An American Folktale (Rough Draft)

Originally posted at And What Will Be Left of Them?,  
November 2011, as a teaser/preface to this second part.

Originally he hailed from the "Cradle of Liberty," that echo of the cradle rocked out of, Boston. Historic and colonial, an Atlantic capitol of Old World once-wasness. A lovely "walking city," everyone said.

But a fucking nightmare to drive in.

Home to the reputed Worst Drivers in the Nation. Unsurprising, seeing how successful navigation requires the quickest and most aggressive reflexes -- the sort that never fail to confound and frighten non-natives. It's what's required if you' aim to get anywhere. Of bettering the illogic of the city's narrow streets, those streets that weren't designed with the idea of this sort of traffic in mind, ages removed from any modern idea of enabling vehicular progress.

And you know how progress means a lot of things. For over a century it'd meant heading west, to the land's nether shore. West over terrain once crossed by horse and by wagon, then by telegraph and railway. Much of it, thank god, now much more easily and more often flown over. All part of expansion, of a fated and manifest destiny. So westward he went. To where everything, as they said, was presently at. The whereall to which everything led, the telos of all pioneering and frontiering. To the ascendant domain of the Now, the cultural seat of powers-having-shifted, of late modernity itself. Last stop, final destination. Built for cars, for maximum traffic, to fully accommodate its flow and—the theory had it -- avoid the snarls and tangles and perpetual arterial clusterfuckage. Its skies and sun having waited all those ages to be finally tinged pink by a brume of ozone.

He found plenty of things to do in L.A., though. Like playing in traffic. Lying down on a bustling blacktop amid flares (but only to get arrested once the cops arrived). Or staging lurid roadside distractions for random passersby. Getting shot, or tortured, or dangled from on high. Or having himself nailed to one of the road-clogging four-wheeled beasts, with the beast screaming beneath him as he lay belly up in the morning sun. All of this a means, perhaps, of becoming one with the city, of becoming part of its circulatory system.

And then one night arriving at an elevated and narrow stretch of coastal highway, and there placing a monument. Twin cruxes, soaked in the very stuff that made all these things possible. Planting them in the paths of the road's to and fro. Igniting them and then vacating into the night, leaving behind a pair of blazing glyphs -- flaming totems, emblems for the name and number of the century in which all of this came to be. A pair of sentinels, their limbs splayed to alert, or forewarn, or to deliver some form of reckoning. Left there for the latenight traveler who, finding his route obstructed, could only stand in the torchlit road and wonder what on earth it could possibly mean.

Frenzies of Renown

From the archives. Originally posted at                       

...And What Will Be Left of Them?,  January, 2011.  

"Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer. And Andrew Witwer shot John Burlingham. And John Burlingham shot Edward R. Darlington. And Edward R. Darlington shot Valerie Gerry. And Valerie Gerry shot Olga Giddy. And Olga Giddy shot..."      - J.G. Ballard, “The Generations of America"  

"The Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep."    - Lance Loud

Altamont, post-Tet Vietnam, the Manson trail, Attica, skyjackings on an almost daily basis, economic decline.

What the hell happened? It wasn't supposed to be like this, living in America in the late twentieth century. The economic affluency and social certainty of the post-War boom, the ascendant "American Way of Life" of a decade prior was pointing to another horizon, to an entirely different future. The outlook of that era couldn't have been more optimistic, more assuring.

The era-defining visual artist of that earlier, not-too-distant past had been Andy Warhol. He had his eye on the essence of the times. Everyone now knows the artist's Greatest Hits -- the ersatz arrays of soup cans, Brillo boxes, gunslinging Elvises, etcetera. All the flat, emblematic, serialized signifiers and mass-produced objects of a new, modern consumerist society blankly mirrored back to itself. But behind all the sharp and glimmering surfaces of those objects lay a shadow; that shadow being death -- death imported into the fabric of modern life in new and improved ways. There was the enshrinement of the suicided sex symbol screen star, then the First Lady in numbed and unimaginable shock after a certain fateful day in Dallas. Death, death and still more death as it played out in newspapers, movies, television. State-mandated death by electric chair, and self-actualized death from leaping off of a skyscraper. Death in car crashes, in plane crashes, and lurking in tainted tins of tuna fish.

