Asks Naomi Fry (at The New Yorker). Subheadline: "The singer died in 1971. A new documentary series posits that he faked his death to escape the burden of fame, and is living in hiding."
That prompted me to ask Grok, "What was that movie in the 1980s about a rock star who faked his death so he could live life as an unknown? Maybe something like 'Eddie and the Cruisers.'"
The answer made me laugh: "You're likely thinking of Eddie and the Cruisers, a 1983 film that fits your description perfectly...."
Yes, Grok doesn't know what I'm thinking. I'm enjoying its circumspection. I'm likely thinking of "Eddie and the Cruisers" when I suggest that the movie I'm thinking of is maybe something like "Eddie and the Cruisers." So meticulous. That's what I want from my A.I.
Later in that artificially intelligent conversation, I wrote: "I'm seeing a New Yorker article, 'Why Do We Want to Believe That Jim Morrison Is Still Alive?' That strikes me as the better path for reflection. Not: Is he alive. But: Why do we want to believe that this particular dead person is alive? What if some other famous person really did withdraw from celebrity life and live on as — to coin a phrase — a complete unknown? They'd be looking on as people imagined Elvis or Jim still walking the earth and thinking: What about me? If I were writing a screenplay about this character, which dead celebrity could I choose to portray as the central character who had made himself too unknown and now struggles to return to the world as a somebody but realizes that no one will really care because it's not as though Elvis or Jim returned into the light."
Meanwhile, Jim was brought back to life in a movie, "The Doors" (1991). And now, we see that Val Kilmer — the actor who played him — died yesterday.
As you can see in the previous post, I saw a George Bernard Shaw play — "Heartbreak House" — at a lovely outdoor theater yesterday. The excellent cast gave a fine performance and got quite a few laughs. I laughed. It was a comedy, based on the style of Anton Chekhov and also inspired by the 1874 painting "The North-West Passage/It might be done and England should do it."
Anyway. Though I laughed a sort of abstracted intellectual laugh during the play and appreciated it silently much of the time, there was something I saw and thought after the play that reduced me to flat-out hysteria.
I was walking down the path from the theater in the woods on the hill, down toward the parking lot with the rest of the crowd, and in front of me was a young man in a leather jacket that has 2 words painted on the back of it. He had a blanket or something slung over he shoulder. (It was a bit cold, and many people had blankets.) So I couldn't read the entire words, just the ends of the words. I saw "-ORM" above "-OW." I tried to think of what he might have written there, and I figured that "-OW" was "NOW," and it was a political slogan. He wanted something, and he wanted it now. Like Jim Morrison:
So what was it he wanted with this primal urgency? "-ORM"? I thought: REFORM. And the idea of "REFORM NOW" as a political slogan cracked me up to the point of insanity. It's like shouting "Give me moderation or give me death!" "Reform" is just too dull of a wish to demand it NOW!
I was lost in hilarity when the man whipped the blanket off his shoulder and revealed the 2 words. Suddenly the impossibly dull political demand was a blatant, far-off mistake, which only made it funnier to me, especially in contrast to the real words, which were for me nonsense — "STORM CROW." Nonsense is funny too. You don't get nonsense when you always have the internet at your fingertips, but I did not have it there as I was dissolving in laughter on that hill. To me STORM CROW was just a new way to shout REFORM NOW!
In the clear light of morning, internet at my fingertips, I see the boring information that Storm Crow is a character in "Magic: The Gathering," and "Magic: The Gathering" is a trading card game. There are over 20 billion "Magic: The Gathering" trading cards out there. That's all news to me. Maybe if you saw "-ORM/-OW" on a young man's leather jacket, you'd figure right off it was "STORM CROW." But I had my 2 minutes of high amusement trying to think what sort of person would get so intense about reform, that he might caterwaul — in the Jim Morrison mode — We want reform and we want it... NOW!!!!!
Also, given the track record of North Korea and Trump to "dissemble," Rothkopf said that "it is a minimum best practice to have a witness to the conversation."
But if Trump brings in his witness, Kim will have his witness. And doesn't Trump know far more than Kim about how to deal one-on-one with another man? Trump has spent a lifetime doing that, but what has Kim had to do, given the adulation he's received and his propensity to resort to killing anyone who could challenge him? And, by the way, Kim is only 34 years old. In years alone, Trump has far more experience.
