Orange Sunshine vs. Harvard Psychedelic Club

Two great books dealing with the psychedelic history of Los Angeles... One leads to the other. Why not have them both?

Don Lattin's The Harvard Psychedelic Club tells the history of the men most responsible for ushering in the drugged-out 60s; which, incidentally led to yoga studios, the environmental movement, organic foods, Don Wilson's AA, etc. Lattin illustrates how Los Angeles was critical in this process, with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley laying the foundations in California. Their early experimentation influenced Huston Smith, who was an influence on Timothy Leary. Lattin also writes about Leary's other colleagues at Harvard: Andrew Weil and Ram Dass.

Orange Sunshine is a book written by Nicholas Schou, a staff writer at OC Weekly. It tells the story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a band of surfers in Laguna Beach who became the world's biggest acid and hashish smugglers and dealers in the 1960s. When Sandoz Labs acid was increasingly hard to come by, the Brotherhood synthesized "Orange Sunshine," the most potent acid of the time. Apparently they dropped thousands of hits of this LSD from an airplane onto a crowd of 25,000 in a three-day Laguna Beach celebration. The occasion? An apocalyptic birthday party for Jesus Christ. They also wanted to buy a tropical island and install Timothy Leary as the high priest of a new spiritual Utopian society.

These two books are both independently great in their own way. Together they form a more complete picture of psychedelic culture from its genesis, through the 60s and to the end of Leary and Co.'s lives. Why not get them both?

Paul Verhoeven's Search for the Historical Jesus

Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven publishes a historical portrait of Jesus...


In Jesus of Nazareth, Verhoeven relates the story of how as a four year old boy he once asked his father if Jesus had felt any pain while nailed to the cross. His father thought that Jesus probably had. Little Paul replied, "But if he was the son of God, couldn't God have made the pain go away?" Verhoeven says he doesn't remember what his father said in reply, but this was a formative moment in the filmmaker's lifelong interest in Jesus Christ.

In 1985 Verhoeven heard of the Jesus Seminar, comprised of scholars and theologians, and later joined it. The group is concerned with what the historical Jesus actually did and said. Verhoeven is the only non-theologian ever admitted into the Seminar.

The book is split into an introduction, ten chapters and an epilogue. The ten chapters are:

1. From Conception to Early Adulthood
2. John the Baptist and Jesus
3. Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God
4. Jesus the Exorcist (I particularly dug this chapter title: very evocative... Could be a great movie)
5. Jesus Flees
6. The Transfiguration
7. The Confrontation
8. Lazarus is Killed
9. The Last Day of Jesus' Life
10. The Traitor

There are also two appendices: A) The Secret Gospel of Mark, and B) Did Jesus Select the Twelve Disciples Himself?

Some things I learned from Paul Verhoeven in this book:

1) Hitler farted a lot in meetings with his staff and generals, and they had to stand by and breathe in the "stench."
2) Jesus and his disciples, being itinerant, "subsisted on whatever food came their way, so they probably had gastrointenstinal problems. Jesus' companions must have heard him snore, snuffle, and fart."
3) Verhoeven writes about farting quite a bit.
4) Jesus was essentially a fugitive (according to Verhoeven and others)
5) That Jane Schaberg presented the idea that Jesus might have been the product of a rape in her book The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives.

Those are just a few things you will learn in Verhoeven's Jesus of Nazareth.

The Selby Is In Your Place

Photographer Todd Selby enters the homes of "interesting people" to take photos of said "interesting people" hanging out in their homes...

This is an interesting enough proposal. Go to hip peoples' homes and capture them amidst their domicile and possessions. After all, you can only shoot so many rusted out Fords or African peoples; so why not let Selby document his idea of "interesting" people from New York to Sydney and everywhere (nearly) in between? And, in keeping with the 21st century art aesthetic, there are some suitably quirky ink and gauche illustrations. Which, under most circumstances would be enough for me to mentally to check out of Selby's book... Lo-fi illustrations are a dime a dozen these days amongst the very, very hip.

