Lawrence Ferlinghetti Dead at 101

The Beat poet and founder of City Lights bookstore and imprint inspired artists from Bob Dylan to Cyndi Lauper

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

Bernie Sanders Interview Punks At the Mall

 

Bernie Sanders, mayor of Burlington, interviews punks at a local mall

(1988)

Rochester, New York Midtown Plaza 1963

documentary/propaganda film about Rochester, New York

(1963)

 

Bookwars

documentary film about book sellers on the streets of New York

directed by Jason Rosette (2000)

 

Book Review

I, Robot

by Isaac Asimov

     Isaac Asmov had a good idea of where the relationship between humans and technology was heading back in the 1950s. This is clearly demonstrated in his book I, Robot. Halfway in between a short stories collection and a novel, it is a book that uses recurring characters to portray the evolutionary trajectory of robots and the people who work with them to build a more highly advanced society.

Each story represents a step in the progression of robots in their development. These stories are framed as reminiscences of a robot psychologist named Susan Collins as told while being interviewed by a researcher. Dr. Collins herself is the main character in several of the stories.

It is fitting that a book about the development of technology would begin with the theme of childhood and so this is what I, Robot does. The first story is about a child and her relationship to a rather unsophisticated robot. Being a sentimental type of a story, this book would have gone downhill quickly if Asimov had not taken it up to another level. The engineering team of Donovan and Powell are introduced at this point. The stories “Runaround” and “Catch that Rabbit” are the types of problem solving stories that were common in the Golden Age of science-fiction. The team are faced with a dilemma and they have to use their scientific reasoning skills to solve their problem. Both stories confront the issue of robot irrationality; their robots are intelligent enough to work independently according to programming commands but sometimes the programming causes contradictions that cause the robots to stop working effectively.

“Reason” is also a story where Donovan and Powell face a potentially deadly dilemma; one robot has put his reasoning faculties to work and, like early human beings, arrived at religion as an answer for his own existence. The robot’s new religion bears an uncanny resemblance to Islam. No doubt, this was a joke on Asimov’s part. The two engineers try to use rationality and empirical science to prove to the robot that his religion is the product of faulty reasoning but the robot’s primitive mind is unable to draw the right conclusions. At this point the robots become a reference point to the humans that create them so that Asimov can make statements about human nature.

In the remaining stories, Dr. Susan Collins takes over as the main character. Some of her stories continue on with the problem solving structure that Asimov utilized so masterfully. By this stage, the robots have begun taking on some distinctly human characteristics. One robot learns how to lie for the sake of not hurting the feelings of the scientists at the corporation that created him. In another story, one robot becomes dangerous when he feels humiliated and envious, In “Escape” a fully self-conscious robot designs a perfect space ship and plays a practical joke on the engineering duo of Donovan and Powell by sending them off into outer space without explaining to them what is going on. These stories are not just about artificial intelligence though; they make statements about human nature and the limitations of the human mind. Dr. Collins is in constant conflict with her colleagues who think she is psychologically disordered. These same colleagues are unable to solve problems because their own emotions and shortsightedness interfere with their reasoning abilities.

This book ends with the stories “Evidence” and “The Evitable Conflict”. The former story is about a robot who becomes so human-like that it is impossible to tell the difference between man and machine. He runs for public office and gets confronted by a sleazy politician who wants to expose his secrets in order to win the election. The latter story is about how artificial intelligence has grown to become so powerful and so perfect that it runs the world as a smoothly functioning cybernetic utopia. The robots have become so perfect that they have found a way to identify agitated humans and remove them before they begin to introduce too much disruptive noise into the system. This is not a nightmare scenario though, as the robots have made the world function so perfectly that people feel no need to rebel against anything. Isaac Asimov’s take on a technopoly could be criticized for being overly optimistic. Maybe he could have taken a tip from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and come to the conclusion that conflict is a necessary part of human societies because without it we stagnate and never make any progress or even find meaning in the lives we live.

