wherever you are tonight...

On You Tube, type in --

Bewitched - I'll Blow you A Kiss In The Wind


...Several videos will show up:  the best one is from uploader valita, with 36K views.

     (There's a video with many more views, hundreds of thousands, but it has more talking and they cut out 6 seconds of the song for commercials.  - Not the uploader, but I think Hallmark channel cut it... [The video with the largest number of views is not always the best one...])




And now -- we PLAY it.

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stuck with a drama queen you can't get rid of

     Exploring through the untamed wilderness of You Tube, I found a video that is titled, "20 Dark Tactics to Make Her Love You."

     It is narrated by a young gentleman who appears to be between the ages of 18 and 14, who speaks into the camera rather fast.

     The advice he is sharing basically says, Switch back and forth on how you treat the girl, and that will make her uncertain and insecure so she's all wrapped up in trying to please you (the guy) and that puts you in charge.


Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight


Reading the Viewer Comments:


Sayhey Laussen
--------------- YOU KNOW THIS IS TOXIC when he starts with PICK THE RIGHT VICTIMS!  LMFAOOOO

Joey Zonda
-------------------- "Picking the right victim"
LOOOOOL     IM DEAD    XD


Salad ---
------------------- Someone just popped ADERALL

Jaxter
-------------- This explains why girls you're not interested in end up being the ones chasing you.  You subconsciously do these things to girls you really aren't all that into.


Osan 338
------------------ It's all fun and games until you use this on a female who knows about it



Jean Harlow and Robert Williams, in Platinum Blonde


----------- How not to have a genuine relationship.  lol

--------- The guy is a psycho    omg

Jonathan Lopez
------------- too much to do, I'd rather just pay for it.

CT-3122
----------------- not all girls are like that either especially not the ones I know


simohatim
------------------ This dude just Reading tips from the book Art of seduction by Robert green


Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year


Kristopher Ryan
------------------ Dude, did you record this in your Mother's bedroom?


max
------ I did some of this unintentionally with a girl I wasn't interested in.  One day woke up to 100+ phone calls.  Guys to be real it's not worth it....




Jake Lindemann
-------------- "it's like when you see Kanye being good to his wife and you're like Wow! He really is a nice guy".  Lmao I'm dying


Sample Dude
------------------- 19:50    Did he say "Be uncle trollable around her"?  Who the hell is Uncle Trollable?


-------------- Sounds like a recipe for disaster unless you WANT to waste your time and money getting stuck with a crazy, insecure, codependent drama queen you can't get rid of.  

You might as well just go outside right now, break all the windows on your car, call the cops on yourself for domestic violence, spend the night in county and call it a day.


Glenn Close, Fatal Attraction




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sensational, simplistic, novel, and enraging

     I read a headline today that said Prince Harry's biographer predicts Harry will not be happy in Los Angeles, where he and his wife Meghan are currently living.

     A Commenter wrote, "No one is happy in L.A.  Why would he be any different?"

____________________________

     A Reader Comment in SLATE on an environment article said, "We have some pretty serious questions to come to terms with as an over consuming society.

______________________________

     Reader Comments in The Guardian, on Bob Dylan's new song, "Murder Most Foul" --

~  This is going to keep us Dylanologists busy for years.  Multiple footnotes on every line.  Good ol' Bob.  Welcome back!

~  One of the few artists who could generate, good or bad, such a response by simply releasing one song.
     Many ego-tripping Minstrels would love that kind of firepower.


~  I am enthralled hearing you all comment on the news, the lyrics, references, etc.  Learning!  I am grateful Dylan release this work at such a trying time.  

Tons of informed people have something to say.  Pro or against, it doesn't matter.  It takes our minds off the most odious subject, traveling from home to home, from country to country.



~  Well, the question is, do we go back to normal after this crisis and get lulled back into self delusion and the status quo or do we drive change.

~  An evocative dream like quality that wanders through the Twentieth Century - certainly play Dylan for me.

