"What is that sound that that we hear irritating us so dreadfully?" Dick Cavett asks Jimi Hendrix, as some kind of background noise, emanating from the musical equipment, is interfering with our effort to hear the very soft-spoken guest.Jimi Hendrix: "Well, it sounds it sounds something like the New York street. I don't know. It's like today the air is all static, so the amplifiers are static. Music is loud, the air is loud, and you know, we're trying to settle things down a little bit, but it's going to take it like a rest."
The idea of trying "to settle things down a little bit" gets the mind of Cavett going toward the idea of human beings settling down, and later he asks Jimi if he sees himself getting married. When Jimi says he hopes not, Cavett delivers a punchline: "But you'll never get a situation comedy on television." That's funny, because sitting on the other side of Hendrix is Robert Young, the father of "Father Knows Best."
Young looks like an funny throwback to an earlier time, but Hendrix died a year later, and Young lived for 3 more decades.
Not a typo for "Donald Trump." There really is a Donald Tusk in this story. He's the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. His mild-mannered contribution to the debate is: "The greatest threat to the transatlantic community is not its external enemies, but the ongoing disintegration of our alliance."
"Rocket technology, which lifted man to the moon, could also hurl hydrogen bombs across the planet. Like the promise of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, the promise of space was shadowed by the possibility of planetary annihilation.... The original space program had fierce and cogent critics in the United States, but the allure of the technology, the bravery and telegenic decency of the astronauts, and the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon eventually won out.... [O]n a nervous night, the world watched us again... wondering whether there might be nuclear bombs.... Trump backed down, but...[t]he distant, wide-eyed wonder of unprecedented achievement of the Space Age had been eclipsed by a deferred promise to return an entire people to the Stone Age...."
I'm a little older than Kennicott, who was probably a young child at the time of the first moon landing. I was 18 and completely disaffected because of the Vietnam War. I didn't experience anything like "wide-eyed wonder." The boys my age were all in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in a war people were justifiably pessimistic about. Nixon was just as horrible to us as Trump is to the Trump-haters of today. I declined to respond with the awe the news shows told us to feel because I didn't want to see anything going well for Nixon. Less than a month after the moon landing, there was Woodstock. Who was a sucker for "telegenic decency" in the summer of 1969? Were we conned by "the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon"? Fiveyears before the landing, we were laughing at Bob Dylan's sarcastic lines, "I ask you how things could get much worse/If the Russians happen to get up there first/Wowee! pretty scary!"
I've got a homophone gap in my relationship with The New York Times.
ADDED: The trendy use of the word "gap" began in the 1950s, with anxiety over the Cold War. There was talk of the "bomber gap" and the "missile gap." This was satirized in "Doctor Strangelove" (1964):
"I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out of these superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!"
We boomers remember the talk of the "generation gap" in the 1960s, but that got started with a Look magazine article in 1967 titled "The Generation Gap" — in a deliberate play on "missile gap."
"... [W]e and our US cousins have wildly differing senses of humour.... Much of the best British comedy relies on understatement, subtle wordplay, self-deprecation, self-mortification. It’s why Larry David is the American many Brits find most funny: he, like us, understands that life is a vale of tears, suffering and torturing yourself over mild social awkwardness...."
A description of the "cold open": "Keir Starmer... and David Lammy... are psyching themselves up to phone Donald Trump, with the help of their 'Gen Z adviser.'... Keir: 'Oh golly, what if Donald shouts at me?' Gen Z adviser: 'You’re looking for more of a special situationship.'"
Also: "In a sketch parodying news headlines, the question is asked whether, once Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is in prison, he will 'be able to keep his mouth shut.' This is followed, I regret to inform you, by the punchline: '"I hope not," said his cellmate’s penis.'"