This cybernetically efficient conclusion is the logical outcome of a book of this sort. Asimov’s sentences are as smooth and polished as the components of a brand-new engine. He wrote stories that are clear, compact, complete and easy to read without lacking depth or complexity. There are no rough edges or frayed corners and even the descriptions of the messiness of human emotions is direct and without any unnecessary details. Maybe I, Robot is a little too polished. Its perfection is an imperfection at times.

In his day, Isaac Asimov had a clear understanding of the direction artificial intelligence was going in and he used his imagination to examine where it would end up. Along the way he raises important points about human society and whether we can even comprehend the technology we create. The fact that computer programmers don’t entirely understand how algorithms work after their software has been wound up and set to go just shows us that Asimov had some kind of prescient insight that a lot of other writers never had. Even if today’s robots and AI don’t look and act exactly the way Asimov predicted, this book still forces its readers, in a sane and healthy way, to question what our relationship to technology really is. These questions are still relevant today.

Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1968.  

 

Book Review

Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism

by Elaine S. Hochman

     At the end of World War I, during the heady days of the Weimar Republic, a new art movement was born. It was called Bauhaus and its founding member was Walter Gropius. Elaine S. Hochman, in her book Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism, gives an historical account of this seminal avant-garde school. She says, however, little about the art they produced and instead orients the narrative to the internal and external political problems that they faced.

Long before the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder got coined to describe the aftereffects of combat, Walter Gropius felt traumatized after fighting for Germany in the trenches of World War I. He nearly got killed several times but he turned out to be one cat that never used up all his nine lives. After his tour of duty ended, he thought there must be more to life than war and set out to found a new art movement. He went to the conservative but cultured city of Weimar and took over an already-existing school and renamed it Bauhaus. The approach was less theoretical and more practical in its method of artists experimenting in a workshop setting to bring out their inner states of emotion. In the beginning, Expressionism, Constructivism, and De Stijl were the main inspirations. Though the school did not teach classes in architecture at first, Gropius believed that all art forms signify and culminate in that discipline since its public display made art available to all people. Bauhaus was all about the transformation of society by making art available to every ordinary man or woman on the street. The school attracted some prominent avant-garde artists like Luwig Kircher, Vassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Mies van der Rohe, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who all came to be employed as teachers.

The Weimar Republic was an experiment in liberal democracy and it got off to a turbulent start. The centrist political parties had a difficult time holding the government together while communists, anarchists, and right-wing extremists fought in the streets. The Bauhaus was publicly funded and government battles were fought over what to do with the socialist utopian art institute. Meanwhile, internal strife involving different factions of the faculty and the students made internal management a dilemma as well. Eventually the city of Weimar told them to leave. Hochman’s account of Weimar politics is not always clear; a conscientious reader might want to look up some information about what was going on at that time in Germany to make the book a little less muddled.

In another region of Germany, the city of Dessau invited Gropius to open Bauhaus there. Dessau was a run-down place with high unemployment and rising rates of poverty. The mayor wanted to rebuild it and thought an up-and-coming art school would attract the attention and funding that they desired. It was there that architecture became a prominent part of the Bauhaus curriculum. The school came up with a plan to design student and worker dormitories that were cheap, easy to assemble, aesthetically pleasing, and functional. But the apartments turned out to be awkwardly designed spaces for living and the local population did not take kindly to the special treatment they thought the Bauhaus associates were getting. The political and managerial strife started up again and Walter Gropius was forced to step down. When the Nazis came to power, they closed the school permanently.

Bauhaus artists found a new life in America. They had a major influence in design and architecture. Ironically, their socialist ideals of making mass produced household goods and cheap, functional architecture found fertile ground in the capitalist system of the U.S.A. Anytime you see the smooth cladding of a skyscraper, a factory manufactured suburban house, or the products in a branch of IKEA or Bed Bath and Beyond, you are witnessing the long term effects of Bauhaus.