Warhol's series of Marilyn Monroes and Jackie O's and the like are among the Greatest Hits; but most of the later iconography that appeared in his work in the years that followed is the stuff that now merits a mere footnote, perhaps because it it struck too dissonant and dour of a chord at the time. Ignore it not, a definite morbid undercurrent seemed to be amassing, becoming a recurrent theme. Maybe even pointing to a sort of symbolic ossuary that was gradually piling up under the surface of the glimmering and sleekly designed banality of modern life.

But perhaps one can invoke only so much death and morbidity before fate itself reciprocates by finding a place for you in its Rolodex. For Warhol, death would arrive one June afternoon in 1968 in the form of three slugs from a .32 calibre pistol, the pistol wielded by disgruntled and deranged ex-associate Valerie Solanas. Although he was briefly and officially declared dead by doctors after the shooting, Warhol managed to survive the attack.

Andy's chest

In his 1975 autobiography, Warhol would write, "In the '60s everybody got interested in everybody. In the '70s everybody started dropping everybody. The '60s were clutter. The '70s are very empty." In the end, he was most likely talking about himself. After the shooting, Warhol began living a more guarded and less accessible existence. And it's been argued that with the '70s-being-very-empty remark, Warhol may as well have ben speaking solely of or for himself, if only because it perfectly sums up the artists's career from that point onward.

No more art with a grim or ironically critical subtext. The 'seventies for Warhol were the decade in which making art meant making money, and the artist found that he could do this by simply resting on his laurels, settling into a formulaic signature style, and cranking out portraits of celebrities, socialites, and wealthy collectors.¹  He'd also spend the decade toadying to glamorous and powerful patrons (among whom could be counted Empress Farah Dibah Pahlavi and her husband, the Shah of Iran), and hanging out with the likes of Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli at Max's KC or Studio 54. And then there was launch of his own show-biz/society magazine Interview, a publication devoted to aimless chit-chat with people who were famous, or angling to become famous.

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One good way to become famous in America during the 1970s was to shoot somebody who was famous. Preferably an elected official. You didn't need a political motive. The target didn't have to be someone who was especially beloved by the public. You didn't even need to be a decent enough marksman to properly finish them off. None of that mattered, because it still made for good theater. Ask Arthur H. Bremer. A socially maladjusted and marginally employable young man hailing from Milwaukee, Bremer originally set out to shoot president Richard Nixon (who was running for re-election in 1972), but wound up shooting would-be Democratic contender George Wallace, instead.

Wallace, for those who need a reminder, was the two-term governor of the state of Alabama. In the prior decade, he’d attained notoriety for having opportunistically opposed desegregation. He'd physically blocked enrollment of black students at the University of Alabama in 1963, and had defiantly proclaimed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." In 1972, he was making his third bid for the presidency, this time running on the Democratic ticket. Regarded as the "Spoiler from the South" by the press, Wallace had proven a formidable contender. He was, by one journalist's description, "a Southern populist of the meanest streak," and in 1972 he posed a considerable threat to both the Democratic ticket and to president Richard Nixon. On the campaign trail, he stumped on a staunch law-and-order plank, and vociferously decried the increased liberalism, civil disorder, and "moral decay" of the 1960s. All of which met with a warm welcome with Nixon’s "silent majority."

Wallace, squaring off with the feds at the University of Alabama in 1963

Wallace's run for the White House was, of course, troubling for some Americans. Even though by 1972 he'd denounced his prior pro-segregationist platform, Wallace proved that he wasn't above exploiting the racial tensions surrounding the federally-mandated school busing program for his own political gain. His campaign speeches were the epitome of unbridled demagoguery -- podium-thumping screeds of anti-federal rhetoric aimed at the intrusive, do-gooder meddling of the "briefcase totting," "pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington," interlaced with mockery of a diffuse and unnamed elite of "hypocrites" and "intellectual snobs" who reputedly shaped the nation’s social and economic policies.

To the alarm of many in the press and public at large, Wallace’s message found a broad and receptive audience, particularly among disenfranchised or alienated blue-collar and middle-class voters. On the campaign trail he met with enthusiastic and overflowing crowds when he appeared at rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan. Covering the Democratic primaries for Rolling Stone magazine, journalist Hunter S. Thompson declared, "George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics," further observing: "But there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. ...The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it -- but what then?" The danger, Thompson recognized, was that Wallace was ultimately "stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel."²

Not that any of that mattered to Artie Bremer, he was just looking to make a name for himself. He'd first set out with Richard Nixon in mind as his target. For weeks he shadowed Nixon's campaign stops, chronicling his journeys in a diary as he went. Hapless and unfocused in his stalking, there was one aspect of his task that he was deeply attentive to -- his appearance. Bremer wanted to make sure he did the job in style. He didn't want to be taken for some disheveled loser or -- even worse -- some sort of hippie. He put a great deal of thought and effort into his wardrobe and his grooming in order to meet each opportunity to shoot the president looking like a normal, clean-shaven, patriotic citizen.

