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Thursday, May 17, 2007
CARNY TALKER 101
Del was in the grips of his speed high, " Likethewayiseeitiknowicouldbeagreattalkerredand-" , Red stepped up, "Kid, kid slow down I can't hear a word you're saying. Easy, easy. Ya gotta know the kayfabe kid. If you're lucky, maybe you can be a talker by the time we leave here. In three days? I wouldn't bet on it though kid. Took me a couple of weeks."
" Look, what do I need to know? What does a talker do?", Del asked, sitting down on the stack of boxes they had unloaded.
Red drew out his pipe, pulled the paper balled up in the bowl out and started the ritual to light the pipe. Drawing slowly on it. Easy, until the smoke coming from the bowl moved continuously into puffs in the air.
"A talker in the carny ain't just a barker for a show, he's the heartbeat of the carny. He bails out a pal in need, he can stop a fight or get us through a town without a payoff so high we'll still be paid. He can't be the center of attention but if he isn't directing traffic, we're cooked kid. Still want to be a talker?", Red looked direct into Del's eyes.
"Yes. Yes, I want to be a talker. How do I start?", Del asked, " how do I study for this?".
Red took a puff off the gar, " You can't learn any one way kid. It's the moment, ya see. Let's say the emby has a B.R. but his pal is a sharpie-"
"What", Del interrupted, " is an emby?".
"An emby is dumb enough to come back and lose over and over.", said Red with the pipe stem in the side of his mouth, " the lifeblood of a carny. Maybe he loves a girl, or a game. But his pal, see, is a sharpie. Maybe he worked at a carny or he knows someone that did, and he knows the real game. You get called over by the Agent, the guy running a game. You have to be aware of every moment. Every move. Every object around all of you. If the agent says Hi, B.C. that means BE COOL. This is a bad situation. So you B.C. and see how the two guys respond. Friendly, but more aware than you have ever been in your life. A B.R. is a bank roll, the wallet, the customer.
To cool everyone out maybe you say to the Agent, "What happened here?", but there's something you know that the B.R. doesn't.
You know how you will respond when the Agent does.
"I do?", asked Del, puzzled.
Red took another drag from the pipe, and let the smoke slowly leave his mouth.
"Yep. You agree. Ya hafta to agree with ANYTHING and EVERYTHING the Agent says. You can't ask him another question, you can't shift the burden on him. You are adding to whatever he says happened. You are pushing the story, not just accepting it. You are gotta watch your partners back.
"You can't just squeeze one of your ideas in, kid. You have to make your story so real a sharpie would buy it. You have to know how to use silence to create tension, noise as a diversion, a pretty girl for agreement and to be prepared for anything. Be alert, or you and the agent could get your asses kicked. You treat the B.R. stupid and he'll pick up in it right away. Ya gotta know every angle to be a talker.
"I've seen guys working here 86'd for not knowing how to spot patterns in the way people talk. Maybe they reveal they have a kid and you can give them a doll to make the problems go away. Or maybe it's his dame and he has to show off, got me? You have to know the patter of the fortune teller and the girls selling their keys.
"86'd is booted off. I don't want you booted off. Or left in some hospital. So let's take this one step at a time", Red said " first off at lunch go over to the hootchie cootchie show and listen to L.C. He's the best talker we got".
Del looked over to the dancers tent and saw the prettiest girl he thought he had ever seen walk inside. Hard to say, she was a ways away, with make -up, Del had to squint. But he knew.
That tent was full of women!
Carny women. Strippers. Hookers. Women on the road like him.
Except they had done it.
Women.
Posted at 10:35 am by Psychomike
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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
EXPLAINING TRIPPING TO SOMEONE WHO HASN'T
I thought I had known where the LSD subculture came from, Leary, Huxley and the like. I didn't know about the experiments with psychedelics by the military, the Nazi's, OSS and CIA. Not when I first tried it. Years later I would play the character Albert Hubbard in THE ACID TEST (1*), the man who actually introduced LSD to the general public. He had been in OSS, and depending on which version of his life you want to believe, he was also a CIA prankster who would on occasion slip the drug into the coffee machine at the CIA cafeteria. (Which apparently turned into laughfests and who knows what else. In the CIA cafeteria you can sit for 20 years and never know the name or job of the person across from you - no matter how beautiful. Then you're tripping together! There are stories he bought gallons of real LSD. Here is mostly what we know about the Johnny Appleseed of LSD - who never, ever meant for a kid like me to trip......
