Dave Blass “recreated the bridge of the Enterprise D,” and “Picard’s triumphant return to his beloved ship brought nostalgic tears to the eyes of more than a few fans,” no doubt regardless of generation. Take the virtual tours here.

via Smithsonian

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William Shatner Narrates Space Shuttle Documentary

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Star Trek: World-Building Over Generations — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #42

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Wes Anderson Re-Creates The Truman Show, Armageddon & Out of Sight as Stage Plays Performed by the Cast of Rushmore (1999)

in Comedy, Film, Television | April 18th, 2023

Nominees of the 1999 MTV Movie Awards included Adam Sandler, Liv Tyler, Chris Tucker, and Jennifer Love Hewitt to mention just a few of the names in a veritable who’s-who of turn-of-the-millennium American pop culture. But for the teenage cinephiles watching that night, the highlight of the broadcast was surely a set of brief skits performed by “the Max Fischer Players.” Directed by Wes Anderson, who had been named Best New Filmmaker during the ceremony of three years before, they present low-budget but high-spirited interpretations of three of the motion pictures up for honors: Out of Sight, The Truman Show, and Armageddon.

Having been a teenage cinephile myself at the time, I can tell you that none of those movies made as much an impact on me as Anderson’s own Rushmore, which introduced the hyper-ambitious young slacker Max Fischer to the world. In it, Max and his players adapt Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, and later put on an elaborate (and explosive) pastiche of various Vietnam War pictures.

Twenty-five years ago, few of us had identified in the painstakingly ramshackle look and feel of these productions the seed of what would grow into Anderson’s signature aesthetic. But it was clear that, if the Max Fischer Players method were applied to the Hollywood blockbusters of the day, amusing incongruity would result.

These skits prominently feature Mason Gamble and Sara Tanaka, both of whom retired from acting a few years after giving their memorable performances in Rushmore. But Jason Schwartzman, who will no doubt forever be identified with Max Fischer, has remained an active member of Anderson’s own group of players, and even plays a starring role once again in Anderson’s new film Asteroid City, which comes out this summer. The Max Fisher Players’ parodies were included on the DVD of Rushmore released by the Criterion Collection — an honor still denied, one might add, to the recipient of the 1999 MTV Movie Award for Best Movie, There’s Something About Mary. (But not to Armageddon, which just goes to show how unpredictable the favor of cinephilia can be.)

via Reddit

Wes Anderson Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Distinctive Filmmaking Style

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Commercials: A Playlist of 8 Short Andersonian Works

Wes Anderson Goes Sci-Fi in 1950s America: Watch the Trailer for His New Film Asteroid City

Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch David Bowie’s Final Performance as Ziggy Stardust, Singing “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithfull, on The Midnight Special (1973)

in Music, Television | April 5th, 2023

If you had to choose a living cultural figure to represent nineteen-seventies America, you could do much worse than Burt Sugarman. He made his name as a television impresario with The Midnight Special, which put on NBC’s airwaves performances by everyone from ABBA to AC/DC, REO Speedwagon to Roxy Music, and War to Weather Report. Breaking with common practice at the time, the show allowed these acts to perform live rather than lip-sync against pre-recorded tracks. Thus, even viewers who tuned in to The Midnight Special to see their favorite bands were guaranteed to hear something they’d never heard before.

They stayed up quite late to do so: The Midnight Special followed The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which meant that it aired at midnight in the Central and Mountain time zones, and 1:00 in Eastern and Pacific. In 1972, the notion of putting on a music show at that hour was unfamiliar enough that Sugarman had trouble selling it.

He ultimately had to buy the airtime himself in order to convince NBC to pick the show up, which it did soon thereafter. (For the network, the prospect of extending their programming schedule would have been sweetened by the previous year’s Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which had banned the once-lucrative airing of tobacco advertisements on television.)

Now, more than half a century after its debut, The Midnight Special has reappeared in the form of a Youtube channel, which features high-quality videos of the show’s original performances. Those uploaded so far have been organized into artist playlists dedicated to acts like the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac, Tina Turner, and David Bowie. That last includes Bowie’s rendition of “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithfull, seen at the top of this post, as well as his version of The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” above, part of his final performance as his space-alien alter ego Ziggy Stardust — itself originally shot for The 1980 Floor Show in London, which despite its name took place in 1973. The Midnight Special itself would run until 1981, which means that a great deal of music remains to be brought out of Sugarman’s archives for us to enjoy here in the twenty-twenties. You can watch Bowie’s complete 1973 performance on The Midnight Special below.