But... but... You have to appreciate Selby for venturing into Karl Lagerfeld's house to show us the extent of Lagerfeld's book collection. Wonderful! Or how he uses makeup applicators for his illustrations... How Jacques Grange has a bottle of Marilyn Monroe's sleeping pills at his place. How Olivier Zahm digs paperback erotic novels like Jackson Preachers Horny Billie Joe, with a girl on the front sucking her thumb.

Naturally, you have the inexplicable hipster cliche of a person, Lou Doillon, who collects taxidermy. I'm from Wisconsin: this isn't hip. If anything, it's slightly deranged. I see a deer head and I think of grizzled men in orange suits hoofin' through boggy marshes tryin' to kick up some bucks and blow a slug through their hearts--and the head is a trophy, a visual to remind all of the hunter's guests that he is still in touch with his inner early man. How does this become some vintage decoration for a Parisian? I do not know...

Ah... But who doesn't like seeing a little Helen Christensen at home? Thank you, Todd. Thank you very much. She's just cute as a button. A real dish, y'know? Who knew she was a painter? Her technique is taking photographs and making paintings based on those images. Not a new method, of course, but always a good one in my opinion. And one of the things she loves most about New York City is 'the river mist in the morning.'

Then it ends with a Laurel Canyon couple. Yippee! I wonder how they afford those digs on the indie musician and filmmaker salary?

Definitely worth a look, though, despite some reservations on the book's hip quotient.

DeLillo's Point Omega

The celebrated author returns with a book about a scholar, his daughter and a filmmaker out in the desert...

Don DeLillo is generally considered one of the greatest authors of the 21st century. He has written novels, short stories, plays, one screenplay and the occasional essay. But his work remains divisive. The writing itself displays the often glittering prose of say, Fitzgerald, mixed with some of the narrative and stylistic experiments of Joyce and Beckett. There is a cinematic quality to his writing that in a way links him to filmmakers like Kubrick, and some of the more literary directors like Fellini and many in the French New Wave. His novel White Noise made him a literary idol to writers like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Brett Easton Ellis, and the mammoth Underworld cemented his representation as a keen observer of America, its land and cityscapes and its people. These two novels, along with Mao II and Libra, greatly increased his readership, but also raised expectations of his work and brought him out of the more underground literary atmosphere he seems to prefer; where he's free to write how he wants and not as others wish he would.

So it is with his latest novel Point Omega, a novel that again has polarized critics. But, DeLillo is writing exactly what he wants and one has to respect that. He is not catering to critical tastes.

Point Omega is technically a novella at a slim 117 pages. Well, maybe it is a novel, but who cares for such distinctions! The story begins with an unnamed character in a museum watching a silent version of Hitchcock's Psycho. (Douglas Gordon's slowed down version titled 24 Hour Psycho, to be exact). The way that DeLillo describes the goings-on of the crowd in the museum, the movie and Finley's thoughts is mesmerizing. The following piece of prose is a perfect example:

"In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see to much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion." The characters sees an older man joined by a younger man, who turn out to be the main characters Richard Elster and Jim Finley.

DeLillo is at once describing the character's perception and ideas of the projected images of Psycho within an art museum setting, providing a window into the character's mind; but also cutting right to the heart of cinema. When the character leaves, he describes the outside world as "Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies."

DeLillo then moves into the introduction by Jim Finley of Richard Elster, a former scholar now living in the desert, there to simply to sit and think. Finley admits that he wanted to make a movie about Elster's time in the government around the time of the invasion of Iraq, uninterrupted like Alexander Sokoruv's Russian Ark (a great movie, I highly recommend it). They are later joined by Elster's daughter Jessica.

What follows are there conversations as they make something of a family-like existence, until an event disrupts things.

Definitely pick this novel up. It's a quick and mesmerizing, like a lone firework in the American landscape.

