1. On Facebook, somebody got me watching
this parody video of Hillary Clinton singing "I Will Survive." Amusing enough that I looked up
the YouTube page of Maximum Suffrage. Lots of stuff there, as yet unwatched by me.
2. I didn't know "Convos with my..." got a second child (like the first, amusingly played by an adult). I watched
"Asking Nicely."
3. Charles Grodin, in 1995, as a talk show host,
riffs for 6 minutes surrealistically introducing Jerry Lewis. (I started watching Jerry Lewis interview videos on YouTube a while back, for reasons I don't remember, and YouTube keeps suggesting more Jerry Lewis videos, and this is never going to end, because I keep watching them, and I'm not going to stop, because they are all so weird, including some where Lewis is the host, like
here, interviewing Cassius Clay.)
4. The Grateful Dead in a live performance of
"It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry." I got there as a result of a conversation that was mostly about "Ballad of Thin Man," prompted by reading
this old 1965 interview in which Nora Ephron tried to get him to identify Mr. Jones and Dylan said: "He's actually a person. Like I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, 'That's Mr. Jones.' Then I asked this cat, 'Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?' And he told me, 'He puts his nose on the ground.' It's all there, it's a true story." Meade seemed to believe that Mr. Jones was Leonard Bernstein, but "That Party at Lenny’s" that Tom Wolfe described in
"Radical Chic" took place in 1966. The word "camel" does appear in that greatest-of-all-time article, in this sentence: "Forty years ago firms flogging things like Hardman pianos, Ponds cold cream, Simmons metal beds and Camel cigarettes found that matrons in the clans Harriman, Longworth, Belmont, Fish, Lowell, Iselin and Carnegie were only too glad to switch to their products and be photographed with them in their homes, mainly for the sheer social glory of the publicity."
5. "Yeah, I'd like to see a video of a young person singing 'Eve of Destruction,'" I said after commenting in
yesterday's post about the death of P.F. Sloan, who wrote the lyrics. The hit single was by Barry McGuire, who was 30ish, and I watched
the video of a TV performance I remembered from 1965. I wrote: "Watching it again, I'm struck by the inappropriateness of McGuire's age. The lyrics are ridiculous coming from an adult. They're a perfect expression of teenage confusion about the world. Coming from an adult, it's mental or stupid." I found
this, by Bishop Allen. It becomes noticeably "Eve of Destruction" at 3:44, but only the chorus is used, in the
changed form: "And I tell you over and over and over again, my friend/That I'm down with you, even on the eve of destruction." I'd like to see a video of a teenager singing the original lyrics earnestly and sincerely.