The Red Hot Chili Peppers Came to Town

Just about everyone has met someone they’ve seen in a movie or on television. Or at least they’ve got a glimpse of them. Usually, they’re not nearly as beautiful as you thought they were.

There’s a doc about the great Bill Murray and how he meets people in random places, the grocery store or just walking down the street, and ends up hanging with them, going to their parties. I met Bill Murray once myself, an unexpected encounter that resulted in a conversation and a deep impression that he’s more “zen” than Buddha and one deep mofo. But that story will never be told in print; only to friends.

The waves that an encounter with celebrity can send through a community, changing people’s lives in unexpected ways. That’s what I’m talking about.

Like when the Red Hot Chili Peppers came to town.

~

During the summer there are always a few private jets parked in their own little section of the airport—you can see them from the highway. Over the years Oprah, various Rockefellers, Sergey and Larry and their Google friends have stopped in for the scenery and the glaciers and eagles and bears. Back in the day John Wayne brought a boat up and fished for salmon every summer.

I’d really only gotten into the Peppers when Blood Sugar Sex Magik hit. A friend and I had a series of bong hits one lazy afternoon, and in the middle of this he spun up the CD. I was immediately, hypnotically into it. Looking back, I can see that it was one of those albums that’s probably best on a marijuana high. I can listen to it now, but I have to get myself in that mindset, the memories of a cramped old apartment and the exhaled smoke streaming through the light from a tiny, hooded lamp.

So it was probably ’92 or ’93, summer. Nowadays I can usually, mostly get the dates on things like this within a year or two.

Imagine a “downtown” of a few thousand people packed into a square mile or so of apartments and little old houses and tourist traps. And one morning, there these guyz are, fresh off the private jet, walking around. Kiedis was wearing some kind of cat in the hat that you could see from far away. Flea went shirtless as soon as the sun came out, and the other two guys? I don’t know, maybe they were there, maybe they weren’t. I probably didn’t know what they looked like.

The next day, I heard from one degree of separation, there’d been a party the night before. The guyz had invited six or seven good looking women they’d met walking around town that day, buying souvenirs and coffee and causing buzz. There was just one other guy besides Kiedis and Flea. Maybe he was the local connection.

I’m not sure if this was supposed to be during one of Kiedis’s “clean” periods or not, but there was certainly plenty of coke, interrupted by the occasional joint to chill a bit, and a flow of brandy and whiskey throughout.

Of the six or seven girls, two or three made it out before the orgy started, my informant told me. She had been one of them. Another was a girl named Katie, that I’d seen around at a few parties. She was the quintessential Alaska babe, pretty face and blonde hair but outdoors tomboy as fuck, hiking, fishing, skiing and often wrapped in layers of rubber to keep the rain off. She lived with some older guy on a boat down at the harbor.

The next night we had a big bonfire at a hidden beach a few miles out of town. It wasn’t a secret place, of course, but you had to hike a mile to get there, which kept the riff raff out. It was a mellow scene, 20 or 30 people all of whom had packed some beer in, and usually that’s all there was, except for pot. Some of them were state government, some had jobs leading tourists on bike rides or driving their busses.

The big topic that night was the Peppers. The guyz were rumored to be heading out on a boat for Glacier Bay the next day.

Katie showed up at the party late. She looked normal enough wearing a baseball cap, but she wasn’t talking much. When she took it off, her head was shaved down to stubble. I was standing with a little knot of friends a ways away. Someone said, “Damn.”

“Yeah, didn’t you hear?” asked one of the other girls, one who hadn’t been at the party. “Jim shaved her head yesterday when she got home. And she didn’t even fuck those guys.”

I was reeling, oh, I’d read the books, of course, after Allies liberated France the French had shaved the heads of hundreds, thousands of women who were suspected of fucking Germans. I’d seen the photos. There was something primitive about it. Something primal. A few had been slapped around, but very few had been seriously injured. The head shaving had sufficed, as a ritual cleansing of sorts.

