Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
about 5 weeks ago I wrote a lengthy review of  the book about Lenny
Bruce's trials for the L.A. Sunday Times Book Review, which I'm sure
can be found on the Internet.
  

    
Actually I'm Barry's cousin in Portland, but I'll pass on to him that
you said hi.

How does an investigative satrist spend his days?  What matinee did he
go to?  How was it?

I've been watching that UFO The Government is keeping secrets and
killing innocent citizens Taken mini-series.  What a concept!

personally, I like the conspiracy theory that says that Cheney is
actually being controlled by a race of reptilian aliens that want to
take over the planet and control the population, killing off most of us
and leaving 30% as slaves and food.

now *there's* a routine for Lenny.

by the way ... you know the catchword "Yada Yada" that became so
popular when used in a Seinfeld episode?  didn't that first come from a
Bruce routine about jail movies?  "Yada yada, warden, yada yada!"

cousin from the northlands,
blue
  

    

It's interesting to hear you say about Lenny, Paul, that events come up and
you wonder what he would have made of them.  That's very much been the 
experience of Terence McKenna's close friends, who muse among ourselves about
what Terence would have made of 9/11 and everything since then.  My guess:
he'd be appalled, of course, but secretly quite excited that there were
even bitter enemies who seemed to be trying to hasten some grand cosmic
reckoning.  Terence didn't like to admit it, but he took a lot of his cues
from the science fiction he read as a kid.
  

    

Hi Paul!

Congrats on the new book. I was just talking to a very politically hip
young fellow the other day for whom Lenny Bruce was a name mentioned
in a popular REM song. I did my best to inform him...

So what do you think of the whole Wynona thing?  I remember when
shoplifting was hip...
  

    
The matinee was a Mexican film about a priest's affair with a young
virgin...ah, yes, ripped right out of today's headlines...
speaking of reptilian angels, the title piece in Murder At the
Conspiracy Convention includes long quotes from British er uh
researcher David Icke, who seems to really believe that crapola...
and yes, Lenny was the pioneer in yada-yad-ism.
  

    
Hey, Dan--it's fun to see old friends popping up out of t he
Well...speaking of Terence McKenna, I dedicated an upcoming anthology
to him--Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to
Ecstasy--now in the hands of a N.Y. agent.
  

    
Hi, Sirius--there's an aspect of the Winona Ryder trial that's
interesting to me, namely that because I know her parents [as you
probably know, her dad is Tim Leary's archivist, and Tim was Winona's
godfather], I identify with her case in a way I otherwise wouldn't,
just as because I knew Robert Blake I identify with his case in a
different way, and just as my daughter's former boyfriend is a network
news correspondent in Bagdad I watch that particular network's evening
news rather than the others.
  

    
Interesting about the media stuff and relations. Back when the Chinese
troops rolled over the kids in Bejing's Teinnamen (sp?) Sq, I saw my
former intern Bruce, the videographer, and slight acquainence, Mike,
send out the final pictures from a supposedly turned off camera sitting
on a night table in a hotel room above the square. You could see Bruce
sitting on the bed across from the night table. Next to him was a
window illuminated by the fires down below.

I realized at that point that I knew these guys coming over the cable
via Earth-orbiting relays to my living room from the other side of the
planet... but I didn't know my own neighbor's last name, he being right
across the hall.

Any thoughts on how such tech and global media bring us together and
take us apart?
  

    
     Wondering how Lenny and Terence would be reacting to current
events made me chuckle when I realized that the concept is similar to
"What Would Jesus Do?"  Maybe we should make bumper stickers that read
"What Would Lenny Say?".
     During one of the last one-on-one conversations I had with
Terence, he was musing that if we could make rebellion cool amongst
youth again, we could kickstart mass revolt, the kind we saw globally
in 1968.
     Of course, a year or so later, we had the Battle of Seattle.  I
wrote Terence's obit for High Times the same weekend in April 2000 that
young people were attempting to shut down the IMF/World Bank meetings
in D.C.  I felt as if Terence's wish had come true.
      I think that within current twenty-somethings are some very
savvy, committed activists.  Paul, what are your thoughts on the
anti-global capitalist movement?  Are you as encouraged as I am? 
  

    
I am encouraged to hear you say you're encouraged, Michael
I left home for a northwest tour the morning after the election, and for the
first time in m adult life I avoided the news -- for days.  I have never been
as depressed, dejected and fearful for my own safety as I am now.

Remind me why we should be hopeful?
  

