The seventies

Carter's Rabbit

2009-11-30T09:16:00.000-05:00

In 1979, while fishing in Plains, Georgia, president Jimmy Carter was forced to use his paddle to fend off a deranged rabbit that had attacked his rowboat. A week later, Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, unwisely mentioned the incident to an Associated Press correspondent over tea, the reporter dutifully filing the story on the AP wire the next day:

The incident, entirely unimportant in itself, quickly set off a minor media frenzy. The press, desperate for copy during the late summer lull, quickly elevated the incident into a metaphor of the haplessness and impotence of the Carter Administration.

Though photographs of the incident were suppressed at the time, Reagan's operatives eventually managed to get their hands on them. A color copy of the photo can now be purchased at the Jimmy Carter Library for $25.50.

The photo itself paints a devasting tableaux. Alone in his tiny rowboat, Carter looks hunched over and solitary. He is diffidently splashing water at a tiny ball of wet fur that is over fifteen feet from the president and is swimming away from him. Not exactly Teddy Roosevelt tracking for bear.

In general, voters are not attracted to presidents who appear to be taken to the limit by a bunny rabbit. This is one reason why military service has historically been an important path to the White House: It comforts people to think their leader has the prowess to manfully dispatch attacks, whether it be the Soviet army or Silly Wabbit. (Sadly, this is probably why women have had a hard time in presidential elections.)

Why haven't nutcases become conspiratorial about this yet? Clearly this incident was hatched by the Trilateral Commission, working in tandem with a cabal of bankers and fringe scientists, to undermine the presidency of Jimmy Carter—thereby clearing the path for a president, Ronald Reagan, more open to corporate/military rule.

Maybe I'll become that nut.

It's also possible, however, that leaders simply become burdened with the symbols the people want them to wear. Within a year of assuming office, Jimmy Carter was already being attacked for being a rudderless namby-pamby. A battle-to-the-death with an aquatic bunny rabbit only confirmed doubts.

Eight months into the new administration, Obama's presidency is already being called Carter's second term. As Obama tries to revive the ideal of progress in America, a notion that went out of style around the time ties became narrow, he is wise to remember Carter's Rabbit—unless you want to spend four years chasing away your own furry animals, always act sure and pretend to be in control. Above all, voters respect strength.

Richard Nixon reviews Star Wars

2009-11-20T13:42:00.001-05:00

As many of you know, I have been spending a great deal of time lately in San Clemente writing my memoirs—a task I feel represents the culmination of my long and fruitful career in public life. For quite some time, Pat has been begging me to slow down and not work so hard. After weeks of pleading, last night I finally agreed to go out and see this film Tricia and Julie have been raving about for weeks: Star Wars. The movie turned out to be a delightful break from my labors.

Dear old Pat always knows best.

Star Wars is an exciting space adventure pitting a rag tag band of anti-establishment rebels against an "empire" meant to represent, of course, evil incarnate. This rebel gang includes CP3O, a gold-plated, lispingly homosexual robot, and Chewbacca, a shaggy eight foot tall creature managing to be more hairy and inarticulate than any stoned hippy you've ever seen.

And I know that's saying a lot.

The rebels are also given guidance by a shrunken green man named Yoda with a funny accent who represents the Jewish elite who lend their support to the anti-establishment side.

I must admit at first I didn't like the overt leftist political overtones of the movie. It does not take a lot of sophistication to see the rebels as representing those who do not like our American way of life: The communists, the Hollywood types, the Viet Cong, all the shouters and the bums who'd rather protest than work together to build a stronger America.

It takes true statesmanship, of course, to see the vision of the movie's "villain," Darth Vader, cleverly depicted as an Uncle Tom black who sells out to the establishment. Though the movie depicts him as vicious and power mad, in fact Darth Vader is striving for nothing more than peace through stability.

Dr. Kissinger and I understood this. Though many have criticized our overthrow of the increasingly socialist Allende government in Chile in 1970s, we understood that consolidating our power was absolutely the best way to achieve a lasting peace in South America. Should our "Death Star"—which we should be clear represents the Galactic Empire's spherical version of the Pentagon—been blown up for making the hard but right choices?

I think you can all agree that would be the wrong thing to do.

Despite its misguided politics, however, I found I could not resist the charms of this movie! I found myself on the edge of my seat when Luke Skywalker grabbed that rope and carried the lovely Princess Leia across the threshold—the startrooper's laser beams flashing all around them! And the dog-fighting of the those spaceships before Luke Skywalker blew up the Deathstar? During this scene, my heart was pounding harder than when I faced off against Nikita Kruschev during the Kitchen Debate!

Since my resignation three years ago I have learned to have become more open minded about hippies and leftists. Yesterday even Tricia was listening to this piece of trash Rock'n'roll by some hippy named John Denver. The song was called "Rocky Mountain High," an ode no doubt to smoking dope. Like I said, hippy trash. But I have to admit it had my tapping my toes.