Later on, after the fire died down, I saw Katie was alone and went over to talk to her. I got her a beer and we took a couple of puffs on a pipe I had. I asked her if she’d like to go out with me sometime. My approach was too indirect. Way too nice. I don’t think it would have mattered, anyway.

“I like you, man, but I don’t think so,” she said.

She was pretty drunk, filters down. It was that time at a party, after a certain number of hours, where the truth comes out.

“I’m going back on the boat tonight. I talked with Jim, and we worked things out.”

“But he shaved your head!” I said, louder. “How the fuck did he do that, did he tie you up?” I’d been wondering about that all night.

“Yeah,” she said.

I couldn’t think of anything to say for a while.

“He loves me, and I deserved it,” she said.

And she handed back my pipe and walked away.

Review: The Gentleman Farmers by Loretta Malakie

(My review of Loretta Malakie’s previous novel Love in the Age of Dispossession is here).

I’ve become very interested in “second novels,” having published my own in January. After reading and enjoying Loretta Malakie’s Love in the Age of Dispossession I was thus very interested when I heard some months ago she was writing a second book, The Gentleman Farmers.

Maggie Kingsbury, single middle-aged alcoholic lawyer, joins her in-laws Molly and Kevin on a homestead in the mountains of North Carolina, where their trustafarian college frenemies Brock and Sandra have just bought their third home. Molly commissions Brock to renovate an old Appalachian tobacco barn on their property. But when maverick hillbilly throwback Uncle Billy shows up to live in their field in a camper van, power struggles ensue. Meanwhile, Kevin has become dangerously obsessed with breeding heritage livestock. When Maggie’s beloved niece Juliet asks her to take on a mysterious client, Maggie becomes implicated in a national political furor.

A second novel should be better than the first in a lot of ways–after all,  the author has experience, the author has practice. Even more important, at least in my experience the author has confidence, that he or she can get the job done. Even in the times I was struggling the most with my second book, I felt like if I just kept pushing words out it would all work together. And it did.

Meanwhile Ms. Malakie was working on The Gentlemen Farmers, and as much as I liked Love in the Age of Dispossession, in some ways this second novel is a better book, a little smoother, a little better edited, and quite a bit funnier. There are more “laugh out loud” moments here, but Malakie hasn’t lost her touch when it comes to illustrating, and mourning, the gradual degradation of Normal America, small town America, where people got along, had children, where children knew their grandparents and aunts and uncles. That’s gone now, in much of America, but Maggie Kingsbury is old enough to remember it and describe it to us, and how it was lost, or taken away, by our so-called “elites,” through immigration and “offshoring,” all of it to fatten the bottom lines of multinational corporations.

The characters in The Gentleman Farmers only come to realize this gradually, as their small New York town becomes unlivable, and as their new North Carolina area begins to show the cracks, as well. It’s the teenager Juliet that points out that becoming gentleman farmers, cultivating heirloom tomatoes and heritage breeds, has become a substitute for  cultivating our own culture and heritage. The author connects the current “statue wars” to the same situation in a neat package, and it becomes clear, how all of it’s connected.

Comedy, tragedy, love, life and death, Malakie deftly handles them all in The Gentleman Farmers. As “second novels” or any novels go, it’s terrific and highly recommended.

Love in the Age of Dispossession on Amazon

The Gentleman Farmers on Amazon

 

Repost: Occam and Me on JFK and 9/11

(My first piece ever at that grand old group blog The Mitrailleuse, November 2014. With an intellectual background like the one below, no wonder I wrote a novel titled Sanity…)

The first reference to Occam’s Razor I ever saw, age 12, was in Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, which sent me to the encyclopedia (and yes, I’m that old), because who could read the mysterious words “Occam’s Razor” and not be dying to know what it was?

I began reading about the assassination of President  Kennedy when I was 14, my interest sparked by Josiah Thompson‘s book Six Seconds in Dallas, which I found through the proven technique of a random walk through the public library stacks, scanning spines for anything that caught my eye and grabbing it. Who knows why or how these fascinations begin, but by the time I finished Thompson’s well-written and reasonable book I was hooked, leaning toward the “second gun” theory, and on the prowl for more of the seemingly endless supply of fact (and especially, fancy) on the events of November 22, 1963.

