"Two smart, insecure, witty singles meet at a Manhattan tennis club, consciously couple, measure their lives in psychotherapy sessions, find lobster humor in the Hamptons and disagree about whether Los Angeles is beyond redemption."

A summary of "Annie Hall." 

From the obituary for Marshall Brickman, "Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen’s Co-Writer on Hit Films, Dies at 85/The duo won an Oscar for 'Annie Hall.' Mr. Brickman went on to write Broadway shows, including 'Jersey Boys,' and make movies of his own" (NYT).

Also, he was a UW alum: "Marshall...  attended the University of Wisconsin, a school he chose casually because a friend was going there and seemed to like it."

And: "In 1964, Mr. Brickman played banjo as a member of the New Journeymen, a trio with John Phillips and Michelle Phillips. When Mr. Brickman left the group, the couple took on two new partners and created the Mamas & the Papas. That may have seemed like bad timing, but a few years later he and a friend were invited to Sharon Tate’s house in Beverly Hills and decided at the last minute to go to Malibu instead. It was the night of the Manson family murders."

In the late 1960s, Brickman was a writer on "The Tonight Show," and he created Carnac the Magnificent!

"He writes graphically of his own deflowering; how he passes on the favor to his friend Carrie Fisher; of the almost-hand job he gets..."

"... in the back seat from someone’s wife when hitchhiking, as everyone used to do before the Manson murders; how Tennessee Williams grabs his testicles when he’s waiting tables at a dinner party — for better and worse, people always seem to be making a run at Griffin’s crotch — and Martin Scorsese’s wrath when he violates an order of celibacy during the filming of 'After Hours' (1985).... Much of [this memoir] is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born.... dropping Timothy Leary’s finest acid. Sean Connery, then playing James Bond, saved him from drowning! Bob Denver from 'Gilligan’s Island' had a temper!"

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Growing Up With Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, in the Land of Make-Believe/In his memoir 'The Friday Afternoon Club,' the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese’s 'After Hours,' recounts his privileged upbringing" (NYT).

Here's the book, "The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir" (commission earned).

"[O]n the morning of John Kennedy’s death in 1963 I was buying, at Ransohoff’s in San Francisco, a short silk dress in which to be married."

"A few years later this dress of mine was ruined when, at a dinner party in Bel-Air, Roman Polanski accidentally spilled a glass of red wine on it. Sharon Tate was also a guest at this party, although she and Roman Polanski were not yet married. On July 27, 1970, I went to the Magnin-Hi Shop on the third floor of I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and picked out, at Linda Kasabian’s request, the dress in which she began her testimony about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. 'Size 9 Petite,' her instructions read. 'Mini but not extremely mini. In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold. Or: A Mexican peasant-style dress, smocked or embroidered.'"

Wrote Joan Didion, in "The White Album" (1979).

I'm reading that this morning after seeing "Linda Kasabian, Who Testified Against Charles Manson, Dies at 73/She had been a Manson family member and was along on the nights of the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, but she later became the prosecution’s lead witness" (NYT).

Didion continues:

"When Dalton arrived, [Brian] Wilson was refusing to co-operate with the swarm of journalists surrounding him. 'He was sitting at the edge of the ocean, playing with the stones'...."

"To the dismay of the other photographers Dalton, an easygoing and charming Englishman, was able to break through to him and 'everything I asked him to do, he would do.'... Wilson.... invited Dalton to live with him and his girlfriend, Barbara. For years afterwards, every time they saw each other, Wilson would say: 'David, you always turn up just at the right time.' It was during this 'spooky' period, when Wilson was nearly always high and so paranoid that he slept with guns under his bed, that Dalton was first introduced to Charles Manson. Wilson was enamoured by the longhaired cult leader: he kept a bullet that Manson had given him on his mantlepiece and drove 120mph into the desert to tell Dalton that 'Charlie is cosmic'.... Dalton was also taken with him and, with his girlfriend Andy (whom he called his 'acid bride'), even went to stay on Manson’s Spahn ranch in Topanga Canyon for a time. There they rode horses in the moonlight and milled around with Manson and his 'family' of spellbound followers....."

From the London Times obituary for the rock journalist David Dalton, who has died at the age of 80.

Heres the award winning article he wrote in 1970: "Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive/A chilling, deeply investigative look into the terrifying Manson family – including a jailhouse interview with Charlie himself." 

Sample text:

"John Hinkley's Music, Whitey Bulger, and MKUltra."

What is MKUltra? "Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) was the code name of an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The experiments were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse, in addition to other forms of torture." (Much more at the link.)

