Open thread 5/1/21
Steve Goodman was certainly ahead of his time. This song was written in 1979, over 40 years ago, and describes the pre-Disneyfied Times Square that I remember. It was a rough place.
This song would probably get him into big trouble these days:
“Where Has All the Flu Gone” reminded me of Ogden Nash’s hymn to influenza aka the grippe. Stayed up all night looking for it. Finally found it in the Internet Archive. It’s called “Song for a Temperature of a Hundred and One”.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.77757/page/n233/mode/2up
A sane listening doesn’t really find anything objectionable even by today’s standards, but the wordplay would likely trigger today’s mal-educated Maoists simply because it references homosexuals in a neutral way, instead of the Central Committee’s approved cant.
I didn’t personally see Times Square the first time until around ’03. I was not impressed. If electronic billboards and lights are your thing, nearly any significant city in Japan has sections that make Times Square look like a state fair. And that was 25 years ago.
Now I’m off to see if I can get that melody out of my head!
gmmay70:
By that time, Times Square had been cleaned up. The area was very seedy when I was young, which was MUCH earlier.
It’s not necessary to watch all 7 minutes and 39 seconds of this to get an idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS7Q3tcnHWM
I remember it well!
We’re in the New Puritanism. Myself, I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.
There are hipsters who look back with longing to those sleazy, edgy days in NYC.
huxley:
I used to have to traverse Time Square to go to ballet lessons, and that often involved (especially in the winter) doing it in darkness. I was about twelve through sixteen at the time, and it was frightening. I have no nostalgia for the old Times Square, but I don’t like the slickness of the new Times Square either. I guess I’m just an old curmudgeon.
neo:
How realistic was “Midnight Cowboy” for that era?
huxley:
Well, I was just walking in the streets, so I’m no expert on the more private side of it. But based on what I saw I’d say quite accurate.
neo:
While I could recognize the film’s value — Hoffman and Voight are excellent — I found “Midnight Cowboy” hard to watch. I’ve only seen it twice.
Jim Carroll, the poet, wrote two memoirs of his teens and twenties in NYC as a poet-junkie-hustler and a fringe participant in Andy Warhol’s scene: “The Basketball Diaries” and “The Downtown Diaries.” Quite sordid, yet very funny.
Nonetheless, Carroll knew he was flirting with disaster, if not death. With the help of a rich lady friend, he moved to Marin to clean up and focus on his writing. He eventually became a minor rock star in “The Jim Carroll Band.”
____________________________________________
Teddy sniffing glue he was twelve years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was eleven when she pulled the plug
On twenty six reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, fourteen years old
He looked like sixty five when he died
He was a friend of mine
–Jim Carroll, “People Who Died”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPNqojbyIDk
____________________________________________
“People Who Died” is still a shocking litany of NYC street life and death then.
Happy Orthodox Easter today (Sunday 2 May) to all my Orthodox and Non Orthodox friends out there. May the Good Lord bless and protect you during the coming year.
Christos Anesti, Xylourgos!
I’ve mentioned the subject of UFOs (now termed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena–UAPs) a number of times here.
I believe UAPs are a subject worthy of serious consideration, for there are a residual 5% or so of reports that cannot be explained by things like observer mis-identification of some natural phenomenon, mental illness, or deliberate hoax and, to judge by news coverage, the number of such reports have been and are apparently growing.
An unclassified Report on what information the government has about UAPs (with a classified Annex) is supposed to be delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee by the end of this June.
As this date approaches, more and more leaks of videos and pictures of such apparent UAPs—several of which the government has certified as taken by U.S. military personnel and as being genuine–are appearing.
Lou Alizondo was in charge of the Pentagon’s UAP program for several years.
While very knowledgeable on this subject, up until now Alizondo has always talked about the characteristics of these UAPs in generalities i.e. they demonstrate instant acceleration, high speed, right angle turns, low observability, have no apparent source of propulsion or lift, can hover, and are able to easily and very quickly transition from travel through the sea, to travel in our low Earth atmosphere, high Earth atmosphere and, then, into Earth orbit.
I just now saw an April 30th interview with Alizondo by the UAP-oriented show, the “Basement Office,” in which Alizondo finally put some actual numbers to some of these abilities, by saying that UAPs have been observed making abrupt and right angle turns estimated to have generated 500-600Gs (Alizondo said that the maximum G forces humans can withstand without blacking out are around 7 Gs, and at 17 Gs jets like our F-16 start to disintegrate) while speeds of UAPs of eight, ten, eleven, or even fifteen thousand miles an hour have also been observed/measured (apparently via Radar). *
One would think that having such unidentified craft with such capabilities—and those obviously far, far beyond our current capabilities–moving with impunity through the airspace over many of the nations of the world would be of serious and paramount concern.
* https://nypost.com/2021/04/30/pentagon-whistleblower-warns-of-ufo-intelligence-failure-on-par-with-9-11/
P.S.–By way of comparison speeds, Alizondo noted that our SR-71 Blackbird has a speed of 3,200 miles per hour.