Civil War 2.0 Will Be Livestreamed

(A repost of my piece at the dear departed Mitrailleuse blog almost exactly four years ago–July 16, 2016. And I  now give it four stars out of five…it just turned out to be even better, four years later. We now return to those days of yore when no one knew who would be the next President, but somehow everyone knew it was gonna be LIT.)

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

~The events of this summer are a taste of what’s to come in the fall, and even more so, November 9, 2016.

Someone is going to win the Presidential election, and regardless of whether it’s Trump or Clinton, the loser’s supporters are going to feel existential angst about America, and their place in it, far beyond the usual.

Pat Buchanan advises us to take a Chill Pill; “For when a real powder keg blew in the ’60s, I was there. And this is not it.” And yet…in “The ’60s” (and the early ’70s, which is when some of the worst SHTF) we had the evening TV news and the papers. The crazy spread slower then. This time, any and every incident is going to be magnified and extremely accelerated.

Scott Adams, one of the most intelligent commentators extant, catches something significant here in a few well-chosen words:

So now we have a situation in which Team Clinton has scared citizens into thinking the threat to their lives is mostly domestic, coming from Trump, Trump supporters, and anyone who looks like them. People who are scared will act. And we see those actions now in terms of violence against police, violence against Trump supporters, and death threats to bloggers such as me. And we already have one attempted Trump assassination.

So far, Trump has showed a willingness to annihilate any professional politician that gets in the way. And he’s annihilated professional reporters and news organizations that got in his way. And he’s tough on non-citizens. But Trump hasn’t tried to turn American citizens against each other. Clinton has, and successfully so.

You can blame Trump for Trump University, and for his uncivil language. You can blame Trump for lots of stuff. But the police shootings and the recent uptick in domestic racial violence are mostly Clinton’s doings to win the election. And it is working. Unless Trump finds a way to counter Clinton’s racial persuasion, he will lose in November.

I expect Trump to go full-attack after the conventions. It would take the world’s greatest persuader to redefine Trump in a way that he can win the election. But as it turns out, Trump is probably the world’s greatest persuader. That’s why I predict he will win in a landslide. Unless someone kills him first.

Everyone, I think, senses something different, something large and vibrating and vaguely menacing, coming down the pike. I recently finished Jon Meacham’s semi-hagiography of George H.W. Bush and I was struck by Bush’s bewildered reaction to his loss to Bubba in 1992: How could America elect a draft-dodging, in-your-face serial liar and shameless philanderer over a man who’d volunteered to go in harm’s way, had his plane shot out from under him by the Japs and done his conscientious best to serve the nation for 30 years?

The answer, of course, was that Bubba and Mrs. Clinton and their friends in the media who’d gone to Harvard and Yale with them had finally got into positions of influence to make their ’60s-’70s Frankfurt School/Rules for Radicals dreams into realities. All of that Old School crap about Duty, Honor, Country was now inoperative. The Republican Party subsequently nominated a series of decent, moderate men, only one of whom could win, and that mainly because of the manifest weaknesses of his opponents.

Which brings us to the Current Year.

“People who are scared will act…”

(Insert now-removed video  of guy in Trump hat being chased and beaten by peaceful protesters)

There’s going to be plenty more of this, at the conventions and after. The BLMers and Black Blocers and Mexican Flag Wavers seem to believe they’re immune to serious retaliation from Trumpers, who actually support Western civilization. But from what I see on Twitter and elsewhere, limits will shortly be reached.

“Civil War 2.0” is, of course, hyperbole. Half a million Americans aren’t going to die in the next four years over who wins this election. Only one side, this time, seems to be spoiling for actual violence.

They’d best be careful what they wish for.

(photo credit)

Te Kererū Book 1 – The Nest by Susan Smith

Te Kererū Book 1 available at GumRoad

The best thing about being on Twitter has been discovering new authors. I also love the humor, but good books > funny .gifs.

