Down on Blogs

Some local politicians have managed to spark a political career for themselves by the use of a blog. For example, Granby teacher Mark Bail had a popular blog that helped to propel him to a seat on the town selectboard. However, since he was elected his writing has all but stopped, with his most recent post being in April and the one before that in January.

Stephanie O'Keeffe of Amherst also launched her successful campaign for selectboard with a blog, which she stills keeps more or less up to date, although she has altered her writing to be a much more dryly factual, with a lot less of the gossipy style that first endeared her to the electorate. A blog she started specifically to deal with selectboard issues, was last updated in June of last year.

No doubt many of those voting for both those candidates did so with the assumption that they would continue to receive the same level of chatty insider insight from them concerning town affairs once in office that they did before the election. Perhaps Bail and O'Keeffe fully intended to do so as well, but if so, what changed their minds?

Politics is an insiders game, something every former outsider learns soon after the inauguration. Frankly, you tend not to be invited into the innermost circle of policy-making if your colleagues fear that you are going to blab everything that goes on among the politicians to the general public. 

Catherine Sanderson is one regional school committee member who blogs. Springfield School Committee member Antonette Pepe, although she never blogged, ran on a platform of greater openness. She was never afraid to run to the media when she thought her fellow pols were up to mischief that the public needed to know about. As a result, she found herself not being informed when things were happening and not invited to any social events where members might gather and share inside information.

In the latest development in the politician's war against openness, Amherst blog-king Larry Kelley reports that the committee that runs the regional school system wants to know what restrictions can be legally placed on politician's blogs. Kelley explains:

So five local school committee chairs have officially requested in writing the District Attorney create guidelines about how and when a blog may or may not violate the Open Meeting Law--key word being "Open".

The irony simply abounds. The joint letter apparently was the idea of Shutesbury School Committee Chair Michael DeChiara,. The other School Committee chairs wonder if perhaps some Anons posting comments could be School Committee members thus potentially bringing together a quorum discussing something outside a posted public meeting.

Forgetting for a moment that a blog is public, these Chairs are not showing much faith in their fellow School Committee members if they honestly believe an elected public official would cowardly cower behind a cloak of anonymity.

These phony concerns about blogging are really just a lot of hair-splitting blather designed to pervert the open-meeting law in order to use it as a club to beat into silence public officials who have the audacity (and the courage) to blog about what local officials are doing. God forbid that the public be as privy to what is going on as the political insiders. There is really no reason for any official rules for blogging by politicians, because the simple standard is this: Any action that brings more information to the public about what the political class is doing is automatically GOOD. Any action that helps to obscure or hide information from the public is BAD. I don't think you need a law degree to tell the difference.

I have long believed that EVERY elected official should be required to keep a blog and to spend at least twenty minutes every weekday composing a post telling the public about what they have done in the last twenty-four hours on the public's behalf. Any elected official that refuses to blog regularly should be considered by the voters as violating the public trust. Indeed, a failure to blog should be considered sufficient grounds for removing that official from office in the next election. 

An almost eerie silence has fallen over the University of Massachusetts with classes now over and the seniors graduated. 

Here is a picture of the Old Chapel as it appeared in 1885. 

Here it is this morning, one hundred and twenty five years later. 

Some UMass students pull a prank on their roommate in this video. What is interesting is how in the conversation before the prank a student refers to "the crazy people that chill in Amherst."

 

What do they think is so crazy about Amherst? Maybe the students watch Amherst Cable TV.

 

About Cassady

Of all the figures of the so-called Beat literary movement, few are more of an enigma than Neal Cassady. That's pretty strange, because no Beat figure was more written about, since it seems nearly every writer who ever met Cassady in person felt compelled to write something about him. The one who wrote the most about him was his sometimes best friend Jack Kerouac, who fictionalized Cassady slightly as the hero of his classic novel On the Road and in a lesser known stream of consciousness novel called Visions of Cody. The other best known work about Cassady is Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a biography of author Ken Kesey which shows Cassady twenty years after On the Road in the wild years of his final decline, when he was a leading figure of the American psychedelic movement.

The Beats revered Cassady in part because they saw him as the embodiment of their bohemian philosophy. Many of the Beats were grad school drop-outs and cafe intellectuals who had great theories of what constituted the liberated life, but who themselves led a bookish, often alcoholic existence. In Cassady they felt they had the real-life example of what the truly liberated person should be like. When asked to demonstrate what their theories of life meant, the Beats could point to Cassady and say, "We mean someone like him!"

