VIEW FROM THE MOON

Is there intelligent life on Earth?

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NO COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL

1960s advertisements reflected the empire at the crossroads. Pop and Op Art and Carnaby Street fashions entered the living room, and grabbed the eyes of younger consumers. While oldsters chuckled to Alan King on Sullivan, the kids waited for the new pop groups, and the ads straddled this split. Did you drink Sanka or Tang? Did you wear a polka dot plastic mac? Or maybe a leopard skin pillbox hat?



Tang, we were assured, was the breakfast of astronauts. If we hoped to beat the Russians to the moon we'd better start drinking it by the boatload! Lots of powdered foods could survive the trip to outer space, or an extended stay in a fallout shelter. Tang, and Kool-ade and Pixie Stix and Fizzies were the food of the future! Especially if we were forced to live underground for any period of time.


Volkswagen changed everything. Their advertisements stood apart from the hard sell, old school commercials. They welcomed a new sensibility that included irony, self-deprecation and a "cool" sense of humor. "Think Small," they said, and "Live Below Your Means." One ad caught our attention with a single word, "Lemon." Oldsters were puzzled.



Old fashioned ads still existed, of course. This soul-killing suburban coffee problem begged for satire. What did Harvey want? Would the wife ever satisfy his gray flannel dreams? God forbid, would the wife ever satisfy her own? We heard she later ran off to a commune in New Mexico to eat peyote and seek the perfect orgasm. Maybe Harvey learned to make his own damn coffee.



Alka Seltzer pummeled our solar plexus with a cool ad featuring the T-Bones performing the slinky rock hit "No Matter What Shape Your Stomach's In." This was new and different--and miles from Madge with the dishwater hands. Catchy, it anticipated MTV jump cuts.


Sexy stewardesses in mod gear promised trips to exotic locales with a "coffee, tea, or me?" insouciance and long, long legs. They were assembled in secret factories run by James Bond, or possibly Hugh Hefner, whose seedy mid-western version of sexual freedom meant wearing a bathrobe all day long. At this point, women's liberation was still a distant land with no direct flights. Fasten your seatbelts!


These were the men flying those planes. They were weekend swingers, and they wanted to look cool. Bell bottoms were cool, right? Right? Just look at these squares.


Vietnam was raging, the cities were in flames, and wife-beating was just a punch-line (pun intended) in Alan King's stand-up comedy routine. Battered wives had yet to make it to the movie-of-the-week. Subliminal advertising was a reality that hadn't yet been exposed. People were too busy fighting over cigarettes and keeping up with the Joneses. America was invincible, an empire on a power ride that included the cold war and the space race, Cadillacs and martini lunches served by black guys in white jackets. We'd rather fight than switch!


No comment.



Sexist? So what's wrong with sexy? An unforgettable ad for...who cares? Take it off. Take it all off!

But the empire needed defending, and that meant training the little ones ahead of time. We would have to police the world and keep it safe for democracy and capitalism. Hearts and minds, right? The cornucopia of endless products would keep us fat and happy as long as we all pitched in and defended our borders from the Vietnamese, the Latin Americans, and those nasty and godless superpowers.



The barbarians were at the gate, but we could stave them off with the help of Mattel and Hasbro--toy manufacturers who kept our wits sharp and our senses battle-ready. All we needed was our GI Joe dolls, er, "action figures." That, and a little napalm.

Twiggy had "the Look." She was the quintessential frail bird of the sixties with an anorexic boyish body and eyes that could shame a Keene painting. She was the English waif, the woman-as-child, the fragile super model whose eyes followed you around the room. Or did they? Were they, like television itself, glittering with potential but more often just vacuous portals to nothingness? Did they see the changes on the horizon? Let's end on a mystery.

AND THAT'S THE WAY IT WAS

Walter Cronkite, legendary broadcast journalist and news anchor, died today at the age of 92. He was a trusted voice in turbulent times, and brought us the daily news and the historic events, the moon landings and political conventions, the assassinations and wars. His broadcast after the Tet Offensive is often credited with turning the American public against the Vietnam war. Long before television news deteriorated to around-the-clock infotainment, Cronkite earned our trust without super graphics or computer generated flash, without ranting or teasing or pandering to popular taste.

They don't make 'em like Walter anymore. Nowadays, news anchors are better looking and less informed, pretty faces without a trace of understanding in their eyes, mere teleprompter readers with studio tans and perfect smiles. These days, the job seems closer to modeling than reportage. We're going to miss Cronkite.


Cronkite reports the assassination of President John F Kennedy.


