image by Mouse

Watts waxed effusive in a 1969 review in the San Francisco Chronicle:

If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society—all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian.

Okay. Fine. But we the “mysteriously rebellious children” were more interested in the art of Victor Moscoso and Stanley Mouse than we were in academic navel gazing. Some of us were crafting a new diet comprising brown rice and veg, acid, and simple get-down rock and roll. Few of us bought the book, but we understood that we were indeed the people our parents had warned us about.

Roszak is back, reprising his role as monitor of the mutants with a new volume titled The Making of an Elder Culture. I think I’ll make time to read this one. There’s something sweet about shameless baby boomer boosterism in the form of pop sociology. Sweeter still is Roszak’s achievement of chronicling the arc of the boomer effect from American youth culture to gerontocracy without actually setting foot in Peoria, Iowa, or Mule Fart, Arkansas: all places where the boomer dynamic plays itself out in a subtly different way from what’s happening in Berkeley, California.

Of local interest:

• el guante will be slamming for the St. Paul team,
• Madison has a team, and
• Milwaukee will be there too.

Follow @NPS2009 on twitter and look for tweets that have been tagged #NPS200. Last and least, for those who tweak on that Facebook crack, yes–there is a group.

DOC BENWAY HERE ………. NURSE, SLIP ME ANOTHER AMPULE
OF LAUDANUM ………. RECOLLECT ONCE ME AND CLEM CLONE WAS CHEWIN
JOHIMBE BARK OUT BACK OF JODY’S ALL-NIGHT PET SHOP …….

NOT A FINER MAN IN THIS WHOLE ZONE
THAN OL’ CLEM ‘N JODY CLONE …..

****WHERE WAS WE, YEAH —- USE AUTHORIZED DATA BASE ACCESS
PROTOCOLS ONLY ….. SENSUOUS KEYSTROKES FORBIDDEN ….. DO NOT
STRUM THAT 33 LIKE A HAWAIIAN STEEL GUITAR ….. GRAND CONCLAVE
OF THE PARTIES OF INTERZONE: CHECK YOUR BOX FOR DETAILS…..
PERSONAL ATTENDANCE REQUIRED; SEND NO REPLICA. BENWAY OUT.
TLALCLATLAN ……

community memory

Fry yourself up a deelishus peanut butter, bacon, and banana sandwich on white bread, and pause for a moment to contemplate The King. Today he is, or would have been, 74 years old.

They served cake today in the Elvis shopping center across US51 from Graceland.

Confession time: I have used the slang negative comparator “Not so much.” I used it with all of its arch, self-consciously ironic informality in conversation with Beth. She called me on it. I don’t know why I used it. Perhaps I simply allowed myself to be imprinted and informed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s a Val gal overtone in the phrase, an oily late seventies currency that slowly seeped out of the pop cultural plastic California suburbs with the middle-school kids who originated it. The process continues, I’m sure. (Internal voice echoes, “Yeah, like you’re SO sure. NOT!”)

One of the most deadly and boring contrivances in American language is the phony posturing that goes with the conversational usage of the asked-and-answered rhetorical question. There’s a TV news-reader pomposity that goes with the delivery of asked-and-answered rhetorical questions. “Should we be in Iraq? No, but since we are already there…”

“Not so much” pickles this formulaic usage in the brine of deprecatory irony. “You may see a good reason to continue the war in Iraq. Me? Not so much.”

Snappy? Sure. Original? Not so much…

more on that caca from wikipedia

wikipedia biographical article

[tags]george carlin, seven filthy words, fcc versus pacifica[/tags]

[tags]jack kerouac, steve allen[/tags]

[tags]dancingbear, dancing bear, hugh da bear, huge effing bear, hugh macleod, hugh’s whuffie, meth lab texas[/tags]

The jive is hip, don’t say hep
That’s a slip of the lip, let me give you a tip
Don’t you ever say hep it ain’t hip, NO IT AIN’T
It ain’t hip to be loud and wrong
Just because you’re feeling strong
You try too hard to make a hit
And every time you do you tip your mitt
It ain’t hip to blow your top
The only thing you say is mop, mop, mop
Keep cool fool, like a fish in the pool
That’s the golden rule at the Hipster school
You find yourself talking too much
Then you know you’re off the track
That’s the stuff you got to watch
Everybody wants to get into the act
It ain’t hip to think you’re “in there”
Just because of the zooty suit you wear
You can laugh and shout but you better watch out
Cause you don’t know what it’s all about, man
Man you ain’t hip if you don’t get hip to this hip and hep jive
Now get it now, look out
Man get hip with the hipster, YEAH! Got to do it!
— Harry the Hipster, 1947

Rock on…