Not everyone was impressed with what they saw. By the end of his life Cassady was a full blown speed-freak whose amphetamine fueled monologues were considered to have mystical significance by his fans but which others have dismissed as gibberish. He neglected his devoted wife Carolyn and their kids, and for someone whom everyone else wanted to write about, he wrote very little himself. 

William S. Burroughs called Cassady "a con-man" who was redeemed only by the fact that what he most wanted to con you into doing (besides supplying him with money, drugs and sex) was showing him your best self. His great gift appeared to have been his ability to get people to let down their walls of defensiveness and inhibition and become the person they really wanted to be. Therefore many people who interacted with Cassady described the encounter as liberating and even permanently life-changing. "Neal had a fantastic power over people," Jerry Garcia once said, "and it was all benign."

Ken Kesey's first novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was an instant classic of American literature and the movie version was showered with Academy Awards. A second novel Sometimes a Great Notion was praised for its extremely original and creative style, but the complicated plot and murky theme made the book much less successful commercially than its predecessor. Kesey was unfazed by the inability to match his previous commercial success, since by that time he had declared that he was abandoning writing as an outdated artistic form. Kesey announced that he intended to create a revolutionary new art form called "happenings" that were designed to help transform society into a culture of liberated individuals - people who would be sorta like Neal Cassady.

The main tool for this liberation was to be the powerfully mind-altering drug LSD. Kesey believed that if large numbers of people had the psychedelic experience, then revolutionary changes would begin to occur in society as a whole. The way Kesey and his followers (who called themselves The Merry Pranksters) intended to get the then legal drug into wide usage was to pass it out to people freely, sometimes whether they knew what they were taking or not. The first of these experiments was to take a bus on a cross-country trip with Kesey, his friends and a heavy dose of LSD onboard, and see what kinds of encounters they could have. It was all filmed, and the driver on this often outrageous bus ride was Neal Cassady.

After the bus trip, further LSD spreading experiments were conducted at public events disguised as common dance parties (and featuring a band that would become the Grateful Dead) but where the non-alcoholic refreshments (usually the powdered soft-drink Kool-Aid) would be spiked with LSD. The authorities at first thought these "Acid Tests" were simple, booze free dances, but it didn't take them long to figure out what was really going on.

Not surprisingly, the authorities frowned on Kesey's new role as a psychedelic pied piper. Emergency legislation was enacted making LSD illegal, and soon after Kesey himself was arrested on drug charges. He fled the country, but returned and was captured and sent to prison. Alarmed by Kesey's imprisonment and fearful for his own safety, Cassady fled to Mexico, where fellow Beat William Burroughs was living in exile to escape charges of killing his wife. There Cassady died in 1968 of an accidental drug overdose; he was cremated and his ashes were later sprinkled from an airplane flying over the San Francisco Bay.

Fast forward to 1980. By that time the American psychedelic movement had pretty much dwindled under government repression and the movement's own excesses. Ken Kesey was out of jail and he and his followers had abandoned San Francisco, previously the capitol of psychedelia, and relocated to Oregon, where Kesey's family had for generations been prominent in the dairy business. There Kesey spent most of his time farming, but slowly he began reconsidering his decision to abandon writing. The result was the occasional release of a largely unpublicized self-published magazine called Spit in The Ocean, each of which had a different theme. For example, book number three featured Kesey's fellow psychedelic pioneer Dr. Timothy Leary. All of the Spit in the Ocean books are out of print except the last one, which was about Ken Kesey himself and published after his death in 2001.

Recently a copy of Number Six of Kesey's Spit in the Ocean series "The Cassady Issue" became available to me. I was delighted to read it, since it has become almost completely unavailable, and is full of little gems of insight into the adventures of Neal Cassady.

Most of the book consists of short memoirs written by people who knew Cassady in various capacities. The collection is edited by Ken Babbs, a close friend of both Cassady and Kesey. Among those remembrances:

Best selling novelist Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) writes that he was never overly impressed by Cassady:

To me he seemed like a rather common Western type: The cowboy, roughneck, dozer-driver or whatever who is enormously capable physically and has added to that capability random scraps of ill-absorbed education.