... Captain Hubbard is a breath of fresh air. A
 spy by profession, he lived a life of intrigue and adventure befitting his chosen career. Born dirt poor in Kentucky, he served with the OSS (precursor to the CIA) during the Second World War and went on to make a fortune as a uranium entrepreneur. The blustery rum-drinking Hubbard is widely credited with being the first person to emphasize LSD's potential as a visionary or transcendental drug. "Most people are walking in their sleep," he said. "Turn them around, start them in the opposite direction and they wouldn't even know the difference." As a high-level OSS officer, the Captain directed an extremely sensitive covert operation that involved smuggling weapons and war material to Great Britain prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In pitch darkness he sailed ships without lights up the coast to Vancouver, where they were refitted and used as destroyers by the British Navy. All of this, of course, was highly illegal, and President Truman later issued a special pardon with kudos to the Captain and his men. During his first acid trip in 1951, he claimed to have witnessed his own conception. "It was the deepest mystical thing I've ever seen," the Captain recounted. "I saw myself as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of intelligence. I saw my mother and father having intercourse. It was all clear." The coarse, uneducated Captain lacked elegance and restraint -- "I'm just a poor son of a bitch!" he'd bellow. Nonetheless he teamed up with a tall, slender novelist who epitomized the genteel qualities of the British intellectuals by the name of Aldous Huxley. In 1955 Huxley wrote to a mutual friend "Your nice Captain tried a new experiment -- group mescalinization." Captain Hubbard had provided Huxley with mescaline, a semi-synthetic extract of the peyote cactus. Though Huxley waxes poetic about his experiences with mescaline, his poetry is tempered by the authors' introduction of the subject in "Acid Dreams." The drug, they tell us, was used "in mind control experiments carried out by Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II... the Nazis concluded that it was 'impossible to impose one's will on another person as in hypnosis even when the strongest does of mescaline had been given... "The mescaline experiments at Dachau were described in a lengthy report by the U.S. Naval Technical Mission, which swept across Europe in search of every scrap of industrial material and scientific data that could be garnered from the fallen Reich. "It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision. ...it opens up a host of philosophical problems, throws intense light and raises all manner of questions in the field of aesthetics, religion, theory of knowledge," Huxley said of his mescaline experience in a letter to a friend. Going on to praise Hubbard he wrote "What Babes in the Woods we literary gents and professional men are! The great World occasionally requires your services, is mildly amused by mine; but its full attention and deference are paid to Uranium and Big Business. So what extraordinary luck that this representative of both these High Powers should (a) have become so passionately interested in mescaline and (b) be such a nice man." Said Hubbard of his proselytizing escapades, "Cost me a couple of hundred thousand dollars. ...I had six thousand bottles to begin with." Hubbard promoted his cause with indefatigable zeal, crisscrossing North America and Europe, giving LSD to anyone who would stand still. "People heard about it, and they wanted to try it," he explained. During the 1950s and early 1960s he turned on thousands of people from all walks of life -- policemen, statesmen, captains of industry, church figures, scientists. "They all thought it was the most marvelous thing" he stated "And I never saw a psychosis in any one of these cases." Hubbard had such remarkable credentials that he received special permission from Rome to administer LSD within the context of the Catholic faith. "He had kind of an incredible way getting that sort of thing," said a close associate who claimed to have seen papers from the Vatican. Even though Hubbard took a lot of acid and was a maverick among his peers, he remained a staunch law-and-order man throughout his life. The crew-cut Captain was the quintessential turned on patriot, a seasoned spy veteran who admired the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. Above all Hubbard didn't like weirdo's - - especially longhaired radical weirdo's who abused his beloved LSD. Thus he was eager to apply his espionage talents to a secret study of the student movement and acid subculture... And so on though a psychedelic topological maze alternating cloak-and-dagger with enlightenment. http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0049.htm
Playing Hubbard was fun, and the stories he told in the play were all true- though I wondered how many in the audience knew he was a real person?
The bible of hippie culture was HOW TO SPEAK HIP by Del Close and John Brent. I didn't know who Del was, but I assure you just about every hippie bought the album. I had no idea when I got mine that years later we would be on stages together.
How to explain the psychedelic experience to someone who hasn't tripped? Is there a test? (2*)
These are spiders creating webs on drugs.....
The common error about drugs and creativity is that one creates the other.
How to explain this..... when a person trips they notice the leaves on a tree, the sun and the clouds. Broken glass on the street becomes shining, shifting explosions of light. They might draw or think of a line or do something creative- but the thing is, the leaves were always there. The sun. The clouds. Broken glass has always reflected the light. You stopped noticing. Likewise, that talent was there before you ever took a drug.
Ahhh, but that's me today saying that and when I return, I will try to show what a first trip on a sugarcube was like........
FOOTNOTES:
.1* -
Mike Flores puts improv technique to the acid test
By Robert K. Elder
Tribune staff reporter
May 19, 2004
If Mike Flores had a resume, which he doesn't, the "experience" portion would look something like this:
Movie director, scriptwriter, disc jockey, playwright, actor, improv comedy troupe leader, Vietnam War protester, underground journalist, hippie and founder and president of Chicago's Psychotronic Film Society.
This week, he's adding "improv dramatist" to the list with " The Acid Test 1966," a psychedelic ensemble theater piece performed by The Wrecking Crew, Flores' improv comedy troupe.
Film composer Mark Mothersbaugh, the former frontman of post-punk icons Devo, provides recorded music for Flores' loony vision, which takes its name from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' 1966 trip across the U.S. exposing
the populace to psychedelic culture and LSD.
"I was fortunate enough to make friends years ago with an older, more mature [ acid guru] Tim Leary," Mothersbaugh says. "Although my days of dropping acid had long been over, I associated the era with a lot of positive change and spontaneity. It always fit into my life in a positive way, and to create music for [Flores'] project -- it's a chance to work muscles that were already there."
From 1966 to 1967, Flores says, the whole country went through a major cultural shift. Students were protesting the war in Vietnam, " the pill" ushered in the era of free love, and politics became a powder keg sitting in the middle of many family dinner tables.
Flores, who turned his 43-week run of "Bettie Page Uncensored: The Unauthorized Story" at Lakeview's Playground Theater into an independent movie last year, says he wants to explore the significance of those few mid-'60s months.
"I'm interested in that moment when things began to change, and the versions I've seen of that moment so far [have been lacking]," he says.
"
The stuff that's left over from the era really doesn't capture what happened to the people, what was on our minds and what started the ripple that would change society."
Flores' " The Acid Test 1966" revolves around a party and a sextet of youths from different walks of life. One character has run away from the home of her Navy officer father, which reflects Flores' own biography.
"All of the characters probably represent some part of me," concedes Flores, a frenetic, motor-lipped raconteur. "Many of the experiences the characters have, I had at some point."
Friction on home front
A former military brat, Flores was born in San Diego, then raised in Osaka, Japan, and Atlanta. He says he left home because of friction with his parents over Vietnam.
"I was being groomed for military school, then a second lieutenant [position] in Vietnam," he recalls.
The turning point came, he says, in 1966 when his father, a lifetime Navy man, was visited by a friend, just back from a tour of Vietnam. The visitor brought along a slideshow, Flores remembers.
" The first slide was of him on top of a pile of bodies and the second was guys with enemy ears strung around their necks," Flores says. "I think it was those slides that shook me up."
So, he left home, hitchhiked through 36 states looking like "a stalk of broccoli," rail-thin with a large Afro. He survived by writing for underground newspapers, and in 1971 got an offer from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago to write and organize demonstrations against the war. After the SDS gig ended, Flores hung around Chicago floating from job to job, watching bootlegged Japanese animation. In 1979, friend Del Close, legendary Second City personality and founder of the ImprovOlympic, turned him on to improv.
"I also got excited by what Del was trying to do with it," Flores says. "Del's vision was the long-form improv method could be used to create shows, movies, TV shows -- and then when you have something you feel comfortable with, you keep it."
From 1979 to 1985, the pair performed as "Pope Michael Flores and Rev. Del Close" on television, radio and nightclubs, Flores says.
Close died five years ago of complications from emphysema. People still misunderstand his long-form improv methods, Flores says, which is basically using improv to create characters and plots spontaneously, then honing
the end result into a cohesive narrative structure.
"Unfortunately, it got labeled as an improv exercise and no one tried to carry it to the next step," Flores says. " The Acid Test 1966" is his attempt to demonstrate Close's vision.
"I liked the idea of characters creating themselves," Flores says. "I have a skeleton of where we're going, where the dance numbers come in, but everything else is created by the actors themselves."
George Dickson, 28, plays Wild Bill in the play, host of the " acid test." He says he joined The Wrecking Crew after answering Flores' ad in the theater magazine Performink.
"He's either crazy or a genius, or maybe both," Dickson says of Flores. "He has big plans and ideas and unorthodox methods. I like the freedom that he gives you. He's the only director I've had who shows up with a 12-pack of beer."
Championing cult movies
Flores hasn't had a day job in 10 years and spends most of his time working on plays, movies and projects with
the Psychotronic Film Society, which champions cult movies. An Internet enthusiast, Flores showers his cast, friends and colleagues with multiple daily e-mails about new music, politics and conspiracy theories.
Starlet photos and autographs, including signed glossies of Sean Connery, Johnny Carson and Kate Moss, decorate an entire wall of the Rogers Park apartment he shares with wife Kat Southerland, " Acid Test's" executive producer.
In a gravelly voice with a vague Southern accent, Flores recounts the time he dropped acid with rocker Duane Allman, the time he dated actress Kim Cattrall (a signed cast photo of "Sex and the City" hangs on the wall), the time his wife proposed to him "over hot wings at Hooters" and the tale of turning 16 in a New Mexico jail -- all stories his cast has heard, some more than once.
"He has a story for everything; he's done just about everything," says Kai Collins, 27, an Uma Thurman lookalike who plays free spirit Eve in the show.
During their first, hour-long, phone conversation, Collins remembers, "I doodle when I talk on the phone, so when we were done talking, I had about 10 pages and at the bottom, I wrote, `This guy is totally nuts.'" Collins has since, affectionately, upgraded her assessment of Flores to "functionally insane."
Ever the non-conformist, Flores isn't moving his production into traditional venues.
"I'm moving it into nightclubs, movie houses, art galleries -- places where people don't expect to see improv anything," Flores says. "We do shows like a rock group."Part of the reason is the form of the show. There's no stage, and audiences are encouraged to mingle and interact with the characters at " the party." Non-traditional venues also have economic benefits.
"Theater people wait for the critic to show up," Flores says. "Then they hope it's a good review and they hope they can sell enough tickets to at least cover the rent. This is unacceptable for me. If I did that, I'd have to take a job."
He is convinced Chicagoans want to see something new.
"There's about 200 theaters and about 700 theater groups in Chicago and they all pretty much battle for the same 2,500 people. So they end up running for four weeks, six weeks. They spend a year developing a show, they don't have a chance of getting back any of what they've invested," Flores says. "My shows tend to run so long -- they've gone 33 weeks to a year and a half. They appeal to people who are experience-oriented. They want to experience something new, want to feel like they are involved in something exciting."
Connection to the fringe
Mothersbaugh says this passionate point of view helped draw him to
the project.
"I've always been connected, through Devo, to the more interesting fringe artists, so I meet a lot of madmen and really talented visionaries," Mothersbaugh says. "I think of [Flores] as somebody who is very enthusiastic about . . . all the little bits of shrapnel that influence and make up culture."
The pair had tried to team up before, but something always got in the way, Flores says. "But when I told him I was going to basically re-create an acid trip [in the performance], his reaction was immediate. He volunteered to do the music."
Flores wants to take the experience from " The Acid Test 1966" and create an unrelated improv indie movie. There are also plans in June to do a comedy concept CD with The Wrecking Crew, produced by Joe Cassidy of local band Assassins.
"I call myself an entertainer, as opposed to being a theater person. I don't hang out at actor bars, I don't talk about the family of theater," Flores says. "I'm easy to miss in the theater community until you look in the paper and say, `Damn, that show is still running?'"
(2*)
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Posted at 10:02 am by Psychomike
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Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Here are armed British soldiers on LSD:
LSD documentary with information on Tim Leary and the LSD explosion.
LSD and Aldous Huxley's Island: Setting sail for a better country by Bruce Eisner in a 40 minute presentation
e  |
Nine drawings
These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.
First drawing is done 20 minutes after the first dose (50ug)
An attending doctor observes - Patient chooses to start drawing with charcoal.
The subject of the experiment reports - 'Condition normal... no effect from the drug yet'.
next drawing |
The newspapers, radio and TV were running LSD stories almost every day. Cary Grant, Groucho Mark, Jackie Gleason, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, everyone hip or square was either taking it or talking about it.
So after doing my research, I got a friend who had tripped before to sit with me ( which had to be agonizingly boring) and prepared. I had a pad of paper and pen, and dutifully noted the time I injested the sugar cube.
The first half hour was ok, but when I tried to write what I was feeling the words no longer fit between the lines of the notepad. I laughed and decided to put on music.
I was playing George Szell conducting Wagner Ring excerpts and was soaring with the music, floating between the instruments, standing on a mountain top. Went outside and looked around and didn't recognize my block! I stumbled back inside tasted a handful of grapes with their every nuance and texture. Tasted them like I had never had a grape before.
I looked in a mirror and wondered about aging and realized I was this voice I hear inside and that voice will always be there no matter how old my vessel and the Beatles came on the stereo and I sat down and started to tell my friend what I had just thought but the music took me away.
To lead a better life I need my love to be here...
Here, making each day of the year
Changing my life with a wave of her hand
Nobody can deny that there's something there
There, running my hands through her hair
Both of us thinking how good it can be
Someone is speaking but she doesn't know he's there
I want her everywhere and if she's beside me
I know I need never care
But to love her is to need her everywhere
Knowing that love is to share
Each one believing that love never dies
Watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there
I want her everywhere and if she's beside me
I know I need never care
But to love her is to need her everywhere
Knowing that love is to share
Each one believing that love never dies
Watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there
To be there and everywhere
Here, there and everywhere
A woman! Wow! What would sex be like on this drug! My friend didn't know and said that was "too heavy" for him.
I couldn't wait......... and now that I knew what LSD was like, I knew I had to try pot. Beer. Cigarrettes.
I wondered what those were like....... I took out one of my comic books
and dug the story of the Silver Surfer finally cut on the TV and it was THE WASP WOMAN and my pal made a pizza which looked like it was breathing when it came out of the oven until I noticed it was just hot and bubbly and Bestoink Dooley was funny and it was too late to play music so we walked over to Piedmont Park which at night was beautiful and mysterious.
Watched the sun come up.
Decided I understood what Merlin meant about us being surrounded by the dragon and walked home and passed out dreaming of sleeping in the dragon's claw.
TO CONTINUE THIS STORY PLEASE CLICK ON NEXT PAGE IN RIGHT HAND CORNER
Posted at 02:15 pm by Psychomike
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Wednesday, June 20, 2007
THE COMEDY PARTNERS
If my journey to drugs was the naive journey of a kid, Del's journey was a more painful and adult path to drugs.
There have been studies that show 3/4ths of drug addicts had abuse in their past. That means two things. They are self medicating. They had been let down by the state when they were abused, then they are tossed in jail or murdered as a second stage of abuse.
I say murdered, because in the UK, Denmark and other nations with legalized heroin they have discovered junkies live long lives. They have jobs, stay healthy- because the drug they get is a standardized drug. Making heroin illegal means harmful impurities, wild variations of quality, street life and shortened lives. By making it illegal, we kill them.
Del lost his virginity in the carny, but never answered how. It must not have ended well as he decided to go back home and go to college. Pretty good for a person who had skipped school to be with the carny.
Must have been tough to walk into that kitchen the first time.
To see where his dad had gathered the family before he drank the liquid that would eat its way out of and deeper into his body as the family screamed.
