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Sunday, April 22, 2001

Bob’s Notes | McLuhan at Fordham with Ralph Baldwin, September 1967

Payday

NOTE:Timing based on Payday archives.


Oct.18/2014 1178055-3-1 Sept./67 ("OPEN-MIND SURGERY"):

(Part 13 at 22:31)

Steve Allen on grievances
23:58

Edison joke
24:50

white-boy joke
25:24

Hitler
26:08

Ray Bradbury on the quest for identity as violence (John Wayne, Blacks, and asceticism)
26:52

the Jazz Age and Negroes during radio and TV
27:55

Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation (today's 21-year olds)
28:18

1920's and jobs
29:03

slums
29:31

swingers
29:47

predicts coming depression ("unless there is surgery")
30:16

Germany in WW2 and us, too
30:34

programmed teaching machines (post-biology, millions of years in seconds)
31:02

the fish don't know who discovered water
32:18

TV is an X-ray device ("the radiation goes right through us") and children in school today
32:52

Vietnam as "education" (repeat of Julius Caesar with the Huns and Alexander the Great)
33:41

West is Orientalizing ("the inner trip")
34:40

Black Power is empowered by TV
35:14

India, China, and Africa will become violent
35:58

obsolesced liberal, literate, fragmented mind
36:12

our different sensory spaces
36:35

newspaper has no story line
36:57

TV as Joyce's "charge of the light barricade"
37:26

"FW is the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet"
37:43

Darwin didn't intuit evolution as outer and programmable
38:07

Teilhard de Chardin was a little more aware of the meaning of the electronic than Darwin could possibly have been
38:41

Darwin's obsession with thumbs, fingers, and appendages ("content of the old environment")
38:50

By programming the total human environment as a teaching machine for the first time, rational man in the "computerized universe" can "get his first innings"
39:23

HCE notices change now
39:56

Utopias are rearview mirror ("Bonanzaland") and why
40:36

easy to predict via media ecology (why the end of "stars" in entertainment and baseball)
41:34

Smothers Brothers and what the kids are interested in ("how things are done")
42:17

Expo'67 (a mosaic with no story line or connections like the front page or the TV screen) vs. New York World's Fair (1964)
42:44

no pictures on TV ("an involving mosaic situation")
44:01

McLuhan's not trying to "present any programs of action" but "to try and suggest ways of perceiving the situations we have developed for ourselves"
44:31

the Indian smoke-signal joke (Indians outdone by bomb blast ["I wish I'd said that"])
44:48

goat joke preferring the book
45:27

mice joke and cancer research (praises Steve Allen again)
46:18

no jokes in New York City ("not repeatable")
46:47

comments on the coming depression again (feels guilty being negative)
47:19

predicts the dropout executive (role player) "phase"
47:45

"all activities now become associated and interrelated"
48:06

more on the obsolescence of the Organization Chart and baseball (one-thing-at-a-time is over)
48:30

mentions his testing in Toronto (literate kids' immunity)
49:00

McLuhan's desire to have discovered media ecology many years earlier
49:05

more on McLuhan's testing of TV kids ("two kinds of human beings") in Toronto
49:13

Vietnam is the first TV war (involvement bothers people)
50:16

uses Lewis' term "gang" (predicts more and more draft dodgers)
51:03

"we do have a rather deep desire to work out a liveable equilibrium for the human community" (despite "designing fanciful reasons for these events" and "selecting very unfortunate and wasteful goals for our energies")
51:21

"we do go to so much trouble to create violent upsets and disequilibrium" (doubts successful global reprogramming in the 60s and 70s )
51:49

"Columbus went too far" and "Plymouth Rock should have landed on the Pilgrims" jokes
52:10

"in our present world there cannot be a Columbus, and external exploration has ended" ("the future of exploration is necessarily internal, whether in medicine or entertainment")
52:56

McLuhan ends by saying "I think I will fold my tents like the Arabs and quietly steal off"
53:20

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