Hochman’s book gives a detailed account of what went on with Bauhaus. It is primarily a book about politics and educational management. Unfortunately, there is very little she says about any of the art that Bauhaus produced. For such an influential art movement, she does not give it adequate attention, and actually almost no description, of what the art of Bauhaus looked like. She provides no analysis of the architectural style they became famous for nor does she say much about the household consumer goods they also brought into the marketplace. Her thesis is that the activities of Bauhaus reflect the events and attitudes of the Weimar Republic but that should be revised since the book is more about how Bauhaus was thrown back and forth, sometimes violently, by the different political teams of that era without any regard for the practices, intentions, or theories of the Bauhaus artists themselves.

For what it is, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism gives a detailed account of what happened with this avant-garde art movement, even if it is a dry read. It is, however, not a good introductory text. With so little attention given to their art, it is something that will appeal more to people who are familiar with Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic already.

Hochman, Elaine S. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. Fromm International, New York: 1997.

 

Larry Flynt, ‘Hustler’ Founder and First Amendment Activist, Dead at 78

His famed legal battles — which he took to the Supreme Court — are memorialized in the 1996 film ‘The People Versus Larry Flynt’

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

The Brotherhood

 

The Brotherhood

documentary film about the Universal Brotherhood

Holy Ghost People

 

Holy Ghost People

documentary film about snake handling Christians

directed by Peter Adair (1967)

Book Review

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964. Dan Mannix’s Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower has got to be one the greatest books chronicling carnival sideshow life. The narrator, named Slim in this account, starts as a young college student whose interest in the occult leads him to visit a traveling carnival. When watching a performance, a fire eater accidentally sets himself on fire. Slim volunteers to learn the trade and replace the injured man. What follows is the story of the carnival and the lives of its performers.

Slim is possessed of an insatiable curiosity for those he travels with. He recounts the details of their life stories and reasons for choosing to live as transients. The sideshow is run by Krinko, an Indian fakir also known as The Human Pincushion. He sticks pins through his flesh, eats glass, and climbs a ladder made of swords. There is also a fat lady, a tattooed man, a cowboy performer from New York City and his fourteen year old girlfriend, and the Ostrich, a Viennese man who can swallow just about anything and regurgitate it. This is lowbrow entertainment at its best.

Slim’s mentor is an old trickster with a long beard named the Impossible Possible who runs a gambling booth that is set up to suck as much money out of the marks as possible. The Impossible Possible has worked in all aspects of carny life and has lots of stories to tell. He is a bit of a psychologist too, explaining to Slim that being a conman means feeling a bit of sympathy for the people he rips off. He also complains about people who try to cheat on the carnival games, explaining with a straight face that he dislikes dishonest people while his whole livelihood revolves around tricking everybody to make money. But this is an insight into carny ethics. There is a definite line between the carnies and their marks and that line delineates loyalty to their own tribe. Everybody on the other side is fair game and the carnies take sides with each other whenever there is a conflict with the outsiders, no matter what the dispute is about.

Slim himself is an unusual character. He is taller than everybody and tries to learn all the stunts that they perform. He starts as a fire eater then moves on to sword swallowing and swallowing neon lightstoo. Other tricks that he attempts are less successful, especially the mentalist mind-reading performances which are too easy for the audience to see through. But his quest to master all aspects of carny life are what give this book is structure. By learning all the tricks of the trade we learn how each stunt is done. While some are fraudulent, others are actually not deceptive and incredibly dangerous as well.

What really give this book its charm is not just the way in which Slim’s education unfolds; as he encounters all the different transients he has each one tell their own story and philosophy on life. All of them love being traveling performers because it gives them a chance to live the way they want to. They are proud of their outsider status and share a supportive community for the misfits of American society. America has always been a country of mass conformity but along the way it has also produced some of the most fascinating counter-cultures in the history of humanity. This book is yet another testament to how liberating it can be to live outside the margins of the dull, gray mainstream full of lifeless people sluggishly shuffling along because they can’t think of anything better to do with themselves.

Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower is a first-rate account of a vanishing aspect of American culture. With its vivid portrayal of the traveling life, it is sometimes light and sometimes dark. It is sometimes sordid, sleazy and even violent but it is never sensational or sentimental. Dan Mannix simply wrote, with honesty, about what he encountered while working with the carnival. There probably is no other book about the carny lifestyle that is this complete.

