Blood, Sweat & Tears was bigger than I've remembered (what the hell happened to them?)

What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?

From the YouTube page:

A political thriller about the first American rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, whose members find themselves in the crosshairs between the Right and the Left of a polarized America with severe career repercussions.

I was certainly aware of Blood, Sweat & Tears back in the 1960s and 70s. After all, I played in a band that played a number of BS&T tunes. But I don’t remember them as being THAT big, perhaps because, as the Wikipedia entry notes, “by the mid-1970s the group’s popularity began a decline.” And if I was aware of their State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in 1970, which is the focus of this fascinating documentary, I’ve forgotten or repressed it.

A Lesson from the 60s: “For What It’s Worth”

Are Things Falling Apart? | Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov

YouTube:

Robert Wright and Nikita Petrov discuss Trump 2.0, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist theory, Covid, the rise of “inner emigration” as survival strategy, normalized warfare in Russia, the reality-distorting effects of deepfakes, and more—all in light of invoking W. B. Yeats to ask: Are things falling apart?

0:00 Teaser
0:59 What is Bob doing in Qatar?
4:04 "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Why Yeats felt this way
7:37 Peter Thiel's Antichrist theory
9:46 Nikita: COVID was a weird time, and nothing has been the same since
14:57 Why Bob feels things are falling apart
18:28 Were things ever in order?
19:53 "Inner emigration": tuning out the world as self-care
22:38 A reaction to a drone strike: "Loud noises don't wake me up"
25:57 Young people are turning away from social media
27:05 When Spain lost all power and cellular coverage
30:36 War as a "major inconvenience"
34:22 Bob's prediction about Ukraine's future retaliation for Pokrovsk
38:56 Nikita's impressions from Europe
42:07 Nonzero Reading Club THIS SATURDAY: Norbert Wiener's God & Golem, Inc.
47:08 Deepfakes and the future of news
52:04 Russia's first humanoid robot falls down

Note that Wright was born in 1957. At roughly 16:23 he notes that:

I grew I kind of came of age entered adolescence amid the the turmoil of the late 60s and was in fact in San Francisco uh the epicenter of it in the US kind of when I was 12 13 years old. Um and so I don't know I you would think that would kind of have anured me to it. Um, for whatever reason, this seems a lot worse than that did to me, at least at the time. I mean, where the US is, the degree of polarization, nature of the polarization, and so on. Um, but it isn't just that and different people talk about different things when you ask them if things are falling apart. I mean, there is the whole international thing with uh Trump really almost making a point of establishing that the rules just don't apply.

I'm a decade older that Wright and so arguably have lived through more of the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s (though I was not in San Francisco). By the time he was in his teens the war in Vietnam was over, as was the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, but I experienced those, not to mention a steelworkers' strike the shut down the steel industry for four months. I agree with his observation that the current period seems more chaotic than things appeared back then. Is this an illusion of some sort, or are things currently more disordered? I'm not quite sure.

Wright's written a Substack post on this theme: Are Things Falling Apart?

White Bird [It's a Beautiful Day]

YouTube:

℗ 2024 Davlin Music

Released on: 1969-03-03

Violin: David LaFlamme
Keyboards: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Organ: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Piano: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Tambourine: Patti Santos
Bells: Patti Santos
Percussion: Patti Santos
Drums: Val Fuentes
Bass Guitar: Mitchell Holman
Guitar: Hal Wagenet
Guitar: Bruce Steinberg
Music Publisher: Copyright Control
Lyricist: David LaFlamme
Composer: David LaFlamme
Lyricist: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Composer: Linda Baker LaFlamme

My first band @3QD [I’m a musician]

I’ve got a new article up at 3 Quarks Daily: White Light and Basement Joy: Into The Saint Matthew Passion and Beyond.

I think of the The Saint Matthew Passion is the first I played in. Strictly speaking, no, it’s not the first. I played in marching band, concert band, and “stage” band in middle school and high school – which I discuss briefly in the article. But they weren’t MY bands in the sense that I was a founding member of the band, which was thus the creation and “property” of us founders. No, those were institutional bands, established by the school. They were good bands. I enjoyed playing in them. I learned a lot.

But they weren’t mine. The Saint Matthew Passion was. To be sure, I didn’t start the band. I was recruited to it by Jon Siskind, who started it along with some of his friends. They recruited others as well. There were seven us, four in the rhythm section and three horns. I was one of the horns.

The band was modeled after Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and Chicago (then Chicago Transit Authority). The idea was to blend jazz with rock by adding a small horn section to a standard rock rhythm section. Just what I was looking for.

* * * * *

This was back in 1969-71, when I was at Johns Hopkins. I’ve written quite a number of articles about that period in my life, which you can find by clicking this link: Baltimore_Years. One of these days I’ll write a post where I say a bit about each one of those articles and perhaps add a thing or two to place them in context among one another.

