WORKINGMAN DEAD: ALTON KELLEY

Alton Kelley passed away Sunday

Psychedelic poster artist Alton Kelley died Sunday at the age of 67. Kelley, who teamed up with longtime collaborator Stanley Mouse (pictured below, Kelley on the left) created some of the greatest psychedelic posters of the Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury hippie scene, including iconic work for the Avalon Ballroom, the Family Dog, Winterland, the Fillmore, and various Bay Area bands like the Airplane and the Grateful Dead. They designed the covers of Dead albums "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead."

Kelley and Mouse helped create the acid-infused look of san francisco in the 1960s

"Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Kelley told The SF Chronicle last year. "But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."

OBAMA WINS NOMINATION

A moment that will define a generation.

Finally!

Michelle Obama gives Barack a pound. I love this clip.


Breaking News: CNN announces Barrack Obama winning the nomination. Obama gave a rousing speech, and magnanimously praised his rivals, particularly Hillary Clinton. (For her part, Hillary still hasn't dropped out of the race or made a concession speech).

Now it's on to beat McCain and the disastrous policies of George W. Bush!

PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER

Patti Smith Group. A song of hope.

SARCASM. YEAH, RIGHT.

Milton Berle was said to possess a huge parahippocampal gyrus

Sarcasm. I'm sure you know all about it. Dr. Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, has just completed a scientific study of sarcasm. She used an MRI to locate the seat of sarcasm in the brain, which turned out to be the right parahippocampal gyrus -- a big surprise. For years, neurologists thought it resided in the left side of the brain, which handles language and social interactions. But you knew that.

Don Rickles, master of sarcasm...as if you'd know, hockey puck

Rankin also discovered that people with certain head injuries or frontotemporal dementias were unable to perceive sarcasm through paralinguistic clues. Videotapes that showed people expressing straightforward thoughts were juxtaposed with the same script read sarcastically (for example saying "What nice weather" in the middle of a thunder storm). Alzheimer's patients did fine on the tests, and understood sarcasm as well as anyone, but those with semantic dementia just "didn't get it."

By the way, humor resides in the right frontal lobe. Funny people are extraordinarily well-endowed in this area. If you're not, don't fall for the frontal lobe enhancement ads in the back of magazines; you're stuck with what God gave you, and you're just not funny. Try compensating by driving a big truck with huge tires, and stick a urinating Calvin decal in the window. That should fool people.

For more about the Rankin study, see the article in the New York Times HERE.

BO DIDDLEY, R.I.P.

Ellas Otha Bates was born in McComb, Mississippi in 1928, and he died today. Known to the world as Bo Diddley, he invented the Bo Diddley beat, which is a boogie beat that sounds like "shave and a haircut, two bits," and the foundation of such rock and roll classics as "Who Do You Love?"

I walk 47 miles of barbed wire,
Use a cobra snake for a neck tie.
Got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made out of rattlesnake hide.
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of human skulls.
Now come on darling let's take a little walk, tell me,
Who do you love


Bo Diddley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in November of 1955, and really ticked off the old man. "I did two songs and he got mad," Bo Diddley later recalled. "Ed Sullivan said that I was one of the first colored boys to ever double-cross him. Said that I wouldn't last six months".

Lucky for the rest of us, he proved Ed Sullivan wrong. He was a big hit, and lasted seventy nine long years. On top of that, he had a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind, and from what I hear he wasn't scared of dying.

NEIL YOUNG'S ELECTRIC LINCOLN

Old dogs and new tricks: Neil Young looks over his 1959 Lincoln Continental that has been converted from an inefficient fuel guzzler to a hybrid electric that can potentially get over 100 miles per gallon.
Johnathan Goodwin works on the motor that powers Neil's Lincoln. The two are cooperating on a project to make a car that has no emissions and requires no roadside stops. Why don't we all have electric hyrbid cars? For one thing, we don't have Neil Young's money to spend. More importantly, the automobile and oil lobbies have tried to squash the hybrid. For a great documentary that will get your blood boiling, rent "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARILYN!

June 1st is the birthday of legendary screen goddess Marilyn Monroe. She would have been 82 today.

"We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards." - Norman Mailer, 1973

"I'm for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them the individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It's really tragic. Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." - Marilyn Monroe


1953 Coca Cola commercial with Marilyn Monroe