"We prefer to have the melody before working on the lyric. We feel that when we have the melody, there are words on the tips of those notes, and we have to find them."

Said Alan Bergman, quoted in "Alan Bergman, Half of a Prolific Lyric-Writing Team, Dies at 99/With his wife, Marilyn, he wrote the words to memorable TV theme songs and the Oscar-winning 'The Way We Were' and 'The Windmills of Your Mind'" (NYT).

I've always been fascinated by the song "The Windmills of Your Mind," and I blogged about it in 2019 when the composer — the man who wrote the notes on the tips of which the Bergmans found the words — Michel Legrand, died.

That post has many versions of the song embedded, but I'll chose just one here, the 1968 Noel Harrison version that I remember as a hit and that I know was heard in — and won an Oscar for — "The Thomas Crown Affair":

My old post ends:

"So, but [Jolly] West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant..."

".... because it was the one thing people knew. And he would say, oh yeah, it, it would sort of, it was his calling card and he used it as kind of a jokey thing. But he always denied any connection to this CIA.... You know, even in the Church Committee, you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money. And West had a special office for him built there. He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move at what he wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment, where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses, you know, in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. He was gonna build that out at the Air Force base. And he was all set to go. And I even had receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his files about this...."

Great episode. Full transcript here. 

You can buy Rebecca Lemov's book "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion" at Amazon (commission earned). The audiobook is free at Spotify Premium.

The men of CNN charmingly circle the drain.

Anderson Cooper struggles to consume a shot:

They’re letting Anderson Cooper drink on TV again for New Year’s Eve.

CNN is getting desperate for ratings.

pic.twitter.com/hbZNY8ODUt

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) January 1, 2025

And Diplo — who's somebody, but I don't need to know who — calmly asserts that he's on LSD:

Diplo trips on LSD while appearing on CNN’s New Year’s Eve special.

pic.twitter.com/V9iauqF86B

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) January 1, 2025

How are men these days supposed to enact the meaning of New Year's Eve? It's traditionally about drinking a lot of alcohol, but they don't want to do that, so they put on a little show of finding it hard to drink just one shot, and then they talk to a guy who calmly and humorously says he's on LSD and he's "not even lying." This stuff has gone viral, so credit to CNN. Do what you must. It's not the news.

Meanwhile, CNN brings out a representative of the opposite sex: Whitney Cummings woodenly delivers some jokes that have — predictably — gone viral because they mock Democrats: 

NEW: Anderson Cooper stands completely speechless after Whitney Cummings says Dems couldn’t hold a primary because they were too busy holding up a dead body.

“It was amazing that the Pro-Choice Party didn't give their voters one…”pic.twitter.com/EtxIcMKRXZ

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 1, 2025

"Crazy thing that we still do as human beings. And the problem is, I don't see a way out of it because terrorists are real."

"Criminals are real bad. People are real. This is the world we're living in. Unless you take mushrooms, we gotta get mushrooms legal for the entire country, the whole country and just force them down. Everybody's throat, force people to do mushrooms do it for everyone else."

Said Joe Rogan, an hour into his 3-hour podcast with Duncan Trussell.

The "crazy thing" under discussion was war and "any kind of violence — like stabbing your neighbor."

The question whether the category "any kind of violence" includes forcing drugs down "everybody's throat" was not noticed by Rogan or Trussell. Obviously, the answer is yes. Note the incoherence: If "mushrooms" were the cure to violence, someone who's had the cure would not recommend violence.

I wanted to add a note about the decades old idea of putting LSD in the water supply and googled "plan to put lsd in the water." I was thinking about hippies, but my screen filled up with items about the CIA. I'll just link to this BBC article from 2010: "Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD?"

"So much of our culture today, with young people, is centered around their feelings... Feelings are indicators, they’re not facts...."

"Parents teaching their kids about safe spaces, and 'I feel uncomfortable'... It’s, like, You know what? The world is not a safe space. You have to find the comfort. It’s mostly uncomfortable.... I don’t like kids."

Said RuPaul, quoted by Ronan Farrow, in "RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business/The drag star brought the form mainstream, and made an empire out of queer expression. Now he fears 'the absolute worst'" (The New Yorker).

Later, RuPaul seemed to want to revise that "I don't like kids" remark. He's quoted as saying that he'd "be a great parent" and that he "fucking love[s]" the "white noise of joy" of kids playing outside in the schoolyard near his cottage.