Bremer, photographed by security at a pair of rallies in the late spring of 1972

At one point, spying Nixon’s car outside the American embassy in Ottawa, Bremer realized that he had been caught by surprise and wasn't properly dressed for the occasion. He dashed back to his hotel room to change and smart himself up, returning to the embassy to find that Nixon had already departed. Furious with himself, he wrote in his diary:

“I wanted to shock the shit out of the [Secret Service] men with my calmness. .... All these things seemed important to me, were important to me, in my room. I will give very little if ANY thought to these things on my future attempts. After all does the world remember if Sirhan’s tie was on straight?”

Yet, attending a Nixon rally a day later, he witnessed the same Secret Service personnel targeting rank-and-file protesters, and noted incredulously, "WOW! If I killed him while wearing a sweatty tee-shirt, some of the fun & Glamore would defionently be worn off [sic x 4]."

But eventually Bremer did draw the attention of Nixon's security detail, which prompted him to quickly change plans. After briefly considering Democratic frontrunner George McGovern, he instead set his sights on Wallace. In his diary, Bremer bemoaned the diminished media coverage his lower-profile target would attract, yet that didn’t dissuade him from contemplating what sort of clever one-liner he'd deliver before pulling the trigger.³  Within a week of trailing Wallace, he shouldered through the crowd in a shopping center parking lot in suburban Laurel, Maryland, approaching the candidate as he shook hands with supporters after a campaign speech. At close range, he emptied his revolver, shooting Wallace four times and critically injuring three bystanders.

█ █ █

In much the same way that acts of terrorism are efforts to intervene in the machinations of history or global politics by way of the "communicability of images" that surround such events, so too can an attempted assassination -- no matter how botched or incoherently motivated -- be regarded as an effort to disrupt the hierarchy of society’s symbolic order. If political assassinations in the U.S. of the 1960s were unanimously spoken of in terms of martyrdom and "national tragedy," then in the decade that followed they often took on an element of absurdity. Perhaps it comes down to the power of contemporary cultural myths, and the deflation of same that transpired in the 1970s. One such myth being that in a supposedly classless society any citizen could "grow up and become President." If anything, the 1960s and 1970s provided frequent reminders that, instead, it was much easier to be the person who grew up to take a shot at the President.

As with Warhol, George Wallace survived the shooting; although the attack would derail his bid for the presidency and leave him a paraplegic for the remainder of his life. Arthur Bremer would receive his desired 15 minutes of fame, which ended up translating into a 65-year prison term. Upon sentencing, Bremer reportedly told the court, "Looking back on my life I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself."

Shortly thereafter, somewhere on the West Coast, aspiring screenwriter Paul Schrader wasn’t doing so well. Estranged from his wife and living out of his car, Schrader found himself contemplating the emotional effects of loneliness on the male psyche. He had also been reading Bremer's newly published diaries, and from there he got it in mind to write a script about an existentially adrift NYC cab driver. The resulting film, as we all know, would become a huge and controversial success a few years later -- controversial due to its brutally violent content as its use of a former Disney child actress playing the role of a twelve-year-old hooker. The actress was Jodie Foster, who would inspire an amorous fan from Colorado by the name of John Hinckley to begin plotting ways of gaining her attention.

"And Olga Giddy shot Rita Goldstein. And Rita Goldstein shot Bob Monterola. And Bob Monterola shot Barbara H. Nicolosi. And..."⁴

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NOTES:
1.  This was, as art critic Matthew Collings has called it, Warhol's "'doing uncritical portraits of anyone who could pay' period."

2.  It's been argued that Wallace was an early pioneer of the contemporary "politics of rage" -- the backlash rhetoric that has been the primary parlance of the culture war waged by American conservative movement over the past 3 decades. It was for this reason that historian Dan T. Carter declared Wallace "the most influential loser in twentieth-century American politics."

