Friday, April 23, 2021

This Day in History

 


Meet Jawed Karim. I'll give you more information about him right after this very brief documentary. For now all you need to know is that on April 23, 2005, he uploaded to YouTube its first video, titled "Me at the zoo": 


Though I've since found out that this is probably the most famous YouTube video of all time, I was unaware of its existence until a week ago. Of course I've heard of YouTube, which regularly supplies this blog with its moving pictures, but never gave much thought to its origins. Not knowing anything about this video when I first saw it other than that it was the first, I assumed that young man was still in high school when it was created. I mean, he looks and even sounds like a teenager, doesn't he? In fact, Jawed Karim was 25 at the time. Admittedly, that's not too long after high school, but shouldn't he at least have, I don't know, a five o'clock shadow or something? Noting the contrast between his thoroughly Americanized speaking style and--I hope this doesn't come across as too xenophobic--foreign-sounding name, I figured he must be a first-generation American. As a matter of fact, he's a naturalized American citizen, born in a country then known as East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother. Not too long after he moved with his family from East Germany to West Germany. When he was about 13, he and his family emigrated to the United States, settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he graduated from high school. English, then, is not his first language, as he would have spent much of his growing up years speaking either German or Bengali, though I detect no trace of an accent, evidence of the transcendent, multicultural power of the phrase "that's cool".


  

9, 868,404? That was years ago. It's now up to 161,518,949.  There are 11,118,151 comments, and a few of the comments themselves have many comments. For instance, the comment, "I learned more about elephants in this video than I did in 12 years of school" has 500 replies (one of which is "Not even school can tell you whether they're long or not 😔.") Then there's the thumb up/thumb down. 182 thousand viewers didn't like the video. That's a lot of people, but it's dwarfed by the 7.5 million who did like it. As for subscriptions to his YouTube channel, "jawed", they're at 1.82 million. Certainly not everybody but I imagine at least some of those subscribers have been waiting for the full 16 years for Karim to post an encore video, whereas there's one subscriber that I know of--me!--who's been waiting a whole week. Don't fret. I'm patient. In the meantime, I have to ask, how did he come to post that 16 year old video in the first place? Did he answer a help wanted ad placed in the newspaper? Or, more appropriately, in the Wired classifieds?


   In a sense, it turns out that he was the one doing the advertising. Jared Karim cofounded YouTube with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three twentysomething males met while working at PayPal, an online money transfer company, a kind of  digital age version of Western Union. PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002. The story then gets a bit hazy, but Karim, Hurley, and Chen seems to have been bought out as a result of the acquisition, and with their newfound riches (which were nothing compared to riches yet to come) decided to form their own company. How did they happen upon video sharing? Stores vary, from Hurley and Chen wanting to start an online dating service specifically focusing on attractive women to Karim frustrated that he couldn't find Janet Jackson's infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction online (I guess I should emphasize that these were three twentysomething heterosexual males.) Whatever its inspiration, YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005 (though not as an online dating service after all,, despite it being Valentine's Day.) By mid-April, the three techies had worked out all the bugs, and that's when Karim uploaded his video. So his primary motivation wasn't to be the next Lester Holt or Anderson Cooper, but just to have content for his own website. His video might encourage others to use the service. And so it did. Within a year, 65,000 videos--a mixture of DIY, as was Karim's, and third-party, i.e., movie and TV clips--were being uploaded every day, and the site was receiving 100 million views a day. That's a lot of supply and demand.

 



I doubt if artistic considerations (or the rules of title capitalization) were uppermost in Jawed Karim's mind when he and a friend (the guy holding the camera) put together "Me at the zoo," but can we regard it as art anyway, or is it just an audio-visual post-it note, with a computer screen in place of a refrigerator? And if it's not art, why is the video so popular? Well, I didn't read all 11,118,151 comments, but the 20 or so that I did skim through would indicate that much of it has to do with simple curiosity. "2021, time to watch the first video on YouTube", as someone named Lonely Sandwich puts it. Obviously, if that video debuted today, it would be less of a sensation, and the San Diego Zoo would find little reason to feel honored. Some naysayers feel the video is of substandard quality. Well, in my opinion, it's substandard in the same way that Gertie the Dinosaur (the first widely-seen animated cartoon), the Model T Ford (the first affordable automobile) and Pong (the first video game) are substandard. Immensely popular in their respective days, those things would be met with a shrug at best were they being introduced for the very first time in 2021. What one has to do is stop obsessing about all the innovations that have since come down the pike, and accept a famous first on its own terms. Do that and the appeal becomes immediately apparent, it becomes fresh again, the sense of promise is once more there. Karim's low-key, tongue-in-cheek approach fit perfectly with the experimental nature of early YouTube. While it's no The Wizard of Oz, I personally got a kick out of "Me at the zoo" and laughed out loud when Karim concluded by wryly saying, "...and that's pretty much all there is to say." Why not laugh? I truly believe he meant to end it on a humorous note. And finally, it is cool that elephants have such long trunks. If you don't believe me, then go to the zoo and see for yourself!

