Bread And Puppet Theater At The Boston Center For The Arts

Bread And Puppet Theater "Tear Open The Door Of Heaven" At The Boston
Center For The Arts

http://www.openmediaboston.org/node/1122

by Dave Goodman
Jan-27-10

BOSTON/South End - This week, for the fourth winter in a row at the
Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, the Glover, Vermont based Bread
and Puppet Theater troupe present their subversively entertaining
brand of politics and punditry.

Members of the year round Bread and Puppet collective again will be
joined this week by scores of local actors and performers (a mix of
pros and mostly amateurs who have been rehearsing all week at the
BCA) who responded to the annual call for volunteers.

Led by their 75 year old founder, puppeteer and muralist Peter
Schumann, the Bread and Puppet residency will include "Tear Open The
Door of Heaven," Thursday through Sunday at 7:00pm and the
kid-friendly "Dirt Cheap Money Circus" on Saturday and Sunday at 4:00pm.

On Monday, Schumann led an audience around the circumference of the
Cyclorama and discussed his murals. This year the display is called
"Relics of the Paper Mache Religion." Unlike past years, when he
agreed to participate in public forums about art and politics,
Schumann opted not to hold a symposium this week, according to
publicist Mary Curtin.

For the past two years, local supporters of Israel have loudly
protested Schumann's attention to the plight of Palestinians living
in Occupied Gaza and the West Bank.

The mural display will be free and open to the public all week during
regular Cyclorama hours: 9:00am-5:00pm.

During Monday's opening, members of the troupe were joined by local
musicians for a performance of composer Mike Romanyshyn's "Music for
Six Clarinets and Percussion." Romanyshyn, also a puppeteer, started
as a member of Bread and Puppets while living in Vermont in 1975 and
performed with them for 17 years.

It's not unusual to hear present and former troupe members say how
much Bread and Puppet has influenced their lives in a multitude of
positive ways.

About 50 people gathered to hear Romanyshyn and his clarinet, along
with members of the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass
Band, which will provide musical accompaniment to both the evening
Bread and Puppet shows and the weekend circuses.

A Bread and Puppet audience invariably includes activists
representing a rainbow of progressive movements. David Fillingham of
Veterans for Peace wore a T-shirt with an anti-war message and
engaged a reporter in a discussion about Smedley D. Butler, the
Marine Major General, anti-imperialist, and author of the 1935
published speech "War Is A Racket."

There's nothing small about a Bread and Puppet Theater Performance.
In order to help demonstrate how grand are some of these puppets,
Monica Raymond of Cambridge agreed to pose next to one of the
troupe's corporate CEO characters.

But for nearly 47 years it's been Peter Schumann and his band of
merry performers who have brought an award-winning and unparalleled
energy and exuberance to the Bread and Puppet performances. Their
mere presence, in fact, has been so threatening that puppets have
been confiscated by police and performers detained during each of the
last three presidential nominating conventions.

Maryann Colella and Greg Corbino, members of the Bread and Puppet
Theater, were looking forward to this week's performances at the Cyclorama.

Ruth Hill, a long-time advocate for theater and storytelling, was
among those participating in the opening Monday. Despite the recent
loss of her husband of 60 years, storyteller, actor, dramatist, and
minister, Brother Blue (Hugh Morgan Hill), she seemed in relatively
good spirits. Hill says a tribute to Brother Blue is being planned
for May 8 at the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul on Tremont Street in Boston.
--

OMB Audio: Mary Curtin, publicist, Maryann Colella, actor, and Mike
Romayshyn, actor, musician, and composer, join Marc Stern and Dave
Goodman of "RADIO with a VIEW" in a conversation about the Bread and
Puppet performances at the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclarama the
week of January 25 - 31, 2010. {recorded Sunday, Janaury 24, 2010)

[See URL for audio and photos.]
--

Web resources

http://www.breadandpuppet.org
http://www.bcaonline.org

.

OBIT: J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger Dead: 'Catcher in the Rye' Author Dies At 91

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/28/j-d-salinger-dead-catcher_n_440500.html

HILLEL ITALIE
01/28/10

NEW YORK ­ J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and
fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and
inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the
author's son said in a statement from Salinger's longtime literary
representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in
self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the
twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of
anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The
Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection,
advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel
will be "a source of wonder and delight ­ and concern."

Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy,"
Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since
Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing ­ more than 60
million copies worldwide ­ and its impact incalculable. Decades after
publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most
American of dreams: to never grow up.

Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over
identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and
fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher"
presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness
of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only
intensified with the oncoming generation gap.

Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis
Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The
Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's
message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the
1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version
of Salinger's narrator.

"`Catcher in the Rye' made a very powerful and surprising impression
on me," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who read
the book, as so many did, when he was in middle school. "Part of it
was the fact that our seventh grade teacher was actually letting us
read such a book. But mostly it was because `Catcher' had such a
recognizable authenticity in the voice that even in 1977 or so, when
I read it, felt surprising and rare in literature."

The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan
Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's
novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book
holds many answers."

By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but
Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was
discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook.

On the Web Thursday, there was an outpouring of sadness for the loss
of Salinger, as many flocked together on social networks to relate
their memories of "Catcher in the Rye." Topics such as "Salinger" and
"Holden Caufield" were among the most popular on Twitter. CNN's Larry
King tweeted that "Catcher" is his favorite book. Humorist John
Hodgman wrote: "I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to
become extra reclusive."

Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of
"Catcher," but they are still read, again and again, with great
affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as
a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.

The collection "Nine Stories" features the classic "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the
little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel "Franny and
Zooey," like "Catcher," is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest
for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his
mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.

"Everyone who works here and writes here at The New Yorker, even now,
decades after his silence began, does so with a keen awareness of
J.D. Salinger's voice," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker,
where many of Salinger's stories appeared. "In fact, he is so widely
read in America, and read with such intensity, that it's hard to
think of any reader, young and old, who does not carry around the
voices of Holden Caulfield or Glass family members."

"Catcher," narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden
recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for
failing four classes and for general apathy.

He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him
everywhere from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with
his kid sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to
escape to a cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as
just so much phoniness.

"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he
reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know?
I swear it's a stupid question."

"The Catcher in the Rye" became both required and restricted reading,
periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents
worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.

"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked,
or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of `The Catcher in the
Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best
friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for
"20th Century Authors."

"It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on
a shelf out of their reach," he added.

Salinger also wrote the novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters" and "Seymour ­ An Introduction," both featuring the
neurotic, fictional Glass family that appeared in much of his work.

His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker
in 1965. By then, he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child
whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the
greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once commented.

In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book
­ prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical
Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry
Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written
at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.

"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said
in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980.
"But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left
alone to do it."

Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His
father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family
lived for years on Park Avenue.

Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of
trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military
Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the
covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published
his first fiction, "The Young Folks," in Story magazine.

He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with
him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an
unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend.

Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an
intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the
bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his
proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E.
Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of
cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced
that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman Melville.

Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the
Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post.
Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New
Yorker, where excerpts from "Catcher" were published.

The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews
were blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York
Times found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and
observed that Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when
contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted."

But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive,
human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T.
Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden.

"Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a
book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too
easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by
writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or
good intention."

The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the
door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he
married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and
Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. (Salinger was also briefly
married in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her.)

Meanwhile, he refused interviews, instructing his agent not to
forward fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in
a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion.

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those
deaf-mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."

"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless
conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something,
they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me.
I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."

Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of
"Catcher," with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down
numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from
Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey
Weinstein were also rejected.

Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued
a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the
author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and
Salinger dropped the suit.

Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an
important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused
to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton,
that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had
copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which
came out in a revised edition in 1988.

In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's
"60 Years Later," an unauthorized sequel to "Catcher" that imagined
Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever.

Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In
1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir "At Home in the
World," in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in
the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an
unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric
eating habits, and described their problematic sex life.

Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to
his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher"
portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine
and spoke in tongues.

Margaret Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely
determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."

.

Troupe’s Communal Vision Includes Lunch

Troupe's Communal Vision Includes Lunch

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/theater/06mnouchkine.html

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 5, 2009

Good food is an essential element of any Théâtre du Soleil
production. A lunch last week started with platters of salad,
colorful mosaics of fresh greens, mangoes, tomatoes, eggs and pine
nuts, followed by three kinds of pasta ­ all prepared by members of
this renowned French troupe. Baguettes adorned each of the dozen or
so tables set up in two solemn wood-paneled rooms at the Park Avenue
Armory, where Soleil's latest production, "Les Éphémères," opens on
Tuesday, the first night of the Lincoln Center Festival.

"If we're going to work well, we need to eat well," said Maurice
Durozier, who has been part of the company for 17 years. Its 70
members ­ actors, technicians, administrators, musicians ­ always
dine together. And as any one of them can tell you, it is almost as
much a part of the creative process as writing the script or
designing the costumes. For Le Théâtre du Soleil, theater is an
entirely collaborative enterprise. And one that includes the audience.

"Ariane is also very concerned with how we feed the public," Eve
Doe-Bruce, a veteran of more than 20 years, explained, her fork
pausing above her plate. "There's something that happens when the
public eats together and they begin to share something."

Ariane is Ariane Mnouchkine, the founder of the 45-year-old Théâtre
du Soleil. Though she is not as well known in the United States as in
Europe, she is considered one of theater's most influential
innovators. This year she was given the Norwegian government's
International Ibsen Award for exceptional achievement in the arts.
The citation noted how "each member of the audience is drawn into a
total experience ­ sensual, richly colored, teeming with life and
absorbing in its choreography."