3.  In keeping with the culture of paranoia of the era, the legitimacy of Bremer's diary (as quickly rushed into print in book form) met with skepticism. There were at the time a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the attempt of Wallace’s life -- theories hailing from both the Left and the Right ends of the political spectrum. Numerous sources have it that in the hours following the shooting, Nixon and his aides were scrambling to find a way to plant evidence that would tie Bremer to the campaign of Nixon's leading Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern. For this reason, the American author Gore Vidal would soon assert in the pages of the New York Review of Books that Bremer’s diaries were a fraud, alleging that that had been authored by one of Nixon's henchmen and planted among Bremer's belongings by the C.I.A.. But even in the last years of his life, Wallace would ask the White House to look into a high-level conspiracy leading to the failed assassination on his life. Who he expected to be behind any such conspiracy is anyone's guess, seeing how he'd already colluded with Nixon's Committee to Re-Elected the President to run as a Democrat (and thus a potential "spoiler" in the DNCrace) rather than as an Independent.

4.  All of which would become a history-repeated-as-farce trope in the early years of America in the 1970s. The '60s had seen a series of political assassinations and iconically martyred figures (JFK, Malcolm X,  Martin Luther King, RFK, et al.) as carried carried out by what can only be described as -- tragically and ironically -- successful marksmen. Whereas such high-profile attempts at assassinating U.S. figures in the 1970s often amounted to little more than incomprehensibly low-level figures (Wallace, Gerald Ford) being by targeted by the likes of Bremer and "Squeaky" Fromme. At the time it made n sense while making perfect sense -- the nonsense of it speaking fully about how many people felt about the state of Americans society at the time. 

From the Annals of Higher Education

Back during the NYC art boom of the 1980s, a common cliché had it that the hot and heavily-hyped new breed of Uptown po-mo artists mostly hailed from one of two art schools – either the Rhode Island School of Design or The California Institute of the Arts (or CalArts, as it more commonly called). Of the two, one could attribute the latter of having nurtured such talents as David Salle, Eric Fischl, Ross Bleckner, Ashley Bickerton, Matt Mullican, Jonathan Lasker, Tony Oursler, both Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, Carrie Mae Weems, Christopher Williams, and Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Some even went so far as refer to this group of artists as the "CalArts Mafia."*

Much of this was credited to the School's faculty, which at times included a who's-who of the cultural cutting edge; recruiting heavily – in the realm of visual arts – from from leading artists of the Fluxus and Conceptualist stripe. From this came portrayals of CalArts as the home of an unruly and unstructured program in which – at a point in which contemporary aesthetics were in a state of flux and generally experiencing categorical breakdown – students were encouraged and allowed to pursue the most indulgently esoteric practices to their extremes, ad absurdum. As some accounts had it at the time, a description of the program at the time sounded vaguely akin the 17th-century descriptions of a tour of Bedlam; or at least some type of satirical artworld update of Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem." Such accounts tended to portray the program at CalArts as being the quaint epitome of the excesses of a prior era.**  All of which was a little ironic, seeing how it took place at an institution initially set up by the Disney family, its original mission being that of serving as a type of high-caliber "trade school" for the Hollywood film industry.

In recent years, the online art publication East of Borneo has published a fair number of articles on the CalArts glory days of yore. Since the site is based out of the institution in question, we could regard this as an exercise in self-achiving and legacy-enshrinement. Of these, the recent essay by Janet Sarbannes, "A Community of Artists: Radical Pedagogy at CalArts, 1969-72," offers a good historic overview of the school's early years – the unlikeliness of its origins, the controversy surrounding its curriculum, and the like. Lots of intriguing details emerge throughout ; such as this bit, which turns up in a footnote:

"In a twist of fate, a number of the first administrators were hired by H.R. Haldeman, who would soon become Richard Nixon’s chief of staff but at the time chaired the CalArts board of trustees (having met Walt Disney through his work at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency). Charged with locating the top artists in their fields, Haldeman proceeded to pluck the original CalArts administration from the ranks of the avant-garde."

As well no shortage of era-specific scenarios:

“'What really blew it,' [James] Real maintains, 'was the playful decision by a faculty member to stage a bit of radical theater by taking off his clothes during a board meeting [to discuss closing the swimming pool]. He really didn’t have to go that far to mau-mau the Disney contingent. Just putting his bare feet on the table would have done it with people who, in earlier times, had spent hours arguing over whether to put skirts around the udder of cartoon cows.'"