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964.

 

When the Frequency for Tuning Instruments Became a Grand Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theories are like blockbuster Hollywood movies. Instead of the painful, confusing tedium of historical detail that meets us when we try to understand the world, they offer spectacle, clear dichotomies of good and evil, the promise of redemptive resolution. If only, say, we could rid ourselves of scurrilous figures behind the scenes, we could get back to the garden and make everything great. Or, if only we could change the frequency of standard musical pitch from 440 Hz to 432 Hz, we could throw off the yoke of Nazi mind control, experience pure meditative bliss, open our root chakras, and…. Wait… what? 

Read the full article on Open Culture

 

Here’s What Happens to a Conspiracy-Driven Party

The modern GOP isn't the first party to embrace huge conspiracies. But the lessons should be sobering

Read the full article on Politico

 

Sun Myung Moon: Emperor Of the Universe

 

Sun Myung Moon: Emperor Of the Universe

documentary film about the Unification Church

Book Review

The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

     Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a broad, sprawling epic of a novel that details the education of Hans Castorp, a naive young man who travels to Berghof, a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin for three weeks. At least, he intends to visit for three weeks but that short time turns into a seven year residency. Hans Castorp encounters several people while there, each one representing a different facet of European life before the start of World War I. The themes of life, death, illness, music, and how they all interact as manifestations of time are examined through the characters as he listensto each one speak.

The resort village of Davos-Platz is the setting. That is the same Davos where economic forums for the most elite political and economic leaders of the world hold regular conferences to discuss the regulation of the world and how they can foster economic growth. Of course, this novel has nothing directly to do with that but Berghof is a place where the rarefied essences and values of the European continent are brought together. The fact that these essences encounter each other in a sanatorium may be an indication that Mann thought of Europe as being a little sick in its time. Maybe it is just a little sick since Berghof also has the ambiance of Elysian Fields with its natural setting and the daily routines that revolve around relaxation, eating, and leisure time. Caught somewhere between Heaven and Hell, Berghof is a comfortable corner of Purgatory. It is the post-Descartes mind and spirit of Europe, cut off from the ordinary lives of those in the flatlands below, a contrast that is referred to often throughout the book. Hans Castorp is definitely a man of the flatlands and his placement in the Magic Mountain is accidental and irregular; he is a common man who does not fit in where he has landed. But there he is, finding comfort where he doesn’t belong. He exists in an in between state like his temperature which is too high to indicate health but not high enough to indicate sickness.

The people Hans Castorp encounters in Berghof symbolize the European values of the times as Mann conceived them. In this way, they bear some resemblance to the Higher Men that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra encounters in his ascent. The first important person he meets up with is his cousin Joachim Ziemssen. Castorp arrives at Berghof to visit him and ends up getting more entangled in the society of the patients then he had intended. But his main purpose for visiting is to see his cousin. Joachim represents duty. He speaks very little, does everything he is told, and follows Hans Castorp around no matter where he goes. There is not much more to him than that. He is like a familiar spirit that does all the work that his master magician commands him to do.

That is significant because Mann wrote this novel under the influence of not just Nietzsche but also Goethe and there are some references to Faust throughout. Zarathustra blended with the Higher Men to contemplate wisdom but Hans Castorp is no Zarathustra since he accumulates information rather than achieves wisdom. In this regard, he is more like Faust learning from his mentor Mephistopheles. The Italian character of Settembrini encounters Hans and Joachim while they are strolling in the woods. He is first introduced under the name Satanas and later referred to as lucifera, the Latin name for Lucifer the Light Bringer. In one passage Hans Castorp is relaxing in his darkened room when Settembrini enters, turns on the light, and begins lecturing the young man. Settembrini takes on the role of teacher and philosophical mentor to Hans Castorp.

Settembrini the contrarian represents post-Enlightenment humanism. He is a freethinker, an individualist, and a revolutionary. He believes in the equality of all men and all nations. He is also a Freemason and an encyclopaedist who has taken on the job of compiling all the literary works that deal with themes of sickness. Like all people, he is full of contradictions. For example, he preaches about individual liberty and freedom of choice but tries to shelter Hans Castorp from ideas that contradict what Settembrini believes. At times he seems to be on a mission to indoctrinate the younger pupil who does not have enough intellectual prowess to think for himself.