Food is a part of that, Ms. Mnouchkine explained later in a makeshift
office; it is akin to welcoming an honored guest into your home. She
was wearing a dusty-blue T-shirt and a long brown-plaid skirt and
took a moment to play with a baby, one of the swarm of children who
made the journey from France. At most theatrical performances, "as
soon as it's finished, the public is thrown out as if we didn't want
them," she said. "But we don't want only the money of the public, but
also their presence."

Unfortunately the logistics of the armory make it impossible to feed
the 578 audience members during the nearly seven-hour, two-part cycle
of "Les Éphémères," as is the practice when the troupe is at its home
base, an old munitions factory in the forest of Vincennes in Paris.

"We are very isolated in the woods, very protected," Mr. Durozier
said during lunch. "That quality of life is essential. I do not think
we could do the same presentation without it."

In 2005 the troupe presented "Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées),"
or "The Last Caravansary (Odysseys)," a six-hour production based on
letters and interviews that Ms. Mnouchkine and her colleagues
collected during visits to refugee camps and detention centers around
the world.

At the time Jonathan Kalb, chairman of the theater department at
Hunter College, wrote in The New York Times that "marathon dramas by
someone like Ms. Mnouchkine can be extraordinary; an odyssey through
uncharted physical and spiritual territory where the theater loses
its trick-box aspect and becomes a site of unexpected communion and
awful reckoning."

"Les Éphémères" started with a single question posed by Ms.
Mnouchkine: What would you do if you found out that all of humanity
would die out in three months? The group followed with improvisations.

"We started with about 600, and there are about 42 in the play," said
Shaghayegh Beheshti, who was seated next to Mr. Durozier. "So much of
the preparation is invisible but essential."

By the end of the nine-month process the idea about humanity's end
was jettisoned, but it had produced a rich collection of stories and
snapshots from everyday family life.

Though Soleil is known for its left-wing politics, Ms. Mnouchkine is
quick to say that her communal approach to theater is not
ideological. "Immediately I was convinced that 10 people have more
ideas and intuitions than one alone," she said.

Ms. Mnouchkine is insistent on the absence of hierarchy. Everyone
earns the same salary. Each actor takes on other responsibilities,
like cooking or caring for the "chariots," the rolling platforms that
deliver and remove the actors and sets from the stage. She refuses to
be interviewed unless other members of the company are included. And
at 70 she has already discussed with the group the question of her
successor. "It was very important that everyone agree," she said.
(Her assistant, Charles-Henri Bradier, will get the job.)

The approach is decidedly different from the traditional Western
notion of the individual artistic vision. "It's not based on the
genius in the wild," Ms. Mnouchkine said. "It's based on the quest.
We are a group that is chasing theater."

It is an adventure to which each member of the troupe must
wholeheartedly commit. It is not simply a career path, said Duccio
Bellugi-Vannuccini, whose two daughters, Alba Gaïa, 14, and Galatea,
12, also perform in the show. "It's much more a style of life."

In other words, a family, with all the joys and strains. "Sometimes
we hate together; sometimes we love together," Ms. Doe-Bruce said.

Jeremy James, an Australian who joined seven years ago, acknowledged
that the rich creative life demanded sacrifices: "We miss Christmases
with our families."

Such a life is clearly not for everyone. But for those who embrace
it, Mr. Durozier said, there is an almost mysterious communion
between actor and director. "It's like a coup de foudre," like
falling in love, he added. "You cannot do anything else."

Ms. Doe-Bruce recalled first seeing a Théâtre du Soleil production of
three Shakespeare plays. "I see all my senses ­­ " She struggled for
the right word, looking to her companions for help.

"Activated," Mr. James offered.

More than that, said another: "Pleased."

"Stimulated," Mr. Doe-Bruce said. Everyone laughed.

After lunch, as some of the company members went downstairs to attend
to costumes or chariots, Juliana Carneiro da Cunha and Serge Nicolaï
took a moment to explain what is unique about Ms. Mnouchkine's vision.

"She has got something," Mr. Nicolaï said, putting his wrists
together and turning his hands right and left like a weather vane.
"She's got this barometer inside her for the theater. She feels so
many things. She's got this talent."

Ms. Carneiro da Cunha described seeing the troupe in "L'Âge d'Or"
("The Age of Gold") in 1976. The light slowly started to rise behind
the stage, and for a moment the audience members thought they had
spent the night at the theater and were watching the sunrise before
suddenly realizing it was a special effect. Everyone was so energized
and joyful, she said, they began dancing and running on the grass. "I
fell on my nose," Ms. Carneiro da Cunha said, "and I thought 'What
does it mean? What does it mean?'

"I am going to join this company," she answered herself. Fourteen
years later she did. "I had a dream, and it became true. I think it
was like that for everyone in the group."

Mr. Nicolaï smiled and shook his head. Not for him. He spoke instead
of seeing the 1978 film "Molière" with his mother when he was 11.
Most affecting was the voice of the narrator, which imprinted itself
on his mind, he said. Years later he participated in one of Ms.
Mnouchkine's workshops. "I was hearing that voice," he said, and "I
found out it was Ariane." It was only then that he discovered that
Ms. Mnouchkine had been the writer, director and narrator.

.

The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick

The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick

http://www.orangecoastmagazine.com/article2.aspx?id=15622

By Patrick J. Kiger
July 18, 2009

Back in the summer of 1981, Catherine Cate recalls, she and the other
young condo owners at 408 E. Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana had a
custom of gathering after work at a table in the building's
courtyard. "We'd pour some glasses of wine, or mix a few margaritas
or Singapore slushes, and just unwind a little," she says.
Occasionally, the casual conversation about their working days took
an offbeat turn, when their third-floor neighbor wandered down to
join the group.

Phil, as they called him, was pleasant and sociable, but older than
his fellow condo residents and a refugee from the Bay Area, where
they suspected he may have experimented with a few illegal
substances. He had a Berkeley Bohemian dishabille­wrinkled clothes,
stringy gray hair, dirty fingernails, an apparent indifference to
shaving. "Grooming was not his priority," Cate recalls. "And his
color was not good. He had an overall aura of not being in the best
health." He was pleasant and convivial, albeit somewhat distracted,
as if his mind were somewhere else.

Phil told them he was a writer, though Cate had never heard of him,
and mentioned that one of his books was being made into a movie
called "Blade Runner." It was when Phil started to talk, though, that
she recalls him morphing from just some aging, eccentric anti-yuppie
into a visitor from some preternatural, alternative reality. "Flights
of fantasy, almost nonsensical," Cate explains. "Sort of 'What if …?'
or 'Have you ever considered this?'"

"At the time, I wasn't a science-fiction fan, so I wasn't familiar
with Philip K. Dick," Cate says. "Not really knowing about his
writing career, our knowledge of him was really based upon what we
saw of him and what we talked about. And he was a very strange person
from that perspective … it was a little bewildering. You'd listen and
look at him and think, 'Is this guy on the same planet?' And the
answer was probably no."

As Cate learned more of her neighbor's literary notoriety, she had to
wonder why one of the most important American writers of the 20th
century, a genius that Rolling Stone once proclaimed "the most
brilliant [science-fiction] mind on any planet," was living in a
Santa Ana starter condo. "When he finally told us a little about
himself, he emphasized he was seeking privacy," Cate recalls. "In
fact, he told us that, should anybody come looking for him, we needed
to protect him, to neither confirm nor deny that he lived there. He
tried to stay under the radar."

Today, even as Dick's literary legend grows, his connection to Orange
County remains obscure. Though he often is thought of as a Northern
California writer, he lived his final decade in Fullerton and Santa
Ana and wrote several of his most important books­"A Scanner Darkly,"
"VALIS," and "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer"­during his time
here. And Orange County was the place where Dick in 1974 experienced
the transcendental visions that, depending on your degree of
open-mindedness, either gave him a secret glimpse of a universe with
multiple realities and the nonlinear impermanence of time, or shoved
him out on the crumbly precipice of sanity.

Today, nearly three decades after his death in Santa Ana at age 53,
Dick has a vastly higher profile. Much of his prolific output­he
published 44 novels and 121 short stories­still is in print. Critics
hold him in increasingly high esteem, not just as a master of the
science-fiction genre in the same league as Isaac Asimov or Ray
Bradbury, but as a philosophical novelist who explored the shifting,
ambiguous nature of reality and the question of what it means to be
human. In 2005, Time magazine selected his 1969 novel "Ubik" as one
of the 100 most important American novels of all time, and
contemporary writers such as Jonathan Lethem cite him as a major influence.

In Hollywood, Dick has become an industry. Nine of his novels and
stories have been made into films that collectively grossed more than
$1 billion worldwide, including the 2002 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg
hit "Minority Report," which generated $132 million in the United
States alone. Many others are in the works, including projects
involving big names such as Paul Giamatti and Matt Damon. (See
related story, Page 88.) A Web search yields an ever-growing number
of sites devoted to Dick's life and work, such as
www.philipkdickfans.com and the Total Dick-Head blog
(http://totaldickhead.blogspot.com).

