I wept openly during this beautiful emotional documentary about Owen Suskind, a kid who developed autism at age 3, retreated from the world, until he discovered that he could communicate to the outside world – as well as express his emotions – through the Disney animated movies he loved so much. Incredible film. Highly recommend it.
She’s still with us, physically and mentally. Her birthday is tomorrow. One of the greatest actresses in the world.
The must-read of the day, the week, the month: Slate’s Oral History of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2: “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika”.
Kushner’s is the most important and unforgettable voice to emerge in my lifetime. Clifford Odets, who also mixed the poetic with the political, who also changed American theatre (briefly) in the 1930s, giving rise to playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, is the only valid comparison to what Kushner has done, what Kushner SOUNDS like on the page. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. There are too many good quotes here to mention but the oral history takes us through the entire history of this astonishing play.
Elvis’ first guitarist, who played on all of those tracks at Sun, and then moving on to RCA with Elvis, and then moving on to Hollywood with him (Elvis was loyal), has died at the age of 84. Here is the Rolling Stone obituary.
Moore was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 as part of the inaugural class celebrating sidemen, a category that honored “those musicians who have spent their careers out of the spotlight, performing as backup musicians for major artists on recording sessions and in concert.”
A legend. He’s sitting there on that crowded stage in Elvis’ 1968 comeback special. He’s such a legend that guitar players from all over the world would make pilgrimages to see him, to talk with him, to play with him.
Listen to Elvis’ first track, the track that shook the world, that started it all, and listen to what Scotty’s doing in the background. Elvis really couldn’t play the guitar. Scotty’s presence was essential.
After they recorded that song on July 5, 1954, Scotty remarked, “They’re gonna run us out of town for that one.”
Well, they didn’t.
Mark Knopfler, who – along with Eric Clapton, Albert Wood, and a couple of others – did a concert with Scotty Moore (one clip to follow), was interviewed about Scotty Moore.
Here’s a clip from that concert.
From Keith Richards’ great autobiography Life
That Elvis LP had all the Sun stuff, with a couple of RCA jobs on it too. It was everything from “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, “Milk Cow Blues Boogie.” I mean, for a guitar player, or a budding guitar player, heaven. But on the other hand, what the hell’s going on there? I might not have wanted to be Elvis, but I wasn’t so sure about Scotty Moore. Scotty Moore was my icon. He was Elvis’s guitar player on all the Sun Records stuff. He’s on “Mystery Train”, he’s on “Baby Let’s Play House”. Now I know the man, I’ve played with him. I know the band. But back then, just being able to get through “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”, that was the epitome of guitar playing. And then “Mystery Train” and “Money Honey”. I’d have died and gone to heaven just to play like that. How the hell was that done? That’s the stuff I first brought to the johns at Sidcup, playing a borrowed f-hole archtop Höfner. That was before the music led me back into the roots of Elvis and Buddy – back to the blues.
To this day there’s a Scotty Moore lick I still can’t get down and he won’t tell me. Forty-nine years it’s eluded me. He claims he can’t remember the one I’m talking about. It’s not that he won’t show me; he says, “I don’t know which one you mean.” It’s on “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” I think it’s in E major. He has a rundown when it hits the 5 chord, the B down to the A down to the E, which is like a yodeling sort of thing, which I’ve never been quite able to figure. It’s also on “Baby Let’s Play House.” When you get to “But don’t you be nobody’s fool / Now baby, come back, baby …” and right at that last line, the lick is in there. It’s probably some simple trick. But it goes too fast, and also there’s a bunch of notes involved: which finger moves and which one doesn’t? I’ve never heard anybody else pull it off. Creedence Clearwater got a version of this song down, but when it comes to that move, no. And Scotty’s a sly dog. He’s very dry. “Hey, youngster, you’ve got time to figure it out.” Every time I see him, it’s “Learnt that lick yet?”
RIP to Scotty Moore, one of the greatest sidemen of all time.