There is one man that represents everything Settembrini opposes, or at least that is the idea. That man is Naphta. The two men argue constantly but there are times when the two contradict themselves and defend ideas that the other supports, albeit dressed up in a different vocabulary. Their argumentation goes in circles like a merry-go-round. Naphta is an ethnic Jew who belongs to the Jesuit order and has sympathies with Marxism and Communism. Despite these odd contradictions, his philosophy is surprisingly coherent since he represents collectivism and totalitarianism. He believes the masses crave slavery and domination. He also believes that those closest to God have the right to rule through cruelty, war, tyranny, and brutality. In a lot of ways, Naphta predicts the rising tide of fascism that would reach its peak in World War II while Settembrini anticipates the triumphant system of liberal capitalism that won in the end. Ironically, Naphta, despite his Jesuit vow of poverty, is a materialist who lives in comfort and luxury while Settembrini, in his threadbare clothing, lives a humbler existence with less amenities while professing the benefits of wealth. Uncertainty is a theme that runs through the whole book.

Two other characters of note are the sanatorium’s two doctors, Dr. Krokowski and Director Behrens. Krokowski bears a passing resemblance to Rasputin and represents the fledgling practice of psychoanalysis. In one of his educational lectures, he explains to the patients that physical illness is a manifestation of repressed sexual desire. This concept is a perennial theme throughout the book. In one passage, a woman describes coughing and sneezing in a way that is highly suggestive of orgasmic release. Also notice the times when Hans Castorp’s temperature rises and how the thermometer is described. Towards the end of the story, Krokowski shifts his interest from psychoanalysis to Spiritualism and begins conducting secret seances with the patients. Here the age old connection between sexual frustration and supernaturalism is given full but subtle expression.

On the other hand, Director Behrens is all about the science of the body. His medical practices are questionable and there are many suggestions that he is using sickness as a way of imprisoning the patients in Berghof. Every visitor who comes to the sanatorium gets the same introduction in which Behrens tells them they are anemic and after Hans Castorp decides to take up longer residence there until he is cured, Behrens tells him that is doing a good job of learning how to be a patient. The mercurial and unpredictable director is like another teacher to Hans Castorp; when he and his cousin Joachim visit Behrens’ quarters, they are introduced to a bit of orientalism by being led into a room decorated with Middle Eastern and Asian décor. They smoke tobacco and drink liquor while Behrens gives them a long-winded explanation of human anatomy and physiology. While the reader may ask the question of whether Hans Castorp’s mild illness is the result of all the smoking he does, it becomes obvious that Behrens symbolizes the modern rise of scientific medicine and evolutionary biology. The exotic setting is an indication that knowledge of the human body is just as exotic to Hans Castorp as Persian carpets and Egyptian snuff boxes.

Hans Castorp binge reads anatomical textbooks during his relaxation time before encountering the woman he desires, Clavdia Chauchat, during a carnival party on Walpurgis Night, in further reference to Goethe’s play Faust. Clavdia is an exotic Russian patient whose French husband is stationed in remote Dagestan. He is infatuated with her because she reminds him of a Kyrghyz boy he was acquainted with as a child. Is his love for her a result of sublimated homosexual urges? The reader can never be sure. During the carnival party, Hans Castorp tries to seduce her by paraphrasing passages from his anatomy textbooks. Clavdia is amused but the worldly Russian doesn’t fall for the naive and awkward German. In this passage, Hans Castorp shows that he can collect knowledge but he does not know how to use it effectively. He is a collector but he is not a curator.

Clavdia Chauchat leaves the sanatorium the day after carnival but returns later with the imposing figure of Mynheer Peeperkorn. This aging sea captain holds lavish parties with food and champagne that last throughout the night. He is an incarnation of the Dionysian principle and represents the supremacy of the emotions. Hans Castorp has gathered around himself a group of friends but Peeperkorn takes them all under his wing. He leads them along the way that a conductor leads an orchestra. None of their idiosyncrasies or arguments matter when Peeperkorn is around because his passion for hedonistic pleasures overrides anything they think.

