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Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say, and instead it’s open mike night. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
Anything goes #2
22 responses to “Anything goes #2”
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Here’s Leonard, perhaps a year from death, singing an old song of his to an audience that thinks they will live forever. The path of the poet is hard, but somebody has to take it. It is, by the way, four in the morning.
sincerely,
johnthebasket-
Dude could write. Dude could play. But dude didn’t have pointed ears, and when someone says Leonard I still think Nimoy.
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I probably should have used his last name. I thought the song might give it away.
John
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A whole song of amphibrachs in 3/4 time: Only Leonard Cohen would (or could) do that. OK, maybe Leonard Nimoy or any other Leonard, but the set is a small, exclusive one.
John
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Wikipedia says “An amphibrach is a metrical foot used in Latin and Greek prosody.” OMG, man, I’m old and fading and always hated education but you’re making me learn words like “amphibrach” and “prosody”?
My cousin has a metrical foot. You can hear him coming from 100 yards.
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Fuck the Latins. Amphibrachs are also used by dead American songwriters. An amphibrach is just a stressed syllable with an unstressed syllable before and after it. If you listen to Famous Blue Raincoat again you’ll hear that it’s a series of amphibrachs. They’re perfect for a waltz time song. Or an all-American poem.
John
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Wasn’t Leonard Canadian? Definitely the all-American poet, though.
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Well, he was from French Canada and retained his parents’ house there, but moved to New York in his late 20s and lived in a modest bungalow in Los Angeles from about age 35 until his death. Upon his death, his body was shipped back to Canada because he wanted to by buried next to his parents. The United States is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. Canada certainly does. He is usually identified as Canadian/American.
John
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Pure pop, which is usually a little trashy can be actual art with near-perfect harmony and a slightly relaxed snare drum. Thus, Dick and Dee Dee perform a lip-synched version of their 1962 song “The Mountain’s High” and it’s pretty damn entertaining. . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnBSBE_7GlI
jtb
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Six points for this one, man. Have I ever heard the song before? Nope. Does it rock? Absofrickinlutely. Have I even heard of Dick & DeeDee who’s really Mary? Not until this morning. You’re educating me and making my toe tap. Rock on!
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It occurs to me (I’m a little slow) that you have a Cole Porter theme song.
jtb
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Heaven knows.
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I suppose.
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JFK was an immoral pig, but, I believe, he was the last President who actually tried to be President. He tried to eliminate the CIA. He tried to keep us on the gold standard for our money. He tried to keep us out of Vietnam. And yes, he wasn’t controlled by the Israeli mafia. As a human being he was a pathetic wretch but as a President, at least he tried to do best by America and for that they shot him through the head.
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I wasn’t shaving yet, so I have no strong opinions on JFK. But yeah, my impression is that he had a human streak, which is of course very odd for an American president.
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I doubt that shaving is in inherent impediment to reading history. I was 10 when Kennedy was inaugurated — 13 when he was gunned down. The details of the Cuban missile negotiations didn’t emerge until the late 70s. Somebody wrote a book (forget who), then historians piled on. For those who eschew books, there was a multi-part television drama called The Missiles of October that is available on Archive. I think it was aired in 1974 and contains several factual errors, but as I recall it was well done.
Few on the crisis team kept contemporaneous records, although some included the episode in their memoirs. There’s a shitload on the Soviet side that we still don’t know and likely never will.
I do recall a spirit of optimism abroad in the land, but that could just as easily have been about the astronauts. We reached for the stars and orbited our rock.
John
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I’m younger, but remember hearing about optimism. Heard it from a number of people, so it’s probably true, but not much of it made it to me.
I’ve enjoyed a few movies about the Cuban missile crisis, makes for great drama, but the moral of the story to me is that our leaders and their leaders and all leaders are idiots, and we’re lucky Kennedy was a little less idiotic than most.
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Based on funding models, I simply wouldn’t trust a movie to document history as it happened. Start with A Man For All Seasons and slide downhill from there. A book has an author — movies have funders.
John
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Books have funders, too.
I used to be a reader, and adamant about it. The books got worse, and/or my patience grew shorter. I’m reading two books now, so I haven’t given up entirely, but I’m old, my time left is short, and I don’t care enough about Thomas More and his squabbles with Pope Clement and Henry the Whateverth to read a book about it. Might watch the movie, though! 🙂
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I don’t think JFK was an immoral pig. He was flawed, but we all are. You omitted to mention that he prevented a very likely nuclear exchange by resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis by ignoring Nikita Khrushchev’s second letter and answering his first. By easing the pressure from the Politburo, he gave Khrushchev time to stop the supply ships and turn them around just short of the American blockade. Bobby Kennedy played an important role in that negotiation as well. I don’t know what the hell happened to his kid.
We don’t know who shot JFK, but it was almost certainly the Mafia, not the American Soviet hardliners.
John
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History will not judge Joe Biden and the Democrats kindly. The best to be said is that Biden supervised a pause in America’s march towards fascism, but he decided that maintaining the status quo for four years was enough, instead of preventing it.
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Civilization doesn’t have time enough left for such long-term thinking. Like the rest of us, future historians will be hunting and gathering and trying to stay safe from the storms.
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