It’s best not to provide a preamble to this marvelous post. It’s best to go into it cold, like I did. If you’re interested in fonts, well … it will be a post made in heaven. If you’re insanely observant about the smallest peripheral details in any given film (or in anything, really), you will be gratified to know that you are not alone. And make sure you read the comments, because it gets even better in there. This post has made my day and it’s not even 9 a.m. yet. It also made me laugh out loud. It’s my new favorite blog and there’s so much more to discover there.
Since I am the type of person (is there such a type) who created a Google alert for “Leslie van Houten” (so that I can have up-to-date information on her various parole hearings), the subject of The Girls: A Novel
And I feel the same way about Cline’s novel which details a summer in the life of a 14-year-old girl in California in 1969, who finds herself somehow hanging out with a group of hippies – mostly women, plus a charismatic male leader at the center – who live out on an abandoned ranch. The narrator is captivated by the group dynamic, the freedom, and turns a blind eye (sometimes consciously) to the more disturbing things she sees. The hippies eventually, for complicated reasons, break into the house of a famous musician and kill everyone who is there.
If you know the Manson story inside and out, you will see where Cline borrowed from it (heavily) and you’ll see where Cline deviated (in some pretty important ways). The characters are eerily familiar (if you’ve read Helter Skelter, even down to Dennis Wilson, of The Beach Boys, who – briefly – got sucked into Manson’s web, drawn by the easy access to all of those available women out on the ranch). There’s a 1-to-1 connection in some cases: Suzanne = Susan Atkins. Donna = Patricia Krewinkle. Helen = Leslie van Houten. Roos = Mary Brunner. Russell = Manson. Guy = Tex Watson. The murder has been changed slightly, although there is a caretaker involved (just like there was at Cielo Drive), and a bunch of people who weren’t supposed to be there.
“Evie,” the narrator, is unhappy at home, but there’s nothing really awful going on. Her parents are separated, and both are dating again. Evie doesn’t like that. She’s being sent to boarding school in the fall. She’s stopped hanging out with her best friend. And one day she sees three girls floating through the park, girls who are filthy, in ragged dresses, but who exude a kind of ferocious and compelling power. Self-possessed, haughty, regal even, but also raunchy (one pulls down her dress to expose her breast, laughing), the girls are then seen digging through a dumpster for food, before being chased off the property and then picked up by a big black-painted bus, which roars off to parts unknown.
The way Cline writes about the effect that those “girls” have on Evie – and the way Cline writes about female interactions in general – is one of the main unforgettable qualities of the book. Cline understands what girls provide other girls. Cline understands that much of what is important in a girl’s life has to do not with getting reactions from boys, but reactions from other girls. Performing for your own gender. Checking out members of your own gender. Compare and contrast. Maybe it’s that the “male gaze” is so prominent, such a default, that women look at each other with the eyes of the “male gaze,” in an assessing way, almost like: “I’d tap that” or “Hell, no, I wouldn’t tap that.” In such a world, true friendship between girls is impossible. You can’t get past it. You’re performing for the men around you … and you’re performing amongst yourselves … both as a way to dominate, but also as a way to “present” to the watching males. Go visit a high school cafeteria. That’s half of what’s going on, at all times. Meanwhile, the boys drift by oblivious, having NO IDEA of the sheer amount of drama that they cause. And it’s not their fault that they’re oblivious. They’re LUCKY to be oblivious. So much of this rang true from my own high school days, where our various crushes were invested with so much power that our emotions floated around the earth in orbit, as opposed to having any connection with any version of reality.
Cline is very very good at capturing this dynamic, in striking prose that gets into your head. There’s a compelling line on almost every page, piercing observations tossed off with casual grace, but flourishing with verbal control. She’s a show-offy writer, and in her case it’s a compliment, since so much of it works so well. It’s attention-getting writing. Rachel Kushner’s is as well. Kushner is superior to Cline (and almost anyone else writing right now) because you don’t feel the “show off” in her writing at all. But still you wonder: HOW is she DOING this?? It’s a distinctive style. The Flamethrowers also involves a cult-like atmosphere (in the second half of the book, which takes place in a fracturing Italy in the 1970s), and also understands the detached and heartless quality so common in self-defined “revolutionaries.” Great book. Have I said that already? Read it. I appreciate Cline’s “attention-getting’ style in The Girls, especially in a world where so much prose sounds the same, where everyone comes out of MFA programs with the same style (one of the main strikes against such programs where a bunch of writers work together in a workshop setting: there becomes a “group” style that is accepted as the norm, and everyone critiqued to move into the same style). Cline finds adjectives and images that suit her story, increasingly hallucinatory, as though the whole thing is happening in a haze of smoke (as, indeed, the summer of 1969 must have felt like, especially in California).