Hans Castorp’s peak as a student of life comes later in the story when he gets lost while skiing during a snowstorm. He passes out in the snow and has a dream and epiphany that summarizes all he has learned since he came to the Magic Mountain. But the profound sensations of the dream are deflated because the realization he has, that death is an intrinsic part of life and not extraneous to it, is really just a reiteration of something Settembrini told him in an earlier chapter of the novel. Later in the story, Hans Castorp has another realization while listening to music on a phonograph at the sanatorium but ultimately, it is just the same realization he had during the snow storm. Thus, Hans Castorp gathers information but never develops wisdom. He leaves Berghof after seven years without developing a world view of his own. His situation appears to be a result of his never having made any consequential decisions for himself. He never chooses to leave Berghof and he never makes a decision about what to do with all the information he has accrued. Such is the collective dilemma of modern Europeans at the turn of the 20^th century.

The Magic Mountain is an endlessly intriguing novel. It is symphonic in its structure with each section being a separate movement while the themes and threads are subtly woven together in a streams of language and ideas that rise and fall like waves of literary music. But this scope is also the novel’s biggest flaw. Sometimes it is just too long and detailed for its own good. The arguments between Naphta and Settembrini, for example, could be cut in half while still getting their point across. This book was not designed for the 21^st century reader. But that also makes its rewards all that much better. You have to work hard to gain anything of value in this world and while this novel may be overly broad and wide, the insights and play of ideas make this long haul of a read worth the effort of those brave enough to take it on.

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Vintage International, New York: 1996.

 

Book Review

Rockabilly

by Harlan Ellison

     At the start of Rockabilly (later reprinted as Spider Kiss) by Harlan Ellison, the rock and roll crooner Stag Preston is finishing a concert. He spots an attractive young girl in the audience and wants to sleep with her. He approaches his public relations agent, Shelly Morgenstern, and demands that he approach her with the message that the famed singer wants to see her backstage. The PR man is not happy about this but goes along with it anyway. So the stage is set for this novel about the relationship between the two men. On one hand, this is the story of Stag Preston’s rise and fall and on the other hand it is about the existential crisis that Shelly Morgenstern has in his relationship with the rock star. The latter theme is actually the more prominent of the two.

Morgenstern is a New Yorker who works for Jack Freeport, a sleazy businessman who sometimes involves himself in the entertainment industry. Shelly Morgenstern overhears Stag Preston playing guitar and singing while sitting in on a poker game in Kentucky. He immediately recognized the talent and takes him to meet Freeport who also realizes that they have something big on their hands.

Stag Preston proves to be truly gifted and becomes a teen idol. He later stars in a movie, furthering his fame and making people realize that he was a natural actor, too good to be in such a schlocky movie. But off stage and off camera he is a complete lout, hard-drinking, violent, obnoxious, irresponsible, and addicted to fast and easy sex with naive groupies.

Shelly Morgenstern’s job as public relations agent is to manage Stag Preston’s image. In reality, this turns out to be little more than a highly-paid babysitting position that involves getting the infantile musician out of all the trouble he makes. Morgenstern gets pushed to the limits of his tolerance after some embarrassing incidents. One is when Stag gets a teenage African-American girl pregnant; FReeport insists on paying for an abortion and a non-disclosure agreement that cost him more money than he wants to pay. But more importantly, Morgenstern is disgusted by the racist comments that Stag Preston makes about her and the sexist way he thinks of her as less than human. Another time, Stag Preston gets all drugged up and allows himself to be filmed for a porn movie with two women. The man who arranged the situation threatens to release the film footage to the public if hush money isn’t paid in regular installments. The worst episode comes when a teenage girl dies because Stag Preston tried to rape her.

