I forgot. I hate editing. Forgot how much I over-write. If I under-write more then wouldn't have to face the dreary editing process. Economy of words. Brevity of wit. Someday I'll figure that out.
Editing has always been an obstacle. The first draft of Lost Vegas was not quite that scene from Wonder Boys, but it wasn't far from it. Original manuscript was massive compared to the lean, mean final draft. I cut almost 300K words down to under 97K. The easy cuts are... easy. Getting it down to 230K was not painful. That's the fluff that you know is there and you must concede. It's those little darlings that are the toughest to kill off. Getting from 175K to under 125K was... painful, and 107K to 97K was torture. For some reason or another, no matter how badly it has to go, I find any excuse possible to keep it in. That bargaining process goes against all logic and reasoning, which is why writers make bad editors and editors have to be merciless. The hardest part of the writing process is flipping the switch from someone who is open to any possibility, to someone who is narrow-minded with one goal... minimalism. I struggle with being cold-blooded and merciless when it comes to editing. Funny... I can act like that in real life no problem.
The key to editing is not to think. Hack away. Nothing personal. It's just excess fluff that doesn't need to be there.
The Human Head helped out with the first round of edits. I nicknamed him the German Butcher because he was not shy about mutilating my script. Entire segments and storylines I worked on and re-worked for years were gone in an instant. It's like seeing a whole chunk of your life get flushed down the toilet. I agonized over certain sections for a year or more. I was haunted for months at a time with chapters. And just when I thought all that agony was over when I finished the script. WHACK! Gone in less than five seconds. Casualty of the editing war. The chapters I crafted and molded and coddled for years were wiped out. DELETE. Gone forever.
It's a mind fuck knowing that something you worked on was considered useless, redundant, sluggish, or out right boring. Why the fuck was I working on something for so long if it was going to get left on the cutting room floor? Such is life. You can't think of that stuff when you're working. You have to put it out of your head otherwise you'll write scared. The way to go about it is... you accept that you have no control over what happens in the future stage of the project, you can only control on your contributions at the moment. But for the moment... for the now... you have to tell the story in the most concise and entertaining manner possible. The better you do that job, the less you'll have to worry about after the fact.
Having your work chopped to bits and flushed down the toilet is tough to stomach. You have to have a thick skin and find confidence at the harshest moments when you haven't seen it in weeks or months. It's terrifying. It's humbling. It's insane.
There was a lesson to be learned during the initial editing process of Lost Vegas with Human Head when he helped me trim it down to one-third its original size. I have to think more like an editor and not waste my time on something that I know is going to get cut later on. And if I want to keep something in a piece, I better have a damn good reason why its there.
How do you slice and dice and three or four page article down to a couple of paragraphs? With a heavy knife blade. I'm currently bogged down in a project condensing articles (anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 words) down to 10% of its original length (250 words is my target). Sounds easy. Thought it would take a couple of afternoons or one full day of work to complete this two-pronged project. It's been three days so far and I'm still not close to finishing the first part. Holy shit, this might take me a week.
What I have now is a good start. Still need to cut more. Is that even possible? Can I get even more K-Mart Minimalist meets Hemingway? icky thinks I can do a better job. I need to go back in and slash and burn some more.
Sweet Jesus. Kill 95% of the original draft? For fuck's sake, that's maddening. Insane.
She's right. It needs to be even shorter. Cut everything down to its bare essentials. Way shorter than what I'm comfortable doing. It took a ton of cajoling and convincing for me to allow 90% to be cut. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! Baby steps. It took a full day to totally process the fact that I did a crappy editing job the first night of this project and I'm way in over my head and need to be more cold-blooded as an editor, otherwise I'm doomed. Late last night and this morning, I went back in and chopped away. I got everything down to the right percentage, but then I spent most of the afternoon performing delicate surgery. When you hack and dice and slice indiscriminately, it leaves a lot of the story on life support, so I have to go in delicately and tie the rest of the remaining piece altogether otherwise it dies on the table.
Word economy is the key. Less is more. I used to think that a story trumps length. If it's a good story, it doesn't matter how long it takes to tell it or to read it. Then again, did DFW really need 1,000+ pages to tell you about the freaks in Infinite Jest? It's 2013. When dealing with internet-based data transactions, shorter the better because it does not waste your time. Holding someone's attention span is difficult in today's over-saturated entertainment-drenched world. I mean if you didn't have to go to work in the morning, you'd stay up all night looking up stupid shit like videos of kittens falling down stairs. For what? Shits and giggles? A walk down memory lane? Research? Intellectual stimulation? Sometimes, you just want to be mildly entertained with slam dunk contests from the 80s, or old jazz recordings of John Coltrane. But how can I compete with that? I can't.