8 Hours of David Bowie’s Historic 1980 Floor Show: Complete & Uncut Footage

David Bowie’s Final Gig as Ziggy Stardust Documented in 1973 Concert Film

David Bowie Talks and Sings on The Dick Cavett Show (1974)

Beat Club, the 1960s TV Show That Brought Rock Music to 70 Million Kids in Germany, Hungary, Thailand, Tanzania & Beyond

Watch an Episode of TV-CBGB, the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Sitcom Ever Aired on Cable TV (1981)

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A New Dutch Reality TV Show Challenges Contestants to Paint Like Vermeer–and It’s a Hit!

in Art, Television | March 10th, 2023

Jokes about “reality television” being a contradiction in terms go as far back in pop-culture history as the format itself. But the fact remains that, deliberately or otherwise, its programs do reflect certain characteristics of the societies that produce them. Before turning into one of the most globally successful franchises of this century’s reality-TV boom, the once-controversial strangers-in-a-house show Big Brother premiered in the Netherlands. It will be left as an exercise to the reader what that says about the Dutch, who have been tuning in to a very different kind of reality programming in the past month: De Nieuwe Vermeer, or The New Vermeer.

Aired in conjunction with the Rijksmuseum’s largest Vermeer exhibition ever staged, the show invites “two professional painters and dozens of amateur artists to compete to reinvent the lost works of the 17th-century master,” writes the New York Times’ Nina Siegal.

“The results are judged by Vermeer experts from the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, and from the Mauritshuis, a collection of old masters in The Hague.” The professionals face such tasks as faithfully reconstructing Vermeer’s lost works, whether they vanished centuries ago or in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of 1990. The amateurs work in their own media, including “stained glass, printmaking and even Lego.”

All this has made The New Vermeer “an instant sensation in the Netherlands, with 1.3 million viewers (in a country of 17 million) tuning in for the first episode.” Like any successful reality TV show these days, it has also inspired a wealth of supplementary content, including a podcast and an online gallery showing all the artwork created by the contestants. “You can’t currently watch the series in the U.S., writes Artnet’s Sarah Cascone, “but the network is streaming a weekly YouTube ‘Masterclass’ ” offering “step-by-step instructions on how to create your own Vermeer canvas.” At the moment, those videos are available only in Dutch, presumably on the assumption that The New Vermeer won’t travel well outside the Netherlands. But if, by some slim chance, it turned into a Big Brother-scale phenomenon, imagine the golden age of reality TV that would lie ahead.

A Guided Tour Through All of Vermeer’s Famous Paintings, Narrated by Stephen Fry

What Makes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid a Masterpiece?: A Video Introduction

Master of Light: A Close Look at the Paintings of Johannes Vermeer Narrated by Meryl Streep

Why is Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring Considered a Masterpiece?: An Animated Introduction

Meet Notorious Art Forger Han Van Meegeren, Who Fooled the Nazis with His Counterfeit Vermeers

Listen to Last Seen, a True-Crime Podcast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Million Art Heist

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Cookery Course: Free Video Lessons

in Food & Drink, Television | March 6th, 2023

Our definition of budget cookery may differ from celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey’s.

True, the world famous restauranteur and cookbook author speaks of cheap cuts with messianic zeal, but the episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Ultimate Cookery Course dedicated to Food on a Budget, above, also finds him paying a call to Lina Stores’ SoHo location to discuss ham, sausages, and salami with the late “deli maestro” Antonio Saccomani.

It’s not exactly Costco.

Nor can we buy bone-in Lamb with fried bread as a cost conscious dish, though the accompanying milk soaked fried bread — homemade croutons really — will cost slightly less to make this year, as the USDA is predicting that dairy prices will fall after 2022’s historic levels.

As long as we’re at peace with the idea that the man is not ever going to be found stretching rice and beans to feed a family of four for a week when there’s leftover risotto to be resurrected as arancini, the series is a goldmine for chefs of all budgets and experience levels.

It’s not so much the final dishes, as the short cuts and best practices on the journey.

His “chef in Paris” might indeed kill him for uglying up a dish with deliciously humble pan scrapings, but his ironclad maxims to waste nothing and use available ingredients will benefit home chefs with an eye on the bottom line, as well as pros in high end restaurants where profit margins turn on a knife’s edge.

