Show-Biz History IS Rose Marie

This documentary showed up a few weeks back (thanks mom!):

This is the Rose Marie documentary.

The filmmaker wanted to make a documentary about the history of show-business, and after asking around, it became clear that his subject should just be Rose Marie, a performer who's own story essentially is the history of show-biz.

I remembered her from "The Dick van Dyke Show:"

Oh my goodness how much I didn't know!

She was the daughter of a goomara!

One of Al Capone's wet works guys had his girl on the side, and she was a nightclub singer. He knocked her up twice, and named those kids the same names he had with his wife. The daughter, Rosemarie, showed a knack for singing: as a kid she was called up on stage one evening and sang a duet with the lady performing that night. That started her nightclub career as "Baby Rose Marie."

She did the occasional voice work for Betty Boop and was sent out by her father on the last vestiges of what accounted for the vaudeville circuit. They had her performing all over the place. Her dad knew a cash-full opportunity when he saw one.

She'd perform for gangsters at their homes and newly opened casinos in the Vegas desert. They always treated her wonderfully, like a daughter rather than a sexual object. 

She fell deeply in love to a well known and respected trumpet player, and they lived together until his death, something she still hadn't really gotten over decades later.

She never got the same shine that, say, Betty White has received, which hasn't been fair, but that's how things work out sometimes.

She passed last December, but had been concerned for work for as long as she wasn't working, as she was never satisfied unless on a gig.

For a look at the ever morphing world of American entertainment, check out this movie.

Been Busy

I've been working on some tiny book projects and have been busy.

So, so busy.

We had a rally last night in DTLA:

And tonight's prom.

At least we have Monday off.

Introspection

Making the discovery of this tiny pocketbook relic seemed to be destiny. If I believed in that kind of thing. It would be so easy to chalk it up to a thing like destiny, rather than the reality of cruel chance. I almost didn't even buy it, despite earlier saying I knew I had to have it. After I'd decided to make the purchase, I knew it was the right choice, but I was torn up until a certain point, which seems ludicrous now.

I've been online looking for copies to buy for people I know who need it in their lives.

It turns out that I'm the kind of person who thinks that everyone has the ability to have their world drastically altered by reading something.

What that something is will be different from person to person, and the timing of that reading must also be special, but the fact remains: it is possible. That's my belief, anyway.

Huxley did it for me years ago, and Baudelaire has done it again, only I can't say for sure how.

My writing art-projects list looks inexhaustible, but now I feel indefatigable. And that may be the lasting effect for me with this "discovery."

I need my boy to see. I need him to know how much work it is to do something for art, out of love, how timeless it is to say something about the human experience, how vital and necessary it remains. He needs to know and to see.

Baudelaire told me so.

The Two Essays

Before I dive too deep into the content, I want to reiterate: both of these gentlemen are fantastic writers.

Back in 1999, after I'd first finished The Doors of Perception, I was compelled to tell everyone about it. I just didn't have that many people to talk to, and the majority of that small list didn't much care. I was excited beyond belief because a life goal was accomplished without me even doing anything.

I had been toying with the idea of how to bring an experience of specific kinds of psychoactive substances to the page using words. I didn't want to do this for myself, for fame or money or recognition or whatever, rather I felt it necessary for The World to have those experiences in the written record, for all time.

I was never really sure how I wanted to go about it, but I knew it was important. Then I found Huxley's text and realized I could never have done a better job, and felt relief. Someone had captured the essence of a psychedelic trip. Now it would be up to me to mine the experiences for literature purposes.

It took some time to realize that plan was folly, but nevertheless I was inspired, as I've mentioned before.

If I had found Baudelaire's "The Poem of Hashish" at the same time as Huxley's "The Doors of Perception," my head may have exploded.

**

The text in this tiny pocketbook starts with Gautier's "The Hashish Club," and right away you can tell that this dude could write. Here's an excerpt from the third sentence: "...a sharp wind charged with icy pellets slashed against my face, and its shrill moan sang in concert with the bass notes of the swollen current lapping against the arches of the bridges..."

He's talking about his trek to one of the islands in Paris that live in the Seine River. The cathedral of Notre Dame lives on one of these islands, but his destination is the Hotel Pimodan, what turns out to be a shabby place on a darkened street.