As well as the tale of how donors reacted when Herbert Marcuse came to town. And if you hadn't gathered by now, the essay is as long on the history of cultural politics at a particular moment in time as it is on art.

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*  Among its other alumni,  such future pop-culture figures as Paul Reubens, Tim Burton, and David Hasselhoff. The Institute's Herb Albert School of Music is another story in itself, responsible for graduating a number of notable contributors to the fields of modern composition, noise, and experimental music.
**  This may all have merely been in keeping with the cultural trend of ridiculing anything having to do with Southern California, which became a fairly popular American pastime in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

,,,

Please Stand By (An Inventory of Effects)

Note: I wrote the below for the outboard 1970s-themed venue. It took a while to write,   wrestling with the thing over the span of many weeks -- a good bit of which involved  pruning and closing off various tangents and trying to get the thing down to a semi-reasonable length. Given all that, and the fact that working on the thing meant a lack of posting here, I decided to do what I otherwise wouldn't, and reprint the piece here.

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1.

Here we have the American artist Chris Burden, looking like a professional and presenting himself to the world. The above photos come from his 1971 performance art piece I Became a Secret Hippy. It was one of Burden's earliest works, executed about the time he was completing his graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine. For the piece, Burden stripped naked and laid down on the floor while a friend hammered a star-shaped stud into his chest. He then sat in a chair while another friend shaved his head with electric shears. Burden then donned the suit of an FBI agent and presented himself to the event's few attendees.

The real-world incidents that inspired I Became a Secret Hippy are so obvious that they don't warrant an explanation. In that respect, it was far from being a subtle work. But considering that it was done at the time that Burden was leaving the cloistered confines of academia and making his transition into the world of professional artmaking, no doubt its ritualistic, rite-of-passage mimicry held some ironic personal meaning for the artist.


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2.

By many accounts, the early Seventies were considered turbulent years -- a time of political, social, and economic upheaval. Most Americans had entered the 1960s with an optimistic vision of the future that awaited them. But a decade later, it all looked uncertain and many people were getting anxious and doubtful, not daring to guess what might happen next. A common, knee-jerk opinion on the street had it that the world was going to hell. "Shootin' rockets to the moon / Kids growing up too soon… Ball of confusion!"

Soldiers returning home after numerous tours of Vietnam reputedly experienced something akin to culture shock, finding things at home much different from when they'd departed. The rapid pace of technological change, and the societal shifts that resulted, had some in the pop-sociology realm talking of "future shock."

So when people read that somewhere a young man had someone shoot him with a rifle and then called the whole thing art, a number of people were shocked, but probably not all that surprised. This is what passes for art these days. The way things were heading, why not?


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3.

The incident in question -- the one that would become Burden's notorious "greatest hit" -- was Shoot, which followed I Became a Secret Hippy by a mere three weeks. On the evening of November 19, 1971, Burden and a few associates and a small number of attendees met in a low-rent art space in Santa Ana. It was, by most accounts, a pretty modest and casual affair, up to the point when -- at an "Okay, let's do this" moment in the evening -- Burden positioned himself against one of the gallery walls. A friend then raised a .22-calibre rifle, took aim at Burden, and fired a single shot.

The plan was a have a handful of spectators witness a William Tell-styled act of trust, with the designated shooter aiming at the wall just to the left of Burden's shoulder. At the most, Burden later claimed, the rifle slug was only supposed to graze him. But due to poor marksmanship the bullet instead hit Burden in the bicep of his left arm. Not having anticipating such an outcome, no one had thought to bring a first-aid kit, so a bandage had to be improvised.


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4.

Before we go any further, a brief overview might be in order...

Selected Works, 1971 - 1976

Chris crams himself into a small metal locker for five days.
Chris gets shot.
Chris lies in a bed for 22 days.
Chris lies down under a tarp in traffic along a busy boulevard.
Chris nearly immolates himself.
Chris dangles naked tied by a rope around his ankles.
Chris crawls over broken glass.
Chris pushes live electrical wires into his bare chest.
Chris has people use him as a human pin cushion.
Chris runs the risk of immolating himself again.
Chris gets crucified to a Volkswagen.
Chris nearly drowns himself.
Chris gets kicked down two flights of stairs.
Chris nearly sets himself on fire. (Yes, again.)
Chris lies on a shelf, just out of sight, for 22 days.
Chris lies, unmoving, under a sheet of glass for 45 hours straight.
Chris bicycles through Death Valley.