Jim Baggott's secret history of The First War of Physics

An epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding: the monumental race to build the first atomic weapons...

But does Baggott's book live up to the "epic" claim? In a word, yes.

Those years are perhaps the darkest in the history of mankind. Everything that physicists had been working toward since the time of the Greeks, Persians and Newton was taken out of the lecture halls and laboratories and used to create weapons of such awesome power that whole cities could be leveled--completely obliterated in less than a minute. The power of the universe inside a device controlled by politicians; men who would bring humanity to its knees all in the name of either nationalism, democracy, communism or fascism.

Baggott begins his book with a prologue entitled "Letter from Berlin," by telling the story of Austrian Jewish physicist Otto Frisch and his aunt Lise Meitner (a chemist), who lost his job at the University of Hamburg with Hitler's ascendancy and ultimately ended up working for Neils Bohr (one of the critical founders of quantum mechanics). Baggott relates how Meitner (who had converted to Christianity) was denounced by a colleague, refused a passport by Himmler, but ultimately reunited with her nephew Otto in Copenhagen through Bohr's efforts.

Meitner's partner Otto Hahn, meanwhile, had finished the work that he and Meitner had started, by building on Enrico Fermi's research into nuclei bombardment with neutrons (from the lightest known elements all the way through the periodic table we all know so well). Fermi and his team believed that by bombarding nuclei with neutrons, they had created unnaturally occurring, heavy elements called "transuranic" elements. Hawn and Meitner attempted to repeat Fermi's experiments, but with much more attention to chemistry. But, as Baggott writes, Meitner had to leave the Germany, and Hahn finished the experiment himself... And he found that instead of creating radium by bombarding uranium with neutrons, they had in fact created Barium atoms. This was significant because most scientists at the time thought bombardment would move the bombarded nucleai one or two places down the periodic table. What Hahn had done was move it down 36 places. Which was rather unbelievable but not impossible. Meitner shared her partner's results with Frisch, and this narrative sort of launches the larger narrative of the book.

Naturally, Baggot moves readers through a ten-year history of scientific research from 1939 to 1949, with American, British, Soviet and German efforts to build the most destructive weapons of all time. There is really so much to this book that I cannot possibly summarize it.

A truly haunting and thrilling read.

Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp

Roberto Bolaño is dead but this reality will not stop a near unending stream of English translation and publication of his work. The latest is Antwerp, a book that Bolaño wrote in 1981 in Barcelona. He admits in the introduction entitled Total Anarchy: Twenty-Two Years Later, that it was written when he was "still writing more poetry than prose" and drawn to "certain science fiction writers and certain pornographers." An interesting combination, to be sure.

He notes that "I never brought this novel to any publishing house, of course. They would've slammed the door in my face and I'd have lost the copy. I didn't even make what's technically termed a clean copy. The original manuscript has more pages: the text tended to multiply itself, spreading like a sickness." This echoes William S. Burroughs' belief that words were a virus and writing merely the expulsion of it. Bolaño, however, writes that his "sickness, back then, was pride, rage and violence."

Antwerp is essentially 56 vignettes or sketches imbued with both poetry and cinema. The narrator is Bolaño himself, though fictionalized. In certain sketches, the narrator Bolaño is observed by another Bolaño, or perhaps by some other omniscient narrator whose name we know not.

Some of the vignettes display dazzling imagery and words (credit must go to translator Natasha Wimmer), often with a surreal tone, while others come across as though Bolaño were bored and didn't know exactly what to write, simply letting instantaneous ideas through words unfurl onto the page. Even those vignettes are interesting.

One of my favorites is 3. GREEN, RED, AND WHITE CHECKS, in which Bolaño the narrator speaks of another (probably the fictional Bolaño) who rises up out of a white tide and is suddenly on a train. Inside the train colorful light shines in through a window, while this persona is smoking and his eyes come to rest on a pale square that begins to disintegrate. The narrator notices the light has gone dark outside as the train goes past the edge of a forest, apparently right where a "little hunchback lives." The story shifts and Bolaño seems to be in the forest with the hunchback carrying on a conversation... A really great vignette.

Definitely a book to own, especially if you want to see a writer engaging in poetic and cinematic surrealism on a micro scale.

And what better endorsement can you get than from the author himself, who said, "The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is Antwerp."

The Greatest Writer in the English Language: PG Wodehouse (according to the book buyer at Book Soup)

Shakespeare is very good with the English language, but to be honest, I prefer the works of PG Wodehouse. All you have to do is open the front page of any of his novels, and you are totally swept away to a different area of your brain. The roots of British wild and crazy humor can be traced to Woedhouse's novels of the 1920's.

Which one of his hundred or so novels is his best? A very difficult question, but a simple answer: all of them! The wonderful Overlook Press for the past ten years have been publishing his books in beautiful smart editions. I have ten at home, and have 90 in my desire box. Here is this a random few from the Overlook Press:








Here are a few quotes to capture this man's wit and genius:

"He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when.'"

"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose."

"It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought."

"She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going through a tunnel."

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun."

"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them."

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

She's baaaaaack. Chelsea Handler, the queen of late night comedy, is back with her third, and maybe her best, book. Chelsea's matured from her amazingly successful book, Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea. She's no longer sleeping with large quantities of men, instead she is sleeping with just one man, and maybe a dog every once in a while.

This is Chelsea at her most adult. But don't be scared, she still has a penchant for Vodka and practical jokes. It's just that now she has a live in silver fox and a need to keep her riotously funny father from being sued by the unsuspecting tenants at his Martha's Vinyard house (just to give it away the house isn't as clean and nice as one might hope).

Through her acerbic wit and never ending string of outrageous stories Chelsea once again had me laughing out loud and staying up way past my bed time with a nice glass of Belvedere, completely unable to pry myself away from the almost unbelieveable stories of her now vertical life.

Happy Reading,
Julia

A Spiritual Investigation Into What It All Means

Title: Devotion: A Memoir (Signed Edition)
Author: Dani Shapiro
Price: $24.99


"Shapiro's newest memoir, a mid-life exploration of spirituality begins with her son's difficult questions-about God, mortality and the afterlife -- and Shapiro's realization that her answers are lacking....Absorbing, intimate, direct and profound, Shapiro's memoir is a satisfying journey that will touch fans and win her plenty of new ones." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955

A collection of artist journals, or, serial publications as a subset of the artists' book.

Editors Philip E. Aarons and Andrew Roth, and Victor Brand present an extremely detailed study of artists' serial publications. Brand and the editors hoped to make "an aesthetic leap from what readers expect to find in a magazine or postcard to something of an entirely different artistic order." A quick look at the photographic reproductions reveals each serial as a piece of art. Though I didn't read all of the book's text, I would imagine that many of these artists were influenced by the publications of the Dadaists and Surrealists. It was probably assumed by the editors since the book deals with serials from 1955 onward. But, if you've seen the published work of Tzara, Picabia, Breton and the rest of the associated writers, poets and artists of the time, then that output is a fair approximation of what you will find in In Numbers. Of course, you'll see how the serial artform has evolved to become more violent, graphic, atmospheric and occasionally even more daring than the dada/surrealist groups had been.

One of the more interesting journals profiled is Amokkoma, which has existed since 1992, published by Klaus Baumgartner, Carsten Holler and Johannes Lothar Schroder with Diego Castro. The first issue reproduced the final chapter of Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, with artists' photographs around the text: photographs that have biological elements to the work.

There's reproductions and text from Situationist Times, Semina, Die Schastrommel/Die Rossel (which was a vehicle for Gunter Brus confrontational work), and Permanent Food (constructed from images from magazines), amongst others.

This book is a great way to educate oneself on the history of artist serials, from those who weren't aware of their existence to the casual reader and the committed collector.