    
Further thought about Winona Ryder.  It's not  her fault for being 
privileged, but the celebrity/class/race aspects of her sentence are
disturbingly present in view of  all the shoplifters spending years
behind bars; life sentences for 3-strikers.  
  

    
Well, Infradibulated, the global media soitanly serve to bring people
together, but the technology is a tool, not a boss; I didn't know my
neighbor's last name before I had a computer and I still don't it. 
Maybe I could find out his e-mail address, though.
  

    
Michael, it's wonderful how in the space of 24 hours you've gone from
being demoralized to feeling encouraged.  The global justice movement
and students against sweatshops and students for a sensible drug policy
and the myriads of other causes inspire me and give me rays of
optimism as I waver between despair and hope.  What would Pollyanna
say? 
  

    
<<Michael, it's wonderful how in the space of 24 hours you've gone
from
being demoralized to feeling encouraged.>>  

     Hah!  Yeah, well, these days it's minute to minute.  Someone once
said that the definition of intelligence is the ability to hold two
disparate opinions in your head simultaneously (or something like
that), in which case I must be a fucking genius because I've never been
so despairing (yes, David, I understand) and so hopeful at the same
time.
      I remember during Clinton feeling like we were in a purgatory
and when I voted for Nader and was warned of the McFascism that a Bush
victory would bring, my reaction was "then let's bring it on."  Now
that it's here, I'm not feeling so bold but I do think the
egregiousness of what I hope is the end stage of capitalism is
radicalizing many young people. 
      I agree with Paul that there is a powerful youth movement afoot,
one that hasn't been equaled since the '60s.  I know a lot of these
young people, I've worked with them in various causes from the
Zapatistas to drug reform, and they may be hipper than many post-'60s
rads because they have an all-encompassing analysis of the
interconnectedness of everything.  They are seeing beyond single-issue
campaigns.  They see that logo branding and environmental degradation
and labor injustice and consciousness freedoms are part of the same
organism.  
       So David, if you can, turn your despair into anger and your
anger into action.  Zack de la Rocha sings "Your anger is a gift".
       Back to Krass, that's why I asked you earlier how you've been
able to stand the world getting worse as opposed to us living in
Woodstock Nation like some of us, including myself, however foolishly,
thought we were headed towards.  I know you have a Zen perspective and
obviously a fine sense of humor.  Are these survival tools for you? 
Any others?  Can you dispense advice to the despairing -- me, Gans, and
millions, maybe billions, of others?
  

    
      Message to Gans: You're a singer/songwriter and a fine one. 
Turn your despair into song.  Politics and music are sometimes like oil
and water, but they can be oil and vinegar and make a delicious salad
dressing.  Have you heard "Jerusalem", Steve Earle's new album?  It
addresses the current Battle of the Fundamentalist Bullies that has the
entire planet held hostage and it rocks and hums and screams and
contains some killer guitar playing.
       But then that is what Krassner has always done and that it is
to find catharsis in the face of misery through art.  His media are
satire and journalism and stand-up.  And he's a stand-up guy as well.
       Sorry.
       Paulsie, one of my favorite recent Krass stories is when Dan
Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, introduced you before you
recorded your most recent comedy album, "Irony Lives!"(Artemis), and
the Fox lawyers who own Homer's voice wouldn't allow you to use it on
the CD.  What reason did they give you?   
  

    
Zen and humor (if I'm not being redundant) are definitely tools of
survival.  I guess I take sort of  a non-alcoholic Alcoholics Anonymous
approach, trying to discern those things I can do something about and
those things I can't, and then within that spectrum, to choose which
battles to fight and, in the process, to try not to take myself as
seriously as I take my causes.  Simmons is right, young people do see
the bigger picture.  They are way better informed than we were in the
'60s, much thanks to the World Wide Web, they have less  innocence to
lose and therefore less energy to spend deconditioning themselves from
mainstream (still brainwashed after all these years) values. 
  

    
About the voice of Homer Simpson introducing my performance at the
taping of Irony Lives!: Fox TV lawyers gave no reason, but I figure
they didn't want to be associated with an album that has such tracks as
Terrorist Attacks, In the Guise of Security, Concepts of God, and My
Cannabis Cup Runneth Over.  Anyone who's interested in reading the text
or hearing Homer's intro can check my Web site, paulkrassner.com
  

    
P.S. Since George Carlin wrote the introduction for Murder At the
Conspiracy Convention, and it was published, whereas Homer Simpson
spoke the intro for Irony Lives!, and it was banned, the moral of this
story is: Burn CDs, not books.
  