I’ll do another post with the (long) list of fine writers and their books I’ve discovered there, but today we focus on one delightful little book (or Part I of a delightful long book) Te Kererū by Susan G. Smith.

My primary goal on Twitter is to:

Promote my beautiful country, chat with people & generally have a fun time

My husbands goal for me on Twitter is to:

Promote my personal brand and my book

Why are you on Twitter?https://t.co/YtzO8KF29p

— Te Kererū (@sgsmith_) February 7, 2020

“Te Kererū” is the Māori name for the native New Zealand wood pigeon, a beautiful and tasty bird. When three-year-old Katherine Taylor, a “Pākehā” (white person) is orphaned by a massive landslide, she is adopted by the regional Māori chief–and by the village and its people. Given the nickname Te Kererū, little Kate is different, quiet, mysterious, apparently the proverbial “old soul.” But the book subtly hints she’s something more than this, something bigger…

Without trying hard in any way, we’re educated about the New Zealand Māori culture and society, something I had only a slight knowledge of before reading Te Kererū. The author obviously loves her country and its people and the book opened up a new piece of the world for me, as I believe it will for most readers.

Her style is clear, limpid is the old-fashioned word, mostly short declarative sentences, but skillfully layered one upon another, sips not gulps, and very satisfying, in the long run.

The story is developed through a series of scenes or vignettes, glimpses of events and pieces of conversations, a technique I also use and can appreciate. Each chapter is a facet of a gem, and gradually we begin to see something taking shape, a mission or a destiny, and…end of Book 1.

Like the wonderful old movie serials, the present volume leaves the reader wanting more. This isn’t so common these days, but I’m all right with it. I understand the next book will be available soon, which I hope is true.

Because the only thing I didn’t like about this book was that it ended.

Te Kererū, Book 1 by Susan G. Smith

The Iron Way: A Narrative of Crisis by John Solomon Bain

Some books entertain, and some make you think about something in a new way.

Some resonate, inject the mind with a bit of the truth that you never would have been gifted with, had you not read that book. And this is a very individual thing; a given book might be life-changing for me, but leave you wondering what the fuss is all about.

John Solomon Bain’s The Iron Way: A Narrative of Crisis resonated with me. Before I get into it, it’s important to note that Bain has recently read my book Sanity, and engaged with it at Man With a Purpose. As he said there:

Note: this is not a review. I don’t write reviews. This is a response. I don’t bother writing about books that aren’t worth reading.

I like the way he puts it. This, too, is not a review, but a response.

The Iron Way depicts a man, today, here in Current Year America, a man with the proverbial Wonderful Life. Material abundance, a good and loving wife, children, health. Yet, like many of us (for this is me, too) he has the feeling that:

[T]hings are not quite how they ought to be. But ultimately I am powerless to change the cosmic tide. The world is broken, and has been since the days of our sire. Even in ancient times you had writers like Hesiod who thought he lived in a fallen time, and looked back into the mists of legend and dreamt of a time when mortals lived freely with the gods.

It is a feeling, then, that men have had for a very long time, perhaps since they became men, as such. And yet, with universal literacy and technological change and the “easy life” we know now, the feeling only seems to have gotten stronger. When necessity and duty and tradition were the powerful principles governing human action there was little time for worry about whether things were as they ought be be, except for aristocratic intellectuals who could read and had time on their hands.

We are all, in effect, intellectuals now.

The narrator of The Iron Way “weep[s] for the stupidity of my existence” even as he drives to his beautiful home and his patient, loving wife, or to his professorship at the university, the work that he desired and strove for so many hours and years to obtain. Yet, at work he cannot really be himself, concealing his truths in conversations with politically correct colleagues. When and where can a man “be himself,” now, hunter, warrior, conqueror, killer? Not at university, almost nowhere in our unisex, equality-obsessed society.