These past years have been a time of deep reflection for me. I have done a lot of thinking during those long, solitary walks along the beach in San Clemente. The world keeps changing but Richard Nixon keep changing with it. If nothing else, watching this movie taught me that the world needs Richard Nixon more than ever.

Fear and Loathing at the Bauerstown Baseball Association

2009-08-11T19:44:00.019-04:00

Sports writer and legendary freak Hunter S. Thompson covers my little league baseball game, 1979

By the time we got to the little league field, my attorney had begun raving about the concession stand. “As your attorney,” he said, “I advise you to buy some hot dogs and Swedish fish.” The mescaline now clearly had a grip on him. At the sound of a foul ball, he swung around to the right, nearly elbowing a plump-faced housewife with a purple sailboat knitted pattern on her sweater.

“These people are vultures,” my attorney said, wheeling back to face me. “They’re filth. They probably eat babies.” A bead of spittle stuck to his bottom lip. The lady with the sailboat sweater took a step back. Her eyes had become wild with fear. With a head swimming with mescaline, her head looked like a slab of bread dough stuck atop a headless body.

Standing between a 300 pound mescaline-crazed Samoan and this terrified woman, who for all I knew was the wife of the police commissioner, I felt the need to explain the importance of our task. To put her terrified, doughy mind at ease.

“Ma’am,” I said. “I am a doctor of Journalism and this is my attorney. We were sent here on a secret mission from San Francisco. Something of importance is going to happen here, according to my editor, Charlie Chan. Do you understand?”

She took another step backwards, nervously biting her bottom lip. I was now visualizing her husband—no doubt a squared jawed ex-Marine as well as a cop—clotting my head with a nightstick. This was getting dangerous. She needed to be neutralized.

“There are infiltrators here. In the bleachers, umpiring the games. CIA. KGB. IBM. We’re here to protect you—”

She stumbled backward and ran away—no doubt to gather a posse of insurance adjusters to bash the skulls of the acid-chomping degenerates hanging around the little league concessionaire.

“Suppose we get our hot dog and repair to greener pastures?” I said to my attorney. He was transfixed by a game winning hit by one of the players for the Allegheny All-Stars.

“Did you see that?” he said. “I’d swear that little kid over there just closed his eyes and stuck his bat out, knocking the ball all the way to the center field fence. Now the other kids are literally hoisting him on their shoulders.”

“And I’d swear your face is being eaten by rabid wolverines.”

“Son of a bitch that kid got lucky.”

"That happens sometimes. Let's get some hot dogs. And Swedish Fish. They're two cents a piece here. We can charge 10,000 of them to Sports Illustrated."

"Last out in the game, down by one, full count and a man on first and third, and the kid just stuck his goddamn bat out there. Won the game."

"Amazing. Now let's go before the vultures peck out our eyes. Got any amyls left?"

"Luckiest damn kid in the whole world," my attorney said over the sounds of frenzied, victorious little leaguers.

Zen batter and sports hero.

My life in Disco

2009-08-11T18:34:00.008-04:00

In case you're wondering if I enjoyed myself during the Age of Disco, here is some visual proof: I definitely had a right funky good time.

This, unfortunately, represented the highmark of my dance moves and skill with the ladies.

Something tells me that Ms. 1976 here in the yellow dress went on to have a fabulous life...

Surviving in the 1970s

2009-08-11T14:36:00.018-04:00

In a review of the 70s concentration camp movie Seven Beauties, psychologist and concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim wrote in 1976 that the decade was guided by a sense of "empty survivorship," a desire to simply exist from moment-to-moment despite the lack of any true threat.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson's 1971 tale of drug excess, makes the comparision to the 60s counterculture explicit:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force – is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

It makes sense that the culture of the 70s was tuned to mere survival. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas accomplished nothing else, it revealed the very moment in which the 60s counterculture became as empty and ugly as the plastic/corporate culture it was meant to replace.

By the mid-70s, youth culture was stuck between two ideals of corruption. The result? A decade obsessed with themes of wandering and surviving.

Since I encountered this notion of "empty survivorship" in Griel Marcus' Lipstick Traces, it has become the key to explaining the entire decade—a time marked by:

Peak popularity of daredevils who conquer entirely invented dangers

Songs about aimless wandering

... or the million songs about truckers trying to make it home

70s Disaster films

The Towering Inferno
Airport (not to be confused with the great Airplane!)

... and horror films

Songs about being lost in space

Major Tom
Rocket Man (both of which use space as a metaphor for drug addiction)

Or songs literally about survival

I Will Survive

Making it through, finding your way home, just surviving—themes of a decade afraid to go forward but not wanting to go back.

Incredibly, I'm still not the Hulk

2009-08-11T13:24:00.007-04:00

For two years in a row in the late 70s I dressed up as the Incredible Hulk for Halloween. My mother would mix green food coloring with Noxema and would slather it over me until I looked like the Incredible Hulk (or like an incredibly large, incredibly knobby green bean.)

