On the Moon

I had graduated from high school less that two months before. I was kind of a loner at school, but for some reason, perhaps the excitement of a long awaited release, liberation, brought about an outgoing emotional transformation, and I was ready to try to start anew. I say “try” because while in school there were many attempts at anew, but in the same old structure that never fit, or changed, cycles just repeated and I never did start doing my homework and become a better student as mother would have wanted, or whatever else I thought would be better. Or get people to not complain about my performance, my self. 

Was is the last day of school that I approached him? What did I say? “Hi neighbor, will you be my friend?” (Was Mr. Rogers even a thing back then?)

Whatever is was I think he was a little taken aback, but went along with this and soon I was running with him and his smart and somewhat fast crowd. 

People might get the impression the the 60s were drug filled. Not in Ohio. Not even at the 60s very end as this was. I had never seen of been offered marijuana, let alone LSD. Oh I had heard all about it but there was none available to me as far as I knew. 

Anyway I had a lot of fun with them and we did the what we had, beer. Maybe some cheap wine. Boone’s Farm was apple flavored sugar, while The Full-Tilt Boogie Band drove Janis to, well, boogie with her Comfort in hand. It was known as her brand. I remember that night at the Chelsea Hotel, but that’s a different fantasy. This was outdoors the Cleveland Orchestra summer venue. Someone had pot and I smoked the first time. It felt like, I don’t know, I was drunk. We got down front at the end, quite drunk by then, but so was Janis wasn’t she? Rock on. Back then you could bring in coolers filled with anything. That’s what we did, and sat on the sloping lawn. The last time I went to an outdoor place like that in New Jersey. They made me dump my Poland Spring at the entrance search and buy inside, and they would not let me have the bottle cap. 

We used to drive out of town, south an hour or so. It was more rural and there were abandoned strip mines where we would go swimming. There were cliffs to dive from. I don’t know why is was full of water, or the quality of the water. One night we camped there. I got really drunk and took of all my clothes on the cliff at night 

I can’t handle alcohol. Too powerful.

So that night was apparently a Sunday, I looked at a web site calculator thing. We were having a party, hanging at a young woman’s apartment. One of the main people in our little crowd. She was already in college and had an apartment in a nearby college town. She had a car and ideas of stuff to do. A leader. 

I guess we knew what was going to happen. There had been a launch and all. But there were sort of a lot of those before. Sheppard, and John Glen, and Russians, but they were not us so not so newsworthy. 

There was a TV and we gathered around and saw this B&W video of a man in a space suit walking on the moon. In prime time. 

Then we went back and listened to more music. You know the stuff, they still play it constantly.  And we had more beer.

 I don’t know, it was kind of like one of those military things. Clean cut Right Stuff in jump and space suits. 

I just didn’t want to get drafted. 

This Land is Mine (1943)

This is a WWII anti-nazi propaganda movie set in that familiar town Studiobacklot, Europe.

The Germans have occupied the town and the story is about how the town people, officials and others, deal with this predicament. The Germans don’t come in and run the government directly. They operate by leaning on the town leaders already in place who are often quite willing to collaborate to retain power and generally save themselves from these polite, but unpredictable, uniformed occupation officers. 

This was written by Dudley Nichols and it’s director Jean Renoir. The script is outstanding and manages to deliver the goods as far as being educational regarding what fascism is as well as the mechanics of power manipulation. There is also a speech that ran down the difference of the impact of the enforcement of new fascist rule depending on one's class position. The middle class may be willing to try it on for size, collaborate, while the workers know that it means their enslavement. It was kind of surprising and pleasing to hear all that stated flat out in the movie. This is an interesting feature of WWII USA, even big business of a high profile type like the movies has to appear as anti fascist to motivate the war effort despite what their hidden political impulses might be. 

At the center of the story is a meek “cowardly” elementary school teacher. 

This role is played by Charles Laughton. This teacher and momma’s boy is not at all manly. This is illustrated comically in a scene where he attempts to smoke a cigarette. One drag sends him into a coughing fit. Later, after a transition, he asks for a light. Cigarette smoking becomes a metaphor for manliness. Perhaps Edward Barnys worked product placement on this movie. Charles Laughton is very good in this and his character has to find his own courage. He is the one who shifts and learns most in the course of the story after a series of occurrences and delivers some fine speeches. Since Laughton is playing this guy and we now know more, maybe than we wish to, about the celluloid closet, the movie can also be easily viewed as a gay schoolteacher standing up to the nazis. The beard is played by Maureen O’Hara who also serves as a radical anti-nazi influence. 