I don't see what's American about those jokes. And I don't see why the SNL format forces writers to use American-style humor! Worse, don't excuse your bad jokes by claiming they are American. The SNL format — cold open, monologue, sketches, Weekend Update, music performance — is an empty shell into which writers can insert whatever humor the producers want. Take responsibility. Or withdraw into the vale of tears and suffer and torture yourself. Apparently, you find that amusing.
Here, you can buy that issue of LIFE on eBay. It was March 14, 1969. The cover story is "The Daring Contraption Called LEM." Inside: "The Race for the SST." And here's an ad: "McDonald's introduces Big Mac/A meal disguised as a sandwich." And: "Why is the Camaro the pace car again?/Because it's the Hugger."That's all so American. And the American point of view was that gurning was a British oddity.
That's not the L&M commercial I'm searching for. And neither is this, though it does have an amazing performance by Teri Garr:
That first video shows what it meant to "live modern" in the 1950s. The couple reminds me of my parents. The Teri Garr commercial shows the ordeal of living in the 1970s and the pathetic hope that cigarettes could bring 2 decent struggling humans together for a tiny moment.
But the one I was looking for is a 1960s commercial with a jingle singing "They said it couldn't be done." The thing that supposedly couldn't be done was to put a filter on a cigarette and have it still taste good. The ad began by showing a few things that "they" said couldn't be done that really were done. The only example I remember is showing Florida as a big swamp followed by images of glorious Florida real estate. The logic of the commercial was that if other supposedly impossible things happened, then this other one probably happened too. See how 1960s that was?
The article says nothing about the 1970s. I do see a reference to the 1960s: "The report’s authors know they can’t tell all women to be stay-at-home mothers (returning the country to 1960s employment levels for women) because that would contradict their other goal, to dismantle the welfare state and put even more work conditions on parents receiving government aid." The 60s were 60 years ago, and the article does call the report "a curious set of guidelines for the future, since it seems mired in culture war battles from the 20th century, unable to face the past 60 years of change."
Usually the 1950s are selected as the era of the traditional wife and the 1960s represent the exciting period of changing gender roles. The 70s were the heyday of feminism. These decades feel quite distinct from each other to me, a person born in 1951. Jessica Grose was born... when? Maybe to millennials, the 50s, 60s, and 70s seem like one big chunk of boomer oldness.
My mother grew up in Ann Arbor, I heard about Ann Arbor throughout my childhood, and I went to college in Ann Arbor, but it had never occurred to me that I might have been named after Ann Arbor. The story my mother told me about my name is that they wanted a name that began with the letter A — so I ended up with the initials AAA, straight As — and they wanted something as simple as possible. The second-choice name was Amy, which is also only 3 letters, but it's 2 syllables, so Amy it wasn't.
I'm also only just now looking into the question whether Ann Arbor was named after someone named Ann. Wikipedia says:
"The script was less than 15 pages, but the play lasted for more than half an hour because of many extended pauses. The same upbeat rock song, Dave Clark Five’s 'Anyway You Want It,' played twice all the way through, with the actors onstage incongruously silent. The Village Voice wrote wonderingly that the play 'achieves its most alive moments in complete stasis.'"
"The band covered 'Little Bit O’ Soul' on its 1983 album 'Subterranean Jungle.' The ever-arty Talking Heads gave their own disjointed spin to '1,2,3, Red Light' while performing in their early years at CBGB, the Bowery club that was a cradle of punk rock. No less a rock purist than Lester Bangs, the storied gonzo critic, eventually gave bubblegum its due in the 1992 book 'The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.' 'The basic bubblegum sound could be described as the basic sound of rock ’n’ roll,' he wrote, 'minus the rage, fear, violence and anomie that runs from Johnny Burnette to Sid Vicious.'"
The links in the text go to the Ramones and Talking Heads covers, but here's a Spotify playlist I made of the original version of those 2 songs along with all the other Kasenetz and Katz songs named in the obituary. It's all great stuff — 9 songs, 22 minutes:
I am old, so I don't care if my listening age is old — a few years older (78) than my actual age (74). It's because I still listen to the music I loved when I was a teenager in the 1960s, when I lucked into what still seems to me to be the best popular music.