He is fed the dawamesk while lounging in a chair in homely room, and as he begins to feel it, he notices he's alone, or has been abandoned, and a creeping anxiety grips him as he feels the walls come alive. 

Gautier writes about being visited by Daucus Carota, a beast made of roots and hair and maniacal laughter. Daucus tells him many things, secrets he doesn't want to know, forecasts of his own impending hashish journey that are borderline threats, and even after Gautier can no longer see Daucus, he continues to hear him.

Theophile is paralyzed in his chair for most of his Daucus conversations, but instead of being terrified and overwhelmed by that creeping anxiety, he is generally overcome with a content mirth and uncontrollable laughter. Daucus, while horrific in nature and claims, is just a silly thing.

I thought I'd missed one of the great mythological figures in letters and did some research on ol' Daucus Carota, research that didn't last all that long: Daucus carota is the taxonomic genus and species name for the common carrot. It turns out Gautier and I find all sorts of places for the names we give characters.

Eventually Theo gets his legs back and goes walkabout at the Pimodan. Stairs seem endlessly long, the shadows and laughter of his Algerian comrades come and go, and finding them becomes a game. Sometimes the age and shabby character of parts of the hotel reveal themselves for Gautier as a vision of the history of the specific piece...all things that sound perfectly natural to an experienced head.

Besides the fanciful Daucus parts, the anecdote---arriving, eating, tripping, coming down, leaving---is a quite spectacular rendition of a consuming-more-hash-edibles-than-possibly-being-ready-for experience.

My interest in Baudelaire's piece was now at a fever pitch: the Gautier piece has been treated like an afterthought, and it was that good?

The "Poem of Hashish" is broken up into five sections, numbered with Roman numerals:

1. The Thirst for the Infinite
2. What is Hashish?
3. The Theater of Seraph
4. The Man-God
5. Moral

I only give them now, and not for either Huxley or Gautier before, because they help me with my own description of what I took from the piece.

The first section, The Thirst for the Infinite, is basically setting the scene for why anyone would be interested in psychotropic substances: the desire to achieve that fleeting moment when you awake on the rare day when the world feels simply perfect---you feel creative, happy, content, energized, and full of vigor. To Baudelaire, those days are rare, when the infinite joy is present, and that feeling---being in the presence of this infinite "keenness of mind and perceptual ability," is precisely the feeling that users chase.

He puts is much more eloquently and lyrically than I just did, and that's the point. This section is the Why.

His second section, What is Hashish?, is a perfectly competent and condensed history of what was then known about cannabis, complete with an explanation of how hash is made from the buds that seems so effortless that, as a writer, I was blown away by the craft. This is the What section.

The How section is the third section, The Theater of Seraph. After the first two parts I was sold on the method and the writing style, but this was the section that opened my eyes like Huxley two decades before, an opening I didn't think even possible in today's age.

Baudelaire first nails the attitudes and fears of the uninitiated first timers, even lampooning over-confident hash-eaters who claim nothing is---or ever will be---happening. As the trip begins, after the prolonged in-between of eating and beginning, the experience is treated with the precision of a scientist mixed with a head's calm confidence of what will be coming.

He covers the mirth, the uncontrollable laughter, being dumbstruck by normally inconsequential things and then being under near-assault by the uncontrollable laughter again. What really got me, though, was his discussion of what he called "hallucinations."

He makes a point to distinguish what he's talking about with what doctors study when their patients hear and see things that aren't there. Baudelaire is trying to describe the flights of imagination that one on the trip may have a passing control over, the ideas and visions and experiences and lifetimes that all race through the imagination of someone tripping, the trip itself for the most part, and he does an amazing job. 

That was really the whole experience for me: I didn't even think it was possible to write up an accurate rendition of the brain's flights-of-fancy while tripping on cannabis, and here it is, written masterfully a hundred-fifty years ago, found by me at some random spot on Willow.

A quick note on the nomenclature: I've used "tripping" and "trip" more than once so far in this piece in reference to being high on this cannabis edible. Those words are typically used for other substances, typically psychedelics---mainly the tryptamines like psilocybin and LSD and the phenylthylamines like mescaline and ecstasy---and occasionally dissociatives, like PCP and dextromethorphan. 

I've done this on purpose because it fits. Remember, these guys in Paris in 1845 weren't smoking this stuff, alone or with tobacco. Baudelaire even mentions that some people have taken to smoking it mixed with tobacco, but the effects produced are a weak and sluggish facsimile of the true power of the hash.