He knew about speed and could do his work and read science fiction and search for cool around the world. So many writers in New York City. Doing heroin and getting drunk. Del had started drinking in the carny and drank in school speed rapping a mile a minute his carny stories, which no one believed. But were all true. If anything, they were toned down.
In those days, not all college kids had sex.
Drinking, speeding his way through college- like everyone else.
He graduated, took off with a traveling horror show.
Horror shows traveled the U.S. from the 1930's until the late 1960's. They would pull into a town, show a classic old horror film someone owned a print of, and put on a stage show. For Del this would mean throwing spaghetti at people so they thought it was worms. You don't leave the sauce on it by the way, stains could get you hurt.
Drinking, reading, speaking, throwing. Between shows hit a bar to drink again.
Del's way of dealing with people was to hit them with one liners - he liked being on and getting the attention he never got at home. Get to really know him, the jokes dropped.
It must have been the avalanche of insights and jokes that led him to his third big heartbreak. He was dressing funny and wearing disguises in publicity shots of the time.
He found himself in a comedy group. In love with "the woman". I guess everyone has that one woman who haunts over the years. She was bright and smart and funny and they would stay up all night speeding and laughing and dreaming of making it.Together.
There was another guy in the group. Smart guy. Del liked him. He spoke of the three of them doing an act together. He just needed to rehearse, with Del and Her.
Apart. You know, for character work.
When she sat Del down at the kitchen table, without realizing the pain that table represented, and told him she was pregnant he thought the world had stopped.
Del thought marriage, but she said she needed an abortion.
(Even though abortions were illegal, every community in big cities had abortionists working the then illegal trade usually in the persons home. Rich people went to doctors who would do the act "off hours").
Del had money, she didn't, and his other partner didn't either, so Del put up the money for the procedure if he could go with her.
They held hands on the way in, and he held her on the way out.
He prayed she wouldn't hemorrhage, that it was all over.
A few days later he awoke and she wasn't lying next to him. He got up, walked around calling out to her. That's when he saw the note. On the kitchen table.
That damned kitchen table.
He sat down at the table and held the note up to his eyes. He couldn't see what it said, not because he wasn't wearing glasses but because his eyes were filled with tears. He had a good idea what the note said.
She had flown.
With the other comedy partner.
Thanks for helping with the abortion.
The blues is a heaviness. It's the feeling you can't get out of bed, or think straight, "a nervous wreck" they called it back then. No one understood depression.
But the pain was so bad Del wanted to die.
So it was time to runaway again.
New York was calling.
Posted at 09:20 pm by Psychomike
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Saturday, July 21, 2007
Vietnam- The World Changes
THE NAM
The impact on America over Vietnam has been compared to the division that happened in our earlier Civil War.
Well, close but no cigar.
Whole states were split in those days. In the early to mid 1960's, it was probably less than 5% of the population that were against the war.
I hadn't even heard of Vietnam. If I had, I paid it no mind.
So instead of the Nam turning "brother against brother", it was pretty much 95% of the public against 5.
My parents had met in the Navy and married in South Carolina. My mother was Irish, southern, my father was Mexican. His parents had crossed over the border just to give birth to him in the states, and he repaid the country by becoming a lifer in the Navy.
This marriage was odd because in those days, marriages between different races were illegal in South Carolina. It would take years before I figured out how they pulled it off.
Watching I LOVE LUCY one day it dawned on me that the #1 show on TV when they met - was Lucy. The impact of this show was such that southern racists looked the other way- after all- everyone liked Ricky Ricardo.
The miracle of that show was that in those days it presented a mixed marriage. The show had been on the radio before it went to TV, but on the radio Lucy had a pretend white hubby.
TV can do that. Before apartheid fell in South Africa, the number one show was THE BILL COSBY SHOW presenting black people in a way white South Africans had never seen before.
TV is blamed for so many ills, we often miss the positives it has contributed to society.
My mother would divorce my dad, remarry but she would always be Navy. She actually tried to fight being booted out for being pregnant but lacked the money to mount a legal fight. She would never forgive the Navy for not having leaves for pregnancy in those days, but her heart and discipline were Navy.
One day a friend of hers from the Navy came to visit. He brought slides from Vietnam where he was an adviser, and after dinner my two brothers, myself and my parents sat down to see the slides.
The room was dark and we sat down to watch in our pjs as we had to go to bed after the slides.
The first slide, the friend of the family was standing on top of a mound of bodies.
The second slide was GI's wearing necklaces of ears around their necks. The third slide-
well, my mom cut on the lights.
She was shaking.
There were tears in her eyes.
He had come to talk to my stepfather about coming to Nam as an adviser - she turned to him and said he wasn't going and told us to leave the room.
I sat in bed. I was a good Catholic kid. But I had just seen something that I knew in my heart was wrong. I was torn. Maybe I even had a nervous breakdown. I was in military school, Catholic military school. The Marist priests would give us our prayer, then the military teachers would take over.
One day in military strategy class the officer in charge would say everything we were learning had nothing to do with Nam. We were on our own there.
I would have graduated a second lieutenant, ordering seasoned troops into combat.
