Because as much as we love to exalt the youtube age for its "user-created media", its "Youability", its "new-media-slap-happy-ness" (note: none of these phrases are in fact in common use), we all really love Youtube for one thing and one thing only: its ability to provide us with things to stare at while suffering from an incapacitating hangover. And Youtube is perhaps the greatest provider of things to stare at that humanity has devised yet.
Picture for a moment the next ten to twelve hours of your life. What are you planning to do with them? Perhaps some household chores or bill-paying? If you are reading this blog at work (which is a fantastic place to read it at) there may be some spreadsheets or email writing in your future. Hell, maybe you thought you could spend that time with your loved ones, with those precious souls who we have all too little time with before we shuffle off this mortal coil. Well, gentle blog reader, I have three words for you: Fuck that noise.
You see, Youtube has entire runs of TV shows on it. One brave internet soul decides to take, say, his video cache of every single Larry Sanders Show ever broadcast and upload it onto Youtube. HBO's generous copyright lawyers see fit to ignore this copyright violation, perhaps because taking action would draw attention to their own inability to release a DVD of the greatest show HBO ever made (non-Wire edition, chill people). Then we, the hungover starers who have anywhere from one to eighty hours to kill, gorge ourselves on intelligent media satire until we start shitting young Jon Stewart guest appearances. And Larry Sanders is not the only criminally underappreciated Judd Apatow-produced 90's comedy to have its entire run posted on Youtube. There's also Freaks and Geeks, starring the comedy trio of a young Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and James Franco talking about weed a lot. It also provides the most achingly accurate depiction of the adolescent experience outside of the Glass family stories, and besides, phoning your sick grandmother can always wait eighteen hours, right?
It's not just American shows, either. If you have been feeling a certain lack of skin-picking English awkwardness in your life recently, full runs of Ricky Gervais' Extras and the genius Peep Show are available, knocking another thirty odd hours off your life (which was getting a little too long anyway). By the by, I was going to post a link in this space to the acerbically brilliant panel show Nevermind the Buzzcocks, which features the world's meanest gay British Jew Simon Amstell making fun of unknown British celebrities (and also Amy Winehouse) to their faces. But those bastards at the BBC took the show down, demonstrating that you should watch these shows while you still can because their time is numbered. Or you could watch Amstell's spiritual forefather Groucho Marx clown random American co-eds on You Bet Your Life. TV used to be so cute!
Which brings us to my most recent Youtube obsession, The Dick Cavett Show. Watching random Youtube clips of it feels like a 20th century American history course where you can actually meet the people you're studying. Dick Cavett's guests are the sort of people that only really need one name. There's episodes with John and Yoko (Cavett asks John if he ever kids Yoko about Pearl Harbor, then you get to watch John Lennon's impression of a Japanese person. Seriously), Woody (Woody Allen and Dick Cavett get dared by the audience to do pushups), Janis (politely tolerating catty remarks by Gloria Swanson), Orson (telling what just might be the greatest anecdote ever about his run-ins with Winston Churchill, and looking disconcertingly like my girlfriend's dad while doing it), and Ali and Frazier (Dick Cavett picks a fight with both of them, they pick him up a few feet off the ground, he scampers off and jokes that they looked like an Oreo together. Racially awkward! But very, very ballsy...) The show ran in the late 60s and early 70s and wholeheartedly set about exploring the contemporary generation and culture gap without ever taking sides. There are moments where you can't quite believe that these people were ever allowed to exist on the same soundstage, let alone the same universe. And the quality of conversation is ridiculous, even the coked-up narcoleptic Sly Stone (it's up there, go find it) is more articulate than half the guests on Leno these days. What ever happened to the art of conversation? Oh yeah. Youtube happened.
This whole Jimi Hendrix interview is a thing of gentle beauty, but this fifteen second excerpt is profound. If Jimi was born in the youtube age, maybe he wouldn't have had to get up every day at all.
P.S. A big thank you to one "cavettbiter", who is truly one of the unsung heroes of our time. And just in case you haven't had enough, here's Dick Cavett's account of Norman Mailer's drunk and pugilistic appearance on the show. Nothing like this will ever happen again, and we are poorer for it.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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3 comments:
The post was getting long, but here's an excerpt from the Dick Cavett's wiki page:
"On March 6, 1970, surrealist artist Salvador Dalí was behaving very eccentrically on a show with silent screen star Lillian Gish and baseball legend Satchel Paige (Dalí carried an anteater on a leash in with him when he came on stage, and he tossed it in Gish's lap, much to her consternation). At one point Cavett asked him why he had once arrived to give a lecture at the Sorbonne in an open limo filled with heads of cauliflower. Dalí responded with a barely coherent discourse regarding the similarity of the cauliflower head to the "mathematical problem discovered by Michelangelo in the rhinoceros' horn"! Cavett interrupted him by waving his hands in Dalí's face and exclaiming "Boogie boogie boogie!" just as his hero Groucho Marx did in A Night at the Opera. The audience broke up, and Dalí appeared at a loss."
I mean, wow.
…gosh… I feel too old! I wasted my time -in pre history- watching some of those shows. On the other hand I suppose this fact should make me feel better about not knowing how to turn on Your-Tube; I was at the premiere, don't need to go to the re-run.
Does anybody do "the live thing" ketch a glance of something that will truly disappear forever?
I am developing an almost religious sympathy for luddites.
Larry Sanders is on DVD. We have it at my place right now.
PS-thanks for the tip about freaks and geeks. This blog is interesting and informative.
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