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wet pavement music

On You Tube, type in

Jefferson Airplane, Somebody To Love.

     Its cold open is exciting to hear:

"When the truth is found -- !"

This song sounds good played back-to-back with the Sopranos theme song, for some reason.  First one, then the other:  it doesn't matter in which order.



     "The Sopranos | Season 1 Opening Credits."
1:46
(You see James Gandolfini's face as he's driving his car -- it looks like he's having a tough time turning the wheel -- maybe the power steering is out...)

Woke up this morning,
Got yourself a gun
Your mama always said you'd be the -- chosen one

She said, you're one in a million, you've got to burn to shine
But you were born under a bad sign, with a blue moon in your eyes...




--------------------------- When the truth is found --
To be lies...!


Play, and Listen.

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some kind of mushroom

     I listened to a video on You Tube where a young-sounding guy explained how "news" and information work, in the Internet Age.


     He said there are four features that cause an item to --

A)  get people's attention, and
B)  to be shared with other people.

An item can have all four of the features, or one or two or three of them, I think.



The four features are:

The item is sensational
It is simplistic
It is novel -- new, different
It is enraging


     These factors automatically get our attention.

     The video guy said, Don't blame the media for constantly shoveling stuff at us that is

     sensational

     simplistic

     novel, and

     enraging,


because -- these are the items that people
     click on,
     watch, and
     share.



Why is "click on, watch, and share" the goal?
That's how "they" make money.

Simplicity.
Sensationalism.


Sensational; simplistic; novel; enraging.
Click on; watch; share.

     The guy on the video said another thing that I wrote down:

"What gets repeated, gets remembered."


     Not only remembered, but eventually believed, by many people.

     This ties in with what Bill Eddy wrote about the Holocaust in his book, Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths -- and How We Can Stop.  He wrote that many people in Germany came to believe everything bad was Jewish people's fault because Hitler repeated it many times.

____________________________________

On You Tube, type in 

White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

and listen.

     This song weaves an hypnotic spell:

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall


And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call...
He called Alice
When she was just small



When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know


When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards...


     Sometimes these days, the words, tone, and mood of this song -- seem to make perfect sense... a lot of people say it... I don't know, but that's what they say... ...Where are we?...


_______________________

{"White Rabbit," written by Grace Slick.  Single by Jefferson Airplane, from the album Surrealistic Pillow}

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volunteers of America

Internet Reader Comments from yesterday.  Some from SLATE, one from The Guardian.

SLATE

Bixley
The way things are looking, Italy will have a 3-4 month head start on the US getting their economy back and rolling.



TJB3838
Well, they haven't really had an economy that was rolling since like 1965.  So they have a really, really big head start.

     Though, one could argue that the Italians show that the obsession with "growth" in the economy is overstated.  Italy has had a stalled economy for decades.  But they don't have obscene poverty or anything like that.  Neutral can be good.


Primecut, Pure Orb Energy
Normally conservatives and other economy knowers love to talk about how these countries are lazy, you know they take a two hour lunch and maybe don't even come back!  

And even with their universal health care and other social benefits, many can't even afford one car, let alone 3!  But now they're very concerned about Italy for some reason.



Smedvick [Donald J Cartman]
     To quote Trump regarding Italy:

Italy is a country, like we are a country, except they aren't as good as I am, believe me.  Yesterday I saw a goose, a tremendous goose.  Sleepy Joe likes waffles, but the best waffles are served in Trump tower.  You people had better be thankful for me.  

If not for my unpresidented electoral victory, a lot of people say it was the greatest victory ever, I don't know but that's what they say.  I have claimed the moon for the United States.  That flag is looking pretty attractive.  Where am I?


Rudy's Socially Distant Recliner
Too many complete sentences.  Sorry.