The book is quite frightening, especially since it’s told basically in flashback, from a middle-aged Evie’s perspective, so the narrative is punctured with phrases like “I can see now that …” Or “This wouldn’t become clear until later …” It’s chilling, because it shows the fragility of youth, how vulnerable we are when we are teenagers to outside influences. Historically, cults have had the most success recruiting on college campuses, a time when teenagers are away from home for the first time, looking for structure and community. It’s sinister. Tory Christman, famous “defector” from Scientology and now one of its most vocal critics, says repeatedly in her Youtube messages: “You don’t join a cult. A cult finds you.” That’s what happens to Evie. She’s in the middle of a “lost” summer, in transition, with minimal parental involvement. It’s also the 1960s so parents didn’t hover over their kids. She’s growing apart from her best friend, she’s curious about sex and has no experience, she’s disturbed by her new view of her parents as silly and ineffective, and she’s about to go off to boarding school. In that in-between-moment, she is ripe for the plucking. And pluck her they do.
In a way, the deviations from the Manson story work well (and I think it would be offensive, actually, to do a re-creation of those horrible murders, and yet change the names. My reaction then would be: “Think up your own story!”) I’m not sure about Suzanne’s pushing Evie out of the car on that horrible night. Anyone who’s read it, I welcome discussing it. Because I’m torn. Maybe it’s just because I know too much about Susan Atkins. That’s probably it, and that’s probably unfair and I should be dealing with fictional Suzanne as opposed to the real-life woman who so clearly inspired her (so many of the details are identical). So I’m just not sure about that aspect of it, and almost feel like Cline cringed away from not only the implications of her own story, but its dark and intriguing possibilities. How far would Evie go in denying the awful-ness in order to stay part of the group? How does the mind-adjustment process work, what happens when critical thinking skills are turned off for good? Susan Atkins, who became a born-again Christian in prison (typical), was the most frightening of all of the girls (at the time, and now). When Sharon Tate begged for the life of her baby, Susan said, “Bitch, I don’t care anything about you” before stabbing Sharon in the stomach. At the trial, when shown a picture of Steven Parent, shot dead in the driveway, who “wasn’t supposed to be there,” and asked whether or not she recognized him, Susan said, “Yes. That is the thing I saw in the car.” Thing. Susan Atkins was a monster and I do not care – one bit – that she had an unhappy childhood. Plenty of people have unhappy childhoods and they don’t become what Susan became. There was something in Susan Atkins (or something lacking in Susan Atkins) that made her embrace murder with an enthusiasm and a passion that must have far surpassed Manson’s wildest dreams for the kind of power he wanted to wield. Emma Cline (to my eye, coming at it as I do with an insane amount of knowledge about all those girls) nails what it was about Susan Atkins that was 1. so appealing at the outset – so pretty, the baby-voice, the floating disconnected quality that seemed deep to those who knew her and 2. so incomprehensibly evil later. And calculatedly evil. At one point, Evie observes that there were times when Suzanne’s eyes became a “brick wall.” One of the really insightful aspects of the book is the difference between pot/LSD and speed/amphetamines. There’s a palpable shift at the ranch, once people start popping amphetamines, paranoia, edginess, hardness, and Cline nails those essential differences, so important to understanding the sheer delirium of the late 1960s.
Russell (i.e. Manson) is a predator, but also a charismatic guy who knows how to talk to these lost girls in a way that makes them feel special. Evie notes that he keeps saying her name in their first conversation (a brainwashing technique). He controls the group through sex and power, and all of them bend their body language towards him whenever he is present. Cline is very good on brainwashing, and how the ranch became the whole world … making the outside world seem not only incomprehensible but silly and dispensable. Within a couple of weeks, Evie is stealing for the group and breaking into a neighbor’s home to look for cash.
