Andy and Me (It’s Not Real and It’s Not Fiction)

This chapter charts the influence of Andy Warhol on filmmaker Tom Kalin and provides an overview of Kalin’s films as well as his activism. From experimental videos such as They are lost to vision altogether (1989) to his features, Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007), Kalin has drawn on Warhol’s cinematic language and bold sexual and gender politics. The chapter also depicts Kalin’s work with the activist collectives ACT UP and Gran Fury. Gran Fury formed to give voice to the political issues surrounding AIDS in America. This eleven-person collective devised appropriation strategies to simultaneously utilize and critique Madison Avenue vernaculars, and circumnavigate questions of access. Named for the automobile used by the New York City police (and also sounding like “big anger”), Gran Fury created public works that drew attention to medical, moral, and political issues related to AIDS.

Southern Projections: Black Television Hosts, Madison Avenue, and Nationalizing the South in 1950s Primetime

This article situates Nat King Cole’s NBC experience within those of Hazel Scott and Harry Belafonte, whose own programs bookended the first decade of television. While Scott was blacklisted and her Dumont show canceled, the brief primetime stints of Cole and Belafonte on national network television, reveal a shifting rhetoric surrounding the policing of blackness on TV that focused blame on the South. The South, then, became a convenient rhetorical device in the rejection of Black national television content. This article follows these two parallel yet interlocking threads, with the first section detailing the rise of national television in conversation with the South and the deflection of racism onto the region—an easy representational task amidst news coverage of the civil rights movement. The latter portion of the article follows a genealogy of Black hosted variety programs and Black televisual resistance from Scott to Cole and Belafonte.

The Perfect Television Game

Television was a key to the growth and success of the NFL. It provided half of the League’s revenue, it was a marketing tool of great power, and the NFL came to dominate the television industry. Television played a key role in the success of the AFL while at the same time the NFL was developing its relation with CBS. The Blackout rule of 1953 and the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 were important developments in this relationship. Pete Rozelle was a marketing genius and cultivated a relationship with the networks and Madison Avenue advertising firms. The Merger set the stage for further television growth for the NFL and the creation of Monday Night Football produced a new bonanza of revenue as MNF became a cultural icon. The entrance of cable television, ESPN and Turner Sports, and the creation of the FOX Network provided more revenue opportunities. The NFL Network, Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, expanding tiers of playoff games, the emergence of the Super Bowl, and the televising of the NFL Draft, added to the power of the NFL economically and culturally. Technology aided and abetted all these developments including satellites, DirecTV, the personal computer, the internet, the wireless phone, electronic games, and multiple forms of social media, and all were absorbed and exploited by the NFL.