Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

Adam Gopnik, former Paris correspondent for “The New Yorker,” provides some context for understanding the “Charlie Hebdo” attack. Also, director Mike Leigh, long known for his trenchant films about contemporary life, turns to one of the titans of 19th-century art, J.M.W. Turner. And the young composer Matthew Aucoin takes us inside his writing process. Aucoin has drawn comparisons with Leonard Bernstein and Mozart — but he’d rather be himself. 

This week, a former CIA man brings his Cold War experiences to light on the TV spy show "The Americans." We take a serious look at "Mad Magazine," the goofy, bawdy, sarcastic kids’ magazine that made America snarky. And Brazilian cellist Dom La Nena performs live. (Segments in this week's episode aired previously.)

"Giving The Perfect GIF" was the very first episode back in May of 2014. But we thought we'd serve it up again considering the season. Enjoy! See all the GIFs in this episode below. For some, the best way to reply to a message isn’t with words (so 2003!) but with a GIF, those short animations, just a few seconds long, usually drawn from a popular movie or video footage.  From that perspective, the image of President Obama’s head on Beyoncé’s body doing a sassy dance in outer space, while riding a pizza, is the best thing the internet ever gave us.  In recent years, the animated GIF has made the jump from email chains and message boards to art galleries and museum exhibitions. New York’s Museum of the Moving Image was recently host to “The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture,” a show whose curator culled his selections from a Reddit thread. To really learn about GIFs, though, the Obi Wan to seek out is Tyler Menzel, editorial director (he’d prefer Notorious G.I.F.) at Giphy, the most popular GIF search engine. Menzel sees and tags thousands of animated images every day. “I’d like to meet the person who sees more than I do and doesn’t get paid for it,” he tells Sean Rameswaram. Giphy’s Tyler Menzel and Sideshow’s Sean Rameswaram during their contentious interview about GIFs (Tyler Menzel) Sean and Tyler discuss the fine art of sending the perfect reaction GIF. Tyler explains his devotion to GIFs drawn from the anime series Sailor Moon, representing as they do “the essential human emotions: hunger, love, and sadness. "If you're feeling things other than that, you're wasting your energy." He also acknowledges that the form has its limitations. “GIFs are supposed to be fun,” he says; you can send a reaction GIF to bad news, but not real bad news. If there’s a perfect GIF for the news that someone has died, Tyler hasn’t tagged it yet.  For Fans Only: Classic Sailor Moon   For a Birthday: Happy Birthday Cake Mistake    For Good News: Levar Burton Thumbs Up   For Good Space News: A Space Cat Riding a Burrito   For Any Occasion: Beyoncé Obama Dancing on Pizza  

This week, Studio 360 is broadcasting from 1914, covering the cultural happenings of a remarkable year. Charlie Chaplin debuted the Tramp, the character who defines the silent film era, in that year; one of America’s great newspaper cartoonists invented the first animated character, Gertie the dinosaur; and George Bernard Shaw opened a front in the war between the sexes with Pygmalion. Tarzan debuted in 1914, and Jack Handey reimagines him trading the trees for the urban jungle. Plus, the assassination in Sarajevo that sparked the Great War is recalled by writer Aleksandar Hemon, whose forebear was in the crowd that fateful day.  (Originally aired June 27, 2014)

The novels of Thomas Pynchon always seemed too weird and too long to make into movies. But the director Paul Thomas Anderson, a dedicated Pynchon fan, has taken on the challenge with "Inherent Vice." They’re not “unfilmmable — maybe just hard,” he says. Also, the story of Linda Ronstadt’s breakthrough album “Heart Like a Wheel.” And we search for the answer to a TV mystery: why was "The Newsroom" so bad?

