Paul Simon Plays a Partially-Finished Version of “Still Crazy After All These Years” for Dick Cavett, Then Tries to Figure Out How to Finish It (1974)

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It’s hard to imagine one of today’s nationally known singer-songwriters voluntarily sharing an unfinished composition on late night TV, then asking for advice on how to wrap things up.

That’s exactly what Paul Simon did on The Dick Cavett Show on September 5, 1974, when he shared the first two verses of “Still Crazy After All These Years,” accompanying himself on acoustic guitar:

I met my old lover

On the street last night

She seemed so glad to see me

I just smiled

And we talked about some old times

And we drank ourselves some beers

Still crazy after all these years

Still crazy after all these years

I’m not the kind of man

Who tends to socialize

I seem to lean on

Old familiar ways

And I ain’t no fool for love songs

That whisper in my ears

[…]

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Animated (622-1453)

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To anyone unfamiliar with the history of Islam, it comes as something of a shock that it got started less than a millennium and a half ago. In that relatively short span of time, Islam has become the world’s second-largest religion, a fact that becomes more understandable when you see the running start to which…

Albert Einstein Appears in Remarkably Colorized Video & Contemplates the Fate of Humanity After the Atomic Bomb (1946)

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We lived in one world before August 6, 1945, and have lived in another ever since. Nobody understood this more clearly than Albert Einstein, who had advocated for the research that culminated in that day. “A letter from Dr. Einstein in 1939 informed President Roosevelt that the Germans were engaged in the development of an…

Alfred Hitchcock’s Strict Rules for Watching Psycho in Theaters (1960)

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Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic films, didn’t come together very easily. Hitchcock’s studio, Paramount Pictures, didn’t like anything about the film and denied him a proper budget. So the director went solo and funded the film through his television company Shamley Productions. The budget was tight — less than $1,000,000. Costs were firmly controlled.…

How the Avant-Garde Art of Gustav Klimt Got Perversely Appropriated by the Nazis

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On paper, the Nazis shouldn’t have liked Gustav Klimt. As gallerist and Youtuber James Payne says in his new Great Art Explained video above, their denunciatory “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937 included the work of “Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Piet Mondrian, as well as Egon Schiele and…