Traitor Joe
Trump and Nancy deny their mutual attraction while Melania fumes in the background.





from The Guardian:

BettyMayou
     Life-threatening viruses bring all the important things in life into sharp focus.  They also highlight that we don't want/need:  cruise ships, smug celebrities, tax-dodging multi-nationals, lying politicians, designer tat, $5 coffees and people in our faces 24/7.

____________________________

tat:  Wiktionary definition -- cheap, tasteless, useless goods; trinkets.  A slang term common in the UK.
__________________________

On You Tube, type in

Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers

(the two-minute song, not the 40-minute album)

and listen.

     The band's female singer, Grace Slick, has a sort of shimmer in her voice -- (vibrato?) -- like Stevie Nicks, or Shakira.

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I don't see the problem

"We called for the abolition of the death penalty, arguing not only that it was barbaric, but that it was disproportionately used against poor people."

~ Hugh Hefner

_______________________________

Last week's You Tube videos:

Hugh Hefner Clashes With Feminists | The Dick Cavett Show
16:19

and

norman mailer gore vidal cavett
24:56



------------------------- A You Tube Comment on the Mailer-Vidal one said,
"This was almost like watching wrestling."

     And another one added:
"Woody Allen in Sleeper -- 'Norman Mailer donated his ego for medical research.'"


     On the feminists vs. Hefner one, that extra brunette who spoke up was Grace Slick from Airplane -- she said, "Well, some men are only interested in sex with you, then that's up to you -- your decision -- and some of them want to play music with you, some want to talk...  I don't -- see the problem..."

___________________________




On You Tube, type in 

Jefferson Airplane, Tobacco Road

and play.

(This song is also in the Hugh Hefner movie, American Playboy -- someone sings it live in a nightclub in the early 1960s...)

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wit and dazzle

     Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer both wrote content, at some point, for Playboy magazine -- since people were "reading it for the articles."


Playboy, January 1979
"Sex Is Politics"
Gore Vidal

--------------------- The sexual attitudes of any given society are the result of political decisions.

     Although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled.  

Any sexual or intellectual or recreational or political activity that might decrease the amount of coal mined, the number of pyramids built, the quantity of junk food confected will be proscribed through laws that, in turn, are based on divine revelations handed down by whatever god or gods happen to be in fashion at the moment.  Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around....


     At any given moment in a society's life, there are certain hot buttons that a politician can push in order to get a predictably hot response....  It is good politics to talk against sin -- and don't worry about non sequiturs.  In fact, it is positively un-American...to discuss a real issue such as unemployment or who is stealing all that money at the Pentagon.



     To divert the electorate, the unscrupulous American politician will go after those groups not regarded benignly by Old or New Testament....

     Today Americans are in a state of terminal hysteria on the subject of sex in general and of homosexuality in particular because the owners of the country (buttressed by a religion that they have shrewdly adapted to their own ends) regard the family as their last means of control over those who work and consume....In the Symposium, Plato defined the problem:

"In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians [Plato is referring to the Persians, who were the masters of the Jews at the time Leviticus was written], the custom [homosexuality] is held to be dishonorable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and gymnastics are held, because they are inimical to tyranny; the interests of the rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid their power."

This last refers to a pair of lovers who helped overthrow the tyrants at Athens.

Copyright © by Gore Vidal


__________________________________
________________________________________

1975 saw the publication of Norman Mailer's The Fight, a book about  the boxing title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman known as "Rumble in the Jungle."  The book was serialized in Playboy magazine.

---------------------- [excerpt] ------------- There is always a shock in seeing him again.  Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best....If Ali never opened his mouth to quiver the jellies of public opinion, he would still inspire love and hate.  For he is the Prince of Heaven -- so says the silence around his body when he is luminous....

     There was an art to watching him train and you acquired it over the years.  Other champions picked sparring partners who could imitate the style of their next opponent and, when they could afford it, added a fighter who was congenial:  someone they could hit at will, someone fun to box.  Ali did this also, but reversed the order.  

