I'm going to do something stupid. I'm going write a movie review about a movie that I have not only not watched, but I have no inclination of ever watching. I've thought it over a lot, I feel like I have something I need to say on the subject, but I would rather watch two hogs engage in a farting contest than pay ten dollars to watch a movie about a Barbie doll. So, instead, I'm going to base this review on the opinions of two people who have seen the movie and have publicly commented on it, one is someone who's widely considered one of the most intelligent, independent thinkers in the world today, and the other, well, not so much.

    In fiction, they have this thing called poetic license, a device that allows the author to the present and manipulate the details of the story in any way that he or she chooses in order to achieve the desired artistic vision.  Non-fiction, in contrast, is supposed to be objective and deal strictly with the truth and the facts that support it. In my opinion, things changed on February 22, 1968, the night that Walter Cronkite, the so-called "Most Trusted Man in America" sitting at his news desk at CBS, renounced his journalistic integrity to call for an end to the Vietnam War. Although he received much adulation for publicly reflecting the country's growing displeasure with the war, his timing was extremely suspect coming as it did on the heels of a major military victory where our troops, in the opinions of many, had thoroughly routed and destroyed most the enemy's ability to carry on with the war. Cronkite also later revealed himself as a supporter of One World Governance  and stated that he had only kept this belief on the down low because of his job at CBS. Most Trusted?

     Ever since that night, it seems that every journalism student coming out of the elite East Coast schools, do not want to report the facts as they present themselves but seek to play God and manipulate the truth in order to achieve not so much an artistic vision, but an ideological one, one that not only plays fast and loose with the truth, but more often than not, leaves out the parts that don't match the narrative. Now more than ever, they also seek to silence those who can call out the scam. As recently as 2018, a group of reporters working for the New York Times and Washington Post shared a Pulitzer Prize for a so-called "deeply sourced" story on Russian collusion in the 2016 Presidential Election. If I remember correctly, they even used the writings of someone from Fusion GPS, the group that created the hoax in the first place. Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, another of these most trusted guys if you count up all his appearances on the main stream news, was quoted, referring to faked story that he had submitted for the 1981 Pulitzer prize consideration while acting in his role as a managing editor for the Washington Post, "Fake and fraud that it is. It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes."

      It's not that I would want to misrepresent facts, I just don't desire to see a movie that probably would make me want to vomit,  a movie that's ironically presented using much the same color palette of the stuff I used to drink in order not to vomit. Recently, I walked out of a movie named Joy Ride that had a near perfect rating from the professional critics. If that movie had any more of a resemblance to a pile of dog crap, they would have had to hang fly-strips in the theater and pump Fabreze through the air ducts.

       Whoopi Goldberg, responding to the backlash to the movie Barbie from conservative voices like Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro was quoted as saying, "It's a movie! It's a movie about a doll! I thought y'all would be happy. [Barbie] has no genitalia, so there's no sex involved. Ken has no genitalia, so he can't — it's a doll movie! And the kids know it's colorful and it's Barbie," To drive her point across, she also wore boots made from the heads of Barbie dolls. The rant was warmly received by her myriad of kool-aid drinking fans and blasted all over the Internet in an effort to depict conservatives as being silly and overly focused on matters of sex.

           Elon Musk watched the movie too. The billionaire wrote, “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends.” I have to take him on his word, and I am pretty certain, I would probably emerge from the theater with the same observation. Why? Well, it's not so much that I have to place any faith in the words of Elon Musk. It's more because I can have absolute trust in Whoopi Goldberg to behave like a Leftist influencer.  Once upon a time, she used to be funny and talented, but it sure seems like she has decided to forego a real career and instead made a Faustian bargain with whoever runs the show on her side of the aisle and pretend to match wits with her erstwhile co-host. Calling their show The View "the most important political TV show, a priority destination and a source of invaluable conversations, " (NY Times), is about the same as someone claiming that the dialogue in the Dumb and Dumber movies was written by William Shakespeare. In spite of the well known truth that Shakespeare has been dead for hundreds of years, I would suspend my belief in science before I would ever believe that The View is essential to our nation's well being.

           And I actually think Whoopi knows it. I don't buy into the idea that she is as silly as she pretends to be on the show. Joy Behar, now that's a different story; she's like the Jim Carrey character in that comparison. What is it exactly that Whoopi  knows? I believe she knows exactly the message that the movie is sending. She probably knows that over a billion Barbie dolls have been sold since 1959 giving the movie not only one of the largest potential movie going markets in human history, she should know that that market is a potential political gold mine, a way to indoctrinate millions of naive and unsuspecting movie goers. This makes her statement, in my opinion, particularly insidious and evil as she attempts to downplay the threat of such indoctrination. She also probably knows that the political Left has long since taken over most of the talk and comedy shows on television. Such shows consistently spew out left wing talking points and an intense hatred for counter viewpoints instead of humor. They actively tailor their message and seek out an audience of those who, in their view, need to be told how to think. (Why else would someone tune in to listen to someone who made the remarkable claim that the Holocaust was not based on racism).

      She does however, not seem to truly understand Hollywood's history. That is probably justifiable because Hollywood has worked assiduously to cover up the tracks of the Soviet penetration of the movie business prior to WWII and after. There's an article entitled Hollywood's Missing Movies printed in Reason, a Libertarian magazine, which points out just how deep Hollywood's association with the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin really was. (Something that's still easily provable if you understand what's been left out of recently released Oppenheimer movie.) "There was never an organized, articulate, and effective liberal or left-wing opposition to the communists in Hollywood," concluded John Cogley, a socialist, in his 1956 Report on Blacklisting. As former party member Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) put it, the party was "the only game in town."  The article goes on to state that the Communist Party viewed writers as 'artists in uniform'. The highest paid screen writer in Hollywood at the time, author Dalton Trumbo, was a party member, one of the few who seemed to have some qualms about the blood on his hands from his work on behalf of the party, he was thoroughly rebuked by most of his colleagues for expressing such doubt. The recent movie starring Brian Cranston about Trumbo's career, left most of this back story out. Remember what I said about telling only half the story.

    It's even a deeper issue than mere political chicanery. Writer Jay Dyer in his book Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults, and Symbols in Film makes the argument that "Film and our mass attendance at theaters is fundamentally religious in character. It is a ritual process at work." He goes on to suggest that many of Hollywood's insiders, producers, and directors have that same mindset. He makes valid points about how modern culture is pretty much all about the formation of mass consciousness via mass media, an idea that most people living are unaware of the consequences of, yet, Vladimir Lenin, one of the first political thinkers to recognize the potential of the new media, would have fully appreciated. Dyer points out what religious scholar  Mircea Eliade had to say about mankind's primal desire to inhabit a sacred space and not be trapped in their purely subjective realities and the need to construct such spaces that are viable in the efforts, "to reproduce the work of the gods." These new temples are to be found "wherever the television screen or the theater feeds him his new narrative by which to read his world." This helps to explain Elon Musk's perceptive take on the movie. Why the need to keep echoing the word Patriarchy a thousand times if it's only a movie about a doll? Why make such a big deal about Ken's/Ryan Gosling's lack of testicles and his complete worthlessness? I suggest Ken take a gander in a certain little pink purse. 

​     Whoopi's disingenuous comments, as always, sure seem calculated, and in this case, thoroughly depraved and evil because of what I perceive to be her motives, and also the motives of all them other late night political prostitutes. What is it? I'll just leave it by saying I no longer feel any need to place the adjective nonsensical or silly before referencing her name, from now on, I think I should just substitute the word "well-compensated".