There are hundreds of such people about the west, boomers mostly. They're all a little crazy. They can do anything with a machine or an animal. They accumulate two or three wives and passels of kids and girlfriends. They run all over the place, drinking, fucking, fighting, talking interestingly at times and boringly at other times.

Most of them don't fall in with a literary crowd at Columbia, of course. It's no wonder that someone like Neal would have affected Ginsberg and Kerouac - particularly if you recall the literary climate in the universities in the late Forties.

One of Cassady's longtime mistresses Anne Murphy writes quite frankly about her sexual adventures with him:

When we came home to Palo Alto, Neal, the angel, traded his halo for horns and made expert use of that main muscle to drive me through undreamed of orgasms. He was a gifted cocksman, though Carolyn doesn't agree. She's more the candlelight-and-wine type, rather than the back seat or filling station type, where for me, many "quickie" fill-ups occurred. Nevertheless, his meat was sweet and such a treat that he became famous for it, at least in underground circles.

He really was a holy man, even as a lover. Sometimes he would expound upon the philosophy of Edgar Cayce during intercourse, or quote from the Bible. Other times he would vent his jealousy and spite at the devil he took me for. "You slut, you! I saw you get into that car with all those men!"

Most of the time, though, sex with him was fun. It often originated from his jealous fantasies, which he used to spice up a performance, but sometimes, too, he went "over the line" and fantasy became reality and he would punish me for imaginary infidelities. Later, these fantasies of his became realities to many of his women; we found ourselves doing exactly what he had accused us of at an earlier time. For instance, I was joyously "gang-banged" by the Hell's Angels right before his eyes. Afterward they handed me a card that read, "You have just been assisted by a member of the Hell's Angels, Oakland Chapter."

 

 


John Clellon Holmes, whose book Go marked the literary debut of the Cassady literary personna, offers an account of some parties from Cassady's first visit to New York City, but ends the piece by ruminating on Cassady's death:

And so this mad internal combustion machine, fueled by a manic hunger that was finally mysterious - this cocksman, hipster, conner-of-cars, horizon-chaser left nothing behind, except patient Carolyn and the kids, and -yes! - some of us who loved him because of, and some of us who like him despite, that remorseless hunger, having (as the world does) an ambiguous feeling for those who continually light out for the territory ahead, reminding us uncomfortably that we are self-imprisoned by work and days, trapped in time and its demands, the body finally inadequate to the crazy hopes it houses. I like to think he drifted into rest, lying on his back, looking up. I want to think of it like that.

Also included is a never before published excerpt from Neal's only published work, the never completed autobiography The First Third, but there is little in it that is new or insightful. Counterculture editor Stewart Brand recounts how Cassady helped him decide to get married. Ken Babbs interviews a drunken, joint puffing Jerry Garcia, who says that Cassady inspired him to give up his painting career in favor of music. Cassady's widow writes about how disappointed she is in the many attempts of Hollywood to try to re-create Cassady and herself onscreen, and one of Kesey's best short stories, The Day Superman Died, a reflection on Cassady's death, is also included. Unfortunately another Kesey piece, written in the voice of someone called Grandma Whittier, is hopelessly spacy, which was a recurring flaw of Kesey's later work.

This book is a valuable collection of interesting and insightful sketches of one of American literature's most intriguing and inscrutable characters. No doubt Neal Cassady will be a figure of controversy, debate and inspiration for many years to come. 

The Scam

 



"One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary."

—Ayn Rand, 1975

Do It

I can identify with the exasperation expressed by this Northampton bumpersticker.

 

Smoke

It gets in your eyes.

 



I'm old enough to sorta remember the days when cigarette advertising on television was legal. Even as a child I considered the ads annoying, as did almost everybody else, which is why not enough questions were asked at the time about the advertising ban's implications for free speech rights. 

I even recall a couple of the jingles that accompanied some of those ads, such as the one for Salem (You can take Salem out of the country but . . . you can't take the country out of Salem!") In our secretly subversive world of children there were even little parodies of the songs which swept through The World Famous Thomas M. Balliet Elementary School, in particular I remember some involving the jingle for Winston's. One of the cleaner ones went:

Winston tastes bad
Like the one I just had
No filter
No taste
Just a
Fifty-cent waste!