I walked out of class, went outside and sat down and cried.
A priest who came upon me asked what was wrong. I let it all out. I no longer believed in the war.
He looked at me in horror.
"Are you saying that the President of the United States would lie?", the Priest said.
I would hear that from that day on for years to come.
From adults.
I was just a kid.
I quickly realized no one in school agreed with me. I had to find people that did.
Posted at 02:01 pm by Psychomike
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Monday, July 30, 2007
GROWING UP IN KLAN COUNTRY
President Lyndon Johnson had claimed we'd been attacked twice at a place called the Gulf of Tonkin. He had run for President promising peace and Barry Goldwater had come out and called him a liar. Goldwater said the plans were already in the works to fight in Nam, that Johnson knew this and was lying. Goldwater had promised to wage a full military campaign, not a piecemeal struggle, and if by 1965 the war was not won we would leave Viet Nam, as it had little strategic importance.
Sometimes I wonder to this day what would America be like if we had left Nam in 1965.
Goldwater questioned LBJ going around the Constitution for civil rights legislation and warned that by doing so we set a standard for imperial Presidencies for decades to come. Goldwater warned that Social Security could only keep going if each succeeding generation had increased in size, and he doubted the baby boomers would have kids the way their World War 2 parents did. All of this sounded bizarre to the American public, who were offended that Goldwater called LBJ a liar.
Years later it was discovered the Gulf of Tonkin incident had not happened the way LBJ told the public it had. There was never a "second attack", and the first was dubious at best. The man who had run promising there would be no war, launched a war that would tear apart families and plunge America into a cynicism it has yet to shake. Somehow most went from believing everything the President said, to almost nothing.
So my first awareness of the war was that it was LBJ's war. A man named Hubert Humphrey would form a student group I would later join called STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY, but for now I was trying to discover who in Atlanta, Georgia agreed with me. The south was reluctantly giving up segregation, and a gay man named Lester Maddox became a folk hero for closing down his Pickwick Restaurant rather than serve blacks. Thousands of Georgians would line up to have him sign axe handles, meant to scare blacks with. Of course none of the rednecks would know he was gay until he died of AIDS years later.
There were no articles questioning the war, and no TV station dared have on civil rights leaders without segregationists in attendance to argue their cause. Usually freely allowed to use the word nigger as well. Today everyone claims they were against the war all along. It is a lie.
LBJ had come to power after JFK was assassinated - I still remember sitting in class when a class monitor came in crying and took the teacher outside. The teacher returned also crying. We were told to leave class and go home. The buses weren't running yet, I didn't want to wait in the long line at the payphone and walked home. I walked by student guards crying, and had no idea why. Had the nuclear war finally happened? What was going on? When I got home and my surprised mom told me the President had been shot, it was almost anti-climatic compared to the thoughts I'd been having.
I was still in ASFO, the Atlanta Science Fantasy Organization when a fanzine produced by one of its members hurled abuse at blacks who had written to Marvel comics asking for a black superhero. The title of the article was I'M A NIGGER AND I WANT A NIGGER SUPERHERO. Shocked I wrote a letter saying it was wrong to use the word, and Blacks should have heroes to look up to.
I received in the mail an envelope with a letter written on toilet paper threatening "my nigger loving life" and the author had enclosed human shit in the letter. The editor of the fanzine had actually put his return address on the envelope. Today he is famous for art about the civil war, but he's just a racist to me. This however, would be the least of the attacks that would happen to me in the years to come. It was only the beginning. ASFO however, had lost its appeal to me. I was reading underground papers and magazines on the new culture and that's what I wanted. I was reading less and less science fiction. None of the people in the group had even smoked pot, some members actually showed up to meetings drunk. Everyone drank in those days. I was into other things.
The first flyer I ever wrote against the war I passed out at Grady High School, after leaving military school. One day later, three adult men showed up at the door of class and told the teacher they had to see me. I went to the door. One man handed me a card with a man atop a horse in KKK robes holding a burning a torch. It read,
YOU HAVE BEEN VISITED BY THE KU KLUX KLAN
Contrary to popular belief, the original Klans and offshoots didn't carry the Confederate flag until the 1980's. The Stars and Stripes was their flag of choice.
and then they walked away. That day after school I went to my friend in the principals office and had him mimeograph for me a flyer describing the incident and promising to continue speaking out against the war. Students surrounded me baffled, wondering why I was against the war.I learned to argue when surrounded by dozens of people telling me I was wrong then. Johnny Reb was a singer out of New Orleans who sold loads of records in those days, and many students quoted his lyrics to me:
You niggers listen now
I'm gonna tell you how
To keep from getting tortured when the klan is on the prowl
Stay at home at night
And lock your doors uptight
Don't go outside or else you'll find those crosses aŽ burning bright
Now i know you won't believe me
So i'm gonna tell you why
The cajun ku klux klan is gonna get you by and by
I'm warning you that when i'm through you gonna change your tune
This story is 'bout a nigger
His name was Levy Coon
He walked into a cafe
He thought he'd get a bite
He thought that they would serve him since they passed the civil rights
The waitress told him no
And that he'd better go
He said: "no mam, my uncle sam say i don't have to go!"