About a half a mile away, there was a kindly old man who every year made fudge. Despite the 70s panic about tampered Halloween candy—as a kid I assumed the paranoia was mostly phoney; I've since learned it was justified)—we went to his house first each year. We were no fools: Homemade fudge beats the possibility of the dreaded Clark Bar anytime. To this day, I remember that man with immense fondness, though he has certainly long since passed.

"Aarrrghhh!" I'd yell as each Candy Giver came to the door. I'd then stand before some bemused businessman or housewife, scrunching my entire body to show off all 75 pounds of sinewy "muscle"—two greenish balled-up fists bobbing in front of me from the strain of my Hulk-like pose. Aargghh! If they were really nice, and most were in our extraordinarily friendly neighborhood, they would feign terror before dropping some cocoa-and-corn-syrup pancreas-busting confection into my bag.

Me circa. Halloween, 1978.

My fascination with the Incredible Hulk was, in retrospect, a transparent fantasy of growing beyond boyish limits. Some part of me is probably still waiting to outgrow those limits—perhaps the biggest shock of adult life was how childish it still feels—but I'm not sure how I'd feel about trying to get green Noxema out of my chest hair.

Sesame Street Gets Paved Over

2009-08-04T21:05:00.008-04:00

By Jimmy J. Pack Jr., editor of wordmagonline.com

In 1969, after Minister Fred Rogers, host of a local kids’ TV show in Pittsburgh, PA, went to congress to explain to 435 morons elected by the moron electorate why it would behoove the nation for the federal government to invest money in a government-run educational television network, Sesame Street went on the air. The original idea was to create a children’s television show that not only entertained but taught children lessons both of the moral and intellectual kind.

The ideas behind the show were ingenious for the time. Make sure no skits lasted more than 3 minutes. Involve a series of moving images that involved live-action as well as animation. As a matter of fact, The Muppets, who made their national debut (and are now, sadly, slaves to the Disney Corp.) on Sesame Street, were originally only supposed to exist within their own skits, but were later incorporated on Sesame Street with the neighbors.

The Neighborhood of Sesame Street was supposed to be lower-middle class neighborhood you’d see in any major American metropolis. Ok, so a lot of the characters were stereotypes — Mr. Hooper the Jewish shop-keep, David the Jive-talkin’ store help, and Bob, the slightly effeminate single guy who…well, let’s say never got married — but all the character went beyond their stereotypes and were never defined by them (especially Susan and Gordon, a middle-class hard-working black couple who eventually adopt a child in the 1990s).

The 1970s were the Golden Years of the series. What we have now is a shell-of-an-idea that has deteriorated to little less than a big steaming pile of Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s shit. As a matter of fact, if there was any justice, one might find one of Elmo’s legs sticking out of one of those piles.

The 1970’s possessed the true spirit of the show. Viewers got the sense that the people creating it really knew their audience. For instance, for years, as a child, I remember Big Bird trying to introduce his reddish-brown wooly mammoth pal Mr. Snuffleupagus to his neighbors on Sesame Street, but for some reason Snuffy seemed to disappear before anyone could see him.

The residents of Sesame Street thought Big Bird had an imaginary friend, and for years Big Bird struggled trying to convince his neighbors that his giant cabbage-eating pal was real. It was one of the longest running jokes on TV. The tension lasted far longer than the romance of J.R. and Sue Ellen.

Come 1985 when the PhDs, most of whom never really taught inner-city kids (nor even took a second to think that not all kids, no matter who they were, learned the same way), decided that everyone would believe Big Bird because they didn’t want to send kids the message that parents didn’t believe what they said. Particularly if children were being abused. But let’s face it — most parents don’t believe half the things their kids tell them.

“Mommy, there’s a monster under the bed.”

“Mommy, Anwar Sadat is licking my feet.”

“Mommy, they are going to renew Homes and Yo-Yo for a another season.”

As the 70s progressed, so many other Muppets and characters were scratched — Roosevelt Franklin, who was seen as a “negative cultural stereotype.” You know, he was black and rhymed… oh, and went to a bad school. Being black and going to a bad school… yeah, this is really far fetched. Because, here in Philly, all the schools a quality learning centers, particularly in areas predominantly black.

How about Don Music, the Muppet who would try to write songs and whenever he encountered writer’s block would slam his head on the piano. They got rid of him because his self-inflicting punishment was also seen as a bad influence.

Hell, I remember it took me years before I would walk by a piano without smashing my face on it.

And barely anyone remembers Sam the Super-Automated Robot, a large Muppet Robot with a pair of cymbals for a mouth who never got one single answer correct. He went the same way our beloved Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip Martians went — somewhere in the bottom of Oscar’s can. There’s even talk that Cookie Monster’s obsessive-compulsive behavior is a negative influence, unhelped by the fact that he ingests large quantities of such fattening foods.

Today, Sesame Street should probably be called The Elmo Show, and quite often Elmo won’t even be on Sesame Street, but on another street perpendicular to our beloved locale, and instead of being a grey, dirty street, it’s colorful with painted buildings and clean streets. You know, like in fairy tales.