Farrow tells us RuPaul is "a proponent of psychedelics": 

If not for homophobia, we could have had Utopia... through LSD.

I'm reading "Could LSD Have Achieved World Peace? Ask Margaret Mead. In 'Tripping on Utopia,' Benjamin Breen chronicles the legendary anthropologist’s doomed effort to save the world through hallucinogens" (NYT).

Here's the book: "TRIPPING ON UTOPIA: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (commission earned).

The the reviewer, Charlotte Shane, writes:

Branding.

pic.twitter.com/JRebl653BP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2023

ADDED: I was going to create a new tag for Musk's new AI project, but typing in the letters, I saw that I already had a tag "grok" — lower case "g" — so I just used that, even though I knew the existing posts with that tag had to be just about the word "grok." I wasn't going to create a second "grok" tag, with an upper case "G." I don't like tag proliferation, but — more important — I wanted to publish this post with the old tag so I could click on it and see what I'd done in the past.

I see that last January I used "grok" in a post about an article about thinking about thinking:

"Up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II’s proscription against inebriation among falconers, I had resolved..."

"... never to use drugs or alcohol. In fact, I hadn’t even tasted coffee. However, I had recently gathered from my favorite comic book, Turok, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. [The person offering it] assured me that this was a near certainty, so I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles; trees bowed and swayed on a windless night; bright lights with long comet tails lent Hyannisport the cheery aura of Christmas in July.... Still tripping, I rode into Hyannis with two older kids and struggled in a Main Street diner with a plate of lively white noodles that squirmed and squeaked as I stabbed at them with my fork. I became suddenly appreciative of the impossibly complex choreography of minute movements required by my mouth and its various parts in order to chew and swallow food. Abandoning that endeavor, I looked up to see a picture hanging behind the counter of my father, Uncle Jack, and Jesus. All of them had their hands folded in prayer.... Two days later I flew to South America.... I worked during July and August as a ranch hand in the Colombian llanos, returning that fall to Millbrook.... My generation was developing its own counterculture. That summer’s Woodstock concert—just across the Hudson from Millbrook—was our constitutional convention.... I... read underground newspapers and Mr. Natural comics.... I thought of drugs as the fuel of the insurrection...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in  "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family." 

It was the summer of '69. Perhaps you remember it. RFK Jr. was 15. 

Millbrook was the private boarding school RFK Jr. attended, chosen by him because "it operated a certified zoo and several of the boys practiced falconry." The place was the alma mater of William F. and James Buckley. James would go on, in 1970, to win the Senate seat that had belonged to RFK Sr.

"If I do my job well, you come away listening to 'Blue Suede Shoes' the way people heard it in 1956, or 'Good Vibrations' the way people heard it in 1966..."

"... and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians.... I can explain the appeal as best I understand it.... But what I can’t do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*.... That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it.... [T]hey always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn’t capture what they did, and that the only way — the *only* way, they were very clear about this — that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs."

Says Andrew Hickey, beginning the long-awaited Episode 165 of his phenomenal podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs": "'Dark Star' by the Grateful Dead." 

Listen to the whole thing, but tell me, did you see The Grateful Dead live and while on psychedelic drugs? Having seen The Grateful Dead live and used psychedelic drugs but not at the same time is not enough.

"Tall and bald with the build of a swimmer, Pollan is no Timothy Leary — he isn’t asking anyone to drop out..."

"... and the medical trials described and shown in 'How to Change Your Mind' shouldn’t be confused with Ken Kesey’s freewheeling acid tests of the ’60s. Back then, when psychedelics left the laboratory and entered the counterculture, the power structure freaked out. 'Kids were going to communes, and American boys were refusing to go to war,' Pollan said. 'President Nixon certainly believed that LSD was responsible for a lot of this, and he may well have been right. It was a very disruptive force in society, and that is why I think the media after 1965 turns against it after being incredibly enthusiastic before 1965.'... Given evolving attitudes, one challenge facing the filmmakers, including the directors Alison Ellwood and Lucy Walker, was how to depict the psychedelic experience in a sophisticated way, without stumbling into the territory of a ’60s exploitation movie. 'We didn’t want to fall into the trap of using psychedelic visual tropes — wild colors, rainbow streaks, morphing images,' Ellwood wrote in an email.... 'The ego is a membrane between you and the world,' [Pollan] said. 'It’s defensive and it’s very useful. It gets a lot done, but it also stands between us and other things and gives us this subject-object duality. When the ego is gone, there is nothing between you and the world.'"