''e New York Times, "The View" is a priority destination for our guests and must-see viewing for our loyal fans with up-to-the-minute Hot Topics and invaluable conversations 

      I've pretty much given up on all television; it's become a tsunami of commercials randomly interrupted by a plethora of stupidity. I've watched a lot movies lately however, and can't help but notice that the people who review films for a living have become about as reliable as the women on The View when it comes to expressing their opinions. The universally enthusiastic reviews of movie Joy Ride made this unavoidably clear. That movie was one of the worst movies I've ever seen (I've only walked out of about three movies in my whole life), but the professional critics loved it, and I can't understand why. No respectable  human being should ever use a phrase like "raunchy but sweet" and expect to have any credibility ever again. Yet, it was like AI wrote all the reviews by simply using a thesaurus to expound on that one simple phrase.

      Christopher Nolan's epic biography Oppenheimer is getting the same royal treatment pretty much, and it's bit of a problem for me, but for a different reason. It's a spectacularly well made movie. Yet, if I were to state what the purpose of the movie was, other than making a profit, I would have to say it's to push the idea that the United Nations is capable of solving all the world's problems and to absolve Oppenheimer of all the baggage of his communist associations. The pre and post World War II periods were politically confusing and complex times, and many people, mostly intellectuals, who flirted with communism back then were being driven by the social effects of the depression and their great fear of Hitler and the Nazis. Yet, to leave out the equably sinister and deadly accomplishments of the Soviet Union and Communist China and their communist leaders, is to not tell more than  half of the story. Nothing in this movie gives the audience any idea of how evil, murderous and cunning Joseph Stalin was. It's all very well and good to talk about the threat to civilization that Hitler represented, but Stalin's absence is very telling considering the influential role he played in the history of the times and the events portrayed in this movie

      Cillian Murphy should win an AcademyAward hands down for his portrayal of the troubled physicist, yet the accuracy of the characterization is very much open to debate. One of Oppenheimer's biographers was known to have written that for all intents and purposes, Oppenheimer was a communist. Oppenheimer's insistence on turning over nuclear secrets to the two greatest mass murderers in history ( Stalin and Mao) seems a remarkably naive assessment of the problems of dealing with the threat of a Nuclear arms race. Robert Downey Jr. was also stunning in the role of the allegedly evil and manipulative Lewis Strauss who becomes the antagonist of the movie. Strauss was known to be staunchly conservative and deeply religious, and there is more than enough room to question how deserving Strauss was of being characterized in such fashion.

     It's a well made, well written, and well acted movie though. The best I've seen this year by far. It is however about twenty minutes too long. It goes overboard in trying to prove Oppenheimer's innocence and stress Strauss's culpability in the scientist's fall from grace. I think that Robert Downey Jr. was given just about twenty minutes too much screen time in the effort to get him an Oscar nomination. Some will say that time was needed in order for to complete the characterization of Strauss, but it's obvious that they had already done that in spades during the scenes at the hearing. It uses a lot of assumptions (behind the door scenes) about the motives of Strauss, yet casually dismisses a lot of what was well known about Oppenheimer. That time could have been more honestly used to place a disclaimer of sorts, and maybe to alert the audience to how the huge, ghostly, evil presence of Joseph Stalin complicated American political thought in those dark days, and continues to baffle our politics today. The decision not to do that, makes this seemingly flawless movie a great deal less than perfect.

    I've kind of gotten used to people misusing the word joy. Take for example, Joy Reid and Joy Behar. I've never seen either of them two ladies exhibit much in the way of ecstatic or exultant happiness; quite the opposite in fact. So, I shouldn't have been too surprised when I went to watch a movie mistitled as Joy Ride only to discover that there was nothing overtly joyful about it. In honesty, I only saw the first half of the movie because after reaching a little past the midway point, I couldn't think of a solitary reason why I should stick around to see the end. The strangest thing about this movie was that all the critics not only loved the movie, they spoke of it with abject wonder and pretended that it was some kind of historically significant, once in a life time cinematic achievement. Truth is, it was a hot mess.

   People hate to be wrong, but they are so far off base on this, there is no way they can avoid this determination. The real critics, the ticket buying public, have spoken. After a disappointing opening week-end, the audience has shrunken faster than a dollar store shirt after a hot rinse. That's called word of mouth, and I guarantee they not were repeating the same catch phrases that the professional critics were using, you know things like "raunchy but heartfelt', "filthy but silly fun", "raunchy but compelling", "hilarious and heart-warming", "a proudly dirty breath of fresh air", and "more heartfelt and human than you would expect from something so crass". No, the people who were lured into the theater by all the  positive reviews were telling their neighbors to not waste their money, just go home, crack a beer and watch South Park or rent any of the Hangover movies and pretend the jokes were written by and for women but involved five times more references to anal sex, blow jobs, and condoms full of cocaine.

    Those critics are going to retaliate by calling those who exposed their idiocy racist and make the claim the public hates the very idea of four Asian women being crass and having fun. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing wrong with the professed premise of the movie: a highly successful adopted Chinese lady is trying to come to terms with her identity by seeking out her birthmother in China while experiencing a road trip with her best friends. It is not only an intriguing concept, it could have actually been made into the aforementioned culturally significant, heartwarming journey of self discovery. Except it wasn't about that at all. Read the reviews yourself and count how many times they all mention and then brush off the word raunchy because that is truly what this movie is about. It's like  twelve-year-old Seth MacFarlane and Seth Rogan were given a basic premise and then challenged to out gross each other. There was one drop of heart warming self-discovery for every gallon of sex engendered body fluids; the math just don't add up.

     A few days ago, I went and watched the Fortieth Anniversary Edition of the first Vacation movie with Chevy Chase. That movie, by comparison, was hilarious. There was more humor in the scene where Chevy Chase pulls out a gun and there was the price tag hanging from the barrel than there was in the entire Joy Ride movie. I thought about how ironic it was that both movies were considered as being somewhat subversive for their time. Vacation was inspired by a short story in National Lampoon which was, at the time, the very bastion of East-coast elitist, college Frat boy humor. You couldn't make that movie nowadays, that is, of course, unless, you bleached all of the humor out of it, and replaced it with a script inspired by Good Kids, and instead of a family substituted a group of characters all drawn from different marginalized community. Pity

At least, change the title.



     

         I walked out of the El Capitan Restaurant a few days ago after eating breakfast with my brother. Our town plays music downtown with speakers on the streetlamp poles. I had remarked just a few days prior that the music seemed to be aimed at me in particular in that the music that was playing whenever we exited the building seemed to be specifically tailored from the playlist of my life. I've always had an eclectic tastes in music and have eschewed for the most part anything that people would regard as popular. In the last month or so, I've heard songs like Souvenirs by John Prine, Atlantic City by The Band, "Your Cheating Heart'; by Hank Williams and on that day the song Easy Rider by Iron Butterfly. These songs, with the exception of the William's tune, weren't ever played on mainstream radio. Sometimes, I can't help feeling that the universe is messing with me. This is principally because the things happening in the world outside the windows of the restaurant are also pretty surreal.

    The lady who I had had written about earlier for exposing herself right there on main street,  who sleeps on a narrow piece of grass between the parking lot and the sidewalk, is back to her old tricks and spends her day pacing back and forth on the sidewalk often hurling expletives at some unseen protagonist. The greatest Shakespearean actor ever couldn't  deliver a soliloquy as intensely passionate as she does on daily basis for free, and what she says is every bit as meaningful as the existential realities that lay behind Hamlet's favorite question.

         After such an auspicious beginning to my day, I really don't understand why I went to watch John Wick: Chapter 4. In my current mental/emotional state it was not something I should have done. As someone who has openly wrestled with issues of spirituality his whole life, I should have known better. There is way too much death involved in a John Wick movie. The fact that I could predict the mass killing involved is a part of the problem. John Wick is an avenging angel of death, and even as a fictional character, possesses an energy that people really should try to avoid.