The many voices of Paul McCartney.

May I recommend this highly detailed episode of "The Beatles Naked" podcast? 

I'm not yet half way through, but I'm so impressed with the analysis. There's so much of it! With the music played, so you can judge for yourself. 

I was interested, for example, in the discussion of the emotional effect of any slightly out-of-tune singing. Is it "soulful"? And has our experience of it changed over the years as present-day music is electronically tuned to perfection?

And is it the case that there is a song that only Paul McCartney can sing and that song is "Helter Skelter"? The Wikipedia article on the song cites a number of cover versions, but the only one mentioned in the podcast is Bono's. It is mentioned with a scoffing laugh (just before saying that if Kurt Cobain had tried, he might have succeeded). I just annoyed myself by listening to the Mötley Crüe version. I also sampled a little of the Marilyn Manson "Helter Skelter." Here's the awful Oasis version.

I'm no expert, but I'd say if you're just going to do it like Paul and just approach what he did, why do it at all? As an homage? But it's an homage with a song that got its reputation twisted up into the Manson murders. Bono said Charles Manson "stole" the song from The Beatles and he was "stealing it back." 

Having just written about the connection between Trump's January 6th speech that — intentionally or unintentionally — seems to have inspired the storming of the U.S. Capitol, I'm interested to stumble so soon into this story of a vocal presentation that may have inspired murder. According to one Manson follower: 

When the Beatles' White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth—that everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn't that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song 'Helter Skelter'—he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.

Of course, there's no way to hold The Beatles complicit in a murder scheme. At most, they could have thought that too many people are too attached to them and looking for messages and crazy connections and maybe they ought to stick to the peace-and-love songs so they don't accidentally inspire murder. It would be a different matter if The Beatles knew before they put out the White Album that there was a violent group set to rise up when The Beatles gave the signal "helter skelter."

Helter skelter in the cathedral.

"For such a place, steeped in mystery and marvel to buy in to sensory pleasure and distraction, is to poison the very medicine it offers the human soul," said The Right Reverend Dr Gavin Ashenden, former chaplain to the Queen, quoted in "Norwich Cathedral helter skelter 'is a mistake'" (BBC).

"The central aisle of Rochester Cathedral has also been converted into a crazy golf course..."



1. I already knew a "helter skelter" was some kind of British ride (which is why The Beatles sang, "When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide/Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride/Till I get to the bottom and I see you again!").

2. But I didn't know precisely what the ride was. I'd thought maybe something like Tilt-a-Whirl. But no, it's exactly the thing you see in the first video above, a slide wrapped around a tower.

3. The word "helter-skelter" dates back to 1593. The OED quotes T. Nashe Strange Newes: "Helter skelter, feare no colours, course him, trounce him." The definition is: "In disordered haste; confusedly, tumultuously, pell-mell." The word started meaning "A tower-like structure used in fun fairs and pleasure-grounds, with an external spiral passage for sliding down on a mat" in 1906, with "The World's Manufacturing Company, examples of whose ‘helter-skelter’ lighthouses are at Earl's Court, Blackpool, Southport, and other places."

4. We could go down the language rathole with "fun fairs"? "Pleasure-grounds"? The British have their own language, don't they?

5. Which brings up "crazy golf." That's British for miniature golf.

6. Or are you still wondering what was the "Strange Newes" in 1593? Wikipedia tells us that Thomas Nashe was "an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer." He was friends with Robert Greene who is famous for "Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance," an attack on William Shakespeare. Greene had made fun of the writer Richard Harvey in "A Quip for an Upstart Courtier," and that inspired Harvey to make fun when Greene died. Nashe's "Strange News" is some sort of response. Here's the full text. Kind of complicated, so I'll just give you an easy example of Nashe's poetry:

"Unhappyie me," quoth she, "and wilt not stand?
Com, let me rubb and chafe it with my hand!"

7. When I went to Genius.com to get the lyrics for The Beatles' "Helter-Skelter" it looked like this:



Shirley Manson is a Scottish singer — whom you might know as the lead singer for Garbage. Manson is her name by birth, so there should be no association with the murderous Charles Manson. It's not like Marilyn Manson, which is a stage name and an intentional reference to the evil man. What strange advertising decision or algorithm put the ad for Shirley Manson on "Helter Skelter" lyrics page?

