Last Friday I was posting the latest From the Archives pick when I read about Glenn O’Brien’s passing in The Guardian. Here’s the word…

Glenn O’Brien, the New York cultural figure who was an author, musician, magazine editor, style guru, TV host and key figure at Andy Warhol’s Factory, has died aged 70.

Described by Rolling Stone, one of the publications he edited along with Warhol’s Interview, as a “renaissance man”, O’Brien was perhaps best known as the host of TV Party – the public access show on which he interviewed guests, such as Debbie Harry and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

O’Brien’s show is indispensable for any student of New York’s punk/new wave/no wave underground scene as the candid chaos of TV Party’s improvised anarchy illuminates these people, this music and art in a way that no documentary ever will. Looking back on these episodes is a bit like watching a nature film where you have the opportunity to view wild things in their natural environment.

Here’s a massive playlist I made for y’all: This kicks off with a feature documentary about Glenn and TV Party before deep-diving into a handful of classic episodes and a few spotlit interviews. Keep your eyes peeled for Blondie, Chris Stein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Arto Lindsay, and David Byrne…

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As media becomes increasingly digitized, the vehicles for our ideas become faster and more fluid. What many people don’t realize is that they also become more fragile.

Let me give you an example: I’m combing through old recordings right now, looking for songs to add as extras to a remaster of my CD, Blue Turns Black. I’ve found digital files on disc and ADAT tapes that cannot be read or retrieved maybe nearly ten years old. However I have recordings on cassette tapes that go back to the 90′s that are still perfectly playable.

I bring up this example of how an older storage medium proves to be better than the “improvement” that displaced it in order to point your attention back to the humble floppy discs used — after cassette tapes — in early home computers. That technology is the hero in an art world story involving the discovery of an archive of digital paintings created by Andy Warhol 30 years ago. The Daily Mail explains…

Dozens of original artworks by Andy Warhol have been discovered on decaying floppy disks.
The artworks were commissioned in 1985 by pioneering home computer company Commodore, who wanted Warhol to demonstrate the graphic capabilities of its new Amiga 1000 as it went head to head with Apple’s popular Macintosh series.
Although video footage exists of the artist creating the images alongside singer Debbie Harry at the launch of the Amiga 1000, the artworks themselves were thought lost until researchers tracked down the obsolete disks within The Warhol Archive and hired a team of experts to extract the contents.

The hunt for the floppy disks began when the artist Cory Arcangel – a self-described Warhol fanatic and ‘lifelong computer nerd’ – stumbled on a YouTube video of the Amiga 1000 launch.

After discussing the footage with figures in the U.S. art scene, Arcangel was introduced to The Andy Warhol Museum’s chief archivist Matt Wrbican, who was able to track the floppy disks down.

Describing the artworks, Arcangel said: ‘In the images, we see a mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing a specific hand to eye coordination now suddenly grappling with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several inches from the screen.’

‘It had to be enormously frustrating, but it also marked a huge transformation in our culture: the dawn of the era of affordable home computing.’

‘We can only wonder how he would explore and exploit the technologies that are so ubiquitous today.’

Here’s that video…

Stay Awake!

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As we talked about on this week’s episode of Coincidence Control Network, Robert Hughes has slipped this mortal coil for that great rant in the sky. A consummate art critic, Hughes was as accessible as he was incisive — rather like the Carl Sagan of the cultural set, complete with his own blockbuster public television series.

Hughes wrote for TIME and he narrated a number of art programs for PBS and BBC but his masterpiece was The Shock of the New. Along with its accompanying book, Hughes’ Shock traced the development of modern art from Impressionism through Warhol. Debuting in 1980, the series’ last episode was prescient skewering of the art world’s increasing commercialization.

Cantankerous but committed, stubborn but straight-shooting, Hughes was a knowledgeable critic, a fantastic writer and someone who clearly felt that art and culture weren’t just the preserve of the privileged.

I’ve gone ahead and pulled together a Hughes playlist on my YouTube channel. So far I’ve added all 8 episodes of Shock including “Episode 5: The Threshold of Liberty.” Here is where you’ll find Hughes’ hilarious dismissal of Surrealism. I still don’t agree with everything he says here, but that’s not really the point. You don’t have to read or listen to Hughes to agree with what he says. It’s quite enough to simply enjoy the way he says it.

Stay Awake!