Except for one moment of violence, when Russell spontaneously slaps Helen across the face, Cline does not show his increasing paranoia and anger at the failed record deal (although she hears about it), nor is there evidence of Manson’s apocalyptic viewpoint, the stockpiling of guns and knives, the dream to blow up the world and hide out in the desert, the “Helter Skelter” of it all. Similar to Jim Jones, who isolated his followers in Guyana, and then bombarded them with end-of-the-world-and-end-of-us propaganda, in his lectures and “sermons” and over the loudspeakers. Without contact with the outside world, his followers relied only on him for information. Manson operated the same way, and increased the group’s fear that something Big was coming, and they were at the center of it, and they needed to do something Big to counter-act it (or start the confrontation in the first place.)
Evie is mostly a “guest” at the ranch, and so its maneuverings often happen behind the scenes. I am not sure that this works entirely. Because to me the really interesting question is, and it’s the eternal question: If Evie had seen more of the backstage story, more of Russell’s violent nature, the mania, the planning for a violent confrontation … would she have still stayed? When would the red flag have come for her? Would it ever come? In real-life, it came to some of the girls involved. There was, after all, a line they would not, could not, cross. After all of the penetrations of and obliterations of boundaries, there were some people there who finally said, “Nope. No can do, Charlie.” Many walked away and never came back. For Linda Kasabian, who became the witness for the prosecution, the moment came the night of the murders when she refused to participate. “I’m not a murderer,” she said. And – and this is very important – Manson did not punish her for it. So, Ms. Leslie Van Houten, your excuses don’t really ring true. You say everyone was in thrall to Charlie, you say Charlie manipulated everyone? You say you would have been punished if you didn’t obey Charlie? Then how do you explain Linda? Linda wasn’t punished. She refused to kill, and Manson shrugged it off. Didn’t even care. In her interview with Diane Sawyer, Leslie van Houten insisted that Sawyer couldn’t know what she would have done in the same situation, because Sawyer wasn’t there, she didn’t know Manson’s power. Leslie’s point was: Sawyer might have participated too because you just can’t know what you would have done in that same situation. Sawyer said, “I do know. I would not have killed anyone.” “But how can you know that?” “Leslie, I know.” And etc. Leslie van Houten is still avoiding personal responsibility. When you think of the example of Linda Kasabian, it is clear that Leslie/Patricia/Susan WANTED to kill someone, to prove their love for Charlie, to show just how much they didn’t give a shit about our world, to kill off their former selves forever, whatever. Linda Kasabian – to this day – lives in fear of holdout Manson-lovers and groupies coming for her to punish her for her “betrayal”. She is still in hiding. In her 2009 televised interview with Larry King (her first interview ever [Correction: Her first interview was in 1988 with Current Affair), she didn’t show her face.
To really get the level of what these women were capable of and their denial of personal responsibility (well, Leslie van Houten parrots all the right words, but I don’t buy it one bit): At one of Patricia Krenwinkle’s recent parole hearings, she was asked, “Who was most hurt by your actions?” Krenwinkle responded, “Myself.” I’m sure she thought that was a lovely and self-aware and Oprah-ish answer. But the parole board heard in that one word that still – after ALL THIS TIME – Patricia Krenwinkle, now an elderly woman, does not get it. She still does not understand what she has done. WRONG ANSWER, Krenwinkle, wrong answer. The person most hurt by your actions, you sociopath-liar, was Abigail Folger, whom you stabbed so many times that the cops who came across the body in the yard the next morning thought she was wearing a red nightgown. Thankfully, after that comment, her file was inked with yet another stamp: PAROLE DENIED.
There were so many who stayed, no matter WHAT Manson did. And some are devoted to him to this day. Squeaky Fromme. I wouldn’t trust Sandra Good as far as I can throw her. So what was that about? Cline’s book does not address that. Nor should it have to, I suppose, because the main appeal for Evie is “the girls,” as the title says. Particularly Suzanne. Suzanne is the main draw. When the other girls at the ranch hover at Russell’s feet, waiting for a touch, a glance, the grand honor of giving him a blowjob, whatever … Evie hovers at Suzanne’s feet. Breathless. Waiting. For approval, attention, inclusion.