But a man can write. There is one place, still, we’re truly, totally free; in our minds and in the words we write. Perhaps those words are not all for publication, but some of us burn to let the words out, and burn to share some of them, the right ones, with the world. The Iron Way is a book of the banality of modernity, of being a man in a feminizing culture, but at the root it’s a book about writing, the agony and the ecstasy of it.

I sit there, staring numbly at the cursor in the blank document for several minutes, My mind keeps wandering to the game I want to play. I wish I was more driven. I feel and overwhelming need to write that haunts me day and night, and has my entire life. I wake up in the middle of the night with fear of things left unwritten.

…

I feel the Dionysian spirit for a moment. The room begins to fade from consciousness as I write in a state of feverish madness. Time slips away. As I slide into the act of creation, I approach the Real.

The narrator talks elsewhere about his efforts to live the hard life, living in the woods like Thoreau, lifting heavy weights, but the real hard life, and his purpose, is to write.

There have been many good novels that explore the idiocies of modernity, the cancer of feminism, the crisis of “manhood,” but few have explored the writer, the writing life and why we do what we must do, as well as The Iron Way. There are other themes and nuances that I’ve not touched on here, but enough of writing about a man writing about writing. I invite you to read for yourself.

Inadvertent Hot-Tubbing With Hot Stewardesses: A Tale

As a public service in these stressful times I'd like to offer, as a palate cleanser, the most embarrassing moment of my life.

10ish years ago, my ex bf and I visited a spa in Germany. It's swimsuits in the pool but you have to be naked in the sauna. 

Btw I speak no German.  1/

— Anbara Salam (@anbara_salam) March 16, 2020

I’m all for palate cleansers, so I hereby offer the world this story.

Many years ago, I’m traveling on business and staying at a nice hotel, a cut above where I usually stay in this particular city.

After an evening workout, I shower and am toweling off when I notice a door with a sign that says “Spa.” I open it and there’s a bubbling hot tub, empty. Without much thought, I walk over, get in and relax. I’m used to my athletic club, which has separate facilities for men and women, and this is a nice hotel, right?

I’m just starting to really zen out, floating in that hypnagogic state the hot water and bubbles induce, when I hear a noise behind me, a door opening. I hadn’t really noticed that door.

Three women come in, beautiful women. In bikinis.

They settle in next to each other on the other side of the tub. I play it cool, the bubbles thankfully conceal everything, so to speak. For the first time, I notice a small sign on the wall: “Swim suits required in spa.” Seriously, had not noticed it before.

The three hotties start speaking German, I gather that they’re Lufthansa flight attendants. I know a few words of German. They’re mostly talking about guys. I close my eyes and sink down until my chin is touching the water. I’ll wait them out.

There is no alternative.

They gabble and giggle on and on. I start to get hot. I would definitely be getting out now if they weren’t there. Finally there’s some splashing. I open my eyes to a slit and see three lovely pairs of German buttocks exit the hot tub. They come around behind me and I prepare to spring up and out and into the men’s locker room as soon as possible.

The door doesn’t completely close. There are footsteps coming from behind.

Two beautiful Japanese women come into sight, yeah, I can tell Japanese from Chinese and Korean, okay? One of them, thankfully, goes to the bubbler timing dial and turns it back to 60 minutes. They get in. Unlike the Germans, they look at me and smile. I smile back, nod. I know Japanese like it hot, and like staying in the hot water for a long time…

I remember a Kung Fu episode where David Carradine survives like a week in some kind of prison hot box. I close my eyes and imagine coolness, cool, cool water, iced drinks, glaciers…the Japanese women are JAL stews, I gather. They speak to each other softly. After a long ten minutes or so, one of them says something that I gather translates into, “Look at the time, we gotta go!” I open my eyes just in time to see two lovely Japanese asses leaving the spa. When I hear the door click shut it takes me approximately .5 seconds to get back in the men’s locker room. I’m bright red, and my hands and feet really do look like prunes. There’s no one else around, and I grab a fresh towel and sit on a bench, and laugh. And laugh some more.

After this, I always read the signs.

