Hey, it's the Tiny Tim song Thomas Pynchon was talking about!
This insane song appears on Tim's 1968 album "God Bless Tiny Tim," so all that ice caps melting business has nothing to do with our present-day angst over polar bears and obeisance to the Great God Gore. Unless Tim started it all. Who are those kids anyway? And why did adults subject the youngsters to this trippy apocalyptic weirdness? Perhaps little Al is there, absorbing the crazed wisdom of Tiny. Mysteries! Wow. It's so far out!
And here's the Pynchon book, "Inherent Vice."
November 22, 2009
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I see at the Amazon site that Pynchon put together a soundtrack for the book "exclusively for Amazon" but it's just a collection of links on a playlist. Lame! I expect an entire album, with original music if possible.
I recently got a new copy of the Old National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody from the 1970s. P.J. ORourke and John Hughes were the editors. They had two (obviously fake) stories on the same page headlined..
"New Ice Age Anticipated" and "Cap Melting".
Oh and I saw that Katrina vanden Heuvel was credited for some research for the parody. Is this the same woman now editing The Nation?
Brilliant - and kinda creepy/weird.
"The ice caps are melting/to wash away our sin"?
Man, Liberals have got a lot of 'splaining to do,...
David,
Yes, it is. And she's a nut.
Miss Vicki divorced Tiny after 8 years of married bliss. Said she felt "stifled."
National Lampoon's Sunday Newspaper parody was a work of genius.
The end of the world!
Very funny.
"Perhaps little Al is there, absorbing the crazed wisdom of Tiny."
Little Al was in Harvard and a year away from becoming a "journalist" in Vietnam, where he would learn the art of taking success and reporting it as catastrophic failure.
Fred, that was pretty funny.
And I think it captures perfectly the feelings of the coastal elites.
Ann, "...our present-day angst... "
Hey, Where is my Angst tag for this post!
This was the D.A.R.E. precursor SKAFTSTAD (show kids acid freaks scare them away from drugs). Unfortunately it didn't work and the rave movement was born 20 years later.
National Lampoon's Sunday Newspaper parody was a work of genius.
If la Althouse went to a party wearing jeans and The Emperor's New Bra and she said she'd just been wearing jeans, would she still be a big lying liar?
If you want my body, and you think I'm sexy...
The more videos I see of the late 60's the more I come to the conclusion that dropping acid must have been ubiquitous.
Bobbie Gentry, Bing Crosby and Tiny Tim sing "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"...
Tiny Tim recording "Sweet And Lovely" in 1994...
Tiny Tim sings "My Hero" in a duet with Tiny Tim...
My favorite Tiny Tim toon is his cover of "Stairway to Heaven," which I can no longer find on teh internets. If someone finds it and could post it I would be greatful.
Oh, and how bout them Cowboys? It sucks to be a Redskins fan today.
Lawgiver:
Is this it: Tiny Tim & Brave Combo?
(Found on this WMFU page of Stairway to Heaven covers.)
Thanks, Palladian. YouTube is amazing.
And, AC245... brilliant.
Tip toe through the tulips. Oh hey look, it's a vampire.
Dear Professor Althouse,
I stumbled across your entry on Tiny Tim and The Icecaps Are Melting when I was trying to find the first article I ever read about CO2 loading and the greenhouse effect. I had just read the article in either Esquire or Playboy (yes, I read the articles) earlier that year (1968) when I found myself participating in a Shakespeare festival in my hometown of Roanoke, Virginia after my freshman year of college. At cast parties, much to my amazement and delight, a great ritual was made of putting Tim's record on, and then we all sang along to The Icecaps, swinging our beers in rhythm. It makes a great drinking song, almost as good as Die Ode an die Freude from Beethoven's 9th, but it has the advantage of being in English.
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