My break is almost over before I return to the horrors of the butcher shop. It's ugly out there. Slaughtered sentences. Cliches. Dangling dangling modifiers. Everywhere. My own entrails.
The atmosphere at the computer repair shop was subdued, but thick with worry. It reminded me of an ER waiting room minus all the junkies trying to cop some cheap dope. Everyone at the repair shop had some sort of tech issue, and whatever that issue was, it was so crippling and rehabilitating that they dropped whatever they were doing and showed up to this magical store on the second story of a strip mall. They were not seeking out the "whys" of the world. They didn't care why their laptops were broken. They just wanted a solution.
The repair shop was nestled in a strip mall near our apartment in the Slums of Beverly Hills. I never realized how close it was. Heck, I never even noticed it was there until Nicky told me about it. It's funny how you can pass a place every day of your life and never know what is really going on inside there.
Half of the commercial space was empty and the other half were businesses that I was convinced were laundering money, like three nail salons that were perpetually empty, and two acupuncture/massage joints that looked like rub and tugs. The only time I went to that strip mall was to visit a smoke shop was on the first floor, which rarely had cigarettes whenever I popped in to buy blunt wrappers or rolling papers. They sold overprices glass pipes and I think I'm the only person whoever bought one. I have never seen anyone else inside the smoke shop aside from the bored-to-the-tits, middle-aged, Middle Eastern guy in a track suit behind the counter.
The computer repair shop was located above the smoke shop. The two kids working the repair shop and they looked like they were both 15 years-old. Hate to say, but it was a cliche that an Indian kid and a Chinese kid were working the repair shop. Shouldn't they be in school? Maybe they were college kids paying their way thru UCLA by working at a computer repair shop. Just listening to them talk for a few seconds let me know that they knew their shit. Then again, the troubleshooting and other silly stuff they were doing was obviously way beneath them. It's akin to a well-trained chef who is asked to work the fry station at Burger King.
My laptop had a mouspad issue. The 50-something year old guy with the golf tan in front of me had a laptop that was crawling with multiple viruses. The cougarlicious woman two in front of me wanted to install spyware on her daughter's laptop. The 30-something guy behind me with circles under his eyes was a distraught writer and by the suicidal looks of him, I knew his Macbook crashed and he foolishly never backed up his files. His only copy of a new (vampire) script was lost in limbo.
The virus guy was getting chastised for not having proper anti-virus
software. It's like the kid knew this guy went to one too many porn
sites and got infected. Back in the day if you fooled around, then you had to worry about catching
the clap. Now you can be disease free IRL if you're entire sexual activity is web-based, but if you show up at free
porn site crawling with infestation (which is pretty much all of them),
then you're laptop will be toast and doing the computer equivalent to
pissing razor blades.
The screenwriter with the lost script did not want to get lectured about back-ups and the merits of cloud storage. He just wanted to get his script and get the fuck out of there. I suspected his Xanax was wearing off.
I wanted to tell the suspicious woman that she really should sit down and talk to her daughter rather than spy on her. I also wanted to tell her that she really needed to monitor her cell phone and not the laptop. Kids today are chained to their mobile devices. I dunno how some of these kids wipe their ass while clutching their phone in one hand and crumpling up TP in the other, while wiping and tweeting in one swift motion.
That's when I came up with an idea... a potential business plan to bilk overprotective parents. I read an article about how one school district installed retina scans on their district school buses. You're kid gets scanned when he gets on/off bus and parents get a text message whenever they get on/off. In theory it sounds safe, but it reality it's BIG FUCKING BROTHER.
When I was a teen during the era of landlines, my mother sometimes listened into phone conversations using the other line. I am very lucky I do not have kids. I'd hate to be a parent today in today's ever-changing tech world. You'd have to wait until their kids pass out to snoop, and sneak into their bedrooms and pry phones out of their hands. Some kids are so addicted to their mobile devices that they sleep with phones under their pillows. I have done that a few times for safety/security reasons whenever I stayed in super-sketchy, tweaker-infested, no-tell motels while on Phish tour or sometimes I got put up in dodgy hotels in South America while on a work assignment.
I'll let my business plan marinate for a few days before I seek out venture capitalists willing to fund SPY-ON-MY-TEEN.COM
I'm conflicted about Foxygen. They look like they walked right off the screen from a Wes Anderson film. I can't decide if they are subversive anti-hipsters, or the complete opposite which is superficial, full-blown plasticine post-modern trash.
Hipsters are way too coddled and self-involved to actually spend time cultivating anything more than a superficial connection to pop culture fare. This is how diarrhea like like Lana Del Rey gets through the filter because when you're sitting around all day snorting Xanax, anything you play will sound like Aretha Franklin.
Broseph turned me onto Foxygen this past winter. He gave me their new album -- We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic. With a lengthy title like that, they have to be mocking everything -- themselves, nostalgia, and the music industry. But, what if they're not and totally serious?
