"The air is loud."

"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.

"Since I have to wrap up soon, do you have any strategies for ending an interview well?"

Michael Schulman asks Dick Cavett at the end of "Dick Cavett Takes a Few Questions The legendary television host talks about his friendships with Muhammad Ali and Groucho Marx, interviewing Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, and finding a new audience on YouTube" (The New Yorker). 

Cavett answers:

Often I would do it very badly. I would rush it, hadn’t saved enough time. I almost called a guest by the wrong name but caught it, thank God, or whatever gods may be. What’s that from? “I thank whatever gods may be.” It’s a poem that’s often recommended as good religious thinking. “I thank whatever gods may be for my indomitable soul”? Hmm.

"YouTube really rewards straightforward, untrammeled, and unscripted discussion, and it's really what people expect on the platform."

Says Jordan Peterson, talking to Piers Morgan about how to conduct an inteview. He's distinguishing YouTube from "legacy TV." He's responding to Morgan, who has just acknowledged that Peterson is phenomenally successful on YouTube:

 

They're right about the constraints of television, but I want to show you this amazing segment of television from October 9, 1970, when the host, Dick Cavett — and guests Jeanne Moreau and Lee Marvin — kept almost entirely quiet for minutes on end while Truman Capote stumbled and mumbled his way to the most important question in the world:

Was Capote straightforward? He was untrammeled and unscripted! But straightforward may seem like the opposite of what he was. And yet, his struggle to find his point is real, and isn't that a form of straightforwardness? I don't think he's holding anything back, and I don't think he's using more words than he needs. He's just very, very needy.

"It was after Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 election that Mr. Sahl’s career first veered off track. He wrote barbed political one-liners for Kennedy the candidate, but..."

"... when he turned his wit on the president-elect, tweaking him for his youth and for his family’s money and power, liberals who had loved his criticism of conservatism became notably cool.... Whether Mr. Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, as he sometimes claimed, or whether his own thorniness was to blame... gigs were fewer and farther between in the 1960s... 'My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,' he said from the stage at one preview. 'The same people who like jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater suddenly freeze when they hear satirical humor about Vietnam or the war on poverty.'... His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin.... 'I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,' Mr. Sahl wrote in 'Heartland,' a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company... I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.... I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice."

From "Mort Sahl, Whose Biting Commentary Redefined Stand-Up, Dies at 94/A self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy, he revolutionized comedy in the 1950s by addressing political and social issues" (NYT).

1. Mort Sahl is before my time, really, so what I'm going to do is listen to at least one of his comedy albums, which I see are streamable on Spotify.

2. I remember Mort Sahl as he was on TV in the 1970s, as in this TV appearance where he goes on and on about how women are never intellectuals, which I assure you seemed creepy and out-of-it at that time:

3. He obsessed about the Kennedy assassination, and we are still waiting for the release of the files that have been held secret all these years. Here's an Intercept article from a few days ago about the current issue, whether to take the 1992 JFK Records Act seriously. Trump could have released these documents but "acquiesced to the demand of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to keep portions of thousands more secret until October 2021," and now here we are in October 2021, and here comes Biden, pushing the deadline out to December 2022. What's going on?

4. [ADDED] I listened to the album “The Future Lies Ahead.” I enjoyed his very fast, smart talking, though I couldn’t experience it as very funny because it was all tied to the politics of the late 50s. It’s hard to see anything funny about Eisenhower! 

"This talk show was so elegant and respectful, that even the comment section of a video like this isn't infested by angry people shouting from both extremes of the issue."

A comment written one month ago on a video put up on YouTube a year ago: 

 

The show aired in 1970. Watch the whole thing. The person at the extreme left of the talk-show couch — who eventually pipes up — is Grace Slick. The host Dick Cavett engineers the mood — which is serious and comical, tense and relaxed. It's quite something. 

The 70s vibe is mesmerizing. Somehow the colors brown and orange dominated. And who remembers that there was once a feminist notion that women should travel in pairs so that no one becomes a celebrity?!

Hugh Hefner takes the position that maleness/femaleness is the very beginning of who you are as a person. He also attempts to bond with the feminists over his strong support for abortion rights. And he gets out his pipe and smokes up a storm. One of the feminists smokes a cigarette, and makes a theatrical point of lighting it for herself, rejecting Cavett's straight-man offer to play the old chivalrous role of cigarette lighter.

I cannot tolerate today's TV talk shows. The mood is so poisonous. One alternative is to watch half-century old talk shows on YouTube.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"Nobody rocks over there" — in Europe — "They're all so... cerebral."

"They don't get down..."



"They over-intellectualize, they cerebrate, they ratiocinate excessively."

Jerry Lewis explains the analysis of gestures.

"That was the comment from the wasteland of the country — waistline, sorry. Can I do that joke again?"

"What Rush Limbaugh says is about as far away from anything I would be interested in as anything I can imagine unless it were Dick Cheney."

"I’ve always loved Camille. Maybe I should have told her."

Dick Cavett deals with Camille Paglia's attack on his attack on Sarah Palin.

Camille said:

... Cavett's piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her "frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences." He called her "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High," "one who seems to have no first language."...

How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

In sonorous real life, Cavett's slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English -- registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?

Ha ha. Really. (I say in blogspeak, proving Cavett's a dick.)

I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

Dick says:

Some of what Ms. P. says is so dumb that I assumed, at first, that it was meant to be funny. But I think I’m wrong. It would be strange of her — considering the number of arrows already in her daunting intellectual quiver — to suddenly attempt humor.

That's very old-fashioned humor, you know, Dick. The street rappers of today would never put it like that.

***

I seem to remember Sarah Palin rapping, though. Oh, yeah, here.

When I say Obama, you say Ayers...

"Phony, academic-sounding verbal junk... trying to talk like effete characters from Victorian novels...."

I've been ignoring this Dick Cavett thing in the NYT that's been sitting at the top of the most-emailed list for days, but now I'm reading it. I don't want to delve into Cavett's earnest opposition to the war — he's lambasting Petraeus – but there's some discussion of language that interests me:

In addition to his own pedantic delivery, there is his turgid vocabulary. It reminds you of Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when talking to “Eyewitness News.” Its rule: never use a short word where a longer one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of “learnedness” and “scholasticism” — possibly even that dread thing, “intellectualism” — to their talk. Sorry, I mean their “articulation.”

No crook ever gets out of the car. A “perpetrator exits the vehicle.” (Does any cop say to his wife at dinner, “Honey, I stubbed my toe today as I exited our vehicle”?) No “man” or “woman” is present in Copspeak. They are replaced by that five-syllable, leaden ingot, the “individual.” The other day, there issued from a fire chief’s mouth, “It contributed to the obfuscation of what eventually eventuated.” This from a guy who looked like he talked, in real life, like Rocky Balboa. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Who imposes this phony, academic-sounding verbal junk on brave and hard-working men and women who don’t need the added burden of trying to talk like effete characters from Victorian novels?

And, General, there is no excuse anywhere on earth for a stillborn monster like “ethnosectarian conflict,” as Jon Stewart so hilariously pointed out....

Petraeus’s verbal road is full of all kinds of bumps and lurches and awkward oddities. How about “ongoing processes of substantial increases in personnel”?

Try talking English, General. You mean more soldiers.

It’s like listening to someone speaking a language you only partly know. And who’s being paid by the syllable. You miss a lot. I guess a guy bearing up under such a chestload of hardware — and pretty ribbons in a variety of decorator colors — can’t be expected to speak like ordinary mortals, for example you and me. He should try once saying — instead of “ongoing process of high level engagements” — maybe something in colloquial English? Like: “fights” or “meetings” (or whatever the hell it’s supposed to mean).

I agree. So did George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language," which Cavett really ought to have cited.

Anyway, last night I was reading the most atrocious sentence, written by (the highly acclaimed blogger) Josh Marshall:

Some of it is likely equally demagoguable, but shows up some of the tendentious misconstruals of what he said.

Talk about phony, academic-sounding verbal junk and trying to talk like an effete character from a Victorian novels! "Demagoguable" and "misconstrual" are not even words. I'm not saying you can't coin a word, but coin something less ugly. (I mean, those are the Wisconsin and Louisiana quarters of word coinage.) "Likely equally demagoguable"... "tendentious misconstruals"... ugh! That's misconscrewed. Makes me want to demagag.