Not too long after YouTube was launched, Jawed Karim decided to go back to school, as a graduate student in--you would have thought he would have known enough about this subject by now but I guess not-- computer science at Stanford University. So while Chad Hurley and Steve Chen served as co-CEOs of the new internet startup, Karim was only an informal advisor, with a somewhat smaller share of the company's stock. When Google  purchased YouTube about a year and a half later, Hurley and Chen (still in their 20s) walked away from the sale billionaires, while all Karim got was a measly $64 million.


Still, he made do.



Jawed Karim was an early investor in Airbnb, the online houses-for-rent vacation booking company, and thanks to the success of that, in addition to his YouTube shares, he now has a net worth of around $190 million. Obviously, he's no longer anybody's idea of what was once known in the vernacular as the "common man". Nevertheless, he struck a populist blow against Big Tech a while back when Google, the motto of which is "Don't be evil", in the eyes of many seemed to be just that when it launched Google+  in 2011 as an alternative to Facebook. Rather than let the superiority of the product speak for itself--well, let's not go there--it decided to use strongarm tactics to attract subscribers, namely people already subscribing to such Google subsidiary services as Blogger and the aforementioned YouTube. Basically, if you wanted to partake in some or all of those services, you had to subscribe to Google+ and waste an hour or so giving a lot of detailed information about yourself, and deciding what portion of that detailed information you want under virtual lock and key and what you want out there for the whole world to see. Google+ came to an inglorious end in 2019, but not before Jawed Karim made his opinion known:

 "why the fuck do i need a Google+ account to comment on a video"

And that's pretty much all there is to say.  
 




  

 


Saturday, April 17, 2021

Quips and Quotations (Workplace Safety Edition)


1937-2021

All the guys on the set smoked. They just dropped their butts and stepped on them. The producers worried that I might step on a smoldering cigarette and go up in flames...They gave me synthetic hair, which was flame-retardant.


--Felix Silla, stuntman and actor, Cousin Itt on TV's The Addams Family



Numerous obituaries are reporting that Cousin Itt was the only television Addams Family character to not have appeared first in a Charles Addams New Yorker cartoon, but as someone who as a kid used to check out Addams' cartoon collections from the library, that didn't sound right to me. Not much googling transpired before I found the above, though in the interest of fairness, I will note "Itt" is both not capitalized and spelled differently--Kirk


 

Sunday, April 11, 2021

Vital Viewing (Weimar Republic Edition)


Actor-singer-dancer Joel Grey was born on this day in 1932. Diana Ross and James Coburn invite the Cleveland native up on stage in this clip from the 45th Academy Awards (held in 1973 for movies made in 1972):


It was an unusual Oscars presentation that year. There was Native-American activist Sacheen Littlefeather famously, or, in the subsequent onstage opinions of Raquel Welch and Clint Eastwood, infamously, turning down the Best Actor award on behalf of no-show Marlon Brando. Eastwood himself was on stage twice that night, planned and unplanned. Planned was his reading of the Best Picture nominees (The Godfather, starring Brando, won.) Unplanned, Eastwood was pressed into service earlier that night when it looked like Charlton Heston might not show up to read the voting rules because of a flat tire on his way to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (after a few Ten Commandment jokes obviously not written with Eastwood in mind, Heston showed up and took over.) Of course, neither Littlefeather or Eastwood is in the above clip. So what I find unusual is that year's Oscars set direction. I don't mean who won for Best Set Direction. I mean Diana Ross' and James Coburn's immediate surroundings. They look like they're backstage or in the wings or something, don't they? That was kind of the idea. The opening musical number had a plainly-dressed Angela Lansbury informing us, via song and dance, that moviemaking is really just another job and the stars are merely working stiffs. It's actually an entertaining little number, and I might show it here sometime, that ends with Lansbury, now all gussied up in a glamorous gown, singing "make a little magic." Except once she's finished, we're stuck with the nonmagical faux-backstage set, and have to rely on occasional shots of the star-studded audience for gussied-up glamour. Unless those stars come up on stage to accept or hand out awards. And just how glamorously gussied-up do you find Ross (who had hoped to both accept and hand out but ended up only doing the latter) in that tuxedo? I have absolutely nothing against unisex fashions but the normally super-femme Miss Ross is the last person who I would expect to see take up crossdressing. But Ross is no Marlene Dietrich. Rather than provocative, she comes across as merely a cute curiosity. Still, it's appropriate that she would be dressed such a way when presenting an Oscar to Joel Grey, who himself was both provocative and unisexual in the film that won a whole bevy of Oscars that night.


