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Here’s the link to the original Henri

(The rock revolution also took over the AM airwaves, with such L.A. stations as KRLA and KFI boasting near-album-oriented playlists — remember Dave Diamond and his Diamond Mine, which featured a mix of psychedelic rock and commentary; Diamond was one of the first disc jockeys to play The Door’s “Light My Fire” in 1967).

Many’s the night I would sit in my red 1965 VW, parked in the carport outside my one-bedroom apartment I shared with Dick Green, listening to the avant-garde and political leanings of late-night KPFK on my Blaupunkt AM-FM radio, well into the early hours of the morning.

It was FM that helped fuel the fire of counter-cultural revolt. And KPPC and KMET were the Los Angeles vanguard of “underground” radio in the United States, presenting a freeform mixture of experimental and historical music with countercultural ideas, playing a wild mix of rock and roll, folk music, blues and comedy. DJs included B. Mitchel Reed, Jeff Gonzer, Tom Donahue, Dr. Demento, Ted Alvy (aka “Cosmos Topper”), Uncle T, Elliot Mintz (whose late-night Sunday show played everything from Baba Ram Dass lectures to listener-created recordings), Cynthia Fox, Paraquat Kelley, Ace Young, Al “Jazzbeaux” Collins, Jim Ladd, blues archivist Johnny Otis and comedy troupes The Credibility Gap (featuring Harry Shearer, Richard Beebe, David L. Lander, and Michael McKean) and The Firesign Theatre.

Which brings us to the death at 72 of Peter Bergman, the comic who co-founded The Firesign Theatre, the hippie-era heirs to the humor of Stan Freburg and Lenny Bruce.

Here’s an excerpt from the obit, which ran in today’s L.A. Times:

“Peter Bergman, a founder of Firesign Theatre, the comic quartet that channeled the absurdist sensibility and chaotic impulses of the countercultural 1960s and ’70s into a popular radio show and a series of cult-classic albums, has died at 72.

A longtime Los Angeles resident, Bergman died of complications of leukemia Friday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, according to his former wife, Maryedith Burrell.

Bergman was hosting an alternative, late-night talk show on the Los Angeles Pacifica radio station KPFK-FM in 1966 when he started Firesign Theatre with Phillip Proctor, David Ossman and Phil Austin. Their stream-of-consciousness comedy, a blend of the daffy and the surreal, spoke to a generation in rebellion.

It also caught the attention of executives at Columbia Records, which released four albums between 1968 and 1972: ‘Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him,’ ‘Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,’ ‘How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All’ and ‘I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.’

Bergman acknowledged the seemingly random nature of the group’s shows, which, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1998, were ‘jazz-like performances, filled with hidden jokes and meanings that even we do not always intend when we write the material.’”

RIP.

Tip o’ the hat to Wikipedia and L.A. Radio – The Way it Was

Read the complete obituary

But the most fun I had was during my lunch hour, when I would jump into my 1957 Chevrolet station wagon and grab my hidden copy of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” published by the Grove Press. “Tropic of Cancer” was a banned book — deemed obscene, it was forbidden to be sold in most cities around the country, including Los Angeles — I bought my copy in Beverly Hills. Miller’s autobiographical adventures in the Paris of the 1930s was nothing short of enlightening — his ribald life of sex, love and art quickly opened my mind to a new world that was diametrically opposed to my antiseptic life in West Los Angeles.

I never gave a thought to the man who published “Tropic of Cancer,” but his name was Barney Rosset, and he died Tuesday in Manhattan at 89. Some people, like Job, raise their fists against the gods and assert their power of humanity against the forces of moral and political repression. Rosset was one of those. Born into a wealthy Chicago family, he was sent to several liberal schools where he quickly overcame his father’s conservative leanings. “I’m half-Jewish and half-Irish,” he told The Associated Press in 1998. From an early age my feelings made the I.R.A. look pretty conservative. I grew up hating fascism, hating racism.”

After attending the University of Chicago and UCLA, and after a stint in the Army and the Communist Party, he headed off for Paris with former high school classmate Joan Mitchell, who by this time had become a well-known Abstract Expressionist painter. They were married in 1949 and returned to the States, where he attended the New School for Social Research.

