Posts Tagged ‘Max Headroom’
“If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.”*…
The estimable Arthur Goldhammer on the flavor of our moment… a moment (for many of us, anyway) in which, even as we strive to stave off despair, hope is hard to find…
There is a saying, well-known in French, counseling resolve in the face of hopelessness: “Il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer.” (Freely translated: Hope is not necessary to endeavor, nor is success necessary to persevere.”) The thought, with minor modification, has been variously attributed to both Charles the Bold and William of Orange and quoted by writers as different as Marguerite Yourcenar and Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s a good motto for bleak times in general and for these times in particular.
For the first time in a long while, though, I’ve begun to feel the first stirrings of hope, and even if Charles and William are right that hope is something one can do without, I think they would agree that it’s easier to get going if you think the winds might be shifting in a more favorable direction.
Certainly, the election results of a few weeks ago offered a modicum of encouragement. To that Republican electoral debacle have now been added signs that the MAGA movement is neither as unified nor as indomitable as it once appeared. For example, Trump has been forced to rescind tariffs on certain food items because of cries of pain from below. He has been embarrassed by the leak of derogatory items from the so-called Epstein files, challenged from within by erstwhile epigones such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and forced to back off opposition to release of the files by the growing belief that he must have a great deal to hide.
Worse still for a would-be tyrant, he has been made to look ridiculous by repeatedly changing his tune: at first, the Epstein files were going to lay bare the perfidy of the Democrats; then, through his mouthpiece Pam Bondi, he asserted that there was nothing in them and everyone should just move on; still later, he ordered the same Bondi to use this supposedly non-existent evidence to go after his enemies Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, et al.
In a Times column published [November 17], Michelle Goldberg evoked these various fissures in the MAGA edifice, to which she added the noteworthy observation that even stalwarts of the movement such as Mike Cernovich, who helped spread the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, were appalled by the magnitude of MAGA corruption. And how could one not be appalled, with the Trump family profiting so handsomely from presidential decisions on matters ranging from cryptocurrency to defense contracts to brokering pardons to wheeling and dealing in the Middle East, Asia, and beyond? Although the shamelessness of it all is breathtaking, until now none of it seemed to have been noticed by Trump’s “base.”
What has changed? Perhaps no more than my mood. I hope I’m not allowing the wish to become father to the thought. But it’s just possible that the “audience” of Trump’s slickly produced reality show has begun to notice that things aren’t going according to script. The war in Ukraine, which was to have been settled on Day One, rages on. Meanwhile, after expending a great deal of firepower to dispatch a few small motorboats to Kingdom Come, a great armada has been assembled for the apparent purpose of bringing Venezuela to its knees. Venezuela! In the heyday of American imperialism, a gunboat or two would have sufficed, but our self-designated Secretary of War has chosen to deploy our “largest and most lethal aircraft carrier,” as ABC’s Martha Raddatz describes it, along with a B52 redeemed from mothballs presumably because it cut a more impressive figure for the cameras than one of the smaller jets arrayed on the deck of the carrier below.
At the same time, heavily armed and masked ICE brigades have been unleashed on city after city, while Homeland Security officials boasted of the arrest of ”81 illegals this weekend, our biggest haul to date.” It may have dawned on television audiences that 81 is a small number compared with the 12 or 20 or 30 million “illegals” (the number keeps rising) said to be in the country. Symbolic shows of force wear thin after a while.
At the same time, doubts about Trump’s management of the economy are growing. The tariff policy is an incoherent mess. Its justification in the name of national emergency has been questioned in the federal courts. There is suspicion that the job market stagnated while statistics were not being collected owing to the federal shutdown. Investors have begun to pull back from the stock market for fear that the AI-driven bubble is about to burst, and without the winds of AI driving it forward, the economy could soon find itself dead in the water.
The Trump Show has always depended on illusion, like the professional wrestling shows that inspired it [see here]. Is it too much to hope that viewers are beginning to tire? I’m not sure, but il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre...
[Image above: source]
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As keep on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that the television signals of two stations (WGN and WTTW) in Chicago were hijacked: a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume was broadcast to thousands of home viewers. The culprit(s) have yet to be identified.
See one of the intrusions here.
“Presenting honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars”*…
A self-contained four-man comedy troupe of writers/actors whose medium was the audio record, they created brilliant, multi-layered surrealist satire out of science-fiction, TV, old movies, avant-garde drama and literature, outrageous punning, the political turmoil of the Sixties, the great shows of the Golden Age of Radio, the detritus of high and low culture (James Joyce meets the found poetry of used-car pitch men) and their own intuitive understanding of the technological possibilities of multi-track recording. Their thirteen albums for CBS, recorded in various group permutations between 1967 and 1975, reveal them to have been at once the Beatles of comedy, the counter-cultural Lewis Carroll, and the slightly cracked step-children of Kafka, Bob and Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Stan Freberg, Samuel Beckett and the Goon Show.