And Dick again is in the news, thanks to a legal struggle that has
developed over the profits from his literary legacy. In April, the
author's fifth wife, Tessa Busby Dick, who was with him during his
time in Orange County, filed suit against an array of plaintiffs that
includes Electric Shepherd Productions­the film production arm of the
Dick estate founded by his daughters Isa and Laura­and his literary
agent Russell Galen. She claims she is being deprived of a share of
the earnings from two of Dick's works­his 1977 novel "A Scanner
Darkly," which was made into a movie in 2006, and a screenplay
version of "Ubik," which she says the author gave her in their 1976
divorce settlement. Christopher Tricarico, an attorney for the
estate, declined to comment, but said in an e-mail he will be
"vigorously defending" against the claim, which may mean even more
headlines in the months and years ahead.

Dickian devotion has grown to such extremes that a few years ago, a
robotics researcher built a life-size android version of the author,
which, according to a New York Times account, "was able to conduct
rudimentary conversations about Dick's work and ideas." Fans lined up
at conventions for a chance to meet the ersatz Dick, until the
android's head was accidentally left in an airline overhead bin, then
apparently misrouted by luggage handlers.

It may seem incongruous that Dick, who for years fueled his writing
efforts with amphetamines and described himself as a "religious
anarchist," would choose to live in what at the time was the nation's
most deeply conservative hotbed. "He used to joke about living in the
shadow of Disneyland, and about how everything in Orange County was
made of plastic," recalls Tim Powers, an award-winning
science-fiction and fantasy author who became a friend of Dick's
while a student at Cal State Fullerton. "But he seemed to find it
convivial. He made some friends here."

And to Dick, who'd become entangled in the darker side of the
Northern California counterculture, then-staid Orange County may have
seemed like an appealing refuge. "I think he liked the anonymity,"
Powers says. "Nobody in Santa Ana knew who Philip K. Dick was. He was
just this guy going to Trader Joe's [to buy] lunch."

As recounted in "Divine Invasions," Lawrence Sutin's 1989 biography,
Dick was in a rough situation when he began looking to relocate in
the spring of 1972. At 43, he was coming off four failed marriages,
bouts of depression and paranoia, a longtime amphetamine habit,
decades of financial struggle, and the respectable literary world's
indifference to his work. He hadn't written anything in two years.
After his house in San Rafael was burglarized­Dick alternately
theorized it was the FBI or CIA, black militants, religious fanatics,
or disaffected members of his circle of drug-using acquaintances­he
fled to Vancouver, where he attempted suicide, and then checked into
a rehab center to kick drugs and get a respite from the craziness.

Eventually, he turned to Willis McNelly, an English professor at Cal
State Fullerton who died in 2003. McNelly was one of the first
academics to look at science fiction as serious literature. "Phil
wrote to Willis and said, 'I've got nowhere to go,' " recalls Powers,
who then was a Cal State Fullerton graduate student. "Several of
Willis' students wrote back to Phil, saying, 'We just lost a
roommate; you can move in with us.' Such was Phil's desperation that
he said, 'OK. I'll get on a plane. Meet me at LAX.' He didn't really
care where he was going."

A welcoming committee included his two potential roommates plus
Powers and Linda Levy Castellani, another of Mc-Nelly's students, who
drove to Los Angeles to pick him up. Castellani recalls that Dick
made a striking, if bizarre, impression on her. "Here was this
portly, bearded man who looked somewhat like a rabbi," she says. "He
was in a trench coat and was carrying a Bible and a box wrapped in an
electrical cord. But the strangest thing was that he never took his
eyes off me. The attention was so intense, it scared me to death."
The author, who had a thing for dark-haired women and a tendency to
fall in love at a moment's notice, already was enamored with her.

The middle-aged writer soon tired of sleeping on the couch and the
expectation that he spring for the students' groceries, and moved
into a two-bedroom apartment with a recently divorced male roommate.
Meanwhile, he continued his pursuit of Castellani, taking her to
dinner in Los Angeles with sci-fi great Harlan Ellison and suddenly
shocking her with a marriage proposal. "He and Harlan were having
this intense conversation and I was just listening, when Phil handed
me this thick envelope," she recalls. "It was this amazing letter­a
scary sort of good, page after page about how wonderful I was, and at
the end, it said, 'P.S. Will you marry me?'" Castellani ultimately
rejected Dick's romantic advances, but the two remained friends and
talked on the phone regularly until his death.

But Dick wasn't without female companionship for long. A few months
later, at a party in Santa Ana, he met an 18-year-old soon-to-be
college student from Anaheim who aspired to be a writer and had sold
a few pieces to small magazines. "I didn't know who he was," says
Tessa Busby Dick, who became the author's fifth wife. "But I just
knew that he was a remarkable man. And as I read more of his work, I
appreciated his genius." Dick wasn't just attracted to Tessa's
looks­the dark-hair thing again­but also to her intelligence and
empathy. On a visit to Disneyland with friend Powers, he proposed to
her, though the romantic ambience was disrupted when he began arguing
with Powers over a pickle that he had snatched from Dick's plate.

Tessa recalls the years she spent with Dick in Fullerton as "the
most wonderful time of my life." In 1970s Orange County, Fullerton
was a bohemian oasis, a college town with war protesters, cappuccino,
even an organic grocery. Dick and his new wife lived near the Cal
State campus, where he could be around the students and intellectuals
whose company he found stimulating. In July 1973, Tessa gave birth to
son Christopher, Dick's third child after his daughters from previous
marriages. (Though Christopher, along with his half-sisters, owns and
manages their father's literary properties, his mother did not name
him as a defendant in her recent lawsuit.)

A few months later, in September 1973, according to biographer Sutin,
United Artists picked up an option on Dick's 1968 novel "Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?," putting a much-needed $2,000 in his
pocket. He even started to write again, completing the novel "Flow My
Tears, the Policeman Said," which he had set aside back in Northern
California. He conceived a new novel, "A Scanner Darkly," set in a
seedy dystopian version of Orange County, in which a narcotics agent
pursuing the source of a new, personality-fragmenting designer drug
goes so far undercover that he begins to investigate himself. As Dick
admitted in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, it was the first time
he'd written a novel without the help of amphetamines.

But beneath the fragile normality, Dick was in turmoil. "His method
was to think about a book for a long time, and then write the entire
thing in 10 or 11 days, hardly eating or sleeping as he pounded it
out at high speed on a manual typewriter," Powers says. "That was the
way he'd done it in the 1960s, when he was doing a heap of
amphetamines to fuel his production. But even after he quit the
drugs, that was the only way he knew how to write, in one sustained
burst. … Particularly in the last 10 years that I knew him, the
writing of his books began to take a real physical toll on him."

In February 1974, after being given anesthesia for dental work, Dick
returned home and began experiencing bizarre visions­a rectangle of
pink light on his bedroom wall containing writing in a strange
language he could not read, along with mathematical equations. He
heard voices, and was visited by strange beings who "looked almost
human, but they had large heads, small noses, small chins and mere
slits for mouths," as Tessa later recalled in a self-published
memoir, "The Dim Reflection of Philip K. Dick." Instead of abducting
him, the alien visitors used holograms to turn Dick's apartment into
a classroom, where they taught him a secret theory of existence. Dick
only explained parts of it to Tessa: The past wasn't immutable; to
the contrary, someone was in the process of changing history. And
neither was it linear; somehow, Dick simultaneously existed in the
present and in ancient Rome. Neither was the physical world solid and
stable; even something as basic as a light switch on a wall might
mysteriously vanish when you reached for it.

Dick would ponder his "2-3-74" experience, as he came to call it, for
the rest of his life, and it eventually would help inspire his 1981
novel "VALIS," a mind-bending synthesis of science fiction and the
mysteries of Gnosticism and Christian theology, in which mystical
revelations are beamed by laser from an orbiting satellite.

"He was his own skeptic, always ready to dismiss and deride his
theories when he saw flaws in them," Powers says. "One day he'd think
it had been God talking to him. The next day, he'd say it was just
acid flashbacks. The day after that, he'd decide it was psychosis, or
some sort of secret Soviet telepathy experiment. But he kept coming
back to the idea that it was God." He pauses. "I'd put money on it
that it was God who spoke to him, crazy as it seems. His sort of
ongoing, contentious dialogue with God does have the tone of Teresa
of Avila [a 16th century Catholic mystic]. Or maybe it's just a
better story that way."

By 1975, Dick's marriage to Tessa was falling apart, and he had
become involved with another woman, Doris Elaine Sauter­a
relationship that became even closer when Sauter, in her mid-20s, was
diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. According to biographer Sutin, Dick
again attempted suicide­gulping a combination of pills, slitting his
wrist, and sitting in his garage with the engine of his car running,
before having second thoughts and calling for help. "When I went to
see him in the hospital, he said, 'See, I tried to kill myself. You
have to move in with me now,' " Sauter recalls. "I read him the riot
act about that."

Dick moved from Fullerton to downtown Santa Ana, where he rented a
two-bedroom apartment that he later bought when the building went
condo. As a bohemian hipster whose work depicted future people
oppressed by life in their monstrously huge, regimented, soulless
"conapt" complexes, Dick couldn't escape the irony that he lived in a
condo. In a 1980 Slash magazine interview, he denounced the condo
association's resident meetings as creepily intrusive.

In truth, Dick's new residence was in some ways ideally suited to
him. His building had an elaborate security system, which assuaged
his latent paranoia. For the agoraphobic author, the apartment was
within walking distance of the post office and a Trader Joe's, where
he could pick up roast beef sandwiches and frozen dinners.