And yet the Peace scholar thinks Trump is "simply not experienced enough." Depends on what you mean by experience, but clearly Kim is far less experienced. Isn't it smart to put Kim at this immense disadvantage? Trump means to pull him in, to give him a big American hug and to warm up this young fan of America.
ADDED: I see in the comments, my phrase "this young fan of America" is being questioned. My source is Dennis Rodman:
Rodman, who brands Mr Kim a “friend of for life”, said... Mr Kim, who he dubs the “little guy”, was a massive fan of American music from the 1980's. “When he’s around his people, he’s just like anybody else. He jokes and loves playing basketball, table tennis, pool,” he told DuJour magazine. ...They love American ’80s music. They do karaoke to it. He has this 13-piece girls band with violins. He gets a mic and they play the whole time. He loves the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Oldies. When I first went, the live band only played two songs for four hours: the theme songs from Rocky and Dallas.... He can’t say it enough. He wants to talk to him to try to open that door a little bit. He’s saying that he doesn’t want to bomb anybody. He said, ‘I don’t want to kill Americans.’ He loves Americans.”
ALSO: Look at where Trump and Kim are meeting, on a resort island, Sentosa, next to Singapore. One reason to choose that place is that it can be closed off for security, but it also vividly tantalizes with American-style attractions:
The island, which is nearly two square miles in size... features 17 hotels and luxury resorts, private beaches, two golf courses, a casino, a Madame Tussauds museum, a water theme park, Universal Studios Singapore, and the largest Merlion statue....
More about Sentosa at Wikipedia, with lots of pictures, a longer list of attractions. Here's the aerial view of the fun-packed place:
When I look at that picture, what I hear in my head is "Optimistic Voices" (from "The Wizard of Oz"), you know that song, perhaps not by its title. It's: “You're out of the woods/You're out of the dark/You're out of the night/Step into the sun/Step into the light/Keep straight ahead for the most glorious place/On the face of the earth or the sky/Hold onto your breath/Hold onto your heart/Hold onto your hope/March up to the gate and bid it open... OPEN."
Wrote Annie C in the comments to the first post of the day, which was about Roy Moore but ended by taking an off ramp into the old Doors song "People Are Strange."
I had a similar response. Jim Morrison experienced intense love from his fans. He was perhaps the most sexually attractive man on earth as you see him in that old video. But the words were the words of the complete social outcast, utterly unsuccessful with women and taking his loserdom to a dark place.
There's the repeated line that resonates with today's sexual harassment stories: "Women seem wicked when you're unwanted...."
By the way, I've never been a Doors fan, but I've always liked that one song, "People Are Strange."
Here's the Echo & the Bunnyman version that was used in the 1987 movie "The Lost Boys":
"Opportunism" is "The practice or policy of exploiting circumstances or opportunities to gain immediate advantage, rather than following a predetermined plan; the ability or tendency to exploit circumstances in this way. In later use esp. with the implication of cynicism or lack of regard to principles" (OED).
I understand using whatever you've got, whatever comes your way, when you're trying to defeat a political opponent. And when opportunities arise — like WaPo's "Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32" — they will be exploited for immediate advantage. And there's no plan going forward. You could never get everyone together on a plan for what's acceptable in bringing up allegations about something sexual that happened in private many years ago. How many years ago? How close to the election? Which sexual things? Is kissing and petting a 14-year-old worse than brutally raping a 35-year-old? How do we factor in a failure to report the incident to the police or to bring a civil lawsuit?
Can we at least agree — as an abstract principle — that the standard should be the same for everyone who is accused? Do we not have a foundation of due process — fairness — values? We need to treat Roy Moore the way we would want our favorite politician to be treated, right?
I'm afraid most Americans will say wrong. I think most of us want to look at everything, give everything whatever weight we want, including suspicions like Pizzagate, and let it all roil and seethe throughout our crazy little minds and then go vote. That's democracy. It's not a court of law. And anyway, those judges and jurors in a court of law are only trying (or pretending) to be rational.
Jonah Goldberg says we should just assume WaPo got it right — WaPo, which must want the GOP candidate to lose. He says:
Now, if you honestly think all of the people talking to the Washington Post are lying and that the Post somehow got them all to make this up, you have got one of the biggest stories of the century. If you can prove it, Roy Moore will end up owning the Post after his lawsuit.