But I would like to say one more thing. Though I’d been playing music since I was ten, and had been serious about it since I was 13, I didn’t think about myself as a musician. Rather, I was a guy who played music, a lot. “Musician” wasn’t an identity I assumed.

That changed during my Baltimore period. One evening I was talking with Gren Whitman, a friend maybe 10 years older. He’s Mr. Alpha in my recent post, Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s. I don’t know quite how it came about, but he told me, “No, William” – didn’t normally call me that, no one did or does, but in that situation, he did, I can even hear the faint echo of his voice in my mind’s ear – “no, William, you ARE a musician.” Just like that: “You are a musician.” I don’t think he explained – though he may have said something, nor did I ask him to, the declaration was enough. Ever since then I’ve thought of myself as a musician.

It was a simple gift, but powerful: Thanks, Gren.

Interview with R. Crumb, 2011

From the YouTube page: "Associated Press journalists Ted Shaffrey, Richard Drew and Matt Moore meet with illustrator Robert Crumb and his wife and collaborator, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, at the Society of Illustrators in New York on March 24, 2011. Crumb has an exhibit on display through April 30, 2011."

Arnold Kling: The 1960s were actually the 1970s

Arnold Kling, Were the 1960s the 1970s, actually? In My Tribe, April 18, 2025.

Kling recalls

my memory is that by about 1974 or so, the cultural shift had taken place in the broader population. Campus values had become majority values.

People accepted that Vietnam was, if not a lost cause, a cause not worth the cost. For President Nixon, ending the draft was way more popular than the war.

By the mid-1970s, sex before marriage was viewed as sensible, and women should not be punished for it. I claim that this is what paved the way for the Supreme Court to legalize abortion, because people no longer had the sense that a woman should be forced to have a baby because she had “strayed.”

The best way to see when hippie culture became mass culture is to look at fashions. As of the late 1960s, working-class men still had short haircuts, to show their rejection of the hippies. As of the early 1970s, their hair was as long as any hippie’s. And everyone was wearing bell-bottom blue jeans.

The sexual revolution found many willing adopters. For men, liberating women to have casual sex was a gift. Readers of Albion’s Seed will recall that the Appalachian borderers (Jacksonian America) were never Puritanical about sex in the first place.

The mainstream media, for which there was no alternative at that time, highlighted and celebrated hippie culture. This was bound to have an effect on popular values.

Kling's memory matches mine on this. He ends by asserting that the current campus values, those associated with woke ideology, will not spread into the wider culture, they me even recede on campus. I agree with that, though I would also add that, despite their presence in the news, it's not at all clear to me just how prevalent those values actually are on college campuses.

Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s

Was it the best of times? It certainly wasn’t the worst of times. They were for damned sure interesting times.

But no, “breaking down monogamy” probably didn’t mean whatever you think it means. Not in context. I should know. I was there, in the middle of it.

North Baltimore, near Johns Hopkins

I was living at 2935 N. Calvert St. in Baltimore, two blocks away from the campus of The Johns Hopkins University. I’d finished my undergraduate work there and was now working on a master’s degree while performing alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Hopkins. It was during the Vietnam War era, and I’d drawn a 12 in the draft lottery. I’d actually had my preinduction physical exam – the best hearing, off the charts, you wouldn’t believe how good – but didn’t serve in the army. Rather, I’d declared myself to be a conscientious objector to military service and was allowed to perform two years of civilian service, which I did in the Chaplain’s Office.

During that period I often went to Sunday afternoon jazz concerts in the Famous Ballroom. Those concerts, which were sponsored by the Left Bank Jazz Society, were the first time I regularly found myself in a majority black setting. It was during that period that I had my first (and only) LSD trip, which played a crucial, but obscure, role in my work on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” However important those things were, this is not about them.

This is about a community I belonged to. That community was not large – most real communities aren’t – and it was about various things. One of them was something called “breaking down monogamy.” Lots of discussions about that. I listened in on some of them, and maybe I even made a remark or three. But, well, rather than try to explain further, perhaps I should just get on with the story.

Burned Out

As I said, I was living at 2935 N. Calvert St. It was a three-floor brownstone that had been divided into six apartments, two on each floor. I lived in the third-floor rear. One evening there was a fire in the building. I forget whether it was on the first or second floor, or perhaps both, but, while fire didn’t make it the third floor, smoke certainly did. And so did firemen. At least one came in through a rear window and stomped in the middle of my turntable. My apartment was a wreck.

I forget just what happened next. But for the sake of getting on with the story, let’s say that a number of people gathered in front of the building and some of my friends were among them. They invited me to sleep at their place for the night. An invitation I gratefully accepted.

The next day me and my friends, the ones I’d stayed with, but others as well, trooped over to my wreck of an apartment and started moving my stuff into their basement, by which I mean the basement of the place where I’d spent the night. For one thing, my stuff had to go someplace, and so did I. Somehow fate had decided that I would live with my friends for a while. Just how fate channeled that decision through us humans, I don’t remember.

So there we were. We got boxes from some place, carried them to my apartment, and filled them with my books, I had more than a few, and records, ditto. That took a lot of heavy boxes, each carried by one person, down two flights of stairs, out the door, around the corner and over a block to Guilford Ave., and then North two blocks. Since my apartment had been furnished, after a rather cheap fashion (student apartment), I didn’t have any furniture. Just my books, records, clothes, dishes, some paintings, and a bit of this that and the other. Not a whole lot of stuff. But it took us awhile, a half day, a day, I don’t remember. How many of us? A half dozen, maybe one or two more. It was drizzling at least part of the day. Beyond that, I can’t recall.

By the end of the day, I was living on Guildford Ave. in Baltimore, MD. I was now breaking down monogamy. Or at any rate, I was right next to the process.

Monogamy, according to the dictionary on my computer, is “the practice or state of having a sexual relationship with only one partner at a time.” That is a minimal definition. More loosely, it is about child-rearing and living arrangements. A monogamous couple lives with their children in a single dwelling unit, an apartment or a single-family home, that’s monogamy. In this sense, monogamy has been the foundation of Western society since forever. From that you may infer that breaking down monogamy has something to do with questioning the foundations of Western society. Breaking down monogamy as it was understood in this particular community was thus a political act.

The Personal is Political

I was part of a community for whom “the personal is political,” as the phrase goes. Here’s what Wikipedia says about that phrase:

In the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it was seen as a challenge to the patriarchy, nuclear family and family values. The phrase was popularized by the publication of feminist activist Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay, “The Personal Is Political.” The phrase and idea have been repeatedly described as a defining characterization of second-wave feminism, radical feminism, women's studies, or feminism in general.

I was part of a political community.

You’d probably guessed that, or something like it, when I told you that I was a conscientious objector to military service. This was the Vietnam era. But it was also the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. That counterculture had two strands, broadly considered. There was the anti-war movement, which protested the war in various ways, and there were the hippies, who were in favor of tuning in, which I did (I played in a rock and roll band), turning on (which I did as well), and dropping out, which I never quite managed.

I joined this community through anti-war activity on the Johns Hopkins campus (I had been a member of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society). Those guys had wives and girlfriends. Those women were central to the feminist movement in Baltimore. Among other things, they produced one of the first feminist journals, Women: A Journal of Liberation.

That’s the community I hung out with. Oh, I hung out other places as well, but yes, and looking back, those people were, for lack of a better term, they were my homies. I visited two homes quite frequently, the place where I moved, and another place, I believe it was on the same street, but a couple blocks away. We’d listen to music, get stoned, sometimes we’d dance, but always, always we talked. One thing we talked about was how the women’s movement was a mediating force between the political movement, anti-war but also civil rights (especially in Baltimore), and the cultural, sex, drugs and rock and roll movement.

Breaking down monogamy was about both culture and politics. Why? Because that’s where the family sits. It is both a cultural and a political institution. To question the family, to breakdown monogamy, is to question the whole damn edifice of Western so-called culture. Wham! What was it that Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western Civilization? “I think it would be a good idea.” That’s what we thought as well. We were trying to make it work.

And thus it came to pass that two families decided to live in one house. I suppose I could give these families fake names, but for some reason I rather like calling them Family Alpha and Family Beta. By living together in one house, Family Alpha and Family Beta became engaged in breaking down monogamy. They took meals together, hung out together in the living room and front parlor, discussed a lot of things together, and... How were household chores distributed between men and women? I don’t remember exactly. But I assume they were more equitably distributed than was conventionally the case. What else did they do together? I suppose that to some limited extent they participated in raising one another kids together. Family Alpha had a boy of about 10 or so while Family Beta had a boy of six months or so. One thing they did NOT do, is swap wives, or swap husbands, depending on your point of view. There was no sexual or romantic adventuring going on.[1] At least not that I was aware of. Who knows what was going on two or three links away from the people I hung out with.

I don’t know what names went on the mortgage and in what roles. It wasn’t any of my business. But it’s my understanding that the Alphas and Betas owned the house jointly.

By entering that home, if only temporarily, I too became engaged in dismantling monogamy. I forget just how I participated in household chores, though I’m not sure how much that should be attributed to breaking down monogamy and how much to simply being a guest. I do remember that I went into a minor panic when I was asked to prepare a salad for an evening meal. Me? A salad? I mean, I’d been cooking for myself for years, but I never made a salad. Anyhow, I managed to rip apart a head of lettuce, do something else as well, slap some dressing on it, and call it a salad. No one complained.