For the second fight with Sonny Liston, his favorite had been Jimmy Ellis, an intricate artist who had nothing in common with Sonny.  As boxers, Ellis and Liston had such different moves one could not pass a bowl of soup to the other without spilling it.  



Of course, Ali had other sparring partners for that fight.  Shotgun Sheldon comes to mind.  Ali would lie on the ropes while Sheldon hit him a hundred punches to the belly -- that was Ali conditioning stomach and ribs to take Liston's pounding.  In that direction lay his duty, but his pleasure was by way of sparring with Ellis as if Ali had no need to study Sonny's style when he could elaborate the wit and dazzle of his own.


     Fighters generally use a training period to build confidence in their reflexes, even as an average skier, after a week of work on his parallel, can begin to think he will yet look like an expert.  In later years, however, Ali would concentrate less on building his own speed and more on how to take punches.  

Now, part of his art was to reduce the force of each blow he received to the head and then fraction it further.  Every fighter does that, indeed a young boxer will not last long if his neck fails to swivel at the instant he is hit, but it was as if Ali were teaching his nervous system to transmit shock faster than other men could. --------- [end, excerpt]


______________________________

------------------ After watching the Mailer-Vidal-Flanner dust-up referenced here April 17th, instead of The Fight about the "Rumble in the Jungle," I want to write a book called The Conversation, describing the "Rumble On The Dick Cavett Show" -- ha.

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would you like two extra chairs for your giant intellect

     Another battle which took place on The Dick Cavett Show was between two authors whose names I heard when I was a child growing up in northeastern Ohio:  Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.  One of Mailer's books was called, Advertisements For Myself.  (My dad thought that title was kind of bogus, lol.)


--------------------- [excerpt] ----------
FIRST ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF

     Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when I began.  

Defeat has left my nature divided, my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy.  So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal.  In sitting down to write a sermon for this collection, I find arrogance in much of my mood.  It cannot be helped.  



The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.  Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.  

I could be wrong, and if I am, then I'm the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.

{Advertisements For Myself, by Norman Mailer.  1959 -- Harvard University Press.}


________________________________

------------------- [excerpt from Gore Vidal's review of Advertisements For Myself - January 2, 1960, in The Nation]

     I first heard of Norman Mailer in the spring of 1948, just before The Naked and the Dead was published.  He was living in Paris or had been living there, and just gone home when I arrived in France, my mood curiously melancholic, no doubt because of the most dubious fame I was enjoying with the publication of a third book, The City and the Pillar; at twenty-two I should have found a good deal more to please me than I did that spring and summer in the foreign cities.  

I do recall at one point Truman Capote telling me about The Naked and the Dead and its author:  a recital which promptly aroused my competitive instincts . . . waning, let me say right off, and for reasons which are relevant to these notes.  Yet at the time I remember thinking meanly:  so somebody did it.  


Each previous war had had its big novel, yet so far there had been none for our war, though I knew that a dozen busy friends and acquaintances were grimly taking out tickets in the Grand War Novel Lottery.  I had debated doing one myself 



and had (I still think) done something better:  a small cool hard novel about men on the periphery of the action; it was called Williwaw and was written when I was nineteen and easily the cleverest young fox ever to know how to disguise his ignorance and make a virtue of his limitations.  

(What an attractive form the self-advertisement is:  one could go on forever relighting one's image.)  Not till I began that third book did I begin to get bored with playing safe.


_______________________

On You Tube, type in

norman mailer gore vidal cavett

Uploader:
The Dick Cavett Show
     24 minutes and 56 seconds
           They say some stuff you wouldn't expect.  (Although you can't hear all of it because some gets "beeped" out...)  There is audience participation (unplanned, I believe) and a third guest, Janet Flanner, sits between them, "reffing" occasionally.

     (I thought the lady was playwright Lillian Hellman, at first, but it's Janet Flanner, who was Paris correspondent for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.)

     She wears a great scarf, and has just the right word or phrase at the right moment.