Sauter did her best to get Dick out of his Santa Ana comfort zone,
but it was tough work: "It was more anticipation anxiety. Prying him
out of the house was hard, though if you could get him to go, he'd be
glad that he did. I could never get him to go to the Santa Ana Public
Library, for example. But when Ray Bradbury would speak in O.C. and
take a room at the Disneyland Hotel, I'd get Phil to go out and have
a drink with him. He always liked that."

For all his psychological maladies and quirks, though, Dick remained
a focused, professional writer. "He would get up at 10, have some
coffee, write until 3 in the morning, sleep for five hours, and then
get up and do the same thing the next day," Sauter recalls. "He'd
switched to using an IBM Selectric typewriter, and he was a
lightning-fast typist. I don't recall him doing a lot of rewriting.
The first draft was always very readable.

"After he passed away, people would always ask me, 'How sane was
Philip K. Dick?' Anybody who could wake up at 5 a.m. like he did and
play hardball on the phone with his agent in New York­I mean, how
crazy could he be? There's been a tendency to picture him as a
psychological mess, because of the suicide attempts and so on. But
Phil had the ability to put aside whatever he was feeling or thinking
to do business."

Over the last few years of Dick's life in Santa Ana, Sutin reports,
he finally managed to earn a high five-figure income from larger
advances, royalties, resales of his early books, and payments from
the producers of "Blade Runner." But to him, relative affluence
wasn't entirely a positive development. "People always say it's too
bad that he died before he made serious money, but he would have been
uncomfortable with it," says Powers. "Remember, he grew up in
Berkeley in the 1950s, when rich guys were not OK. As it was, he
always was finding excuses to give it away feverishly­charities,
UNICEF. One time he even had a bank teller who'd seen his account
balance call him up and ask for a loan of a couple of thousand bucks.
It was an unbelievably inappropriate thing for the guy to do, but
Phil just said, 'OK.' "

In February 1982­a few months before the release of "Blade Runner,"
the Harrison Ford movie that would introduce Dick to mainstream
audiences­he suffered a major stroke at his condo, dying on March 2
at age 53. The facts of his demise have not been universally
accepted­perhaps fitting for someone who believed in multiple
realities. Someone once assured Powers that Dick had committed
suicide, just as musician Kurt Cobain had, though Powers quickly
corrected them. Six weeks after Dick died, Sauter was startled to
read a claim in an article that he was still alive. She once made
arrangements to see the android version of the author. "It really
felt like it was going to be a big emotional shakeup, like seeing a
dead family member," she says. "Then we finally decide to do it,
[but] the head disappears … Phil, who had this great droll sense of
humor, would have thought that was hysterically funny."

It's all part of an Internet-age version of the ancient Greek mystery
cult that has sprouted during the last two decades, with Dick as its
deity-oracle-role model. "Phil's work, with its hints of insights
into God and the universe, lends itself to that sort of obsessive
interest," Powers says. "A lot of people respond to that. But I think
Phil would have been a bit bewildered, just as he was in the '70s
when Marxist critics in Europe adopted him as a hero. He never had to
deal with the kind of prominence he has now."

If he had lived, Powers wonders if Dick might have followed the same
course as Hawthorne Abendsen, the fictional writer in Dick's "The Man
in the High Castle," who writes a novel revealing an alternative
reality­and then goes into hiding to avoid the consequences of his revelation.
--

Patrick J. Kiger is an Orange Coast contributing writer.
--

The Philip K. Dick Filmography

Dick's novels and short stories are among the hottest commodities in
Hollywood nearly three decades after his death. In 2007, the Philip
K. Dick Trust and Electric Shepherd Productions struck a deal with
the Halcyon Co., owner of the "Terminator" franchise, which gives
Halcyon first-look rights at all of Dick's literary properties, as
well as the opportunity to develop video games based on them. In
addition to the films below, projects currently in the works include
a Disney animated version of "The King of the Elves"; a $62 million
adaptation of "Adjustment Team," starring Matt Damon; "The Owl in
Daylight," a biopic starring Paul Giamatti; and "Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said," announced in May by Halcyon at the Cannes Film
Festival. An adaptation of "Radio Free Albemuth," starring singer
Alanis Morissette, is awaiting release.

Blade Runner (1982) Director Ridley Scott'sadaption of the 1968
novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," set in a monstrously
decayed Los Angeles, initially struggled at the box office, but the
Harrison Ford flick has become a cult classic.

Total Recall (1990) This Paul Verhoeven directorial effort bears
little resemblance to Dick's 1966 story "We Can Remember It for You
Wholesale." But audiences loved Arnold Schwarzenegger as an ex-secret
agent. A remake is underway, scheduled for a possible 2011 release.

ConfeSsions d'un Barjo (1992) A French adaptation of Dick's 1975
non-sci-fi novel "Confessions of a Crap Artist," about an eccentric
ne'er-do-well obsessed with preposterous theories. An Amazon.com
reviewer called it a "very strange movie, at turns comic, harsh, and
fantastic."

Screamers (1995) Peter Weller starred in this flop, based on the 1953
story "Second Variety." Miners fighting their former employer on a
distant planet create autonomous killing machines, which then turn on
them. Critic Roger Ebert said the film depicts a future so grim "it
makes our current mess look like Utopia."

Imposter (2002) TV stars Gary Sinise, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Tony
Shalhoub were cast in this unsuccessful adaptation of a 1953 story of
the same name, about a man accused of being an alien double of
himself. Variety called it "a penny-pinched 'Blade Runner.'"

Minority Report (2002) Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom
Cruise, this adaptation of Dick's 1956 story "The Minority Report,"
about a future police officer arrested for a crime he has not yet
committed, was a huge success critically and at the box office.

Paycheck (2003) John Woo directed this Ben Affleck-Uma Thurman
vehicle, faintly inspired by a 1953 story with the same title about
an engineer who plants clues to thwart his employer's erasing of his
memory of a secret project. Mixed reviews and mediocre box office.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) Director Richard Linklater'sadaptation of
Dick's 1977 novel about a future undercover narc, played by Keanu
Reeves, and a personality-fragmenting drug. Critics declared it
brilliant, but it opened the same week as "Pirates of the Caribbean:
Dead Man's Chest."

Next (2007) Bears almost no resemblance to Dick's 1954 story "The
Golden Man," upon which it was loosely based. In lieu of Dick's
golden-skinned mutant protagonist, it stars Nicolas Cage as a Vegas
magician who can see two minutes into the future. Panned by critics,
it did well at the box office. ­P.J.K.

.

How the Fab Four changed my life

The Beatles:
How the Fab Four changed my life

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/6105219/The-Beatles-How-the-Fab-Four-changed-my-life.html

As Beatlemania is about to explode all over again with the launch of
their remastered album CDs, Charles Spencer recalls growing up with
the iconic Sixties band.

by Charles Spencer
29 Aug 2009

I'll never forget that glorious moment of revelation. I had just
turned eight and was on the swings at the rec in Ripley, Surrey.
There was a group of teenagers nearby with a transistor radio and for
the first time I found myself consciously listening to pop music.

The song playing was the Beatles' From Me To You (April 1963) and as
soon as I heard the first notes I got off the swing and went and
stood as close to the teenagers as I dared, listening in a state of
wonder. I was hooked with my first hit. That Christmas my parents
bought me my first record player, a Dansette, and Aunty Kay gave me
my first LP, the Beatles's second album, With the Beatles. Bliss was
it in that dawn to be alive, but to be eight, and a fan of the Fab
Four was very heaven.

I saved my pocket money and bought every Beatles single as they came
out, though I couldn't usually afford the albums until Christmas or
birthdays came around. Every Thursday I would watch Top of the Pops.
I liked a lot of other groups too, notably The Kinks, The Who and The
Stones. But from eight to 13, with the release of the double White
album, The Beatles were undoubtedly my favourite band. Never a
football fan, I finally felt I had a team to follow.

And now Beatlemania is about to explode all over again. All the album
CDs have been carefully remastered and lovingly repackaged and on a
first listen to some of them, the sound has a freshness and depth
that helps revitalise songs you thought you had played to death.
Radio Two is devoting this weekend to the Fab Four and there are
movies about Lennon and Brian Epstein in the works. There's even a
Beatles video game coming out that could win them a new generation of fans.

Philip Larkin famously wrote that "Sexual intercourse began in 1963
... Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.

Well sexual intercourse certainly didn't begin for me in 1963 ­ but
something changed when Beatlemania erupted in that annus mirabilis.
Until then, the Sixties had just seemed like an extension of the
drab, grey Fifties. With the arrival of the Beatles, Britain began to
start swinging and ­ in the mind's eye of memory ­ everything changed
from grainy black and white into glorious Technicolor.

One of the many extraordinary things about the Beatles is that they
seemed to appeal to everyone ­ not just to the screaming teenage
girls whipping themselves into frenzies of unrequited passion, but to
pre-pubescent schoolboys like me, my mum and dad, and even my grandparents.

In a Britain that was still rigid with class and snobbery, the
mop-tops brought a refreshing blast of irreverent cheek and fresh air
into our lives. "For those of you in the cheap seats I'd like you to
clap your hands," John Lennon told the audience at a Royal Variety
Show attended by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. "The rest of
you... just rattle your jewellery."

