Groupies by Sarah Priscus

 Are we all groupies one way or another?

With Groupies, Sarah Priscus has produced a fine first novel with an engaging story and a handful of believably human characters.

It is a period piece set in the late 1970s mostly in Los Angeles. This is the world of young women orbiting around the male power center of a famous, very successful, rock band.
How successful? There is a scene in which the band, Holiday Sun, flies to NYC to appear on a TV show modeled after Saturday Night Live, so THAT successful and high profile. 

The story is told in first person by Faun, a young woman from Massachusetts who has just arrived in LA to live with a childhood friend. 

This old friend has been out there for a while and has become the girlfriend of the lead guy in Holiday Sun, a British musician Cal. Faun is a photographer who shoots polaroid instant image film. She intends to use the association with the band to help launch herself into a successful photography career.

Given the time/place setting in high profile showbiz the novel could attract readers interested in the music business and this LA period in particular. In that way, it could find readers who look at the story closely, search for clues, and speculate on historic models of the characters and band.
Perhaps the novel is better viewed in the wide angle of American culture beyond the music biz; seeing it as a story of people attracted to power and attempting to get something for themselves from it. This gives the whole story and greater meaning and a significance beyond a rock or showbiz novel.

Much of the dynamics of the theme could be shifted to a story about cults or political power. In the story the rock dudes find themselves in power. That offers them via female fans. In this way the novel looks into the world of male stars who feel entitled to “grab them by the pussy”. Priscus tells us that the women, the groupies are primarily there for a type of supportive loyalty that can be assumed and relied upon by the power males. They pump the boys up.

The men/boys are at core needy, insecure in their precarious power positions. They need the backup of these attractive young women. The women are expected to be “true fans”, sincere and loyal. They need them in a way similar to a Keith Raniere, Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, or back to the LA music scene, Phil Specter, who was so needy he would repeatedly, for decades, put a pistol to the heads of women who wanted to leave to make them stay with the ultimate result of that.

In a way it is a crime fiction novel.
Who is the perp?
USA cultural and political life as we have it and must deal with it.

The time setting of 45 years ago is not more innocent, merely less equipped. The technology of social media and continuing media business consolidation/centralization with algorithmic personalized diffraction and separation, empowers marketing, powermen and corporations. The boys in the band are not all that bright and don’t have the power of certain tools of control. No one in the novel is super villain sinister and about to build a multl-level marketing system of branded sex slaves, but at core is all sadly the same. None of this takes anything away from this interesting and entertaining novel and story.

Is this a hero's journey type of tale? It’s better than that. Maybe a more realistic anti-hero novel. The groupies provide support for the band but every one of them has their own angle, their own wish for transcendence and immortality by their sucking up to glory. If they do THIS, they can maneuver themselves to THAT. The novel provides a clear view of a culture gone wild with need, greed, and lust for some kind of meaningful life within the atmospheric chaos of the marketplace. .  

Are we all groupies one way or another?

Page 348

“It was a study in groupiedom. In pain. In joy. In good. In evil.

In life.”

The Guru’s Touch: A novel by Robert G. Schneider

 The Guru’s Touch

by Robert G. Schneider

Here is an unusual novel. It is the story of a young USA man’s four year involvement with a cult headed by an Indian guru and his enablers.  
Kind of, The Other Side of The Razor’s Edge. 

It all starts out in Ithaca NY. I liked that because I’ve spent some time up there so am somewhat familiar with the gorge-ous little college city that it is. Doug, narrates his own story here so we get a chance to really get inside the head, the thoughts, of this youth fresh out of high school whose mother has just died of cancer. The character of Doug ends up being very believable and realistic. Yes, his mother has just died, dad sometime before, but he is a typical emotionally repressed teen boy. He hasn’t necessarily developed the skills to deal with his emotions in a productive way. Older sister is now kind of house mom in the family home, they don’t get along. He wants control over his own life but the money is in trusts or in control of big sister who has her own ideas about what Doug ought to be doing. Bowing to her pressure, he enrolls in Cornell, taking an inappropriate major he is not interested in. (Doug is asking for trouble with this bowing to others.) He doesn’t participate and ends up flunking out.

Doug’s older brother and sister in law are into this particular guru. He gets the book through them and falls for the whole thing. In a way this is a love story. In his naive innocence he is really touched by the book and is soon off to the ashram in the Catskils and on from there.

Since the novel is in first person it is presented with an option of really showing what is up with Doug. As he gets more info about the rotten structure of the place and the guru himself, the question eventually gets down to, “How and why can he remain?” That’s the whole point of reading a novel like this, to get some insight into overwise puzzling behavior.  
All this is well performed in the novel. He was touched, he was touched by “LOVE” and it transformed him in ways that were physically real to him. Like any other love story, that first encounter, touch, eye gaze, the feeling of being seen, acknowledged as someone who matters. That’s how the love begins here as in so many other relationships. But watch out for being blinded by the afterglow so as not to see that you are being dominated, bullied, kept in work without pay, and belittled the opposite side of mattering. 