***

But the actual substance of Marshall's post is excellent. I was going to say, after reading Cavett's post, that we tend to find language especially irksome when we are irked by the message. But Marshall's post is something I would like to link to uncritically. He's found a 4-year-old clip of Barack Obama saying something very close to what he said this week about bitter small-towners:

"I’m not really familiar with that."/“You don’t seem to be familiar with anything."

Dick Cavett encounters William F. Buckley.

"Wee embers were fanned into an inferno by skilled flame-fanners and the professionally offended."

Dick Cavett on Don Imus:

The Imus show had long been an eccentric mix of news, music, sports talk and — thanks to its well-read host — first-rate conversation....

There is really no getting away from the injustice that’s been done. A program enjoyed (and missed) by millions was trashed for the sake of the few. No one who contributed to the denouement of the Imus show and the mindless abuse heaped on him has anything to be proud of.

IN THE COMMENTS: It's all about... Hillary!

That time the health food guru went on the TV talk show and died.

Dick Cavett tells the story. It happened on his show. (TimesSelect link.)

[Jerome I. Rodale] was extremely funny for half an hour, talking about health foods, and as a friendly gesture he offered me some of his special asparagus, boiled in urine. I think I said, “Anybody’s we know?” while making a mental note to have him back.

I brought out the next guest, Pete Hamill, whose column ran in The New York Post. Rodale moved “down one” to the couch. As Pete and I began to chat, Mr. Rodale suddenly made a snoring sound, which got a laugh.

Comics would sometimes do that for a laugh while another comic was talking, pretending boredom. His head tilted to the side as Pete, in close-up as it happened, whispered audibly, “This looks bad.”

The audience laughed at that. I didn’t, because I knew Rodale was dead.

To this day, I don’t know how I knew. I thought, “Good God, I’m in charge here. What do I do?” Next thing I knew I was holding his wrist, thinking, I don’t know anything about what a wrist is supposed to feel like.

Next, in what felt like a quick film cut, I was standing at the edge of the stage, saying, “Is there a doctor in the … (pause) … audience?”

He had the wits to know to figure out how not to say "Is there a doctor in the house?" which would have made people laugh.

The show was never aired, but Cavett did watch the tape a view weeks later:

[W]e noticed three things that, incredibly, no one had recalled Rodale’s saying: “I’m in such good health [he was 72] that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way.” “I’ve decided to live to be a hundred.” And the inevitable “I never felt better in my life!” (The gods and their sense of humor.)

That happened back in 1971. I remember something else like that from back in the 1970s. The actor Peter Finch was on the show and, if I am remembering this correctly, he -- or someone else on the couch with him that night -- talked about death and said by the time he would be on the show the next time some of the people listening to him saying this would be dead. Finch himself died a week day later.

The post-Woodstock Cavett show.

Last night, I watched another episode of "The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons" (a new DVD set). Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Joni Mitchell were there in Cavett's garish studio. Hippie "supergraphics" were painted all over the floor swirling up to little hassocks for the rock stars to perch on or lean against. Woodstock had just ended that morning. We're told Joni skipped Woodstock just to be on the show. Stills proudly points out the "Woodstock mud" on his jeans.

Jefferson Airplane were doing tunes from "Volunteers," including "We Can Be Together." You know:

We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very proud of ourselves

The song ends with the prescient, Reaganesque repeated line "Tear down the wall." It was fun to see the Airplane in their prime again. I saw them myself a few times around that year, 1969. Maybe you younger readers don't realize how much we adored Grace Slick back in those days. And, I'll tell you, "Surrealistic Pillow" is one of the six album covers I have framed on my living room wall. On the show, Cavett asks Slick about her parents, and she says her mother is a housewife and her father is an investment banker. "All your private property is target for your enemy," indeed.

The other members of the Airplane are nearly catatonic, though Paul Kantner rouses himself at one point and says something either unmemorable or incoherent — I forget. David Crosby is the liveliest person in the group (for whatever reason), and while I'm working on the the theory that he's the smartest rock star in the room — and thinking that's good for Bailey and Beckett — he announces that he has an idea and, beaming with pride, lists the names of six large corporations and advises them to go out of business — as if that would save the world. There's some tedious patter about astrology, including the fact that Crosby is a Leo and looks like a lion.