Tommy

While I’m reluctant to name the adults, I can see no harm in calling Family Beta’s son by his name, Tommy. I remember that one day shortly after I’d moved in Mr. Alpha and I were in the front parlor with young Tommy. We’d set up my stereo speakers on the floor, each was about two feet high, and young Tommy was between them in his little rocker. We got a buzz on, started listening to some music, and watched young Tommy rock out.

Four versions of "She's Not There"

The fourth version is the one we played in "The Saint Matthew Passion," a band I played in back in 1970-71 or so.* Were were a rock band with horns, trumpet, sax, and trombone. We modeled ourselves on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA, which later became just Chicago) and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. I have no idea where we got our version from, maybe Jon (our leader) just made it up. But it certainly wasn't modeled on one of the versions in this post. It's was The Zombies' song. I like the Santana version (this is the first time I've heard it). But I love the Vanilla Fudge version, which I knew back when their record first came out.

*NOTE: FWIW, we played it on our final gig, when I had a mystical experience. I doubt that that particular song had anything to do with it. It was but the vehicle. And the experience, the white-out and the opening-up, didn't happen during the song proper, but during an introduction that could have gone with just about any song. Whatever. It shook me. I'm still vibrating, ever so little, but still.

Is Beyoncé channeling "For What It's Worth" in "American Requiem"?

Though I've been aware of Beyoncé since Destiny's Child, I don't follow her music, or much current music for that matter. But I've been hearing at least one tune (“Texas Hold ’Em”) from he new album Cowboy Carter, on YouTube shorts and, for some reason, the first paragraph of the New York Times review piqued my curiosity:

The first song on “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé’s not-exactly-country album, makes a pre-emptive strike. “It’s a lot of talking going on while I sing my song,” she observes in “American Requiem” over guitar strums and electric sitar, adding, “It’s a lot of chatter in here.”

So I followed the link and started listening:

It took awhile before I heard the guitar strums and the sitar (roughly 0:48) and her opening lines – "It's a lot of talking going on/ While I sing my song" – reminded me of a 1960s anthem by Buffalo Springfield – "There's something's happening here/ What it is ain't exactly clear" – "For What It's Worth." Is the resemblance intentional? I don't know. The sonic textures of two songs are quite different in various respects, and Beyoncé’s is a bit slower, but there's a deliberateness, a martial quality, an overall vibe, that resembles the older song. There's a back-up vocal on "For What It's Worth" that kicks in about half way through, no words, just syllables, that resonates with some of the (more elaborate) background work on “Ameriican Requiem.”

Beyond this I note a few things:

• Buffalo Springfield pioneered the genre of country-rock and Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter is billed as a country album.
  
• Cowboy Carter contains a Beatles song, Blackbird, from roughly the same era, 1968.
  
• Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton show up on the album; both of them are older than dirt.

The albums range of reference and resonance is nothing if not wide. So why not "For What It's Worth"?

"For What It's Worth" came out in 1966, well before Beyoncé was born (1981). And while the song sticks around on YouTube and, I assume, other streaming sources, it's not at all prominent. But she's in the music business and, while I know almost nothing about her, I do know that serious musicians tend to have catholic listening habits. It's not a matter of deliberately setting how to channel and transmust the older song – though, who knows, it could be, but that's not a requirement. It's a matter of inhabiting the same vibe and using it for contemporary purposes.

Pete Townsound talks about the origin of "Tommy" starting at about 07:48.

The Doors, Bugsy [Media Notes 75e, 76] {narcissistic adolescents doing their thing}

I watched The Doors (1991) the other day and figured that maybe I’d cap off my series on How to Change Your Mind by reviewing The Doors and making some general observations about Change. After all, the Doors, named after Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, were an important band in the psychedelic 60s, one of those bands where we treated each new album as a potential source of mystical revelation – until, of course, they weren’t. And the movie did have its trippy sequences, its augmented reality sequences.

Except, except, Morrison himself, as presented in the film, was such a disaster. A gifted performer, yes, but as a human being, a disaster. Here’s the opening paragraphs from Roger Ebert’s 1991 review:

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the problem with American lives is that they have no second act. The problem with Jim Morrison’s life was that it had no first and third. His childhood was lost in a mist of denial - he never quite forgave his father for being an admiral - and his maturity was interrupted by an early death, caused by his relentless campaign against his own mind and body. What he left behind was a protracted adolescence, during which he recorded some great rock ‘n’ roll.