Cronkite's reports from Vietnam challenged the hawks and swayed public opinion.

Update: a good note from Salon's Glenn Greenwald, "Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did." Click here for the story.

LEVON HELM

photo by Jaime Martorano

Levon Helm is still alive and kicking out great music. After a bout with throat cancer in the late 90s, his soulful voice was reduced to a whisper. But he fought his way back and fully recovered. In the past couple years he released two great albums, "Dirt Farmer" and the recent release, "Electric Dirt." His music boils over from the melting pot of the Mississippi Delta and Deep South, and Levon serves up a spicy stew of blues, country, jazz and rock and roll.



He was born in Elaine, Arkansas in 1940 to Nell and Diamond Helm, a cotton farmer. The Helm family played music for entertainment, and they listened to The Grand Ole Opry and Sonny Boy Williamson and His King Biscuit Entertainers regularly on the radio.

Levon, in 1959

Levon was fourteen when he saw Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins do a show at Helena in 1954. Also performing was a young Elvis Presley with Scotty Moore on guitar, and Bill Black on stand-up bass. No drummer. The music was early rockabilly and the audience went wild. Levon saw Elvis again a year later--this time D.J. Fontana was on drums and Bill Black was playing electric bass. Levon couldn't believe the difference, how the added instruments filled out the sound. It was the greatest thing he had ever seen. As a junior in High school he formed a rock and roll band, "The Jungle Bush Beaters." In 1957 he met Ronnie Hawkins, a show biz entertainer with an eye for talent, and formed "The Hawks." They recruited four more musicians, all Canadians, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson--all of whom would later form "The Band."

Levon and the Hawks, New York, 1964.
From left. Jerry Penfound, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson.

Bob Dylan was enjoying an unparalleled creative surge that produced Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde in just eighteen months. He needed a back-up band, and he hired The Hawks, who accompanied him on a world tour--Levon left after the first leg in 1965.

After the tour, licking wounds and recovering, Dylan and the band retired to Big Pink, a big pink house in Woodstock, New York, and recorded in the basement. "The Basement Tapes" were nearly mythical, and bootlegs of the unreleased recordings soon circulated among diehard fans, including what may have well been the very first bootleg, "Great White Wonder."



The backing band--now rechristened "The Band"--soon released an excellent album called Music from Big Pink, which featured some of this new music they were playing in the basement, and an original painting by Dylan on the cover.

The album was released when most rock was heavily psychedelic, but this was very different and old-timey, echoing the American past with voices and instruments mixing folk, blues, gospel, R&B, classical, and rock & roll. The record included such soon-to-be classics as "Chest Fever" and "The Weight," and a number of Dylan compositions "I Shall Be Released," "Tears of Rage," and "This Wheel's on Fire."



The next album was a masterpiece. Released in 1969, the eponymously titled The Band, showcased Robbie Robertson's songwriting skills, which had improved since the first album. The band was even more focused and cohesive. "Up on Cripple Creek" was released as a single (and became the Band's first and only Top 30 release) and other favorites were "Rag Mama Rag," "King Harvest," and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The world stopped and listened.

The Band made seven albums total, and influenced a wide range of musicians, encouraging people to get back to roots, and inspired the alt.country and Americana movements of today.

After the Band broke up, Levon continued playing music. He released The RCO All Stars in 1977, and reunited with good friend and former Band-member Rick Danko to make music. They eventually reformed the Band with some former members, and played until Richard Manuel's tragic death in 1986. Sadly, Danko himself died in 1999, a day after his 54th birthday.

Levon played on, and even acted in movies--He portrayed Loretta Lynn's father in the Coal Miner's Daughter. He was in The Right Stuff, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

More recently, Levon conceived The Midnight Ramble Sessions, a series of live performances at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock. Named for the traveling minstrel shows of his youth, the first Midnight Ramble was held in January, 2004. Since then, people have scrambled to the ramble to hear Levon tell his great stories and perform with a wide variety of musicians in an informal setting.



We're happy Levon Helm is still making such great music and recommend you buy his latest album, Electric Dirt.

FORTY SUMMERS

This summer is the fortieth anniversary of two pivotal 1960s events--the moon landing and Woodstock. I was too young to go to either, but I watched the film and video of each in a state of rapture and awe, thrilled we'd made it to another world, and convinced that the music and arts festival was a shining glimpse of our utopian future. Naive? Perhaps. Utopia didn't come to pass, in any case. The war in Vietnam dragged on, and we still had Nixon and the hawks to get rid of, and since that golden season history has repeated itself so many times I can't keep track if this round is tragedy or farce.