The best person on the show is Joni Mitchell, who's wearing a bulky green velvet floor-length dress. She sings at least four songs, playing guitar, then piano, and finally going a cappella — for "Fiddle and the Drum":

And so once again
Oh, America my friend
And so once again
You are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall

Earlier in the show, she'd talked about how she writes about love and that she's a Canadian and Canadians are just not political at all. But she does say she would support Pierre Trudeau, after Cavett asks the assembled icons if any of them would support any political candidate and all the others say no — no one deserves it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Among other things, I'm asked what the other five album covers are. Instead of answering, I give hints. See if you can guess.

Early morning radio.

I'm about to go on Wisconsin Public Radio to talk about the Ten Commandments and the Establishment Clause. (The Supreme Court took cert in two cases on the subject this week.) It's strange to be sitting at home, before dawn, trying to feel awake, and using the telephone to talk on the radio. It's a call-in show too, so there's no telling what someone might ask. Are people up and ready to talk about God and government at 6 am? Are local separation-of-church-and-state types fired up to get all legalistic and ideological? Will there be people with religious conviction who are offended by impositions from the legal realm? Will callers draw the conversation far afield into other matters, like the Pledge of Allegiance? I like to feel ready for anything, but it is very early in the morning. The station has called, and I'm on hold, hearing the news over the phone, waiting for the show to begin. Hmmm... both presidential candidates will be in Wisconsin today ... Kerry, at a fish fry in Sheboygan.

UPDATE: We're halfway through the show, on an 8-minute news break. So far, the callers have been people who are opposed to religious displays, speaking from a political, not a legalistic, perspective. One caller expressed antagonism to President Bush for exploiting religion to his political benefit.

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the news break, the news of Kerry's appearance in Sheboygan is repeated, causing me to look back at my original post and see that I wrote "fish fry"--Friday fish fries are big in these parts--but that it is in fact a brat fry. I laugh to hear one announcer said to another: "Do you think someone told John Kerry it's a brat fry not a brat fry?" The reference is to Kerry's disastrous pronunciation of "Lambert" Field a few weeks ago. ... And now the show is over, and it's just starting to get light out. It was fun doing the show. The callers for the most part wanted to concentrate on why separating church and state is considered bad or good. That's getting to the heart of things.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's the WPR site, where there is streaming audio of the show (look for my name on the page, or if it's no longer the day of the show, search the archive). I'm listening to it now and hear that at one point I say "Tenth Amendment" instead of "Ten Commandments."

AND YET ANOTHER: So did anyone see whether Kerry named the name of our beloved sausage with appropriate Wisconsin vowelage?

AND EVEN MORE: I'm watching some news coverage of his Wisconsin visit--not the brat-fry part--and I'm hearing: "The bottom line is this: this economy has a bad case of the flu and we need a new medicine, ladies and gentleman"--stop, you're killing me!--"... The problem is, this President EYE-ther didn't understand what's happening to this economy and to the average family of America or ..." You (middle class Americans) say either, and I say EYE-ther.

But I don't care that he's really got an upper class accent. I've heard it in full force in the old tapes of his appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show" back in the early 70s, and I find it quite charming. It's who he authentically is, but he's got to mask that noblesse oblige stuff to run for President. But then he lets it slip and says "EYE-ther." If he would just be his authentic self, an upper class guy, trying to serve, being thoughtful and adult, I would probably love him. But he's been twisted and wrung out by the process. If he does win in the end, I hope he recovers that authentic self and governs well. But he shows us every day that he doesn't believe we want that man. It's really quite sad!

EXTRA, BONUS UPDATE: I concede that "EYE-ther" isn't just an upper class thing, and that it actually is the way all sorts of people say "either" in some regions. It sounds upper class to me. I grew up in Delaware and New Jersey. I'm assuming it sounds upper class to people in Wisconsin, but I'm not really an expert in Wisconsin pronunciation preferences. I'm still breaking the first syllable in "Wisconsin" after the "s" instead of after the "i"--that's how much of an outsider to Wisconsin-talk I remain after living here for 20 years.

Readers respond re: "Is Kerry a war hero?"

Yesterday, I wrote that I didn't think much of the new assertions that Kerry was not a war hero on the theory that if the assertions were true they would probably have come out back in the early 70s when Kerry was a prominent anti-war activist.

Several people wrote in to call attention to the episode of "The Dick Cavett Show," where another Vietnam Vet, John O'Neill, debated with John Kerry and strongly opposed him. I watched this show back in March when it was on C-Span (and took two photos), and O'Neill was not raising questions about Kerry's medals or heroism. The debate was about whether the war was wrong and whether war crimes were being committed.