If we can trust Oliver Stone’s new biographical film, “The Doors,” life for Jim Morrison was like being trapped for months at a time in the party from hell. He wanders out of the sun’s glare, a curly haired Southern California beach boy with a cute pout and a notebook full of poetry. He picks up a beer, he smokes a joint, and then life goes on fast-forward as he gobbles up drugs and booze with both hands, while betraying his friends and making life miserable for anyone who loves him. By the age of 27 he is dead. Watching the movie is like being stuck in a bar with an obnoxious drunk, when you’re not drinking.

How could I float a reasonable set of more general observations about psychedelics on a film about all that went wrong about the 60s?

So I shelved the idea for a day or two while I thought about it. Meanwhile, I decided to watch Bugsy, 1991 film about the gangster Bugsy Siegel and his development of The Flamingo Hotel & Casino, which became extremely profitable, though Bugsy was killed because his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, stole $2,000,000 from the project before it opened. As I watched the film, I realized that Bugsy and Morrison where the same person, headstrong narcissistic overgrown adolescents. Morrison was an out-of-control front man for the group, and lyricist, Bugsy was in thrall to his vision for The Flamingo. Where Morrison was a compulsive drunk, Bugsy killed people. Both were womanizers.

What have we got? Two films about the same guy, but expressed through a different mise-en-scène. Both 1991, for what it’s worth, the year of Operation Desert Storm, 42 days of aerial bombardment of Iraq.

I’m still looking for a way to come to terms with How to Change Your Mind.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75b] – Psilocybin brings depth to the series.

As I’ve already indicated, I found the first episode in Michael Pollan’s series, about LSD, to be disappointing. The second one, about psilocybin, is much better. Or at least I found it so.

It was natural to begin the series with LSD, for that’s the drug that brought psychedelics to public consciousness. The story’s simple: 1) Swiss chemist accidentally discovers it, 2) Timothy Leary turns on, tunes in, and urges the world to drop out, and 3) HIPPIES! I more or less lived through this story – I’m a bit older than Michael Pollan, who missed it – so the history wasn’t new to me, and this episode was mostly the history.

The second episode has history as well, the story of how Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan banker and amateur mycologist, traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to meet María Sabina, a curandera, and thereby brought knowledge of psilocybin to the 20th century Western world. This brings a new dimension to the story. The story of LSD is a story of 20th century pharmaceuticals. But psilocybin is a naturally occurring substance that has been used by humans for centuries and centuries around the world to take these journeys, these trips, these investigations, making them a facet of humanity that has been sidelined by Western culture.

But that’s not how the episode opened. It opened with the story of an older woman who had been diagnosed with cancer. She took psilocybin (in a clinical setting) to help her overcome her fear of death, which it did. Here we see special effect used to present us with her trip, convincingly but not flamboyantly. This is done, I believe, three more times in the series. Once with Paul Stamets, a mycologist, once with a man suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and finally with Pollan himself. I thought this was quite effective. We also learned about the work done on psychedelics at the Spring Grove Clinic in Baltimore – I was aware of it at the time.

Taken in conjunction with the first episode, on LSD, we now have a much more rounded and fully realized picture of psychedelics. In particular, the first episode makes a connection between psychedelics and computer culture through the figure of Steward Brand, best-known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Brand had settled in San Francisco, which was an important center of counter-cultural activity (Haight Ashbury was legendary), but the surrounding area, Silicon Valley to the southeast, was important in computer culture as well. Thus these two pivotal movements matured in close proximity.

In one sense they are very different. Computers are highly complex technology used to facilitate things in the external world. Whatever the chemical complexity of psychedelic drugs, anyone can ingest them, and take an inward journey. Both, however, are mind technologies, one a set of devices for externalizing mental activities, the other a group of drugs for re-ordering one’s own mind. Their physical conjunction is thus important. If we are to understand the course of cultural growth and change since the middle of the 20th century, we need to track the parallel evolution of these two movements.

Here's a brief chronology indicating some of the conjunctions of these two movements. It is derived from a book proposal I’d created, but failed to sell, about the interaction of these developments.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75a] – LSD for serious people: Mind-changing is asserted, not shown.

How to Change Your Mind is a four episode miniseries on Netflix based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. It has four episodes, each named after a different psychedelic drug: LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, Mescaline. I’ve watched the first episode. Color me underwhelmed.

Pollan serves as an on-screen guide and narrator, and is appropriately serious. He’s very clear that LSD is a potentially mind-changing and therefore very important drug. But, to be honest, he’s also a bit boring.

Before I get going, however, let me quote from a review of the episode published by James Hallifax in Psychedelic Spotlight News:

Episode 1 of Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind is a great introduction to the topic of LSD for those who don’t already know a lot about the subject. Narrated by Michael Pollan, the show takes us on a journey through the history of the powerful compound, from its discovery and its early medical use, to secret CIA mind-control studies, the counterculture and its banning, and finally to our current renaissance.