From "With ‘How to Change Your Mind,’ Taking a Trip With Michael Pollan/Based on the book about psychedelic therapy, a new Netflix docu-series prompted another writer to reach out to Pollan — and dig into his own experiences" (NYT).

LSD without the psychedelic visuals of the 1960s, repositioned for our dismal times as something to eradicate whatever might be left of your ego. Thanks a lot, American culture. 

"[O]n Oct. 4, 1969, everything changed... 20-year old Diane Linkletter jumped to her death from the window of her Los Angeles apartment after allegedly trying acid."

"Her grieving father, TV and radio host Art Linkletter, told the press, 'She was murdered by the people who manufacture and sell LSD.' The newspapers ran wild with Linkletter’s take: 'LSD KILLED DIANE.' Later, when news of her clean toxicology report made the rounds, Linkletter blamed the jump on an '“acid flashback.' President Richard Nixon — in the midst of launching his War on Drugs — invited Linkletter to the White House. Nixon knew that a story like this could galvanize the anti-drug movement more than any fact or figure could.... It was the perfect moment for a book like 'Go Ask Alice.'... The fact that the author was anonymous only heightened the buzz. 'Alice' could be anyone, even your daughter. The media ran with it — everyone from The New York Times to the Library Journal presented the book as a verified teenager’s diary. A million copies sold nearly overnight. Avon Books published the paperback and two years later, in 1973, ABC aired a TV adaptation of the book. That, too, was a supersonic hit, with nearly a third of all US households viewing it...."

From "1971 druggie diary ‘Go Ask Alice’ was made up by a suburban housewife" (NY Post).

People believe what they want to believe. Too good to check! I wanted to see how embarrassing the NYT coverage of this ridiculous book was. Here, from 1973: "Diary of a Schoolgirl En Route to Death." It's a review of the ABC TV movie. 

"John Hinkley's Music, Whitey Bulger, and MKUltra."

What is MKUltra? "Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) was the code name of an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The experiments were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse, in addition to other forms of torture." (Much more at the link.)

"It was sometime during the 2012 season when Alcides Escobar of the Kansas City Royals grabbed a bottle from his locker and sprayed some of its contents..."

"... onto Salvador Pérez. Caught off guard, Pérez warned his fellow Venezuelan and close friend not to mess with him, punctuating his emotion with some colorful language in Spanish. Hours later, though, Pérez was far from bothered. He collected four hits that day and smelled great in the process. The mysterious substance in the bottle, from his point of view, had become a performance-enhancer: women’s perfume. 'From then on, I bought all the Victoria’s Secret there was,' Pérez recalled recently in Spanish.... 'If I don’t have perfume on, I feel strange,' said Seattle Mariners third baseman Eugenio Suárez, a Venezuelan.... Even though most players are often several dozen feet away from each other on the field, Suárez said he likes hearing that he smells good. Pérez said he can sometimes pick up the aroma of Luis Severino, a Dominican pitcher for the Yankees who uses a women’s body splash, despite Severino being 60 feet 6 inches away when facing him. 'I’m a catcher so I sweat a lot,' Pérez said, pointing to all his gear. 'So a little perfume helps. The umpires say, "Oh Salvy, you smell good." I say, "Thank you. Give me some strikes."'"

From "Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good. Smell Good? Baseball is full of traditions and superstitions. For numerous players, a heavy dose of cologne or women’s perfume is the unlikeliest of performance enhancers" by James Wagner (NYT).

I don't know what the "colorful language in Spanish" was. Something not fit to print. But what was the Victoria's Secret perfume? I'm guessing Bombshell. But maybe it's Amber Romance perfume. I see something from 2019 about the LSU baseball team and their use of Amber Romance to repel gnats. (And, yes, I know there's an MLB team called The Gnats.)

ADDED: "Amber Romance" — I'm not picturing hurled baseballs but hurled vodka bottles that shatter and cut off your fingertips.

I've got 5 TikTok selections for you today.

1. Goodbye to Estelle Harris — George Costanza's mom. Some excellent clips.

2. An aging woman in her LSD shirt.

3. A comic interpretation of how they fire you in L.A. versus how they fire you in NYC.

4. The woman who has overheard how men talk about woman.

5. "Are we supposed to know what we're doing? No?! Great! Just checking."