This is a rich, well made, beautifully written, directed and staged production.
It has some nice stunt work, a chase on rooftops, and jumping from a railroad bridge on to a movie train.
It also has some really nicely done set-extending mat shots. It’s a classy production.  

And it features Tommy Bond somewhat older than his mid-30s Our Gang/Little Rascals unforgettable Butch character as one of the smart ass school boys. 

——-

An interesting offshoot of 1930s-40s Hollywood is the long running radio anthology series Lux Radio Theatre. This show presented live radio play adaptations of recent movies often with the original stars reprising their roles. There are lots of these. This Land is Mine is one of the movies given hour long adaptations with Laughton and O’Hara reprising their roles from about a year earlier. 

I haven’t listened to this yet but here it is: 

YouTube: https://youtu.be/ngCtgMUEFxc

Or download an audio file from the great source that is archive.org 

April 24, 1944 on this page:
https://ia800706.us.archive.org/23/items/Lux_Radio_Theatre_Digitally_Restored_Collection/44-04-24ThisLandIsMinecharlesLaughton--maureenOsullivan.mp3

Don’t Crowd Me by Evan Hunter

Having just read and enjoyed Last Summer, I thought I would try another of his books. 

This one had an old school pulp fiction cover painting and runs only 175 pages. It is also an early work which, compared to Last Summer, from 15 years later is a product of the writer learning a craft. 

I don’t claim to have much knowledge about this mid-20th Century pulp fiction. I read some of the hits of the genre, such as Horace McCoy’s noir masterpiece They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, but not so much of the less revered stuff like this one. 

Don’t Crowd Me is about a NYC advertising executive in his late 20s on a solo vacation in a camping situation on an island upstate in Lake George. It’s a rather complicated plot involving greed and lust. It’s all very manly. Reading it made me think of the 1950s men’s magazines that my dad got occasionally. They always had these lurid cover paintings depicting some dramatic moment of physical struggle. A solo man battling elements, savage animals and/or humans. He is usually stressed to the limit with bleeding wounds, but struggling on. The painting always depicts the moment of physical battle where it all will be decided, the cliff hanger, “Will he make it!?!” Most likely he usually does. I don’t really know since I never read any of the stories in those magazines. 

Don’t Crowd Me feels like this type of manly fiction. It also feels like something written rapidly for fast sale in an already established genre market. All that is fine. Evan Hunter is young and finding his way here, maybe the rent was due. This is a sort of outlandish B movie type quickie project. 

The main character, Steve Richmond, comes off as a bit of a provincial New Yorker at a time when a holiday out of town meant upstate, the Catskills, or as in the novel, Lake George. This is 1950s NYC destination. Now with heavy promotion by the airline industry and the tourist promo commercials they fly off somewhere far.
There is a certain townie element in the novel. The town people in Lake George are seen at the very beginning to be deeply interested in getting as much money as possible from the vacationers. The camp described is rather crude, with no showers. They jump in the chilly lake to freshen up. It’s seems kind of old USA democratic in a way. There is a wealthy couple who owns a jewelry company. I say “democratic” because they are the type of people who would be flying off somewhere more exclusive rather than hanging out with just anyone at this upstate camp. They are also at the center of the plot. 

There is a lot of manly stuff going on. Little of it really believable. After all this guy is up there for a two week vacation during which he has sex with two attractive sisters, but not at the same time. Toward the end he gets very badly beaten up, with a rock, is left for dead. After awakening and stumbling back to camp he gets seduced by a seemingly irresistible woman. Yes he has been beaten and when he gets to a mirror sees that his beating was so bad on his face that bone is exposed, but fortunately his lips were spared by the beating so he can still kiss, etc. 

(Funny how they trained us 50s and 60s boys to think we are getting away with something as a way of keeping us interested in sexual activity for the furtherance of the tribe and keeping the species going. Get in fights, win, and fuck. It seems simple and it is really just keeps us tied to family and work. Its too bad sex isn’t fullfilling enough on its own without some kind of nasty persuit and capture story attached to it to, I guess, make it more interesting.)

Don’t Crowd Me is not really very good. But it clips along rather nicely. It’s not badly written. Just fast commercial product that is only interesting because of the writer, the old time vacation setting, and it’s odd peek into the manly entertainment in a bygone era. 

Last Summer: A novel by Evan Hunter

  

I cat sit in the apartments of friends in the summer and this one in East Harlem, maybe not far from the author’s childhood home, has a few Evan Hunter/EdMcBain novels on the bookshelf. One of which is an old Signet paperback of Last Summer. I needed something to read and since I had positive feelings about the old movie and the novel is only 206 pages, I thought, “Why not?” Sometimes it is good to follow an impulse. 