The End.

 

 

A Good Dose of Reality

My novel Reality has been out on Kindle for a week, and I’ll have the print version posted by tonight. I’m happy to note how many people asked for a hard copy.

The book is a “follow-up” to Sanity–not exactly a sequel, but given the fragmented style of the whole enterprise, I’d say it fits together with the first book like one of those puzzles where various odd shaped pieces of wood combine, with some difficulty, to form a sphere.

The background of the ideas that set this whole thing off is here, from April 2018:

Anyway…as described here I read a tweet where someone asked “Who is going to be the Tom Wolfe of the Dark Enlightenment/Red Pill?” and I’ve been searching for it for awhile to give credit where credit is due, but I think I finally figured out why it couldn’t be found, because the account has been suspended. @TitusAvenged RIP:

Just promised to do this. Been preparing for it all my life, or since I found out Mommy was lying when said girls like “nice boys,” anyway. https://t.co/TH5E5Lf1mZ

— neovictorian23 (@neovictorian23) January 25, 2017

So, it took a year to write a little bitty 68,000 word novel. How did it actually get done? I had some memory tickling me, of Isaac Asimov’s Murder at the ABA, A Puzzle in Four Days and 60 Scenes. I’ve always dreamed about writing something in the style of Illuminatus!, a whole book where the time line is shattered and then scattered, over and over (I think a guy named Joyce got there first). So no, I don’t have an outline. I’m going to write 60 scenes and they’re going to be temporally shuffled, and they’re going to be DE/RP and they’re going to be entertaining as hell.

You’ll have to judge for yourself, how it all turned out.

Book Review: A Moon Full of Stars by Jon Mollison

A Moon Full of Stars (2017)

Good works of art always contain some combination of the expected, and the surprising. Too little of one or the other and the work becomes boring, or incoherent.

One of the charms of Jon Mollison’s novel A Moon Full of Stars is the use of some familiar post-apocalyptic science fiction tropes in the opening, followed by some unexpected twists that show the reader things were not as they seemed. When marauders raid a small, peaceful farming village, two of the young men, Rome and Warsaw, are out hunting and avoid capture–and events are set in motion that will radically change the future history of Earth, and the Moon.

This is the kind of book where much more description of the plot would certainly spoil the surprises, so I’ll leave it at that; but I especially enjoyed the mental power or “psi” aspects of the book, something that I weave into my own fiction.

The fighting/combat scenes are well-done, and the descriptions of “mental combat” are, too. As an admirer of the great E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series I felt like the author hit just the right notes here.

A Moon Full of Stars is fun, and it satisfies. It contains a few typos which detracted from my reading not at all. It takes a place of honor in the “PulpRev” movement (note: Mollison is included in this PulpRev Sampler) and I heartily recommend it to readers who like action, adventure and pleasant surprises.

Speaking Reality Into Being

rly interesting how in Harry Potter a sign of slavish fear is the inability to name something

— Just Loki (@LokiJulianus) July 15, 2019

“The novella Gulf was quite unusual, for Heinlein or any writer, in its conception and execution. In the November 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction a letter had been published critiquing the…November 1949 issue. As editor John Campbell wrote:

“Generally, a desirable, practically attainable idea, suggested in prophecy, has a chance of forcing itself into reality by its very existence. Like, for example, this particular issue of Astounding Science Fiction.”

“By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all the stars by the breath of His mouth.” Psalms 33:6

“There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities.” Alfred Korzybski, The Manhood of Humanity (1921)

We know, or think we know, that “scientists” have “proven” that every “thing” is made of atoms plus those rather ghostly neutrinos plus electromagnetic radiation as photons and what ever else lives in the “particle zoo” but then they get back to the “Singularity” at the Beginning and 1) flat out concede that they know not what came before, 2) refuse to speculate about “Why?” and 3) by the way, the Universe will “end,” if one can call it an end, in a sort of perfection, the Heat Death of perfect entropy, of all energy spread perfectly evenly, ghostly, throughout all of spacetime.