Rosset in 1967

In 1951 he bought a small, struggling press on Grove Street in Greenwich Village for $3,000 and immediately began to champion the Beat poets, French Surrealists, German Expressionists Absurdists and counterculturalists. In 1957 Rosset launched The Evergreen Review, which became one of the most important magazines of the 1960s (I still have many of those original issues). The Evergreen Review lasted until 1973, publishing fiction, theatre pieces, essays, poetry (Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” appeared in the second issue) and lascivious comic strips.

In 1959 Rosset first published the banned “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which was deemed “smutty” and barred from distribution through the U.S. mail by Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield; a federal judge lifted that ban. Next Rosset took on “Tropic of Cancer,” originally published in 1934 in Europe but banned in the U.S. He bought the rights in 1961 and published the book, which was quickly banned around the country; Rosset was even arrested and taken before a Brooklyn grand jury. In 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida ban, and the floodgates were opened.

Rosset went on to publish William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” “The Voyeur” by Alain Robbe-Grillet, work by Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, the Marquis de Sade and a variety of other writers on the cutting edge of culture (Grove later branched out to include such titles as John Kennedy Toole’s” A Confederacy of Dunces,” Eric Berne’s popular “Games People Play” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”).

Rosset also dabbled in films, distributing the banned Swedish sex film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” as well as the controversial 1968 “Titicut Follies,” Frederick Wiseman’s cinema verite expose of the abuse of mental patients at the Bridgewater State Hospital.

Though the press was sold in 1985 and he was deposed as publisher, Rosset kept his hand in other publishing ventures, starting Foxrock Books and even publishing Evergreen Review online.

Rosset called Grove “a breach in the dam of American Puritanism,” and told NPR in 1991 that “anything should be — can be — published. I think that if you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech.

Barney Rosset, May 28, 1922 to Feb. 21, 2012.

Additional links:

N.Y. Times obit

Current Evergreen Review

Downloadable Evergreen Review back issues

I don’t think the world will end in my lifetime — though it will end when I die — but maybe there was something to the fact that the Mayans’ calendar stopped at the end of 2012.* We humans are so messing up the earth that we might as well stop counting years going forward.

Case in point: Under the headline “An exquisite Mexico beach, cursed by plastic,”the Los Angeles Times recounts how a beautiful, pristine beach along Mexico’s Caribbean coast (southern Yucatan Peninsula) has been destroyed by “fragments of trash, thousands and thousands of them, strung like a vast, foul necklace. Even a quick inventory finds discarded motor-oil cans, hair-gel containers, juice bottles, hub caps, buckets, a soccer ball, flip-flops. Here’s a margarine container from the Dominican Republic, there a butter tub from Haiti. The label on a washed-up glue bottle says it’s from Central America.” The debris is carried there by ocean currents from the Caribbean and Central and South America.This, of course, is not an isolated area. It turns out that, according to the Times, “By some estimates, 46,000 pieces of plastic trash float in every square mile of ocean” creating “huge ‘garbage patches’ in ocean gyres, giant dead spots formed by currents and winds that push trash toward the becalmed centers. One of those, the Eastern Garbage Patch, midway between Hawaii and California, is estimated to be twice the size of Texas.”

The results: devastation of the oceans and its inhabitants, including the disruption of the surface of the oceans, important for seeding the atmosphere with rain and cooling our environment, as well as the poisoning of sea life, from seaweed to fish, which surely will alter the world’s food chain.

This is not new news: The L.A. Times won a Pulitzer prize for its “Altered Oceans” series in 2006.

Another story to pay attention to (if you believe on the disruption of our Global weather system by human intervention): “U.S. seems to have largely escaped winter: A combination of factors has trapped winter’s cold air over Canada and Alaska, making for unseasonably warm weather in the Lower 48.”

Or maybe we should worry about solar flares: NASA has reported that we are in the midst of a period of increased solar storm activity with the sun unleashing the largest solar flares in a decade. Some of the massive outbursts head toward the Earth — threatening the disruption of communications (radio, satellite) as well as dosing us with increased levels of radiation. According to Space.com, “The sun’s activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle. Currently, the sun is in the midst of Solar Cycle 24, and activity is expected to ramp up toward the solar maximum in 2013.”

Happy New Year.

*Actually, the Mayan “Long Count” calendar — which marks the end of a 5,126-year era — comes to an end on Winter Solstice this year — but the next Mayan cycle picks up after that. So their calendar didn’t mark the “end of time,” just a cycle.

