World Out of Whack

Chaos, Lemonheads, Do What You Want

Hello friends, apologies for the brevity in advance. I flew out to Northern Virginia to spend some time with my mom who is in poor health. Yesterday morning I was running around looking for my wallet while the clock ticked down before the car arrived to take me to the airport. I’d broken a sweat and was getting frantic. Nuvia snapped me out of it by getting me to take a few deep breaths and I found my wallet… packed inside my suitcase. Late last night while watching television with my mom a fucking tornado warning flashed across the screen as lightning flickered in the distance. And now Texas has gone full Gilead? 

The world is out of whack. That seems to be the explanation for everything these days. I’m worn out from my travels so I’m going to share a few updates and then get off your screen.

More Manson

After my recent Once Upon a Time in the West-inspired ramblings about Ed Sanders’s The Family, a reader (Hi Josh!) alerted me to a newish book called Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neil and Dan Piepenbring. 

You might recall that my chief complaint about The Family was how confused I felt after reading it. I felt like a bunch of stories had been dumped in my head and then mixed up with a blender. Chaos is somehow broader in scope but clearer and better organized. It’s also one hell of a read. Again and again I couldn’t believe what the authors had dug up. O’Neil takes the novel approach of inserting himself in the story and leading the reader through his investigation so that it reads like a detective story. 

Reading Chaos is the closest thing I’ve had to a Thomas Pynchon experience since, well, reading Thomas Pynchon. One of the things that Pynchon’s masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, accomplished was the demolition of the myth of the single villain. We take comfort in the idea of an evil antagonist because she can be taken out by a worthy hero. (And that hero could be any one of us.)

Well, not so fast, kaputnik. Pynchon’s postmodernist masterstroke was to reveal that for every so-called “villain” there are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of enablers working on both sides of the conflict who do just as much damage. And so it is with the Manson story, a postmodernist crime saga if there ever was one. O’Neil’s book destroys the narrative that Manson’s prosecutors used to convict him and his followers and reveals criminal malfeasance by a host of shady operators, including celebrities, drug dealers, police detectives, the DA’s office, and, yes, the CIA. Chaos doesn’t offer an alternative explanation, but blows a hundred holes in the one that’s been accepted for the last fifty years.

Feeling the Squeeze

I’m getting close to finishing up a draft of the Evan Dando book. The project has been bringing me a lot of joy lately. Check out this ramshackle version of “Mrs. Robinson” that the Lemonheads performed on Top of the Pops in 1993. The end of the song features Evan imitating Morrissey. Just watch it. 

The official Lemonheads Instagram account has been more active lately as the band gears up for a series of shows this fall. Recently, Evan posted a moving tribute to his father, who passed away recently after a long illness. It’s breathtaking how much pain and suffering there is in the world. Is there anyone anywhere isn’t going through some shit right now? (Please don’t answer that but…

Do What You Want

Last week a book of paperbacks arrived and I’ve already given a bunch away. Don’t worry, I’ll have a special giveaway for readers of Message from the Underworld when I get back to San Diego. But it makes no sense to do it now since I can’t mail them out. If you don’t want to wait you can order the book through your favorite bookseller or request it from your local library. The paperback feels heftier than the hardback somehow. I’m really happy with how it turned out. 

One last thing. I know a lot of you are hurting. I want you to know that you can always write and peak your mind about whatever baffling bullshit the world has dumped on your plate.