From amazing clips of LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann describing his “Problem Child,” to powerful personal testimonies of individuals who have healed their suffering through LSD, episode 1 is a fun and entertaining refresher on the topic of LSD for even experts in the field.

In short, How to Change Your Mind’s first episode is definitely worth the watch.

My favorite segment came when psychedelic researcher James Fadiman was discussing an early LSD study on its effects on creativity, held at Stanford University in 1960. They recruited 48 senior scientists from various fields, all of whom had been working on a scientific problem to no avail for at least three months. In the study, each scientist was dosed with 100 micrograms of LSD, which can be considered a medium-sized dose.

As Fadiman describes it, “out of the people who came, we had 48 problems and 48 satisfactory solutions.” In other words, the LSD study was a stunning success. The fact that all 48 scientists —who had all been working on their problem for at least 3 months!!!— credited their LSD experience with solving their problem is nothing short of a miracle. True, perhaps this study would not meet the rigid rules of today’s clinical trials, but the results speak for themselves. According to Fadiman, “We had patents, we had publications, and because most of these people worked in industry, we also had products. And eventually the computer world emerged here.”

Despite this amazing story — and many more held within the one-hour premiere — the debut episode was not without its faults. Primary among them is its over-reliance on anecdotal stories, weaving a narrative that is not necessarily always backed up by current scientific study. The best example of this comes towards the end of the episode when Michael Pollan turns towards the subject of microdosing LSD.

About that last paragraph, I’m neither here nor there.

My problem with the episode is a bit different. It’s serious and, on the whole, dull. There’s some nifty special effects used to recreate the legendary bicycle ride taken by Albert Hoffman after he’d taken a substantial dose of LSD, 250 micrograms. There are some special effects scenes as well, and footage from some of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests from the 1960s. But there was nothing like this:

That’s a mural painted by Bob Hieronimus in Levering Hall on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in 1968-1969. I was a student at Johns Hopkins at the time; I saw that mural being painted. I listened to music played in that room, which functioned as a coffee house on the weekends. I rehearsed with a rock and roll band in a room next to that. That’s what I think of when I think about when I think about LSD.

Mind you, I am not now nor have I ever been an acid head. I’ve only taken LSD twice – which I’ll get to in a minute – but I was there and, if not exactly immersed in the culture, I spent a lot of time at its edges. I read a lot of the scientific literature on LSD and other psychedelics, not to mention a wide variety of material on mystical experience, I listed to the music, wore the clothes. And whatever THAT is, it’s missing from this episode.

The problem is one of technique, of aesthetics. How do you convey THAT while at the same time making it clear that you are not stoned out of your freaking mind? It’s clear that Pollan thinks psychedelics are important, that it’s important that we investigate them, and learn how to use them. He’s also aware that The Establishment, if you will, freaked out and made LSD illegal in 1968, shutting down all research on it. I mean, Pollan writes for The New York Times, fercrissakes, he IS the establishment (almost). He wants to steer clear of all that crazy stuff that freaks people out while at the same time knowing that, considered appropriately, the craziness is the point. It's not crazy, but rather reflects a different order in the universe.

As for my two acid trips, one was in January of 1972 and lasted approximately two weeks and the other was, I believe, in the Spring of 1974 and only lasted several hours. In neither case did I experience the visions and other sensory effects typical of LSD trips. Why, I don’t know. But that first one, that was a trip. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from an article I published in 1975:

What happens on an LSD trip is intimately bound up with one's expectations. I had lots of them. I expected to receive an insight (at least one!) into my study of language which would make it possible to write my masterwork. I had also expected to experience all kinds of nifty sensory effects. None of my expectations were met.

The sensory world remained the same and I spent two weeks living the life of a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel. I was on a quest and every event I faced was a test of my herohood. Nothing was what it appeared to be; everything had a hidden meaning. If I succeeded in my tasks the world would be saved and I would be inducted into the Secret Society of Master Creators (I didn't call it that at the time, but that is what it was) and spend the rest of my life as a Master of Improvisational Musics.

Winter in Baltimore is a dreary rainy affair. But those days in January were like the first days of spring–proof that I had succeeded and the world was being reborn. I received a letter from a friend which was misdated; the year read “1973” rather than “1972.” But I didn't think it was misdated; I merely assumed that self-sacrifice (as in Christ and Oedipus–sometimes I lay in bed at night pressing my palms into my eye sockets wondering if I would be called on to blind myself) had eliminated a year from time and that it was in fact 1973. (I didn't bother checking calendars.)

The account continues in that vein for a half-dozen more paragraphs and concludes:

Many of the people around me surely thought I was going mad. But none of this seemed in the least bit incoherent or confusing to me. And, as my cryptic messages went unanswered, as events refused to follow the course indicated by the signs, I realized that I had been acting out fantasies but that I had not broken free of them. My ego had been inflated, but not transcended. The dance had been exhilarating, but it lacked grace.