Moore knows whether the allegations are true or not. He can withdraw if he knows they're true, but Goldberg says he should withdraw even if he knows the allegations are false, because he can make so much money in a defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post.
But Goldberg is only saying that because he thinks Moore is bad in so many other ways and because having to defend Moore will hurt the kind of Republicans he likes.
And Moore can't win that lawsuit, even if he knows the allegations are false. He's a public figure, and WaPo is protected when it publishes false statements, unless the plaintiff can prove that there was reckless disregard for whether it was false. The Washington Post was careful to make that impossible. Goldberg knows that, I think, because he was cagey enough to write that Moore would have to prove that "the Post somehow got them all to make this up." That's a lot to prove! That's the point of the defamation law. The Post is not at risk putting this material out there for people to decide for themselves how to use.
Most people, I suspect, already didn't like Roy Moore and didn't want him in the Senate, but the question is what will Alabama voters do with it. We're talking about people who chose him in the primary over the more normal man named Strange. That's not easy to discern. People are strange.
When Jim Morrison first read his song lyrics to Ray Manzarek.
Outwardly the two seemed so different. The strikingly tall, dark and handsome Morrison looked the part of rock star, while Manzarek, with glasses and comparatively close-cropped blonde hair, retained a more professorial look.
Ray Manzarek has died of bile duct cancer at the age of 74. Manzarek was the keyboardist for their group, The Doors, and if you know any keyboard riff from that era, you know his.
"A term of extreme approbation: the best, the ultimate." I looked up "end" in the (unlinkable) OED, while writing the previous post (about all the "The End of" book titles), and I got nostalgic for the 1950s/early 60s when "the end" was very common slang. Here are the OED's examples:
1950 Neurotica Autumn 45 Senor this shit [sc. narcotic] is the end!
1954 Time 8 Nov. 70 A term of high approbation in the swing era was ‘out of this world’, in the bop era it was ‘gone’, and today it is ‘the greatest’ or ‘the end’.
1957 J. Kerouac On Road ii. iv. 127 That Rollo Greb is the greatest... Man, he's the end!...
1963 Nugget Feb. 46, I was blowing some jazz in the student lounge on this end Steinway.
Blowing some jazz on a piano. I would have thought blowing jazz could only be done on wind instruments. I look up the jazz slang "blow," and there's this:
1962 Radio Times 17 May 43/3 A jazz musician never plays an instrument—he blows it, whether it be drums, piano, bass, or horn. Should he ‘blow’ with feeling, or great excitement (‘like wild’) he is either ‘way out’ or ‘wailing’.
"Blow" acquired a mid-60s slang use: "to blow (a person's) mind, to induce hallucinatory experiences (in a person) by means of drugs, esp. LSD; hence transf., to produce (in a person) a pleasurable (or shocking) sensation." OED examples:
1967 San Francisco Examiner 12 Sept. 26/3 On a hip acid (LSD) trip you can blow your mind sky-high....
1968 J. D. MacDonald Pale Grey for Guilt (1969) xii. 152 They had some new short acid from the Coast that never gives you a down trip and blows your mind for an hour only.
1970 Rolling Stone 30 Jan. 1/2 Blue blazer, grey flannel pants, shirt and a beautiful scarf with a chunky Mexican turquoise/silver bracelet and ring which blew the white-shirted jury's minds.
ADDED: Rereading this post, I'm thinking the Oxford English Dictionary editors intended to drop a clue that Jack Kerouac was not as hip as he seemed — that he picked up his slang from Time Magazine. Look at that greatest... the end... combination.
IN THE COMMENTS: urpower said:
Kerouac's "On the Road" was completed in May 1951 and the recently published 'scroll' version includes the quoted sentence. Time magazine, still not with it! And wonder if "blowjob" came from jazz. Edmund White said it came from blowing, like wind, but ??
Thanks, urpower! I'm glad to see Kerouac vindicated. (Still don't know if the OED-ers did that on purpose.) I will reward you for your assistance by looking up "blow job" in the OED:
Nate Lowman is "bummed out" that "other people’s gambling habits change the meaning of paintings." Contemplate the pain of artistic success when the high prices paid "dictate how people perceive art."
