Media 70 in Austin and the Age of McLuhan

History of Media 70 and Timeline

(Note: This is a work in progress. There may be memory lapses. After all, we are becoming part of the new ’60s Generation’. Additions and corrections welcome.) Media 70 was organized in the Summer of 1968 to produce a multi-media show for the Freshman Summer Orientation Program at University of Texas in Austin. The show was designed to stimulate evening ‘rap’ sessions among incoming freshman–discussions were a key part of the orientation experience. The initial production, called Values was highly successful. Media 70 lasted until the Summer of 1971, and would produce 4 major productions and several message themed shows. At it’s peak, Media 70 included as many as dozen talented contributors.

Multi-Media Shows at UT Austin – Media 70

OK, here’s some ancient history, to mix in with the future history. In the late 60’s a group of UT Student Orientation Advisers put together a ‘multi-media’ show for new students arriving in the summer before their entry into life on the Austin campus. The show was designed to be entertainment after dinner in the dormitory, at the new Academic Center Auditorium (AC 21). AC 21 was a wonderful gallery type lecture hall with 4 giant rear projection screens, a center stage level film screen, and clear walls above the stage for more front projection from the booth. People filed into the darkened room tentatively, wondering what was going on, here?

With the room still dark, a rock and roll sound track started off with the raucous voices of the Stones (She’s a Rainbow) and ended with the sweet tones of Judy Collins (Who Knows Where the Time Goes), and for 30-40 minutes the kiddies were pounded with multiple screen images (35mm slides, film, TV) of campus life, anti-war protests, football (Go, ‘Horns), parties, and oh yeah, classrooms. The sons and daughters of Texas and the world got a dazzling taste of life in the new world of 1968-70 in Austin.

… Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto. The times were definitely changing, and for the group calling itself Media 70, it was like a prehistoric version of Second Life, with mind expanding ‘stuff’, music, images, issues, people. The group went on to do other shows for different venues, on and off campus. The most ambitious was a theatrical show that brought live actors on stage (and on film) into the AC 21 for a psychedelic Moog version of the Wizard of Oz, called The Wozard of Iz (written by Jacques Wilson with music composed and performed by Mort Garson). Students being what they are, very little survived of the images, sound track or script for this and other shows, but here is replicated the flier produced to handout all over campus to fill the house for the 8 night, 24 performances of The Wozard. Wow.

2011 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 23 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

World Series Gremlins Reveal the True Origins of Halloween

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt of an upcoming paper to be delivered by an aspiring Peer of Human Studies, to the Review Board of Tralfamadorian University, Universal Date – 312456, was intercepted by the SETA Observatory Radio Telescopes in Puerto Rico, at about 0100 hours, 28 October 2011.

 

“The dedicated student of human nature will often look for valuable indicators of these most fascinating creatures, by surveying some of the peripheral aspects of their culture. From their literature, folklore, superstitions, and from the games they play or follow in their spare time. In observing two of these phenomena occurring in the later portion of the 10th month of their solar year (marked by the time of 1 complete orbit of their world, Earth, around their star, Sol), this scholar found a curious and, I believe important, link.

‘Baseball’ and ‘Halloween’ exhibit a previously unknown, or at the very least, under-explored relationship. The members of this Board will recall, from both my previous presentations on these two items, that they seem to stem from very different parts of the spectrum of Human Culture. That is, Baseball being a Game played by children and adults with a small, hide covered orb (or ‘ball’ thus the name), and Halloween, described as a pseudo-religious, fairy-tale inspired celebration of a ‘Ghosts, Goblins, and Gremlins – Shop at WalMart’ endeavor for children and low intelligent adults, primarily as an excuse to eat massive quantities of sugar and sharp metal-laden confections – candy.

After close observation and review of the activities of the latest (Game 6) of the seven games of the World Series held last night in the City of the Arch (which artifact has puzzled Tral historians for some time), I propose that the World Series (of Baseball) is in fact the ritual and celebration that leads up to the annual night of offspring sacrifice known as Halloween.