Unlike the Rolling Stones, the Beatles were hardly ever threatening.
Their early songs were about the innocence of young love. Never mind
going "all the way", John, Paul, George and Ringo seemed ecstatic at
the possibility of holding their girlfriend's hand. Indeed, right
through their work, they never really communicated sexual passion,
normally the bedrock of popular song. They were superbly tuneful,
quirky, melancholy, funny, and touching and in later years
thrillingly weird and spaced out. Unlike the Stones, there was no
throb of lust. When Paul McCartney sang "I want to do it in the road"
on the White Album the effect was downright embarrassing, a little
like watching your tipsy maiden aunt flashing her knickers at a
wedding reception.

Unfortunately, their popularity meant that they never really had a
chance to prove themselves as a live band. Those who were lucky
enough to be there still speak with awe about their early
performances in Hamburg and the Cavern in Liverpool, but once
Beatlemania exploded they were more or less inaudible over the
screams and seemed happy to abandon live work in favour of working in
the studio with George Martin, who developed their talent with such
care, wisdom and tact.

What remains startling, even miraculous, is just how much ground they
covered between the release of Love Me Do in October 1962 and the
final single, The Long and Winding Road in 1970. They came up with a
dozen albums and a succession of superb singles that constantly took
their listeners by surprise with their melody, wit and freshness.

The Beatles' progress seemed to be a journey from innocence to
experience, and finally disillusion. Watching their bitter break-up
in 1970 was a bit like witnessing your parents go through an
acrimonious divorce. It left a nasty taste, particularly when John
lambasted Paul in the extraordinarily bitter How Do You Sleep?

Over the years we hoped they would bury the hatchet, reform, come up
with a new album and even perhaps return to the stage. The
speculation was endless, and intense, but the murder of John Lennon
outside the Dakota Building in New York in 1980 put an end to that,
while the more recent death from cancer of George Harrison was
another reminder of mortality, and of the truth of his beautiful song
All Things Must Pass.

Everyone always had their favourite Beatle, and mine was John,
because even in the polite early days there was something subversive
about him, and I loved his dangerous edge and haunting voice.
Although he was the superior melodist, Paul always seemed that little
bit too eager to please. George, with his brilliantly economical lead
guitar and some of the finest songs in the catalogue (Something;
While My Guitar Gently Weeps), has often been underrated. As for
Ringo, he was likeable and gave good quotes, but according to a
characteristically cruel jibe from Lennon, he wasn't even the best
drummer in the Beatles.

If I was forced to choose a favourite number I'd be torn between
Lennon's Help ­ an apparently cheerful pop song that is actually a
cry of depressive distress -and his haunting Norwegian Wood on Rubber
Soul with its ethereal strangeness and Harrison's evocative sitar.
But what about Paul's beautiful Eleanor Rigby and She's Leaving Home,
songs of rare emotional depth and compassion, or A Day in the Life
that ends Sgt Pepper, in which Lennon and McCartney dramatically
welded two different songs into one unforgettable masterpiece?

Now, almost 40 years since they broke up, the Fab Four look set to
reclaim their position as the hottest property in pop music. The
Beatles are dead. Long live the Beatles!

.

Numero Ono

Numero Ono

http://www.newsweek.com/id/214124

By Seth Colter Walls | NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 28, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Sep 7, 2009

To talk about Yoko Ono is to talk about The Scream. An impossibly
long, warbling vocal tremor, it confirmed the public's worst
prejudices about Ono­that she was an unmusical self-promoter who'd
put John Lennon under her spell and split up the Beatles. Never mind
that her experiments with musique concrète played at Carnegie Hall's
recital space five years before she ever met Lennon, or that Ono's
studio art had previously become a pillar of Fluxus, the
conceptual-art movement organized around chance. Perhaps it was an
unintentional testament to the raw force of her act, but the public's
reaction constituted a frenzied rhetoric beyond the influence of such
information. Today Ono recalls being blamed for whatever Lennon's
failings were seen to be by any given group. She says the radical
left, frustrated with Lennon's peacenik refusal to sign up for
violent protest, thought her the culprit. So too did Middle America,
except that its beef seemed like an after-the-fact explanation for
the onetime moptopper's pivot away from adorableness. "Maybe it made
me stronger," she says today of her time taking shots from both sides
of an ideological crossfire. But while the experience may have made
Ono tough, it didn't help anyone construct an honest appraisal of her work.

Then something odd happened­even stranger than a member of Fluxus
finding herself the subject of tabloid innuendo. To a younger
generation growing up after the baggage of Lennon's personal life had
largely been laid to rest, Ono became an esthetic godmother. As the
world itself got noisier, her scream seemed more and more legitimate
as a response­to anything from the panic of AIDS to the specter of
WMDs. "It is a scream of the human race, in a way," she says today,
and it makes sense: you can think of her music as an aural
accompaniment to the paintings of Munch or Bacon. It may have taken a
couple of decades, but the world caught up to that sound. It's
difficult to imagine the X-Ray Spex anthem "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!,"
the Riot Grrl movement of the '90s (featuring groups like
Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill), or even contemporary dance-punk
heroines like Peaches or Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs existing
apart from Yoko's trailblazing, proto-feminist howl.

On her 2007 album Yes, I'm a Witch, Ono attracted a diverse crew of
modern indie acts to reinterpret songs from her back catalog. The
Flaming Lips, the best-known group to take part, elected to
reinterpret the noise freak-out "Cambridge 1969" (from the
oft-reviled Unfinished Music No. 2 album she cut with Lennon)­an
activist assertion that even Ono's most out-there music deserves a
fresh listen. And not only her old recordings are worth hearing. For
more than a decade now, the shadow side to Yoko's scream has been her
fascination with dance and remix culture. This year she became the
oldest woman­at 76, likely by a long shot­to notch a hit on
Billboard's Dance/Club Play chart, for the ironically titled remix
album I'm Not Getting Enough. Devoid of pain-engorged screams, her
exultant play with rhythm still points toward a unifying theme of her
work: out-of-body transcendence, whether it be hellish or heavenly.

This September Yoko is releasing a new record, Between My Head and
the Sky, that spends some time in both realms­rocking feverishly and
then blissing out. It's credited to the Plastic Ono Band, a moniker
last used for 1973's Feeling the Space. In part, Yoko's return to
that iconic brand is a family matter. While Lennon played the
slashing riffs on her first two Plastic Ono Band LPs, their son,
Sean, acts as ringleader on the new disc­assembling an impressive
roster of musicians from modern-day scenes in New York and Japan.
Yuka Honda's digital sampling and piano work were a principal
pleasure of the band Cibo Matto, and she brings a similar buoyancy to
Ono's latest. The production on the album's second song, "The Sun Is
Down," is credited to electronic pioneer Cornelius, who adds frothy
funk to Ono's arsenal of sounds. And along with in-demand jazz
session man Shahzad Ismaily, Sean Lennon lays down some pleasingly
dirty guitar and fierce percussion. Which isn't to suggest that the
album is an unremitting stomper. There are a couple of meditative
piano interludes, featuring violin and a muted trumpet, during which
Yoko employs a talk-song cadence that approaches sweetness. Her
voice, which could once fry the treble frequencies on any speaker
system, has assumed a fuller quality with age. At times, it even
sounds­gulp­pretty.

The album's greatest weakness comes in the form of some undercooked
lyrics. "Time … the great equalizer of all things" doesn't exactly
roll off the tongue. This comes as no surprise, since several of the
album's 15 songs were improvised live in the studio. Yet there's a
fine line between employing a light conceptual touch and actually
sounding insubstantial. Similarly, some of the Zen-like koans that
animated John and Yoko's '60s politics seem dated today, a reality
Ono recognizes. "You guys will have to be much more intelligent than
us," she says. "We did things like waving flags for peace. But now it
doesn't make any impact." But that scream still carries a charge. On
the album opener, "Waiting for the D Train," Yoko turns in a vocal
performance that, for its uncanny marriage of power with nuance, puts
most postpunk singers to shame.

Surprisingly, for someone subjected to so much unkind snark over the
years, Yoko is an optimist late in life­particularly about the power
of the Web. With the help of an assistant who feeds her questions,
she replies to Twitter followers approximately once a week. Fear and
wonder over the state of the physical being continue to grip her, as
she likens the disembodied online community to the concept behind her
'60s-era "bag events," in which participants covered themselves from
head to toe in order to render themselves blind to visual perceptions
of one another. "It's now like we have become spirits on the
Internet. The time sense and the physical-location sense is lost. And
of course the visual looks are lost, too." Worrying about appearances
is, somewhat charmingly, still on Ono's agenda­even as she's invited
to headline hip summer festivals from Chicago to London. "You
probably shouldn't say 'screaming,' " she advises me at one point,
"or else people will … you know." But Lennon actually had this issue
nailed back on his first solo record, also titled Plastic Ono Band.
"Hold on Yoko, Yoko hold on, it's gonna be all right," he sings, as
though he's aware Ono's first record is due for a rough public
reception, but also trusts time will deliver some measure of vindication.

.

Man who made Amsterdam 'magic centre' dies

Man who made Amsterdam 'magic centre' dies

http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/man-who-made-amsterdam-magic-centre-dies

12 July 2009

Poet and author Simon Vinkenoog, who had been known as Amsterdam's
"weed ambassador" since the 1960s, has died aged 80, his family said
on Sunday. He had been ill for some time, having undergone a leg
amputation and suffered a fatal brain haemorrhage.