At the core Foxygen is an LA duo of high school friends who hated "modern music" and adored bands from the 60s and 70s. Lead singer Sam France is also obsessed with San Francisco, which you will learn right away with their lyrics. Foxygen's sound might be retro, but their lyrics are a contemporary indictment of modern society, which is waaaaay too deep for a run-of-the-mill hipster band.
This particular lyric from No Destruction sucked me in:
There’s no need to be an asshole You’re not in Brooklyn anymore.
Listen to No Destruction here (audio only):
But then again, a song like No Destruction is strewn with goofy images like toking weed on the subway. In one hand, it's subversive genius, yet on the other hand, they are pandering to the kids who ride the L train and waste money (they don't have) on overpriced rent, solely so they can say they live in a hip neighborhood.
Foxygen's sound is a throwback to psychedelic rock (early Rolling Stones) and pre-punk (Velvet Underground). There's been several Mick Jagger comparisons to lead singer Sam France. There's one song in particular -- the title track from We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic -- in which Sam France eerily sounds like Jagger, and the arrangement reminds me of the Stones in the early 60s when they were pretty much a R&B cover band.
Here is a video of their song San Francisco, that reminds me of Wes Anderson flicks:
The indie genre is cluttered with bad bands that are only semi-popular because they're caught up in the most recent wave of hipsters' "purchased coolness." When I was a teenager, you bought a record because you liked the music... and if you dug that particular genre, then you did everything possible to dress up like the band members or their fans. In high school, the kids who liked heavy metal music all dressed up like headbangers (e.g. ripped black jeans, Iron Maiden shirt, long scraggly hair, some sort of flannel shirt).
Nowadays, teens steal their music and only accumulating albums to impress their friends. Music, for many of these hipsterfied millennials, has become a conduit of coolness, instead of what it used to be -- a gateway to your soul. Nothing is more powerful that a specific song that can extract raw emotion when you least expect it. When you're bombarded with emotions, music can certainly multiply those feelings. That's why you want to crank up an AC/DC song in a bar when you're riding high after you're seventh tequila shot, or why it's impossible to listen to the radio after you break up with someone because every fucking song sounds so fucking sad and torturous.
The music industry is struggling to stay profitable because no one is buying albums anymore. But the labels trying to evolve are doing everything possible to extract money from the few groups of people who still buy music. One of those groups is hipsters. They purchase music as a shortcut to coolness. Most weekends in the life of a hipster include paying $50 for a vintage t-shirt, chain-smoking clove cigarettes, raiding their grandparents closest for ugly cardigans, and learning how to play Kanye songs on the ukelele. Yeah, sometimes I think that the entire indie music scene is just one big scam to get 20-somethings to buy music they don't actually like, because they're culture-frauds desperately pretending to like obscure bands in order to have something different on their Facebook profile under "favorite" bands. Fabricated coolness.
Back to Foxygen... the studio album is well crafted, which makes them a tough act to see live. The few live shows I heard had sound mixing issues, specifically the vocals. Plus, what makes Foxygen's studio albums unique is the usage of backing vocals and overdubs, but that does not translate well into a live performance.
Foxygen is on the Jagjaguwar label, the same label as supreme hipster indie king Bon Iver. Jagjaguwar pulled some strings and made sure that Foxygen was one of the select bands that was going to get some PR pimping during the SXSW festival. Man, I miss the days when Sundance or SXSW were places in which you could see emerging talent. These days, both festivals have been co-opted by corporations. Park City, Utah becomes a miniature version of Hollywood for a couple of weeks every year. Meanwhile, Austin, TX is invaded by vampires from the recording industry that swoop in from LA and NY. They're not really there to check out new talent as much as they manipulate tech-savvy hipsters and use SXSW to promote their own agenda (i.e. printing money).
Anyway, it's difficult to rise above the static at SXSW, but somehow, Foxygen was one of the few up-and-coming bands that were going to get exposure at this year's festival. All they had to do was play a quick set and then wait for the echo chamber to elevate them and give them an injection of buzz, that would boost in record sales, spark interest by festival promoters, and in the best case scenario... parlay that "buzz" into a slot as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live or Jimmy Fallon's show.
Yet, something happened at SXSW and Foxygen went off the rails. It was a combination of tech issues (not-so-good sound) and a crowd of shitfaced hipsters talking through their set. Heck, one of my biggest pet peeves is people talking during concerts. If you're a musician, nothing is more disrespectful than someone yapping away when you're onstage. But Sam France from Foxygen snapped at the audience and began berating one guy in partiular. It was almost like a scene out of Dig! when Anton from Brian Jonestown Massacre incites numerous brawls with an antagonistic audience. Foxygen struggled through their set and only got through 3 and a half songs before Sam France became unhinged. France said something about how his voice was shot and a drunk troll in the crowd told him to shut the fuck up and stop whining because that was his job. That bit of heckling set France off the deep end.