The best point raised in the email was that Kerry was not claiming heroism back in the 70s. He was expressing shame about what he had done as he criticized the tactics used in the war. So the occasion calling for a response actually did not exist. Only the new version of the story, used in the Presidential campaign, paints him as a hero and motivates his opponents to respond with information they kept silent about before. Of course, his political opponents are also motivated to attack him.

Another good point readers made was that it would have been very hard for a vet who wanted to discredit Kerry to get media attention in the early 1970s. If the media were anti-war--and I believe they were--they would have been eager to give a forum to the thoughtful, articulate vet who was saying how terrible things were in Vietnam. As one emailer wrote: "People (most people) WANTED to believe Kerry and his ilk--they were the glamorous ones."

Then there's the notion [ADDED: emailed by Buddy Larsen] that the accusers in question would not, when they were young, have been the sort of people who would come forward (though, as older men, faced with Kerry's new presentation as a hero, they are behaving differently):

[T]here was a distinct inward-turning of many, many of the cohort in the 70s. The idea of going public for any reason would have been alien to these guys, and the idea of organizing to do so, with the aim of straightening out some part of an entirely bent universe, doesn't fit with these type guys, in that time.

Another emailer notes the difficulty, especially for a young person (especially if they were still in Vietnam), to find a way to make his voice heard. Kerry, as a young man, was an extraordinarily capable when it came to moving into the public sphere and becoming a spokesperson. We ought to remember that before asking why others did not become prominent.

Some have written that only the prospect of Kerry becoming President provided sufficient motivation for the new accusers to come forward. This seems to be the main point made by a vet who appears in the anti-Kerry ad who was interviewed on CNN the other day and asked why he did not come forward earlier: "For one thing, I did not know that John had been put in for a Bronze Star, a Silver Star or, for that matter, a Purple Heart on that day. I did not see the after-action report, which, in fact, was written by John. And as the years went by, John was not running for the highest office in the free world."

Journeys With George. I didn't have HBO back when Alexandra Pelosi's documentary Journeys With George was on originally, so it was nice to finally get the DVD. It's quite enjoyable. Pelosi did not hesitate to some include footage shot from the TV (usually with the camera tilted to give the talking heads that David-McCallum-on-Outer-Limits giant cranium effect). This encouraged me to continue with my TV photographing propensity, displayed below with John Kerry on Dick Cavett and earlier with Courtney Love on Letterman (TiVo helps you get the best frames). I like the effect of getting extra close, which Pelosi did, and forthrightly showing the lines and imperfections of the TV image. It's similar to the way Roy Lichtenstein gets close to a newspaper image and revels in the dots:




So let me give you a frame I liked from Journey's With George, where George Bush is spelling out the letters to VICTORY in cheerleader style. This is the R:

Anyway, it's a cool documentary, quite funny, about what it's like to be a journalist following a candidate around. At one point, there's a telling statement, that the journalists traveling with Gore can't stand him (though they want him to win), while Bush, surrounded by reporters who are hoping he will fail, has "charmed the pants off" them.

Kerry in 1971. C-Span showed an old episode of The Dick Cavett Show with the young John Kerry debating a Nixon supporter, also a Vietnam vet, about the Vietnam War--in particular the assertion that the soldiers were war criminals. Kerry was very articulate and also quite mild mannered, almost diffident, with eyes downcast most of the time, making it hard to capture an image of him. Below are two images, one showing the glorious 1970s set, sprouting with orange shag carpeting and space age chairs. The other vet, John O'Neill, started off incredibly stilted, reading an opening statement, and awkwardly trying to attack Kerry, but he loosened up a bit toward the end. Seeing O'Neill reminded me of how tough it was for a young man to be an actively political conservative in those days. It was very uncool! Better to be the frat boy, then, as perhaps George Bush aptly perceived.

Here's a nice account of working for Jack Paar on The Tonight Show by Dick Cavett. Interesting revelation: Paar was very intelligent, but not well schooled, and he was especially conscious of his lack of schooling and envious of people who had what he lacked.

That was true of two other great comedians: Groucho Marx and Woody Allen. I wonder if that quality--self-conscious, unschooled intelligence--is the best source of humor.