Michael Bloomfield, Easy Rider, 53 seconds. Or do you know of anything shorter?
UPDATE (8/5). London Ed knows of something shorter:
Depends what US meaning of ‘cut’ is, I am reading it as ‘track’. Contender for shortest track is "A Concise British Alphabet – Pt. 1" at 10 seconds by British 1960s psychedelic band The Soft Machine, from their second album. They were named of course from the eponymous book by William Burroughs, an old mate of Kerouac, as I am sure you know.
Yes, cut = track. And yes, I knew whence the band acquired its name.
The British pronounce ‘z’ as ‘zed’ which clearly confused the YouTube commenters.
Right. So if you want to show that you are in the know, pronounce his name D. Zed Phillips and not D. Zee Phillips. Here is an interesting tidbit: Dale Tuggy Avoids D. Z. Phillips.
On your earlier point about millennials and Trotsky I tried this out on daughter and partner. True, they hadn’t heard of either Trotsky or Lenin, though they had heard of Stalin (‘obviously’). I explained about the complicated relationship between Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, not forgetting the ice pick incident. This means they don’t know about Trotskyism (‘the strategy of a revolutionary class to continue to pursue its class interests independently and without compromise, despite overtures for political alliances, and despite the political dominance of opposing sections of society’) or Marxist-Leninism.
I am surprised that your daughter and her partner hadn't heard of Lenin. When I ask people about Lenin they hear the name as 'Lennon.' Has your daughter heard of John Lennon? It is hard to believe, but we are coming up on the 38th anniversary of his assassination — if that term is appropriately applied to a famous musician. He was gunned down on the night of December 8, 1980 outside his digs in New York City. A student of mine in those days was so distraught that she called me in the middle of the night to report the news.
You know the story. Mark David Chapman, having read J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, didn't much like phonies. Chapman decided that Lennon was a phony and so had to be shot. Fame is vastly overrated and we who are obscure should take satisfaction in our status.
Trotskyism was pretty much the official doctrine of the UK Left in my day. Perhaps even now, given Corbyn’s call for the ‘complete rehabilitation’ of Leon Trotsky. And if you haven’t heard of Lenin, you probably haven’t heard of Marxist-Leninism. Thus the importance of history. On the other hand millennials are about 40 years younger than us. Trotksy was born 1879, so how much do we know of revolutionaries born 40 years before him, i.e. in 1839? Perhaps Georges Clemenceau who was active in the Paris Commune of 1870, but then most of us remember him not as a revolutionary but as a famous French Prime Minister.
But I do have to correct you on one point, dear Ed. As I wrote in Trotsky's Misguided Faith,
Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but a climber's ice axe.
I am sure both are available for purchase in London town assuming your Muslim mayor hasn't banned them. You can find pictures on the Internet and see the difference.
UPDATE 2 (8/5). Ed Farrell sends us to Paul Geremia, Don't You Leave Me Here, which clocks in at 39 seconds, beating my Bloomfield selection by 14 seconds.