"Who said that? Come on stage and talk to me about it, you fuckking coward. Come on, get on the fucking stage."
Foxygen performed one more song and then left the stage. A more serene France returned a few minutes later to apologize.
"I'm sorry about what I said earlier to that guy. I wasn't even talking to him; I was talking to myself."
Shortly after that incident, Foxygen cancelled their European shows citing "creative health." Ha, that's a new one. Most of the time when you hear musicians use "exhaustion" it means... 1) exactly what it means and the act is super tired after a whirlwind tour, or 2) strung out on drugs... so exhaustion could be a code word for rehab, or it's a break to detox. In modern times, I'm sure there's a Dr. Feelgood that the tour promoter has on speed dial that will issue the band members a script for Adderall, or they're old school and know a dealer who slings cocaine or speed. Hey, the show must go on... so if it takes a bump or a 15 mg wonder pill... whatever it takes.
Alas, Foxygen (or rather, Sam France) hit the skids with creative health issues. They're supposed to be back on tour when they hit up the festival circuit this summer including a spot at indie heaven -- the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. If they are playing this summer somewhere near you, check out their show because you might catch another meltdown.
If you haven't watched last night's episode of Mad Men, then this is your disclaimer and stop right now to avoid any spoilers.
I thought last night's episode of Mad Men (titled A Tale of Two Cities) would focus on NYC (where the series is set) and Chicago (the scene of the 1968 Democratic National Convention). Rather, the two cities involved were NYC and Los Angeles. I could spend hours and hours writing about the differences of my hometown and the city on the Left Coast where I currently reside, but if I gave all of that stuff away for free, then you wouldn't buy the (eventual) novel. Besides, I wrote extensively about my struggles as a New Yorker living in LA at great lengths many times before (like in Whiskey and Ice Cream). Anyway, A Tale of Two Cities is about the eventual shift in power from the East Coast to the West Coast after the decline of crime-ridden and graffiti-strewn NYC in the 1970s and the rise of sunny Los Angeles as the epicenter of new-found wealth (aerospace, computers, and the rising influence of television, the music industry, and Hollywood). I could write an entire post about that, but it's not as interesting as writing about drugs.
Last night's episode of Mad Men was another drug-induced episode. I wrote about previous episodes in which drugs were prevalent like LSD (Roger in the Sky with Diamonds) and amphetamines (Speed Men). This week's episode included experimentation with marijuana and hashish -- both labeled soft drugs by today's standards and considered relatively tame drugs compared to mind-bending psychedelics or high-grade pharmaceutical speed.
Pete Campbell (an Ivy League-educated rich prick who is one of the most high-strung characters on the show, but who has shown the greatest resistance to change) smoked marijuana for the first time, while the serious alcoholic main character Don Draper, nearly drowned after smoking too much hashish at a party in the Hollywood Hills.
In the case of Pete smoking weed for the first time... he desperately needed it badly. I see so many people in real life that are so insanely stressed out that I really think that if they just took one drag off a doobie, they'd be so much more relaxed and wouldn't get stressed out about the littlest things. Of course, too much marijuana turns you into an unmotivated space cadet, but like anything in life, moderation is the key.
At the start of the 1960s, it was very common for ad men to drink at their desks. By the end of the 60s, booze was passe and marijuana became more and more prevalent in writers rooms in ad agencies all over the country. Doesn't matter if it was Hollywood or Madison Avenue, in the 60s and 70s, anything remotely related to the "creative process" in a work environment was accompanied with the familiar aroma of recently smoked herbs. A few seasons ago (in Mad Men's timeline it was the early 60s), a couple of characters went to great lengths to hide the fact they were smoking a joint to help writer's block over a deadline (ironically for a rum company), but in the current timeline (1968), writers openly toke joints in the office.
A despondent Pete Campbell, wrought with personal problems (senile mother and a marriage on the rocks) and struggling with work (trying to stay relevant in a firm that doubled in size) was so far at the end of his rope that he finally said, "Fuck it." He took a long toke while Janis Joplin's Piece of My Heart played in the background
The episode ended right there. We have no idea if Pete passed out, or he got the munchies, or if he ran out and bought a copy of Pet Sounds, or if he wigged out and hid underneath his desk until the weed wore off. I guess we'll have to find out for next week's episode.
If you believe the anti-drug fear mongers (the ones who profit off the war on drugs)... then you know that marijuana is labeled a gateway drug... and considered an evil stepping stone to harder drugs. I don't believe that assertion, rather, it's not drugs... it's the person. If you have emotional problems it is inevitable that you will turn to some form of self-destructive behavior whether it be developing an addiction to booze, pills, street drugs, sex, food, or hoarding. The war on drugs was a failure because our leaders and politicians outlawed substances when they should focus on mental health issues and how to fix broken people.
