It’s on YouTube, Kid

[Valin]

NYRB

Charles Simic

 

It dawned on me recently that every song, movie, and TV show that ever made an impression on me is available on YouTube. To test that proposition, and with so many options where to begin confronting me, I began by looking up a 1939 western called Oklahoma Kid with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart that I saw in 1950 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, one cold and snowy winter day while playing hooky from school. Not only was the entire movie on the website, but several isolated scenes and a trailer were also available, along with the astonishing information that 45,298 others had already viewed the clip I was watching. In a flash it all came back to me: the rundown, near-empty movie theater, where on a previous occasion I had seen a rat make his way across the stage, come to a stop directly under the movie screen, and study the action with great interest for a while, before proceeding into the wings on some more urgent business.

 

(Snip)

 

When one lives in the boonies, as I do, and the winters are long, one has a choice of either dying of boredom or going stir crazy, unless one can find a way to pass the time. One night recently, my wife and I made a YouTube tour of the early TV shows: Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Ernie Kovacs and Jackie Gleasons Honeymooners, all of which our families watched faithfully in the 1950s and afterwards fondly recalled to their dying day. Many of them, like Caesars This is Your Story a skit from his weekly variety program, Your Show of Shows, are still very much worth watching. It just doesnt get any funnier than this, one of the 78,525 people who viewed it says in his comment, and I fully agree.

 

Reliving ones past with the help of YouTube tends to be addictive. Once one starts, its hard to stop, because any name dug up from memory inevitably suggests another, and hours pass, and before one knows it, its close to midnight and time for one last song, or movie clip, before slipping under the heavy down covers. But it cant be just any old thing. It has to be something extra special to mull over and savor as one drifts off blissfully into sleep, like this clip of Ida Lupino playing the piano and singing in a 1940s film called Road House, which I found recently, and am ready to play at least once every night till Christmas and New Year come, and after that, even till that distant and unimaginable first day of Spring comes:

[Pepper]

@Valin

 

"It dawned on me recently that every song, movie, and TV show that ever made an impression on me is available on YouTube."

 

A large portion of the Internet is just and electronic version of the old magazines at the dentist office

 

and I just did extensive research and found this striking parallel

 

it turns out we can get viruses at the dentist office, too