       Years ago, I stopped reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in the middle of the book because of how depressed it made me feel. More recently, I quit watching The Game of Thrones because I wanted one of the characters to die so badly that it became a palpable feeling and led to thoughts on how to best kill him. I didn't want to feel that way. I don't want to think about killing anyone, even imaginary characters no matter how deserving. I should have known that any series that would kill off the Sean Bean character so early in the story would not be something I should have been watching in the first place.

          There was something interesting in the first movie of the John Wicks series. The idea of a grieving widower being forced into unbelievable acts of violence because of the selfish actions of a narcissistic young thug who kills the widower's innocent dog is very compelling and  capable of completely capturing the audience's desire for justice. It was made even more compelling by the father of the young thug being forced by his sense of filial loyalty into actions to protect his son against Wick's vengeful wrath. However, right from the beginning, the audience was asked to ignore everything that had happened prior to the movie's narrative beginning. John Wicks was an hired assassin; the father a crime boss who had raised the feckless son. So, on a deep and important level, that overwhelming desire to see the revenge narrative play out is placed on a much shakier ground and should have made it a lot harder to defend the giving in to the urge to see how the story played out. Then, when we arrive at the supposed last chapter of the series, it becomes, despite the grandiose beauty of the settings, a macabre ballet of death and destruction. It should a lot harder to justify to oneself why one would want to consume that much death and violence at a single sitting. The whole thing becomes more than a little bit reminiscent of attending the Roman Games back when people sat in the stands and watched people being butchered while they munched on peacock tongues on a stick and waved big foam rubber hands to denote who should die and who should live. And while I would definitely prefer playing cards with John Wick than Javier Bardem's character in No Country for Old Man, Wick does make that dude look like an inept Boy Scout when it comes to the taking of human life. A lot of critics believe that Bardem's character was supposed to be a symbol for death itself. If so, what does that make John Wick?

          I got up to go to the restroom three times in the movie (courtesy of a 32 oz. Pepsi Zero). Each time, I left at the beginning of a fight scene, I took my time, didn't hurry, and when I returned, the fight scenes were still in mid sequence. I've read that lot of critics felt that the actions scenes were true masterpieces of the genre. No, they were actually quite boring, and at times even pretty fucking silly. I mean how many times can someone shoot at a person point blank and miss by a mile, and then there was that effort to convince us that Wick's perfectly fitted jacket was made of bullet proof material and all he had to do was hold up the lapel and it would repel a bazooka round fired six inches from his face. I kept half expecting for the Road Runner to come bounding through the Arch de Triumph and scooping Wick off the pavement and saying Beep! Beep! to his assailants before disappearing into the Paris night.  It was so ridiculous that you could even envision the extras being killed off and then running in a crouch behind the cameras so that they could be killed a second or even third time in the same action sequence. I'm not sure how many human beings John Wick killed by the end of the fourth movie but I'm pretty sure that he has now surpassed Joseph Stalin and is pretty close to breaking the record set by Chairman Mao (I know theirs were real and his were reel, but figuratively, I'm trying to make a point here).

      The thing is it could have been a much better (and shorter) movie if they had just toned down the violence by about 99%, and used the traditional elements of fiction to create narrative tension and empathy for the main character's plight. I read a story about Charles Manson once in the desert, the cult leader and some of his minions went to an old prospector's cabin in the middle of the night to retrieve a couple of his wayward followers. Some witness said, Manson and his devotees climbed over walls and then crawled on their hands and knees toward the cabin where Charlie and the prospector engaged in a prolonged, silent battle of wills that was broken only when Charlie looked away and his followers slunk, crawled away in defeat. Not a single person was killed, nothing important was even said, yet compare the dramatic tension of that scene, however true, to the entire carnage unleashed in the Wick's series. I wish that someone would have told that story at a creative meeting where the details of this movie were being discussed over wine and cheese, and then one of them would have slapped his/her head and exclaimed, "Damn, we've been going about this all wrong!"

     Then there's the question of do we humans, in these troubled and confusing times, need to be witnessing so much death, violence and destruction at a single sitting. I've read that the ancient Greeks felt that watching the Tragedies on the stage enabled the theater-goer to wrestle with the reality of death without getting blood and gore on their clothing, a way of saying in effect that I'm not afraid of that Javier Bardem dude and thumbing their nose at death itself. They used tragic heroes to convey meaning and did not depend upon the anti-heroes that are so prevalent in culture today. I wonder what they would make of these movies and our  society's exploitation of our desire to see witness such overwhelming carnage and destruction. Would they think that we were motivated by a sense of shame for even existing? What would they think about profiting from it?

    I read on Rotten Tomatoes that the movie was  judged as 96% fresh by both the professional critics and the verified audience. That judgment is so far off base that I have to wonder if those reviews were really being written by AI and weren't coming from genuine human beings, and if even if that weren't the case, I'd still have to wonder. But, that's just me.
         

           



      

        

   I hate it when people do things like this, but have to admit at the same time, very often I take the time to check out what they have selected. I've done so enough times to believe that most of them actually put very little thought into what is essentially an effort to create some content with the clickbait ethos that the more conflict and division you create the more readers you attract. Admittedly, I  have created some things that involved using my subjective judgement of selected songs, artists, and lyrics and presenting them as being somewhat better than some others, but I don't remember ever entitling a piece "the best" or expressing the judgement that my opinions are ultimately superior to everyone else's. 

    I'm going to give it a shot though and up front I'm going to state two very good reasons why people should not lump this list in with most other clickbait fare. First of all, if it were really biased, it would be made up mainly of the recordings of the late Sixties which were the years in which most of my musical tastes were formed. Quicksilver Messenger Service's self titled album would be at the head of the list along with something by the Grateful Dead or the Rolling Stones. I loved Sixties Era psychedelic music, especially records coming out of the Bay Area and those containing the solos of iconic guitar gods like John Cipollina. As it is, none of first two even made the cut as I believe they recorded some markedly uneven material. As for the Stones, I cut them out of consideration simply because Mick Jagger once sang a song from the point of view of Satan. I haven't been able to take them seriously since, not to say that they weren't influential. There is only one album from that era, and it is the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band, a choice I believe I hardly need to defend.

     For some reason, I always downplayed my personal choice of music even to myself. I attribute it to an incident when I was young where one of my playmates called me out for being a know-it-all saying, "Why we always gotta listen to you? You ain't our daddy!" We were standing in circle in a small grove of trees, and I was explaining how we were going to reenact the Battle of Thermopylae instead of just playing war. The incident reoccurred in high school when another kid told my best friend that he didn't like me for much the same reason. I learned that people don't like people with opinions almost directly in proportion to their lack of holding an opinion of their own. For some reason, I chose to internalize that message.

    Preparing for sleep recently, I decided to listen to one of my all time favorite albums. I discovered that I didn't have it in my library. I also noticed that what I did have was a lot of  music I never listened to, music I had chosen to impress others, music that I felt would convey an image of myself as being somewhat sophisticated and eclectic in taste, but not the actual music that I loved. Most of the playlists that I had compiled over the years fit that description too. I had never made a single playlist containing just the music that I myself truly loved.

     It wasn't that hard to decide what to put on it. There weren't a whole lot of albums that I played over and over and wore out. I only had to select albums that I had had purchased more than once. These were the songs that were the film score of my life; songs attached to the strongest memories good or bad with lyrics I couldn't listen to without crying or nodding my head in abject wonder. It was somewhat harder for me to convince myself that I not only had the right to assert this subjectivity but was also deserving of doing so. This is music that made me who I am, and I should not be ashamed who knows it.

Kind of Blue (1959) - Miles Davis
I love this album. When my ex-wife passed away from brain cancer within six months of my father having died, I was also inflicted with tinnitus. I almost went insane. I couldn't sleep, sit still, watch TV or listen to music with words. I became  convinced that most of the things that came out of the mouths of human beings was pure blather. This album was the only thing that could sooth my anxieties. I could put it on, sit back and close my eyes and go somewhere else entirely. It is considered by most of those who know to be the greatest jazz album of all time, and justifiably so considering  the collection of musicians who played on it. In my opinion, it is the greatest piece of recorded music ever. It is existential in nature and speaks a language not fully of this earth. Listening, you go to strange and not unpleasant places,  and the journey is relaxing and exhilarating at the same time. I taught middle school Language Arts for thirty-one years and have long understood the simple truth that most of the young hate our music and love their own. Freddie Freeloader and Blue in Green are the two of only songs that the kids in my class ever requested that I play in the background while they worked. One of my fondest memories of teaching is the vision of a very challenging classroom of kids tapping their feet, nodding their heads, and swaying to the sound of Miles Davis and John Coltrane blowing the roof off of the room. 

Past, Present, Future (1973) - Al Stewart
 A hundred years from now, if humanity is still around, archeologists will puzzle over the discovery of this album. They will be amazed by both its brilliance and the fact that Al Stewart didn't reach greater heights in terms of public acceptance. He has achieved cult status and has his die-hards like myself, but most people who know his name consider him something of a one-hit-wonder because of the singular success of the song Year of the Cat, in my opinion, the most perfectly crafted pop song ever.  It is a pity because there are at least three songs on this album I think should rank among the greatest rock songs ever recorded starting with the eight minute opus that begins side two The Roads to Moscow a song which tells the story of Hitler's invasion of Russia through the eyes of a young Russian soldier who is trying the survive the greatest episode of death and violence in the history of the world. The Last Day of June 1934 juxtaposes the scene of Hitler and his minions driving through the mountains on their way to murder Brown Shirt leader Ernst Rohm against the scene of a party at a chateau nestled in a vineyard as the lights from the party spills over the fields.Complete with some stirring Victorian brass, Old Admirals tells the story of a seaman who devoted his entire life to the Crown who retired and has to watch the sea battles of World War I play-out from the sidelines. It contains a lovely little line where Stewart expresses the sentiment that the saddest thing to be is an, "Old admiral who feels the winds but never puts to sea." This album isn't special just because it boasts the most cogent lyrics in the history of rock music; Stewart had already recorded several folk albums prior, this time, he backed it up with some very tasty rock music provided by the likes of Tim Renwick, Rick Wakeman,  and Peter White.

Blood on the Tracks (1975) - Bob Dylan
This album changed my life. I discovered it in a bargain bin in a drug store while I waited for a prescription to be filled. I had never liked Dylan's voice enough to give him a serious listen, but it didn't take long for me to recognize his genius. At the time, the locus of my musical tastes resided in the area near my groin, and I prowled the streets of my small town with pot smoke and Deep Purple pouring out of the windows of my two-toned Buick Riviera. This album relocated the locus of my musical tastes to my brain, and within a few years, I began teaching reading at the local middle school. My great appreciation for Al Stewart and John Prime started here as did my love affair with the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Carl Jung. Dylan said that he spent some time with an artist who taught him how to takes the themes garnished from his subconscious and place them into the material plane. It's the slower songs that detail the breakup of his marriage that move me the most though. I still can't listen to the opening strains of If You See Her, Say Hello without tensing up. Its like he was writing about the breakup of my own marriage which ended tragically after thirty-one years.
 "If you get close to her, kiss her once for me
 I always have respected her for doing what she did and gettin' free
 Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won't stand in the way
 Though the bitter taste still lingers on from the night I tried to make her stay,"
I tear up regardless of where I am or who I am with. It's one thing to live with the knowledge of your own failings, but quite another to have Bob Dylan reminding you of them. Strangely enough, Dylan said once that he never completely understood the popularity of the album. It's personal, Dude; the pain of heartbreak is universal; the universe should have told you that.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band (1967) - The Beatles
There are a lot of people who feel that this album should be at the head of the list, and I wouldn't quibble with them. This is the album that took rock music out of its pelvic shaking past into the consciousness stretching future. It was the first real presentation of rock music as an art form.  It is not as personal a record as most, being in part more of a force that engendered a generational shift in human consciousness. You couldn't be young and alive at the time it was released and not notice the difference in the very essence of things as Rock music proved to even its staunchest critics that it could exist as an independent art form. A Day in the Life has to be lodged near the top of any list of all-time greatest rock songs. Consider  the opening lines.
 "I read the news today, oh boy
 About a lucky man who made the grade
 And though the news was rather sad
 Well, I just had to laugh
 I saw the photograph
 He blew his mind out in a car;
 He didn't notice that the lights had changed
 A crowd of people stood and stared
 They'd seen his face before
 Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords."
They are still jarring enough to be considered revolutionary. Just think of the all the great music written after the appearance of this song that owes its existence to these lines. 

At first, I liked the Stones a whole damn lot more than I did the Beatles. I was scruffy; they was scruffy. I was trying to figure what made the whole girl-boy work, and the people in charge kept testing us on questions like, who's better The Beatles of the Stones?  Which was basically the question to 'do all the birds like scruffy more than smooth, or the other way around'? I settled on Jagger and the scruffy more because it was more in line with my family's economic situation than anything else. This album changed that. These songs informed us that there was a whole lot more to existence than breathing, eating, having sex, and defecating. In contrast, the Stones with Their Satanic Majesties Request and especially the powerful, incessent beat of Sympathy for the Devil seemed to want to inform us all that those things should be more than enough. It's not, but it's possible to fool yourself for a while into thinking that it is. The arguments that you use to justify things to yourself are always, no matter how seemingly mundane, worthy of Shakespearean treatment. This is the message that music still needs to be sending.

Diamonds in the Rough (1972) - John Prine
I was at somebody's house reading a record review about this record in a men's magazine. It mentioned some of the lyrics to the the beautiful song Souvenirs,
"I hate graveyards and old pawn shops
For they always bring me tears
I can't forgive the way they robbed me
Of my childhood souvenirs" 
I was intrigued enough to run out and buy the record and was blown away at what I had discovered via that simple moment of chance. There isn't a single song on the record that didn't display Prine's natural ability to turn a phrase about something as modest as a break-up note into a dazzling insight into human nature. I was fortunate enough to see him in concert three times and even turned my daughters into devoted fans. We were all crushed when he died. I can't think of anyone else right off the top of my head who had put forth such a remarkable and consistent body of work.

I once got an A in a college speech class talking about the allegory in The Great Compromise, and I was in the middle of giving an eulogy for one of my childhood friends when the words from He Was in Heaven Before He Died popped into my head.
"The sun can play tricks
 With your eyes on the highway
 The moon can lay sideways
 Till the ocean stands still
 But a person can't tell
 His best friend he loves him
 Till time has stopped breathing
 You're alone on the hill"
 Imagine what Prine could have done with that image.

Loving in the Valley of the Moon (1977) - Norton Buffalo
Norton Buffalo and his band The Stampede showed up in Fresno just days after I had bought this album. I had listened to a clip of it on the headphones at a Borders store. I ran out and bought tickets to the concert, but at the last second my wife came down with a cold and couldn't go. She insisted that I give her ticket to her brother and take him. It was one of the best shows I had ever witnessed and was really excited when I came home and told her all about it. Sick as she was, her eyes lit up with joy when she saw how animated and happy I was. I remember looking at her  that in the dim light of the bedroom and being quite affected by her selflessness. Norton was the greatest harmonica player of his generation and quite the charismatic performer. For years, a local television station used his lovely instrumental Another Day when they signed off the air, and every time it reminded me of that night. I wore this album out and replaced it at least three different times. He doesn't hit a false note on it. The title song is classic, one of my all time favorites. His follow up album Desert Horizon also had its moments but just wasn't as consistent. Norton played on a lot of records and accompanied almost every well-artist in the Bay Area at one time or another. He even had roles in a couple of Hollywood movies. He discovered he had cancer in September of 2009 and died a little over a month later. I didn't hear about his death until after he was gone. It made for weird night as it brought up the memories of my wife, who had left me by that time, and mingled them with the sadness of his passing.