In an age when any fool can Google up dozens of foolproof methods for cooking rice, sometimes it’s reassuring to get this sort of intel straight from the lips of a globally recognized expert. (We’re big fans of Julia Child’s scrambled eggs…)

How does your method measure up against Ramsey’s freely shared secret for cooking perfect rice?

Weigh out 400 grams of rice on a kitchen scale

Rinse with cold water

Season with salt and pepper, and — going up the food chain a bit — 3 pierced cardamom pods and a star anise

Add 600 grams of water (that’s a 1:1.5 ratio for those playing along without kitchen scales or the metric system)

Bring to a boil, and steam, covered for 8–10 minutes

No peeking!

Remove pot from heat and fluff

Such universal tips are the most persuasive reason to stick with the series.

Ramsey’s rapid fire delivery and lack of linked recipes may leave you feeling a bit lost in regard to exact measurements, temperatures, and step by step instructions, but keep your ears peeled and you’ll quickly pick up on how to extend fresh herbs’ shelf life and keep cut potatoes, apples and avocados looking their best.

Other episodes reveal how to grease cake tins, prevent milk from boiling over, remove baked-on residue, peel kiwis and mangos, determine a pineapple’s ripeness, seed pomegranates, skin tomatoes, and keep plastic containers stain-free…

Seriously, who needs TikTok when we have Gordon Ramsey 2012?

Ramsey’s advice to bypass expensive wine when cooking those comparatively cheap cuts of meat low and slow gets a chef’s kiss from us. (In full disclosure, we would happily swig his braising vintage.)

As to the slow-cooked duck, truffles and caramelized figs with ricotta, we must remind ourselves that the series is over 10 years old. These days even eggs feel like a splurge..

Perhaps some stress free cooking tips will lower our stress level over this week’s grocery expenditures?

Here too, there seems to be some discrepancy in Ramsey’s definition and the general public’s. His idea of stress free is achieved through lots of prepwork

If your idea of de-stressing involves skinning & deboning a salmon or making homemade fish stock, you’re in luck.

Obviously the end product will be delicious but the phrase “chili chicken with ginger & coriander” activates both our salivary glands and our impulse to order out…

Watch a full playlist of Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Cookery Course here.

Watch 26 Free Episodes of Jacques Pépin’s TV Show, More Fast Food My Way

How Cooking Can Change Your Life: A Short Animated Film Featuring the Wisdom of Michael Pollan

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why We All Need Subtitles Now

in Film, Technology, Television | January 31st, 2023

We live in an age of subtitles. On some level this is a vindication of the cinephiles who spent so much of the twentieth century complaining about shoddy dubbing of foreign films and public unwillingness to “read movies.” Today we think nothing of reading not just movies but television shows as well, even those performed in our native language. For an increasing proportion of at-home viewers — including on-computer, on-tablet, and on-phone viewers — subtitles have come to feel like a necessity, even in the absence of any hearing difficulties. Vox’s Edward Vega investigates why this has happened in the video above.

The chief irony of the story is that the intelligibility of film and television dialogue seems to have degraded as a result of sound recording and editing technology having improved. Back in the early days of sound film, actors had practically to shout into bulky microphones concealed on-set or placed just off it. Today, a production can keep a couple of boom mics suspended overhead at all times, but also rig each actor up with a few hidden lavaliers. The upshot is that dialogue almost always gets recorded acceptably, but it removes the pressure on performers to deliver their lines with the clarity they would, say, on stage.

For better or for worse, this has encouraged a tendency toward unprecedentedly naturalistic dialogue, manifest though it often does as slurring and mumbling. At the same time, says dialogue editor Austin Olivia Kendrick, filmmakers have come to believe that “if you want your movie to feel ‘cinematic,’ you have to have wall-to-wall bombastic, loud sound.” Yet a soundtrack can be cranked up only so high, an explosion of the same loudness as a human voice won’t sound like an explosion at all: “you need that contrast in volume in order to give your ear a sense of scale.”

This need to preserve the sound mix’s “dynamic range” — just the opposite of the “loudness wars” in popular music — thus keeps dialogue on the quiet side. You can still hear it clear as day in a theater equipped with up-to-date surround-sound facilities, but much less so when it’s coming out of the tiny speakers crammed into the back of a flat-panel television, let alone the bottom of a cellphone. Turning the subtitles on and leaving them on has emerged as a common solution to this thoroughly modern problem. Another would be to invest in a proper high-end amplifier and speaker setup, which, if widely adopted, would certainly come as a vindication for all the frustrated audiophiles out there.

