Song Lyric of the Day (Cat Stevens, on ‘The Old Schoolyard’)

“Remember the days of the old schoolyard
When we had imaginings
And we had all kinds of things.”— British singer-songwriter and musician Yusuf/Cat Stevens, “(Remember the Days of the) Old Schoolyard,” from his Izitso LP (1977)
 
In the Seventies, I bought and listened incessantly to every Cat Stevens song I could, until the Izitso LP. I couldn’t imagine that by the end of the year, he’d convert to Islam, starting enormous changes in his life—and that this would turn out to be the last song collection of his that I’d own.
 
At the time of its release 49 years ago this week, “Old Schoolyard” represented something of a comeback for Stevens after the commercially disappointing Numbers collection. This song reached #33 on the Billboard Top 100, the last time to date he’s achieved that distinction.
 
Maybe to the extent that it was successful, it was because “Old Schoolyard” tapped into baby boomers’ wistfulness and nostalgia. That’s certainly why it, along with another tune from the LP, “Child for a Day,” made such an impression on me at this time, when I was looking forward to senior year of high school, wondering what college would bring—and thinking back to what really wasn’t so long ago, to my own elementary school days.
 
Now in my retirement years, it all feels so much longer and far away. With another June here and another age cohort saying goodbye to this environment, do the younger generations go through something of the same thought process—or, in this digital age, are they too caught up in the present moment to consider how they and the world have changed?
 
On his “From My Desk at Home” blog, Steven Pereira—a couple of years older than me—offers an especially thoughtful meditation on childhood as a life stage for both Stevens and himself.

Quote of the Day (Nicolas Cage, Adding an Unforgettable Detail to an Already Memorable Film Scene)

[Among the rich lore of legends associated with the film “Vampire’s Kiss,” pictured here, David Marchese asks star Nicolas Cage if it’s true that he asked to have “hot yogurt poured on your toes” during an intimate scene.]

Cage: “There was some yogurt. There wasn’t hot yogurt, and I think I was administering the yogurt to myself.”

Marchese: “But why?”

Cage: “I don’t really remember.”

Marchese: “It’s better that you don’t.”

Cage: “Probably.”— Oscar-winning American film actor Nicolas Cage, interviewed by David Marchese, “Nicolas Cage Made Himself A Legend. Then He Had to Live With It,” The New York Times Magazine, May 31, 2026

Well, I’m glad we got that squared away. I think.

Faithful reader, do you recall perhaps the most bizarre interview ever conducted on David Letterman’s Late Show? Oscar-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix made the late-night host uncomfortable with his long hair, unkempt beard, and gaseous musings—until admitting a year later that it was all staged for a mock documentary.

I wonder if the same phenomenon is going on—and has been for years—with Nicolas Cage. Stories like the one above are only marginally less nutty than the ones retailed for years about him (including that the urban legend that the actor actually is a vampire).  

Did the actor, bored by what Joni Mitchell called “the star-making machinery,” decide to have a little fun with his interviewer?

It wouldn’t be the first time that a celebrity spun a few fables for an all-too-credulous reporter or talk-show host. Bob Dylan was famous for that. The late director David Lynch and Twilight star Robert Pattinson were also known to have invented a tale or two.

Cage didn’t stop with that little yogurt yarn.

He disputed that he’d taken an aquarium from the Museum of Modern Art (actually, he says, it was a Lucite box that covers artifacts, and he had “used it as an enclosure for a king snake”).

And he acknowledged having jumped as many as four beer kegs in his childhood, and of even planning a “hoop of fire” around the whole until a sensible adult came and took it away.

Please—enough already! Nobody can be this crazy. It’s all a put-on—right?

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on an Invitation to an Early June Wedding)

“There was the usual insincere little note saying: ‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’ It was a double shock to Michael, announcing, as it did, both the engagement and the imminent marriage; which, moreover, was to be held, not in New York, decently and far away, but here in Paris under his very nose, if that could be said to extend over the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, Avenue George-Cinq. The date was two weeks off, early in June.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Bridal Party,” originally printed in Saturday Evening Post (August 9, 1930), reprinted in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1989)

F. Scott Fitzgerald and a June wedding—how could I resist blogging about this? Well, as you see, I couldn’t.

But “The Bridal Party” is of interest for another reason: it was Fitzgerald’s first piece of fiction to take into account the Great Crash of the prior autumn. Though the bridegroom in the story, we are told, is “heavily involved” in the stock market, nobody knows how much he had lost on Wall Street: “Anyhow, nobody ever tells you the truth.”

Fitzgerald would later address this financial and cultural cataclysm more fully and piercingly in several essays that form the heart of his posthumous collection The Crack-Up.

This Day in Cold War History (Tensions Spike at JFK-Khrushchev Vienna Summit)

June 3, 1961—Any hopes that John F. Kennedy harbored for easing superpower tensions were quickly discarded when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev badgered and bullied the inexperienced American President in their first and only face-to-face meeting.