It’s the end of the year and there are more “Best of” lists than there are people to read them, but we figured we’d add one that seems to be missing: the Best of the Internet. With the help of past sideshow guests, Sean Rameswaram attempts to compile a collection of the best videos, sites, songs, and memes that thrived online in 2014. Good luck, kid.  Studio 360's Kurt Andersen - "Too Many Cooks" “The guy raised the stakes for himself, and then met them and upped himself,” Kurt Andersen says of the surreal send-up of cheesy TV sitcoms made by writer Casper Kelly. The 11-minute parody rewards repeat views. “It is literally the first viral video I have ever gone back and looked at again,” Kurt says. “And I am a notorious one-time watcher of things.” GIPHY's Tyler Menzel - SeeHearParty.com  It wasn’t easy for Tyler Menzel to pick just one thing that he loved on the internet this year because he spends his entire day deep-sea diving for gems as the editorial director at Giphy – a GIF search engine. He settled on seehearparty.com, a website that allows you to sync your favorite categories of animated GIFs to your favorite songs.  “One of the best things is when you start adding multiple tags,” says Menzel. If you were gonna cut my head open and look inside, it would look like a seehearparty.com of ‘No Flex Zone’ and Sailor Moon and cats on skateboards.” Jezebel's Jia Tolentino - ClickHole   Jia Tolentino recently became an editor at Jezebel, but The Onion’s ClickHole – which posts satirical listicles, quizzes, and celebrity quotations every day – is her favorite site. “All websites in comparison are absolute garbage,” she says. “Including the one I work for.” Funny Or Die's Jonathan Van Ness - Voguing Kid & Kim Jonathan Van Ness, host of Funny or Die’s Gay of Thrones, couldn’t pick one thing he loved online this year, so he chose two. The first was the kid who interrupted a local Las Vegas news spot with refined voguing stylistics. “He was camera ready, he knew all of his angles, he did not get stale; it was amazing.” Kim Kardashian and Paper Magazine tried to “Break the Internet” by releasing a series of oily nude photos this year, but instead they created a monster meme. “When I saw the one where they replaced her bum with that Krispy Kreme doughnut, it was the same texture, it was the same shine,” Van Ness says. “I loved that.” But not enough to download her supremely popular game. Vulture's Margaret Lyons - "Transparent" Margaret Lyons spends a lot of time watching TV for her job as a critic at Vulture, but her favorite show of the year was only available online: Jill Soloway's Transparent. “The show is amazing, it’s beautiful,” Lyons says of the dramedy about the patriarch of a Los Angeles family who transitions genders. It’s available on Amazon Prime, where Lyons also purchases her socks.  Gallery 1988's Jensen Karp - "Run The Jewels 2" Jensen Karp was a rapper in his teens, but now he mostly curates exceptional fan artwork. His love for hip-hop remains strong thanks in part to Run the Jewels 2, the latest release from the rap supergroup of Killer Mike and El-P. “These two guys are on the third leg of their career each,” Karp says of the 39-year-olds. “And if you know hip-hop well, that’s impossible.”  The success of Run the Jewels 2 began online where the singles for “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” and “Blockbuster Night Part 1” hit big before the entire album was made available as a free download in October. After its release came universal critical acclaim for two independent rappers who have seen their share of victory and defeat over the years. “The things that are happening for both of these guys, you just sort of have to applaud it.” Kutiman - "Symphony Orchestra Pachebel Canon Rehearsal" Kutiman watches a lot of unknown musicians performing on YouTube. It’s kind of his job. Most of what he finds while scouting for his “Thru You” project is unusable, but some of that unusable stuff—like this video of middle school students annihilating Pachelbel’s Canon—is unforgettable.

Bert Williams was the most famous African-American entertainer of his day. But for some reason, his first film was never released. Now, 100 years later, it’s finally being seen. Also, we hear from Boots, the little-known producer on Beyoncé’s last album. And Lisa Kudrow finally steps out of the long shadow of Friends’ Phoebe Buffay.

Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair don’t remember how the idea for High Maintenance came to them. Considering the show’s subject matter, that’s to be expected. Though some might dismiss a web series about a weed messenger and his customers, High Maintenance might be the finest TV made exclusively for the internet. Yes, it has won acclaim from High Times, but also The New Yorker.   Blichfeld, who won an Emmy as a casting director for 30 Rock, had always hoped to find an outlet to showcase the great, underused actors she came across – including her husband and co-conspirator, Sinclair, who plays the show’s nameless marijuana delivery guy. “I feel like on 30 Rock, unfortunately, so many of the roles I was casting people for were one and two-line parts,” she says. “Over time, I wanted to see them to do more.” The couple’s actor friends are given ample screen time to shine in High Maintenance, which is essentially a series of character studies about users young and old dealing with life, love, and loneliness in New York City. Watch “Trixie,” an episode of High Maintenance: High Maintenance isn’t the first show to tackle drug culture, but it is among the most authentic. It’s about marijuana as much as Cheers is about whisky. “Truth be told, the weed story is the last thing to get figured out,” Blichfeld says about writing episodes with Sinclair. “What haven’t we seen before that happens in real life?” As essentially the show’s sole recurring character, Sinclair is the face of High Maintenance. To celebrate the latest batch of episodes, Vimeo has plastered his likeness all over Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the internet. Thankfully, being a poster boy for the normalization of marijuana culture isn’t intimidating to the actor, who first inhaled at the age of twelve. But his love of the project is family-friendly. “The most wonderful thing is that I get to do this with Katja,” he says. “I imagine the pride that we feel in this project is tantamount to the pride that one feels for their children. And I don’t know a lot of people whose babies are painted on a 24-foot wall.” Watch “Brad Pitts”: 

This is America’s vision of utopia. Generations of Americans have grown up with Walt Disney shaping our imaginations. In 1955, Disney mixed up some fairy tales, a few historical facts, and a dream of the future to create an alternate universe. Not just a place for fun, but a scale model of a perfect world. “Everything that you could imagine is there,” says one young visitor. “It's like living in a fantasy book.” And not just for kids: one-third of Walt Disney World’s visitors are adults who go without children. Visiting the parks, according to actor Tom Hanks, is like a pilgrimage — the pursuit of happiness turned into a religion. Futurist Cory Doctorow explains the genius of Disney World, while novelist Carl Hiassen even hates the water there. Kurt tours Disneyland with a second-generation “imagineer” whose dead mother haunts the Haunted Mansion. We’ll meet a former Snow White and the man who married Prince Charming — Disney, he says, is “the gayest place on Earth. It’s where happy lives.” (Originally aired October 18, 2013) → What is your Disney story? Tell us in a Comment below. Special thanks to Julia Lowrie Henderson, Shannon Geis, Alex Gallafent, Nic Sammond, Steve Watts, Angela Bliss, Todd Heiden, Shannon Swanson, Katie Cooper, Nick White, Marie Fabian, Posey Gruener, Chris DeAngelis, Jenelle Pifer, Debi Ghose, Maneesh Agrawala, and Tony DeRose. Bonus Track: Cory Doctorow on the Disney theme parks Hear Kurt's full conversation with Doctorow about his life-long obsession with Disney in general, and the Haunted Mansion specifically.   Video: Walt Disney's original plan for Epcot    Slideshow: Inside the Magic Kingdom

Alan Turing broke the Nazis’ Enigma code and helped win World War II for the Allies — and also invented modern computing; we’ll compare the legend of Turing to the reality. Mexico’s violent narcocorrido songs became a form of state propaganda. And the famous jazz musician Charles Mingus had a little-known sideline: cat trainer. Who knew?

Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled album in 2013 was a giant hit, thanks to collaborations with super-producers like Timbaland, Pharrell, and Frank Ocean. But it was some guy named Boots who was credited with writing some of the album’s most personal songs: “Heaven”, about a miscarriage; “Blue” about Beyoncé’s daughter; and “Haunted," which maligns the music industry.  In no time, BuzzFeed, Pitchfork, Vogue, and just about everyone else took cracks at answering the question, “Who is Boots?” Reporters were calling his parents’ house in Florida, someone tried to sell photos of him, and Beyoncé fans started following him around Brooklyn. “To go from none of that to a lot of that, I didn’t take it well,” he says. Still, the 27-year-old has nothing but positive things to say about her. “The only reason she and I worked so well together is because something I had to say resonated very deeply with her,” he says. “It’s amazing that it happened.”  Jordy Asher started in Miami. He was in a string of rock bands before he and a girlfriend took a hard left turn towards indie-pop as Blonds. They broke up; Jordy moved to New York, became Boots. How he got from there to Beyoncé (and Jay Z’s label, Roc Nation) is still unknown, and Boots won’t be the first to discuss the matter. He’d prefer to talk about the future, beginning with the lead single from his upcoming album, “Mercy.” Watch Boots play an acoustic version of “Mercy” on piano here.  Boots is sticking with his idiosyncratic indie methods. He replaces all the songs on his SoundCloud on a whim. He almost exclusively releases music without warning – no marketing or social media campaigns. And when he tours the country, as he is doing now with FKA Twigs, he prefers to get a rental and drive himself. The mystery of Boots has been solved, but he remains an enigma.  Watch Boots cover St. Vincent:  Watch Boots perform "Only" (new): 

Jon Stewart makes his directorial debut with the movie Rosewater. It’s no comedy — the movie is based on the experience of a journalist who appeared on The Daily Show, and then was arrested and tortured for it in Iran. Also, the man behind the band Bahamas may hail from the great white north, but he plays sunny folk-rock. And a look back to how Buck Owens stormed Carnegie Hall with the boot-stomping Bakersfield sound.  

At the height of her fame, Juliette Binoche turned down roles in blockbusters to do European art-house films. So why did she decide to do Godzilla this year? Kurt Andersen also talks to Mark Mothersbaugh, a founding member of Devo and in-demand film composer, who now has a major retrospective of his visual art. And we’ll meet another composer, whose music turns garden-variety haunted houses into something much scarier.

If YouTube had an A&R genius, his name would be Kutiman. The Israeli musician and video editor, whose real name is Ophir Kutiel, charmed millions in 2009 with Thru You, an album of music he created by selecting YouTube musicians’ videos and layering them into new tracks.  Earlier this month, Kutiman released Thru You Too. The novelty has worn off, but the new record shows that Kutiman’s method was never just a gimmick: he makes terrific songs that happen to use videos as his instruments.   The idea came to him while watching an instructional drumming video featuring the famed session drummer Bernard Purdie. “Apparently he’s the most amazing drummer in the world, and I didn’t know,” Kutiman says. His first intuition was to write bass and guitar parts to accompany Purdie, but he ended up finding other music on YouTube that gelled with the drums. He kept layering samples and videos until he ended up with “The Mother of All Funk Chords.” His art form had found him. On Thru You Too, Kutiman is still sampling and layering, but his focus is now is more on the songwriting. “The first one was more about the concept and I tried different genres,” he says. “This time I really felt like creating this album of ballads, of singers, trying to make people forget it’s coming from YouTube.” His sophomore effort hasn’t garnered nearly as much press, but his fans stayed loyal: the album’s first single, “Give It Up,” hit a million views shortly after being uploaded last month.  Kutiman’s work violates YouTube’s terms of service, but no one seems to mind. It probably helps that he doesn’t make any money from the project. “It’s not for the money,” he says. “I earn my living producing, playing, and performing.” Since becoming internet-famous, he has directed a Maroon 5 music video, performed at the Guggenheim Museum, and collaborated with PBS Digital Studios to create “Thru Tokyo” – a live version of the mash-up form he perfected from his bedroom. Together, the various gigs pay for the groceries. “I don’t eat much,” says Kutiman. 

In her memoir Fun Home, cartoonist Alison Bechdel — a newly minted MacArthur Fellow — told the difficult story of her childhood in the family funeral home with a closeted gay father. Now her family’s most private moments are jumping from the comic-book page to a Broadway musical. We go inside a beloved Nashville music studio saved from the wrecking ball at the eleventh hour. Rosanne Cash explains why the great performers of classic American pop don’t get royalties, but their younger successors do. And Blake Mills, guitar virtuoso turned singer-songwriter, performs live.