His first volume of poems, entitled Wondkoorts ("Traumatic Fever"),
appeared in 1950; one of his last works was a bundle of translations
of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, Me and my peepee (2001). Twenty years
earlier he had also turned his attention to the American Beat Poets
of the 1950s, publishing Jack Kerouac in Amsterdam. Vinkenoog loved
the city where he was born and where he lived, as he expressed in his
ode to his native town Am*dam Madmaster, published last year.

In 2004 Simon Vinkenoog was elected Poet of the Fatherland (Dutch
poet laureate), a position which he held until 2005.

Drugs advocate
Vinkenoog was an advocate of recreational drugs use, as illustrated
by titles like How to Enjoy Reality (1968). He often appeared in
public, reciting his poetry. One of his most recent appearances was
in 2007, when he lent his support to a demonstration in Amsterdam
against a proposed ban on magic mushrooms. In the 2006 general
elections, he was a figurehead candidate for a small party which
promoted the legalisation of cannabis. The party did not succeed in
winning any seats in the Lower House.

In addition to his purely literary work, Vinkenoog wrote profusely
about his experiences with drugs. Esoteric magazine Bres published an
apparently never-ending series of articles, starting with an
exploration of LSD in 1968, and ending in 2004.

1960s fading away
With the death of Simon Vinkenoog Amsterdam loses one more of its
iconic ambassadors of the Swinging 'Sixties (1960s), when the Dutch
capital gained its reputation as a drugs-friendly Magic Centre, which
it has managed to retain to this day. Earlier this year, performance
artist Robert Jasper Grootveld died. Grootveld was known for his
large-scale open-air ceremonies in the mid-sixties in which he mocked
bourgeois hypocrisy.

.

Woodstock concert's undercover lovers

Woodstock concert's undercover lovers, Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, 40
years after summer of love

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2009/07/07/2009-07-07_woodstocks_undercover_lovers_.html

By Jim Farber
July 7th 2009

Of all the images snapped during the original Woodstock weekend, one
stands above all: a young couple huddled together in a blanket,
standing alone in a sea of people lying on wet ground.

It's an enduring image of love, care and protection that earned
iconic status through its placement on the cover of the original
"Woodstock" album in 1970, as well as on the movie poster.

Forty years later, the couple in the photo - Nick and Bobbi Ercoline,
both 60 - remain together. They married two summers after the fabled
weekend, and they still live less than an hour's drive from the
original concert site of Bethel, N.Y., and within spitting distance
of where they both grew up.

Nick Ercoline works for the Orange County, N.Y., Department of
Housing. Bobbi is a resident nurse at the elementary school in their
hometown of Pine Bush.

The 40th anniversary of the ultimate hippie be-in, this Aug. 15-17,
has thrown the Ercolines into the spotlight again - something they
never expected or sought.

They say they remember nothing of the original shot, taken by Burk
Uzzle. "We weren't striking a pose," Nick says. "We were as surprised
as everybody to see that photo on the album cover."

They discovered it while at a friend's house listening to the album
and passing around the gatefold jacket. First, Nick recognized the
famous yellow butterfly staff in the left corner. "It belonged to
this guy Herbie," Nick says. "We latched on to him that day because
he was having a very bad experience. He was tripping pretty heavily
and he had lost his friends. After I saw that staff I said, 'Hey
that's our blanket.' Then I said, 'Hey, that's us.'"

Bobbi, then 20, wasn't overly impressed. "Woodstock was over and done
with at that time," she says. "It didn't seem like a big deal. The
only thing was that then I had to tell my mother I had gone. She
didn't know. But by then, she didn't mind."

The two had arrived in the middle of the weekend, a rare feat given
that all main roads were closed by then. "We were local kids, so we
knew the back roads," Nick says. "About 5 miles away we abandoned
this big white 1965 Chevrolet Impala station wagon."

The two didn't realize the impact their photo had until Woodstock's
20th anniversary, when the world's media began seeking them out. In
fact, their memories of the original event have more to do with the
scene than the music, because they were too far away to hear or see much.

"I remember the rain, the lack of toilets and the body odor," Bobbi says.

"I also remember an orange haze from the glowing lights of the stage.
It was everywhere, lighting up the sky."

The pair had met only three months earlier, over Memorial Day
weekend, at the bar where Nick worked. "This waiter brought this
beautiful blond in one day and said, 'This is my girlfriend; keep an
eye on her,'" Nick explains. "Every night she stood in front of me
and we got friendlier and friendlier. Then one weekend he made the
mistake of leaving her home while he went to the shore with the guys
and he never told her. That was the end of that. And the beginning of this."

Despite all the time gone by, Nick says they still get recognized.
"We were in Germany, and right when we walked into the hotel they
knew who we were."

As to why their photo was chosen, Nick has a theory. "It's peaceful,
which is what the event was about," he says. "And it's an honest
representation of a generation. When we look at that photo I don't
see Bobbi and me. I see our generation."

.

Prom Night in Mississippi [film review]

Prom Night in Mississippi

http://www.hour.ca/film/film.aspx?iIDArticle=18806

Mississippi burning

Melora Koepke
December 3rd, 2009

Morgan Freeman foots the bill for a town's first integrated prom in
Canadian doc Prom Night in Mississippi
--

Paul Saltzman, the Torontonian director of Prom Night in Mississippi,
first visited the Deep South in 1965, when he drove down from Canada
to work on registering voters as part of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was assaulted and jailed for 10 days.

When he returned in 2007, he met Charleston's most famous resident,
the actor Morgan Freeman, who was offering to foot the bill for an
integrated prom in his town. The school board refused. When he
offered again in 2008, they accepted, and Saltzman and his wife and
producing partner, Patricia Aquino, moved down south to film the
first integrated prom, ever, in Charleston.

Prom Night in Mississippi examines heavy-hitting issues of entrenched
racism, tradition and human rights in the Deep South. Though his film
examines a serious subject in an accessible way, its heavy-hitting
themes aren't the only thing he wants people to understand. More than
anything, he says, the film is a lot of fun: He tells of screenings
in Toronto where the audience has applauded and a class full of
high-school students gave the film a standing ovation.

"I want people to know that this is entertaining, intimate, alive and
real. The kids are terrific and so is the music [which includes
tracks by Beyoncé et al.]," says Saltzman.

Of course, Canadians might feel that Prom Night in Mississippi
expresses an outdated way of life that doesn't affect us, but
Saltzman points out that we aren't all that disconnected from the
dark heart of American racism.

"We may think that we're better than that; I don't think we're exempt
at all," says Saltzman. "Up here, we have our hate groups as well:
There is a Nazi Party of Canada, there is a Canadian presence of the
KKK and the Aryan Nation. The story of Prom Night in Mississippi is a
specific story of a small town and high school dance but it's also a
universal issue about how we hold other people in our hearts."

.

Panel to discuss sit-ins' 50th anniversary

Panel to discuss sit-ins' 50th anniversary tonight

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20091208/ARTICLES/912081004/1002

By Curt Devine
December 8, 2009

On Feb. 1, 1960, four students made history by sitting at the
whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth store in Greensboro, N.C.
When the manager asked them to leave, they refused.

"This was a shocking moment," said Bill Link, a University of Florida
history professor. "People weren't sure if blacks and whites could
ever eat together, but these students proved otherwise."

Despite opposition from police and store workers, the four students
of all-black A&T College returned the next day with 15 more students.
The next day, 300 students came and the sit-in movement began to
spread to other states.

A panel discussing the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins that energized
the civil rights movement in the South will be held at 7 tonight in
the Ocora Room at Pugh Hall.

Link, who will be one of the panelists, said these issues still have
relevance due to the racial identities and stereotypes that affect
decisions made in today's society.

Discussing the history of civil rights can reveal a lot about the
present, he said.

Link believes the sit-ins played an essential role in the civil
rights movement because the four students in Greensboro attacked a
symbol of white supremacy and racial injustice with a non-violent method.

The Greensboro sit-ins also led to the creation of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, pronounced "snick," which
organized national sit-ins and provided publicity for the movement.

"This was a time when courage and action moved rapidly to make
change," Link said. "But this was not the end of the story. We are
still living it."

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, a UF assistant professor of religion,
described the sit-ins as one of the most iconic times in the South.

As a student at Spelman College and a member of SNCC in the early
1960s, Simmons participated in many Atlanta sit-ins. She recalls
people pouring coffee and spitting on students who sat in white-only
sections of the Kresge five-and-dime stores.

"We were beaten and dragged to jail, but we didn't fight back," she said.

The knowledge that she was a part of a bigger movement gave Simmons
strength to keep fighting for civil rights. She said she remembers
singing and holding hands with SNCC members as they were taken to jail.

Simmons worked with the SNCC through the late 1960s and remembers the
excitement when the Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1968 were passed.

"People who are organized and dedicated can bring about real change,"
she said. "The face of the South was changed forever."

Tom Calhoon, a UF history freshman, said he hopes the panel sparks
conversation about social justice and human rights because he
believes racism is the cause of most global conflict.

"I think it's necessary to understand our history so that we can
continue making changes today," he said.

.

Independent probe sought in killing of Muslim leader

Independent probe sought in killing of Muslim leader

http://www.energypublisher.com/article.asp?id=22272

Police in Dearborn Michigan, outside of Detroit, shot to death Imam
Abdullah, a Muslim prayer leader allegedly involved in a theft ring
that also trained children and young men in martial arts and religious hatred.

November 09, 2009
by John Chapin

Ron Scott, head of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality,
said on November 2 that he is concerned about the killing of the
Muslim prayer leader, Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah on October 28.
Abdullah, formerly known as Christopher Thomas, had led the Masjid
Al-Haqq mosque in Detroit. Abdullah was shot dead by FBI agents in
the suburban Detroit locale of Dearborn after he allegedly fired at
and killed a police dog. A federal affidavit described Abdullah, his
son, and accomplices as Islamic extremists wanted for numerous
violations of federal law, as well as operating a theft ring.
According to Scott, "We're concerned about the excessive force,"
adding "We want to see an independent investigation."

Abdullah's family said that he was shot 18 times, while the medical
examiner's office would only say he was shot multiple times. Andrew
Arena, special agent in charge of the Detroit FBI office, said agents
acted appropriately.

According to a federal affidavit, Abdullah believed he and his
followers were soldiers at war against the government and
non-Muslims. "He told his followers it is their duty to oppose the
FBI and the government and it does not matter if they die," FBI agent
Gary Leone said in an affidavit unsealed on October 28, the day of
the raid. "He also told the group that they need to plan to do
something," apparently, "violent jihad."

Abdullah and eleven others were charged with conspiring to commit
several federal crimes, including illegal possession and sale of
firearms, tampering with motor vehicle identification numbers, theft
from interstate shipments and mail fraud. Nine of the suspects are
currently in federal custody, and two others remain in Canada and are
fighting extradition to face justice in the United States. "We're not
any fake terrorists, we're the real terrorists," Abdullah once
boasted to an undercover informant, according to the affidavit.

Abdullah, a.k.a. Christopher Thomas, was a "highly placed leader" of
Ummah, a group of predominantly African-Americans converts to Islam
that seek to establish a separate sovereign state governed by Islamic
law "sharia" within the U.S., according to the affidavit. Ummah was
founded by convicted cop killer H.Rap Brown, now known as Jamil
Abdullah Al-Amin. Brown was chairman of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee in the 1960s and later became the Justice
Minister of the Black Panther Party. He is famous for saying that
"violence is as American as cherry pie", as well as "If America don't
come around, we're gonna burn it down."

In addition, according to the federal affidavit, Abdullah had several
conversations with informants and undercover agents in which he spoke
of attacking Super Bowl XL in Detroit and blowing himself up as a
final act of courage. "If they are coming to get to me, I'll just
strap a bomb on and blow up everybody."

Federal authorities have issued a warning that members of Ummah may
retaliate against law enforcement officials in Michigan and in the
Washington area due to their "close ties and staunch support of Jamil
Al-Amin." According to the federal affidavit, Abdullah regularly
encouraged his followers to arm themselves for potential
confrontations with the law. He allegedly told his followers that
police would have to shoot him before he would allow himself to be
arrested. In a 2004 sermon, Abdullah urged his followers not to
"carry a pistol if you're going to give it up to police. You give
them a bullet."

The affidavit noted Abdullah's November 2008 explanation of how to
attack a federal agent, "Trail them, follow them, know where they
house is at, and everything else. Deal with them, deal with them the
way, the way they supposed to be dealt with, man."Abdullah's
followers underwent firearms, sword fighting, and other martial arts
training in his mosque. According to the affidavit, this training was
allegedly geared toward violent confrontations against law
enforcement and street gangs.

In February 2009, Abdullah allegedly told his followers that they
should align themselves with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and
Hezbollah. The following month, Abdullah gave an apparent follower,
who is also an FBI source, a CD described as "pro-Taliban
propaganda," according to the affidavit. Abdullah and at least one of
his followers have made derogatory statements about Jews and
Christians, the affidavit alleges. Abdullah has previously urged his
followers to cut off all ties with Jews and Christians.

Over 1,000 people attended the funeral for Abdullah on October 31.
Some of those attending called him a good man and martyr. Dawud
Walid, head of the Michigan Council on American-Islamic Relations,
said he knew Abdullah."I know him as a respected imam in the Muslim
community." One of those named in the federal affidavit, Mujahid
Carswell, who lived in Windsor Ontario ­ the Canadian city across the
river from Detroit ­ stated that his mosque was affiliated with CAIR.
Imam Abdullah, according to the affidavit, said of the group "They
send me all this stuff…CAIR and everybody send me all this stuff. I
get sick. I can't watch." Also according to the transcript, Abdullah
said "Obama is a Kafir, McCain …all the rest are Kuffars. You can't
make a good Kafir [into] a bad Kafir…The worst Muslim is better than
the best." CAIR has long had to defend itself against accusations
that it is affiliated with extremist Islamist organizations.

In Washington DC, Imam Abdul Alim Musa, a Muslim activist and
director of the Masjid Al-Islamin, referred to the Abdullah's killing
as an "assassination" by the federal government. In an interview with
Iran's Press TV, Musa said in reference to the federal affidavit on
Abdullah, "If you notice the government, in order to do something to
you, they have to prearrange a scenario so that they do whatever
crime that they want to commit. When they wanted to invade Iraq they
said there were weapons of mass destruction. So, this is what they
said. Although it wasn't true it justified the invasion."

Musa added, "Abdullah told his followers that if the police tried to
take his weapon or tried to apprehend him he would respond with
violence and they will have to shoot him before they can arrest him.
Ok, this is a government informer giving the government the
information that they want to justify using violent means against
Imam Luqman." The Washington DC imam continued, "So, what we are
saying is that we refer to his killing as an assassination by the
federal government. This is to intimidate the rest of the Muslim
community. The Muslims in America are under a lot of pressure and the
masjids, the Muslim centers, the community centers are full of
government infiltrators, spies, and saboteurs who try to break the
back of this wonderful Islamic movement in North America."

.

No easy ride for a dying hellraiser

No easy ride for a dying hellraiser

http://tonight.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=354&fArticleId=5319984

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1244298/Why-does-Dennis-Hopper-hate-wife-hes-divorcing-deathbed.html

January 20, 2010
By Glenys Roberts

As a gesture of pure, hate-fuelled spite, it takes some beating.
Ultimate bad boy Dennis Hopper, the actor who played the psychotic
thug in Blue Velvet and the hairy biker in Easy Rider, is divorcing
his wife, Victoria, from his deathbed. Most people, given weeks to
live, would at least attempt a reconciliation. Especially if they had
a six-year-old daughter and had enjoyed nearly 14 relatively happy
years together.

But not the incorrigible Dennis. Suffering from terminal prostate
cancer, he is vowing to cap the amount Victoria gets in his will and,
what's more, to deny her any hope of contesting it. As the
73-year-old lies dying, he also wants her to move out of the
beachside compound where they had once lived in harmony.

It seems only yesterday that I was in Morocco with Hopper, who was
playing a Philistine general in Nic Roeg's movie, Samson And Delilah.
Newly married to the then 28-year-old actress, Victoria Duffy, the
couple were holed up in their desert bungalow, enjoying each other's
company so much that the other stars, including Elizabeth Hurley, who
had been expecting displays of Hopper's legendary roistering, were
left sorely disappointed.

Here was the infamous Hollywood hellraiser, variously known as a
genius and a maniac, in nesting mode, his only arguments confined to
benign exchanges with the local carpet-sellers as he haggled for soft
furnishings to take back home.

It was a far cry from the argumentative "madman of the movies" we had
come to expect, the man who habitually carried a gun and a knife, and
whose daily intake of stimulants was half a gallon of rum, 28 beers
and three grams of cocaine.

I always gave him a wide berth in Hollywood, largely because I wanted
to keep my sanity - and he had a habit of sucking others into his murky world.

Despite the odd spell of good behaviour, Hopper has always been very
bad indeed. Yet he could have been Hollywood royalty. Born in Kansas
in 1936, he claimed he developed his outlaw urges while growing up in
his home state, where "if you could put your hand on the bar, they
put a beer in it - even though the state was dry".

When his soldier father returned a hero from World War II, he failed
to rein in his son. The young Hopper took to sniffing petrol fumes
and smashing up trucks with a baseball bat.

A born show-off, he soon gravitated to Hollywood to work in the
theatre. And there he started propositioning girls in the street with
the characteristically unsophisticated chat-up line: "My name is
Dennis Hopper. Do you want to f***?" Legend has it he even tried his
luck with a couple of nuns.

He recently described his philosophy as "living to the edge of your
senses. All my early idols were alcoholics and drug addicts. Arthur
Rimbaud, John Barrymore, Edmund Kean. Crazies.

"When I started doing Shakespeare at the age of 13, the first stories
I ever heard were about the great English Shakespearean actors, who
all seemed to be a bunch of drunks. So I took immediately to the
bottle and let it carry me through my career. Then there was the sex..."

He was initiated into Hollywood ways by none other than Natalie Wood.
The pair were making Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean, and as
well as bedding director Nicholas Ray, Natalie also propositioned
Dean's stand-in - the then 18-year-old Dennis Hopper. The two made
love in a car by the side of the road.

Then, while working in New York in 1961, he met and married Brooke
Hayward, daughter of the great Broadway producer, Leland Hayward. In
a legendary scene, her exasperated father followed them up the aisle
whispering in his beloved daughter's ear: "It's still not too late to
get out of it."

In New York, Hopper cultivated his interest in photography, sculpture
and painting, taking photographs for Vogue and developing his passion
for pop-art.

