"The History of Lobotomies and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

 

At 1:02: Duncan Trussell starts talking about "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" — "It's completely different from the movie... Ken Kesey, he was like..." — and Joe Rogan, who'd just said he read the book, blurts out: "Ken Kesey wrote it?!" Trussell lets that go and proceeds to put the story, as told in the book, into his own words.

At 3:22: Duncan and Joe discuss the real-world medical practice of lobotomies: "They really did that"/"They really did that.... What happened to the person? 'They became a really good patient.'"

At 4:45: Duncan and Joe discuss Thomas Eagleton and electroshock therapy for depression. "Today, in this victimhood society, if you said he suffered from clinical depression but he sought help, [he]'d be a shining example: Look at him!... He's a hero!"

"'Vibe' as slang, referring to an aura or feeling, emerged in the sixties, in California, and gave the word its enduring hippie associations."

"The underground paper Berkeley Barb made frequent use of it as early as 1965. The following year, the Beach Boys hit 'Good Vibrations' exposed the slang to broader audiences.... In some ways, the rise of digital life allowed for a vibe revival....  Whereas Instagram’s main form is the composed tableau, captured in a single still image or unedited video, TikTok’s is the collection of real-world observations, strung together in a filmic montage....  TikTok’s technology makes it easy to crop video clips and set them to evocative popular songs: instant vibes.... When I watch a morning-routine TikTok from 'an herbalist and cook living in a Montana cabin,' I take in the mood of December sunlight, coffee in a ceramic mug, a vegetable rice bowl, tall pine forest, with a slowed-down Sufjan Stevens soundtrack—a nice creative-residency or hipster-pioneer vibe. After absorbing a dozen such videos at a stretch, I look up from my phone and my own apartment glows with that same kind of concentrated attention, as if I were seeing it in montage, too. The objects around me are lambent with significance. I can take in the vibe of my home office: hibiscus tree, hardwood desk, noise-cancelling headphones, sixties-jazz trio, to-go coffee cup. I suddenly feel a little more at home, as if the space belonged to me in a new way, or I had found my place within it as another element of the over-all vibe, playing my part."

From "TikTok and the Vibes Revival/Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence" (The New Yorker). 

ADDED: Speaking of hippies, I've been rereading Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which was published in 1968. It never uses the word "vibe," but "vibrations"/"vibrating" appears 61 times: 

When you happen to watch 2 movies in a row and see a common theme.

There are a million things you might perceive in a movie. So when you see 2 movies in a row, your brain is going to match things up, and then something looks interesting and you go running down that road.

Let me tell you about the 2 movies we happened to watch this week. Because we almost never watch movies, 2 recently watched movies are going to suggest a lot of connections with each other, even when they have little in common.

1. "Magic Trip/Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place." This is a documentary about Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters driving a gaudily painted bus from San Francisco to the New York World's Fair in 1964. A man who's written a very successful novel ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") and discovered LSD (by volunteering for a CIA-financed study) lets a speed freak (Neal Cassady) drive him and his friends across America. They take many, many reels of poorly shot film, and 50 years later, some talented filmmakers figure out how to base a watchable documentary on that sprawling footage. Highlights of the film: Kesey on his CIA/LSD trip, painting the bus, going to a blacks-only beach on Lake Pontchartrain (and not being welcomed as integrators), visiting Timothy Leary at his Milbrook Estate (and getting snubbed and looked down on), partying with Jack Kerouac (who wasn't On-The-Road Kerouac anymore, but a boring drunk), and making it back home where LSD really worked better, staying in one place and partying with the Grateful Dead as the house band.

2. "Get Out." This is a 2017 movie, by a black writer-director (Jordan Peele, who came from the world of sketch comedy), about a black man going on a short, strange trip with his white girlfriend to visit her parents, who turn out to be a real horrorshow. I recommend seeing this movie without knowing what's going to happen, so please stop now and come back later if you haven't seen it yet. It came out last winter, but maybe you're like me and you don't get excited about movies because they happen to be new. You might be noticing this movie now because it's on various year-end lists and getting nominated for awards. It's on HBO on Demand, where we watched it. Anyway, the man character — Chris Washington — feels uneasy being around so many white people and takes heart whenever he encounters a black person, but the black people there are very weird, for a reason we eventually learn: They are really white people who got surgically inserted into the black person's head. The black person is still in there, riding along, observing but unable to speak or act. The evil white people are systematically bringing black people to this place, one by one, lured by Allison Williams (of all people), and using them as shells for the aging white people to gain a new life. It's not just a way to avoid aging and death, but a way to experience life as a black person. That's something they all really want, these people who like to tell Chris about as soon as they meet him that they voted for Obama and would vote for him for a third term if they could.