So he sat there in that cafe
Being stubborn as a mule
No matter what she said he wouldn't get up of that stool
He sat their like a jackass
And i'm gonna demonstrate:
"I came in here to eat and i ain't leaving 'til i've ate."
The waitress had enough
She said i call your bluff
She said if we can't treat you right we'll have to treat you rough
The phone was in her hands
She gave him one more chance
He wouldn't go and so she called the Cajun Ku Klux Klan
When he saw them Cajuns coming
Levy knew it was too late
His eyes popped out his head and his kinky hair got straight
He said: "oh lousy white folks
I didn't mean a thing
Why did i have to listen to that demonstrater King?"
Now niggers understand
They tied up both his hands
He was at the mercy of the Cajun Ku Klux Klan
I knew just what they do
Levy knew it too
I knew what kind of torture they would put that nigger through
Now the moral of this story
As plain as it can be
Niggers mind your buisness, and let us white folks be
You better heed my warning
And try to understand
Don't you demonstrate around the Cajun Ku Klux Klan
(Here is the story behind the above singer: http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2003-07-01/commentary.html
But I was listening to someone else, and hoping to find someone who agreed with me. And though I was young, I knew a girl would be fun, too. So I listened to these words over and over. The words on this album were my only hope.
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.
BOB DYLAN
And I saw a girl at school, older than me, and I knew I wanted to lose my virginity to her.......... I still had high hopes.
Posted at 02:01 am by Psychomike
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Monday, August 06, 2007
WATCHED THE SECOND CITY WHITEWASH
The PBS channel showed the Second City documentary, a two parter, revealing the heavy handed way Second City now makes Del appear.
He doesn't.
In fact, half of the content of both episodes skips over the Belushi and Del years and instead promotes Canadian SCTV- a concept that Del had come up with according to Bernie Sahlins at the time of Del's death. He was never paid for it, nor did his name ever appear in the credits.
To avoid mentioning him they don't discuss ANY of the people that have taught at Second City. In fact, little is said about the classes at Second City in any medium.
Del only had two requests. He wanted his improv style used for more than comedy. He wanted his skull given to The Goodman to be used in plays.
Nothing he wanted was delivered. The skull at the Goodman is not his. The Harold is now used as a comedy training device.
They aren't just erasing my years with him, now they are erasing him.
The IO ( aka Improv Olympic, which wouldn't exist without him) even has a show up ATTILA attacking him.
Dear readers I promise you here this nonsense will not be tolerated.
Posted at 10:43 pm by Psychomike
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Vincent Price, Sears and Art
Born in San Diego by parents who had met in the Navy I grew up in Asia and found myself in South Carolina after a time in Virginia. Post 62, but I think JFK was still President.
My mom had me watch Vincent Price movies and along with my FAMOUS MONSTERS collection I had been exposed to his work on TV. I loved Boris Karloff as a kid, but Price was in the top 5. With Groucho, WC Fields, Bogart- good company!
When mom asked me if I wanted to go to Sears and meet him, I could come with her! Well that was a quick yes!
I couldn't think of much more than asking for his autograph and telling him I loved HOUSE OF WAX ! He was selling an art line for Sears, which allowed people to buy rare art prints for a few bucks down, and sold millions of dollars worth of art for Sears. (A Picasso limited edition might go for $300- a bargain and investment it would later turn out).
We walked into the store and it was the end of his time there. He was standing and talking to a couple that walked off, and I ran up to him.
He was very polite to me and I told him how much I liked his movies like HOUSE OF WAX and he laughed, turned to my mom and said, "Kids are watching those horror movies on TV and I hear this all the time. I wish they'd see LAURA-"
and I interrupted him and said I did! My mom had me watch it with her and he was great in that, too!".
He replied when I got older I might appreciate the woman in the lead GENE TIERNEY! ( He was right, and I got her autograph, too. She was in fact the woman who already had spawned adult thoughts in my mind, I realized not all women were like my mom after seeing her, but I wasn't going to say that in front of my mom!)
My mom talked about Tierney and they chatted about her (tragic) life and when there was a lull in their talk I asked for his autograph. He smiled and said yes, signed his name and drew his profile and gave it to me and told me to study art to understand life.
Years later I would teach at the Chicago Art Institute, 20th Century art history. From there I would go on to create and work in theatre and film.
And it all started with a trip to Sears, to meet Vincent Price.
Posted at 10:25 pm by Psychomike
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Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Posted at 08:49 am by Psychomike
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Saturday, August 25, 2007
MY DEBUT
I had been a fan of the Atlanta Horror movie host Bestoink Dooley, aka George Ellis and he had opened a movie theater that showed films no theater in the south would show. CHELSEA GIRLS, MY HUSTLER, SCORPIO RISING and other films at the zenith of the underground film movement were just a few of the films that played the Festival Cinema. He would later open the Film Forum which helped launch the ROCKY HORROR phenomenon in the south, but at the Festival he played the underground films I had read about in magazines like EVERGREEN and I decided underage or not, I wanted to go and see the films. There was a girl in my neighborhood I wanted to ask to go with me, she was older than me so I hoped he would let us in to see Warhol's MY HUSTLER if I could convince them she was my guardian!