Lowman’s work takes the shape of smiley faces, magnetized bullet holes, and Arbre Magique air fresheners. The images he gathers often come from the news cycle or the crime blotter (distressed blondes in general, among them Nicole Brown, murdered former wife of O. J. Simpson; “More or Less,” a 2003 show at Apex Art, featured bearded men such as John Walker Lindh, Jim Morrison, and Che Guevara), and he re-purposes “found” language that lies awkwardly between personal and impersonal, like the bumper sticker Jesus would use the turn signal, asshole.
ADDED: The linked Vanity Fair text is written by Edward Helmore, and he seems unaware of the political (and moral) incorrectness of referring to a murdered woman as a "distressed blonde."
All right, this looks like another one of those articles that made Bob R say "So how long until NYT subscriptions drop down to the level where every subscriber gets an article about them like this? Althouse already had hers." (In case you're new here, my article was this one.)
Anyway, today's Article About You is "The New Age Cavemen and the City":
LIKE many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable — just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants.
The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.
Is it one of those refrigerator cases with a glass front, so that the hanging meat is a bit of an art display? If I were the woman in that scenario, the first thing I'd think is: How do I know those are not human body parts? Is that the last woman he brought home? I'd be thinking about Jeffrey Dahmer, who had all those human parts in his regular old Milwaukee apartment refrigerator. But now, here's a meat locker in the living room in New York. Is this some kind of artsy upgrade on Dahmer? Would I vocalize my questions and be the sort of nervy comedienne I've always wanted to be or would I be out of there?
As it unfolds, Durant is supposedly living like a caveman. In New York City. At least in the ways that he's decided he can, because, of course, the caveman didn't have a meat locker or even a place to plug one in.
The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.
So... it's a diet?
These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.
A diet + exercise. Because you know you need exercise too. So buy meat in a store and jump up and down, and it's pretty similar to survival-level hunting on the tundra.
In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people’s ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.
“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said.
Durant wanted a manly faddish diet.
The caveman lifestyle in New York was once a solitary pursuit. But Mr. Durant, who looks like a cheerful Jim Morrison, with shoulder-length curly hair, has emerged over the last year as a chieftain of sorts among 10 or so other cavemen. He has cooked communal dinners in his apartment on East 90th Street and taught others to make jerky from his meat locker.
So the neo-Lizard King's found 10 guys to make jerky with him?
Then, there is Erwan Le Corre, 38, "who once made soap for a living." Soap? No thanks! I've seen "Fight Club"!
At the LBJ Library, the floors of archives are on beautiful, grand display:
And there are three floors of exhibits, which pull you through the history and culture of the 1960s, the time when I was a teenager. Did so much more happen then, or does it only seem so to me? Much of what was on display had no real connection to LBJ but intense significance to me as I walked through the depiction of the past:
The piped in music is The Doors, The Jefferson Airplane -- all counterculture, evocative of hating LBJ. "Did people hate him more than George Bush?" Chris asks. "Yes," I say without hesitation. Remember, there was a draft, and many more people were dying in Vietnam. I watch a little video that quickly documents what happened year by year from 1963 to 1968. So many impressive achievements I counted for little at the time, because of the war. So many sad things -- riots, assassinations. I cry at the one thing that always breaks through my public stoicism: the killing of Bobby Kennedy.
I remember where I was -- standing in the kitchen in our house in Wayne, New Jersey -- when I heard these words:
I was watching a little black and white TV on the counter and thinking how much I hated that ugly, old man with his ugly, endless war. I hadn't a shred of pity for him, but when he said those unexpected words, I broke down and cried. That poor man. How strange to suddenly see him as human.
Deeply affecting too were the handwritten edits on the short speech he gave on the day of President Kennedy's assassination:
We saw the many gifts, given by heads of state, most of them perplexingly bad. Only one stood out as truly worthy, from the Shah of Iran:
That is a terra cotta effigy urn, from 1000 B.C.
There's a replica of the Oval Office:
And I'm surprised how small and uninspiring it is.
I love all the old buttons:
Some so mindbogglingly inappropriate as a political statement:
Bob Dylan is suing to block the release of a movie -- "Factory Girl" -- that depicts the life and suicide of Edie Sedgwick:
The Californian heiress was the troubled muse of artist Andy Warhol, whom she met in 1965, and starred in many of his films.
