Doors

What happened during hammock time today: 8:45 am to 11:50 am:

The New Yorker insisted I devour three articles in a row.  All relevant.  To me anyway.  Review of the Timothy Leary biography (Harcourt $28).  Author Robert Greenfield. Critic Louis Menand sprinkles his review with all the cool references, unattributed, like saying Leary (and "many people in those days") "started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff" and The Doors of Perception and then remarks about Leary's scary smile "a rictus somewhere between a beatific, what-me-worry grin and a movie star's frozen stare into the flashbulbs."  It was really Alan Watts or Aldous Huxley who legitimized acid for the seekers; Leary was the P.T. Barnum.  No one wanted to be like him. Ultimately, acid died out because the social context was lost and, as the story so rightly concludes, "the LSD experience is completely suggestible.  People on the drug see and feel what they expect to see and feel...  If they expect that the secret of the universe will be revealed to them, then that's what they will find.  An illusion, no doubt, but it's as close as we're likely to get." 

Flip past "Briefly Noted" to a review of the Dada exhibit at MOMA.  Quote: "Dada was and remains a drug, of the hallucinogenic type.  What young self-styled bohemian of the past ninety years hasn't got at least briefly high on it?  I sure did, back in the sixties."  Critic: Peter Schjeldahl.

Turn page to a reassessment of Radiohead, which gets a surprising comparison to the Grateful Dead.  And Miles Davis.  And the second theme of a Schubert string quartet. 

Time to burn new copies of the entire Radiohead oeuvre while waiting for Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, to come out in a couple of weeks.

All this and a $2.50 sisal hammock from Guatemala, plus generic brand diet grape soda.

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"I have no idea what I am talking about.  I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead