Not long ago, major league baseball player Dock Ellis passed away. His best season was 1971, when he won 19 games for the World Series champion Pirates and was the starting pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game. Ellis is probably best known for pitching a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD in 1970.
He didn't plan it that way. Ellis had been hanging out with friends in LA and was under the impression he had the day off when he ingested the powerful psychedelic.
"I was in Los Angeles, and the team was playing in San Diego, but I didn't know it. I had taken LSD..... I thought it was an off-day, that's how come I had it in me. I took the LSD at noon." At 1pm, his girlfriend and trip partner looked at the paper and said, "Dock, you're pitching today!"
Ellis boarded a shuttle flight to the ballpark and threw a no-hitter despite not being able to feel the ball or clearly see the batter or catcher.
"I can only remember bits and pieces of the game," Ellis recalled. "I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the glove, but I didn't hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached me."
autographed ball: Dock Ellis, No Hitter 6-12-70
The dubious achievement inspired several songs, including "Dock Ellis" by Barbara Manning (performed by SF Seals), "Dock Ellis No-No" by Chuck Brodsky, and "America's Favorite Pastime" by folk singer by Todd Snider.
Listen to "America's Favorite Pastime" by Todd Snider, click the button below:
Listen to "Dock Ellis" by SF Seals, by clicking here:
In 1969, 14-year-old Beatles fanatic Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrator James Braithwaite created an animated film using the original recording as the soundtrack. "I Met the Walrus" was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short.
"Sweet Hitchhiker" by Creedence Clearwater Revival
If you've ever hitchhiked any distance you've done a lot of standing by the road singing songs. Rides are few and far between, so you entertain yourself. Some people live on the road--drifters, hobos, dharma bums and outriders--and they explore the Great American Highway. They've got wanderlust. Maybe they can't make it in straight society, maybe they're modern day gypsies. Road trips were once seen as rites of passage, important coming-of-age experiences like Indian vision quests, but nowadays it seems that most young people forgo the Kerouac bug for the lock-step of security, career, and life in the Comfort Zone. It's all about viewpoint. If you grow up believing what you're told, you have no reason to "go out there and see for myself." On the other hand...
"Hitchin' a Ride" by Vanity Fare
...some people have the bug. I did. Unimpressive by true vagabond standards, I've still got my bonafides, logging some long runs up and down the West Coast several times, and thumbing through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, California and down into Mexico. I hitched around upstate New York when the leaves were turning. I'm not fooling myself--I'm snug in the Comfort Zone, too, and surprised I was ever foolhardy enough to hitchhike around the country. People say it's too dangerous now, but it was always dangerous. On the road, you surrender to chance, fate, luck, the elements. You have no choice. I got robbed once, got into some bad spots, slept under a bridge when there was snow on the ground. I got thrown into jail in Circleville, Utah, home of the famous Butch Cassady. I like to think we were both in the same jailhouse--at different times, of course. The old bunker jailhouse certainly seemed old enough for the Hole in the Wall Gang.
An old map of the Outlaw Trail
The Wild West is long gone. Nowadays, I want comfort when I travel. I want cozy beds and honey-roasted peanuts and a mini-bar full of expensive Snickers and tiny bottles of good booze. Still, I wouldn't give up my hitching days for anything. Sure it was senseless and foolhardy--you can't put it on a resume, and it doesn't translate well to the status seekers and stay-at-home types, but it provided me with an advanced degree of the spirit. If you want to know your country--your world--you need to get out there and see it firsthand. Hitchhiking is a way to do it on the cheap.
A night in jail in Butch Cassady's hometown. Priceless.
You'll meet some real characters. You might share snacks or travel tips ("If you ever go to Houston..."). Some people never forget their fraternity brothers or army buddies, but I'll never forget Julie with the patchwork jacket from San Diego and Black Bart ("like the outlaw") from Montana, and the crazy Kahlua drinking dude who had just got a divorce and kept singing "Miss You" until we told him to shut the hell up. Or the Navajos in the green Camaro going to the all-Indian rodeo in Tuba City. Or the county sheriff who bought us a stack of pancakes and eggs because the law requires you to feed prisoners. Or "El Cougare," the modern day gunfighter who fought in electronic quick-draws for prize money. Or the country club golfer who bought me a cold beer in the desert outside Page, Arizona, because you had to be a club member to buy a drink at the Pro Shop and it was over a hundred degrees in the shade. Thanks.