The importance of the Vienna Summit did not lie in any agreements concluded, but instead in the attempt made by the cool, aristocratic, 43-year-old JFK and the volatile, 67-year-old former peasant to take the measure of the other. The differences between the democracy and the Communist dictatorship they headed were heightened by their temperaments.

When the talks, conducted in the US and Soviet embassies in this nonaligned Central European city, ended the following day, Kennedy noted carefully to the pack of reporters that no issues had been settled. Privately, to those he trusted more, he was blunter.

“He just beat the hell out of me,” JFK told influential New York Times columnist James Reston. “It was the worst thing in my life. He savaged me.”

Kennedy was unprepared for this diplomatic drubbing. Suffering from intense back pain and Addison’s Disease (an adrenal insufficiency that causes persistent fatigue and muscle weakness), he had brought with him to the summit a physician to celebrities, Dr. Max Jacobson.

Injections administered by “Dr. Feelgood” temporarily relieved the President’s symptoms (even giving him such a sense of euphoria that he bounded down steps to greet Khrushchev on the first day).

But the mixture of “vitamins” may have contained amphetamines, which, diplomatic historian Michael Beschloss observed in his superb The Crisis Years, can cause “nervousness, garrulousness, impaired judgment, overconfidence, and, when the drug wears off, depression.” 

Did Khrushchev, who had risen into Joseph Stalin’s inner circle by staying alert to threats and weaknesses of rivals, notice any of these signs of the drug in the man facing him?

While Kennedy carried with him to Vienna physical problems that could have hampered his performance, Khrushchev brought psychological ones that complicated the talks.

Psychiatrists have formulated “the Goldwater rule” to warn against assessing the mental health of a candidate without examination by a professional.

But, given totalitarian regimes’ barriers to unfettered access to information, the US Central Intelligence Agency may have come as close as anyone ever will in a 1961 “personality sketch” which concluded that Khrushchev suffered from “hypomania,” associated with “lability of mood and with rapid shifts to anger or depression.”

That condition would explain many, if not all, of Khrushchev’s shifts from earthy humor to violent outbursts like his notorious shoe-banging episode at the United Nations, as well as impulsive tactical moves that caught both Western adversaries and ostensible Kremlin colleagues off guard.

The failed American-backed invasion of Cuba only six weeks before the summit furnished Khrushchev with a cudgel against Kennedy—a pointed reminder that the U.S. had not only interfered with another country in the Western Hemisphere but that it had been inept and impotent in doing so.

But Khrushchev also sought to convert a Soviet disadvantage—a swelling exodus of refugees from Communist-controlled East Berlin to the Western-oriented sector of the city—into yet another weapon against JFK. The US must either agree to a settlement favorable to East Berlin in six months, he insisted, or the USSR would forge its own agreement with it that would leave it free to cut off Western access to the city.

"Force will be met by force. If the US wants war, that's its problem. It is up to the US to decide whether there will be war or peace,” Khrushchev told JFK.

“Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war,” Kennedy answered. “It will be a cold winter."

Khrushchev’s ultimatum and loose talk about nuclear weapons stunned the American. I wrote earlier that no agreement was reached in Vienna, but it would be a mistake to say there were no consequences. JFK went home and, after consulting with advisers, delivered a televised address to the American people in which he called for:

*an additional $3.25 billion in defense spending,
*doubling and tripling of draft calls,
*calling up reserves,
*raising the Army's total authorized strength,
*increasing active duty numbers in the Navy and Air Force,
*reconditioning planes and ships in mothballs, and
*minimizing the number of Americans that would be killed in a nuclear attack through a new civil defense program.

Under intense internal pressure from the Politburo, Khrushchev erected the Berlin Wall and resumed above-ground nuclear testing after the summit. The most dangerous period of the Cold War, climaxing over a year later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, ensued.

Quote of the Day (Susan Sontag, on Compassion, ‘An Unstable Emotion’)

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do—but who is that 'we'?—and nothing 'they' can do either—and who are 'they'—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.” — American critic, novelist, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist Susan Sontag (1933-2004), Regarding the Pain of Others (2002)

Quote of the Day (William James, on Pragmatists)

“A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.”— American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Burns and Allen Show,’ As Gracie Receives Friendly Advice)

[Fearful for her son Ronnie’s safety over the news that he wants to move to Greenwich Village, Gracie concocts a plan: to visit his apartment disguised as beatnik model “Mona Lisa.”]

Gracie Allen [played by Gracie Allen, right]: “I think I know a way of finding out about Ronnie without him knowing I'm there.”

Blanche Morton [played by Bea Benaderet, left]: “Look, Gracie, before you do whatever it is you're thinking of doing, would you take a little friendly advice?”

Gracie: “Well, sure.”

Blanche: “I think it's going to be silly.”

Gracie: “Oh, Blanche, this is no time to give me silly advice when I'm worrying about Ronnie!”— The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Season 6, Episode 7, “Ronnie Moves to the Village,” original air date Nov. 14, 1955, teleplay by Harvey Helm, Keith Fowler, Norman Paul, and William Burns, directed by Frederick De Cordova