During that period I had signed up for trumpet lessons at the Peabody Institute and, as a result, brought my technique up a notch and have continued with the trumpet ever since. As important, perhaps more so, I completed my Master’s Thesis on “Kubla Khan,” and have been pursuing that work ever since. Would I have done those things if I hadn’t taken LSD? I don’t know. The fact is that before that trip I hadn’t played my trumpet in over a year and I was blocked on my thesis.

Pollan surely knows of that. It’s why he wrote the book and undertook this miniseries. I’ve not read the book, though I’ve read a review or two, but something is missing in this first episode. It tends to be strong on the facts, even if only anecdotally, and seems pitched at people who don’t know those facts. If you’ve lived through them, then there’s not much here for you. It jogs your memory, but leaves your imagination untouched.

I’m reminded of some lines from Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”:

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

Where’s the feeling? Maybe things will improve in the other episodes. We’ll see.

Stewart Brand – "We are as gods." [watch the video clip]

Trailer here: https://t.co/VyKQ4PVxBB

— James Cham ✍🏻 (@jamescham) June 20, 2020

A Child of the Space Age

Bumping this to the top in honor of the SpaceX launch that was cancelled today. It might happen Saturday or Sunday.

One evening in the fall of 1957 my father took me outside. He pointed up to the sky and said “That’s Sputnik.” I’m not sure I saw the (moving) speck of light he was pointing to but I believed him. Yes, there was Sputnik up there in the sky. A man-made object going around the earth.

A first.

I was almost ten years old at the time and that's the first time my mind connected with world history. That’s the oldest event I can remember that is important to me as an individual and  also important in the history of the world. No doubt I had some awareness of other world-scale events as a young child, but I don’t remember them. This one I do.

From Here to the Moon

Some time in the mid-1990s I was working a trade show in Orlando, Florida. things were slow at the booth so I decided to ditch the last day and head over to Kennedy Space Center. I’d grown up watching satellite launches on TV and was curious about the place they had been staged from.

So I drove east through central Florida, which was much like a desert except that it had lots of plants. I arrived at Kennedy Space Center around noon. I parked the van wherever, walked past a parade of rockets on display, and purchased a ticket for one of the standard tours. The NASA guides took us through some launch pads, around and even up into a couple gantry towers, and we saw a couple control rooms–one, as I recall, mocked up as though a mission were in progress. And then we saw it, a Saturn V suspended from the ceiling of a long, low building. The physical scale was humbling, but it was more than that. Big is big – that Saturn was the length of a football field – but this earth and these buildings birthed journeys that took us to the Moon. There is sacred energy in this soil and these structures where humankind ventured beyond ourselves, not merely into space, but into an almost living presence above and beyond.

That’s what floored me. This ground, this very ground where I was standing, was once tangibly connected to the moon 238,900 miles (384,400 km) away. Men had suited up in a building on this site, gotten into a small capsule atop a large rocket, and four days later got out and walked on the all of a sudden here and now beneath our feet, the moon. And then – How they ever did it I'll never know because when you've been there how do you ever but you have no choice, do you? You want to live, to see your wife and children again – they got back into their landing craft, took off from the moon, and returned to earth in another four days. Eight days from the earth to the moon and back.

Incredible.

And it really happened. In my life time, four decades ago. But there’s no guarantee that it will happen again in my remaining years, much less that we’ll travel to Mars or mine the asteroids.

Dreams and Reality

I don’t know when I first started thinking about space travel. Walt Disney featured it on his evening TV show, which started in 1954; there were science fiction movies, both in the theaters and on TV, and there were comic books. But I have few specific memories of those things.

The earliest thing I can put my finger on is this painting I did as a child:

There’s no date on it, but I’d guess I did it when I was eight or nine. I was somewhat older when I did this painting, though it too is undated:

The technique says I was older, as does the medium. This one is in oil paints while the other is in tempera. I used tempera for the first year or two when I took art lessons; then my teacher, Glenn Brougher, moved me to oils.

I’d guess that I painted the second one from a photograph. It depicts a Jupiter-C launch vehicle (compare with the photograph here; notice the painted markings).

The Whole Earth Catalog evolves

Whole Earth Flashbacks takes you on a dazzling journey through time, from first Whole Earth Catalogs to Co-Evolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Review, Hackers Conference, The Well, Cyberthon, WIRED, Burning Man & the The Long Now Foundation https://t.co/FAWRIPlXn3 @WholeEarth50th

— (((Howard Rheingold))) (@hrheingold) October 15, 2018

Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Mad Men

Back when I was watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s I noted that “hey! that’s the Mad Men era.” That is, the film was made in and about the world depicted in Mad Men. “How interesting”, thought I, “How interesting.” But I didn’t go beyond that.