Another one of those Oscars went to Liza Minnelli (she beat out the aforementioned Ross, nominated for Lady Sings the Blues), allowing her to finally, and deservedly, emerge from the shadow of her famous mother. I'll examine her signature performance at some later date. For now the man of the hour (or for however long it takes you to peruse this post) is Grey. A mainstay of the New York stage for about 20 years at that point (despite looking like he was still in his 20s), the Cabaret win made him, for a time, a household name, though the character he played, the nameless Master of Ceremonies of a between-the-world-wars Berlin nightclub, isn't one you would have found hanging around very many American households. Watch:

 


The movie does not exploit decadence; rather, it gives it its due.

--Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Before it was a movie musical, Cabaret was a stage musical (and before that a stage play and before that a book of interrelated short stories by Christopher Isherwood.) Among its feature players was a woman who a few years earlier tried but failed to kill James Bond in From Russia with Love, a man who at the same time he was appearing in hit Broadway musicals also appeared in a series of Cracker Jack commercials on TV, a woman who spent the 1970s appearing in British-made horror films and doing guest shots on American TV crime shows like Baretta and Vega$, and a man who later hosted the game show Tattletales (I admit to being fascinated by performers career arcs.) And then there's Joel Grey, the only one to appear in both the stage and film versions. And for good reason. Though on the original Broadway poster his name appears below the actors I just mentioned, the critics of the day praised his performance, which brought audiences into the theater, and he was and is seen as the main reason the stage version became a hit in the first place.

Here's a blurry clip from the 21st Tony Awards (held in 1967 for productions that debuted in 1966.) That's Larry Hagman's mom who introduces a legendary husband-and-wife dance team (though not so legendary they didn't eventually divorce), who in turn have come up on stage the then-35-going-on-19 Grey:


Joel Grey more-or-less reprised his Master of Ceremonies role for television in 1976. The atmosphere is much less decadent, but, to paraphrase Ms. Kael, it gives whimsy its due:

 

I have a sudden craving for a Kit Kat bar.

Monday, April 5, 2021

Selling Your Sole to the Devil


 Have you heard the latest controversy? Last week,  as a promotional tie-in to his new video,  rapper Lil Nas X put on sale 665 satanically-modified Nike sneak--oops, I'm dating myself--athletic shoes, with a drop of human blood in each and every one, at $1,018 a pop. If all you Iron Maiden fans out there are wondering about the 666th, that's to be raffled off in the near future (so, in order to pull this off, did 666 different people get pricked with a needle, or did one person just get pricked 666 times? I can't help but wonder about these things.) As evidence that capitalism is still very much with us despite some devastating blows of late, all 665 pairs sold out in less than a minute. Not that every single customer that ordered one got it delivered to their door via Amazon or whoever, as Nike Inc.--which didn't authorize either the modification or the sale and certainly not the raffle--has won a temporary restraining order halting the delivery of the fallen angel footwear. The multinational corporation--headquartered in 14% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 27% religiously unaffiliated Oregon but with most of its factories in Buddhist East Asia--is planning other legal action as well. I guess I can see where Nike is coming from. Nobody likes having their brand coopted, especially without their permission. That said, Nike should be careful about (as numerous biblical quotes put it) reaping what they sow, or (as Hesiod by the way of Edith Hamilton puts it) opening up a Pandora's box, or (as 1001 Arabian Nights by way of Sidney Sheldon puts it) letting the genie out of the bottle. After all...


...a certain Greek goddess might complain that it was originally her brand that was coopted.


Saturday, April 3, 2021

Peter's Poultry

 


Easter may be on its way, but whatever happened to hippity-hoppiting down the bunny trail?