And THAT element is what makes the book so unforgettable. How girls look at other girls. What girls will do to get the approval of other girls. How girls relate to one another when a man is present. What jealousy means between girls. What love means between girls. Cline’s conclusions are extremely disturbing.
It’s a book deserving of the hype. I read it in two days.
How have I never seen this before. How have I never seen this interview between Stephen Colbert and Eminem before? Stephen Colbert hosted a public access show in Michigan called “Only in Monroe.” He interviewed the hosts. He did some news-y items. And then he introduces “a local Michigander who is making a name for himself in the competitive world of music.” And there is Eminem, slumped in his chair. Colbert does his schtick, and pretends that he has no idea who Eminem is or really what rap is all about. Colbert is earnest, and fatherly (even though he is only 10 years older than Eminem), urging Eminem to set up a retirement fund in case rap doesn’t work out for him. Eminem plays along (but he’s an amazing actor and so it looks totally real) – he’s totally confused, trying not to say “Do you know who I am?” and trying to be polite about it. It’s like he’s trying to be nice to this totally clueless public-access TV host. The whole thing is DEADPAN as hell (reminds me of the faux interview with Eminem that starts off The Interview. At one point, Colbert asks Eminem if he is inspired by Bob Seger, another Michigander. Because yeah, when you think of Eminem, you think of Bob Seger. Colbert then starts to list all of Seger’s songs, singing brief snippets of them, and of course Eminem knows most of them, but hearing Colbert shrieking “Kathmandu” at Marshall Mathers is the most bizarre thing I’ve seen all … Ever?
The whole “Feat” thing. “Have you ‘Feat’-ed for anyone?”
“You seem a little angry.”
“I’m so frightened,” says Eminem, off-screen.
“Do you do hot yoga?”
“I’m starting a new project in the fall and I’d like to be ‘phenom-ee-NAL’…” Colbert, keeps imitating Eminem’s pronunciation in the song, and I’m dying.
And then the two of them read community announcements at the end (unfortunately not included in this clip).
This is some surreal deadpan performance-art, I’ll tell you that.
A letter from Groucho Marx to Peter Lorre (included in the wonderful The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx
October 5, 1961
Dear Peter:
It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years’ difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.
You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.
Best to you both.
Regards,
Groucho
War journalist and screenwriter Michael Herr has died at the age of 76.
His Dispatches
“We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived – but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade.”
John Leonard in his New York Times review on December 4, 1977, wrote:
“Dispatches by Michael Herr, contains all the subjective energy, the bruised ear, that characterized the 1960’s at their best. It is style disappearing into substance, into history, as though the war, and loves and hates its own perception. In a dull time of maundering, it is an edge, cutting and scraping. I wish it were fiction.”
Alfred Kazin addressed the political aspect of the book (buried in the haze of pot smoke, nearly drowned out by the music). Kazin wrote that Herr’s
“big effort is not literary but political. To his generation, Vietnam did come down to so much self-enclosed, almost self-deafened despair. No one gets above that specific cruel environment.”
Here is a particularly hallucinatory and creepy excerpt from Dispatches:
There were times during the night when all the jungle sounds would stop at once. There was no dwindling down or fading away, it was all gone in a single instant as though some signal had been transmitted out to the life: bats, birds, snakes, monkeys, insects, picking up on a frequency that a thousand years in the jungle might condition you to receive, but leaving you as it was to wonder what you weren’t hearing now, straining for any sound, one piece of information. I had heard it before in other jungles, the Amazon and the Philippines, but those jungles were “secure,” there wasn’t much chance that hundreds of Viet Cong were coming and going, moving and waiting, living out there just to do you harm. The thought of that one could turn any sudden silence into a space that you’d fill with everything you thought was quiet in you, it could even put you on the approach to clairvoyance. You thought you heard impossible things: damp roots breathing, fruit sweating, fervid bug action, the heartbeat of tiny animals.