He is forever reminding himself to have “right thinking”, basically the guru is a god and the teacher and you are too lowly to understand his ways so just go along to get your enlightenment 

This is a 700 page novel. Robert G. Schneider uses that length maybe as a tool to show us the tedious repetition of the work and devotional duties of the disciples. He generates a good deal of suspense as well. Is it an enjoyable read? Yes
I would recommend it to anyone interested in cults, . . . or love, I guess.

Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

 Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

Written & Directed by John Waters

This could be looked at as a clever witty fun violent comedy romp. It certainly scores in that. It is a terrific, very fast paced entertainment but it’s deeper than that. It has youth rebellion, but more. The violence is a lot of fun, but there are consequences and deaths. There is really something else going on here. 
 
  The setup is simple enough. Fading Hollywood movie star Honey Whitlock, played by Melanie Griffith, is in Baltimore for the premiere of one of her movies. The scene is infiltrated by the Demented crew, disguised as the worker staff at the premiere; waiters, etc. They kidnap her and force her to act in their underground movie.
  “Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented, the director tells her as she sits bound and taped up in a chair in the gang’s old movie house hidaway. The colorful crew and cast introduce themselves. Each has a tattoo of the name of  a legionary, off mainstream, or maverick, director hero. Cecil’s is Premminger. The crew, Warhol, Peckinpah, Anger and others. This establishes that these outlaw film crew terrorists are products of the influence of movies. It is the movies, by highly successful internationally renowned filmmakers that have made them what they are.

They proceed in shooting their movie with the captive Honey. Lots of other movie reference stuff familiar to most movie fans goes on, plus more inside production material that would delight anyone who has worked on mainstream movie or TV productions. There is a tone of revenge flick. They attack movie related events and eventually a big production of a Forest Gump sequel as armed outsiders righteously enraged at being left out riding in on a high horse of disgust at the entire bloated big money system and the boring redundant products it continuously spews forth.

“Death to mainstream cinema!” cries former mainstream tool Honey who, after some resistance, has become a convert by way of passage through a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Honey, now one of them, is attacking the very thing that created her. She is along with the others who are attacking what has made them, through manipulation of their consciousness, but leaving them confused wannabe outsiders without any of the success of Honey the movie star.

  The movie is filled with really great movie connected locations and set pieces, including a very funny scene in a porn theater among the wankers and the climax at a drive-in movie theater.
  The viewer can easily be pulled into the revolutionary fervor of the lovable outsider terrorist crew. Aren’t we all movie lovers? But are we not movie haters too? We love the products that we love but hate some other stuff with a vengeance. We know it’s a big eliete money game that we aren't a part of no matter how strong our wannabe dreams might be. We know it’s just another enormous global big business but one that we are more hypnotically sucked into. We know how powerful it is, akin to That Ol’ Time Religion which it has been partly responsible for replacing. We feel how it has implanted and distorted much of what makes us human, our ideas of what love is, what success is, what is right and wrong. We can resent that and are enraged within at how we have been manipulated by this outside and out of our control power, even if we are not consciously aware of that manipulation and the resulting rage. Yet we can’t turn away and continue to feed in the endless streaming of big budget products. We are addicted to the dopamine thrill of the 2 million dollar action scene and the empathy we feel for the coming together of the play-acting yet completely convincing lovers. We watch people interacting with their “Friends” while we, in viewing isolation, have no friends. We know we love it, and are constantly told we ought to so that we bury rage at it all within us. This is the rage that can reemerge in self-hatred knowing that we can never measure up or really be involved. We are just enslaved consumer couch potatoes.

Cecil B DeMented and John Water knows all this. He is the one, the unique individual who more than any of the others came up out of us, out of the deep filthy underground our fandom and rage and breached that gated community. Yet the movie shows it all to be a suicide mission. A åfailed attempt to fight fire with fire.
“Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented. Indeed!

There is also a real story fictionalized, hidden in plain sight in this great and culturally astute movie. Patricia Hearst has a small acting role in it but her real life story parallels that of the Honey Whitlock character. Patricia Hearst was a princess of the ruling class and kidnaped in 1974. She sooned joined that ragtag band of revolutionaries biting the hand that created her, either a converted revolutionary or a victim of coercion, the Stockholm Syndrome. She participated in bank robbery until her eventual capture.

In view of this the Cecil B Demented crew is also revelied as a unhealthy personality cult following their leader into destruction or others and themselves. There is even a long scene where Cecil demands that they all submit to being branded with his initials. Was Keith Raniere (NXIVM) influenced by this movie? The same demand for control and submission in his cult many years after the movie was released particularly stands out, the branding of the DOS sex slaves.  

Cecil B Demented is a great movie.

                            

The Disciple

 The Disciple

Written and directed by Rachel Carey

Seen July 25, 2021 closing night at The Wild Project in Manhattan, NYC. Produced by Third Wing LTD

This one act, two-character, play tells a story of the relationship between Ayn Rand and her disciple Ayn Rand
Rand is played by Maja Wampuszyc, Branden by Cameron Darwin Bossert.