I would have thought most Americans get fixated on whatever was popular when they were a teenager, but I'm seeing that a lot of people are getting a "listening age" of 70-something.
I'm reading "Spotify Just Called You Old" (NY Magazine), which especially likes this tune "Why did everyone I know have a listening age of an old-age home on Spotify Wrapped?":
"They realized, for example, that by recording each member of the Monkees singing individually, they could avoid the actors horsing around and trying to impress one another. Musically, Mr. Boyce and Mr. Hart struck a fine balance between several imperatives. Study the Beatles, but don’t imitate them to the point of absurdity; catch the spirit of the ’60s in the use of Indian instruments and lyrics about 'the young generation,' but don’t be too challenging. Some veteran producers became frustrated trying to make the Monkees into a real band and gave up. Mr. Boyce and Mr. Hart persisted. 'To us,' Mr. Hart wrote, 'it was the chance of a lifetime.' Robert Luke Harshman was born on Feb. 18, 1939, in Phoenix. Bobby formed a lifelong relationship with the Hammond B-3 electric organ by playing it in the Pentecostal church his family attended...."
"Just the provable actual facts are so nuts, that very likely Charles Manson was a CIA asset.... They had groomed him when he was in prison and taught him mind control techniques when people were high on acid, taught him how to be sober, but pretend he's on acid. And how to interact with these people that are on acid and shape their mind and even get them to commit murder.... Between 1960 and 1970 is like What?! This world is crazy. The music is crazy. The culture's crazy.... Everything is wild. It's very psychedelic.... They were like, We're losing control and power.... They actually pulled it off.... Oh my God, these hippies are murderous.... And our own goddamn government engineered it. They engineered, they stopped what was probably one of the most beautiful cultural shifts in this country's history that would've organically still kept evolving into other things that would've blossomed out of it.... that completely demonized any peace, love, and... any of that kind of movement. Those people became a real problem now, because you're now connected to Manson...."
The phrase in pink is contributed by Charlie Sheen. The rest is Joe. The 2 men are going on and on about conspiracies — and objecting to "this conspiracy theory pejorative" that "they" are "foisting" on us. And then — 2 hours after that clip above — they suddenly encounter the news of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
The 2 men do not respond with freewheeling conspiracy notions. Sheen says, "Murder for having a different opinion from somebody else, different ideology from somebody else," and Rogan says, "Yeah." They read some of the instant chatter on line, and Joe says, "What a crazy take, like it might not have been someone assassinating someone for the wrong opinion."
"This is the question raised with appropriate hippie optimism in 'Sixties Surreal,' an ambitiously revisionist exhibition opening on Sept. 24 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It brings together about 150 works by 111 painters, sculptors, photographers, collagists, cartoonists, junk assemblage-ists, and at least one Kabballah-ist, most of whom were pushed to the sidelines of the ’60s art scene for various unkind reasons...."
"Of the 111 artists in the show, 47 are women... On a recent afternoon, I visited the studio of Martha Edelheit, a little-known, twice-widowed Manhattanite, now 94, who is about to make her Whitney debut.... She was part of a generation of proto-feminists who painted explicit nudes. In 1965, she recalled, she had a show at the Byron Gallery in Manhattan. The New York Times critic John Canaday came in to look, only to politely explain to the gallery owner that he couldn’t review 'that obscene woman.' Stretching 16 feet wide, across three panels, ['Flesh Wall With Table' (1965)']... embeds a group of female nudes in the space surrounding her drawing table. Languid bodies sprawl from edge to edge of the canvas, snoozing comfortably, their flesh graced with a rainbow of color that progresses from delicate ivories and pinks to dense ceruleans and purples."
