As a teenager I read several books by Alexander King, and they were a huge influence on my tender psyche. His memoirs formed my concept of what an artist is, and made me decide to grow up to be one. Sure, he was a heroin addict. But he was also the first one to confirm every one of the sneaking suspicions about the world which had been developing in my subconscious. And I wanted to make for myself a life that I could look back on with as much pleasure as King looked back on his.

It’s possible that Acid Heroes could have pretty much the same effect, and ruin a whole new generation of kids. Ruin them, that is, for the purposes of the military-industrial-religious-educational complex.

It’s okay to laugh ruefully at your old hippie self from the pinnacle of middle age, but to totally renounce that earlier, crazier self, as so many have done, is despicable. Ace Backwords has neatly avoided this possibility by remaining crazy, and also by pouring out for our delectation the results of years of psychedelically abetted thought processes.

Ace has been a fixture of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue scene for yonks. He used to publish Twisted Image, one of the zine era’s most widely-circulated publications. Cartoonist, musician, and writer, his mission has been to collect and present the art and music of street people. He’s published two other books, Twisted Image and Surviving on the Streets, both from the late lamented Loompanics Unlimited.

Acid Heroes is a druggy book with an anti-drug message; a detailed analysis of the downside of the counterculture which went on to become, in many negative ways, the culture. More than a memoir, it’s almost like being there – too much for comfort, maybe.

Geniuses, who often violate the rules of established society, certainly come to suffer for these deviations in various cruel ways but they are, at least, sustained in their travails by the glory of their brilliant accomplishments.
Alexander King

The Acid Heroes Buy It Page

Acid Heroes on YouTube

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Free-lance archaeologist Elena in the field

For so many reasons, this gets my vote for all-round greatest website. Virtually join Elena’s motorcycle tours of Chernobyl, old battlefields, and other unbeauty spots. She also writes, for instance, a series of reminiscences from Gulag survivors. Oh, please just go there. You must discover Elena’s world for yourself.

First, I got to thank all who support my “Ghost Town” story. Inspite of all dirt that our officials pouring, story is still on and keep showing people the tragedy of Chernobyl. click here for entering a “Ghost Town”, you will see Chernobyl with my eyes.

BIKERS’ PAGE

kawasaki big ninja, ZZR-1100 (ZX-11) is also known as “big Zed” or “eleven”.

Kidd of Speed, one of the Russians my government tried to teach me to hate.

This days people forget their history, ask anyone in downtown where is bunkers, they don’t have no idea what is bunkers. They can only show pubs and I can show both bunkers and pub.

Recalling his time at McGill University ” I yearned to live a semi-bohemian lifestyle, an unstructured life; but a consecrated one; some kind of calling.“
in an interview

Do not be a magician, be magic.
Beautiful Losers

“I had the title Poet, and maybe I was one for a while.“
in an interview

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
and he said to me, “Don’t ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman by her darkened door
she cried out to me, “Why not ask for more?”
“Bird on a Wire”

“We all thought that we were immortal…We did have this mythological sense of our own lives.”
in an interview

You told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you’d make an exception.
“Chelsea Hotel #3″

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
“Anthem”

Many stones were rolled but God would not lie down
Beautiful Losers, and Buffy Sainte Marie recorded this long passage as a song, “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot”

Magic loves the hungry.
Beautiful Losers

He talks about the song “Traitor” and
“...the feeling that we have of betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill, and being unable to fulfill it, and then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it, and that the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself.”
in an interview

If I have been unkind
I hope that you will let it go by
And if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you
“Bird on a Wire”

“It was in the realm of things that couldn’t be disputed or rejected or even judged.”
about his father’s death

“Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.”
in an interview

and even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah
“Hallelujah”

RELATED:
Leonard Cohen at Red Rocks 2009
Suzanne Vaillancourt

It’s often been said (especially by me) that the only people worth paying attention to are science fiction writers, and stand-up comics – such as George Carlin, for instance. He’s right up there with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, in the ranks of the funny gods.

What does it take to be a stand-up comic? How do they get that way? It’s tempting to generalize, e.g. “The formula for humor is a wounded childhood plus, later, a lot of cannabis.” Being left-handed may help: Franklyn Ajaye says that 60 percent of comedians are, as compared to only ten percent of the general population. I don’t know if Carlin was left-handed, though he did take the trouble to learn that someone had registered a patent for a left-handed cheese straightener, a term which went on to join the muffler bearing as one of America’s favorite non-existent items.

One reason people become comics may be a childhood based on “We’re not here to have a good time.” This kind of kid might grow up with a strong resolve to spend a lifetime proving otherwise. I don’t know if this was the case with Carlin, but doubtless the biography is out there somewhere.

A comic has the ability to pinpoint the aspects of experience that are most nearly universal. The banal and uninspired will do this by dragging out the same old mother-in-law jokes; the genius will do it more subtly. In one of Carlin’s routines he recounts a favorite line of his mother’s – “If Billy jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?” Where I grew up the expression was, “If Didi jumped over the Falls…” But the final result was the same: firm parental reaction to peer group pressure. Universality of experience is taken to its limits by Carlin, who includes stomach noises, nose picking and farts in his subject matter. “Anything that we all do and we never talk about is funny,” he once said.

What it takes to be a great comic is a long-range, finely tuned bullshit detector, and you can tell when somebody has one. Here’s a typical Carlin observation: “Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”

Carlin admits that he wants to give the audience a “mental hotfoot.” It’s kind of like the Zen approach, where a whack with a stick sometimes boosts the novice to enlightenment.

There’s a very sexual aspect to stand-up comedy, which has nothing to do with the content of the material. Simply expressed, making someone laugh is like giving a john a blowjob. The performer acts upon a passive, usually willing, audience, and elicits an explosive physical reaction. (And gets paid for it.)

As the news of Carlin’s death sinks in, a cluster of funny little synchronicities come to mind. Just a few days ago I posted a collection of “the hippest things anyone ever said about politics,” and quoted one of his sayings: “Politics is so corrupt even the dishonest people get fucked.”

Also, on the VirtualVenice.info website (that’s the California Venice, not the Italy one), a woman wrote in to say she used to live in an old house owned by Carlin, who had rented it to the Canaligators, who in turn sublet it to her. Did Carlin ever actually occupy that Venice house? I don’t know, but he wrote the introduction for Paul Krassner’s book, Murder at the Conspiracy Convention and Other American Absurdities. Krassner was of course a long-time Venice resident, so it’s not impossible that the two met in the city that’s been called the world’s largest outdoor lunatic asylum.

There’s another Venice connection. The bio of media ecologist and meta-entrepreneur Gerry Fialka notes that he once worked for Carlin. Fialka also used to work for Filmex, and for Frank Zappa, making his CV one of the more interesting ones on the block. He went on to found the PXL This Film Festival; the Marshall McLuhan-Finnegans Wake Reading Club; the 7 Dudley Cinema Series; and the Documental series, which is recognized as the “pre-eminent documentary and experimental film showcase” of Los Angeles, and that’s saying something. It just goes to show, people who really know what they’re doing tend to hang out together.

Much comedy involves taking language literally. Laurel asks, “May I have part of that banana?” and Hardy hands him the peel. When invited to get on the plane, George Carlin says, “Fuck you, I’m getting in.” Of course English is the world’s best language for this kind of comedy, since it has much ambiguity in the form of words that sound like other words, or have multiple meanings, or whatever.

Not “getting” puns indicates the inability to entertain two concepts simultaneously. In fact, much humor originates in the clashing dichotomy. When asked for the formula he uses to think up a joke, Carlin once said, “Seeing the incongruity in things has a lot to do with it. You take two things that are not normal and not related to each other.” That doesn’t automatically make a joke, he cautioned, but it’s a start.

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the artist as a person who can hold two contradictory ideas and still function. The comic artist can throw a spotlight on the contradictory ideas we hold, and open the door to deeper understanding.

George Carlin was all about the Sixties holy trinity: sex and drugs and rock’n'roll. Here’s sex: “If God had intended us not to masturbate, he would have made our arms shorter.”

In the 1990s he narrated many episodes of the “Thomas the Tank Engine” TV series. This came up when Melanie Martinez was fired from a children’s TV show, because she had appeared in some satirical short films making fun of things which, according to her network, shouldn’t be made fun of. Not only that, the network went back and excised Martinez from all the previous shows, so she will not be appearing in “encore performances.”

Blogger Edward Champion mentioned that firing, and started a discussion that included many mentions of the fact that George Carlin, revealer of the 7 dirty words not allowed on network TV, is one of the voices of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Tony Hendra once explained the National Lampoon humor standard: “…it had to be about something that mattered, a funny statement on a vital issue, a small but painful bullet in the posterior of an odious power structure. Most important – something that might make the powerless laugh at what they weren’t supposed to.” Exactly.

“Humor is what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh.” The poet Langston Hughes said that, and he also said, “Humor is your unconscious therapy.”

One of George Carlin’s old stand-up routines includes a bit where he explains his job, which is thinking up goofy shit. We, the audience, are too busy all week to do it ourselves; we’re on the run, making a living and taking the kids to soccer practice. So he thinks up the goofy shit and reports back to us on the weekend. But Carlin did more than that, just like Bruce and Pryor and my new comedy hero, Craig Ferguson. What these guys do is, they teach us to see the goofy shit, too. They help open up little windows in our minds.

Kingsley Amis once said, “The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them.” The two things work together. Being sane helps us see what’s funny, and seeing what’s funny helps to keep us sane. I’m pretty sure it was Carlin who came up with this idea for the working stiff: instead of calling in sick, call in well!

The job of a comedian is very important. There’s more to it than pointing out what’s ridiculous about the government and the other institutions that run our lives. He helps us see our own pretensions, superstitions, and other varieties of human foolishness; in other words, our own bullshit. It’s more fun and memorable than going to a psychiatrist, it’s cheaper, and probably works just as well. But it gets even better. Here’s what Tom Robbins says: “A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.”

Speaking of which, here’s a humorous observation:

“On your birthday people usually say ‘Happy Birthday,’ when actually the day of your birth was the birth of your suffering. But nobody says, ‘Happy Birth-of-Suffering Day!’”

Did George Carlin say that? No, the Dalai Lama did – but the line is pure Carlin.

The world was once astonished to learn of the seven types of ambiguity. Actually there are many more. That is where Craig Ferguson’s particular genius is found. He lays on the ambiguity like nobody’s business. This tendency is broadly self-satirized in the chain of “I’m just kidding…. no I’m not….. yes I am…” that can go to absurd lengths.

Ferguson shares his tales of a past littered with the residue of odd jobs (including punk rocker), problematic relationships with parents, authority figures, and women, and 15 years as a blackout drunk (including a weekend in a Glasgow jail). Then there’s the rehab experience, and the subsequent 7 years it took to pay off his debts. He recounts so many unlikely embarrassments, you don’t know which ones really happened or really happened quite that way, but fear the worst. Like, when he took the driving test at the advanced age of 27, he probably was really drunk.

Talking about fashion week in New York, he says he was a model once, and imagines people asking how he got into it. “I was a drunk at the time. Someone saw me throwing up and thought I was a model.” He invites the audience to celebrate with him the years of sobriety.

In this interview, when asked about the public’s reaction to Saving Grace, Ferguson says,

It interests me that you could be fine with someone drinking a large scotch and be concerned with someone smoking a big doobie. I don’t see the difference. I really don’t. I say that as someone who neither drinks scotch or smokes doobies, so it’s intriguing to me.

Quite a few monologues feature remarks about what lovely women his former wives are “for legal reasons;” in fact that little disclaimer “for legal reasons” shows up a lot. Then there’s the tease of whether Ferguson is really straight, gay, bi, or what. What does it mean that he wrote himself a movie role as a gay hairdresser? You just really never know exactly how much to believe. It’s even possible that Bob Barker actually is a vampire.

This is where things start to get all philosophical. When have we ever been entitled to expect truth from comedians? A monologue is a performance like any other – a fictional, exaggerated, dolled-up, piece of playacting. We don’t expect literal truth from Rodney Dangerfield or Phyllis Diller. But there’s something about Craig Ferguson that makes you want to believe in his truthfulness. You want to believe he’s leveling with you, all kidding aside. It’s a paradox, and a strange thing to wish for from a professional storyteller.

Here’s even more of a paradox: I often say the only people worth listening to are speculative fiction writers and standup comics. I’m kidding… I’m not. Very often, those who wield the most influence upon a culture don’t come at things head-on. They slip their ideas in sideways, en passant, coated with plot or humor or some other attractive component to make the medicine go down. Standup comics and speculative fiction writers have an important thing in common: they don’t preach to the choir. Given any political awareness at all, they have an enormous advantage as winners of hearts and minds. They’re not just talking to a few like-minded friends who have heard it all before. They deal directly with the masses whose hearts and minds count, if any change is ever to come about in a warped society. Because of their fantasy, because of their comedy, they have the ears of millions of ordinary people who willingly, voluntarily, eagerly listen to them. So we’d better hope they have something to say.

I like the story Ferguson tells about having his aura massaged, to the accompaniment of the predictable new-age patter. After the procedure, he wrote a check for $200 and the therapist suggested writing “chiropractic treatment” on the memo line, so his insurance would pay for it. He asked her, “Wouldn’t that mess with my aura?”

I also like that he flouts the “don’t laugh at your own jokes” rule – he cracks himself up on a regular basis. My only complaint is the schwa syndrome. For a brilliant, eloquent guy, Ferguson says “uh” too much.

The Late, Late Show has been called the best thing on television, and it just might be.

I think what happens is, when you get married to someone, you’re then related to them, and the only people who are into that are hillbillies and the royal family. Craig Ferguson

I collect ex-wives. There are two ex- Mrs. Fergusons and they’re very valuable because no more are being made. Craig Ferguson

Photo from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, April, 2008, courtesy of angela n. via this Creative Commons license.

RELATED:
All the monologues, etc.
Craig Ferguson Passed the Litness Test
Saving Grace (2000)
Craig Ferguson’s Dad
Humor Quotations

I don’t often pass along video links, partly because I don’t run across many things that really warrant excitement. But I just can’t resist recommending one recent discovery: Craig Ferguson’s monologue from January 30, 2006; the first one after his father died.

I send the link to a man who possesses not only an aging father, but a sense of humor he credits with keeping him sane. I think, this is a fit. He will get it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. My friend is totally unimpressed. Doesn’t find it funny. Thinks it’s tacky.

So I figure I’ll have another look at the thing. Maybe, carried on the wave of devout Ferguson-mania, I mistook pyrite for gold. Maybe it is crap.

Ferguson explains the concept of the wake, a custom found in many cultures. The survivors get loaded and tell stories and recall the most hilarious things about the life of the departed. They cry and laugh, and it’s all cathectic and cathartic, very healthy. I got no problem with humor in conjunction with a cherished person’s death.

He talks about his dad’s work ethic, and I love this line

Spirituality is not all about aromatherapy and scented candles.

He talks about his job at the post office, where “Big Scrubber” (his dad) was also the boss, and how the boss cured him of being late for work. He talks about watching TV with his dad, and a bunch of other things. My absolute favorite is the rehab story. And, with his dad old and sick, he talks about the last visit.

I can’t help thinking what a privilege it is, when you know it’s the last visit. That’s a good death. I can’t help thinking what it must be like, when thousands of people are cataloging your every move, and every nuance of expression, and flaming each other online, over the significance of those details. And what it must be like to have a contract where the show must go on. Even if it’s possible to take some time off, how much of it do you have to take, to indicate sufficient respect? And if you do the show, how do you treat this major event? If you just ignore the fact that your father died a couple days ago, a certain amount of hate mail will come in. I think Craig Ferguson did exactly the right thing, presenting the audience with the fact that one night would be for his dad, and then things would go back to normal.

Anyway, after another viewing, I still think this 15-minute monologue is powerful, moving, beautiful. It certainly defies the cliché that men can’t express feelings. I think it’s a classic human document. It should be on any recorded media sent into outer space, it should be buried in time capsules, it should be included in any anthology of things worthy of preservation, from the early part of the 21st century.

A good suit is the best way for a scoundrel to disguise himself. Every time I meet a bastard he’s wearing a suit. Craig Ferguson

MORE MONOLOGUES
(Everything is on the same magnificent page. You need to zero in on the date.)

masculinity and male bonding Sept 29, 2005
cars and traffic Nov 1, 2005
pirates Nov 7, 2005
bugs and monkeys Nov 30, 2005
cars and car show Jan 6, 2006
Paris Hilton Feb 6, 2006 July 12, 2006
animals Feb 23, 2006
Craig Ferguson’s birthday May 17, 2006
immigration Oct 26, 2006
fat kids, cannibals Feb 8 2007
stomach virus, prostitutes and politicians April 30, 2007
the judge’s pants drycleaner lawsuit May 2, 2007

RELATED:
Craig Ferguson Passed the Litness Test
Saving Grace (2000)
Craig Ferguson and All That
Humor Quotations

Photo courtesy of

andrijbulba via this Creative Commons license

I’m a one-person cult of Michael Ventura. One of the reasons I dig him is because of the people he digs, for example Robbie Robertson and Leonard Cohen and Eve Babitz. (Who is Eve Babitz, you may ask? See, that’s just it. Ventura knows.) And conversely, he is also dug by people I dig. For instance, Letters at 3 AM wears a cover blurb by Andrei Codrescu, who just happens to be one of my culture heroes.

Ventura is always quoting somebody interesting, like Thoreau who said, “You may do as you like, so long as it does not injure someone else.” (It’s hard to imagine two people with more different images than Thoreau and Aleister Crowley, but Crowley said, “An it harm no one, do what thou wilt.”) “The Witness Tree” is a powerful essay named after the Robertson song it discusses, which happens to also be one of my personal all-time top ten favorite songs in the entire world. I like Ventura because he talks about things that remind me of other books I’ve loved. His discussion of gambling recapitulates how it began as a shamanistic ritual that later became debased and corrupted, finishes up with unconventional conclusions, and calls to mind Bone Games, a very memorable book by Rob Schultheis.

Once in a while I have to disagree with Ventura. For instance, when considering the increased possibilities offered by the modern world for a relentlessly mobile lifestyle, I think he goes too far in saying the ability to move around is “a fact unique to contemporary life, and alien to every previous society.” There have always been nomads, troubadours, samurai, gypsies, cowboys, actors, and many other subcultures of people who refused to settle.

There is a lovely memoir of Stevie Ray Vaughn in here, and some quite important thoughts on topics familiar to such writers as Robert Bly and James Hillman, having to do with the true meaning of adolescence and the initiatory moment and what it takes to be a male in America these days. There is autobiographical material where we meet various disturbed members of the author’s family, and learn about their breakdowns and his own. We share his experiences and meet his friends on a cross-country road trip, and find out all about the real significance of oil.

Especially recommended are his reflections on the Vietnam memorial in Washington, titled “Standing at the Wall.” Not only is it a great piece of writing, but again I take it personally because the name of my first lover is on that wall. There’s so much in Ventura’s stuff to take personally, always. He comments on the wide open spaces and the relative importance of things in the West, “with its endless, beckoning vistas,” where he has driven “70 miles for a pizza, 500 for a party, 1,000 for a girl.” This got to me, since when I lived in Texas there was a fellow who more than once made the trip between Amarillo and San Antonio for a weekend with me. About something said by a concerned citizen on a radio call-in show Ventura remarks, “If I had the time or mental energy I’d try to differentiate between all the different kinds of ignorance needed to make that statement.” I sure know the feeling.

A major piece in this book is about one of America’s endless wars, and it explains how being against a war “doesn’t insulate you from its demonic properties.” We see how other dichotomies work hand-in-hand in an inexorable yin and yang configuration : police need criminals, social workers need dysfunctional families. Ventura points out the same diabolical symbiosis between peace activists and war. “As a protester you, like the soldier, are not quite yourself. You are yourself plus the war. If you lean too heavily on that role of protestor, when your movement has no more war to protest, you too will feel diminished, lost, less.”

Ventura observes that most Americans could not care less whether the Gulf War was right or wrong, worthy or ignominious After all, our own wonderful country was created with “tactics identical to Saddam’s lies, broken treaties, surprise attacks, atrocities, and the mass dislocation of former residents.” No, the morality of this particular war was not a concern of most Americans – the only issue was whether we pursued it successfully. “If we can’t be happy or good, perhaps we can be, in the street sense, ‘bad.’ This is not a feeling to be underestimated in a people hooked on violent entertainment, arrogant music, and the conflict of sports.”

Ventura quotes Kierkegaard and agrees with the idea that thought without paradox is as foolish as love without passion. Paradox is meat and drink to Ventura, and I greatly admire his ability to let his own ambivalence show. Writing about strip clubs, he gets down to the nitty gritty: “Are you going to go home and think of that naked dancer while you hold the woman you live with? Don’t imagine for a minute that your lover doesn’t know. Not in her mind, where she doesn’t want to know, but in her flesh, where she can’t help but know.” Yet this kind of ethereal emotional damage is, as he admits, a kind of harm that is difficult to prove, and harm that certainly shouldn’t be actionable at law. Speaking of an activist anti-pornography housewife who appeared on TV he says, “She was talking about how bad it was for husbands to stop into places like the Kitty Kat on their way home from work. That was the ‘crime’ she felt so righteous about quelling.” At times like this I feel justified in claiming Ventura as a fellow ‘mystical libertarian’ – someone who doesn’t want to pass legislation to try and make people act differently, but who wishes and hopes they would be better.

Most of the time, however, he appears to be a liberal who sees things like socialized medicine as good solutions. Ventura is the only writer under whose influence I have trouble holding to my libertarian principles. For instance, as a libertarian I feel that people should be able to do what they want to with their own property, including their business if they own one. In the unlikely event that I were ever in a position to hire someone to sharpen my pencils, I’d want them to do it to my satisfaction or forget about being paid. According to strict libertarian interpretation, the owner of a business should able to run it as she sees fit. But Ventura reminds me that without workers, there’s nothing. “I’m willing to take my lumps in a world in which little is certain, but I deserve a say. Not just some cosmetic ‘input,’ but significant power in good times or bad. A place at the table where decisions are made.” It’s hard to find a decent argument against that.

In another place Ventura quotes Article IX of the Constitution and reminds us, “Just because a right isn’t stated in the Constitution doesn’t mean you don’t have it,” something any libertarian can definitely agree with. Then there’s his essay about Las Vegas, the most libertarian place on earth, and one which was destined to come into existence because the Spanish Conquistadors intuitively knew it four hundred years before, as they searched for El Dorado, the “city of gold and light, incredible riches, eternal youth, exquisite pleasures – an intoxicating city of riches and dreams.”

As Ventura sees it, “that’s the promise of Las Vegas : Anything.” (Once again, we’re back to “An it harm no one, do what thou wilt.”) “If, in Puritan America, you dedicate a city to the pursuit of Anything, and you put that city far enough away from everywhere – then Puritans will find a way across one of the most dangerous deserts in the world just to rub shoulders with Anything without ruining their safe lives.”

Ventura is against the concept of safe lives on principle. He is a devotee of wildness and chance, a unique brand of rowdy mysticism. “I have a passion for Anything and would love to write a piece saying the more Anything the better, because it’s what I feel in my bones. But the statistics on teen suicide say my bones may be bad wrong.” His ambivalence shows through again in another essay which approaches Anything from another angle, as a very large problem, in fact. He is forced to realize and to admit that Capital-A Anything is not only what keeps people sane but what drives people crazy. “Our everyday world is one of dreamlike instantaneous changes, unpredictable metamorphoses, random violence, archetypal sex and a threatening sense of multiple meaning.” We aren’t constructed to go that fast and handle that much contradictory input. “For a quarter of a million years we experienced this only in sleep, or in art, or in carefully structured religious rituals.”

Much of Letters at 3 AM is about our current Age of Endarkenment. “The world is aflood with dark psychic fluid.” Ventura maintains, and “everything’s stained with it.”

One piece is entitled “You, in Particular, Are Going to Die – No Matter What You Eat, How You Exercise, or How Much Money You Have.” It’s about the pervasive sickness of everybody in what ought to be the healthiest country in the world during this or any other era. He points out (in regard to Vietnam) “in ten years of a shooting war, fewer Americans got shot dead than during ten years of ‘peace’ in their own country.” He takes on the boogieman of the moment and wonders whether Illegal Drugs really are the awfulest threat there is. “Either one of these figures,(365,000 tobacco casualties, 125,000 prescription-drug mistakes), much less the two figures combined, describes many, many more than the total number of people killed by heroin, crack, coke, PCP, handguns and AIDS yearly.”

The crime inherent in illicit drug use is not, as the government claims, the health hazard, the fatalities, or the “cost to society” but the fact that people are altering their consciousness without asking permission and in ways that they themselves choose. That’s something our government is not willing to let us do. Alteration of the mind is criminal – unless, of course, it is done by the government.

A woman I know with a large house keeps little nests of supplies – tissues, pens, scissors, hand lotion, post-it notes – at every place in the house where she might want to sit. Practical and time-saving as the idea may be, it definitely makes a cluttered environment. Hey, a person can do whatever they want in their own home, ya know? But at least one visitor to that house always feels a vague unease, amidst all the caches of goods arranged for the convenience of someone with no compelling physical reason not to get up and go fetch something once in a while. I recalled that sense of psychic discomfort when reading Ventura’s essay “An Inventory of Timelessness”, in which he makes some very interesting points about the hidden damages we wreak upon ourselves by our insistence on the continuous availability of everything. We suffer from a rapidly decreasing tolerance for delayed gratification of even the most trivial sort, and it comes with a very high price tag. Ventura counts every penny of that price.

Nowadays we tend to see our jobs as the rat race, the stressful ordeal against which, in order to survive, we must arm ourselves with good nutrition, plenty of healthful exercise, and meditational tape cassettes. Home is where we go to chill out and somehow recover for the next day’s onslaught of trauma in the workplace. But in another time, during his childhood, Ventura points out that the roles of home and work were in an important sense reversed. Home was a seething cauldron of emotional turmoil and physical violence, while work was the place men escaped to, to reclaim some illusion of order and a feeling that things made sense.

In Los Angeles I knew a husband-and-wife screenwriting team, both of them smart and hip and several other qualities that I don’t usually associate with religious zealotry, but they just up and turned into Bible-thumpers practically overnight. It was quite a shock. It set me to thinking. The spectacle of someone you know being “born again” is difficult enough to assimilate, but the possibility that it might strike both partners simultaneously is mind-boggling. It just amazes me that two people could get that way at the same time, and it probably doesn’t happen too often.

What happens instead? A unilateral conversion experience puts quite a strain on a relationship, and although many couples must have confronted such a dilemma, we don’t seem to hear much about it. One of the frightening alternative scenarios is presented in Ventura’s novel Night Time Losing Time: the unfortunate protagonist is actually deprived of his woman by Jesus as if the Naz were a rival suitor, just another guy with a cooler car or a smoother line of jive. This amatory method of dealing with the deity is reminiscent of a Leonard Cohen song that I’m pretty sure is a love song but can never determine whether it’s addressed to another person or to God. Like Cohen, Ventura ponders spiritual matters at great length. If there is a connection between religion and life, they want to know about it.

It is always a good idea for anyone to devote some thought to the relation between one’s professed beliefs and one’s practices. Are they aligned in some way that approximates integrity? Or do they barely overlap? Individually there is a gap between belief and practice; societally there is a gap between real spirituality and such clanking empty constructs as “Christianism,” and Ventura explores that difference.

An issue of Meshuggah carried his very informative look at the historical Jesus, the alarming differences between the various gospels, and the way that the Christ figure affects us today. Among the people of traditionally Christian lands, even the most confirmed atheist knows that Jesus is out there, lurking, somewhat like the AIDS virus. For anyone who has heard of him at all, the possibility always exists, no matter how miniscule that possibility may be, that some day, somehow, Jesus will get us.

Even better than his theological musings is when Ventura speaks of authentic spirituality: the intimate rituals through which friends confirm their mutual value; the spontaneously created altar; the magic that is all around if only we know how to see it.

At the end of Letters at 3 AM, prompted by readers who say he has complaints about everything but no answers, he offers Solutions to Everything – 38 of them to be exact. For instance, “Don’t chicken out about sex. Given that you’re with a consenting adult, do whatever you fantasize. This is much more important than quitting smoking.” Or have a rhododendron for a house pet. “They give much, ask little, have marvelous names, and they don’t shit where I walk.” In one of the Solutions, he devotes a considerable amount of energy to exhorting people not to drive like assholes.

Ventura can turn your perceptions inside out and present you with a whole new way of looking at something that may not totally convert you, but will never allow you to crawl back into your old way of looking at it.

Related: Leonard Cohen at Red Rocks 2009

In There but for Fortune, an Ochs biography, the author says Pleasures of the Harbor was not a perfect album, an opinion that isn’t universal.

One night R and I dropped acid and rolled around on the mattress until dawn. Disheveled and still about half fucked up, we walked over to J’s apartment and got him out of bed, and sat in his front room with the early light filtering in through the closed curtains. I heard the Pleasures of the Harbor album for the first time, and it was one of my life’s peak experiences.
Anne Alexander

The 1940 movie The Long Voyage Home is said to have been the inspiration for the piercingly lyrical song, “Pleasures of the Harbor.” One biographer says Ochs worked harder on it than on any of the others on the album. He says the vocal track gave trouble, and had to be removed from the tape and redone in several places. There was disagreement over how to orchestrate the song, and three versions exist – on the album with the same name, on Gunfight at Carnegie Hall with Lincoln Mayorga on piano, and on Then and Now with Ochs on guitar.

Originally, the album was too long, and Ochs removed verses from “Cross My Heart.”

“I’ve Had Her” is said to have been written as the result of a fight between Ochs and the great love of his life, Tina Date, an Australian musician who managed to play guitar despite having two-inch fingernails. It’s been called misogynistic and the weakest song on the album.

One critic calls “Crucifixion” the biggest recording failure of the musician’s career.

During that trial I learned many ugly things in this country, but I don’t think I had a more shining moment than when I had the honor and privilege to take Phil Ochs through his direct examination.
William Kunstler on the Chicago Seven trial

When Ochs was a kid, his family lived in Perrysburg, NY, and he played the clarinet. One writer says that he would go yearly to Fredonia State Teachers’ College for evaluation, and got A grades for his individual performances. I’ve been to Fredonia, so it’s almost a kind of link. There’s always that wish to feel close somehow to the artists you admire. Even more interesting, the chain of acquaintanceship between me and Phil Ochs is only two people. He hung out with the cartoonist Ron Cobb, who knew Sherry Gottlieb of A Change of Hobbit Bookstore. And I knew her.

To have a career you need a society to have it in. You go off and you make works of art and you present them here. You’re glad to be making a contribution. America doesn’t provide that society any more.
Phil Ochs, around the time of the Chicago Democratic convention

The master tapes for one of his albums remained in A&M’s vault for 23 years.

Phil Ochs is another one of those Gary Webb-type of deaths where, if you had a good imagination and a paranoid mind, you could find CIA written all over it, or one of those creepy agencies anyway.
Will Knott

He left behind a 12-year-old daughter. His body was cremated, according to his wishes.

RELATED: Troubadour in the Shadows: Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs was the singer-songwriter who could have been Dylan, had Dylan not already occupied that position. If Dylan had never been born, Ochs would have been the major musical spokesman for the Sixties. Since Dylan did exist, Ochs always felt somewhat like the little brother tagging along.

Perhaps to prove his authenticity, or perhaps because it was just his way, Ochs put his life and body on the line in ways that Dylan never did. He joined demonstrations and got into fistfights. He went to Chile with counterculture icon Jerry Rubin to check out the progress of the revolution. He adventured in Australia and journeyed to Kenya, where his vocal chords were permanently damaged when he was mugged.

Phil Ochs was born on December 19, 1940. A journalism student in college, Ochs became one of the strongest voices in the civil rights and anti-war movements. He wrote “The Draft Dodger’s Rag”

I’m only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen,
and I always carry a purse…

During the Sixties, Ochs was certain he would be assassinated because of his radicalism. It wasn’t such a crazy idea, in view of the fate of Latin American poet and musician Victor Jara, whose hands were cut off before his execution. (Added later: This turns out to be a legend. They only shot him 43 times.) One writer says that when the Chicago Seven were charged, Ochs was insulted not to be included, which meant he was only important enough to be an un-indicted co-conspirator. He needed to feel relevant. His former manager said, “He thought he was risking his life by singing.” One school of thought says, when he finally realized that nobody wanted to shut him up that badly, he became terminally depressed.

Ochs could be a real pain in the ass, which was why he often didn’t receive from the world the consideration and respect that his genius deserved. As the political climate changed and songs of social injustice went out of fashion, he felt redundant, drank more, acted worse, and perceived enemies everywhere. In the fall of 1975 he turned up at New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel, registered under a false name, and was arrested for drunkenness and assault on a woman friend.

His last real public performance was at a party for the owner of a folk club. It was practically a dress rehearsal for the Rolling Thunder Revue, and Ochs had “understood” that he’d go along, but he wasn’t invited on the tour because of the drinking and unpredictable behavior. He stayed in Manhattan until December, drifted from one hotel to another, drank, crashed with friends or even slept in the street. He finally bottomed out and went to stay with his sister, where he quit drinking and played a lot of cards with her three kids.

Back in the good times, Ochs wrote a wonderful song that outlines some of the reasons why life is painful, but returns always to the refrain

I’m gonna give all that I’ve got to give,
cross my heart and I hope to live.

At 35, Phil Ochs had given all that he had to give. On April 9, 1976, he hanged himself. “He had often talked about suicide,” said Jerry Rubin, who had seen him four days earlier. “He was so tied to political changes that when that spirit went down he went down with it.”

——-

An earlier version of this appeared in Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics

RELATED: Phil Ochs Miscellaneous

Blood Moon Productions Ltd. logo

This Q&A with the president of Blood Moon Productions just might be the most satisfying interview ever published. And not only because of his motto: Be brave, sin boldly, and try to have fun marketing your product. It doesn’t say here who posed the questions, and if it was Prince himself, so much the better, because he asked just the right ones.

My first thought is: I’m going to adopt these questions the next time I do an interview. I might even interview myself with them. For instance, “What would surprise most people to learn about you?” Prince notes that his ancestors include Harriet Beecher Stowe and Jonathon Edwards.

Maybe it wouldn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone, but I have similar reasons for ancestral pride. The gnarly old family tree includes abolitionists, union organizers, and moonshiners. While not having a name recognition factor, still, they were of the American stock that breeds heroes and legends aplenty. And I like that.

I like it that Prince names Werner Erhard as an influential visionary. I still say the est training was the best $300 I ever spent. The Dalai Lama, too, is dear to me, thanks to being one of the few humans capable of saying “I don’t know.”

I like it that Dick Cavett is named as an influential person. I write a fictional character modeled after the Dick Cavett in my mind, and he’s one of my favorites.

And I love what Prince says about indie publishing, just like I love any other advice that tells me to go ahead and do what I want and intend to do anyhow.

Develop a niche that taps into some perceived need or universal curiosity. If somebody’s oral tradition is in danger of dying out, uncelebrated and unwitnessed, try to translate it into literary form before it is lost forever, and then articulate your passion about its rescue.

Here’s another question I’d ask myself or somebody else: “If you were a member of a tribe, what would be your special role in it, and why?” He says,

I’d be the shaman, balancing expediency with long-term benefits to the tribe, channeling wisdom and inspiration from the dead, and articulating creative, morally appropriate solutions to tribal problems.

I like the part about being a speaker for, or of, the dead, a role I seem to have filled pretty often lately. In one friend’s online memorial page I left some words, that his wife told me she printed out and read aloud at the scattering of his ashes. That’s one of the best compliments I ever got.

RELATED: I’d Be a Rotten Belly