Dispatches From the Real World: LBJ

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

H2O Gate Blues

I really love this blues piece on Watergate, LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, the slaughter of Attica, George Wallace, Kent State, Bobby Seale and Vietnam by Gil Scott-Heron.
I love that Scott-Heron mimics the sound of an old school telephone. I love Scott-Heron's voice, which is perfectly for delivering poetry: with swagger but epic, enunciating every word like a news reader.
I love that he draws a parallel between Richard Nixon and two Shakespearean kinds, MacBeth and Richard III.
There are so many great lines. "The election was sabotaged by...trickery and greed." "The water buggers in the Watergate buggers was no news." "Spy movies with the same name and a cast of a thousand." I love how Scott-Heron keeps asking "How blind, America?" Indeed.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

LBJ Orders Pants

Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.
Continuing on my love for LBJ, I found this video of him ordering pants. Lol. This sounds like my Grandpa.
This has got to be one of the most intimate conversations I've ever heard out of a president, describing various body parts. I like that LBJ knows exactly what he wants. I've heard girls talk about clothes in about this much detail.
The only thing that was sort of creeping me out is that they recorded this conversation. Nixon was notorious for his phone conversations, but I didn't realize all president did that.