Why Marvel and Other Hollywood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Painting Explains the Perils of the “Temp Score”

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Really Made: Discover the Magic of “Foley Artists”

The Distortion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Created “a McDonald’s Generation of Music Consumers”

David Lynch on iPhone

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Watch Cher Play All the Major Parts in a 12-Minute Remake of West Side Story (1978)

in Gender, Music, Television, Theatre | January 9th, 2023

Cher, the mononymous Goddess of Pop, gifted the small screens of the 70s with a lot of over-the-top glamour.

Her work ethic, comedic flair and unapologetic embrace of camp helped her stand out from the crowd, conferring the fame she had longed for since childhood, when she commandeered her 5th grade classmates for an unofficial, and, from the sounds of it, all-female production of Oklahoma, covering the male roles herself when the boys declined to participate.

Some twenty years later, she was a household name — one that was no longer appended to that of ex-husband Sonny Bono, co-host of the popular eponymous variety hour in which they sang, hammed their way through goofy skits, and busted each other’s chops to the delight of the live studio audience.

The 1978 television event Cher…special found her bringing many of those same talents to bear, along with country star Dolly Parton, rocker Rod Stewart, outré glam band, The Tubes, and the crowd-pleasing array of spangled, skin-baring Bob Mackie designs that defined her look.

More shocking than any of Mackie’s creations or the Musical Battle to Save Cher’s Soul, a set piece wherein Parton and a gospel choir endeavor to coax the diva from a kinky disco hellscape, is the star’s 12-and-a-half minute solo version of West Side Story, above.

This is no mere medley. Cher puts the big pot in the little, donning multiple wigs, a facsimile of the chaste white party dress Natalie Wood wore to the dance at the gym, and flats (!) to embody Tony, Maria, Anita, Bernardo and various Jets, sans irony.

Some of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning songs have been transposed to a different key to accommodate Cher’s contralto, and when they haven’t, her famous voice is stretched a bit thin.

Vocally, she makes a more convincing Jet than she does the ingenue, Maria.

(Speaking of which, let’s not forget that that’s ghost singer Marni Nixon, not Wood, as Maria on the 1961 film’s soundtrack…)

Why West Side Story?

Why not Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar? Wouldn’t those fit better thematically with the portion of the special that has Dolly and a white-robed chorus battling the denizens of Satan’s sexy playpen?

Two words:

1. Variety. That’s what Cher was peddling in the 70s.

2. Nostalgia. As Cher recalls in On the Dance Floor: Spinning Out on Screen:

I remember dancing around my living room to West Side Story (1961). I would sing all the parts and dance every single dance, when there was no one else around.

That admission helps us reframe the cringe factor. Before ye cast the first stone, think: hast thou never stood before a mirror singing into a hairbrush?

And if, by some chance, you’re unfamiliar with West Side Story’s dramatis personae and plot, don’t look to Cher for clarification.

Instead, we refer you to Romeo and Juliet, and for some modern context touching on green screens, genderfluidity, and the color-conscious casting of the 2021 remake, the below episode of Chris Frank’s snarky Bad Music Video Theater.

Leonard Bernstein Awkwardly Turns the Screws on Tenor Jose Carreras While Recording West Side Story (1984)

- 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.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch David Letterman’s Complete Interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy

in Current Affairs, Television | January 6th, 2023

In a special episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, the iconic TV host traveled to Kyiv to interview President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The conversation took place in a protected subway station, in front of a small live audience. About Zelenskyy, Letterman said: “When you first learn about the guy, it seems impossible to not find him appealing, and his story to be astounding. You just don’t see actions and deeds like this, people behaving like this, on the right side of things.” Above, thanks to Netflix, you can watch the interview in its entirety.

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

How Ukraine’s Works of Art Are Being Saved in Wartime–Using the Lessons of World War II

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Take Virtual Tours of Every Star Trek Enterprise Bridge: A New Interactive Web Portal Created by The Roddenberry Archive

Wes Anderson Re-Creates The Truman Show, Armageddon & Out of Sight as Stage Plays Performed by the Cast of Rushmore (1999)

Watch David Bowie’s Final Performance as Ziggy Stardust, Singing “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithfull, on The Midnight Special (1973)

A New Dutch Reality TV Show Challenges Contestants to Paint Like Vermeer–and It’s a Hit!

Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Cookery Course: Free Video Lessons

Why We All Need Subtitles Now

Watch Cher Play All the Major Parts in a 12-Minute Remake of West Side Story (1978)

Watch David Letterman’s Complete Interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy

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