Chris does a bunch of other things during these years, but it's the more violent and alarming and supposedly masochistic things he does that everyone talks about. Thereby making him a bit infamous in the process, saddling him a reputation as the "Evel Knievel of the art world" that he grew to resent.


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5.

Chris Burden didn't consider himself a "performance artist," nor did he ever aspire to be one. He'd originally set out to be a sculptor. In the latter years of his studies, he became preoccupied with the task of creating interactive sculptures -- works that invited the audience to become a part of the piece, that were meant to be engaged and manipulated by the viewer. But he quickly became frustrated and deemed many of his works to be unsuccessful, because each time the audience balked at the invitation, choosing instead to maintain the role of distant and passive spectators.

To remedy this impasse, Burden decided to physically make himself a part of the "sculpture," if not the primary component of the work itself. He did this for his senior thesis project, which involved cramming himself into a 2' x 2' x 3' steel locker for the duration of five days. As word of the Burden's project circulated around campus, the curiosity factor brought a steady flow of visitors. People sat outside the locker, inquiring into his well-being and asking him why he was doing what he was doing. A few people sat for extended periods and -- perhaps confused by the dynamic -- treated him like a Father Confessor and divulged all sorts of personal details about themselves. During the final day of the piece, university administration were debating whether to have the locker cut open, fearing for their own liability in connection with Burden's project.

So, problem solved. But noted for future reference: How to calculate for the vagaries of interpersonal psychology? ¹


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6.

Performance art was, of course, something of a big deal in the artworld of the 1970s, and Chris Burden was regarded as one of its leading and most controversial pioneers. But performance art wasn't such an entirely new thing. It'd first been kicked around by the Futurists and the Dadaists in the early part of the century, then gone dormant for many years before being reanimated in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily by way of the "happenings" staged by John Cage and his disciples in the Fluxus movement.

If there was any recent historical precedence for the type of work Chris Burden was executing in the early '70s, it was probably Yoko Ono's 1962 Cut Piece, which involved the artist sitting silently on a stage and inviting the audience to cut of here clothing piece by piece with a pair of communal scissors. On the three occasions that Ono staged Cut Piece during the mid-1960s, the audience obliged her each time, in the end leaving the artist sitting on stage wearing little more than scraps and tatters.

Cut Piece is an often-cited work in its own right. Critics often speak of how the piece addresses gender dynamics and how these dynamics play out in terms of social power and status. But in a broader context, one could argue that it ultimately points to an interrogation of the codes of conduct in a supposedly polite society, one which eventually (or hopefully) leads to a critique of the nature of socialization itself. ²


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7.

On the morning of January 5, 1973, Chris Burden walked out onto a beach near the runways of LAX and fired several shots from a revolver at a 747 as it flew overheard. Burden later explained that the piece was about "impotence," since he knew in advance that the bullets would fall short of their target. Impotence in this case meaning bold but futile gestures, the inadequacy of human agency in the face of the grander scheme of things.

Still, unsurprising to learn that the FBI showed up on his doorstep with some questions about the incident a few days afterwards.

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Circular Breathing

For those inclined to bother: Me going on an off-the-cuff riff over at the team-effort '70s blog, clearing a few stray thoughts out the attic.

Processed Instant God: Straggling Endnotes to an Era

NYT piece on Chayevsky's notes to self throughout his development of the screenplay for Network.


* * * * *

And then there's this item, hot off the wire...

'You Light Up My Life' composer kills self, police say.

The man who composed the pop hit "You Light Up My Life" ended his own life Sunday, New York police said.

Joseph Brooks, 73, was facing charges on 11 alleged rapes and sex assaults, New York Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said.

The songwriter was found dead in his Manhattan home by a friend with whom he was supposed to have lunch at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, Browne said.

A plastic dry cleaning bag and a towel were wrapped around his head, with a tube connected to a helium tank attached, he said. A suicide note was found nearby, he said.

Brooks' son, Nicholas Brooks, was charged in January with the murder of his ex-girlfriend, according to the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

Unintentionally Topical

Semi-lenghty guest post of mine up at one of the outboard venues. Something along the order of: "The Quest for Fame in the 'Me Decade': Political Assassination as Theater of the Absurd." Link here.

I wanted to work in something about Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme as well, but couldn't without it over-burdening the thing (re: "fact fatigue") or it veering into tangentiality. Shrug.