Now I’ve got a couple of quick observations.

Obviously they’ve very different. For one thing Breakfast is a movie that runs a bit under two hours while Mad Men unfolded in 92 one-hour episodes over seven seasons. Breakfast is a light comedy while Mad Men is basically a drama.

Given those differences however, both feature a central character who isn’t what they seem to be. Neither Don Draper (MM) nor Holly Golightly (BaT) is the urban sophisticate they appear to be. Both have a working class rural background, though it takes awhile for us to learn that. What’s that about? Given that a somewhat older fictional character, Jay Gatsby, also has hidden past, it’s not a 1960s thing. Perhaps it’s American?

Both seem to be struggling with a transactional view of the world, in particular, with transactional relationships between men and women. While it’s not clear whether Holly is a (high class) call girl or merely a paid companion, she supports herself at the arms of wealthy men. Her friend and neighbor, Paul Varjak, is kept by a wealthy woman. Everyone in Mad Men is using relationships to get ahead, but the most obviously single example occurs in season five when Joan, who had started the series as the head of the secretarial pool, is made partner in return for sleeping is the potential client (and thereby landing the account).

Beyond this, I note that there’s a party in Holly’s apartment that seems very Mad Men.

Finally, both end with a wistful look at the future for their protagonists: Just what WILL the future have for them? We can imagine something better, something wonderful, but it’s not a lock. We HAVE to own our imaginings.

Culture is a Driving Force in History

I'm thinking about this a lot these days. May write a book about it. So I'm bumping this post from April 2011 to the top of the queue. And this, it seems to me, is sufficient reason to want to talk about cultural evolution as a specific kind of historical process. It's not just change. Everything is flux (Heraclitus). but cultural evolution is a specific kind of flux, one that has its own historical form.

Over at Arcade Gregory Jusdanis has raised the question of culture’s role in social change, lamenting the fact that the default and dominant view is that culture is “always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” Culture is treated as being epiphenomenal to the economy.

He believes otherwise, and I agree with him. Culture is itself a driving force in history. Jusdanis goes on to note:

So it was with relief that I read Nurdan Gürbilek’s recent book, The New Cultural Climate in Turkey. As Turkey’s foremost literary and cultural critic, Gürbilek describes the wonderful power of culture in society. Writing on the social transformations Turkey experienced after the military coup of the 1980’s, she shows the intense involvement of culture in the decades since then. She demonstrates, for instance, how intellectuals, pushed to the margins, jailed, and tortured, gained power by seeking refuge and freedom in cultural institutions.

He goes on to observe that

Nationalism is a perfect example of a cultural factor that can act as a force in itself. Colonized peoples, feeling themselves oppressed by foreign rulers, have often turned to culture (as identity and as artistic production) where they preserve something vital and untouched by the foe. And on the basis of this culture (traditional identities, inherited institutions, folk art, ritual), they try to build a new society, different from the neighbors and the colonial rulers. I have studied this in Greece.

In the decades leading to the Greek War of Independence of 1821 against the Ottoman Empire, Greek intellectuals living in Europe and within the Empire, sought to reformulate Greek identity. They provided a new geography of Greece, uncovered the links to the ancient past, reconsidered the ties of Greece to Europe, and tried to create a new type of language. In short, they sought to convince the peasant populations that Greek society was belated, that it lagged far behind developments in western Europe. Trying to rouse Greek populations with the arguments of belatedness, they sought to place culture at the forefront of their program of social engineering.

I’ve done a bit of work about how popular music has been important in social transformation in 20th century America: “Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues”.

Mickey Mouse Gets Shot in Vietnam

Back in 1968 Milton Glaser (National Medal of Arts 2009) and Lee Savage create a crude one-minute cartoon, “Mickey Mouse in Vietnam,” which recently showed up on YouTube:

Salon has a few remarks HERE; Glaser is interviewed in BuzzFeed HERE.

Given that this little gem went on the web in late April, I'm wondering why DisneyCo hasn't ordered it taken down. Here's what Glaser said in the BuzzFeed interview:

Disney is very protective of their intellectual property. Did you ever hear from them after you screened the film? 

MG: No… There was some talk about Disney suing us, but I think the consequence of that — everybody realized — would have been negative for Disney and would have no benefit. And obviously no profit was made out of the utilization of the character or the film, so nothing ever happened.

He's talking about the situation back in '68, but things really haven't changed all that much. No one's taking any money out of Disney's corporate coffers through this little short from 45 years ago, but the PR consequences of kicking up a fuss would be just as bad now as they would have been back then. And perhaps worse, given widespread anti-copyright sentiment and the existence of social media.