I had remembered the movie as being good and the first time in saw both Barbara Hershey, and Richard Thomas. Also that it was not a happy movie, it involved bullying and worse. The movie script was written by Eleanor Perry and directed by Frank Perry. As a pair, they made some fine movies in the 1960s-70s. They made David and Lisa, another intimate human drama. After reading the brief Last Summer novel, I’d like to see the old movie again although it seems out of distribution currently. 

Last Summer is about four high school aged white children of economic and social privilege from Manhattan private schools dealing with life at their parent’s summer places on an island somewhere outside the city presumably a brief ferry ride off Long Island somewhere. 

The boys know one another from summers past. They bond in sort of a moderate triad with a brash attractive bikini clad girl, Sandy. She has found an injured seagull. These three hang out, acquire beer, do stuff with the seagull, none of which is heartwarming, and take Peter’s dad’s sailboat out. All the while we are becoming familiar with their characters and their relationship with one another. Dan (was that even his name?) is the sketchiest character even through his suggestions propel some of the plot. He is mainly focused on Sandy. Not so much in love with her but seeing her as a vehicle for his urges to act out sexuality. He is not motivated by need for intimate human connection, but sensational pleasure that is selfish and greedy and heightened by getting away with something natural and beautiful turned nasty naughty. He is a consumer. There must be a core of attempted connection in showing other boys/men how one has scored. 

They meet Rhonda. She is the opposite of Sandy. She’s injured by something horrible that happened in her family and socially awkward. 

Sandy is the dominant force in the triad. Through a series of encounters Rhonda is granted a type of provisional acceptance by Sandy into the group. The boys just follow. Ultimately it would have been better had Rhonda stayed away from them. 

The novel is written from the point of view and in the voice of Peter. This character is the nicer of the two boys, the nicer of all three really. Perhaps it is that he is the only one who gets to tell his side of the story. His description of the characters and their actions are all we have. We have to take him on his word, unreliable narrator that he no doubt is. There is the sort of weakness in him, an insecurity that compels him to stay with the group and its power. His is a self-protective chameleon nature. He blends in to hide, thrive, and consume. He develops sympathy and ultimately affection toward Rhonda.  But can he follow through? 

Peter is the story. He is the one who represents maybe all of us when we are on the fence, know what is right action, but must drift along with power. When we are given the choice of the uncertainty of loving, and take the alternative route with the others into fleeting sensation and a type of gang mentality. 

Evan Hunter presents a wonderfully constructed scene with the entrance of the Anibal character. Having read the brief online biography of Salvatore A. Lombino and his East Harlem roots it appears Anibal from Puerto Rico, with learner’s level but carefully accurate English, and living in East Harlem, is a sort of stand-in for the author or based on men he once might have known as a youth. Even Anibal is not immune to the allure of the young white rich pleasure seekers. Heartlessly they call him “Annabelle”, ignoring his repeated prompting that the accent is on the middle syllable, after all he is not a real white man. He’s just another disposable toy to bored consumer kids. The sequence is also of retro interest because it has a modern element of ancient computer dating. In the way familiar, not remote, from 21st Century hookup apps, as well as reflecting current “Build a wall” mentality incubating in kids. 

  50 years after this book came out, it is easy to see that the people in it are in their late 60s now and perhaps still holding on to that kind of gang power thing that seemed to work for them back then. They are the elite in business and politics still running things. Getting ready to pass it on to their survivors. Sophisticated yet ruthless they went through whatever it took to please their spouses,  children, and their good old American narcissistic personal needs. 

The rest of us? Maybe we are all Rhonda hanging on the fringes trying to fulfill our own narcissistic needs, by attracting high profile miserable jerks in control. We would probably be better off wandering away from them and playing alone or among ourselves.

Evan Hunter presents a sunburned noir. 

It still holds up.

The Roku Netflix app is terrible.

I have experience with the Roku and another version that is on smart TVs I have used.

The Roku Netflix app is not at all friendly. Maybe it’s too friendly, it never shuts up, until the TV is muted of course.
The smart TV app is very nice. It does as it is supposed to within the limits of it’s intelligence. It displays a main featured show, with accompanying still image and descriptive text, and in the bottom third of the screen, interactive rows of images and text for other show which we then scroll through. (Endlessly, but that’s another issue).  