Fifty cents?!! Good Lord, today 50 cents wouldn't cover the most recent increase in the tax per package. I grew up to be a smoker myself, having tried my first cigarette in fourth grade (stolen from my mother no less) but didn't actually buy my first pack until I was fifteen. I quit in 2004 when I developed a stubborn cough. Happily the cough faded away within a few months of quitting and I never went back and don't intend to. But I still find myself occasionally missing the cigarettes and probably always will on some level.

What people that have never smoked don't understand is that in many ways smoking is a wonderful pastime. It fits in perfectly with our modern lifestyle, which is always requiring you to wait for this, stand around for that and full of any number of dull, meaningless interludes. Being able to light up a cigarette is a great way to fill these empty spaces in your day.

Furthermore, smoking cigarettes are a calming activity, while at the same time giving you a surge of energy that helps to lift depression and enhance your ability to focus on the activity at hand. That's not a completely subjective opinion. Scientific studies have shown that people can perform complex tasks requiring extra concentration better after smoking a cigarette. Psychiatrists have long noted that patients who suffer from anxiety and depression report a marked improvement in their symptoms when they smoke, and sometimes hesitate to urge their patients to quit for that reason.

Of course smoking is also addictive (some studies suggest that the process of becoming addicted to cigarettes is quicker than becoming addicted to heroin) and heavy smoking over many years is also linked to heart disease and cancer. Evidence that cigarette smoke poses a risk to bystanders is much flimsier than most people think, but in any case, cigarette smoke doesn't smell very good, although smokers themselves get so they don't even notice it.

So America continues to have this love/hate relationship with tobacco. On one level we recognize smoking to be a sometimes useful, kinda cool drug, and on another we want to condemn it for its addictive, health threatening side-effects. There is also the little matter of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who make money off the drug, from the farmers in North Carolina to the pusher behind the counter at the local 7-11. Not all of that money is coming from American citizens either, millions of dollars come pouring into this country from overseas, where American cigarette brands are considered status symbols and can be sold at outrageously high prices. No one is too eager to cut off that fiscal gravy train.

So we settle for half-measures. We put up all kinds of legal roadblocks and inconveniences to smoking while always making sure that none of those barriers are actually high enough to prevent anyone who really wants a pack of cigarettes from getting one. The government (all the while stuffing its own pockets with cigarette taxes) sternly scolds us to stop doing what, if we actually stopped doing it, would mean that the politicians couldn't balance their budget. So instead we play silly, petty games and strike phony virtuous poses.

Once upon a time in America you were free to go to your own inevitable grave in your own way, with your family and friends and the general public leaving you be. But now there are all kinds of health Nazis running around. They see nothing wrong with nagging friends and family members and even scolding perfect strangers about smoking, without an ounce of the compassion that would be granted to victims of other vices. A heroin addict we are told deserves our pity, compassion and treatment on demand at the taxpayer's expense.  But the friendless cigarette smoker deserves only our self-righteous scorn. When did our once magnanimous American spirit become so petty and small?

Of course, these are just ways of dodging the real question, the answering of which we always go to inordinate lengths to avoid: What kind of drugs do we want to be legal in this country? Cigarettes, alcohol and caffeine are not the only options, and some would argue they are not the best options by any means. But that would mean approaching our national drug policies from a completely fresh perspective, indeed recreating them from scratch. Instead we'd rather tackle the issue from the margins, with such things as banning cigarettes in restaurants, so that we can pretend that we're doing something, when actually we really don't want to do anything at all.

On this hot and hazy morning a black dog kept watch on the streets of Northampton. 

Meanwhile the humans sat on the stoops and played with computers.

I was downtown to meet with Mo Turner of the Valley Advocate and Mary Carey of The Amherst Bulletin, and we spoke of my forthcoming projects for both publications as well as politics, culture and the media agenda for this summer.

I'm going to Maine tomorrow morning with my lost brother and I don't know when I'll be back. Having sold my laptop last year while in my crackhead death spiral, I'm unsure of my degree of computer access in the coming days. However, I believe there is a computer in the house I'm staying at, so I sstill may be able to post my Maine adventures, at least sporadically. Stay tuned.

Bill Kreutzmann of the Grateful Dead has a new band featuring Oteil Burbridge of the Allman Brothers Band and guitarist Scott Murawski of Max Creek. You may recall Max Creek as the Connecticut based jam band that has played all up and down the Valley for years. Here's a video with some great crowd shots. 

