NOTE:Timing based on Payday archives.
Aug.30/2014 1176560-14-1
(Part 2 at 49:07, Part 3 at beginning, and Part 14 at 5:38 [finished playing on April 4/15])
McLuhan introduces himself as having been called “Canada’s revenge on the United States… you know, from the land of the DEW-Line, early warning system”
49:07
the grievance jokes about French Canada (and Steve Allen’s aphorism about jokes)
49:42
the role of slang and “cool” (involved and detached simultaneously like a surgeon operating [identifying with the creative process, see this Oriental concept in Eliot’s “FOUR QUARTETS”])
51:25
cites an example from John Cage to explain James Bond (“the world of the hunter, the unified person, Paleolithic Man”)
53:39
Jacques Ellul and “growing up” (“knowing”) (“no personal concept”)
55:37
roles (“identity as involvement”) vs. jobs (“classification”)
57:23
the obsolescence of “old age”
58:03
computer as retrieval system flips into discovery (cliché-to-archetype process)
58:48
Part 3 at beginning
McLuhan quotes from “FINNEGANS WAKE” (McLuhan retrieves his own non-existent “Sherlock Holmes” quote from FW) as an example of the computer’s retrieval system (“pun as a form of retrieval”)
:18
the future of the planet as a work of art
1:20
“anything becomes a work of art as soon as it is surrounded by a new environment”
2:26
“art is misunderstood as a blood bank of stored human values”
2:58
the future of the book
4:08
the newspaper without the dateline
4:36
Montaigne’s self-portrait for his Public
6:16
“Xerox enables the reader to become publisher”
7:29
more on the future of the book “as information service and tailor-made”
8:23
Part 14 at 5:38
the audience becomes a workforce (do-it-yourself)
5:56
harnessing the audience to solve top-level problems via TV (Oppenheimer’s example)
6:22
the audience was angry that they’d been left out of rigged quiz shows
7:46
the movie eye vs. the TV viewer (“Oriental reverse perspective”)
8:21
the safety car (“the carsophagus”)
9:14
Bucky Fuller and the space capsule (“first man-made environment”)
9:48
Xerox takes us back to the medieval scribe
11:52
our cultural rearview mirror orientation
12:38
our new desire to program the environment (no more rearview mirror habit)
13:39
“Bonanza” TV show
13:51
“going from the known to the unknown” is not the case for human learning
15:07
more on the audience becoming a super-creative workforce as in language (in spite of the “gloompourers”)
15:36
joke about the Nairobi kid looking for “Mr. Cartwright”
16:38
“California never had a 19th Century” (this evokes great laughter from the audience)
17:21
“Canada never had anything but a 19th Century”
19:04
Adlai Stevenson said, “Columbus went too far”
19:25
advantages for leapfrogging countries
19:32
“the tendency to involve the audience as actor, as publisher, as writer, is a characteristic that applies to an enormous amount of electric technology”
20:20
the global classroom
20:55
“more scientists than people by 1980” is a typical projection
21:32
“schools should now be for discovery [via research teams exploring the world outside the classroom and the effects of color TV], not for classification and instruction”
22:04
definition (including formal causality) of the “medium”
24:42
“an environment is a process, it is not a wrapper”
26:23
the inevitable art form from Greece to the Renaissance
26:38
the 18th Century Romantic artists used the outer landscape (“the picturesque”) to create a mood/effect for controlling the mental life of populations
27:03
the Medieval arts were “festive, communal, and participative” (“not intended to give any sense of privileged or elite life”) (“like the Balinese who considered art as the programming of the environment” as in Pop Art)
28:20
“in an age of electronic immediacy and totality, we now dream of tackling the whole human environment as a work of art” (Pop Art is merely reporting this to us)
29:17
“the elite Art Establishments (the blood bank people) are mere classifiers (art as a means of ratings rather than as a function for training human perception)”
29:40
the mid-19th Century Symbolist artists (“the Rimbauds, the Wagners, the Baudelaires”) examined the “inner mental landscape” as something that could be programmed to create “an enriched, inclusive, total, mythic, corporate consciousness” instead of just creating a mood
30:13
April 4/2015 1176560-12-1
(Part 16 at 34:26 [finished playing from Aug.30/14])
Seurat did TV (“Lord of the Flies”) (rear-projection = light through)
34:26
the Malraux joke
35:58
McLuhan learned his media ecology from late 19th Century artists and poets PLUS the Vorticists
37:30
a Picasso painting creates “involvement” and “poetic drama” (Eliot’s theater)
38:23
modern advertising as a substitute for the product (Tony Schwartz mentioned)
39:29
the West is Orientalizing
41:53
McLuhan explains why he uses the technique of suspended judgement
43:26
movies on TV is TV
45:24
a Fellini film has no “storyline” (neither does a VanDerBeek movie or the “nouveau roman” novel [the ‘thing’ novel])
46:27
the Russian sensibility (Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and the film, “Dr. Zhivago”)
46:55
the new jokes with just an effect (no “storyline”) (“Alexander Graham Kowalski, the first Telephone Pole”)
47:33
no more lines (“clothes lines, hem lines, stag lines, etc.”)
48:05
McLuhan says he’s neither negative nor positive about the world today (“doesn’t even pretend to know”) 48:26
McLuhan puns on “On the Road” (a novel with plots/fictional narrative based on the 18th Century novel of “the characters all moving along a road”)
48:46
McLuhan explains “In Cold Blood” (like “Dr. Zhivago” it has no storyline but is “the account of a huge upheaval within our own sensory life…, it’s a revolution…, or an environmental shaping of energy”)
49:24
more on how we are “Orientalizing” (“role-oriented”)
50:14
the Peace Corps activity should be “at home” not in remote parts of the world
50:58
the kids are engaged in “inwardness, self-inspection and inquisition, profound earnestness and seriousness, and lack of playfulness” (“Oriental”)
51:15
Thomas Merton as an example (left the noisy monastery for the life of the hermit’s “silent hut”)
51:40
the habit of the West (“of cheerful endeavor and applied knowledge”)
52:28
modern dance is “sculpture” (“you make images, you can’t ask anybody for a dance on that floor…, it’s a closed world…, it has depth”)
52:48
Canada was shaped and unified by the railroad but has now fallen apart via “the airplane and electronic speeds of information movement” (the French Canadians are “offered legally and politically participation only by the most fragmentary and partial forms like nose-counting, voting”)
54:03
“electric technology decentralizes human energies because it makes possible anything happening anywhere at the same time… electric light can be enjoyed anywhere… no privileged position)”
55:51
McLuhan is concerned for his work in literature but has become more fascinated with the new forms and doesn’t think “there is too much occasion to despond”
56:33