What is most disturbing, and what inspired the thesis I present here today, is that events of Game 6 actually support the existence of Gremlins (or Angels or Devils, depending upon which Movie or Theatrical Performance is referenced). See Damn Yankees, Angels in the Outfield, or Gremlins in the Bullpen, for reference.

What else could explain the baubles, bumbles, and ‘whacky antics’ of two groups of very talented and professional adult Baseball Players, to whom this Human Society has paid millions of dollars (in a very bad economy), to ‘turn the perfect double play’ ?

Gremlins exist, and while this is not the first time that they appeared in World Series Games (See the 1986 World Series), this 2011 World Series is without a doubt, the most extensive showing of the ‘little devils’.

Respectfully submitted for your consideration, I remain,
Honus W. Doubleday, Humanist Studies, University of Tralfamadore

Post Script: Be sure to watch tonight’s Game 7, and observe a possible answer to the true purpose of the building of the St. Louis Arch, which was completed 46 years ago, on October 28, 1965. Is it some sort of time capsule Trojan Horse, spewing out 100’s of Baseball Ghosts (the Dean Brothers or Satchel Paige), to play their part in this scariest of Human Endeavors. I will update this post with the chilling answers. “So it goes.”

A Thousand Lifetimes

My part of the country has been suffering under a ‘heat dome’, with over 60 days at plus 100 degrees and zero rain. Driving in to the city this morning, there was a tease of weather that delivered 18 raindrops on my windshield. Not that driving into town at 5:30 AM, dodging the usual morons isn’t philosophical enough, but today I was listening to a freshly downloaded bonus track mp3 release of Glen Campbell’s “Ghost on the Canvas”. An incredible journey…

“A Lineman for the County” was an amazing introduction for me to Campbell’s voice and music, in a time of my life when AM radio and driving cars gave me a voice that sounded good, as long as I sang along with the blaring single speaker in the ’63 Chevy I drove around Austin in 1968. A freshman at UT Austin, I had no TV but went to the Student Union Building to watch the Smothers Brothers, and saw the too clean cut GC singing.

Glen Campbell on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

Now Glen is 75 with Altheimer’s, and I’m older, too, thinking about my ‘never-ending farewell tour’, and how tenuous our mental awareness is. It scares us, as it should. Those of us in our 60’s are ‘holding on to hope,’ and rooting for another victory by the medical community, over another demon of aging.

But back to the music, and how an icon of my life is making a journeyman effort to leave us with a legacy of words and music that will hopefully carry us to our end, as well. All of the 18 selections in “Ghost” are marvelous, and “In My Arms” really celebrates the music. But my favorite, “A Thousand Lifetimes”, has the line that speaks to me and mine, so well.

“Every breath I take, is a gift that I will never take, for granted.”

Warren Zevon left us with “Enjoy Every Sandwich”, as an epilogue and reminder to ‘live today’. And now Glen Campbell gives us more songs to sing along with as we spread our lunch, on the next thousand picnics.

Ghost on the Canvas - Glen Campbell

Marvin Argyle Everett

On this Father’s Day 2011:

On this day, observing the most amazing times and events in our history, two things strike me as important: The legacy of my father, and the 24nd annual cycle since we started our Fantastic Journey.

Dad’s Day

A note here about Marvin Argyle (1909-1990). He instilled in me the burning curiosity that got me here, and taught me the most important lesson in my life: “You don’t have to know all the answers. But you do have to know how and where to find them. Look it up.” He was a crossword puzzle freak, knowing at least 17 different 3 letter words for a river in India. Here’s a picture of him from a half a century ago. He would have loved the Internet, since he was the living analog predecessor of Google. I’ve often thought that if I had invented a gozillion dollar search engine, I would have named it marvinargyle.com ’cause he knew something about everything. Happy Father’s Day.

Originally posted June 21, 2009

The Marv in the Moon

On December 21, 2010 we will see a total lunar eclipse on Winter Solstice, an event that has not occurred since 1638 CE.