The play, even though it runs about an hour, takes us through a 25 year timeline that focuses on critical points in the relationship between master and follower.

They meet when he approaches her as a nervous starstruck 19 year old admirer of her work including the novel The Fountainhead (1943). His physical presence, as performed by Bossert in the role, is appropriately tense and apologetic in contrast to Wampuszyc's forceful, direct, and chain-smoking, Rand. In that first scene she accepts him as a disciple.

There is a well constructed scene in which Rand makes her move on the attractive young disciple. She was 15 years older. She even frames and uses her philosophy and tops him from the bottom in a sense that she tells him that he needs to be a forceful man and have what he wants regardless of the fact that she is married and he is deeply involved with a young woman. This is the liberterian free-love justification with fake male dominance thrown in. She tells him that they will tell their other partners about it and it will be fine, which it is at least between Rand and her husband.  And she tells him how to physically do it. She wants him to be forceful and rape her.

This sets up the main question that the piece explores. Which is: What happens when the person of intellectual social ideals is put in a situation in which her emotions do not cooperate.
As usual, when that person is a charismatic cult leader the disciple gets excommunicated and blamed for everything.
Rachel Carey has constructed an interesting and entertaining example in her play by putting Ayn Rand in this situation.
Any exposure of the nastiness of Rand and her ideals is welcome since unfortunately her reactionary notions had been so widely embraced in the ruggedly individualistic USA.

The show could be viewed just as an indictment of Rand, an accusation of gross inconsistency. 
Perhaps it is more useful to the audience as an invitation to look into one’s own ideals and what would happen if they were challenged by real-life emotions arising from real-life situations.

https://www.thirdwing.info/the-disciple-page

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

 

This novel from 2018 is set in the post Trump elected USA.

The novel is written in the first person voice of Phoebe a New Yorker. Phoebe, a journalist, had a nice NYC life as a Op Ed editor at the Times but just before the events in the novel decided to quit.
She has a good friend, Roslyn, who works at NPR. She is also friends, or thinks she is, with Roslyn’s college age daughter Arabella. Arabella has taken off from Reed College in Portland and has broken off contact with her mother, and Phoebe, causing the expected parental distress.

Newly footloose, jobless, and looking for SOMETHING anyway, Phoebe sets off for the wild west in search for Arabella. She follows a hunch that Arabella might have gone to Mount Baldy in California where there is a zen monastery where Leonard Cohen hung out for years (while his business manager ripped him off for millions). Phoebe has a NYCer’s disgust at the election of Trump who city people were all too familiar with for decades while unable to grok why people in the sticks, in the good old USA, love and worship him so. It is noted in the novel that Leonard Cohen died on election day 2016.  

In seeking professional local help in the search for Arabelle, Phoebe hooks up with Charles Heist, The Feral Detective, and a wild adventure commences.

The novel can be looked upon as a contemplation of the politically and culturally binary nature of Trump’s USA. There are opposing cult and survivalist elements that make for an exciting and suspenseful adventure saga. Since the novel’s voice is a first person sophisticated NYC woman we share with her the wonderment, and sometimes threatening horror, of what and who she discovers out there in the California desert as well as how it all could be oddly appealing in a primal way.  
Since Phoebe is a-seen-it-all New Yorker nothing is looked upon as all that ghastly through her descriptions, even though some of the events surely would be quite horrifying to witness first hand.

It’s all a wild ride though the still wild west and a welcome off the road and grid ride. Lethem’s not a Johnny One Note. His novels are all inventively different. This fact might upset some readers who will say, “This wasn’t like Fortress, Motherless, Chronic, Dissident, or Blot.”,  but this reader delighted in it and traveling with one of our finest contemporary novels in a look at yet another viewing angle in the crazy world that is the USA.

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.

House Arrest A novel by Ellen Meeropol

This short novel is packed with ideas and actions. Actions in the present and feelings and results of actions that reverberate from the past.

The story is told primarily through the first person of Emily, a nurse who works at a for-profit visiting nurse agency in Western Massachusetts. Then in other chapters it switches to the third person voice to be with other characters and witness their movements and thoughts that are out of the view of Emily.

This is an effective mechanism in that it gives us a strong central character to really get to know and pull for while further illuminating the world around her, its people, and their motivations. It is a solid choice that avoids the possible confusion of an alternating first person work.

The story centers around a young woman, 20, pregnant with her second child when only a year ago something terrible happened to her first because of accidental actions related to the tiny local cult she has become a part of. She is under house arrest with an ankle monitor, Emily is her home care nurse, and is increasingly drawn into the young woman's dilemma.

This is a very fine novel. With a tight suspenseful emotionally charged plot.

It is the first novel of an older woman who focused on writing after a career in nursing. That surely is a personal triumph for Meeropol, but would not be enough to draw readers to the work if it were not the outstanding novel that it is.

I will be seeking out her other work published since House Arrest.