Though much of the great rock ‘n’ roll of the late 50s and early 60s were made by garage bands, early punks or lone renegades (think Buddy Holly, the great Doo-Wop groups, the rockabilly movement, Love, the San Francisco sound, even the early Elvis), rock had pretty much been tamed by the end of the 50s by the major record labels. It was up to rebels like Bonniwell and his Music Machine, to insert a hint of insurrection, danger and sex into the music — and they did it with their one-hit wonder “Talk Talk,” a proto-punk single that broke into the Top 20 in 1966.

We’ve always loved “Talk Talk” (and a similar one-hit wonder, “Psychotic Reaction,” by the Count Five) and the adrenalin still gets flowing we hear it.

Tip o’ the hat to ya, Sean.

To wit, this headline in the Dec. 29, 2011 Los Angeles Times: “Grauman’s Chinese: Movie star prints’ futures not set in cement.” Seems that the new owners of the venerable Hollywood showcase (built in 1927) — movie producer Donald Kushner and entrepreneur Elie Samaha — have been allowing just about anyone to add their hand and footprints into the hallowed theatre forecourt — as long as they pay the price ($25,000 for “cement and labor,” plus around $20,000 to cover costs of the ceremony). Recent additions: The Chipmunks, the young cast of the “Twilight” movies (Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart), Kobe Bryant, French DJ David Guetta and the Smurfs — big stars all to stand side by side with Marilyn Monroe, Cark Gable, the Barrymores, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Natalie Wood, Mickey Rooney, Tyrone Power, Julie Andrews, Kirk Douglas, Danny Kaye, Doris Day, Eddie Cantor, Henry Fonda, Alan Ladd, Sophia Loren, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Crawford, the Marx Brothers, Lana Turner, Gloria Swanson, George Burns, Debby Reynolds, Myrna Loy, Abbott & Costello, Jack Benny, Gary Cooper, Sidney Poitier, Jack Lemmon, Nelson Eddy, William Powell, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers among them.

The Times quoted Kushner as saying, “They’re not going in the forecourt. They weren’t real ceremonies — they were mock ceremonies. The kids’ stuff would be displayed at the Chinese 6 theaters, located in the adjacent Hollywood & Highland mall complex and operated by Kushner and Samaha. But what about the non-kids stuff? Will those be added to the forecourt?

Tinseltown seems to be losing its consciousness of its history, blotting it out at every economic step: whether it be a new mixed use high-rise development on Vine Street that threatens to block views of the Capitol Records Building and even the Hollywood Sign (from some angles) — or last August’s announcement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that Oprah Winfrey would receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award given “to an individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry”; Winfrey, of course, has spent virtually all of her career in television (granted she’s a humanitarian and philanthropist, but not in the movies). Oh well, at least she’ll draw some TV ratings for the televised awards how when she makes a brief appearance.

I suppose it’s all for the tourists, who don’t know the difference between Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Stewart, or the kids, who see everything on digital screens these days and think the Kardashians are a bigger deal than Kurosawa. It’s all celebrtiy, after all.

Despite the fact that the boys of U2 are noted as being politically active, socially conscious and incredibly philanthropic (Bono, for one, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize), at heart they’re super-rich rock businessmen. In the past they’ve been criticised for trying to skip out on Irish taxes (at a time when Ireland began to become sorely in need of tax monies to fund social programs) by moving their song catalog to the Netherlands, where bands are subject to lower taxes, and for being naive in the way they fund charity groups (throwing money at symptoms rather than trying to repair underlying dysfunctional social problems).

OK, we’ve been willing to cut them some slack — until the L.A. Times reported that U2′s The Edge was trying to build five gigantic mansions on protected land on a rugged ridge in Malibu. This was a gigantic project that would have taken up 158 acres of wilderness and negatively affected the environment (The Edge’s main house alone would be 12,785 square feet). When authorities balked at the size, The Edge, according to The Times, tried to conceal ownership by having his representatives put the property in other names. And after the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy told The Edge that “the development would have unavoidable significant adverse visual and ecological impacts, he bought them off by paying them $1 million if they took a neutral stance.

Fortunately, the California Coastal Commission stood its ground, denying the proposal. The Times quotes Peter Douglas, the agency’s executive director: “In 38 years of this commission’s existence, this is one of the worst projects that I’ve seen in terms of environmental devast ion … It’s a contradiction in terms — you can’t be serious about being an environmentalist and pick this location.”

“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

Dreamsville’s Movie Poster

              Slide Show

Here’s a slide show we put together a couple year’s ago
as an electronic holiday card. Click the poster and enjoy.