If there were any justice, The Count would take Elmo and his sister, Zoe, into Time Square where lonely businessmen from Omaha can bugger them in an alleyway for $11 bucks. Eleven! Ah ah ah ah ah! That’s right. Tear the back of their felt throats with a diseased [EXPLETIVE DELETED - ed.] and then dump their bodies in a Rubbermaid trashcan.

There was a reality to Sesame Street in the 1970s that today’s Sesame Street completely lacks. Instead of growing out of what it used to be, Sesame Street competes with Barney and Dora the Whora.

Keep the 1970’s Sesame Street in your hearts, and never ask anyone how to get to Sesame Street. You can never go back there again.

70s Artifact #2: Topps Baseball Cards

2009-07-31T14:56:00.017-04:00

When I was a kid, baseball cards weren't merely collectors items—they represented an alternative system of currency for young boys.

Like the use of cigarettes in prison, they were tokens of agreed-upon value in environments—like Marzolff Elementary School and my back yard—where woefully little real money could be found.

Baseball cards were "fungible:" Easily substituted for tater tots or Twizzlers at suprisingly consistent values. An elaborate but uncodified system existed for the valuation of baseball cards that involved age of card, quality of the player, and team. As we lived in Pittsburgh, any player for the Pirates was automatically highly valued.

Most of my "liquid assets" were tied up in baseball cards. Packs could be purchased for a quarter at the grocery store or department store—a cheap way of buying my silence for 15 minutes or so. In the middle of cards was a stick of calcified bubble gum that literally broke into shards when you bit down on it.

If our boyish economy was built on baseball cards, our "means of production" was too often whining to our moms to buy us a pack of cards, an earnings strategy that tended to be frustrated by my mother's perverse stinginess and willfulness. Even then she was a radical rightwinger, advising me instead to "save my allowance."

Laughable.

At the time, my friends were building vast empires of cards they would show off to me when I'd visit their houses, which they usually kept very orderly separated by year and team in shoeboxes. I actually went through the effort of separating mine by team and year and sorting them alphabetically!

In fourth grade, bent on empire but stymied by my mother's bourgeois attitudes, I decided to make my fortune another way: By gambling. There were two forms of baseball gambling, Knocksies and Flipsies.

In Flipsies, two players faced off, the first player dropping a card from chin-height. The card would fall to the floor, gently fluttering as it flipped side to side. The second player would then drop his card, hoping to match heads on heads or tails on tails. If successful, he earned the right to take both cards. If not, the first player claimed the cards.

Knocksies, on the other hand, was more action-oriented. I favored it. Each player lined an equal number of cards against the wall (the number of cards often a matter of testy argument.) Each player would then flick a card with their wrist at the cards, one at a time, claiming all the cards each player knocked down.

Through skill, determination, and luck, I was eventually able to amass a respectable fortune of over 15,000 cards! It helped that in the 80s my newly pinko mother began buying me sets for the entire year for my birthday.

When I moved out of the house, the cards were neatly stacked in the corner of my parent's garage. You can imagine my pain when, years later, when I was living in Oregon, my mother casually mentioned during a phone call that they had had a minor flood.

"Your cards all got ruined," she said, a bit apologetically. At the time, I was posing as a guy who didn't care about, you know, things, man. Still I'm sure the halt in my voice was unmistakeable before saying, "Guess I shouldn't have left them on the floor."

In truth, despite my stoic pose, vast holdings of nostalgia had suddenly gone up in thin air— a devastating ~~bull~~ bear market on memory that left me feeling impoverished for days.

70s Superlatives: Crap Music Edition

2009-07-30T23:21:00.011-04:00

Insipid crap, virtuostic crap, literate singer-songwriter crap, safety-pin-through-the-nose crap, mellow crap, glam crap, booty-shaking crap: If nothing else, the 1970s represented a revolution in crap music.

Never before had crap music been taken so seriously before, with the predictable result that pop music experienced an unprecedented explosion of creativity— while "Einstein on the Beach," the decade's watershed opera, was nothing more than five hours of music seemingly designed to make people go insane.

(Stick with the video to the six minute mark, when the composer, Philip Glass, thrillingly breaks from single chord he had been playing over and over. The change has the cathartic effect you might experience when a leaky faucet that had been keeping you up gets fixed.)

The following songs are neither the best, nor worst, nor even remotely representive of anything in particular. They're just the lucky songs that happened to pop into my head tonight:

Song that Puts Me In the Most Enchanting Clinical Depression

I have this feeling that at some especially evocative but forgotten moment during my early childhood—perhaps when some ineffably delicate fading sunset pitched just right through a late summer sky—Gilbert O'Sullivan's schlock-rock masterpiece was playing on an old transistor radio in the background. For a song I supposedly first heard in 1991, it seems to hold a lot of power over me.

Alternatively, it's also possible I'm just a big sap.

Either way, pass me the whisky and tissues.

Song that Convinces me that I am Loaded with Rhythm—In my Mind

When the dude in this video comes out and starts pop locking, doing some crazy, slightly spasmodic I'm-drinking-a-soda mime routine— what the hell does that have to do with a rollercoaster?— I know I could do that! I am sitting here at my computer, visualizing every movement, beads of sweat forming on my brow from the sheer mental exertion. Never mind that I have to get loaded at wedding receptions before I'm willing to dance (i.e. stumble) to "Love Shack."