"Ridin' Thumb" by King Curtis & the Kingpins
Years later, when you're buried in polite society and you've forgotten most of what you ever learned, you will come across somebody who knows, you can see it in their eyes, and before you know it you're trading old road stories. A song might grab you, too, trigger a memory so it all comes back in a great disorderly rush and you get a flash of the University Avenue onramp in Berkeley, say, or snow falling in the Siskyous and taillights fading in the dusk. You have to laugh. Squeeze your eyes shut and you're back in the wind, bundled up in a pile-lined denim jacket, climbing into a long-haul rig just outside Salt Lake City. Diesel fumes, air brakes, static on the radio.
If you're like me, you love zombies. We're talking crazed, hungry undead reanimated corpses that roam the earth in search of human flesh--not the numb dullards you may see on a daily basis. Those are co-workers. We're talking actual zombies with their flesh rotting off. Zombies are the rage. They're hot! There are plenty of zombies movies out there, a zombie survival guide, and --believe it or not--a rewrite of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" replete with zombies. Yawn. For my money, the original zombies are the best. Kudos to George Romero who spent about twelve bucks to produce the definitive zombie classic--the brilliant low budget 1968 masterpiece "Night of the Living Dead."
You can't beat these reanimated corpses, that's for sure. These slow moving creeps amble along after you while you try to escape...but the car won't start, or you break a heel, or you slip in the muddy graveyard. It's excruciating. They keep coming.
Along with the Austen parody, there are plenty of other attempts to breath life into the tired old zombie genre, including "serious literature" such as "World War Z," a tale of surviving an all-out zombie war, and "The Zombie Survival Guide," a how-to book with the same idea. There are new and improved zombies, such as the fast running bloodhounds of "28 Days Later," and the hilariously slow-moving ghouls of "Shaun of the Dead," but for my money the best zombie flick is the black and white gore-fest shown above. This is the bomb. Watch it with the lights down low.
Enough revisionist zombies! Why update, morph, and remix the original unless you can improve it? Zombies are in vogue, and while they may never be as popular and sexy as vampires--witness the "Twilight" phenomenon of teen bloodsuckers--they have a certain dignified stature among the undead. Let's keep it that way. Help the zombies survive the hacks.
Denis Johnson wrote the best book I read last year, Tree of Smoke. Evidently, I wasn't the only one who thought so since it snagged him the National Book Award. He's coming out with a noirish pulp thriller that was serialized in Playboy, Nobody Move. (I just read an advance proof, and it was brisk hardboiled fun). Johnson first caught the public eye with a brilliant collection of stories, Jesus' Son, back in 1992. Dialog, structure, heart--this guy has the chops. He also knows more Dylan lyrics than anyone I've ever played guitars with...but that's just shameless name-dropping, so I'll shut up.
Tree of Smoke, his last book, the big book, has an historical sweep of America in the 1960s, concentrating specifically on US foreign policy in the hearts and minds of a handful of soldiers, drifters, outlanders, true believers. Oh oh, you say, another Vietnam novel? Why do we need another Vietnam book after Robert Stone and Tim O'Brien, after the reportage of Michael Herr? To paraphrase Celine, don't judge it too quickly. The novel rings like a tuning fork with current foreign affairs. It's about then, sure, but it's about now.
It's a big story--an interweaving of several stories, actually--with very real characters and difficult moral questions. After exhibiting his knack for shorter work, this comes as a surprise since most writers are fortunate to master one form, and here Johnson expands his universe to convincingly cover a huge cast of disparate characters across several continents. Don't get me wrong. This is not some simple macho war story or any of that gung ho horseshit, but a masterful display of what we expect from literary fiction at its best. Johnson delivers. Don't believe me. Read the review in the New York Times, here.
Or better yet, read the book.
here's an excerpt:
He kept his vision on the spot where he'd seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze. It moved again. Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog. Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree's trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste. Seaman Houston took the monkey's meager back under the rifle's sight. He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey's head into the sight. Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.
The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground. Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there. It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labor.
Seaman Houston took himself a few steps nearer, and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey's fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it. It looked from side to side, its breath coming in great rapid gulps, its belly expanding tremendously with every breath like a balloon. The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.
Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two. "Jesus Christ!" he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition. He thought his head would explode, if the forenoon kept burning into the jungle all around him and the gulls kept screaming and the monkey kept regarding its surroundings carefully, moving its head and black eyes from side to side like someone following the progress of some kind of conversation, some kind of debate, some kind of struggle that the jungle—the morning—the moment—was having with itself. Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding its buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other. With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing. "Hey," Houston said, but the monkey didn't seem to hear.
As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating. He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless. He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was eighteen years old.
New York City was broke and dirty in the seventies. It begged Washington for help, but Nixon pardoner Ford refused to lend a hand. NYC toughed it out.