That same summer, on July 20th, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and American spacemen ambled onto another world. They planted a stiff flag that would forever wave in a vacuum, and beamed back pictures of Earth, which looked nothing like the dusty brown globes in our social studies classes that were mapped and marked by man-made boundaries. Our home planet was sparkling and blue. There was a global recognition that this was a small boat indeed, and we were all on it. There was hope. If worse came to worse, some reasoned, good old American technology could save us. Mankind could shoot its silver seed into the cosmos and escape our war-torn planet to build a sci-fi fan's dream of an antiseptic orderly future a la Star Trek. That was also naive, I suppose, a utopian fantasy of a different sort.



Woodstock didn't commence the Aquarian Age, but the three day rock festival at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in upstate New York was a gathering of the tribes. This was "youth culture" in full freaky fruition, and a joyous celebration of the hippie message of peace, pot, nudity and music. Fantastic music. Sure, it didn't stop the war machine, but it spit in its eye. This was art and whimsy on a mass scale, and people looked up from every uptight button-down small town to think, maybe I'll grow a mustache. Wear a peace button. Get the hell out of Dodge.



Woodstock inspired countless rock festivals, but this was the milestone. The country was violently divided. It was less than a year to the Kent State shootings, when National Guardsmen opened fire on protesters Nixon referred to as bums. It was less than a year til progressives like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. The counterculture was driven underground. Soft drugs, once considered a ticket to expanded consciousness, were replaced by hard drugs that left people strung out and hopeless. The anti-war movement and the black power movement were harassed and wiretapped and infiltrated by various secret police forces and red squads. Body bags kept coming home from Nam. Nixon went down, sure, but history provided even more Nixons, more greedy Republican war hawks who invoked Jesus while robbing the treasury and incinerating peasants. Change is impossible, you might think. Stupidity is hard-wired into our DNA. Maybe so.

But for one brief shining moment there was a festival--no more, no less--where a possible future played out in a few rolling hills and cow pastures, a future that was crowded and muddy and crazy and stoned and for a brief moment also stardust and golden before it got sucked back into the devil's bargain.


The last morning of the festival, Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner and Purple Haze to the tired huddled masses

YOU CAN'T SAY THAT ON TV

Marcy Wheeler appeared on MSNBC Monday to argue for an investigation of secret CIA operations under President Bush. Instead of concentrating on the content, the anchors focused on--and even apologized for--Wheeler's use of the word "blow job."

Have we all gone crazy? Obscenity may reside in the eye of the beholder, but as far as I'm concerned CIA torture and violence against unarmed prisoners ranks higher on the obscenity scale than a common term describing oral sex. Get real, America. Grow up!

According to ABC News, the CIA sources described a list of six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" that were practiced on prisoners. Bear in mind, this is what they will admit to, so actual practices are most likely far worse:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

This is obscene.

FRONTIER PSYCHIATRIST

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis, pictured here with phallic symbol. Freud articulated the concepts of the unconscious, of infantile sexuality, of repression, and proposed a tri-partite model of the mind's structure, all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development, based on a limited sample of unhappy Viennese housewives.



Eventually a frequent cocaine user, Freud started with the purchase of a gram for fatigue. After all, he reasoned, the German army used it to fight off exhaustion so maybe it would help some of his patients. First, he took a dose himself. And then another. Before long, he was tooting on a regular basis. He even sent some to friends, including his fiancee, Martha Bernays, accompanied with this note on June 2, 1884:

"I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big strong man with cocaine in his body. In my last serious depression I took cocaine again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance."

Clearly, Freud was coked out of his gourd.


John Styth Pemberton, plucky entreprenuer and dope pusher

Along came Pemberton. Back then, one could buy cocaine lozenges and pastilles, elixirs and pills. Cocaine wine, first sold in Europe under the name of Vin Mariani, was a raging success. There were many imitations. In the United States, John Styth Pemberton brought out his own version in 1881. He hit the jackpot when Atlanta banned the sale of alcohol in 1885, and he tweaked the recipe, removing the alcohol but keeping the cocaine, and sold his drink under the name Coca-Cola.

This was the true "Classic Coke." Of course, the coke was eventually removed from the Coke (in 1913) but the company has remained successful. It turned out it was even cheaper to sell colored sugar water without the cocaine!


In the spirit of psychiatry, we present a wonderful expressionistic portrait of madness by The Avalanches, entitled "Frontier Psychiatrist:"