Rainbow Bridge (1971) - Jimi Hendrix, Caravanserai (1972) - Carlos Santana, and Metamorphosis (1970) - Iron Butterfly.
These albums are a part of a trilogy of records that me and a few friends of mine consider to be kind of holy. They came out in an era of great experimentation when most of the people I knew followed the lead of the Bay Area crowd and undertook a series of exploratory psychic journeys. These were Sixties Era voyages of discovery, largely mythological in nature. We would stack the records on the turntable and each grab a sofa and lie down and let music sail us out to sea. We usually led off  Rainbow Bridge. We would close our eyes and set out on our individual hero quests. When the record ended and the needle lifted, I would often open one eye and stare across the room into the one open eye of a fellow traveler. We never said a word but the silent gaze was as fraught with meaning as anything I've ever experienced. Then the needle would settle down unto the first groove of the next record, usually Santana's jazzy and largely instrumental Caravanserai; the eyes would close and we'd be off on the second stage of the journey. I believe that both records were the best music in their artist's repertoire. Rainbow Bridge was a posthumous album compiled from stuff Hendrix was working on when he died. Some people dismiss it because of this. I think, regardless, it his most cohesive album. He displayed some great lyrical talents in songs such as Roomful of Mirrors and I Hear my Train a Coming. I believe that Caravanserai was also Santana's best album. He was being very inventive and taking greater and greater risks and even though I have hard time listening to it straight (I admit I was twisted at the time) I well know its hidden depths and the sublime pleasures tucked away within its grooves. Iron Butterfly's Metamorphosis was usually saved for the last act of the drama. This was because the last song on the album Stone Believer was clearly the most intense song of the evening with an ascending bass line that mimicked the spiraling energy traveling up and down your spinal-chord, and it usually gently put us down somewhere in a good place. Iron Butterfly's other efforts were plodding and bloated with self indulgence and not much worth the listening. This album was special though. They had added the talents of guitarists Mike Pinera and Larry Reinhardt(El Rhino), and that addition made all the difference in the world.

O'Keefe (1972) -Danny O'Keefe
Like Al Stewart, a lot of people mistakenly think of Danny O'Keefe as something of a one hit wonder, the one hit being Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues. And like Stewart they are out of their mind. His songs has been recorded by a wide variety of well know artists including Jackson Browne's hit version of The Road. There is not a bad song on this album. He did catch lighting in bottle with this album. The others have their moments but are not nearly as consistent as this one.  I first heard it while riding in the backseat of a friend's GTO while drinking Spanada wine from a green bottle, winding through the tree lined hills on our way to a swimming hole above Three Rivers California. It was a magical day when being young and alive was the greatest thing that a human being could possibly do. A few months later, I would be wrestling on the carpet of my sparsely furnished apartment with the Cotton Festival queen who had I snatched off a float of a parade. I would break every now and then to place the needle back at the start of the beautiful Valentine Pieces at the Queen's request. It's not everyday that a vagabond like me could cuckhold a Cotton King, and it was an event that required special music which Danny O'Keefe supplied. I can never listen to that song without hearing her laughing and giggling as I tickled her ribs.

The Rest
As I said at the beginning, this is a very subjective and very personal list. I don't expect people to agree with its content. That would be pretty stupid. I did have a lot more mythical memories than just ten though, and there are times, depending on my mood, where I could replace one album with another without feeling guilty in the least. I still have a lot of albums like Jackson Browne's Running on Empty, Tower of Power's East Bay Grease, or B.B. King's Indianola, Mississippi Seeds and many others sitting on the shelves of my subconscious, each containing wonderful songs attached to powerful memories of their own.

I will close with a warning though of just how easy it is to lose sight of the most important things as we wrestle with the obstacles that life keeps throwing at us, and a few well chosen words from my good friend John Prine.

 "Memories they can't be boughten
 They can't be won at carnivals for free
 Well it took me years to get those souvenirs
 And I don't know how they slipped away from me."

     During this depressing (no other adjective works as well) period known as the Lockdown, it seems I spend as much time dodging "wokerism" with as least as much skill and acuity as I spend dodging the virus.  Hollywood, for the most part, is one of those things that I've given up during this prolonged period of emotional/intellectual fasting (Lent?) that I've been putting myself through on the offhand chance that my own lack of substance somehow aided in the creation of this mythopoetic nightmare.

     Hollywood has become as narcissistically obsessed with its own sense of virtue and self importance as those slick-haired, flatlander preachers who can go on for days about the glory of Christ without understanding said subject in the least. All the discussion about non-essential and essential workers seems to have lit a fire under its ass to the point that if an A list celebrity so much as takes the trash outside it has to be accompanied by a video lecture on the virtues of recycling. And they make it worse by pretending it's a spontaneous act borne out compassion, as if their agent weren't pushing them out the door, and the film crew, poised and waiting, was a part of the daily trash removal ritual.

      It's gotten so bad, that almost nothing that Hollywood puts out nowadays interests me in the least, and before the lockdown I loved going to movie theaters late at night and eating buttered popcorn. 

      I decided to rent the movie North Hollywood because: A) I was bored out of my mind and tired of deep reading and thinking B) everything else Hollywood has made lately is either pretentious, lightweight, or repetitious C) I like coming of age stories because of their similarity to hero quests and the message they send that with proper guidance we are all capable of overcoming our problems  and D) I love movies that are set in the back streets and seldom seen areas of big cities like New York and Los Angeles. In truth, I didn't really expect much and at the beginning, I suspected that was exactly what I was going to get. The movie starts out slowly.

        North Hollywood was made by the same people who made Mid90s, a skater flick about a young boy's search for meaning during the decade when pop culture exploded with all its flash and crass shallowness. I didn't like it when I first saw it and didn't really understand why.  I thought that it was like a lot of movies about being young and glorified aimless sex, drug use, an alcohol fueled excess, and was serving as a primer for existentialist thinking using the skater lifestyle as a method to convey the message that life has no meaning so it's up to us peons to color it up anyway we that we see fit, mainly by dulling our senses, tattooing everything in sight, and creating our own hieroglyphic understanding of the banality of life. I went back and watched it again though and came away with a different perspective. The second viewing forcefully reminding me of my own straying from the well trodden path being laid out for me by all my disinterested instructors, Sunday School teachers, and my tired, distracted parents.


         Like Stevie, the protagonist of the movie (ably played by a young Sunny Suljic), I also was searching for something else when I rejected my parent's lifestyle and whatever it was those well-intentioned adults were trying to tell me because it didn't take more than a minute to  figure out that they were every bit as confused and frustrated by life as me.  

        It seems to me, that the society of the 60s and 70s only wanted me to drink, screw, and get high. If I had to summarize the message of era as I lived it, that would be it. Eat, Drink, and have Sex because tomorrow you die. It didn't occur me until much, much later that there were many other alternate meanings contained in the events of the times. Meanings that people who were much less confused than I held on to tightly and used to guide them forward and who therefore suffered a lot less than me and my friends.

        It was the ending of the movie that changed my view the most. Stevie's mom walks into the waiting room at a hospital and sees his friends asleep and has to recognize that Stevie had managed, despite all the danger and false turns, to create a family unit out of nothing but a simple desire for acceptance.