Now, what are the connections I'm seeing between these 2 movies I happened to encounter in sequence?

In both, you've got a group of white people who see ordinary life as a white person in America as a predicament in need of transcendence by radical means. They take drastic, dangerous actions to break out of themselves and get somewhere else entirely. So involved and entranced with their own journey, they impose on everybody else.

At the Sleeping-Dogs-Lie Café...

... you can lie all you want or rouse yourself and tell the truth.

And you can shop at Amazon, using this special link, if you've got some shopping to do. If you're looking for a video to stream, here's the movie Meade and I just watched (for only 99¢). It wasn't really a great documentary, but how could it be, made out of reels and reels of badly shot footage of a very long bus trip that was mostly happening inside the head of a bunch of people who were in no position to show or tell us what it was like for them. Occasionally a word of wisdom seeps through, like the fact that no matter how much you believe you can, you can't pick up a saxophone for the first time and play like John Coltrane and why the bus was called "Further" rather than "Farther."

The German news in German: "Kölns OB Reker erntet Shitstorm wegen 'Armlänge'-Tipp."

I'm trying to read about the sexual assaults that took place in Cologne and what the Mayor Henriette Reker has said about them. Yesterday's post on the subject took off on her saying that the attackers might suffer from "confusion about what constitutes celebratory behavior in Cologne, which has nothing to do with a sexual frankness." Today, I'd like to talk about what's getting reported as her advice to German women that they follow a "code of conduct" to avoid attacks. But this is all translation into English. I don't know whether the German sounded the way "sexual frankness" and "code of conduct" come across in English.

Unfortunately, I don't read German. But that headline! "Kölns OB Reker erntet Shitstorm wegen 'Armlänge'-Tipp." One word jumps out. And it kind of proves my point in reverse. I know how "Shitstorm" sounds to me, but I've got to doubt that German readers are feeling it the same way. A search at the same news site shows that Germans seem to have accepted the English migrant "Shitstorm" without any serious scrutiny:


(Click to enlarge.)

"Shitstorm" is in the OED, defined as "a frenetic or disastrous event; a commotion, a tumult," with the oldest usage going back to 1948, Norman Mailer's book about WWII "The Naked and the Dead": "The hell with Brown... He's been missing all the shit storms. It's his turn." It's also in Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962): "They finally got to arguing with each other and created such a shitstorm...." A good substitute for "shitstorm" is: "clusterfuck." "Clusterfuck" is also in the OED. It's first in-print sighting was in a 1969 Vietnam account: "These are the screwups that the American public rarely hears about. They happen often enough over here that we have a term for them—‘cluster-fuck’!"

Now, back to what I was looking for, the news about Henriette Reker's advice to women. In English. The Guardian has "Cologne attacks: mayor lambasted for telling women to keep men at arm's length":

Asked by a journalist how women could protect themselves, Henriette Reker said: “There’s always the possibility of keeping a certain distance of more than an arm’s length – that is to say to make sure yourself you don’t look to be too close to people who are not known to you, and to whom you don’t have a trusting relationship.”... Reker also advised women to “stick together in groups, don’t get split up, even if you’re in a party mood.”

We're told Reker seemed caught off guard and groped for an answer. There's perhaps unintended revelation in unprepared blurtings, but something this unplanned isn't really a "code of conduct." The shitstorm in social media has the hashtag #einarmlaenge (which means "an arm’s length"). Example:

Christopher Lauer, a politician, tweeted: “Man: 'I had intended to mug this woman and molest her, but shit! She’s an arm’s length away from me!'”

Alles geklärt oder.. #einearmlänge pic.twitter.com/3q3PqOmXWU

— S. Wintschnig (@SWintschnig) January 5, 2016

IN THE COMMENTS: Discussion of the shitstorm/clusterfuck distinction.

"When I was young and first read the book I was immersed in the Boulder counterculture where madness was regarded as a liberating experience and being clinically insane was thought to be kind of cool."

"Of course those who believed this nonsense had never experienced real insanity first-hand. They only knew about it from reading bullshit authors like Ken Kesey, R.D. Laing, Charles Reich, and Theodore Roszak, among others. Pirsig was not a bullshit author but it seems that most of his readers (myself included) misinterpreted his writing and placed him in the 'madness-is-subversive-and-liberating' crowd. The fact that his descent into madness was a function of his study of the Tao greatly enhanced his appeal, since Eastern religions and philosophies enjoyed great cachet at the time. Which is to say, it was very hip of Pirsig to be driven crazy by the intensity of a mystical experience induced by his Taoist studies. Most people had to swallow heavy doses of LSD to have that experience, and he did it 'naturally'! What a lucky guy! What silly, frivolous, dangerous times those were. What a stupid time."