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"Hugh Hefner is my enemy"

     Today's fabulously unusual You Tube video is as follows --


Title of the video:
Hugh Hefner Clashes With Feminists | The Dick Cavett Show

Uploader:
The Dick Cavett Show

It is 16:19 (sixteen minutes and 19 seconds).

The two feminists who visit the show are Susan Brownmiller and Sally Kempton.



     Later on in the conversation, the camera shows another guest from earlier in the program, off to the left side of our view -- she speaks up, adding a perspective -- and I don't know for sure who it is.  Couldn't find a name for her in the video's Description.  I think it might be Grace Slick, of the Jefferson Airplane.




     Susan Brownmiller is the one who announces calmly, firmly, and cheerfully, "Hugh Hefner is my enemy."

     Mr. Hefner gets to add his thoughts and ideas, and occasionally the audience chimes in, calling out from the balconies....


Below is a sample of Ms. Brownmiller's writing.

------------------- [excerpt] -------------- Political organizers understand that the important thing about action is reaction.  There you are, taking a stand, struggling to express a new idea, and the response is so powerful -- positive or negative -- that it reverberates into new responses and reactions, especially in you.


     Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were part of the American delegation that traveled to London in 1840 for a World Anti-Slavery Convention.  

As the high-minded congress got under way, the male abolitionists voted not to accredit and seat the women.  For ten days Mott and Stanton watched the proceedings from the visitors' gallery, where in mortification and anger they hatched the idea for a women's rights congress that became the historic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.




     White women in the civil rights movement during the 1960s were also consumed by a vision of equality, one that seemed important enough to risk our lives for.  (And one white woman, Viola Liuzzo, did in fact lose her life to a sniper on the Selma-to-Montgomery March.)  

Although Martin Luther King, Jr., came to embody the stoic heroism of those hopeful years, to kids on the college campuses, and to many older radicals like me, SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the true cutting edge of the movement.


     SNCC had been formed after the lunch-counter sit-ins in February 1960.  And it was SNCC that sent out the call for an army of northern volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, the call to which so many white women responded.  

SNCC was cast in the image of a young, fearless black male, a concept that may have been necessary for its time, but its corollary was that women of both races were expected to occupy a lesser role.


     Jane Goodman and I were in the second batch of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer.  No longer part of the student community from which SNCC drew most of its volunteers, I was by then a researcher at Newsweek, stuck in a dead-end job, and Jan was directing inner-city programs for the Girl Scouts.  During our orientation session in Memphis, we were told that Meridian needed emergency workers.  



Michael Schwerner, the project director, James Chaney, a local organizer, and Andrew Goodman, a summer volunteer who hadn't had time to unpack his duffel, had just been murdered in nearby Neshoba County, although their bodies would not be found for another forty days.  



When no one else at the Memphis orientation session volunteered for Meridian, Jan and I accepted the assignment.  Between us, we had a good ten years of organizing experience, hers in Democratic primaries and presidential campaigns, mine in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and both of us together in voter registration drives in East Harlem.  

The night we arrived in Meridian, a field secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers.  Proudly we raised our hands.

     "Shit!" he exploded.  "I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women."


     On other projects in other Mississippi towns that summer, white women were reminded of their second-class status as movement workers through a variety of slights.  Because of the southern white male's phobia about mixing the races, our presence in the volunteer army of integrationists was construed as an added danger to the movement's black men.  



I do not wish to underestimate this danger, but there will always be a germ of a reason, sound or unsound, behind the perpetuation of sexist practice.  



When antiwar activism got under way a year or so after Mississippi Freedom Summer, there was also a logical reason why women in that movement were relegated to second-class status:  the draft for the war in Vietnam directly affected young men.

     Women the world over are required to modify their behavior because of things that men fear and do.

------------------------ [excerpt, In Our Time:  Memoir of a Revolution, by Susan Brownmiller.  1999 - Dial Press]

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