Some people don't get high the first time they smoke weed. Sometimes, it's the opposite and newbies get super-super-super high and are not prepared for the intense buzz and sensory overload. That happens when you all of a sudden activate dormant parts of your mind you never knew were there. It was like turning on a switch, but sometimes flipping that switch is too much to handle. People who freak out smoking weed the first time describe the harrowing effects of similar to dropping acid for the first time. I'm envious of people who get THAT FUCKED UP on a couple hits off a joint. I guess I've built up a huge tolerance that I just get a stoney buzz most of the time. Shit, I'd love to smoke a doobie and feel like I'm in Alice in Fucking Wonderland.
Pete Campbell took baby steps. I hope the weed helps him become less of a dick. I'm glad he didn't dive into the deep end of the pool and gobble up a bunch of LSD as his first act of rebellion against the establishment. Could you imagine someone as high-strung as Pete Campbell walking around with a head full of acid? He's the type of guy who would take off all his clothes and jump out a window. Hmmmm.... maybe that's how Pete Campbell dies? He loses his shit on LSD and jumps off the roof. That would finally explain the "falling man" in the open credits of Mad Men.
Entire Reddit threads are devoted to the falling
man theory, along with other insane Mad Men-related conspiracy theories (Bob Benson is a
G-man, Don Draper's illegitimate son, or time-traveling Bobby Draper), or other well-crafted ideas about the fate/future of characters
(like the Megan Draper is really Sharon Tate and will be murdered by a hippie
cult).
Mad Men is a complex show with tons of subtext, so it gives their fans plenty of fodder to masticate on in the days following a new episode. You really have to watch each episode more than once, and approach it like a film student the second time around. Sometimes Nicky and I get into long discussions about the most subtle things like what song is playing on the radio or record player in a scene (last night it was "Found Love" by the Fly-bi-Nites) or what is going in the background (I have an entire post rattling around my head about how the art on the walls -- either in a character's office or their home -- give you a deeper insight into what's really inside that character's head).
Falling man aside, Pete may or may not be the next character to get killed off, or commit suicide. But Pete is trying something different to escape instead of crawling into a bottle. Booze makes you belligerent, aggressive, and mean-spirited. Marijuana helps you find serenity and focus on the donut and not go berserk over the hole.
Drugs were an integral part of the 1960s. Old hippie friends of mine love to joke, "If you remember the 60s, you weren't actually there."
The latter part of the 60s were a whirlwind blur of psychedelia if you took part in counter culture. I think about how square my parents were and how they stood on the sidelines and the safety of shore during the 60s as a massive tidal wave of potential revolution crashed ashore and perished... dead on arrival. Hunter S. Thompson nailed that sentiment in his infamous "wave speech" near the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Watch it here:
Lazy critics dismiss Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a drug book, but they missed the point completely because Hunter was writing an obituary about the demise of America and the death of the American Dream. Hunter witnessed the extermination of democracy by jack-boot thugs and how the entire country's leaders were co-opted and public policy hijacked by corporations and the military-industrial-entertainment complex.
The older I get and the crazier America gets, the more I find myself writing gushy content about how awesome the 90s were. I'm starting to realize that the free-loving days of the 90s were Generation X's version of the 60s. Much like Baby Boomers are nostalgic for the 60s, us Gen Xers long for the halcyon days of the 90s, when the music was edgier, and movies were not watered-down sequels, and social situations seemed much easier to navigate and you had meaningful relationships with real-life people instead of superficial connections via social media, and you could show up at an airport ten minutes before your flight took off. The 90s were my 60s. I feel bad for Gen Y and millennials because they grew up in post 9/11 world dominated by the Police State and the dividing lines were not generational but rather politically divided into a bogus right/left paradigm.
Mad Men is a series about how America changed (or died) over the course of the 1960s, but it achieves that by telling the story about the men and women who write the ads for powerful corporations involved with the military-industrial-entertainment complex (as one of the conservative partners explained to one of his left-leaning copy writers: "I hate hypocrites, like hippies who cash checks from Dow Chemical and General Motors.")
In the middle of 1968, you were either a cog in the establishment or part of counterculture movement. That division was essentially a generational divide (but you had people over 30 who were anti-war or against the current system that was in place and they knew only a revolution could begin to address all of the current problems with inequality). At the same time, many confused teenagers in the late 60s did not know which path to take. Do they tune in and drop out? Or do they adhere to their parents' social mores and join the rank and file of the establishment as members of Richard Nixon's silent majority?