       North Hollywood takes up that theme and runs with it. It also offers up something that has been missing from Hollywood for quite sometime, a middle ground that is not a marshy, swampland  filled with radioactive alligators and soul sucking zombies, a middle where the conflicting characters can gingerly work their way back toward each other innately understanding that it this middle that needs solidified and maybe even surrounded by a dike or two to hold back the storm waters that both mother nature and stupid sons-of-bitches unleash upon us as we set about the sowing and reaping of our own lives.

         The film juxtaposes a flashy modernity representing the future against a backdrop of Leave It Beaver neighborhoods, parent/child conflict as old as the middle of the last century, and outdated social structures and understanding to reveal the truth that the past and the future are locked in a permanent embrace which all about producing moments where we must face decisions about what we should regard as timeless, what new thing is needed to help us move forward, and what  needs to be jettisoned or buried.  I haven't seen this in a movie for quite some time. Modern movies seem to be always about the blaming, the failing, and the rejecting with the writers and  movie makers not only intent on passing out corporate culture judgement while handing out worn-out platitudes covered with bling to make them seem original, and where pushing their often insane belief systems is deemed more important than documenting life as it plays out in real time.

        The film goes against a lot of the hogwash that Hollywood has shoved down our throats for such a long-assed  time, that our fathers aren't Al Bundy's or Homer Simpson's and never really were except in the poisonous minds of Hollywood scriptwriters, ass kissers, and producers; that Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein may share male genomes, but they were never perceived as father figures (Hollywood forgetting its own role in pushing Hugh Hefner and Larry Flint as culture heroes and the extreme irony involved in shouting ME TOO from a stage at the Academy Awards where they passed out awards to all of the people who shaped that toxic culture in the first place (Thank you, Ricky Gervais), and that there is and always has been a solid middle ground where young and old not only can but must meet to learn from each other without the intersession of the high priests and priestesses of the hedonistic and power mad elites. 

      Michael (Ryder McLaughlin) the protagonist is a young man in search of a better future. In many respects, he is the continuation of the Stevie character of Mid90s. He wants to be professional skater and faces a lot of hard choices because of this dream. His father doesn't see skating as a valid career choice and urges him to find something more substantial and practical. He's lucky because he does have talent, and the talent brings him to the attention of people who have followed the career path successfully. This however creates problems with what to do about friends who are less driven to succeed and are more into skating for the simple pleasures and the distractions. This is also a throwback thematically. My generation coined the phrase Go With the Flow back in the 60s and society has suffered from it ever since It is more than somewhat refreshing to see something that points out that going with the flow usually carries one downward to the lowest levels of existence. In one of the film best performances, actor Angus Cloud powerfully portrays Walker a character who serves as the very embodiment the effects of such existentialist attitudes when combined  with hedonistic life choices. 

        Vince Vaughn plays the father in one of his best performances. There is a scene at the end that made me tear up at the recognition of the conversations that my father and I never had. My dad was a mechanic, a Dust Bowl Okie, and a working class Renaissance figure capable of building a house or taking a car apart and putting it back together. I, on the other hand, was born to read. It was always in books that soothed my anxieties and searched for truth and meaning. I've gotten to point where I realize that my Dad's knowledge of electricity and mechanical systems would have greatly enhanced my understanding of life in general, and all I ever had to do was ask him a question. He would have answered not only joyfully, but with every ounce of passion that he had in him, and it would have allowed me to share some of the things I learned from reading.

      I bought my dad a nice Fender acoustic guitar on his birthday for helping me get through college. It took his breath away when he pulled it out of the case. This movie made me realize that asking him a few simple questions would have done so much more.

       The last scene of the movie was simple yet effective as it showed Michael skating away from what could have been an explosive confrontation with his father. Echoing a similar scene in Mid90s where young Stevie and his friends are shown skating down the center of road in the awesome light of the dying sun, the scene conveys a sense of complete freedom that only comes after ridding ourself of the baggage of the past that so often clings to us like stepped-on dog shit, but only after squaring up accounts with all the good our early years had to offer. 

         

        One night, I had a long conversation with Shanks O'Toole and one of the subjects we talked about was music. We were discussing the fact that way too many people settle for what the radio and the music industry hands them and go no deeper. They are surface dwellers, so to speak, people who never dive beneath the waters to discover the treasures lying on the sandy bottom and hidden in caverns.

          We also shared glimpses into the gloomy side of things. I believe that most people, if they live any kind of a life, would know what I am talking about. Being somewhat depressed, like most other things in life, has a beneficial side in that it strips away the illusions that we use to soften the edges and cushion the blows. Being sad forces one to look at life as it really is and can make one stronger coming out of the shadows. I mention it here because it also helps shape your taste in things like movies, books, and music.

         We were talking about the songs we hated because the radio just wore them out, wearing ruts in our brains in the process. I don't know how it is now, I don't listen to radio much, I suspect it's the same. Back then if the song had just come out and worked its way to the top of the playlist, they played it over and fucking over about five minutes apart at least a thousand times, to the point that you wouldn't listen to the song if they bought your mama a new house and filled it with big screen TVs. You grimaced whenever the song came home and cursed the artist who made it down to their third generation.

          We mentioned a few of our least favorites, songs we hated with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Then we started bringing up exceptions to the rule. For example, I told him about how I listened to a mixtape of Al Stewart's music every single day while I drove to Fresno State and back.

        So, there are exceptions, and to me those songs seem to be a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Let's face it 95% of the music we've listened to will be buried in our graves, there are a few though which, somewhere down the line, someone will pick up out the heap, blow the dust off, play and say "This shit right here. This shit right here."

            I started thinking about it and thought that it would be interesting to go in search of those songs and to see what other people thought.

            These are a few of mine, in no particular order.
​

Year of the Cat - Al Stewart

       This is Al Stewart's greatest, some might say, only hit. It is nowhere near his best. I love it  though because, in my opinion, it is the most perfectly crafted pop song ever and an object of great beauty.  The opening verse, that opening verse....

        On a morning from a Bogart movie
        In a country where they turn back time
        You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
        Contemplating a crime
        She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
        Like a watercolor in the rain
        Don't bother asking for explanations
        She'll just tell you that she came
        In the year of the cat

        Stewart is idolized by his fans mainly because of his cogent lyrics. However, his backing musicians were always first rate (Peter White, Peter Wood, Tim Renwick, Lawrence Juber ), and his musical ideas were often as interesting as his words. This song is the best example of the marriage of the two.

​
Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

       I am not a huge jazz fan. Kind of Blue is the only jazz album I have ever owned. I believe it is also the greatest collection of music ever recorded. The kids in my class, who generally disliked everything not modern, liked Freddie Freeloader. Go figure.

          There was a period after I was inflicted with tinnitus, my ex died, and Nurse Ratchet type people started telling what I could and couldn't teach when I couldn't listen to music with words. Most of what was passing for music then was blather that you could dance to and reminded me way too much of the staff meetings I was required to attend. 

          My ex's passing months after my dad's passing had made me all to aware that we never really talk about the truth. It hurts way too much to even know that it's there.

          Discovering Miles Davis and Kind of Blue got me through the darkness. I don't know how. I really can't explain why. All I know is that I can still put the album on, and it will chase away the blather and the nonsense.

 

If You See Her, Say Hello - Bob Dylan

       There are times that I have to shut this song off when I hear its opening notes. Dylan owns the rights to most of the music that I love. This is the one song that is most capable of penetrating past all my defenses and reducing me to a trembling fool. It is also the one most capable of putting me within earshot of God. Well, maybe just outside of a closed door, but close enough that I can hear him talking. 

     If you get close to her
     Kiss her once for me
     I always have respected her
     For doin' what she did and gettin' free
     Oh, whatever makes her happy
     I won't stand in the way
     Though the bitter taste still lingers on
     From the night I tried to make her stay

     The lyrics to this song reveals what some people have known all along, that Dylan is a shapeshifter, and one capable of entering into the dreams of sleeping people. He stole these words from me and from the inarticulate yearnings of every other broken heart. Listening to this song, I can visualize the whole progression of my relationship with my ex from the first shy kiss till now. 

