WWW

The weekly series WWW, which debuted on October 29, 2006 and dealt with the intertwined histories of television and the Internet, is now off the air. We here at Blog About Town thank you for your interest in the show, which replaced Tonight on Desperate Housewives.



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Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW



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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

WWW

By special arrangement with the WGA and The Late Show with David Letterman, we further interrupt our rerun schedule to bring you this fresh episode of WWW:

"A little OT since we’re talking about TV schedules – Bill Maher will be a guest on The Late Show this coming Thursday, 1/3/08. Letterman’s company (Worldwide Pants) has come to terms with the WGA, so Bill won’t be crossing any picket lines. I’m a little surprised that he’s agreed to return to his own show, however, as of January 11, 2008. I imagine that he wants to keep the other staff employed, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts out with some kind of ‘solidarity’ statement on the first broadcast!"—newsblooz at the AC 360° blog (January 1, 2008)




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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

By special arrangement with the WGA, we interrupt out rerun schedule to bring you this fresh episode of WWW:

"I write this to you two nights before Christmas. It’s tough as hell to be on strike during the holiday season. Not only are we staging outdoor pickets and other events in the throes of winter’s cold, we’re without work and paychecks at a moment when gift giving and good times are very much on the minds of everyone around us, especially our friends and loved ones.

"Yet we know that what we’re fighting for is worth it, that we’re exchanging our temporary stress and discomfort for future gain and security, not only for ourselves but those who will follow us as wordsmiths and storytellers."—Michael Winship, President, Writers Guild of America, East (December 23, 2007)

WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

This week's installment of WWW has been pre-empted due to the WGA strike. Instead, we offer this rerun and the following message from Woody Allen:



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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

This week's installment of WWW has been pre-empted due to the WGA strike. Instead, we offer this rerun and the following message from Doris Lessing:

"What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking."

WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

This week's installment of WWW has been pre-empted due to the WGA strike. Instead, we offer this rerun and the following message from Amy Sohn:

"Everyone knows the future of TV is the Internet and I see this move as an attempt to get us to get used to not being paid on the Internet so the next generation of writers, who are kids now, won’t expect to be when they’re in the position we’re in now."

WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

This week's installment of WWW has been pre-empted due to the WGA strike. Instead, we offer this rerun and the following message from screenwriter Irving (Life of Riley) Brecher.



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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

This week's installment of WWW has been pre-empted due to the WGA strike. Instead, we offer this rerun and the following message (thanks to Dan Radosh for the lead).



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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

This week's installment of WWW has been pre-empted due to the WGA strike. Instead, we offer this rerun and this link regarding the WGA and Broadway stagehand strikes.


WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

This week's installment of WWW has been pre-empted due to the WGA strike. Instead, we offer this rerun.

TV is completely changing, the way people are watching is completely changing, and we just want some structure in place to make sure the union is treated fairly. I hope this ends as soon as possible; I’d be more than happy to do SNL this Saturday.

As far as how long we’re willing to strike, the important thing for us to remember is that twenty years ago the writers went on strike for 22 weeks, and as a younger writer I’m a beneficiary of what they went through. But we would all much rather be working!"—Seth Meyers

WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photos: David Marc Fischer

WWW

"Frank is dressing up as Y2K for Halloween tonight--he's going to wear a TV screen filled with static. Why is this a joke for so many people? Is it that impossible for something in computers to go so wrong that the results will be catastrophic? Downloading all the upgrades is entirely up to me."—Excerpt from October 31, 1999 email from lizziema@osu.edu to rengob@uwm.edu, used as bookmark in copy of Westworld acquired by the Strand Bookstore in December 1999



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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

"Danny calls a TV a TV but he also calls a computer monitor a TV. Which got me thinking. When I think about computers on television, I think about those stories that climax when the hero cleverly asks 'Why?' and basically gives the evil computer a nervous breakdown, complete with sparks and smoke. But television on computers is actually matter [sic] of almost insidious infiltration, blending in so smoothly that you hardly notice that a takeover is taking place."—Excerpt from October 15, 1998 email from mediaprof@cuny.edu to nosmot@syr.edu, found in Syracuse University office on October 17, 1998


WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

"The broadcast of the 1947 World Series clinched television's growing importance. By the end of the 1950s, nearly 90 percent of U.S. homes could boast at least one TV set. The world no longer needed to be imagined—now it could be seen and heard. America had a new communal fireplace."—Excerpt from entry for Television (#14 out of the 100 Events listed in Life: The Millennium, the Fall 1997 Special Double Issue)


WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW

RDWORRIER So I've been thinking...
BSCOUT96 Your first misteak :)
RDWORRIER lmao
RDWORRIER Anyway, what is the Emergency Braodcast system anway? does it work? does anybody take itseriously?
—Excerpt from AOL chatroom transcript printed out October 10, 1996 and found in scrap paper pile on July 15, 1999