Eating a cannabis edible, when it's too powerful or more than you can handle, or on the edge of what you can handle, will produce the same kind of stymieing effect that any psychedelic could or would produce. It is a "trip" of the first order.

Because Charles Baudelaire thought deeply about things that would otherwise have the names of Platonic Forms, his fourth section, The Man-God, tackles his feelings about how these kinds of experiences fit in with Morality. Is it a moral act to continually try and create that feeling of the infinite that only those perfect days guarantee to give you? 

He settles on an answer of No, partly because while a person under the influence thinks they're being artistic and awesome, in reality they produce far less material and it tends to be of questionable quality; and partly because a person tends to exalt themselves because they can create those feelings, and they begin to see themselves as a godly creature.

I loved his line of thinking, because you could see him wrestling with himself in the words on the pages. Whether or not I agree with him is not the point: reading a genius junkie fight with himself is worth the time.

In the first section, Baudelaire mentions that the only two substances that are readily available to people that help create that infinite keenness are hash and opium. There's even a passage where the writer states that he respects a man who's battled opium and won more than a man who's managed to abstain from the drug. Knowing that he himself was constantly in a losing battle with opium certainly colored my entire reading, but not in a bad way. It filled in unknown gaps.

And, not to out do himself, his last section, Moral, is a wonderful look at the hangover, the next day after having eaten an obscene amount of hash, how that goes. By this point in reading it, I was ready for him to do an excellent job with the translation from experience to words, and he delivered. 

He then uses the after-effects as more evidence for the case he started in the previous section, but, of course, more eloquently than I have.

**

Over the course of the forty small pages for Gautier and sixty for Baudelaire, my world view had shifted. How that shift looks, I'm still working on. I'm not that drugged out kid who discovered Huxley and needed a push. I'm older, having lived a life influenced by Huxley.

Discovering Baudelaire at this stage of my life has inspired me once again, but in a different manner. Different because surely my circumstances are different, but in which direction will this nudging send me? What about my world has changed?

Does the power of writing have equal effect? That is, can anyone be forever altered simply by reading something seemingly specifically designed for them in a perfectly defined set of circumstantial moments?

Discovering Baudelaire

Known mainly as a poet, Baudelaire wrote criticism and essays and theoretical papers discussing the underpinnings of various Platonic forms (but never calling them that). As a poet, his output is dwarfed by contemporary Victor Hugo, and only after time has his influence proven to be far more reaching.

Taken by Etienne Carjat, circa 1862

His father was quite old and passed while he was young, but had been part of the aristocracy. There was money for him. His mother married a career military man who had been appointed an ambassador. Baudelaire grew to despise this man, but see if you can spot why:

Baudelaire, as a young man, developed a taste for laudanum and parties, and had troubles with the money that had been left for him. The General, as he came to call his step-father, set up a trust that would trickle out the cash like a pipet.

This turned Charles into a man who was constantly hard up for money and essentially begging from his friends. He needed to write to make a living, one of the earliest geniuses who was at the whim of the market. Most writers from the era, or, rather, people who were deep thinkers and able to communicate those thoughts through writing, did so because they were independently wealthy and had the time and means to polish the language they used.

Baudelaire's most famous collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), caused a scandal with its obscenity and had poems cut by state censors. Some of the poetry that was deemed obscene I have read, and you can as well if you follow this link. It is a very good piece about the ways that humility and circumstances shaped Baudelaire's writing and helped bring about modernism in literature. He is, in fact, credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernite), about the fleeting experiences urban life yields.

Think of Les Fleurs du mal as you would Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

He died at only 46 years old, having spent the previous two years mostly paralyzed by stroke. The years of opium use and hard drinking took their toll.

This tiny piece is not meant to be a formal biography of Charles Baudelaire, more of a quick summary gleaned from a handful of sources.

Does the picture above show a man happy and pleased to be "writing for a living?"

He was a complicated man with drug issues, family issues, perpetual financial issues, but also had a genius for writing. He makes me think he's the original basis for the "drunk as a poet on payday" idiom, but then I remember all poets...

I see shades of myself in this man's history. I am blessed with a stronger support foundation that kept things the more destructive elements at bay, but the fact remains: I identify.

And then I saw his birthday: April 9th, 1821.

