The Philter

The Metal Machine Music 8-track, which Lester Bangs used to play in his car.

I’ve been rereading Lester Bangs’ classic Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and as a result thinking a lot about Lou Reed, Lester’s idol and nemesis. Odd that all these years later Lester’s long gone while Lou improbably remains alive, or at least not certifiably dead, and still an enigma wrapped in a paradox: the misanthrope’s misanthrope, also author of such transcendently beautiful and human songs as “Candy Says,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

He is also the creator of the infamous Metal Machine Music, which is the subject of not one but two pieces in Psychotic Reactions. The first, “How to Succeed in Torture without Really Trying,” describes MMM this way:¹

What we have here is a one-hour two-record set of nothing, absolutely nothing but screaming feedback noise recorded at various frequencies, played back against various other noise layers, split down the middle into two totally separate channels of utterly inhuman shrieks and hisses, and sold to an audience that was, to put it as mildly as possible, unprepared for it. Because sentient humans simply find it impossible not to vacate any room where it is playing. With certain isolated exceptions: mutants, mental patients, shriek freaks, masochists, sadists, amphetamine addicts, hate buffs, drug-numbed weirdos too walled off by chemicals to feel anything, other people whose nervous systems are already so bent out of shape that it sounds perfectly acceptable, the last category possibly including the author of this article.

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About a week ago, I set out to create one last installment of this series that would make use of all the stuff I couldn’t fit in anywhere else. What I ended up with was an uncontrollable shaggy dog of a thing that goes on roughly forever. You may, nevertheless, find it amusing.

This crazy concoction is dedicated to crazy Dennis Hopper.

1969, PART 4: HIPPIE WIGS IN WOOLWORTH’S

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It’s a pretty lovely day here in the City of the Proud, despite the foul prognostications of that obnoxious rodent in Pennsylvania. I’ve said this all before, but I’m not such a fan of the groundhog. Every damn year it supposedly sees its shadow and we are told that no, spring won’t be coming early this year, foolish humans. I’m starting to think there’s some kind of conspiracy behind the whole thing—maybe the companies who make winter coats, or speculators in natural gas?

Well I for one refuse to go along. I do not acknowledge your authority, Marmota monax. I’m going to go ahead and act as if spring starts today, and let’s see you stop me.

Rock is basically an adolescent music, reflecting the rhythms, concerns and aspirations of a very specialized age group. It can’t grow up — when it does, it turns into something else which may be just as valid but is still very different from the original. Personally I believe that real rock’n'roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

–Lester Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun,” 1970

And what can I add to that? Absolutely spot on.

Someone left the hope out in the rain:

Barack Obama has been president for a year as of today, and everybody wants to know, aren’t you disappointed? Well, no, because I did not expect him to wave his magic fingers and instantly solve all of our problems. He has consistently succeeded at the one thing I most wanted him to do, which is not be George W. Bush. When the Haiti quake happened and Barack came on TV to talk about it, it was great to remember that we had someone in charge who is smart and actually cares.

Let’s try to keep things in perspective. Total financial apocalypse seems to have been avoided; things may be improving more slowly than anybody likes, but they are improving. Do you wish John McCain was president right now? And that’s not the worst thing that could have happened; in the days leading up to the election, I spent some sleepless hours haunted by a vision of McCain pulling off a miraculous upset and being so shocked that he dropped dead of a heart attack, making Dingbat president. The USA would have been a smoking hole in the ground by March at the latest.

So let’s count our blessings. By way of calming down, have a listen to this audio clip I found on the CD I Can Hear It Now: The Sixties, where John F. Kennedy talks about his first year in office:

JFK: The Problems Are More Difficult Than I Imagined Them To Be

Much more than the other mixes in this series, this one is constructed for pure pleasure, and I think it is fairly successful in that respect. See what you think.

Playlist and a few notes after the jump.

1969, PART 4: A RISING BALLOON

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Today’s morsel of schtick continues my project of updating old jokes for the 21st century, which basically just consists of adding the word “Google” to them. Try to hear it in your head in the voice of Chevy Chase.

Google announced today that it was pulling out of China.

A frustrated China could not be reached for comment.

The original Dingbat

Oh happy day. There I am flipping on Fox News for my daily dose of self-inflicted agony, and here’s Glenn Beck looking very serious with the Statue of Liberty over his shoulder, and he says something typically asinine. The camera cuts away, and sitting across from him is his network’s newest hire, HRH Sarah Palin. (Or as I prefer to call her, Dingbat. Is it sexist and wrong of me to call her that? Does it help that I thought our last president was also a dingbat?)

It’s pretty rare when I see something on Fox that I can 100% get behind, but this is an idea that has my full support. Clearly, this is where Dingbat belongs. It’s just like when Terrell Owens played for the Cowboys; a person I detest paired with an organization I loathe, giving me a convenient place to focus my dark energies. Honestly, I think this is going to work out great for everyone. She gets a job that plays well to her strengths, which are looking good and talkin’ funny in that scary/entertaining kind of way, and we get her on the TeeVee where we can keep an eye on her, instead of in an office somewhere fucking up the country even more. Beck gets to look positively statesmanlike next to Dingbat, who enthusiastically agreed with everything he said. (And that alone should disqualify her from ever again holding public office. Even the people who are on Beck’s side ideologically know that he is a dangerous lunatic, and palling around with lunatics is just not a smart political move.)

While we’re on the subject, I just had to post the following photo that I found while looking for Edith Bunker shots:

Doesn’t it kind of look like a publicity shot for a new Fox show with Bill O’Reilly, Sarah, and Beck? They could call it “Lunatic, Dingbat and Asshole.” Catchy, no?

With all due respect to Cecil’s one-word review of Avatar, my one-word review would be “tragedy.” And not just the intentional kind, though there is plenty of that, wrapped up with a tidy Hollywood ending. I’m talking about the other kind of tragedy: a gazillion dollars worth of beautiful technology being deployed in service of a 99-cent script. What is this terrible hubris that prevents tech wizards like Cameron and George Lucas from hiring a co-writer to add some small element of soul to their opuses?

Honestly, the luscious visuals of this movie were quite involving for about 30 or 45 minutes; after that it was a matter of waiting for the trite, clunky mechanics of the plot to get very, very slowly to the obvious places they were going. It’s doubly tragic that, while Cameron’s ostensible agenda is on the side of the groovy, holistic blue Pandorans, it is fatally undermined by Avatar’s apotheosis of technology and failure to connect with anything recognizably alive.

If this is the future of cinema, I’ll stick with the past, thank you very much.