While the action of the story is provided by Stag Preston, the moral commentary is personified by Shelly Morgenstern. As the plot progresses, the PR man becomes increasingly morally conflicted about his relation to Stag. He is dependent on the rock star’s career to maintain his comfortable lifestyle but he feels like he is defending the actions of a monster to do so. He feels like he is a leech or a parasite but also knows that Stag Preston does not have the mental capacity to manage his life on his own. Shelly Morgenstern gets severely depressed and his dilemma is whether or not he should continue his relationship with Stag.

Halfway through the book, Shelly compares himself to Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein and Stag Preston to the monster. Notice that the monster was created by the doctor and in parallel, the agent Shelly Morgenstern created the career and image of Stag Preston. Here we can take into consideration that Shelly Morgenstern is obviously modeled on the author, Harlan Ellison. By following this line of reasoning, we can interpret this novel as an examination of the relationship between an artist and their art. It examines the responsibilities a writer has when creating a character. Stag Preston’s public persona is one of being charming and wholesome; this persona was created by Shelly Morgenstern while in reality Stag Preston is an oaf, a loser, and a sorry excuse for a human being. The image does not fit the reality and Shelly Morgenstern is responsible for managing the image. So if Shelly is a stand-in for Harlan Ellison, we get the existential dilemma of the new author standing at the crossroads of his future career. The young and obviously talented Harlan Ellison, knowing that he had potential, could have been considering whether he wanted to follow one path of writing trashy pulp novels at the margins of the noir genre and making some easy money or the other path of using his skills to take a more nuanced and meaningful look at the human condition. The way that Shelly resolves his own conflict in the end says a lot about where Harlan Ellison would be going as a writer in the future.

Rockabilly is an energetic novel but it certainly has its flaws. The trajectory of Stag Preston’s career and artistic development is glossed over and related in a rapid succession that sometimes has the feel of amateurish journalism. The relationship between Stag and Shelly is not always well-drawn either. The two men at several points say that they are good friends and, despite his misgivings, Shelly sometimes claims to admire Stag. But most of the dialogue involving the two is argumentative; they fight all throughout the book. The warmer side of their relationship is never fully realized and it is hard to understand why the two think of each other as friends. A passage or two detailing the affection they have for one another would have given the story a necessary depth and complexity, the absence of which makes the story a little hard to believe at times.

Harlan Ellison would go on to write bigger and better stories but Rockabilly is well worth reading. Its depiction of the celebrity lifestyle and the entertainment industry is brutally frank and at times disgusting. Stag Preston is a rock star archetype and his personality would later show up in real-life characters like Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, and Sid Vicious. Ellison’s foreshadowing of things to come is uncanny. This novel is a truly American story. While that may be a discredit to its characters, it is a credit to Ellison’s talents as a writer, even at such an early point in his career.

Ellison, Harlan. Rockabilly. Gold Medal Books/Fawcett Publications Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut, 1961.

 

Happy Inauguration Day 2021

Goodbye donald trump

worst president ever

 

Bauhaus: The Face Of the 20th Century

documentary film (1994)

 

Phil Spector, Famed ‘Wall of Sound’ Producer Convicted of Murder, Dead at 81

Revolutionary producer behind some of pop music’s most enduring songs dies from natural causes while serving prison sentence

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

Blank Space QAnon. On the Success of a Conspiracy Fantasy as a Collective Text Interpretation Game

QAnon – the movement according to which Donald Trump wages a secret war against satanic and pedophilic elites – is not just a run-of-the-mill conspiracy belief, but functions as a collective text interpretation game. This is also the reason for his ridiculous success, which now includes the German Reichsbürger [people who believe that the German Reich still exists and that the Federal Republic of Germany is a company with no legal basis registered in Frankfurt] and the Corona denier scene. The fact that QAnon’s origin story was collaged from literary and popular cultural sources – among them a collective novel published in 1999 also by the co-author of this article – does not throw off its followers.

Read the full article on Giap

 

New York Dolls Guitarist Sylvain Sylvain Dead at 69

R.I.P. Sylvain Sylvain

“His role in the band was as lynchpin, keeping the revolving satellites of his bandmates in precision,” Lenny Kaye writes of pioneering musician who had been battling cancer

 Read the full article on Rolling Stone