"In the late 1980s, when [Rick Doblin] wanted to do research on the effects of psychotherapy with MDMA... 'no one would let me... I realised that politics was in the way of science. So I decided to study politics.'"

"He enrolled in the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, and he founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies to lobby for and ultimately to fund clinical research into psychedelics... Though possession of psychedelic drugs outside a research setting is still an offence under federal law, the Food and Drug Administration has recognised breakthroughs in the therapeutic use of MDMA for PTSD in 2017 and of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. An effective campaign for political reform has been led, in particular, by American military veterans who have championed the use of MDMA for PTSD; an unexpected reversal from the days when psychedelics became part of the protest movement against the Vietnam War. Part of the legal backlash against the drugs had a much broader target than just Leary and Alpert, said Mason Marks, leader of the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School. 'President Nixon wanted to shut down voices that opposed his political agenda.'"

From "Harvard takes a new trip into the world of psychedelic drugs/Six decades after Timothy Leary’s controversial experiments on his willing students, scientists are taking a more sober approach, writes Will Pavia" (London Times).

"Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying..."

"... and insisted on showing them his self-inflicted bullet wounds. This did not go down well with John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom were on acid at the time. As Lennon later said, 'We didn’t want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn’t know; he hadn’t made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it’s like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! … It was scary. You know … when you’re flying high and [whispers] "I know what it’s like to be dead, man."' Eventually they asked Fonda to get out, and the experience later inspired Lennon to write ['She Said, She Said']. Incidentally, like all the Beatles songs of that period, that was adapted for the cartoon TV series based on the group, in this case as a follow-the-bouncing-ball animation. There are few things which sum up the oddness of mid-sixties culture more vividly than the fact that there was a massively popular kids’ cartoon with a cheery singalong version of a song about a bad acid trip and knowing what it’s like to be dead."

From "Episode 139: 'Eight Miles High' by the Byrds" (on the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs"). I excerpted something about The Beatles, but the episode is ostensibly about The Byrds. That said, there's also plenty about John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar. And Sonny and Cher.

"A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design."

"There weren’t many bright colors, but some theretofore unnoticed textural quirks—on clothes, on faces—went wild with deep, scrutinizing, photographic detail. For many hours after those visual effects had faded, I haunted the hallways of my mind, regretting how many memories I’d retained and neuroses I’d cultivated. Mostly, I regretted eating the things at all. Nothing happened that I’d want to put onstage; certainly, nobody sang.... The closest 'Flying Over Sunset' gets to true surreality is when Cary [Grant], a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings, dons a body stocking and a cap and flails around, having become a facsimile of the phallus that possesses so much of his thought and his posture.... The play is based on a groovy idea, but it indulges in the myth that... drugs alone... make for interest."

Writes Vinson Cunningham in "The Bad Trip of 'Flying Over Sunset'/James Lapine’s new musical, at the Vivian Beaumont, sets the LSD hallucinations of three nineteen-fifties celebrities to song" (The New Yorker).

"'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: 

Glimpsing The Beatles, Bill Maher, Margaret Thatcher, and — above all! — Craig Brown.

I read Craig Brown's "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret" — as I noted here — so the minute I see that he's got a new book, "150 Glimpses of the Beatles," I put it in my Kindle. Nothing more is needed to get me. It's Craig Brown! And The Beatles.

But I'm interested to see what Bill Maher — of all people — has to say about it in the New York Times. Let's read this:

I like the old stories — frankly, if I wanted something challenging to read, I wouldn’t be reading “150 Glimpses of the Beatles.”... Glimpse No. 53 begins: “For Christmas 1964, when I was 7, my brothers and I were given Beatles wigs by our parents.” If you change 7 to 8 and brothers to sister, I could have written the exact same sentence. So I knew I was disposed to like this book — and I did.... 

"Don’t do acid and drive. Control your set (i.e., the people you’re tripping with) and setting. Don’t ever look in the mirror."

"... or, alternatively, do look in the mirror. And, as Marc Maron says he was once told, during a bad trip: Just hang in there, man. According to Maron, that’s advice he still gives people today, although it sounds pretty banal."

From "Talking about LSD sounds funnier than taking it in 'Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics'" (WaPo)(reviewing a Netflix movie).