Marvin Argyle Everett

Decembers always seem to bring transitions, and Saturday, December 11, 2010 will mark the 20th anniversary of the passing of Marvin Argyle Everett (1909-1990), who could have been one of my favorite characters in any number of Robert Heinlein’s marvelous stories. There’s more about “Marv” in a post I did in 2008, called Papyrus 2.0. These two very different individuals provided much of the fabric from which I made my coat of many colors, through my childhood and into manhood.

Marvin Argyle Everett was not a scientist, writer or politician. He was a teacher and factory worker who knew more about the science of making soap for Procter and Gamble than all the junior execs who came through on their way somewhere else. He gently asked them not to step in his pile of floor sweepings in the Dallas P&G plant, while they queried him on the operations of the saponification process section he ran for over 20 years. He was also a Sunday School Teacher for the Men’s Class in the Baptist Church in our town for more than a decade or so. He taught me how to find the answers for all but the most technical or philosophical questions. He did not teach answers but taught how to find them, which is a distinctively different process.

From the juvenile sci-fi books of Heinlein, and more exactly the later adult stories, I learned to open my mind to explore galactic alternatives to the sodden life in South Dallas County in the 50’s and 60’s. From Podkayne of Mars,  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,  The Glory Road and Stranger in a Strange Land, I imagined that my ‘boy hick’ would someday travel the stars, and meet the Empress of the Seven Universes. Little did I realize then that all these tales would come true, not in some distant world, but right here in Parker County. Together my heroine and I conquer worlds of villains, from the comfort of our stone cottage.

Robert and Virginia Heinlein on the set of Destination Moon, in 1949

Marv would not have agreed with very much of what Heinlein had to say in his stories, but in my cooling tower of a brain the two provided me with all the number crunching, text processing, emotional roller coastering that I have needed to build a pretty damn good picture of life.

The enigmatic nature of the literature of Heinlein is that his heroes were often misfits, orphans, accidents, or inconvenient additions to whatever world in which they found themselves. This underdog mythos speaks volumes to most of us nerds, geeks, and generally Animal House denizens, who wind up on the Supreme Court or running the Olympics. Wow! Dinkum good.

These tidbits of fact and fict I pass on to you, who are smart enough to find this needle in the haystack of a Web 2.0 bloggers’ universe. Ha! TANSTAAFL I say to you! Marv would say, “Big Joke!”

An Evening on a Tropical Beach by Ed Clifton (1969)

Notes from Tom Clifton, about the photo in Flickr:

The Tektite habitat at the bottom of Lamshure Bay, St John, US VI. Photo by Ed Clifton 1969. I have included this photo in the Meteor, Meteorites, and Tektites pool for obvious reasons. What might not be obvious is why it was called Tektite. This is second hand, so I apologize if I missed something:

The story behind the naming the habitat goes something like this. The original design came out of GE’s space division and someone at GE figured that it could work as an marine habitat. When working on what to name it, they came across the definition of a tektite as something from space that lands on the ocean floor.

Tektite Habitat ~ Originally uploaded by Tom Clifton

Never Give In, Never, Never, Never

Winston Churchill: November 29, 1941 – Address To Harrow School

…this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

Here’s another leader from our past that has words to heed in this time in our country’s struggles. There are those that want to spin truth from lies, that want us to give in to the claims of failed policy. The Media is not without blame in this game of spinning lies into belief. But please go back and read our history. There is always much to learn from the past…  .mp3

Lincoln’s Birthday

Factoid: Lincoln was asked by his own party to step down and not run for re-election in 1864.

Commented on HuffPost: Why Judd Gregg’s Change of Heart Was a Birthday Present to Lincoln’s Protégé –

“Thanks for the refreshing post, running somewhat against the grain of most of the splinter heads in the media (take that! Fox and MSNBC and all in between). Now is the time for the center cut of America to step up and eschew all the fringes. We should be partisans only for all of America, as is our President.”