8. Here's what Wikipedia has at "Helter Skelter/Charles Manson interpretation": "Charles Manson told his followers that several White Album songs, particularly 'Helter Skelter,' were part of the Beatles' coded prophecy of an apocalyptic war in which racist and non-racist whites would be manoeuvred into virtually exterminating each other over the treatment of blacks. Upon the war's conclusion, after black militants had killed off the few whites that had survived, Manson and his 'Family' of followers would emerge from an underground city in which they would have escaped the conflict. As the only remaining whites, they would rule blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the United States. Manson employed 'Helter Skelter' as the term for this sequence of events. In his interpretation, the lyrics of the Beatles' 'Helter Skelter' described the moment when he and the Family would emerge from their hiding place – a disused mine shaft in the desert outside Los Angeles." "Healter Skelter" was written (misspelled like that) in blood at the scene of the LaBianca murders. Manson wanted John Lennon to testify at his trial. John Lennon, years later, said: "All that Manson stuff was built around George's song about pigs ['Piggies'] and this one, Paul's song about an English fairground. It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me."

9. I've been avoiding all the stories about the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders which just could not avoid getting written this month. It took that helter skelter in the cathedral to get me here.

10. A cathedral has to do with a long-ago murder... or should I say attempted murder? Or will you say an execution is not a murder, whatever the circumstances?

11. Should there be fairground amusements inside a cathedral? Is it a sacrilege? One could argue that all the amazements and decorations of a traditional cathedral are themselves sacrilege and that if you don't think they are, you ought to accept the addition of other wonderful marvels to attract and grab hold of people. Or maybe that's precisely why you should object: Don't mix marvels! Keep the religious wonders separate from worldly tricks...

12. ... unless your aim is to knock religion down to earth.

"The buyers who seek out serial killer art don’t fall into easy categories."

"William Harder, who’s run Murder Auction from Fresno, California since 2005, says his customers aren’t just creepy murder fetishists. 'They’re regular people,' he says. 'I remember this contractor guy I sold to. He built houses and decks and stuff, and he came to me looking for something subtle. He told me, I thought about getting a Gacy, but I’m afraid that’s just going to attract too much attention. So he bought something by Charles Manson, but nothing you’d recognize as a Manson unless you looked closer and saw the signature.'... Murderabilia is in many ways a contradiction. The dealers and even the murderers themselves ask us to separate the art from the artist. Their creative ambitions aren’t an extension of their crimes; the two things, they insist, are unrelated."

From "Blood on the Canvas: The Lucrative, Controversial World of Art Made By Serial Killers" (Observer).

"I said, 'Jackie, I want to stay home and eat lemon meringue pie in my pajamas, in front of the T.V. at the Beverly Hills Hotel.'"

Jackie was Jacqueline Susann, and the "I" there is Rex Reed, describing how he turned down a dinner invitation to Sharon Tate’s house the night of the Manson murders.

Quoted in "Rex Reed Bangs a Gong on the Mediocrity of Modern Life" by Alex Williams in the NYT.

Lots of great pictures and stories at the link, including life in the Dakota building, where he bought a place for $30,000 in 1969 and where John Lennon was shot in 1980:

He once signed a petition supporting John Lennon when the government was trying to deport Mr. Lennon because of his drug use and political activism. Mr. Lennon thanked him with a one-year subscription to TV Guide, Mr. Reed said, adding, “That was his bible. All he did was lie around stoned watching television.”

Gone at last.

Parole, at long last, for a Manson family member?

Leslie Van Houten, 68, has convinced a 2-member panel in Chino, California that, after 40 years, she has "radically changed her life and is no longer a threat to society" (NPR).

It was the 21st time that Van Houten has appeared before a parole board and the second time that commissioners found her suitable for release. The ruling must still be approved by the state parole board and Gov. Jerry Brown, who reversed another panel's ruling last year.

So the answer to the question in the post title is: NO.

"I feel absolutely horrible about it, and I have spent most of my life trying to find ways to live with it," Van Houten told the panel....

On the night of the attack nearly five decades ago, she said she held Rosemary LaBianca down with a pillowcase over her head as others stabbed her dozens of times. Then, ordered by Manson disciple Charles "Tex" Watson to "do something," she picked up a butcher knife and stabbed the woman more than a dozen times.

After 19 denials, a Manson family killer, Leslie Van Houten, is approved for parole.

"I don’t let myself off the hook," she told the parole panel. "I don’t find parts in any of this that makes me feel the slightest bit good about myself."

Van Houten was 19 in 1969 when the crimes took place. She's now 66.

Before the panel, Van Houten recounted how she held Rosemary [La Bianca] down with a pillow and lamp cord as Charles “Tex” Watson, another Mason Family member, stabbed her. Then he passed the knife to her, and Van Houten proceeded to stab Rosemary 14 times, later using the blood of the slain La Biancas to write messages on the walls of their home. The word “WAR” was carved on Leno La Bianca’s stomach.