​Run - Lindsay White

         I'm not one of them fathers who run around saying that my daughter is the greatest songwriter who ever lived. She is one of my two favorite people, it goes without saying. The fact that I place her on a list which includes Dylan, Stewart, and Prine should tell her what she needs to know. 

           We are as different in our political outlooks as night and day, yet when I listen to her lyrics and her insightful metaphors, beautiful imagery and perfect similes, I know that she still sees the same world that I do although we sometimes disagree on what it means. And maybe that is how it should be.

              how do i breathe now there's no air in my lungs
              how do i climb down this ladder's out of rungs
              how do i slow down when all i ever did was
              all i ever did was run

            I've often told her this is my favorite song of hers. It reminds me of my own anxieties and how much of my  survival I owe to the flight part of the "fight or flight" scenario, a trait her mother hated. It also reminds me of the need to always make better efforts to be better. Something we do agree on.

Fish and Whistle - John Prine

      To be honest, this has not always been my favorite John Prine song. It is right now though. That's the beauty of Prine. John Prine is a like a high dollar mood ring. He could pull a lyric out his ass on just about any emotion and thought. Makes it hard to choose a favorite, but works well when you need a song because you're feeling low, you need a laugh, or are just trying to make sense of something that's just out of reach of understanding.

         However, there are two lines in this song that elevates it above most everything else he ever wrote.
             Father forgive us for what we must do
             You forgive us and we'll forgive you
             We'll forgive each other 'til we both turn blue
             And we'll whistle and go fishing in the heavens

           Those two lines should rank among the most perfect encapsulation of truth every written. They trump most everything I've ever heard a man or woman of God say on the subject. It's mankind's perfect response to our situation, and one that I'm sure that God would listen to, ponder, and say, "Well, alright then. Let me get my pole."

       I like reading about the history of both Los Angeles and San Francisco. I also love San Francisco and often wish I had moved there when I was young. Although this book tells some great stories and anecdotes about the history of how the city became what it is today, it is principally about the San Francisco of the 60s and 70s wherein it careened crazily from one extreme to the other like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

        The book has a decided liberal bent. You can tell because of what it fails to mention. On one hand, it goes out of its way to somewhat glorify the antics of the Hallinan family and their efforts to make the city a more equitable and just place to live which is all well and good, but it also downplays the role of communists like Harry Bridges to follow a party line which at that time was largely dictated by one Joseph Stalin, a man who certainly was no piker as an evil mass murderer.

     In the author's defense, he does treat the sins of Jim Jones and those who helped him gain political power unsparingly. It was only the murders two weeks after Jonestown of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk that allowed those most responsible for Jones's rise to power to go unnoticed and largely unpunished. The author was extremely fair in this regard.

        The book is also highly entertaining and very well written. However, it is the fact that it serves as a perfect illustration of the nature of duality, showing how good and evil can exist in same person, in the same historical reality, and even in the retelling of the stories that is both its strong point and its major weakness. 

      The structure of book shows how a society marked on one side by unbridled creative freedom also could contain traits of extreme narcissistic excess and evil and would inevitably evolve into putrid decadence and violence. The slant to the left, however, gives the appearance that the author is a little unwilling to look too deeply behind facades to tell a more balanced story. In short, he seems a little too enamored of the city's contrarian past, to recognize the role that such  a past plays in the problems that the city currently faces.

          The ancients would have understood the role that drugged out ecstasy plays in the search for self knowledge; they would have also been abhorred at the idea of handing it out in punch bowls without the structure and guidance to contain the flow of flood waters of the subconscious. They would have known by their understanding of the cult of Dionysus about the monsters and the violence that would be unleashed. It makes one wonder if the people who set The Summer of Love in motion understood that truth, or, if it all happened as spontaneously as they would have us all believe.

           There are several books that should be read in conjunction with the reading of The Season of the Witch. Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee is one. The book details the efforts of our government in programs that utilized LSD. Chaos, released last year, by Tom O'Neill, is another in that it presents some of the things going on at Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in a more sinister light.  One might be surprised to discover that our government was also spiking the punch bowls of unsuspecting people and also appeared to be trying to use hallucinogens to implant false memories into people. 

         I think anything that deals with the history of the Venona project would help balance out the view of this country's Cold War history where those who fought against communist infiltration are almost always portrayed as the bad guys and those who participated in espionage against our own country are considered to be naive at the very worse. There is plenty of guilt to go around from that time period, and our continuing reliance on Hollywood to tell us the way it all went down, and Hollywood's smug self-serving excuses not only hinders our ability to truly understand the era, but also cast some suspicion of its current actions and pronouncements.

          In this light, Season of the Witch successfully underscores the fact that there is both good and evil in damned near everything that enters into this world, and that is always the people in the middle who get screwed. It would have helped his message if the author had done a better job of clarifying it more simply as the formula: good things inexplicably often come out of bad intentions, and evil often grows out of well meaning people. 

            The biggest problem of this book is the naive belief that it was a Super Bowl victory that saved the city from its demons. It might have stopped the bleeding for a while but can be regarded as a cure only if you think of a band-aid as a cure. I think it is hard to look at what the city has become and not think of San Francisco as a elegant lady haunted by her past, her beauty, and her sins.

   The Turner Classic Movie channel recently ran three of the 1960s era Beach Blanket movies from back when I was a kid. God, I loved them movies back then, and I think I saw most of them because I had a this huge crush on Annette Funicello which began when she was on the Mickey Mouse Club.

    Looking back, I can't even see what I thought was so cute about her. I mean her hairdo looked about as soft and appealing as a plastic football helmet. She was supposedly out in the sun and sand all day, but that one bottom curl on her left side never moved from the first scenes of Beach Party to the ending scene of How to Stuff a Wild Bikini the last film to feature the romantic duo of Frankie and Annette.

    The genre was supposedly apolitical and many people have said that American International Pictures, the studio who invented the genre, wanted to keep things light because of the general unrest that was keeping much of the nation sleepless during the 60s. In actually, the movies are anything but mindless, I mean they are mindless, but they also contained hidden political agendas.  

       In the first place, the movies were known for their lack of adult authority figures. Placing the setting in the surf culture of Southern California gave the producers license to leave the parents of these kids back home in the Suburbs mowing their yards and hosting bridge parties. These movies fed into the fledgling youth culture that was emerging after World War Two. Some of the characters, especially the antagonists, were comic caricatures of groups and individuals who would later morph into the dirty, disenfranchised and drug addled denizens of Southern California hippy culture of the late Sixties.

        I believe it's possible to see the comic North Dakota Pete character in How To Stuff A Wild Bikini as the fictional progenitor of the living king of nightmares, Charles Manson. The movies, in general, seem to have many parallels with Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As I watched these movies, I was totally amazed at just how banal and stupid they were, and I couldn't believe that I actually watched two such movies every Saturday during my early adolescence.

       The second way that they projected a political agenda was in the unbridled Hedonism which seemed to be the theme of the entire beach movie catalogue: don't think, party all the time, and think about sex 24/7.  And that pretty much describes the 60s as I remember them. I don't think it was much of an accident that these films mirrored the same message that we were being forced fed by the media and popular culture of the day.

            There was an article in Life Magazine about Hippies and how cool and colorful they were. There was also an article and iconic cover featuring four psychedelic images of the Beatles. Manson gave the Beatles credit for being the influence of his lunatic ravings and as crazy as it sounds, he had a point. My transition from a baseball playing, book reading, clean cut kid into a pot smoking wannabe hippy, was largely engendered by those magazine covers and  articles in Life Magazine.