    
      While this following news item may not be "ironic", it
definitely borders on revealing self-parody.
      Evidently our new Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was paying
tribute to Senator Strom Thurmond at a bash on the occasion of his
100th birthday (some people just don't know when to call it a night). 
Trent recalled how he'd voted for Strom when he ran for President on
the segregationist Dixiecrat ticket in 1948.  He went on to note "And
if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had
all these problems over all these years either."
      According to the news source, there was an audible gasp -- even
from these dinosaurs -- when they realized the problem ol' Trent was
referring to is the Negro Problem (and I don't mean my favorite band --
Stew, you there?).
       Of course, he'll get away with this but what a faux pas.  It
ranks up there with "Barney Fag".  When I read it, I immediately
flapped my arms like wings, a trick I learned from Krassner.  Paul,
care to explain the arm-flapping test? 
  

    
The uncontained arrogance of the current crew is breath-taking. Even
Nixon knew when to keep his racist yap shut in public.

Fwiw, the AP had a piece on Thurmond's birthday yesterday. They
mistakenly put a picture of Jessee Helms in the piece, instead of
Thurmond. I know a little about the past photo editing practices of the
AP and the fact that they have made such a goof, and that local papers
who carried the story didn't catch it, is a testament, one among many,
to what goes wrong when the news business is run like any other
business.
  

    
Ah, yes, the arm-flapping test.  As events became more bizarre, I
resorted to a childhood method of determining whether I was dreaming or
not.  If I flapped my arms and could fly, then it was a dream, and I
could just surrender to what was happening.  If I flapped my arms and
couldn't fly, then it was a reality I had to confront and act upon. 
The only problem was that I would sometimes flap my arms and fly, but
accept it as a reality, which of course often happens in dreams.
  

    

> So David, if you can, turn your despair into anger and your anger into ac-
> tion.  Zack de la Rocha sings "Your anger is a gift".

Thanks, Michael.  I'm working on it.
  

    

> Message to Gans: You're a singer/songwriter and a fine one.  Turn your
> despair into song.  Politics and music are sometimes like oil and water,
> but they can be oil and vinegar and make a delicious salad dressing.

And thanks for that, too.  I am working on this, too.
  

    

I need to find me some more of these politically aware activist kids to hang
out with, 'cause an awful lot of the music lovers I run into on tour seem
pretty apathetic.
  

    
<I need to find me some more of these politically aware activist kids
to hang
out with, 'cause an awful lot of the music lovers I run into on tour
seem
pretty apathetic.>

      Paul, excuse me, but I'm going to digress for a moment in order
to address David because I want to say something that's been bothering
me for thirty years or more.  Im fact, if you have anything to add,
please hop in.
      I love the Grateful Dead and I, when pressed, still refer to
myself as a hippie, although I'm really more of a Yippie, thank you
very much Paul Krassner!  Although my hair is still occasionally long,
I smoke dope, I share many social characteristics of what society
refers to as a "hippie", I am appalled by most hippie's -- and in
particular the Grateful Dead's -- political apathy.  Even now, when I
read old Garcia interviews and he starts whining about politics, I
wanna grab the fat fuck (even tho he's dead, even tho I loved him
dearly) and scream at him "If you hadn't been burning yourself up with
Persian and floating this tie-dyed corporate commodity known as the
Grateful Dead and just ever so tentatively realized that your basic
bohemian values were being trampled by an organized right-wing and your
fans are targeted by the DEA and you had done SOMETHING to fight back
-- well maybe Jerry -- just maybe -- you'd still be alive today!!!!!"
      I say this, David, because I assume most of your fans are
Deadheads -- I may be wrong.  But whoever they are, if they're
apathetic, then do what you can to raise their consciousness.  The
Grateful Dead were brilliant at raising consciousness altho again
completely apolitically.  Your fans will stay your fans.  I once wrote
that the kids in the streets at the Battle of Seattle were the children
of Ani DiFranco and Rage Against the Machine.
      Now Krass, you were one of political hippies who recognized the
need for an entity that represented heads 'n' freaks who also demanded
justice and peace, and you co-founded and named the Yippies (Youth
International Party).  In their sense of humor, anarchic style, love of
loud music (punk and hip-hop), etc., I see today's young activists as
being a manifestation -- even if they aren't conscious of it -- of YIP.
 Do you agree?