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

More of my babbling: The State of Israel, the US Air Force, the hydrogen bomb, and myself are all roughly the same age. In those 60 odd years, we have all seen maybe a dozen moments, that in retrospect, could have gone a different way, and literally could have changed the fabric of the universe. A new shirt, or wads of tangled, smoldering thread drifting through the cosmos waiting for another set of complex hydrocarbons to make a stand. We are at one of those times.

When I was 12, I heard the “Ask not…” call, and it thrust me into a state of consciousness that has been both a blessing and a source of intense pain. But the bottom line is, that each of us can, on some level, or with some degree of success, absolutely change the way the electrons spin around the center.

Make a difference? Absolutely. One more important than another? Sometimes, briefly. Have an effect if you say “No, thanks.”? Impossible. That is not to say that “Just say No.” is not often the right answer, and itself can be a game changer. But to slip out of the ring because there might be a problem, or because things might not go perfectly, is unthinkable to me. Now is not the time to drop out.

I believe that Frodo was right not to kill Gollum when he had the chance, because you never know when even the most vile creature can, for all the wrong reasons, cause the right thing to happen. If all this appears to be psycho-literary-elitist babble, then you are just not reading enough history. Final answer. Locked in. “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

Gov Two Oh!

Update 6 Feb 09

Infrastructure. Information. Community.

Enabling Collaboration: Three Priorities for New Administration 5 Feb 09

on dot-gov: Transparency Requires Plain Language 2 Feb 09

White House Memo – Open Government Directive 26 Jan 09

GovLoop Group for Enabling Collaboration: Open Government Directive

Original 30 Jan 09

Government is Information. The basis of US Industry is Information. If we can perfect the model for the development, management, distribution, communication, storage and archival of information for Government, then we can provide a model to re-grow the economy, green the culture, and vastly reduce our addiction to foreign sources of petro chemicals (oil).

Government is Food. If we change the paradigm for food production away from fast food, which uses vast amounts of energy and oil, and sickens our population with sugar and fat, then we can significantly reduce our healthcare costs,  extend our environmental protection, and greatly reduce our need for foreign oil.

Step One:  Fix the Government

1. The Data Infrastructure needs a major upgrade in power and consistency, utilizing all the tools that are razor’s edge now, to bring organizations into standards that work and are secure.
2. Interactive and Collaborative methods must become part of the fabric of the organization from the top down. Part of this re-tool must include thinning out middle management bottlenecks, and empowering individuals as collaborative peers.
3. Green the Government: Telework (40%) must become mandatory for all positions where physical presence is not absolutely necessary. This includes managers. The state of consumer electronics has already proven this viable technically.  What are we waiting for?
4. We must Mobilize our legacy staff and Recruit from the talented pool that have been raised on Web 2.0. In the 30 odd years I’ve been an IT geek, no one ever learned how to help themselves with me around to bail them out. Listen to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and then walk around most any building in DC. The similarity is shocking.

Step Two:  Fix the People

Any of this sound familiar? Let me know. As we went on our monthly run for supplies at Walmart today, we walked among overweight young people, with bluetooth and 3G devices, piling up their baskets with products made from cheap subsidized sugar, vegetable oil and starch, made with energy from foreign oil. And beer and disposable diapers, for too many kids born to under-employed families. I am a childless older version of those, now diabetic, and now somewhat smarter, looking for good food that won’t kill me faster than the 40 years I spent drinking Dr. Pepper and eating at McDonalds. Of all the bounty in this modern market of deadly, cheap food, only about 23% can be eaten safely by a 60 year old white male with Type 2 Diabetes.

Step Three:  Give Peas a Chance

But don’t do this for me. Do it for yourself. And your kids that are so bright, and now have a real chance to grow up without the venom of a racist America to distract them from the incredible potential that shows in the face of children that want to grow up to become President. We really do now know that any of us can. LMAO. Steal This Blog!

Taking Risks: Roosevelt in Paris 1910

27 January 2009: It seems quite appropriate to re-blog this entry, at the end of this first week of a new chapter in the American story…

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.” – Teddy Roosevelt

“Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Originally posted September 2007…