The Philter

David and Marc, older, richer, and more coked-up

This month’s book club selection is Bowie: A Biography by Marc Spitz. (Is he any relation to Bob Spitz, author of the gigantic Beatles book it took me the better part of a year to get through? I am mildly curious, but not enough to actually do any research.) My favorite factoid so far: In the years while David was still David Jones, his friend Marc Feld, later known as Bolan, briefly toyed with the name “Bowland.” It would have been Bowland and Bowie, and then maybe Iggy Stooge would have changed his name to “Bowery” and they would have formed a trio.

I also loved this anecdote about the first time they met:

It’s now hard to believe but the meeting of these two rock icons was as humble as it could have possibly been. Les Conn, managing both Bolan and Jones, had promised both future icons some much-needed spending money to whitewash his office.

“Both Marc and I were out of work,” Bowie would later recall, “and we met when we poured into the manager’s office to whitewash the walls. So there’s me and this mod whitewashing the office and he goes, ‘Where’s you get those shoes, man?’ And I asked, ‘Where’d you get your shirt?’ We immediately started talking about clothes and sewing machines. ‘Oh, I’m gonna be a singer and I’m gonna be so big you’re not gonna believe it, man.’ ‘Oh right. Well I’ll probably write a musical for you one day then ’cause I’m gonna be the greatest writer ever.’ ‘No no, man, you gotta hear my stuff ’cause I write great things and I knew a wizard in Paris!’ It was all this. Just whitewashing walls in our manager’s office.”

This is the kind of image that amuses me no end, two young, skinny, overdressed aspiring rock stars doing manual labor and talking shit. To quote another famous Bowie associate, “Those were different times.”

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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A particularly striking paragraph from my current reading project, Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, representative of Herzog’s peculiar combination of detached observation and visionary mysticism:

A man was walking down the dusty road to the Rio Nanay, shuffling a deck of cards as he went. On the plane a woman began to sing litanies, and then, her eyes growing wilder and wilder, to rail at evil spirits. Not until we had landed and taxied to a stop did she calm down. Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all? Drastic measures, he whispered to me, were appropriate only for someone who had not set foot on this continent yet. To fail to embrace my dreams now would be a disgrace so great that sin itself would not be able to find a name for it.

That is one sexy ape. (Image courtesy Cecil Vortex.)

Following up on the theme of the last post, I’d like to share with you some things I learned recently from a book called Men and Apes, a 1966 bestseller by Desmond Morris (author of The Naked Ape) and his wife Ramona. In truth, though loaded with facts and excellent pictures, this is a bit of a dry read. The most compelling parts have to do with the sex lives of the different apes and monkeys, which vary quite a bit. The descriptions are alternately instructive, curious, horrifying, and downright steamy. Here are a few excerpts organized by species:
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I was at the Red Cross today, feeling a little lightheaded as the blood ran out of my right arm, when I read the following passage in Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June:

HAROLD: America’s days of greatness are over. It has drunk the blue soup.

PENELOPE: Blue soup?

HAROLD: An Indian narcotic we were forced to drink. It put us in a haze — a honey-colored haze which was lavender around the edge. We laughed, we sang, we snoozed. When a bird called, we answered back. Every living thing was our brother or sister, we thought. Looseleaf stepped on a cockroach six inches long, and we cried. We had a funeral that went on for five days — for the cockroach. I sang “Oh Promise Me.” Can you imagine? Where the hell did I ever learn the words to “Oh Promise Me”? Looseleaf delivered a lecture on maintenance procedures for the hydraulic system of a B-36. All the time we were drinking more blue soup, more blue soup! Never stopped drinking blue soup. Blue soup all the time. We’d go out after food in that honey-colored haze, and everything that was edible had a penumbra of lavender.

PENELOPE: Sounds quite beautiful.

HAROLD: [Angered] Beautiful, you say? It wasn’t life, it wasn’t death, it wasn’t anything! Beautiful? Seven years gone — like that, like that! Seven years of silliness and random dreams! Seven years of nothingness, when there could have been so much!

And because one corner of my brain is devoted to the Beatles 24-7 these days, I thought immediately of Mr. Lennon:

Everybody seems to think I’m lazy
I don’t mind, I think they’re crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find, there’s no need

Please don’t spoil my day
I’m miles away
And after all
I’m only sleeping

Yes, yes, the eternal question…drink the blue soup or face reality head-on. Lennon was a blue soup guy; Vonnegut’s character Harold Ryan is not, though it must be noted that he is more or less the villain of the piece. It’s a question most of us face every day, save those courageous few who have sworn off the stuff for good. The blue soup, mind you, isn’t necessarily a substance; it could be a comforting delusion or an unquestioned ideology. To see with clarity and deal with the consequences, this is no easy thing. In the future, I’d like to do more of it; at the moment, however, dreamland beckons.

My bedside reading for the last, I don’t know, seven years or so has been Dr. Thompson’s The Proud Highway, the first volume of his collected letters covering the years 1955-1967. This is a weighty tome, almost 700 pages in hardback, and offers a great deal of insight into the man. In his personal life he was something of a pig, racist and sexist and rude, but also unfailingly loyal to his friends. In his professional life he was an anything but a slacker; during the years covered by this book he cranked out unpublished novels and reams of correspondence while making ends meet as a journalist, often through difficult and dangerous travels in South America.

Which makes the following—an excerpt from a 1958 letter that seems all too timely 51(!) years later—that much more interesting.

I hadn’t realized I had so many gloomy, cynical acquaintances. Everybody wants to give me religion, sympathy, hope, forbearance, all sorts of idiotic priestly qualities so that I may better weather the storm of unemployment.

To hell with unemployment: I think it’s a fine thing. I like sleeping all day and having nothing to do but read, write, and sleep whenever I feel tired. I like waking up in the morning and going immediately back to bed if the weather is foul. In short, I think it’s a fine situation for a man to be in: provided, of course, that he has enough money to eat and pay the rent.
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Magic Alex in his laboratory.

With a lovely Bay Area summer in full flower, I am determined—determined, I tell you—to finally polish off Bob Spitz’s gigantic Beatles book, which has been languishing around my apartment with a slowly advancing bookmark in it for something like a year and a half.

It’s difficult, though, because periodically some little detail or reference will cause me to go rent a movie, or listen to one of the albums, or just drift off into a reverie that impedes my progress. Consider the following, which recounts events from 1967:
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On the reading front, after spending a couple of weeks struggling through William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, I ripped through Charles Bukowski’s Factotum in one day. Faulkner may have been a Literary Artist of the Highest Order, but I’ll take Bukowski any day; he wrote to be read, directly and succintly and without pretense. He was a drunk, a lech, and just generally kind of an asshole, but was unflinching in his portrayal of these things. He was often accused of being a misogynist, and when you read him you can see why; but to be accurate he was more of a misanthrope, or a nihilist, and like many nihilists a damaged romantic at heart. He once said, “I have died nine-tenths, but keep the other one-tenth like a gun,” and he was getting at something there; even in his darkest portrayals of life at its most desperate, there is a hint of poetry and a glimmer of something like hope.

Anyway, as public service I would like to present the following passage, which is Chapter 31 of Factotum. It neatly sums up Bukowski’s style and themes, and can save you a lot of time if you read it instead of his collected works (which were many). Enjoy.

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I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, per se, but one of my goals for 2009 has been to downsize the towering pile of unread books in my office. This formation is caused by the simple fact that it’s so much easier and faster to acquire books than it is to read them. Why can’t anyone do something about this? Where are the books in pill form we’ve all been waiting for?

More or less at random, I began this program by cracking open the irresistably titled The Mystery of the Mind, by the equally well-named Wilder Penfield. I don’t remember exactly when I added this to the collection, but it was some years ago. I’ve always been interested in the brain as a subject, and a blurb on this back of this book promised that Penfield’s “lucid writing and depth can be appreciated by the lay public.”

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I recently had occasion to read Charles McCabe’s brilliant The Good Man’s Weakness, an authoritative treatment of the many aspects of a single topic: alcohol, which another noted authority, Homer J. Simpson, called “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” It concludes with a section on hangovers which inspired me to set down all I’ve learned on the subject in my years of study, in the hopes it may be of use to some of you young people out there in Cyberville.

Handled properly, a hangover need not be terribly unpleasant, and can even be somewhat enjoyable. Ideally, hangover management begins the night before. There are several things you can do when drinking heavily to minimize the next day’s suffering, though most of the time you’re not going to do them, because the whole point of boozing is to forget about things like being prudent and planning ahead. Still, I’m going to list them here, just so I can say I didn’t leave anything out:

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