The Roku app is a pusher. It pushes moving content in one’s face, audio and video.
I want to read a description of something to decide if I want to watch it. I don’t like to watch previews, trailers unless I’m not really going to watch the movie. I don’t want to see snippets of the movie to decide if I want to see it. I want to read about it and see an image or two. Who is in it, who directed it (I dare not ask who did a minor thing like write it, but that’s another issue)?
No reading something in the Netflix description on Roku  and hitting “Add to my List” without seeing and hearing a preview. This shit stresses me out. It harshes my sweet consumer buzz. It’s a bring down, dig?
Oh well, there’s always the insane wonderland of Amazon Prime if one wants to mingle with that monster.

The Roku Netflix app is terrible.

Outside Looking In by T C Boyle

Reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric KoolAid Acid Test and Boyle’s own Drop City, Outside Looking In, is set a few years earlier than Drop City, and concurrent with Acid Test, except it is set in Leary’s East Coast scene instead of the West Coast Kesey Pranksters.

It is not about Leary, he appears, it’s his world at Harvard and mostly Millbrook, but the novel follows a psychology grad student, Fritz, and his wife, Joanie, an upwardly mobile high school psychologist teacher. They have a young son. Fritz enters Harvard for and graduate degree to advance his career. They are a rather straight laced couple in 1963, a rather straight laced time. He is studying under Leary and they get all involved with the scene that evolves from that.

So there is LSD and surprisingly, alcohol, and a lot of it. I say surprisingly because it had not occurred to me that drinking would be a part of that scene. How naive! This is the early 1960s, everybody drank. Yet as the story goes, it has negative effects in some cases, and maybe lead to reckless things that went on needlessly in the scene. (I’m set up for being negative about alcohol because I don’t like it and hardly ever use it.) Of course all this is fiction, but now I assume Millbrook had a lot of alcohol consumption as well as some lovely Czech made LSD. Fiction, movies/books, alters facts to fit it’s needs.

Dick is in it too, the rich boy and the one booted from Harvard with Tim. He flies to Canada to get the Czech acid, pilots the small plane. This is Richard Alpert, later Ram Dass, of Be Here Now fame (he’s still here now, like Hawaii, on Netflix).
 

I had read something in passing before reading this book; that Boyle said he had never had a positive LSD trip, so I was concerned how LSD would be treated in the novel. Happy to say that I feel that the descriptions of the experiences, the trips themselves, are conceivable and close enough to my own experience with it to say, well written and true to psychedelic life. There is really not a lot of big scary LSD situations in it. I’m happy with this. 

LSD itself is a neutral, sort of passive, character in the novel. It has enormous effects but it varies of course with “set and setting” and can be very joyous and just as challenging, and all in the same trip. This is clear in the novel. LSD is mostly good in this.

The point of view in the novel shifts from a third person describing what Fritz is going through to being with Joanie and her thoughts, then back to Fritz, who is really the main focus of the novel.

It’s an interesting time now, 2019, with psychedelics experiencing another wave of more popular interest. This time more positive. It could be said and maybe suggested in the events of the novel that, Leary was really too reckless and ultimately damaged to reputation of LSD with his need to advance his own ego with it. The novel cast it all as rather cultish with the great leader who had gone further and therefore knows better and followers gathered around him and more of less adhering to the structure and games that Leary designed.

So in a way it is a novel about regular people who are involved with a personality and substance cult. In that way some of the events are easily transferable to any other cult. LSD doesn't make people become cult members, but there is a suggestion in the book, that one is susceptible to “imprinting” a feeling of deep connection to the person who has the LSD, controls it, gives it to a person for the first time and trips with them.
This might be so but I cannot say directly, because that is not the way I went into it. When I was 18 in 1970 I was at a tiny southern Ohio college visiting a friend. Someone, I don’t know who, had LSD that I had been hearing about for years and was eager to try. It was a good experience and I have gone back repeatedly through the years and continue to do so when I can get some LSD which is rare because I’m not socially connected to any scene where I can get it. I’m shy. (But if I can't connect to people maybe I ought not to be doing it anyway. I’m old so I know I’m going back to the pool seen enough, the ultimate transcendence.)

The people in Leary’s scene in the book are trying to do something with it, get someplace, achieve something. I think psychedelics maybe ought to be approached with more neutrality. Yes they are somehow connected to some kind of transcendence which is also associated with types of spiritual/religious experiences, mysticism. I don’t believe in loading up on anticipation of something like that prior to taking the substance. That stuff can also open one up to some of the cultish social set up and grow around these things.  
I suggest that is one is a newbie, forget about all that stuff and just take it and see what happens. I don’t think most people really need leaders and guide as much as people need to put themselves in leader roles. Ignore them. 


The novel has a terrific final scene and it made me laugh out loud.