“I took one of the knives … and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady,” Van Houten testified in 1971, as the Los Angeles Times noted. At a parole hearing in 1991, Van Houten said of Manson: “I thought he was Jesus Christ.”

Van Houten, who grew up in a Los Angeles suburb, was a homecoming queen who fell in with the counterculture. Her parents divorced when she was 14, and her mother forced her to have an abortion when she got pregnant not long after. As Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi recounted in the true-crime classic “Helter Skelter,” a psychiatrist who interviewed Van Houten called her “a spoiled little princess” unable “to suffer frustration and delay of gratification” who once beat her adopted sister with a shoe.

Here's Leslie Van Houten in 1994, talking to Larry King — "Leslie, what were you doing?" — 25 years after the murders:

"Attorneys for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said Saturday they may seek a deposition from presidential contender Donald Trump..."

"... or call him as a witness at a legal proceeding, saying they fear his comments could affect their client's right to a fair trial."

What Trump said — showing a clumsy feel for the rule of law — was that Bergdahl is a "traitor, a no-good traitor, who should have been executed."

This takes me back to 1970, when the headline read: "President Nixon may have freed Charles Manson-not by an act of executive clemency, but by one of errant stupidity."

What Nixon said was "Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason." Manson's response was: "Here's a man who is accused of hundreds of thousands of murders, accusing me of being accused of eight murders."

Here's David Brinkley reporting it in the soberly black-and-white serioso tones of the past:

40 years ago today: Squeaky Fromme, 2 feet away from President Ford, points a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol.

A Secret Service agent grabbed the gun, which contained bullets, but had no bullet in its chamber.

Last year, a tape of her interview with a mental health examiner was released. In the interview, done shortly after her arrest, Fromme explained the "X" mark that she and other followers of Charles Manson had on their foreheads:

"Well, it has different levels. On one level it is a cross that's a following cross. On another level it is an 'X' and the 'X' is we are marked out of the system as it stands. We don't go along with it."

She commented on her use of LSD:

"I became aware of the possibilities of different realities as seen through different eyes, as seen through the Chicanos for example. I traveled in my mind into their world, the east Los Angeles. And then I traveled into the ghetto and I traveled into high society."

Here's some video containing interviews with Ford and Fromme looking back on the incident. Notable quote from from: "Of course, I could have shot him, and to me, his life didn't mean more to the redwoods to me."



The comments there (at YouTube) don't take assassination too seriously: "She didn't kill anyone." "Fuck. We could have been rid of that dip-shit." Even those who seem to take it seriously can't be serious: "She remains unrepentant of her actions and her mullet."

Fromme is now 66 years old. She's been out of prison since 2009.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigates a blogger who quotes a lyric from the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour."

The blogger — a Democratic activist named Daniel Tilson — made fun of an on-line "tax cut calculator" as "Gov. Scott’s Magical Mystery Tax Cut Calculator" and used the line from the song "Coming to take you away, take you away..."

Some person at FDLE (an “analyst,” the agency said) eyeballed those words on Tilson’s blog and perceived a potential threat to the governor. Could somebody be plotting to take him away, take him away...?

Not since Charlie Manson got mesmerized by “Helter Skelter” has anyone twisted the words of a Beatles song so ludicrously — and Manson, let’s remember, is crazier than an outhouse rat.

Yet the FDLE, the top crime-busting force in Florida, detected possible ominous undertones in the lyrics of “Magical Mystery Tour.” An agent was promptly sent to interview Tilson....

I thought no one took song lyrics seriously anymore. Anyway, "coming to take you away" meant that whatever it is that is coming — the mystery tour or the tax cut calculator — is going to transport you on a journey into ecstasy or madness. The song "Magical Mystery Tour" is quite obviously about going on a psychedelic drug trip. It's hard even to try to project a threat of violence into "coming to take you away" in that very 1960s songs. Other coming to take you away material from those simpler times:

1. "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!," the 1966 novelty single by Napoleon XIV. The "they" who were coming were the "men in white coats" — which is an expression you don't hear anymore — who would take him to "the funny farm" — you don't hear that either.

2. Calgon "Take me away" advertising. For some, it took drugs. For others, a simple bath:

"Charles Manson called off his wedding to his much younger fiancée after he learned she only wanted him for his body..."

"... once he was dead, that is."

ADDED: "Afton Elaine Burton... and a pal, Craig Hammond, planned to lay out Manson’s remains in a glass cryp... The pair figured their bizarre California version of Lenin’s Tomb would draw huge crowds and make big money."