Drugs, especially powerful psychotropic drugs, fractured the fabricated reality set forth by advertising and the media, and for the first time in a lot of people's lives, people were able to see through the bullshit. This is the main reason why the government outlawed LSD. They didn't want the entire populace to find a doorway that led to enlightenment (the jarring realization that the people in power were corrupt and ruthless motherfuckers and that the exploited have-nots vastly outnumbered the haves), so the government made LSD illegal because they were scared shitless to have any more people walk through that door.
If the masses had easy access to LSD over the last couple of decades, I can guarantee you that the Kardashians would not dominate the news cycle. Alas, the rise of the Kardashians are the ultimate result of the government boarding up the doors of perception.
Today, it's a lot easier for the government to indoctrinate children through compulsory education and control teenagers by funneling them toward a life of gross consumerism. Instead of tuning into to spiritual awakenings, teens are busy struggling to live dual lives -- obsessing over their real lives and their internet lives (a virtual projection of what society told them was cool). In 2013, the establishment is not worried about being overthrown because college kids are not marching en masse, shutting down campuses, or inciting a revolution. Instead, our current generation of teens and 20-somethings are pre-occupied with more vapid and vain pursuits like Facebook likes, or desiring to be on a reality show, or doing their best imitation mimicking the psychotic, promiscuous behavior of their favorite Jersey Shore cast members.
Don Draper went to Los Angeles on a business trip and ended up at a wild party in the Hollywood Hills. He's a man still caught up in the 1950s and humors conventional trends of the 60s because he needs to understand them in order to be a better ad man. He smoked marijuana plenty of times before, but often treated it as an alternative way to self-medicate. Then again, if he didn't like it, he wouldn't keep doing it. Anyway, Draper was looking for the bathroom and stumbled upon a group of hippies smoking out of a hookah. Draper toked some killer hash and promptly got lost in a hallucination (these moments remind you that Mad Men creator Matt Weiner used to write for The Sopranos, because these druggy dream sequences remind me of some of the best episodes of The Sopranos like the time Tony ate peyote). Somewhere during his break from reality, Draper fell into the pool. Hey, it's not a real party in the Hills until some schwasted fucktard falls into the pool, right? At least he didn't climb onto the roof and proclaim "I am a golden God!" before jumping into the pool.
Shit, Draper had mad hallucinations on a couple hits of hashish? I wish that happened to me when I smoked hash. In fact, I smoked some right after breakfast and I feel somewhat... normal.... which is why I won't face plant into a pool and almost drown.
Draper's hash incident gave the writers an excuse to flush out Draper's inner demons but in visual form. It's not every day you can engage a pregnant hippie doppelganger of your wife or talk to a solider who died in Vietnam. Draper's run-in with hash was probably a one-and-done experience. I'm sure he'll never touch the stuff again, not because he almost drowned, but rather because the hash made him confront serious unresolved issues about identity and self. What should have been a mellow moment transformed into a M. Night Shyamalan nightmare-twist in which Draper saw dead people. Draper had previously used booze and sex to quell his demons and block out his most painful memories, whereas hash thrust him face-to-face with his own shortcomings and the fact that he switched identities (dog tags) after he nearly died in the Korean War. No wonder Draper barely resisted when he got back from L.A., and the partners agreed to change the name of their firm (shorting it to Sterling Cooper & Partners, utilizing only two of the seven partners' surnames instead of a mouthful of SCDPCGC).
Before I bail, let's return to Pete Campbell and his magical mystery tour. The future of Pete Campbell is interesting and I have four questions that I would love to find out answers....
Will Pete continue down the path toward enlightenment, embrace counterculture, and help incite a revolution by fucking up stuff from the inside?
Will Pete fall in love with the merits of marijuana, quit his job at Sterling Cooper & Mooks, migrate to Northern California, start a commune, impregnate a lover named Astral, and become a pot farmer?
Will Pete enjoy weed too much and become one of those shut-in stoners who smokes fourteen joints a work day, hides out in his office, make his secretary fetch him 40 White Castle hamburgers for lunch, and he watches the Zapruder film over and over and over again in the dark while researching his six-book series on the JFK and RFK assassinations?
Or is Pete's stoner phase just a phase and a minor mid-life crisis and this foray into mary jane is just a temporary vacation from reality before he returns to his psychotic, self-loathing self-involved self?
I'm not a fan of the Eagles because I can't fucking stand Glenn Frey. I'm indifferent about Don Henley, but I respect and dig both guitar players -- Don Felder and Joe Walsh -- yet neither were members of the original quartet (Randy Meisner, Bernie Leadon, Frey and Henley) that came together in 1971 as a "super group" of sorts. Henley and Frey were in Linda Ronstadt's touring band, Meisner played bass in Poco, and Leadon probably had the most notable success playing with Graham Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers. The four marched into David Geffen's office at newly-formed Asylum Records and demanded a recording contract. Geffen told them to move to Colorado and not to come back until they honed their chops. The original Eagles went off to the Rockies and played dinky bars in ski towns while they developed their sound and jammed out late into the night for acid-drenched hippies. When they returned to L.A., Geffen felt they were ready to make him some moolah.