What I remember about the Ohio Players is that my cousin Charise owned one of their albums (their album covers were noted for their stupidly sleazy artwork), my brother upbraiding her for her bad taste. The Ohio Players, after all, lacked the nuance and richness of the KISS albums he adored.

Most Confrontational Song by the 70s' Smartest Songwriter

Say what you will about 70s culture, but find me a popular songwriter working today with the intellectual firepower to explore the philosophical question of theodicy: Why is God such a jerk? Call this song morose and gloomy—and it is—but it's a far cry more sophisticated than today's crap music that tends to explore such questions as: "How did I end up naked again?"

Bonus Crap: Three Songs I Realized Were Filthy Only in Retrospect

Land of the Lost (and why kids don't need drugs)

2009-07-29T14:31:00.009-04:00

Yesterday I received an early birthday present from the little lady: The complete series of Land of the Lost on DVD!

This devious little gift all but guarantees I will be spending a good portion of my weekend "lost" in the "land" of my own pathetic nostalgia— at least during those spare moments when I'm not busy moving my entire life to Washington, DC.

Land of the Lost was one of those uber-cheap Sid & Marty Krofft children's shows in the 70s that look like they were made in some guy's basement during a three day peyote binge. At the time, of course, I had no idea they were so cheaply made. Every part of me wanted to believe that these painted-foam rocks and clumsily rendered clay dinosaurs were real. Cartoons like Land of the Lost offered adventure, tapping into the basic wanderlust that children have for imaginary worlds.

Nor were the overt psychedelic overtones obvious to me. Maybe it was a sign of how pervasive the "counterculture" drug culture had become that it began influencing children's programming and McDonald's commercials. (Good God! What were they putting in those Happy Meals back then?)

Sid & Marty Krofft probably reached their trippy zenith during their run of H.R. Pufnstuf. With its promise of taking magical trips, the show's intro was essentially an advertisement for getting high:

It is only through the perspective of less innocent eyes, however, that I can correctly understand the lyrics. "Can't do a little 'cause you can't do enough?" Did Keith Richards help them write this song? One clue to interpreting the lyrics is the simple fact that you can't even say the name of the cartoon without uttering the phrase "puffing stuff." How the generation of kids growing up during these 70s even learned to their shoes is beyond me.

A few years back, the HBO comedy show Mr. Show ran a brilliant parody of Sid and Marty Krofft:

Sadly, this sketch pretty much nailed it!

And yet I look forward with childish glee to watching these videos. The truth is that the Sid & Marty Krofft cartoons evoke in me the most wholesome feelings of nostalgia imaginable— their string of perverse drug references doing nothing more than bringing me back to a time when I was innocent (and before I discovered that little else in this world was.)

The fact is that most of my memories from childhood have a slightly hallucinatory cast, probably because there's something naturally psychedelic about being a child. Children simply haven't carried around their consciousness long enough to become invested in the world as it is, and part of the allure of childhood is a willingness to find colorful new worlds beneath the fussy and obstinate forms of daily reality.

It is only adults who learn to habitualize their sobriety and need the crutch of drugs to temporarily escape it. For children, the world has a naturally kaleidoscopic glow that makes the notion of "getting high" essentially redundant.

Tom, circa 1974

2009-07-27T19:13:00.012-04:00

Man, the 70s are out of sight. It's the goddamn Space Age. Can you believe that shit? Even our orange juice now is sci-fi now. How funky is that?

My brother just came back from Vietnam and he says America will never try to bomb its way to peace again. Says we learned our lesson. Can you dig that? I hope he's right. Time to give peace a chance.

When he got back, he bought a used car, '69 Camarro. Sometimes we tool it around town. It's totally sweet. When he gets home from work we drive it down the strip. All the stone cold foxes down there turn their head as we drive by. They don't mean to, but he always catches them looking in the rear view mirror. My brother could have a thousand girls at the snap of a finger.

Sometimes he gets restless and drives around town at night. Says it helps "him find his center." Dad tells me not to worry about it. Says he's a man now. Says he has a lot to think about.

Sometimes he gets a little heavy and doesn't want to talk. When I ask him what's the matter he says it's nothing. Says he's just been trying meditation to get grounded. Dad hates when he talks about that stuff. But since he's come back, Dad doesn't ride him like he used to. They don't seem to have much to say anymore, but I think they seem to have an understanding.

He's been working with the old man at the office, helping do books. Looks totally pinkpolo'd in his slick tie and nicely pressed shirt. I'm proud of him. He says everything is going to better now that the war is over. Says we're going to have peace. Not only overseas but inside.

He's been taking classes in T'ai chi and been on a health kick. Spent a whole day eating nothing but carrot juice. Been seeing this girl in Southington who makes her own yogurt. I think he likes her. I like her too. She's really nice.

He says things can only get better from here. The war is over, man has walked on the moon, and Nixon is on his way out. Soon, he says, Americans will discover the true last frontier: Themselves. A revolution is upon us. We are right on the cusp of a new day. And my big brother has never been wrong. If he says it, it's true.

A new world, a new way. Can you dig it? I know I can.

I don't know about you, but I think it's outta sight. Completely out of sight.

Keep America Beautiful

2009-07-27T10:31:00.002-04:00

There has been only one commercial my entire life that brought me to the edge of genuine tears— the Keep America Beautiful public service announcements from the early 1970s. I remember watching this as a kid and feeling waves of guilt and a fierce determination to never, ever litter. (It helped that my mother would have backhanded me into next week if she ever caught me littering.)

In 1979, this awareness led a group of us neighborhood boys forming our tough little suburban, pre-teen gang, "The Sunshine Boys." The Sunshine boys were a "positive" gang committed to cleaning up litter. We met in an old pigeon coop on the edge of our property my Dad turned into storage.

Let me just say that times were different then.

Advice from Uncle Carl about women, 1977

2009-07-26T20:54:00.015-04:00

Hey, kid. That's right, you. Come over here. Do me a favor— see that bucket of ice? Yeah? Well, bring it over to me.

Thanks kid.

You ever tasted whiskey? Oh, you haven't? Well, here take a sip.

Ha! Has a bite to it, don't it? This stuff will put hair and your chest. Here, take a swig of water. That'll wash it down.

Tell me, kid. Your Mom still upstairs squawking with my old lady? Squawk, squawk, squawk. What are they talking about—how bad their husbands are? Yeah, I thought so. That's why I stay down here. I'd rather listen to the static on the shortwave radio than listen to the static in the kitchen.

These broads will drive you crazy if you let 'em. I don't let 'em. I spend most of my time down here in the garage alone here with my friend Jack. That's Mr. Daniels to you, son.

Kid, by the way, don't tell your mother I let you taste whisky, OK? Capiche? Good, good.

Billy, when you get a little bit older, you're going to want to meet a lot of girls. And that's ok, son. Have some fun while you can. I married your Aunt Nancy when I was 19. Got hitched a church in San Diego that had a neon sign. Place call the Four Square Church. Got hitched and went right into the Navy. Too young.

She was my brother's sister. We met while he was courting her. What are the odds that man is going to fall for the sister of his brother's girl? Not as bad as you'd think.

Son, believe it or not, broads are like janitors. They carry with them a lot of keys but for some reason they never seem to have to key to every door. There's always one room or another they can't open. This is just a fact of life. And there's nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it at all.

Kid, you're going to meet a lot of women in your life. Make sure you sow some wild oats. But after you've broken a few hearts, just pick one. Don't be in a hurry and don't wait too long. Just pick one and be done with it. At some level, they're all the same.

Son, I bet your Mom is wondering where you went to. Come here. Take another swig of water. Make sure she can't smell that whisky on your breath.

And kid— do me a favor? Please shut the door on your way out.

Chewbacca looks back: Part 1

2009-07-26T16:21:00.009-04:00

Featuring guest blogger Chewbacca

The 70s were out of sight. When Star Wars exploded, it was like I was sitting in the Millennium Falcon as it blasted into hyperdrive. One minute I’m just another struggling actor serving fat slobs fried hash and pancakes at an IHOP in Van Nuys. The next moment—WHOOSH!— I’m moving so goddamn fast the whole universe turns into a freakin’ blur.

Dude, I won’t lie to you: the “blur” started a few years before Star Wars. Kashyyyk was certainly a nice enough planet to grow up on— about as comforting and stifling as a womb—but if I ever see another freakin’ Wroshyr tree I think I’m going to puke.

Even a few light years away, I knew that fantastic sun-drenched, Bikini-drenched, dope-drenched L.A. was where it was at. In the 70s’, L.A. was cosmically famous.

I landed in L.A. in 1974 and found myself living in a pink stucco house up in Laurel Canyon. Lived with a bunch of wanna-be actors and musicians, who spent most of their time getting treated for crabs and staying up all drinking tequila and snorting some of Central America’s finest hand-crafted exports. Like I said, “WHOOSH!”

I absolutely loved living in Laurel Canyon. Down the street, Joni Mitchell owned a gigantic furry dog—it looked a bit like the The Shaggy DA— and she used ask me to walk him when she was out of town. Frank Zappa would laugh when we passed his house—he lived in a log cabin that had once been owned by silent movie star Tom Mix. Staring first at the dog’s shaggy face and then at mine, he’d yell: “Hey, Chewie, are you taking your brother for a walk?”

At that moment, Laurel Canyon felt like it was at the intersection of all of the creative vibes in the cosmos. (That’s right, I just said the word “vibes” and “cosmos.” Back then we actually used groovy words like that. WHOOSH!)

Unlike my roommates, I didn’t come L.A. to get famous. My roommate Randy did. Back then if the adjectives “chiseled” and “good looks” ever came even remotely within proximity of your name, you moved to L.A. It was practically the law. In Randy’s case, it was as if the state of Rhode Island collectively said, “Randy, you’re just too darn good-looking to live here so we all chipped in to buy you this bus ticket to California.”

When I met him, Randy was a struggling actor with a predilection for seducing rich middle-aged women at the Polo Lounge. Class act, that guy. Last I heard he was selling real estate in Escondido.

Before I get into how I got the part of Star Wars, I just want to say that LSD was never my drug of choice. Weed and blow seemed more “natural,” to me—as if you could buy it in bulk at the health food store. Acid seemed a little harsh and industrial to me. My coworker at IHOP, another struggling actor, had an insider's Hollywood euphemism for LSD: "Special effects." To me it was like fiddling with your concsiousness with a pneumatic drill.

The night before my audition, however, I was given two tabs of acid by a coworker at IHOP. I was facing three days off work and was already restless. So on the day of the Star Wars audition, I had dropped the two tabs and sat on the sofa in the living room trying to figure out the chord changes to “Moonshadow” on the guitar, waiting for it to kick in.

Randy would get up around noon, invariably hung over, light up a joint, and read through casting calls on a hammock we put up in the living room. On this day, August 5th, 1975, Randy yelled to me. “Check this out, man. This is far out!”

I wasn’t quite at WHOOSH, but the edges of shapes were starting to take on a certain wavy iridescence.

Randy continued. “Listen to this casting call: ‘Hairy male Wookiee for supporting role in sci-fi film. Minimum 8 foot tall. Must be shaggy and must have piercing yelp’.” He attempted to jolt upright, swinging awkwardly in the hammock, the bogarted joint dangling from his lip. “Dude, the audition is today at 2:00pm!” I looked at my wristwatch, which was starting to warp and drift in and out of my field of view.

“Um, Randy. That sounds cool and all, but I don’t think an audition is a good idea. For one thing, I’m not in the Screen Actor’s Union…”

“Who gives a sh—

“And I just dropped two hits of acid.”

“Oh,” he said. "Oh, right."

But after reflecting for a moment, he said: “But who cares about that? This could change your entire life! Let’s go!”

To be continued...

A terrifying past: Apache

2009-07-21T22:16:00.008-04:00

“The past is a different country,” said LP Hartley. “They do things differently there.”

If this is true, what can we say about the Nation of 1973?

Judging by some shocking documentary evidence I recently uncovered, I would say that 1973 was a terrifying land of rhythmless dorks who enjoyed dressing up like Indians and plastering insanely cheerful smiles on their faces:

I have a cousin Chip who smiles like this. He had a bad habit of falling on his head, usually by falling off the backs of pickup trucks—or peddling bikes with no brakes down steep hills. (The later happened during a visit to our house in Pittsburgh. All I remember is my brother telling him he was putting his life in danger by riding this bike down this hill—followed by his dramatic helicopter lift to the hospital.)

Was 1973 a nation populated by cousin Chips? The evidence is strong, except I doubt Chip could have pulled off having a trio of sexy “Apache” girls doing what appears to be traditional Native American dances around him.

I ended up looking this song up, by the way, because I heard a version of it in Starbucks— and recognized that it had been sampled a million times. (Most notably by the Sugarhill Gang’s “Jump On It.") I then read on wikipedia that the tune is considered “hip hop’s national anthem.”

If you want a change of pace, however, this tune offers a glimpse of a truly evocative nation of the past— a country I could live in for a thousand years.

70s artifact #1: Wild Country cologne

2009-07-20T15:05:00.007-04:00

At some point in the late 1970s, I was given a bottle of Wild Country cologne (or as my father put it, some “smell-pretty”) for my birthday.

Wild Country was made by the then-ubiquitous Avon Corporation, which employed armies of women in the 70s who went door-to-door selling cheaply made beauty products. No doubt my mother killed two birds with one stone by adding this portion of my birthday gift to her normal order.

Slipping the bottle out of its box, I was amazed to discover it was made in the shape of a wild turkey. At the time, I was only interested in gifts that took batteries, but I remember thinking there was something decidedly grownup and cosmopolitan about a cologne bottle shaped like a wild animal! I reasoned that this was certainly a product only a technologically advanced culture could fabricate.

I twisted the turkey head off and doused a little bit of it on my finger. My sister advised me to put a splash on my “pulse points” on my wrist and neck. It smelled like something that could keep mosquitoes away— a deeply artificial scent that could have only been hatched by bald chemists in football field-sized laboratories, perhaps by the same guys who invented Agent Orange. In a pinch, my Dad could have probably run the lawn mower on the stuff.

I never ever let the stuff touch my skin again— it truly did remind me of bitterly scented paint thinner—but for years it sat on my headboard next to my buck knife: A testament to an idea of adult masculinity that never really took hold.

Leisure Suit Larry

2009-07-20T09:36:00.005-04:00

In the 1980s there was a line of video games centered on a character named Leisure Suit Larry, a balding, 40-something loser clad entirely head-to-toe with synthetic fibers.

The Leisure Suit Larry games represented a noble departure from the typical shoot ‘em up fare of most video games, which tended to require no more creativity than blasting pixilated aliens to smithereens. These games, on the other hand, offered a challenge infinitely more complex: Using his (and I mean “his”) creativity, the player negotiated Larry through a world of beautiful women armed with frustratingly good taste.

I’d argue that video games work, in part, as metaphors for the, uh, romantic ambitions of certain types of adolescent boy—a way of directing the excess drive bestowed upon pathetic teenage boys towards something more tractable than live female girls. It was encouraging that, with his bald spot and cheesy manner, Larry was the one creature in the universe less likely than a gawky teen boy to find romantic bliss.

(Ironically, I became familiar with the game while watching John, my sister’s future husband—and future ex-husband—play it for hour on end. It seemed to set the stage for him to become twenty years later a balding, 40-something loser on the prowl.)

As a grown man, I can’t help but think with utter amusement (and contempt) about the Leisure Suit Larry archetype, a relic from the Disco-and-sexual-liberation-movement 1970s utterly adrift in our more judicious times.

Like many horrible cultural trends of the 70s, the leisure suit phenomenon was a reminder that freedom isn’t free—but can be ridiculously cheap. As the anarchist tendencies of the late 60s counterculture morphed into a corporate repackaging of the ideal of liberation, it became easy in the 70s to “do your own thing” at an entirely hedonistic level.

The Leisure Suit phenomenon was what happens when the idea of “liberation” detaches from the idea of political awareness: In the end, you’re left with a bunch of synthetic fibers and gold chains—and a boundless, unsatisfiable libido.

Happy anniversary, crisis of confidence!

2009-07-15T11:08:00.000-04:00

This morning as I received my daily indoctrination from the Berkeley Politburo--dailykos.com-- I read a post reminding me that today is the 30th anniversary of one of the weirdest political speeches in American history: Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence speech."

The speech was an attempt to find spiritual causes to the nation's woes--the gas lines, inflation, the legions of shaggy-haired, stoned kids-- almost like a therapist would try to help cure your drinking problem by getting to the cause of your low self-esteem.

Now I am hardly a student of rhetoric, but off hand I can think of a couple obvious American political speechmaking no-nos:

(1) Do not imply the American people suck. Americans are the greatest and most decent and most hard-working people in the world! We are in no way complacent and lazy. Our problems are never the result of our values; our values are always the solution to the problem.

(2) Never admit you don't have a clue. Carter spent ten days in the wilderness of Camp David asking regular folks what he should do to fix the country. I don't know about you, but I am really too lazy and complacent to think about this stuff. Just make everything better.

(3) Do not appear to genuinely think. As president, you are a prophet armed with solutions of Biblical simplicity. Little pensées about the national spirit are vaguely French and offputting.

(4) Give Americans simple solutions to complex problems. In the speech, Carter outlined a series of far-reaching reforms that would have forced Americans to give up their dependency on foreign oil. He should have just offered tax cuts.

(5) The word "sacrifice" is appealing; actual sacrifice isn't. Make sure that you do not in any way infringe on American's right to keep buying lots of stuff.

Many say this speech represented the "nail on the coffin" of the Carter Administration, opening the door for a politian, Ronald Reagan, who well knew the rules of American political rhetoric.

This historical moment represents the last time an American president has attempted anything like leveling with the American people. It discredited the whole notion that a leader can be thoughtful, leading to the New Sociopathy of the 80s.

One wonders how much bloodshed and financial ruin could have been avoided had the American people actually had been as decent as their leader.

The 70s: Victim of bad film stock

2009-07-14T09:46:00.000-04:00

I have a theory that memories of particular eras are seen through the filter of the prevailing film stock of the time. It is as if the memory loses track of what was observed first hand and what was recollected later with photographic help.

I suspect that my recollection of the last ten years will always maintain the flat, luminous quality of digital photography--a reality so upclose and shimmering it begins to seem unreal.

Memories of the 80s and 90s, on the other hand, have a fussy solidity that seems nervous and defensive. Every shape is stamped in heavily saturated hues, as if to say, "Everything is back to normal now, right?"

I even have ex post facto memories of the 50s and 60s, an inherited awareness of those years when my parents were younger than I am now, a hint of mischief in their eyes as they seek a measure of youthful joy in a world as stiff and rigid as crew cut.

But it is the bleary, kaleidoscopic images of the 70s--blurred and faded in shades of yellow and orange, as if they had been soaked in water--that I tend linger. It is their utter unreality, their sense of ghostliness, that creates a seemingly unbridgeable distance to my childhood.

The truth is that what I now know about the time in which I grew up--a decade of exhaustion, decadence, and malaise--fails to match up with what I personally remember. Had I known then that it was a worthless time, perhaps I would have spent less time wandering around in blissful ignorance.

Beyond the carnivalesque swirl of my childhood memories were cultural currents that were frightening, electrifying, and ultimately unsustainable. This blog is an attempt to fill in the gaps of those faded memories--to make sense of a time that feels impossibly insubstantial 30 years down the road.