The music that came out of 1970s New York embodies that survivor spirit. The city adds grit and soul to anything it touches, including the post-punk sounds that exploded from a grimy little club on the Bowery, CBGBs. For some reason, that dive spat out the Ramones, Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Dead Boys, Talking Heads, The Dictators, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Misfits, and Blondie. There were no rules but one, to play the venue the bands had to write their own songs.
Free-form beat poet and punk godmother, Patti Smith was the first of the CBGBs gang to land a recording contract, even beating the Ramones to the punch. "Horses," her first album, was a powerful combo of poetry and rock that sounded like the Shirelles on acid. Patti cast herself as the missing link between Mick Jagger and Arthur Rimbaud, firing the DIY aesthetic in a million pink bedrooms and garages nationwide, and spitting in the eye of conventional definitions of what it meant to be a female performer. Primitive and sophisticated, she was a contradiction in boots with a Keith Richards' haircut and a volume of William Blake's poetry. Songs of Innocence and Experience. She wrote "Because the Night"--her biggest hit--with Bruce Springsteen. I interviewed her in Portland when this record came out, and up close she was charming and charismatic, not at all the enfant terrible, not the arrogant rock star but more like the girl who scrawls poems in her PeeChee, and I took a couple photographs, too, and she helpfully tossed in a scowl and snarl which seemed to be equal parts art and act. Desire and hunger is the fire I breathe.
Blondie. Guilty pleasures...I confess I liked "Heart of Glass." Sure it was slick and commercial and they ran it into the ground, but as a lad I was powerless to resist the charms of icy robot Debbie Harry, even if I knew better. New Wave meets frozen disco--forget about punk--Sold out? Maybe. But nobody ever listened to her first band, The Stilettos, and this was a number one hit. This is when people who were too cool to dance thought, well, okay, maybe. Let's dance on the left of the dial.
tom verlaine and patti smith
Television was brilliant. They looked like French criminals, Patti Smith said. I can see that. Breathless era crooks, skinny as junkies, with eyes glittering like desert mystics. They were city poets, which in a way is criminal.
Marquee Moon is one of the greatest albums from a great year, 1977. No, from any year! Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played these intricate guitar figures in perfect counterpoint and created something shimmering & beautiful but with enough NYC grit to keep it real. It was punk or post-punk but it was worlds away from the basic 3-chord variety...these were virtuoso guitars. A guitar solo! And poetry. Before "punk" got narrowed down to a brand name and a rigid set of guidelines (Green Day, anyone?) there was still room for poets and criminals to remix and reinvent rock any way they wanted. They created a new sound.
It's nighttime in the city. You've had a few drinks and you're sweaty from dancing but you're outside in the cool night air and the skyline is twinkling. The band is on break. A yellow cab swooshes by. Someone is yelling in the street. You hear those chiming guitars and you know the band is back onstage and you're surprised to be face to face with a world so alive. That sound.
People are furious about torture. Sort of. They're actually upset with Obama for releasing the torture memos. It turns out the CIA was torturing like crazy while President George W. Bush was denying it to the American people--so naturally conservatives are angry with Obama. God forbid we learn what our government is doing in our name. That's bad for security, they say. Of course they should be angry with the CIA for turning into the Gestapo when our backs were turned, but apparently that's too logical for these dunderheads.
It's not like we invented it or anything...waterboarding scene from the Spanish Inquisition.
According to the released memos, CIA interrogators were allowed to choke off prisoners' breathing in the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding; slap them and slam them against walls; confine them in small boxes for hours on end, sometimes with insects; and keep them awake for as many as 11 days. One captive was waterboarded 183 times in a month, another 83 times. Aside from the "intelligence" extracted in these conditions, which most agree is unreliable, moral issues arise from torturing a defenseless captive.
Shocking strangers--the Milgram study
You may remember the series of social psychology experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram to measure the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to commits acts--such as inflicting electric shocks on others--acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
In a 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram summarized his experiment:
I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Playboy journalist Mike Guy bet he could undergo "waterboarding" for 15 seconds. How hard could it be? Maybe these guys are just whining.
The New York Times guide to the torture memos is located HERE. Read the actual memos on the ACLU website HERE.
Here is Jon Stewart's take on torture and the Bush apologists:
Not long ago, major league baseball player Dock Ellis passed away. His best season was 1971, when he won 19 games for the World Series champion Pirates and was the starting pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game. Ellis is probably best known for pitching a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD in 1970.
"I can only remember bits and pieces of the game," Ellis recalled. "I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the glove, but I didn't hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached me."
autographed ball: Dock Ellis, No Hitter 6-12-70
Dock Ellis, American Hero
