This is not a video, but it is essential, a live recording of Charlie Parker playing “Well, You Needn’t” with Monk as accompanist. This is one of the “famous” Dean Benedetti recordings. Benedetti was a passionate fan of Parker and surreptitiously recorded many of Bird’s nightclub performances. To save tape (or “wire”—the earliest taping machines…
Celebrities die, Geezers laugh
The deaths of Prince and Carrie Fisher: what lessons can these icons teach us? How about “Don’t do drugs”? Okay, the only thing tackier than maudlin tributes to dead celebrities is dead celebrity jokes, but we geezers have a special reason to crack wise. I was 31—31!—when the original Star Wars came out, so, no,…
Captain Kangaroo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brCNJHFdYFI This is “Geezer Memories Week” at Literature R Us. I was actually a little old for Captain Kangaroo (aka Bob Keeshan), which didn’t premiere until I was 10, and a great deal of the time I “watched” it only because my little sisters were watching as I got ready for school. Still, I appreciated…
Suzy Snowflake
Suzy Snowflake was always paired with Hard Rock, Coco, & Joe. Revisiting her is a bit of a disappointment. I never liked her as much as HRC&J—she was a girl, after all—but viewing her today, apart from her gender, the animation isn’t as much fun, probably because she’s moving through space instead of just sitting…
Hard Rock, Coco, & Joe
This clip dates from 1951, produced by WGN TV in Chicago. I have no idea of where the three came from. They look like the characters that used to appear in department store windows back in the day, but whether they were featured in one of the big downtown Chicago stores like Marshall Fields or…
One for George
I basically called George Will a shithead—or at least a periwighead, which is pretty much the same thing—a couple of days ago. Well, that was then, this is now. Now is George hitting one out of the park, labeling incoming attorney general Jeff Sessions a shithead for his championing of “civil forfeiture”, aka “stealing”—when the…
Hillary Clinton, Loser?
Only in America would a woman who outpolled her opponent by close to three million votes be declared a “loser”. That is to say, only a woman running for president, because in every other election in the U.S.—and there are, of course, thousands—the person with the most votes wins. But because Hillary Clinton was running…
Thelonious Monk—“Well, You Needn’t”
Okay, enough of “Straight, No Chaser” for awhile. Now I’m going to be doing “Well, You Needn’t” for a month or two. Thelonious Monk, piano. Charlie Rouse, tenor sax; Larry Gales, bass; and Ben Riley, drums. Posted by Ilana X.
One for Bob
I lambasted, pretty much, Robert Samuelson last week for a dumb-ass column he wrote claiming that we don’t spend enough on defense. Well, this week, Bob gets it right, in a column praising President Obama’s handling of the Great Recession, which was in fact his greatest achievement, though not quite great enough to allow Hillary…
Passing the buck: Smith to DeLong to Krugman
Writing in Bloomberg View, Noah Smith offers Four Ways to Help the Midwest, prompting Brad DeLong to go off on a bit of a tangent, musing about “Regional Policy and Distributional Policy in a World Where People Want to Ignore the Value and Contribution of Knowledge- and Network-Based Increasing Returns” (aka “the Human Condition”), causing…