 

Q: If the dove is the bird of peace, what is the bird of true love?

A: The swallow.

Bye-bye Brandon

Heather Brandon falls silent.

 



I'm sorry, but not necessarily surprised that Heather Brandon, author of the popular Urban Compass blog, announced yesterday that she is taking a hiatus from her blog for an undetermined length of time. The announcement culminates a year long fade for the blog, which never quite found a clear identity after she moved out of Springfield, the city which was the primary focus of her writing. At that time her departure, just months after I had chosen her and Charles V. Ryan for my top internet awards, prompted the headline Woman of the Year Leaves Town.

It's not that the quality of the blog in any way declined after the move. Brandon did an excellent job at providing the kind of detailed, researched and thoughtful writing that had made her one of  the region's most professional citizen journalist. In fact, much of what she did was superior in both depth and insight to what many paid journalists for the local media were producing. However, unlike them, she was not getting full pay and benefits for her valuable work.

This underlines one of the stubborn weaknesses of the New Media revolution. How can you expect talented amateurs, some of whom like Heather produce work of enormous value to the community, to work for only small sums of money? Personally, I have always made money off my blog, but thank God for the taxpayers, who used to pay my salary at UMass and now underwrite my welfare benefits, because if I had to live solely off my website I would have to take up dumpster diving.
 

Hopefully this will change as advertising revenue continues to flee print media and go online. In the meantime, it is no surprise if people like Heather Brandon, who is a wife and mother and is going back to college, have other things to do with their scarce time rather than write for what almost amounts to a public service. 

I'm certain we'll hear from Heather again, because she's far too talented to completely fade away, and it may even take the form of a revival of Urban Compass. But it will probably not happen until the media revolution has evolved to the point when the money one is able to earn online more closely matches the time one must invest. 

I was surprised to walk past the student travel center at UMass this morning and see that their signs were empty!

In fact the whole place was closed and all the office furniture moved out! On the locked front door was a sign indicating that from now on I have to go all the way over to the UMass hotel lobby to get my bus tickets to Springfield.

Gee, I wonder what happened? That place has been there since I was a student in the late '70's.

My cousin Larry who lives in Arizona had quite an adventure recently when a deadly rattlesnake suddenly crossed the path of him and his step-daughter. Here is a first hand account:

It finally happened. Marianne's daughter (Lori) and I walked down a couple of streets where we could get an unobstructed view of the Fireworks in Phoenix Friday night. On the way back, walking along the sidewalk, her in sandals and me in my everyday boots, she was walking ahead of me. The wind was blowing at least 40 mph and tree debris was everywhere. Small pieces about the size of your hand mostly. Our trees don't have big leaves like yours do.

So she said (as she walked past it) "Is that a Snake?" Even though we have streetlights, I took out my flashlight for a better look. Sure enough, it was a small Rattler about 2 feet long! I looked closely to check the species because we have 13 different kinds. It was a "Black tailed Rattlesnake." 

It was so windy it apparently didn't sense us approaching. It was coiled on the curb next to the sidewalk. It's tiny little "rattletail" was moving constantly. So I kicked it into the street and it came right back! I kicked it harder next time putting it out in the travel lane. Only one car came by in all the time we had stood there watching fireworks from the opposite direction. But it was wounded from my kick and bleeding. Better it than me! I don't kill harmless snakes, but a Rattlesnake so close to my neighborhood has to go.

I killed a big one back in 1976 and wore the tail on my hat for years until it fell off somewhere. Hope I don't see another one for another 3 years! But it was a great wake up call. I am and will continue to be more alert in the future. Having lived here before, I know enough to always be watchful where ever I go. You never know when or where one will pop up!

At least we have a cure called "Antivenin." All the hospitals stock it. I'd rather get bit by an Arizona Rattlesnake than a Florida alligator. It's a lot smaller scar! Frankly, I'll take my chances with a real snake compared to the ones they have "back-east" that carry guns and knives and would kill you for the fun of it.

Wow cousin, glad you and your step-daughter escaped unharmed!

Looks like Captain Babbs' holiday bash out in Oregon was another big success!

Among those in attendance was Bruce Hornsby, who occasionally played keyboards with the Grateful Dead. 

Check out the fun and festive photos by clicking here.