The character that Dylan has issues with is called Danny Quinn and the part is reportedly a mix of him, Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger.
"You appear to be labouring under the misunderstanding that merely changing the name of a character or making him a purported fictional composite will immunise you from suit," Orin Snyder, Dylan's lawyer, wrote to the filmmaker.
The lawsuit is in Britain, so I have no opinion about the legal merit of the claim, but I certainly find it rather absurd that a public figure like Bob Dylan even cares that a fictional composite character is based in part on him. And if he's really so sensitive about how he's portrayed, why isn't he sensitive about portraying himself so damned sensitive that he'd sue to block the release of a film. It's not even a Borat film.
666! Don't be superstitious. How about a little wisdom? The question whether Althouse is the agent of Satan. She was for Taylor Hicks and Sean on "The Apprentice." And George W. Bush in the 2004 election! Reminiscing about sitting around watching the election returns sets off a secondary digression about Burger Chef, the defunct fast food restaurant where Althouse worked, long ago. How the Satanists are responding to 6/6/06. The man who yelled "God will save me, if he exists" as he crept into the lion's den (and his death). Naming the electric chair... and the lethal injection. Jim Morrison singing "Soft Parade." Architecture! Docents! Tattoos! Including a tattoo of a bathtub. You know, Jim Morrison died in a bathtub.
It's a new podcast. You can stream it right on your computer -- no iPod needed -- right here. But all the cool people subscribe on iTunes:
There are three surviving members of the Doors: Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore. Manzarek and Krieger want to tour and play, and they asked Densmore to join them, but he can't, because his ears are too damaged. So Densmore sues to prevent Manzarek and Krieger from using the Doors' name, and he wins because the three have a contract providing that they must all agree (along with Jim Morrison's estate) to any use of the name.
Densmore's all "I'm just so happy that the legacy of the true Doors, and Jim Morrison in particular, has been preserved by this decision."
Quite aside from his apparent legal right to prevent Manzarek and Krieger from using the name, don't you think Densmore's being a jerk? Or are you buying this "legacy of the true Doors" business?
On Saturday, I encountered a peace rally. (Here is my photo-essay.) The usual "What do we want? PEACE! When do we want it? NOW!" routine was heard. An emailer sends this:
Right before the election, there was a protest march around City Hall, which is kitty-corner from my office. It had a similar call-and-response, though it was not an antiwar march.
For some reason, the absurdity of it struck me in a way it had not before.
You will never hear protesters chanting:
"What do we want?" ___________!
"When do we want it?" LATER!
Or:
"What do we want?" ___________!
"When do we want it?" NO RUSH! WHENEVER'S GOOD FOR YOU!
At that peace rally Saturday, I could see yelling "Peace!" to the first question, but then for question two, the answer would have to be something that isn't a one-syllable, shoutable word. When do we want it? When the insurgency is defeated and Iraq has been transformed into a stable democracy!
Whenever I hear the "NOW!" response to that chant, I always think of the old Jim Morrison lyric: "We want the world and we want it .... NOW!" Well, that seemed quite exciting and cool when I was a teenager. But imagine if the world had been handed over to Morrison and the kids who shouted "NOW!" back at him when he sang. At the time it seemed to us Baby Boomers that the over-30s -- none of whom could ever be trusted, according to the saying of the time -- had ruined the whole world for us. Now the Boomers are those old folk and they are failing to make the world perfect, to the dismay of the new generation. But there's nothing about the babyish yell "NOW!" that is going to hasten the emergence of a perfect world.
UPDATE: An emailer lets me know -- re the quoted email -- "The Simpsons" already did it:
Carl: What do we want?
All: More equitable treatment at the hands of management!
Carl: When do we want it?
All: Soon!
Activist: "What do we want!?"
Crowd: "The gradual phase-out of animal testing over the next three years?"
Activist: "When do we want it!?"
Crowd: "Over the next three years!"
And as to the observation that "The Simpsons" already did everything, so we might as well give up on efforts at saying anything funny: "South Park" already did it.
ANOTHER UPDATE: You know, the quality of the email I get from readers of this blog constantly amazes me. I just got this:
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