Stereo Review
Firesign Theatre started to assemble during 1966 at KPFK, a freeform stereo FM radio station in Los Angeles, which was then a very new thing, during Peter Bergman’s “Radio Free Oz” show. Phil Austin and David Ossman worked at the station and would appear on RFO, while Philip Proctor, an actor friend the “Wizard of Oz” (Bergman) knew from Yale, was invited to join a bit later. The name refers to the fact that all four were born under fire signs in the zodiac, and to Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. The late night Radio Free Oz show was so popular—and they were regularly gigging in Hollywood’s folk and rock clubs—that they were quickly offered a record contract.
There are four undisputed “classics” in the vast Firesign canon, all recorded between 1967 and 1971, titled (in order) Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (which includes their most famous creation, “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”), Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, and I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus. Their first album was recorded in the same CBS radio studio where The Jack Benny Show was taped using vintage microphones and sound effects. By the time of their second record they were using 16-track tape machines in the studio, constructing tightly assembled radio plays with extremely creative sound effects and spatial cues that suggested time travel, watching something at a domed planetarium, being on a people mover, getting into a car where the inside is bigger than the outside and so on. These four records are the ultimate presentation of their unusual artform—literature as much as performed comedy that’s been carefully sculpted in a recording studio—but there are at least 20 other albums, dozens upon dozens of hours of live performances recorded onstage and during their radio shows, and TV and film work. Dear Friends, a 1972 released two record compilation of the best of their syndicated radio show of the same name is also considered to be a classic Firesign album, but being culled from live radio, it’s less elaborately constructed, and more spontaneous and improvisational.
These five albums represent the cream of the crop and they are all masterworks of surrealist “theater of the mind” sci-fi counterculture comedy. There was nothing else like them, and the sole thing I can think of to compare them to would be the Monty Python albums. Firesign Theatre were often called “the American Monty Python,” but this comparison would stop at the Python albums, as Firesign were a strictly audio proposition for the most part, and certainly during their late 60s/early 70s golden years. [They are actually much more akin to lysergic Goon Show, of which all four of the Firesign Theatre were fanatical fans. In fact, Peter Bergman wrote some TV comedy sketches in London with Spike Milligan in the early 1960s.]…
These days, everybody is always listening to their favorite podcasts, at the gym, in the car, cooking, whatever, they’ve all got a podcast going on in the background. Why not think of the Firesign oeuvre as the greatest comedy podcast ever made?
Well, you’re in luck as all of the major (and much of the minor) works of Firesign Theatre are streaming from the exact same sources as that weekly true crime thing you always listen to. Spotify, TIDAL, YouTube, Amazon Music, Apple Music, all of them are pumping Firesign Theatre directly into your home. The four (or five) classic albums are super easy for you to listen to. Just a few clicks away from where you are reading this…
An appreciation of past masters: “Firesign Theatre’s ‘Dope Humor of the Seventies’” from @DangerMindsBlog.
* Firesign Theatre
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As we slip on the headphones, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that ABC premiered Max Headroom (which had originated on the UK’s Channel 4 in 1985). Painfully prophetic, the series followed the near-future exploits on the digital avatar of Edison Carter, a news host/reporter who hosts the most popular show on Channel 23.
As SyFy Wire explains, this future is a:
…dystopia in which several television networks essentially rule the world. That’s no exaggeration — the government knows all about it too, and plays along, while the networks do what they want without anyone to curtail their schemes. There are no “off” switches on TVs, so you can’t escape the watchful eye of the networks, who’ve even gone so far as to watch citizens through their TVs.
Each episode revolved around the various evil plans the television conglomerates planned to enact on the unsuspecting public. Network 23 is one of the major stations with the highest-rated “new” program, which Edison Carter himself hosts. Real-time ratings are more important than ever in this world, as they translate to money put toward advertisements. In fact, ads have taken over stocks in this world, making whoever performs the best on-air essentially the most powerful entity on the planet.
Every installment of the series is about the inner workings of the crooked conglomerates, up to and including advertisements known as “Blipverts,” which are completely capable of killing people just by airing on television. They’re meant to condense longer ads into a few seconds so the station can run more, but they’re much deadlier than that…
Catch an episode here.
“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television”*…
And sometime, good television: full episodes of the frighteningly-prophetic Max Headroom at Dailymotion.com— watch ’em while you can!
* Woody Allen
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As we cope with blipverts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that the legendary Edward R. Murrow aired his 500th and final Person to Person interview (with actress Lee Remick). The series continued for another two years with Charles Collingwood as host.
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