But his real speciality was the city's heavy-duty nightlife. He hung
out with foul-mouthed comedian Lenny Bruce and jazz musician Miles Davis.

Brooke, mother of his first child, says: "Dennis had a reputation for
being difficult - he was actually very shy and very sweet, but much
of his personality was distorted by virtue of being an actor."

Why she put up with him for so long has always puzzled me. He would
come home from drug-fuelled orgies - and start beating her up. By
1969, the marriage was over.

That was the year Hopper and Jack Nicholson persuaded supermarket
heir Huntington Hartford to give them $500 000 to finance their
breakthrough movie, Easy Rider, in which Hopper, by now a
semi-psychotic maniac, directed as well as starred, alongside Jane
Fonda's brother, Peter. The stories from the set are legendary. On
one occasion, Hopper demanded that Peter clamber on top of a statue
of the Madonna and open his heart about his mother, who had committed
suicide by cutting her throat with a razor when Peter was only 10.
"Ask her why she copped out on you," raved Hopper cruelly.

Relations became so bad Nicholson said: "Everyone wanted to kill one
another or put one another in institutions."

Hopper's famous lack of inhibition was always getting him into
trouble. Orgies with 50 girls a night were quite common, as was his
fondness for walking naked through town.

At the height of his depravity, he was involved in marathon sex
sessions fuelled by a mixture of cocaine and heroin that he injected
every 10 minutes.

When the Easy Rider crew moved to Taos, New Mexico, Hopper had
everyone dropping LSD and hallucinating.

One girl who resembled Joan of Arc was chained to a post and narrowly
avoided being set on fire. Another actor almost died when he took too
many hallucinogenic peyote buds.

But Dennis's most memorable moment in Taos was when he married blonde
Mamas And Papas singer Michelle Phillips, who happened to be
visiting. The morning after the wedding, he woke up so stoned he
didn't recognise his bride. The marriage lasted a week; Phillips has
always said she divorced him because of his unnatural sexual demands.

Indeed, when he later tried to set up a hippy commune in Taos, the
drug abuse and violence were so bad the locals ran him out of town.

Despite all this, Easy Rider was a phenomenal success, giving its
leading men untold freedom to behave as they liked. Fonda, Nicholson
and Hopper would congregate at a production company called BBS, where
secretaries were hired for their skills in rolling and injecting drugs.

One story known to Hopper insiders concerns the ashes of the dead
wife of a BBS executive, which were kept at headquarters in a gold
dish. The doped-up stars were so used to inhaling anything they found
in an open bowl that one day they snorted her ashes by mistake.

For the time being, though, Hopper could do no wrong. The studios
threw money at him hoping he would make another masterpiece, and he
came up with his next film, The Last Movie. It was a flop and Hopper
did not direct anything for a decade. Within a year, he was in an
institution, which probably saved his life.

"I always thought an artist was allowed to derange their senses any
way they wanted, as long as they created," he said.

By the '80s, after falling off the wagon and indulging in another
binge, things had once again got so bad, Dennis was known as The
Menace. He was imprisoned in Mexico after being found naked wandering
in a jungle and begging the police to shoot him. He reportedly spent
time in seven different jails.

He was hospitalised for months in LA after he tried to clamber on to
the wing of a moving plane. He claimed the drugs they gave him to
bring him down gave him temporary Parkinson's disease, which brought
him to his senses - and he gave up drinking in 1983.

Having failed at matrimony to two more actresses - which produced
another daughter and a son - Hopper married Victoria in 1996 and
appeared to calm down. Their daughter, Galen, was born in March 2003.

The wonder is that despite all this bad behaviour, Hopper has managed
to make more than 80 films. No one has ever disputed that he is
talented both as an actor and artist .

And until last year, he was still filming a TV series in the heat of
the New Mexico desert - playing an aggressive, drug-fuelled and
paranoid music producer, based on his friend, Phil Spector, who was
recently jailed for shooting dead a woman.

While he is officially a reformed character, Hopper the hellraiser is
still given to venting spleen in the most magnificent fashion - both
on and off screen - if he doesn't get his own way.

His deathbed divorce is obviously a last act of defiance from one of
Hollywood's greatest hellraisers.

.

Middle Class White Man vs. Wild

Middle Class White Man vs. Wild

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35224

by Mac Johnson
01/18/2010

"I'm sitting, alone, at my kitchen table, eating cold leftovers for
dinner. Bear Grylls is floating, accompanied only by a full camera
crew and a giant digital blur to cover his blaring white bare butt,
on a rickety raft in the midst of the ocean -- giving himself a
"survival-enhancing" sewage enema to the accompaniment of much grunting."

"This is crazy," I thought. "Why aren't I on a raft?"

On any given night, all across America, this scene is repeated in
thousands of homes. The age of digital television has given
Americans the power to watch anything they want and what middle class
white guys want is… angry crab fishermen, belligerent lobstermen,
unruly swamp loggers, ice road truckers, survivor men, monster
garages, demolition crews, rough necks, and assorted other dirty jobs. Huh.

At some point, even someone as self-centered and clueless as me has
to see a larger societal trend at work here. While a substantial
segment of the population may still be watching the same old tired
crap …and also shows about midgets -- angry midgets (curmidgets),
married midgets, pregnant midgets, and now felonious midgets with pit
bulls (criminidgets)… another segment seems to have decided what they
want to watch are all the crappy jobs and hardships our parents and
grandparents worked so hard to "save" us from.

Clearly, a cubicle and a 401k is leaving unsatisfied some basic
aspect of the American male soul. Men are yearning for a chance to
express the basic inborn characteristics of maleness i.e. to act like
freakin' a man, damn it. Working in corporate America (if indeed,
the corporate world can be described as "America") involves a whole
lot of not being male.

As a matter of fact, being male is pretty much a dismissible offence
in most workplaces, with a whole corporate police force dedicated to
investigating tempers, urges, unauthorized actions, conflicts,
insensitivities and attitudes. The ideal worker is neutered, quiet,
subservient and unobjectionable. That's the whole point gelding
draft animals, isn't it?

The ideal worker does not get his own show on The Discovery
Channel. If he's a midget, he might get a show on TLC, but even that
is doubtful. Really, he would need to be a midget with a severe
medical defect -- "I am my own midget twin" could work, or perhaps "I
didn't know I was pregnant... and a midget". Anyway, where was I?

Right, manly men are such an anomaly in today's neutered society that
they have to be put on TV so that we can remember what they look
like. This is especially true in the white middle class, which being
the main victims of the evil generation of anti-men that arose in the
1960's has had all relevant male role models banned by political
correctness. Soldiers are baby killers. Cowboys are gun
nuts. Rednecks are racists. Frontiersmen are mean to Indians. And
the Founding Fathers are racist, sexist, homophobic wealthy religious
fanatic gun nuts who were mean to Indians. Manual labor is now
considered a sign of failure in life (a punishment for "lack of
education,") and is best left to illegal aliens so that white folks
can all go to college and experience limited aspects of testosterone
for one last time before being neutered for the workplace.

So what we are left with are only a few socially acceptable male
icons accessible to middle class white people. These include,
ironically, antisocial and formerly outlaw bikers -- a group that
would likely kick the crap out of the Hollywood rejects that lionized
them in "Easy Rider," "Rebel without a Cause" and other such Biker
Chic films. Despite the foamy-mouthed hatred a real biker would have
for his boosters, "biker" has become a rare and hot commodity - an
approved white male manly stereotype. The result is that a few
million fat balding fifty-year-old dentists and office workers have a
shiny, rarely-used $30,000 Harley in their garage and a leatherman
dress-up outfit to wear on select weekend days with sunny warm weather.

Another approved white male role model is the professional athlete --
and it's easy to see why! Professional sports really matter. Every
week, we all face the horrible prospect that the group of felons paid
to wear the name of our city (that week) might get beaten in a
children's game by a group of felons paid to wear the name of a
different city (that week). Gasp! Yankees suck!

A third option is to engage in blatant ethnic transvestism -- many a
white kid has become so desperate for a model of manhood that he's
bought some overpriced baggy pants and feigned being a gangster
rapper. Saddest of all, though, may be the self-loathing white kid
sporting dreadlocks. Friends don't let friends go natty. Love the
skin you're in.

Obviously though, these slim pickings don't seem to be doing it for a
lot of people, because unapproved role models are creeping back into
the public eye -- thus the recent fascination with the white working
class. Between The Discovery Channel, The Military Channel, The
History Channel, and a variety of other outlets, a curious character
is slowly regaining respect in the national psyche.

He's a fighter, a soldier, an adventure seeker. He eats little
animals, lives off the land, finds his own way. He fishes, traps,
repairs vehicles, builds skyscrapers, shovels manure. He's juvenile,
active, and possessed of all the introspection of a golden
retriever. He cusses. He strains. He endures pain and enrages
coworkers merely for fun. He yells when he's mad and drinks at the
end of the day. He is, apparently, a distant cultural memory that
many aspire subconsciously to return to.

He is, basically, a redneck -- the one figure most maligned and hated
by the elites that have controlled our media, our universities, and
our politics for decades now.

Deep down inside, people see in him a true and a free man -- a slave
to neither materialism nor human resources, and a rare thing nowadays.

Where is all this going? One possibility is a general uprising --
sort of like the end of "Fight Club". The other is a show about
midget rednecks -- catching crabs. In a survival situation. With Mike Rowe.
--

Mr. Johnson is a writer and medical researcher in Cambridge, Mass.

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