Geffen shipped the Eagles to London to cut their debut album and work with the legendary producer Glyn Johns (The Who, Stones, Zeppelin). If the Eagles fell short of the mark during the recording sessions, Geffen knew Johns would surely get them into the end zone. But the Eagles didn't need Johns' magic. They had a couple of radio-friendly hits that appealed to the masses. Johns just polished it up. The Eagles returned to California with their first record (eponymously titled Eagles) and it was a massive hit. Geffen cleaned up. The Eagles were instantly famous and got cool houses in the Hollywood Hills and got free drinks at the Troubadour and got to snort/smoke as many drugs as they wanted and bang as many groupies they could handle.
The second Eagles record, Desperado, was foolishly a cowboy-themed record. The suits loathed it. The critics panned it. Their fans were disappointed. A couple of songs got airplay, but the Eagles as a country-rock band (or what the hip-cats running labels today would call "alt-country") were not going to succeed if they stayed on that path. Glen Frey wanted the Eagles to be rock-and-roll, but the lead guitarist Bernie Leadon (one of the best banjo players on the West Coast and premier acoustic guitar players) wanted to remain with country roots. Frey won out and the band went on a path to evolving into a traditional rock-and-roll sound.
For their third album, the Eagles added another guitar player -- Don Felder -- who was friends with Leadon in high school. Felder came in to help out in the studio and he impressed everyone with his guitar chops. They loved his sound and made him the fifth Eagle. Felder wrote a great memoir about his time in the Eagles called Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974-2001).
While Felder was getting adjusted to life as the new guy, Leadon became distant and eventually quit the band. That's when they added Joe Walsh, who had a pretty decent solo career with a few bong-rattling hits and along the way garnered a well-deserved reputation of epitomizing the rock in rock-n-roll. Walsh was an insane party animal and a graduate for the Keith Moon University of Room Trashing. All of a sudden, the band had two ripping hard-rocking guitar players and Frey got what he wanted -- a kick-ass, popular rock-and-roll band. They next two records, with Walsh, were popular but it was Hotel California that blew the hinges off the door. The album was a cautionary take about everything that's awesome and hellacious about the pursuit of fame and fortune in the City of Angels. Even Hotel California was a subversive song about the dark side of the recording industry.
Hotel California was a mega-hit, but the difficult and tumultuous recording process nearly destroyed the band, which was on the brink of breaking up. They embarked on a whirlwind world tour to support the album and by the time they got home, they were super burned out. They also had to go back into the studio and start recording the next new album. The show/party continued because they all had lifestyles and drug habits to maintain as the 70s were ending and the 80s were inching closer. They struggled during the recording of The Long Run album, which took forever and ever and ever. Egos got in the way, the creative juices went dry, and whenever you throw cocaine (like a shit-ton of blow) into the mix... the results are disastrous. The Eagles delivered the album under duress and they broke up shortly after.
You know the rest of the story. In the 80s, Classic rock radio stations sprung up all the country and the Eagles greatest hits were played all the fucking time. I must have heard Hotel California a million times by the time I was even 20. The Eagles reunited in the 90s during the "Hell Freezes Over Tour." The reunion was a money grab and everyone involved (e.g. Irving Azoff) raked in more dough than they could ever imagine.
The Eagles cranked out the jams in the 70s. Broke up for the 80s and developed solo careers. Then returned for the 90s... and you know what... the fans were still there.
The Eagles tried to pass off some new songs, but it was derivative shit compared to their classics. The bottom line was that the 90s version of the Eagles did not have to worry about coming up with new material because the fans wanted to sing along to the hits. Since the Hell reunion tour, the Eagles returned to the road and toured every few year on self-indulgent sojourns around the world while Irving Azofff, Glen Frey, and Don Henley printed money. Millions and millions. Adoring Eagles' fans donked off millions, buying overpriced tickets to hear millionaire-musicians in the twilight of their careers performing tepid versions of a pastiche greatest hits, sprinkled with a couple of Henley/Frey self-wanking renditions of the more popular songs from their solo efforts. Millions and millions and millions.
Anyway, I heard an Eagles song this morning -- Life in the Fast Lane -- and there's a line that stood out. It was written almost 40 years ago, but it's still applicable to the vanity and vapidness of L.A...
They knew all the right people, they took all the right pills They threw outrageous parties, they paid heavenly bills There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face She pretended not to notice, she was caught up in the race
I don't like the Eagles, but that was such a stunning assessment of L.A. that I had to sit back and say, "Holy shit. Ain't that fucking right. Some things never change." I could write a book about that someday. Soon, I hope.