The two screen effect of Chelsea Girls
She was the only exotic woman in Morningside in Atlanta. Some whispered she was Italian, some she was Jewish. Every time I saw her she was dating older guys, so I had to figure out how to approach her. I was barely a teen, and here she was 17 and being driven around by guys in their 20's!
I decided to just go up and talk to her, and I did. I told her about underground movies and Bestoink Dooley and she laughed and said we should carry on the conversation that night.
That night I met her by the Baptist Church which had a sloping hill and trees in a mini forest. Before the developers hit Atlanta, I was just two blocks from a street that ended in miles of cliffs and woods. Kids found old civil war bullets and even Indian arrowheads- it was a magical area at the end of a residential street!
She wore big hoop earrings (to this day those earrings get me excited) and we walked and talked. No adult had asked me what I was reading from the magazines before, and I talked about New York and the movie scene, which I still hadn't seen. It must have been the first time I talked to anyone about Andy Warhol and his movies. As we walked we came upon the sloped hill and sat down. For the first time in my life, it happened.
"It" was a pull, a kind of electromagnetic pull. We both felt it. At first she played with this feeling, which seemed to be new to her as well. She would draw her face close to mine, and the pull would happen. It was as if we were drawn to each other. After going back and forth like this a few times, and it would be years later I would learn it was probably our serotonin levels rising, she kissed me.
The pull happened again as we kissed and I lay back and saw the stars. We laughed about the feeling and she kissed me again.
I began to touch her. We began to touch each other, and there literally in front of God and everybody I lost my virginity. All the while feeling the pull of feelings.
Afterwards we hatched our plan to go to the Festival Cinema and made a date to meet in a few days to see the movie.
The next day I told my mom I had a date and she laughed and then got all serious. I'd have to clean the front room so we could chat before we left. I could tell my mom thought the whole idea, a 12 year on a date, was very cute.
The night came and She came to my door. I watched for her through the window I had been looking through for hours before the date when she glided to the door. Some women walk, some glide. She was a glider. I was excited and called my mom.
My mom walked to the door and opened it and there was this beautiful girl who had just driven up our driveway. My mom looked shocked. She asked her where my date was!
When informed the woman she met was my date, mom hit the roof.
As she yelled at her I could make out the words "slut", "whore" and the date was over.
I wanted to die.
I was all dressed up with nowhere to go, and my mom informed me I wasn't going on anymore dates.
No cell phones, answering machines or email in those days, I would have to wait for mom to leave to call her. I still wasn't any closer to the Festival Cinema. Later I tried to call her, but there was no answer.
I realized I could not stay home. The horse wasn't going back into the barn.
The next day I noticed MIN AND BILL was going to play the theater and that was all ages. So I went to the theater and decided to meet George Ellis, tell him I enjoyed his horror host personae, and maybe he would let me in for the underground movies. I entered the lobby and there at a desk were two of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Carol and Linda. George was out getting candy for the theater, and I started talking to these women. I have no idea what they thought as I talked about the factory in New York where Warhol made his movies, or comedians like Lenny Bruce and music and all this knowledge I acquired came out.
And they talked to me like an adult.
And they were wonderful and charming and stunning- Carol with her blonde hair and hourglass figure, Linda who looked like a model. We talked all the way through the film in the lobby when George Ellis showed up with bags of goodies to sell. Carol said, "This guy is cool" and my heart skipped a beat. When asked how old I was, I said 17.
George Ellis actually made a couple of movies to cash in on his Bestoink Dooley character that played drive-ins
They bought it. After all, how many 12 year old Georgians were knowledgeable about Andy Warhol? Or Kenneth Anger?
I went into the next showing of MIN AND BILL and as I left George told me to come back next week for SCORPIO RISING and CHAFED ELBOWS. I was in!
I couldn't wait to invite her, and without her trying to pretend to be my guardian it looked great. If she would still talk to me.
I finally reached her on the phone and she laughed off my moms comments and told me her parents were leaving town for a night and would I like to spend the night! Would I! She also said something that caused a great deal of anxiety. She said I kissed like a girl!
What did that mean?
I laid in bed watching the shadows cross and wondered what she meant.......
Her home was only a couple of blocks away, so I waited for my parents to go to sleep and snuck out. She greeted me at the door with her killer lips and dangling hoop earrings. She poured me a glass of wine and as we sat down on her bed I apologized for kissing like a girl! She laughed and said that was a good thing, that guys push their tongues (and themselves) on women and I kissed and waited for a response.
I didn't tell her that was because I had no idea what I was doing, but to this day, the woman has to make the first move!
And we kissed and fell into bed and the records on the spindle kept dropping and playing until I either passed out or was asleep.
The next morning it was 7 am when she woke me frantically. Her parents had come back early!
For the first time, I found myself throwing my clothes on fast, grabbing my shoes and climbing out the window to get out fast.
But what a night.
I entered my home quietly with my parents none the wiser.
Within one week I had made my first adult friends who knew the things I was dying to find out about, I had lost my virginity to a girl that would a few years later be in PLAYBOY, and jumped out a window ala Don Juan, not a bad start for a 12 year old!
Posted at 11:40 am by Psychomike
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