Writes Roughcoat in the comments to "Mr. Huntington built the treehouses over several months last year with the help of what he called a 'bronado' of friends," where the topic turned to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

There's also discussion of "man caves" that begins with "Guys are so desperate to find a place to get away from women that it has come to this. How come we never hear about 'woman caves'?" and moves on to "There are no 'women caves' because women dominate every other space in the universe." Which incites Freeman Hunt to say: "I thought it was because women aren't so gauche as to demand a room in the limited space of the house that is only for themselves."

"Growing up, we listened to a lot of blues and rock and roll in our house, but there was always one particular song that my mother always told me that she hated."

"'Good morning little schoolgirl,' it goes, 'can I go home with you? Tell your mama and your daddy, that I’m a little schoolboy too." Regardless of the era in which it was made, it’s hard to view the song’s lyrics as anything other than flesh-crawlingly creepy, and not just because it was covered by the Grateful Dead and the thought of Jerry Garcia dressed incognito as a schoolboy truly is the stuff of nightmares."

The first paragraph of an essay titled "Why I regret dressing up as a sexy schoolgirl."

I tried to find a photograph of Jerry Garcia in school clothes. This isn't Jerry:



That's Angus Young, iconically in shorts, ironically from a piece titled "25 Short Musicians," which isn't about musicians in shorts, but about short musicians, Young, being 5'2".

Does Young wear shorts because he's short?

Q: Is that just your way of compensating for your short man's complex?

A: Well, America likes big things. I'm really tiny in real life, and I thought, if they got a big one of me, this might fulfill that ambition.

A big what of him? Anyway... looking for a photograph of Jerry Garcia dressed as a schoolboy — unsuccessfully — I stumbled upon a 2012 Vanity Fair article on the "summer of love."

“It was this magical moment … this liberation movement, a time of sharing that was very special,” with “a lot of trust going around,” says Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, who had a baby with Ken Kesey, the man who helped kick off that season, and who then married Jerry Garcia, the man who epitomized its fruition. “The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love,” says Joe McDonald, the creator and lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish and a boyfriend of one of that summer’s two queens, Janis Joplin. “And it became the new status quo,” he continues. “The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten.”

Hope and change. Who knew Country Joe was such an intellectual? It's so strange what turns up when you go searching. Now, dress carefully, ladies.

What do you think of when you hear this phrase: "institutional flip-flops"?

I ask Meade, as I'm reading this op-ed by Cass Sunstein, that begins:

What are the legitimate powers of the president? Of Congress? Some people’s answers to these enduring questions seem to shift dramatically depending on a single (and seemingly irrelevant) fact: whether the current president is a Democrat or a Republican. These shifts amount to “institutional flip-flops,” a defining feature of modern political life.

In recent weeks, the filibuster has been the most prominent example...

Meade says:

I'm picturing the characters in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," shuffling about in paper slippers...

He demonstrates the drugged mental-patient walk.

Sunstein recommends the "veil of ignorance" as a solution to "institutional flip-flops." He's actually saying something smart, so smart it feels obvious and mundane at the point when you understand. You're all: Everybody already knows that. I'm distracted by the accidental metaphor "institutional flip-flops" — I know he didn't mean to make us think about footwear — which is intensified by the old intentional metaphor "veil of ignorance."

The veil goes over your face and puts a barrier between your eyes and the world you'd otherwise see, and the flip-flops go up between your toes and put a barrier between the soles of your feet and the ground they would otherwise come into contact with, not that the filth of wherever it is your walking doesn't rage up and contaminate the insole.



I'm distracted by the concrete.

"You're either on the bus or off the bus."

It's an old hippie saying that sprang to mind when I looked at this photo (taken a week ago in Madison).



What exactly did it mean? From Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test":

[Ken] Kesey's explicit teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables, aphorisms: "You're either on the bus or off the bus." "Feed the hungry bee," "Nothing lasts," "See with your ears and hear with your eyes," "Put your good where it will do the most," "What did the mirror say? It's done with people."... The world was simply and sheerly divided into "the aware," those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of "the unaware," "the unmusical," "the unattuned." Or: you're either on the bus or off the bus. Consciously, the Aware were never snobbish toward the Unaware, but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of straight souls looked like hopeless cases...