* * * * *
By the way, I wrote about the origins of the title of Life in the Fast Lane, along with the poker scene from Almost Famous in a recent issue of Bluff Magazine. Check out Donking Off Penny Lane and Life in the Fast Lane.
There's a fine line between a cult and a religion. It's called tax-exempt status.
If the omnipotent IRS deems your organization as a legitimate religion, then you don't have to pay taxes. Ever. It's a good scam if you can blow a fast ball by IRS auditors, but there's far more lucrative ways to make money.
Cults are cults. I was raised in a cult (the Catholic Church) and I regularly attend cult meetings several times a year (Phish concerts). I've been paid a decent wage writing positive things about a cult (the poker industry) and I even succumbed to peer pressure and caved in and joined the cult of Facebook.
In the new season of Arrested Development, one of the characters joked something like: "Leaving Scientology was a lot easier than deactivating my Facebook account."
Facebook is like the mafia. Once you're in, you're in for life.
The worst aspect of Facebook (and mostly all forms of social media) is how it dehumanizes you and turns your once meaningful relationships into units of information and your page/profile/account essentially becomes a database. Any sort of virtual connection (comment, "like", or tag) seems cold and impersonal. Data collection. Binary. 1 for like; 0 for nothing. It's like we've been reduced to 1s and 0s.
I'm not a Luddite opposed to social media and I think those platforms (much like the philosophy of life) are all about what you the individual user wants to do with it. You can take it seriously, or not. You can become a wallflower or jump right into the fray, You can stir the pot and spit venom at people on the opposite side of the political spectrum, or you can try to make people laugh when they're having a rough day.
I am not thrilled with Facebook's evolution from an online version of the "Fuck Finder" to its bumbled IPO. Facebook treats its users like cattle and all that data that people willingly fork over is virtual gold for Zuckerberg and his cronies. Some trends disturb me like heightened superficial interactions and bullying. While other things outright enrage me like having user data been manipulated/exploited and bought/sold by multi-national corporations for malevolent reasons (spying) or consumerism (marketing). But it is what it is. It's not compulsory, but there's so much peer pressure to conform that anyone dissenters are marginalized.
Social media is a great means as a connection point, but I firmly believe the real world is where you truly cultivate that original virtual connection into a blossoming real, concrete relationships either as an acquaintance, colleague, friend, or confidant. I'm one of those people who feels guarded about virtual connections. Maybe it's the poker player in me that feels more comfortable being able to observe people in order to get a read on them through non-verbal communication. Nothing can trump human interaction. The virtual world is a substitute, like methadone, but it could also be a raging addiction like heroin.
Some of the saddest cases I've seen are people who eschew their real lives in favor of the internet world to hide online and use the anonymity of the internet to create a new persona thereby extinguishing the real life trauma. That schism is dangerous and unhealthy and I'm frightened to think how many millions of Americans are hiding in the virtual world and making insincere and superficial connections with other hurt people. Instead of having a deeper connection in which they can help each other work out their real life issues, they opt for a more fantasy-like realm. It's no wonder Catfish is a huge popular show. I guess my biggest surprise is why doesn't it happen more often? I suspect it does, but most people are so embarrassed about how deep they fell down that rabbit hole.
Like anything else, if you have you're shit together, you will flourish in real life and in the virtual world of social media. If you're a train wreck in real life, no matter how much you try to cover up all of you're weaknesses, it will eventually bubble to the surface.
In the 80s, if you had a shitty day or were down in the dumps you could crawl into bed and go to sleep and hope that tomorrow is another day, or you can zone out in front of the boob tube, or you can listen to depressing/uplifting music on the radio. But today's kids are slaves to the "stream" and they must plug in and find out what everyone else is doing, who is everyone gossiping about, and if anyone else is talking shit about them. Shit, it's hard enough to do that in real life, it's even more vexing to go home and manage that aspect of your life.
In 2013, when someone having a bad day, the entire world is aware of it via social media. Everyone has a bad day. Life is a series of bad days squeezed in between a ton of mediocre days with the occasional day of awesomeness. But when someone has a couple bad days in a row, they're on the verge of an epic social media meltdown. I've witnessed my fair share of them over the last few years. It's some of the best/worst aspects of social media voyeurism... like a car wreck on the freeway that you cannot look away from when you pass by.
It's not like the old days when you can close the door to the bedroom and insulate yourself from the outside world and wallow in your own misery for a bit until you feel better and emerge from your cocoon of self-loathing. But in the 21st century in which everyone stars in their very own reality show, people are so addicted to social media that they forget that they can go bonkers without live-updating it.
I'm old school. I prefer to go fucking bananas behind closed doors.
