Topic: Arts & Literature

When NBC presented the mini-series The 60s a few years back, it was preceded by several months of hype. According to the ad masters, this was going to be the definitive story of the sixties, as an important a movie for us boomers as Gone With the Wind had been for my grandparents’ generation or From Here To Eternity had been for those who’d reached maturity under the cloud of the second world war.

While the ad campaign, which began airing during the summer re-run season (the show ran in January), was certainly deserving of an Emmy, the movie itself was nothing but typical movie-of-the-week fare that could have aptly been called A Very Brady Sixties. Even though there were many historical nuances that I was surprised to see that the producers got right, there was just as much that was very wrong. The caricatures of hippies and student radicals looked as if they came right off the set of the old Dragnet series and the movie seemed to reflect anti-drug and pro-nuclear family values that were the antithesis of much that the decade represented.

If I were to describe Black Ice and Banana Peels in one sentence, it would be this: It thoroughly explores the kaleidoscope of tricks that the mind plays on us. These are the real mind games, and this book helps us recognize them.

Black Ice & Banana Peels is not only intellectually stimulating, but it also provides practical ways to beat the mind at its own games. You discover early on that Mr. Bender has a knack for understanding and explaining mental processes and states of mind.

It used to be good to be "banned in Boston." Before the 1950s, publishers used to rush their adult themed books to Beantown, hoping to be able to plaster a coveted "banned in Boston" logo on the cover before releasing the book nationwide. By the 1960s, producers of movies and Broadway-bound shows often worked hard to get their work banned, because being "banned in Boston" meant increased box office receipts elsewhere.

To understand Linda McCartney’s importance to the alternative community, it’s first necessary to grasp the role of the Beatles. Even though she came along at the end of the group’s tenure, in many ways she (along with Yoko) was a member of the band. Some, in fact, blamed her for the demise of the band. In any event, she would be destined to live the last 29 years of her life in the shadow of the group’s memory, and in the shadow of her husband Paul - even though she was an accomplished person in her own right.

John Phillips, 65, founder and songwriter of the Mamas and the Papas, died of heart failure on Sunday March 18th at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

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The Internet, which didn’t even exist a decade ago, is changing everything. Take the music industry for example. It used to be that if you started a record company, your chances of competing with “the majors” were slim to none, no matter how good your product. The big boys had the big bucks, and they used them to stifle competition. A small label had no chance of getting their tapes and CDs in the stores, much less getting them played on the radio. All of that’s changed now, thanks to the influence of the World Wide Web. These days, if you can’t find a deal to get your music distributed, you can sell it yourself in cyberspace. With a little luck (and a little marketing savvy), you might even find yourself becoming a force to be reckoned with.

In 1959, when the U.S. Government decided to conduct tests using psychoactive drugs on paid volunteers at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in the San Francisco area, they didn’t know what a cuckoo’s nest they were about to unleash on the world. Taking part in the study on the then legal drug LSD, along with psilocybin, mescaline and amphetamine IT-290, was Ken Kesey, an unassuming graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University. During the period of several weeks, Kesey “dropped” hallucinogenic drugs and wrote about his “tripping” experiences for government researchers.

“Blue Mother EarthAn Obsession With Time”

A CD by Nick ShiresGabriel Publications Ltd. reviewed by Christine Hall

Putting together a good meditation CD must be a thankless task for an accomplished musician. To begin with, the artist must write and perform music that is designed to not only soothe the soul, but which can unobtrusively remain in the background during a meditation session. At the same time, the compositions should be texturally rich and filled with complex passages. Most of all, the music on such a CD must avoid any comparison with Muzak, otherwise known as elevator music. This is much like the task that faces a composer of soundtracks for motion pictures, except that here it’s the listener’s soul and emotions that are being enhanced, rather than an on-screen love scene or action sequence. This is exactly the job that British musician and composer Nick Shires has undertaken for his CD Blue Mother Earth, An Obsession With Time. The twelve tunes contained on this disc are symphonic meditations on twelve separate one word themes, like “Awakening,” “Joy,” and “Achievement.” Although each track neatly fits into the overall theme of the album, each is also complete unto itself, and Shires deftly avoids any pretentious or oversimplified Yanni-esque influences that have become much too common in the world of “New Age” music.

On a spring morning in 1999, a delivery van rattled down the long driveway to Joseph Jenkins’ country home in Pennsylvania to deliver a manila envelope. Inside the envelope was an official looking legal document and another envelope, this one white and letter-sized. The legal document was from a group of lawyers in Montana, informing him that his Great Aunt Lucille Boggs had died on April 26. Following her instructions, they were forwarding the enclosed envelope to him, which contained a letter from Aunt Lucy, along with a check for $10,000.

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“Big things come in small packages.” Like most clichés, we’ve heard this phrase so many times that it’s lost its impact, if not it’s meaning. Clichés are like that, which is why we’re supposed to avoid them when writing. We’re not supposed to write phrases like ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

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