               In one of the articles, the authors talked about how the Hippies would smoke baked banana peels and sniff powdered nutmeg in order to get high. My mom came into the kitchen one day and saw me baking banana peels in the oven. When she asked why I was doing it, I naively told her the truth, "To get high!" She hit me on the head with a wooden spoon. I don't know if it was the blow to the head, or the content of those articles that started the change, but it wasn't long before I quit playing wiffle ball in my front yard and listening to every game Willie Mays played on the radio and began to openly seek out more covert ways to get high and listening to Mick Jagger sing about painting red doors black and trying to get me to sympathize with the devil.

           I know that were some natural juices and bodily changes that played a big role in my metamorphosis, but no other generation in American History before us had been so seduced by the Song of the Sirens, obsessed with sex, and lured away from our parents' homes by not one Pied Piper but literally hundreds of them, each attired in the clothes of clowns and jesters,  leading us on with songs about sex, drugs and freedom while holding long poles with burning joints hanging at the ends of a string out in front of us.

             It was during this time, that the producers of popular culture were constantly defending their product as saying that it only mirrored what was happening in our society, and that is still what they are saying today. Today, they might actually be right, but it is only because of the years and years that they have been pushing this lowest common denominator shit onto the airwaves, the press, and the movie theaters. In other words,  it is not much of a leap to say that they made the culture what is was, and not the other way around.

              There is one thing I didn't notice when I originally watched Beach Party, the first movie of the series, and it was the looks on the faces of the characters as they were dancing and even on the face of the legendary surf guitarist Dick Dale; they all looked constipated. I thought they were all about having fun, but apparently they were not getting enough fiber to go along with their beer. 

             The other thing I failed to notice back then, was just how fake everything was. Frankie, Deadhead, John, and the boys looked nothing like the people who really running the surfing scene back then, and most of the actors playing kids weren't even kids; John Ashley and Joel MaCrae, two of the mainstays, were only two years younger than my mom.

             And if all of this isn't enough of an argument to justify charging the producers with the crime of corrupting the morals of millions of America's minors, they did something unforgivable in four of these movies, and that was in casting Buster Keaton in them.

              Keaton probably needed the money at the time, but the sumbitches should have just gave him the money rather than to try and gain some degree of respectability for his presence in what can only be truly be described as a celluloid version of feces. Using the comedic genius, one of the truly great geniuses of film, in these movies can only be compared to getting getting Picasso drunk enough to puke on a table and then recreating and packaging the results as plastic vomit.

         I know that some people who read this are going to roll their eyes and mumble to themself, "What he's getting all worked up about? Those movies were just harmless bits of fun." All I can say in response is that if I had just kept playing wiffle ball and listening to Giant games when I had the choice, then maybe I wouldn't be living in world where it is almost impossible to escape the immature mindlessness that passes for culture these days, maybe Miley Cyrus would be in a television show where she would be playing the matronly version of Hannah Montana instead of writhing about like she lost her damn mind, there could be Broadway versions of Peter, Paul, and Mary's song catalogue, Andy Griffith could have been president, and Fred MacMurray could have been our ambassador to the UN.

       Nah, screw that! I'm just glad that we weren't subjected to the sight of Annette wearing her mouse ears on the center pages of Playboy Magazine.

         This was another book I got for a dollar at the University Women's Book Sale.  I had read it years ago and have watched the movie several times. Larry McMurtry is one of my favorite authors; he is also the author of my favorite American novel, the sprawling myth of the American West Lonesome Dove.
  
           I always had some issues with the Peter Bogdanovich's movie even though it is a great movie, one of the best. I never liked the choice of Cloris Leachman as Ruth Popper, even though she won an Academy Award for her role as the mousy wife of the brutally narcissistic Coach Popper.  My wife was a high school coach's wife, and while I was never particularly brutal, I was certainly narcissistic enough to cause her some grief. Anyways, I didn't think Leachman was pretty enough for the role. Ruth Popper was meant to be a trampled flower. I don't think Leachman played her with enough life left in her to attract a boy like Sonny.

           I also felt that the movie took it way too easy on Coach Popper. The moviegoer couldn't get inside his head to hear those interior monologues that make him out as a monster. In a sense, it is his story that is being told. McMurtry was onto this toxic masculinity stuff a long time ago. Coach Popper is a monster who cares only about one person, his selfish, fat-assed self. It doesn't matter who he ruins or destroys, as long as no one questions his right to serve as a role model to Thalia's young men. 

             Yes, I said role model. Sometimes they don't have to be good people. We can just as easily decide to be not like someone as be like them.  I have a belief that McMurtry read Fred Gipson's classic Old Yeller growing up. I would bet on it. The juxtaposition of Coach Popper's character, or lack thereof,  up against that of Sam the Lion looks to be borrowed from Gipson placing the slobbering, selfish Bud Seary up against the selfless, polite Burn Sanderson.

               I always taught that the Gipson placed them side by side like that to show young Travis Coates how he should act. Gipson gives him a choice, behave like Searcy and be universally loathed and avoided, or behave like Sanderson and become loved, respected, and admired.

             There is also a deeper, more hidden message in all of this juxtaposing. In Sam the Lion's case it is how much it hurts sometimes to be good. That's the same message of Christ.  We live in an age where Happy Meals and ice cold Coca Colas are said to be the cure for all our ills, and that happiness is what we seek on this earth and basically anything goes in our pursuit of it.

              Nothing can be further from the truth.  Ronald McDonald, in essence, is the Antichrist and Coke is his beverage of choice. Maybe he's not the real one, maybe he's just a cousin, or maybe he's only a piece of him, but the idea that happiness is  truth and the real reason for being is as bogus as store bought homemade biscuits.

                 Yet, the character I feel the most empathy for is not Ruth Popper as she still has a tiny sliver of hope, a glimmer that keeps her afloat. Coach Popper is the lost soul here, McMurtry reveals that Coach's voice is an echo coming out of the Pit, a hell he arrived at without even knowing there were other choices.

           All he ever wanted to do was be the Marlboro Man. It is an interesting note that McMurtry never says that the anecdote to Toxic Masculinity is wearing skinny jeans and buns on top your head or going along with the crowd no matter how stupid they fucking are. He makes it perfectly clear that real men tear off pieces of themselves and give up their dreams of glory to feed and bind the wounds of others.

                Salvation is not without scars. That line comes from one of my daughter's songs. Sam the Lion is the true role model in that he gave up his own chances at happiness to try to make the world a better place to live. He was kind, understanding, and generous to a fault.

               McMurtry has used this all suffering hero many times, most memorably in Captain Call of Lonesome Dove. But there's also a bittersweet chastisement involved.

​            In this book, Sonny,  soiled but still innocent, returns to Ruth Potter, seeking motherly solace as much as sex, knowing full well that their relationship will never end well; it was in fact incestuous. To become his true self, he needed to man the fuck up and to go help save Jacy from her own destructive nature. The sins of Sam's self sacrifice, yes, there is such a thing, and his failure to help Jaci's mother Lois avoid her fate are revisited upon Sam.

               Men are too often tied to the ground where they fell out their mother's womb, and the umbilical cord only stretches to the city limits sign. Sam needed to have left Texas and taken Lois with him. Sonny needed to drive faster and further when he had the chance but stopped in hope of sleeping with her and staking his claim instead of saving her from her destiny. Jacy tried to tell him as much.

               In Lonesome Dove, Captain Call would never acknowledge that he fathered a son from a whore. It is one of the most compelling situations in all of literature. Men are taught that we have to be perfect, but all we really need to learn is that it is our scars that make us men. It is the holes in the palms of our hand, and not our perfections that really matter.

                A sign of a great book is that there are other stories involved, little side streets off the main road that are as every bit as interesting as the story being told. McMurtry is a master of positioning these stories, and alluding to their existence in the thoughts, behaviors, and dialogue of his characters.