My birthday is April 9th.

The Artifact Itself

The book itself is slight, the pages yellowed and with more white space than necessary around the edges, common for the era it seems. The cover has that trippy painting by Margo Herr:

The cover definitely made me think: drugs.

Published in 1971 in the middle of the Freak Moment, it makes a certain kind of sense. An editor or a scholar (or both) figured the time was ripe for the Freaks or the heads---time to unleash the old French classics. They must have rounded up two of the best pieces from the first wave of hash hitting Paris 125 years before, packaged it with a tripped out cover that was a signal to a prospective reader, and then sell it for 95 cents.

Before I read the pieces, I started to research the background, like who was Baudelaire? Why had I heard of him and not Gautier? And who was Gautier?

Baudelaire, for me, was just a French name that I recognized, like Rimbaud. I once had a book called Rembrandt and Spinoza, a book about the spiritual and philosophical conflicts in Holland in that era, that at least turned Spinoza from a name into a person for me. (I'm still ignorant of Rimbaud.)

I got busy...

...And it turns out Baudelaire is considered one of the brightest literary thinkers in French history.

Gautier was well respected, but never considered on the same level as Baudelaire, and consequently his material has largely been out of print or never properly collected.

After reading the introduction by Githens, Gautier's translator, the impression I got about the two pieces went like this:

• Gautier wrote an experiential and anecdotal piece about his eating the hash, full of fanciful scenes that featured a creature named Daucus Carota, a gnarled root of a menacing figure;
• Baudelaire wrote a piece far more clinical and not anecdotal, and in fact was not about eating the hash at all.

I should possibly reread Githens piece again, because somehow I was left with the idea that Charles Baudelaire constructed "The Poem of Hashish" through interviewing the people who were invited to these nights in that forgotten neighborhood in Paris.

It doesn't take a reader very long to understand that, uh, yes, Charles Baudelaire certainly ate the dawamesk, possibly multiple times, and wrote beautifully from his own experience.

How did I not know Baudelaire, one of the greatest French thinkers? 

Should those who fancy themselves deep thinkers and Serious People of Letters be cognizant of important examples of themselves from the past?

Discovery of the Artifact

Depending upon after work errands, I have a series of routes I will drive to get to those destinations. Along Willow Ave, an east-west Long Beach thoroughfare, I noticed one afternoon book carts outside what looked like a hair and nail salon. Books! my brain, having assumed the salon status of the business front among the street's density of establishments at that spot just east of Magnolia, was dealing with confusion as traffic flowed easily by.

Instead of a picture in the establishment's window of braided hair or someone getting their brows threaded, there was a white sign with five red all capital letters: BOOKS.

The next time I was running that particular errand, I saw the carts on the approach again, but this time I tried to locate the name of the place. It was tougher than it needed to be.

It should be here mentioned that when encountering a newly discovered independent bookstore, I turn into a regular consumerist American. I don't really shop under normal circumstances, unless I'm in the warm confines of a used bookstore. Then I'll stroll around and find something, anything to spend some money on and do my part to keep a place open.

Only on these days, trying to scope this one particular place, my time was severely limited. I realized I would need to plan my time around the visit.

First was a quick Google Maps look to see what bookstore this was. Easy enough in today's day. The name turned out to be Castle of Books. Wait...that was the name of a place I was interested in checking out years ago, only it was far up Atlantic Blvd. Seems like the location has changed over the years.

Finally the day was here. I made a quick right turn into the neighborhood and parked on a residential street. I made it into the cramped space and was surrounded by stalagmites of books to the far reaches of the indoor sky. The organization left some to be desired, and after a minute or so I asked if they had any Hunter Thompson. My last copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was loaned out a while back and I'm not sure its coming back.

The gentleman running the store looked puzzled and suggested I check the mystery stack around the corner.

Mysteries? I lost confidence in the guy at that moment. Whatever. I started to look all over, looking for Pynchon, Murakami, Flanagan, HST, DFW...the names I usually look for. On the spine of a sixties era pocketbook sized book was the title The Poem of Hashish. That caught my attention. I pulled it out. It was written by Charles Baudelaire, a French name I recognized, if otherwise knowing nothing about him.

The collection had another piece by a contemporary of Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, named "The Hashish Club", as well as an introduction by John Githens, the translator for the Gautier piece.