"... Ms. Francis reached out beyond her teenage audience, recording material that made her a natural in Las Vegas as well as in nightclubs like the Copacabana in New York. She was also a sought-after entertainer on television variety shows. She briefly tried performing before teenage audiences, but she found that she did not care for the experience. 'I always remember receiving much more applause from teenagers when I was introduced than at any other time during the show — especially after my closing number,' she wrote in her memoir. 'After my name was announced and the squeals of delight subsided, it was downhill all the way.'"
Seen, just now, in a prominent place, which I won't name, out of mild avoidance of spoiling.
You know, Bob Dylan recorded "Tangled up in Blue" on the second-to-last day of the year 1974 — half a century ago. And he was telling the story of something further back in the past: "It didn't pertain to me. It was just a concept of putting in images that defy time – yesterday, today and tomorrow. I wanted to make them all connect in some kind of a strange way." It's hard to say what year there was that "revolution in the air." Perhaps a decade earlier.
And now the "revolution in the air" is in the crossword puzzle.
Speaking of revolution "in the air" in the 1960s, I always think of the 1969 Thunderclap Newman record, "Something in the Air." Maybe if "Tangled up in Blue" didn't pertain to Bob Dylan, it pertained to Thunderclap Newman. He'd have heard their song in the air:
Call out the instigators/Because there's something in the air/We got to get together sooner or later/Because the revolution's here....
"... that yielded three albums within two weeks. It did not, at the time, feel like a song that had the makings of a hit, so it landed on the B-side of the 1962 single... that was released in Britain. Since then, it was more or less overlooked. Then came TikTok... Over the last few weeks, 'Pretty Little Baby' has been trending on the social media app — it has been featured as the sound in more than 600,000 TikTok posts and soared to top spots in Spotify’s Viral 50 global and U.S. lists — bolstered by celebrities and influencers, like Nara Smith, Kylie Jenner, and Kim Kardashian and her daughter North, who have posted videos of themselves lip-syncing to it. The ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog used the song for a clip on TikTok in which she said Ms. Francis had long been her favorite singer...."
Interviewed, Francis said she didn't even remember recording the song, but, listening to it now, she pronounced it "cute." I remember when that kind of thing was the current music...
Of course, I watched that at the time. I loved the Kinks. Just turning around from my computer and not rearranging anything, I see this on my windowsill:
And I love the line "It was the sound...." I get the 60s vibration. I remember struggling to convey the meaning of "the sound" to my father when he Socratically questioned me about why the music I was listening to all the time could genuinely be considered good.
An incredibly stupid YouTube title for what is a fantastic episode of "Firing Line," from 1968, with William F. Buckley interacting with Jack Kerouac (and a sociology professor and Ed Sanders of The Fugs):
Kerouac died 7 months later. He may be drunk but every word he says has more value than anything that comes from the sociology professor. And nobody on the stage has much of a good word to say about hippies.
Speaking of death, Buckley opens the show with: "The topic tonight is the hippies an understanding of whom we must I guess acquire or die painfully...."
"The girls all have to prove themselves to him. And then he goes home at the end of the day to milk and cookies. He has nothing of a life, except what goes on in that nightclub, and everything goes on in that nightclub. I’d worked in nightclubs before, and I hated it — all these crummy emcees who would do anything for a laugh, such creeps. One day, I said to [the director Hal Prince], 'Let me try something at rehearsal today.' And I did. I was very lewd with all the girls, touching and feeling them — I was disgusting! And they were all looking at me like I’d lost my mind. Afterward, I went and hid behind a flat in the theater because I thought my career was over. It was so vulgar. And I was standing in the back, hiding from everybody, and Hal walked up to me, and he put his arm around me, and he said, 'Joely, that’s it.'"
He created a brilliant role and made "Cabaret" what it is, but you could never do that today. You couldn't suddenly surprise the other actors by groping them lewdly... even if it was all for art.
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That's the teaser on the front page of the NYT for an article with a different headline, 
पोस्ट्स