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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW. "I got the numbers I told you about. Many of the big Usenet groups from this July were for porn (of course) but there were other popular bulletin boards too. The TV-related ones were (not very surprisingly) alt.tv.simpsons and two for Star Trek: rec.arts.startrek.info and rec.arts.startrek.current. Oh—your favorite alt.2600 was behind The Simpsons but ahead of Star Trek!"—Excerpt from email sent from Prodigy user REKCAH to AOL user AL1962, dated October 2, 1995 (printout found in used file cabinet sold in Pasadena, California, in 1998)


WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW. "Okay, so I need your opinion. Clark thinks that Friends is just like Seinfeld. I think he's crazy. What do you think?"—Excerpt from letter from M. L. (Columbus, OH) to B. C. (Milwaukee, WI), dated September 25, 1994



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WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

WWW. "Have you been following the shitstorm over Bochco's new show? I can't believe that in this day and age anybody gives a flying fuck about whether a guy's ass might appear onscreen or a few curses are in the script. Who the hell cares? Unless it's Franz's ass."—Excerpt from letter from A. D. C. (Daytona Beach, FL) to M. F. (Beverly Hills, CA), dated September 13, 1993


WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer

PLAYING AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

Perhaps you noticed the WWW episode that mentioned Supervision, the very obscure TVTV excursion into surrealistic television history. I'm a big fan of it myself—perhaps the biggest fan of it in the world! Once upon a time I managed to find installments of Supervision at the Museum of Television and Radio, where they were scattered willy-nilly amidst recordings of PBS Visions episodes from the 1970s.

This stuff is so obscure that it wasn't even included in an MTR salute to TVTV, but it looks like Anthology Film Archives will screen one Harold Ramis-directed installment in a fascinating program scheduled for Friday night at 8 pm. (There's a chance that it isn't technically part of Supervision, but I'm sure it's close enough.) Here's the description, from Anthology's website:

ALL CIRCUITS ON: THE BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
What on earth did people do before there was TV? Tonight's sophomore installment of ALL CIRCUITS ON attempts to answer this burning question with a panoramic presentation of videos, performances and fun-filled facts. Engineer/Filmmaker/Philosopher Park Doing will be on hand to tell us the true story of early TV; how it was created, contested and co-opted. You may not know that in 1928 the first live drama broadcast, a three-camera production called THE QUEEN'S MESSENGER, was received on a General Electric Octagon set in Schenectady, New York. In 1931, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) broadcast experimental signals from the Empire State Building, featuring a familiar cartoon character, Felix the Cat. Prof. Doing, whose forthcoming book from the MIT Press is titled VELVET REVOLUTION AT THE SYNCHROTRON, will shine a light on the story behind and technology involved in these nascent broadcasts. He will even have some of it on hand for a show-and-tell demonstration. You haven't seen anything till you've witnessed a functioning Mechanical TV, or the films that Doing has made with this odd and wonderful device. This talk will be presented alongside a staged re-telling of TV's origins by TVTV and, well, one of the best uses of the medium thus far, THE GONG SHOW.

ALL CIRCUITS ON is a new Anthology series produced in close collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video and media art since 1971. Together we are revisiting our roots, combining forces and bringing our archives together to increase the potential for rarely-screened works from the early days of video exploration (which is to say pre-1979)....

Works to be screened include:

TVTV
BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
1977, 18 minutes, video. Directed by Harold Ramis; written by Frank Cavestany, Hudson Marquez, Harold Ramis, Michael Shamberg, and Willie Walker.
A fictional, at times satirical portrayal of the rise of television and the death of radio, rooting the story in a greater American mythology. The historic figures of Philo Farnsworth, Edward Armstrong, and David Sarnoff are reduced to archetypes in a stand-off between the little man and Big Media. By now, we know who wins.

Tony Labat & Bruce Pollack
BRUCE AND TONY ON "THE GONG SHOW"
1978, 28 minutes, video.
Tony Labat and his frequent collaborator Bruce Pollack created an appropriately absurd performance for their appearance on the popular American variety/talent show. In a line-up that includes a man singing "God Bless America" through his nostrils and a woman who bends herself into a pretzel, Bruce and Tony manage to present a performance so absurd it defies ridicule. See it to believe it.

Also at Anthology this month: Unamerican Activities: The Films of Abraham Polonsky and several days of ephemeral oddities (September 20-23), including Why We're Fat, a program of nutrition documentaries curated by Skip Elsheimer (September 21 at 8 pm).

Here's Eat for Health, one of the films on the nutrition program.



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WWW. "So now we've got round-the-clock news for the city. It wasn't so long ago that a 1-hour news show for New York seemed like a radical thing. Now 24 hour news is like some kind of addiction. I bet it's just a matter of time before you stop seeing all the grannies looking out their windows."—Diary entry by M. L. of New York, NY, September 11, 1992


WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer