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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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.

Some of the Best Things Ever Said about Being Funny

The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what’s funny is one of them. Kingsley Amis

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. W. H. Auden

A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist. Jacques Barzun

Stand-up is like a movie every night. You write it, direct it, produce it, the audience votes, and you go home. There’s nothing more satisfying. Elayne Boosler

Literary parody is half obeisance, half ridicule. Its essence is ambivalence. John Brooks

A patient complaining of melancholy consulted Dr. Abernathy. After an examination the doctor pronounced, “You need amusement. Go and hear the comedian Grimaldi; he will make you laugh and that will be better for you than any drugs.” Said the patient, “I am Grimaldi.” Bennett Cerf

Most of what goes on is very funny. Chicago

Wit is something you possess, but humor is something that possesses you. Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels

Humor, like frogs, can be dissected, but neither ever lives through the process. Frank Gannon

Oh, it’s hard, very hard indeed. But not as hard as doing comedy. Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed, when asked by Jack Lemmon asked him how hard it was to face death.

Major metropolitan police departments regarded him as a kind of traveling hunting trophy. Tony Hendra, about Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce told me that backstage once: the best laughs come from things you’re not supposed to laugh at. Tony Hendra

Humor is what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your unconscious therapy. Langston Hughes

People are much too solemn about things. I’m all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds, and that sort of thing. It seems to me a most salutary proceeding. Aldous Huxley

It isn’t necessary to be cruel in order to be witty. Kindly humor takes a little more work, but it’s an art worth developing. Kat Kinkade

Anger, or more specifically, a need to denigrate everyone in sight, can be sublimated into humor, healthy and corrective cynicism, and the highest forms of spiritual instruction, or be degraded into mere neurotic and counter-productive bullying. Art Kleps

Satire is a weapon of self-defense as well as attack, and the satirist inflicts wounds in retaliation for his own wounds of outrage and pain. Gavin Lambert

Parody is an intuitive kind of literary criticism, shorthand for what ’serious’ critics must write out at length. It is Method acting, since a successful parodist must live himself, imaginatively in his parodee. It is jiujitsu, using the impetus of the opponent to defeat him. Dwight Macdonald

Humor teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn. W. Somerset Maugham

“By Jove, if I weren’t flippant, I should hang myself,” he thought cheerfully. (The character Philip Carey in W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage)

Stop dying. Am trying to write a comedy. Wilson Mizner to his brother Addison, who had a fatal illness

Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor. Michael O’Donoghue

The Iban, when they decide that something is really funny, and know that they are going to laugh for a long time, lie down first. Redmond O’Hanlon, about people of Borneo

A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised. Tom Robbins

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art. Philip Roth

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own. Jonathan Swift

In my experience, most joke-tellers are nags, bores, racists, sadists, boasters, blasphemers, look-at-me types. Paul Theroux

The only requirement for a long career in satire – besides not losing your mind – is a rolling sense of indignation that the world is so resistant to sanity. Gary Trudeau

Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever I mean thirty years. Mark Twain

The greater the horror the louder the laughter. Unknown

He who laughs last thinks slower. Unknown

As I witness the universe getting away with me, I wonder what other uproarious deceptions it will perpetrate. Alan Watts

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, let me just say, fuck you…. I’ve only been here 45 minutes. It’s gonna be a long day, I’m gonna insult a lot of people. Swami X

RELATED:
Craig Ferguson’s Dad
Craig Ferguson and All That

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

A cultural critic named David Toop once said, “What’s utterly now will soon be thoroughly then; once it becomes then, it might as well be paleolithic….” That’s what this book is all about – the ephemeral nature of “what’s happening now.” Generation Ecch! is written by Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman and illustrated by the brilliant comix artist Evan Dorkin. It’s funny as hell.

The whole generation, created as a marketing strategy, was big news for a long time, leading to such heinous faux pas as the New York Times printing a “Lexicon of Grunge”, which purported to give outsiders the key to insider lingo. It turned out to be a hoax, much as I often suspected back in the Sixties that the journalistic revelations of lists of hip drug terms were a put-on, my favorite being “mohaski” for marijuana – uh-huh.

The text begins with a long examination of all the names that have been given to “Generation X.” They examine Ecch’s taste in comics, and its preference in so-called literature, the “MTVesque brand of fiction” that spawned Fast Sofa, Less Than Zero and of course Generation X. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City comes in for a big chunk of criticism, not least for the unparalledly annoying device of narration in the second person. The exuberant hatchet job culminates in a parody called Ecch-topia.

Cohen and Krugman have not a single kind word to say for MTV’s “mockudramedy,” The Real World. Its clones, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place are also savaged. Why waste hours and hours watching the vapid things when you can just read this chapter?

The authors give Ecch-deity Quentin Tarentino a verbal beating equalled only by the recent Baffler articles by Gary Groth and Ray Carney. They take apart John Hughes and The Breakfast Club in irresistibly hilarious style, reserving particularly merciless ridicule for Judd Nelson’s “transparent bid to get his nostrils nominated for an Academy Award.” Fast Times at Ridgemont High is analyzed as the prototypical Ecch movie. Pretty in Pink and Reality Bites are slandered- “Why create a character when you can just saddle someone with a job at the Gap, a Charlie’s Angels lunchbox, and a list of the sixty-six different men she’s slept with?” The holy of holies, My Own Private Idaho, is savaged, followed by an examination of the reasons for such pathetic excuses for heroes as River Phoenix.

There are some disrespectful observations about the fashion for hemp, and a comment on Newsweek’s concern with the fact that not only grunge kids but regular straight-looking teenagers buy clothes and accessories with pot leaves on them. “The nation is concerned about these clean-cut youngsters: pot T-shirts are gateway fashion, leading eventually to suit jackets emblazoned with syringes.”

The authors joyfully deconstruct Kurt Cobain, “the very manifestation of all that is ecch.” “If Kurt could see the canonization that accompanied his demise it would kill him. Again.” They take us on a tour of Lollapalooza which is characterized as “ridiculous.” The Deadhead phenomenon comes in for even worse. “The keyboard seat in the GD is perhaps the most dangerous job in showbiz. Three, count ‘em, three Grateful Dead ivory ticklers have kicked the bucket over the group’s twenty-odd years, yet both drummers live on and on…and on and on and on and on….”

There is a very disrespectful examination of Antioch College’s verbal consent policy in regard to sexual activity. They take on the silliness of most of the doings “online” and of the rave movement. “Pearl Jam is the one band that exemplifies all aspects of the Ecch world: the sappy liberal politics, the sad victim mentality and the classic rock meets grunge sound. Oh yeah, and they’re from Seattle.”

Unlike the perpetrators of too many of the zines that show up in the mail, the authors of Generation Ecch are literate, widely read, very smart, and conscious of the existence of other values and other world-views than the narrow spectrum embraced by the rest of what they call the “rebel without a clue” generation. They even know about stuff like the Living Theater and Judith Malina before she was Grandma Addams. Their lively, funny, irreverent approach is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s incisive takes on cultural phenomena, and there isn’t a dull sentence to be found. “If a modern-day Allen Ginsberg were to write a Howl for the age of Ecch, the minute he saw the best minds of the generation he’d drop the poesy and go into the schmatte business.”

First published in Scene, July 1996

Note: the work of Evan Dorkin appeared several times in Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics.

This is an unabashed paean to one of my major culture heroes, Ace Backwords. I’ve gone on record calling him a genius more than once, and when everybody else reaches the same conclusion I’ll be already there, reclining in a hammock, sipping lemonade and grinning “I told you so.”

If music were the only thing Backwords had going for him, he’d still rank as an artist. If cartooning were the only art he practiced, he’d still be from the very top shelf. If he never did anything but write prose, he’d still be great. And if community building were the only thing he’d ever undertaken, he’d still be a star. Put it all together, and what we have here is one brilliant sumbitch with a roster of accomplishments anyone could be proud of. Especially taking into account that the guy has been on the streets for pretty much all of his creative career.

Ace Backwords went from “soft li’l suburban pup” to bum (his word) so long ago that “homeless” wasn’t yet part of the consensus vocabulary. His book, Surviving on the Streets, describes the lifestyle of a displaced and disenfranchised soul who feels like “an actor in the wrong movie” when confronted by the exigencies of contemporary American life. His purpose is not to romanticize the street life, nor to minimize the hardships and horrors, but to testify that wealth and security are not the ultimate goods of life. It may not happen this year or this decade, but at some point in the future Surviving on the Streets will be recognized as a seminal work in the areas of sociology, philosophy, psychology, pop culture, urban studies, you name it.

That doesn’t sound so crazy when you consider prolific author Colin Wilson, whose breakthrough book, The Outsider, was written in the British Museum’s reading room by a man who slept in a park. It’s enough to make you wonder how many of the aging ragamuffins hanging around the public library are undiscovered philosophers. There are some remarkable people living in squats, in alleys and sheds, and under highways. Bringing their stories to light is one of the things Backwords does. For many years he’s been the guiding spirit behind the Telegraph Avenue calendar, and he oversaw the making of a CD of street musicians’ work. He’s written a number of profiles of individual homeless folk, and the cartoons have helped raise consciousness and awareness.

Loompanics, publisher of Surviving on the Streets, also brought out Twisted Image a few years back: a collection of Backwords comic strips, most of which first appeared in his own indie publication, also called Twisted Image. For years his comics ran in Maximum Rock’N'Roll and High Times as well as in countless zines, including mine. As an editor (Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics) my appetite for his stuff was insatiable. Whatever theme issue I dreamed up, he had material to fit, and I was honored to showcase it. Even better, Ace Backwords sometimes made it known that he liked something I wrote. It knocked me out! A good word from that direction meant more to me than selling a hundred copies. Not exactly the accepted recipe for success – but I’ve always been funny that way.

Being a humorist is no joke – especially for the few who do a really spectacular job of using comics as a medium for social commentary. Not only must you draw well enough so the targets of your satire can be recognized, you must also make a point and, of course, be funny. T. S. Eliot said that when one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is stretches to its limits and produces its richest ideas. Nowhere is that more true than in the cartoonist’s art. It requires great ingenuity and mental agility to take the immense, intractable stupidity of humankind and break it down into four-panel increments.

The thing is, no matter how thickly he lays on the sarcasm and the cynicism, everything radiates from a center of deep primal innocence, a dyed-in-the-wool decency that’s impossible to disguise. There’s an extraordinary level of empathy, hypersensitivity to hypocrisy, and a finely-tuned bullshit detector. Ace Backwords is not only a maestro of irony but the king of cognitive dissonance. One of his favorite targets is the person capable of believing two mutually contradictory things at the same time. It’s a trait he never ceases to be amazed by – even in himself.

And then there’s the music: hundreds of songs. The ones I’m most familiar with are on a tape of nine songs, made last year, called Really Stoned: The Jann Wenner Experience. Made on a 4-track, the album has plenty of heart, plenty of attitude, painful honesty, and honest pain. Like Jerry Jeff Walker says, “A man can’t lie when he tries to sing, it betrays him every time.” In fact this material reminds be of some Jerry Jeff Walker tunes on Hill Country Rain, and of some Edgar Winter numbers on Not a Kid Anymore. I don’t want to use a corny word like “mature,” but there’s the same kind of vibe – the unpretentious voice of a former wild child who eventually got his shit together.

I’m a sucker for lovely, melodic songs – Billy Vera’s “At This Moment,” George Michael’s “One More Try,” Robbie Robertson’s “Broken Arrow.” In other words, I love a good ballad, and “Where Ya’ Going?” definitely is one. My musical vocabulary is inadequate but I find, for instance, the plangent one-note-at-a-time accompaniment strangely affecting. The song “You Know We Will Miss You When You’re Gone” makes me smile because a reference in the lyrics takes me back to what someone once said of me: “Your problem is, you’re always lookin’ for the fuckin’ Great Beyond.”

I read a memoir once by a Russian woman who happened to learn the prisoners’ tapping code, never dreaming that one day she would be in solitary confinement with the tapping code her only lifeline to sanity. This is why it’s good to have a book that aims to help you “prepare for a camping trip that could last for the rest of your life.” If I wind up homeless, I’ll be equipped with the insights and precepts of somebody with true street cred. Surviving on the Streets is packed with practical advice on self-defense; how to use time to your advantage; what you really need and what will only weigh you down; and the identity of your best ally. And how to feed yourself – that chapter is the biggest eye-opener in the whole book.

There’s no fat here. Each line is vital, and every now and then one comes along that shines with gemlike purity. “Your relationship with Nature is akin to a relationship with a demanding dominatrix; if you learn to please Her, she will reward you extravagantly.” Never pious or shrill, Backwords is both tough and fair, and he says the things that need to be said. It is his hope “that the homeless activists’ appeals for help on behalf of the homeless will be balanced with equal appeals for the homeless to get off their asses and start helping themselves.” And he’s the man to lead the way, showing how to not only survive but thrive – how to “skate through the urban landscape, basically doing whatever the fuck you please.”

One of the downsides is being unable to escape from people. When it comes to that impulse, I’m a sister under the skin. Merely to be left the hell alone is one of the hardest things for a person in any social class to accomplish. Backwords says he’s always been a private person “…but when you’re on the streets, you live in public, 24 hours a day…your true self comes tumbling out, in all its glory and hideousness, simply because it’s just too much effort to maintain the act all the time.”

If you lack a permanent address, you will frequently be in dialog with peace officers, who often seem to give more attention to the homeless than to higher-priority offenders. “It’s a running joke on the street scene that maybe we should start killing people so then the cops would leave us alone.” The best relationship to have with the authorities is none. But if you must encounter them, the book contains helpful hints that could save your life.

The best relationship to have with housed people is, don’t go out of your way to piss them off. And give yourself a pat on the back for your contributions to society. “The nocturnal life…can be seen as a public service that we perform to help alleviate the crowdedness of city life. We’ve volunteered to go on the night shift….” Another valuable service performed by street people is to utilize some of the amazing amount of stuff that gets thrown out by this wasteful society, thus reducing its collective guilt for squandering the earth’s resources.

Relating to other street people is what you’ll do most of, and a lot of that relating consists of hassles. In some ways the street tribe is like a big, dysfunctional family. Some are out there because they’re crazy, others because it’s the only way they know of staying sane. Many, says Backwords, “find a sense of community and belonging on the streets that they’ve found nowhere else,” which is a damn sad commentary on life in these United States. Among the homeless are vulnerable victims and violent predators, and a vast majority who just get along the best way they can. A friend who lived in Oakland once told me the public demeanor to strive for is one that subtly broadcasts the message “Don’t fuck with me – because I just might be crazier than you.” Backwords endorses this tactic of looking preventively formidable – up to a point. Look dangerous, okay. Actually be dangerous, no. He did, in his youth, experiment with carrying a very sharp knife, but when it ended up being used against him, he gave up on weapons.

As a homeless person, you want to watch out for con artists – but they’re easy to spot, because if they really possessed any expertise in their chosen field of hustling, “they’d be in the Senate attaching their parasitic tentacles to the public trough.” The analysis of the Asshole Syndrome alone is worth the price of the book. The upshot is, Plan A would always be to – walk away. “It’s a big world after all, and the whole point is to occupy a part of it that doesn’t include The Asshole.” But sometimes walking away doesn’t work. You’ve got to have a straight talk with yourself and mentally define where you want to draw the line. And be prepared to hold the line.

The same advice goes for love. As in every stratum of society, a romantic relationship can turn out to be far more trouble than it’s worth. “You very well may meet some beautiful, alluring siren and wonder to yourself what this beautiful person is doing on the streets. Sooner or later you will find out.”

Ace Backwords takes a jaundiced view of the Sixties era, all its various revolutions, and its legacy. “It cracks me up when I hear these so-called ’60s icons congratulating themselves for the greatness of the ’60s….Virtually every aspect of American life has gotten worse since the ’60s. Much worse.” He looks at the basic philosophy of every brand of counterculture from then until now, and finds them all inadequate, especially the concept that alienation from society is a badge of honor. “Can anyone explain the universal scorn I keep hearing being heaped on “yuppies” these days? It just means you’re young, you live in the city, and you’ve got a fucking job.”

Drugs? Don’t get him started. The Backwords Theory of Drug Rotation is classic. In fact there’s a lot of funny stuff in here, like the amusing riddle:
“What does the street person do when he gets sick?”
“He dies.”

Backwords reflects extensively on a subject that also occupies my thoughts: materialism. Having stuff, and the stuff you then need to store and maintain your stuff, and how many hours of precious life you want to give up to income-producing activity in order to continue storing and maintaining your stuff and getting more stuff. Backwords describes the process of paring down consumerism to the minimalist nub, where the only things purchased are socks and underwear.

I’ve been on both sides of the economic fence so many times – okay, never actually on the street. But when things get too comfortable I always find a way to cut my income. I’ve had long periods of voluntary poverty, and some spells of a bit more poverty than I had volunteered for. Interspersed with these have been more prosperous eras. (I define prosperous as being able to have a tooth fixed instead of pulled.) I’ve drawn some lines. This sounds like a ludicrous problem in our era of casual dress, but it used to be an issue: high heel shoes. There came a time when I decided to never again take a job where I had to wear high heel shoes. And I never did. And I grok the anecdote where Backwords passes a street crew and imagines a worker thinking “Man, this job might suck, but at least I’m not sleeping in the dirt like THAT poor slob!” And Backwords is thinking, “Man, sleeping in the dirt might suck, but at least I’m not standing in the middle of the street, holding up a stop sign, and listening to jack-hammers all day long like THAT poor slob!” Or wearing high heels.

I adulate Ace Backwords because he’ll say anything. I don’t mean, like, say “shit” in church, or some trivial jive like that. Here’s a writer who will reveal the bottommost layers of his psyche – like Yeats said, “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” And who will speak for viewpoints guaranteed to reduce a Berkeley liberal to tears of incoherent rage. Such as alleviating homelessness by reducing immigration. He also has plenty to say about the utter stupidity of clean needle programs.

Backwords quotes Dylan: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” He also quashes any myth about the supposed nobility of the non-materialistic lifestyle, “Fact is, most of us street people are just as greedy as your average Wall Street junk bond crook. We’re just not as good at it.”

On the street, I probably wouldn’t last a week. But in previous lives, who knows? I think there was a time when I spoke Rommany and never spent a night beneath a roof. I think in other existences I was a wandering mendicant monk in India; a naked aborigine in Australia’s outback. And life was good. Without sugarcoating the reality of homelessness, Backwords reminds us that, like any other condition of life, homelessness can have its spiritual aspects. But you have to work at it. “It is all too easy for your very soul to be twisted like a pretzel into a grotesque thing in this world of gargoyles.”

A truly remarkable thing is, all his wisdom for living on the streets also applies to those of us who are snugly housed. Here’s my favorite line: “You’ll know when you hit on The Truth, for it will soothe your soul, it will get you ALL THE WAY OFF, while Pollyanna wishful thinking will only cock-tease you to distraction. Let that be your guide.”

And in the writings of Ace Backwords, I feel that sensation again and again of having hit on The Truth. Here’s an example, from one his interviews. “I feel confident that the homeless and the ‘downtrodden’ don’t necessarily suffer one iota more than the rich and affluent. In fact, in many key aspects, the rich may suffer more.”

To me, hearing that is like a cool drink of water in the desert. I know it’s true. I’ve known some miserable rich people. And some beatific paupers. Which doesn’t mean I’m in favor of children starving or any nonsense like that. It’s just the way things are, here on planet Earth, notwithstanding any amount of PC nanny-state propaganda, and it’s a helpful precept to keep in mind. For anybody.

Call me a cultist, a fanatic, whatever: Ace Backwords is the best, and you heard it here first.

Newest book: Acid Heroes

Ace on the homeless situation
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A kind friend provided a tape of a documentary about the career of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the Adam and Eve of hip comedy. (Nichols went on to become a highly original film director, responsible for, among others, The Graduate, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, and Silkwood.)

The distinctive thing about Elaine May as a comedienne is that she was neither plain like Lily Tomlin nor cute like Gilda Radner, but debutante beautiful, model beautiful. Looks of course don’t affect the range of character an actress can play, but having someone so comely to work with must have made life easier for the makeup, costume and lighting crews. Nichols was a handsome and quite presentable youth but behind all the stage makeup the poor guy looked like the Joker in Batman comics, or a vampire.

In vaudeville and early TV, the paradigm for comedy teams was the straight person and the funny person. May and Nichols may have been the first pair to fill both roles simultaneously. In those less sophisticated days, comics who were used to the non-visual media of radio and recordings probably laughed at their own jokes all the time. In many sketches, you notice May and Nichols couldn’t help cracking up at their own material, even though coming from the Second City comedy troupe, they must have been accustomed to live performance before an audience with eyes.

I remember as a kid seeing them on TV, but in circumstances where it was dangerous to laugh at lines like, “It’s a moral issue…so much more interesting than a real issue.” The documentary is a combination of their performances interspersed with interviews with other show biz figures. Steve Martin, for instance, says he used to listen to Nichols and May while falling asleep, in the same way I used to listen to Lenny Bruce.

In one sketch, Elaine appears on the left side of a split screen, the archetypal Mom, while Mike is on the right, as her grown-up son. It’s a phone conversation, a dead-on portrayal of maternal possessiveness, one of the most perfect works of satire ever created – and I do mean ever. It was brilliant for its time, and every word holds up today. It might even be perennial – comprehensible in Shakespeare’s day and throughout the foreseeable future. One of the commentators says Nichols and May were like music, the contrapuntal thing, and in this piece that musical element is apparent.

In one sketch, May is a funeral home employee and Nichols a bereaved relative. Their interaction is reminiscent of the way certain software companies function. You don’t get what you think you paid for, but find an endless series of add-ons are necessary to make the program work.

In another bit, he’s a dentist and she’s having her teeth worked on. They enact a schmaltzy romantic scene worthy of a 40s movie, with orchestra music swelling to enhance the drama. The lovely Elaine emotes her way through the dialog with a spit vacuum tube dangling from her mouth and a big bib flapping on her front.

At times they collaborated with animators. One sketch, from Michael Sporn Animation, is a conversation between a couple in bed, which couldn’t be shown on TV in those days. The screen is entirely black except for the two pair of eyes which tell the whole story.

Robin Williams in his appreciation of Mike Nichols notes that he was “happy to be a flaming asshole.” For example, in a sketch where May played an awards presenter, Nichols portrayed “the most total mediocrity in the industry,” one of those who bravely go on “quietly and unassumingly producing garbage.” This face-slap to the entertainment business was administered during the 11th Annual Emmy Awards broadcast in 1959. May and Nichols were introduced by master of ceremonies Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who said, “We recognize how fortunate we are that these men and women can say what they believe, and you who listen to them, if you don’t like it, can turn to another channel.” Right on!