It started with the introduction, then the piece by Gautier, and then the titular piece by Baudelaire, "The Poem of Hashish." Why, I imagined, with the emphasis on Githens and Gautier, was Baudelaire's name so prominent?

I thumbed through it and noticed that Baudelaire did not, in fact, write a poem, instead it was an essay.

A quick view of the blurb on the reverse shed a little light on the context: the French occupation of Algeria brought much of the North African cultural phenomena to the heart of France, and one was dawamesk, an edible made primarily with hash. In 1845, groups of intellectuals were invited to a dark and decrepit mansion in a forgotten corner of Paris to sample the goods. After a series of rotations, different pieces were created by different writers and painters about their experiences.

That was enough for me. I found what I was going to purchase. The handwritten price of $3.99 would be easily covered by the five spot in my pocket. On the way out, I marveled at the design of the printing on the receipt, matching the marking of the location's logo, seen on their discount punch card:

A castle on the receipt? Cool!

I didn't know yet just what I held in my hands. It would take a little research to bright light to this tiny book.

Discovering Baudelaire; an Introduction

I've been working out the details of a writing project for a about a month now and I'm getting ready to share it.

Back in 1999, after moving back to Sacramento, I found a book that changed my life. 

That isn't hyperbole, even though I didn't want to type it. At the old Walden Books on Douglas out Roseville way I purchased a copy of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

Never before had I come across such a compelling, well written, well intentioned, and important piece of literature. In it, an intellectual eats some mescaline in the name of science, and sets down one of the best descriptions of a psychedelic experience ever attempted.

The early on-set of the trip; the best recollections of the peak supplemented with audio tapes and a sober guide/buddy to corroborate afterwards; the come-down period and the post-come-down time. Before the mescaline is eaten and after the post-come-down, Huxley discusses the place of psychedelics in both ancient civilizations and the modern scientific world, and what kind of good they can do for psychiatric advancement.

By that time I was an experienced head and fan of whacked out writings, having settled on Hunter Thompson as King of the Freak Writers, over Ken Kesey for some reason.

And Aldous Huxley is not Hunter Thompson. He wrote Brave New World! And his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a personal friend to, and public defender of, Charles Darwin. 

Slightly different than, say, eating a sheet of LSD and running a burn on a Vegas hotel. But, it wasn't Huxley endangering himself by taking the LA Sheriff's Department to task for their murder (by tear-gas-bazooka) of LA Times reporter Ruben Salazar. 

Whereas Hunter was brazen and swaggering, Aldous was straightforward and clear. Aldous was not a public head, rather, he was a Serious Man. At least that was my take after reading his long essay back in 1999. 

Trivia moment: Jim Morrison liked the piece so much he named his band, The Doors, after it; while Huxley took it from William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"---"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite." Blake to Huxley to Morrison. Quite the chain.

After reading The Doors of Perception, and subsequently digesting it and re-reading it, a new path for serious scholarly work appeared to me out of the haze: I was inspired to imagine a world where someone could be both a serious head and a Serious Man of Letters, and not to gender-normalize anything, I'm only talking about myself. I began to see a future where being knowledgeable about head-topics and being a serious writer of literature could be compatible.

It seems silly now to even write it: so many of my favorite authors and philosophers were messed up on plenty of things, but at that time this was a revelation to me. I had a bad case of tunnel-vision, where being a renegade writer describing the constant state of being loaded was the only useful thing I could imagine doing with my need to write.

It was an important summer for me, making the transition from en soi to pour soi. Between Huxley and the Cartesian epistemological trial by fire kick-started by "The Matrix", of all things, I experienced a lot of personal growth.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and if I'd been asked about the chances of finding a long essay/tiny book that would rival The Doors of Perception in nearly every way, from its psychoactive substance content matter to its starkly amazing ability to accurately describe an experience to the inherent importance of its author, I would have set them within an epsilon neighborhood of zero.

But still, there exists such a book as described above, a rival to Huxley's classic that predates it by nearly a century, and, judging by the way Aldous structures his piece, he most assuredly had read this elder.

I like the metaphor of discovery here, and have been inspired to discuss the tiny artifact that is in my possession, how it came to be, how it came to me, and how my world view has been altered. It may even balloon and obtain a glandular problem.

The next series of posts will be obviously related, but only obvious if you read them---the titles won't match up, if you know what I mean.