You could sustain that sensitivity for a long time, either until the babbling and chittering and shrieking of the jungle had started up again, or until something familiar brought you out of it, a helicopter flying around above your canopy or the strangely reassuring sound next to you of one going into the chamber. Once we heard a really frightening thing blaring down from a Psyops soundship broadcasting the sound of a baby crying. You wouldn’t have wanted to hear that during daylight, let alone at night when the volume and distortion came down through two or three layers of cover and froze us all in place for a moment. And there wasn’t much release in the pitched hysteria of the message that followed, hyper-Vietnamese like an icepick in the ear, something like, “Friendly Baby, GVN Baby, Don’t Let This Happen To Your Baby, Resist the Viet Cong Today!”
Sometimes you’d get so tired that you’d forget where you were and sleep the way you hadn’t slept since you were a child. I know that a lot of people there never got up from that kind of sleep; some called them lucky (Never knew what hit him), some called them fucked (If he’d been on the stick …), but that was worse than academic, everyone’s death got talked about, it was a way of constantly touching and turning the odds, and real sleep was at a premium. (I met a ranger-recondo who could go to sleep just like that, say, “Guess I’ll get some,” close his eyes and be there, day or night, sitting or lying down, sleeping through some things but not others; a loud radio or a 105 firing outside the tent wouldn’t wake him, but a rustle in the bushes fifty feet away would, or a stopped generator.) Mostly what you had was on the agitated side of half-sleep, you thought you were sleeping but you were really just waiting. Night sweats, harsh functionings of consciousness, drifting in and out of your head, pinned to a canvas cot somewhere, looking up at a strange ceiling or out through a tent flap at the glimmering night sky of a combat zone. Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn’t 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and made your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet. There were spots in the jungle where you had to have a cigarette going all the time, whether you smoked or not, just to keep the mosquitos from swarming into your mouth. War under water, swamp fever, and instant involuntary weight control, malarias that could burn you out and cave you in, put you into twenty-three hours of sleep a day without giving you a minute of rest, leaving you there to listen to the trance music that they said came in with terminal brain funk. (“Take your pills, baby,” a medic in Can Tho told me. “Big orange ones every week, little white ones every day, and don’t miss a day whatever you do. They got strains over here that could waste a heavy-set fella like you in a week.”) Sometimes you couldn’t live with the terms any longer and headed for air-conditioners in Danang and Saigon. And sometimes the only reason you didn’t panic was that you didn’t have the energy.
Every day people were dying because of some small detail that they couldn’t be bothered to observe. Imagine being too tired to snap a flak jacket closed, too tired to clean your rifle, too tired to guard a light, too tired to deal with the half-inch margins of safety that moving through the war often demanded, just too tired to give a fuck and then dying behind that exhaustion. There were times when the whole war itself seemed tapped of its vitality: epic enervation, the machine running half-assed and depressed, fueled on the watery residue of last year’s war-making energy. Entire divisions would function in a bad dream state, acting out a weird set of moves without any connection to their source. Once I talked for maybe five minutes with a sergeant who had just brought his squad in from a long patrol before I realized that the dopey-dummy film over his eyes and the fly abstraction of his words were coming from deep sleep. He was standing there at the bar of the NCO club with his eyes open and a beer in his hand, responding to some dream conversation far inside his head. It really gave me the creeps — this was the second day of the Tet Offensive, our installation was more or less surrounded, the only secure road out of there was littered with dead Vietnamese, information was scarce and I was pretty touchy and tired myself — and for a second I imagined that I was talking to a dead man. When I told him about it later he just laughed and said, “Shit, that’s nothing. I do that all the time.”
John Leonard summed up the impact and atmosphere of the book in his 1977 review for The Times:
“If you think you don’t want to read any more about Vietnam, you are wrong. Dispatches is beyond politics, beyond rhetoric, beyond ‘pacification’ and body counts and the “psychotic vaudeville’ of Saigon press briefings. Its materials are fear and death, hallucination and the burning of souls. It is as if Dante had gone to hell with a cassette recording of Jimi Hendrix and a pocketful of pills: our first rock-and-roll war, stoned murder.”
U.S. soldier counting off the months in Vietnam. Michael Herr was his voice. Rest in peace.