"There's another national anthem playing/Not the one you cheer/At the ball park."

"It's the other national anthem, saying/If you want to hear/It says, 'Bullshit!'"



A song lyric, from the musical we saw last night.

(2 more performances, tonight and tomorrow. Buy tickets here.)

ADDED: As I was playing the song at the link — "Another National Anthem" from "Assassins" — Meade said: "What is that, 'South Park'?" And he saw the play last night! I said, "Yeah, it does sound like 'South Park.' Now you know where 'South Park' gets its inspiration.'"

AND: From a review in yesterday's NYT of a production of "Assassins" in London:

Some are fired by political ideals, like the magnetic John Wilkes Booth... the naïve anarchist Leon Czolgosz... the Depression-era firebrand Giuseppe Zangara... and the failed Communist Lee Harvey Oswald... taunted into taking his fatal shots by the commanding ghost of Booth.

Others are narcotized by the cult of celebrity: the sniveling John Hinckley... clutching his tattered photo of Jodie Foster as if it were a religious relic, or the sweat-begrimed Samuel Byck... ranting with grim earnestness into the tape recorder hanging around his neck, composing an urgent bulletin for Leonard Bernstein. (A reeling snatch of “America,” from “West Side Story,” is heard.)

And then there are the lost souls like Charles Guiteau... outraged when he was denied a job at the White House of President James A. Garfield; Lynette Fromme, a.k.a. Squeaky, a frail flower child...  whose perorations on Charles Manson are delivered with the moist-eyed innocence of a teenager mooning over a boy-band member; and her companion in delusion, the much-married, dithery and unhinged Sara Jane Moore....

Was the Kel-from-Good-Burger correction the greatest NYT correction of all time?

Or was it something else?

(I'm partial to: "An article last Sunday about the documentary maker Morgan Spurlock, who has a new film out on the boy band One Direction, misstated the subject of his 2012 movie 'Mansome.' It is about male grooming, not Charles Manson. The article also misspelled the name of the production company of Simon Cowell, on whose 'X Factor' talent competition show One Direction was created. The company is Syco, not Psycho.")

Whatever happened to Primo Communist Flitworth?

I'm reading Simon Winchester's "The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible," the part about Robert Owen, born in Wales in 1771, who came to America with ideas of utopian socialism he'd developed in Scotland. He met "with President Monroe, took tea with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and gave two public lectures in the Capitol. John Quincy Adams, the president-elect, came to both talks, and was so taken that he had Owen build a scale model of his proposed New Harmony building and display it at the White House." New Harmony failed:

As is so often the way with utopias, factions developed — no fewer than ten had formed within just two years of Owen’s arrival, and all began bickering, squabbling, and arguing for various rewritings of the commune rules, each splinter group jostling for ideological supremacy. In the end, a demoralized and disillusioned Owen, shocked at a brand of waywardness he had never experienced back home among the Scots, returned to Britain. His confidence was sorely shaken: his ideas for the universal betterment of the working classes began slowly to evaporate, and he became steadily ever more marginalized and ridiculed a figure.

That paragraph ends with a footnote, and it is in that footnote where we encounter the most perfectly silly name I have ever seen:

Robert Owen’s final grand gesture was the creation of an immense and ruinously expensive cooperative community in Hampshire called Queenswood, in which seven hundred people lived, their inner quadrangle illuminated by “koniophostic light,” with conveyor belts bringing food from central kitchens to their dining halls. Couples moved in. A first baby born at Queenswood was formally named Primo Communist Flitworth. But the community never really prospered and closed after only a short while. Owen then changed gear once again and provided valuable help in settling the rival US-Canadian claims to Oregon territory, then tried in vain once more to sell his socialist ideas in Paris, where he died in 1858 and was buried in the grounds of a deconsecrated church.

What happened to Primo Communist Flitworth? Was he not worth a flit? Did he have some informal name that he used and blended into the general populace. He's the 19th century's Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz. Who did he become when he disaggregated himself from the commune that gave him his stigmatizing name? A nobody?

Patricia Krenwinkel talks feelingly about how she threw her life away for Charles Manson, 45 years ago.

That film, by Olivia Klaus, is published in The New York Times.

Seeking to inspire a race war, Manson ordered Ms. Krenwinkel and other members of his group to commit a series of murders. Over the course of two nights, they savagely murdered seven people, inflicting more than 130 stab wounds. One of them, the actress Sharon Tate, was eight and a half months pregnant. At their trial, the women shamelessly admitted their crimes and flaunted their allegiance to a leader they loved, but who clearly controlled their minds.