If I said to you, “Probably a Pisces, working for scale,” or “Here in the City of Emphysema,” or “Porgy, your clamcakes are getting damp,” or “We’re in the portrait gallery, Nick,” would you have any idea what I’m talking about? A few close friends, as well as my son, would immediately know I was quoting a line from the Firesign Theatre. They created audio skits and made dozens of records based on their wildly zany but deeply rooted sense of American culture that provoked deep insight into, and mockery of, our cherished institutions. The four guys who made up this screwy, psychedelic, pop-culture crew of humorists were a huge influence in my Ironic Education.

I began listening to them on KPPC, the Pasadena public radio station, in 1969. They did a three-hour live, extemporaneous show every Sunday morning [how could they pull this off after Saturday night?], a series of skits and dramas and dialogues with one another. Their sponsor was Jack Poet Volkswagen, back when the only VW was a beetle and a microbus. I would crawl out of bed, load a reel of recording tape on my Sony deck, and record these shows. They inspired me to pursue my interest in radio and recording, which led to creating some pretty zany radio commercials of my own for a local head shop. Over the years I’ve always loved technology, and that was certainly manifest in making musical collages on tape, often as if they were radio shows, and as a live deejay doing a two-hour, whacked-out radio show called “The 2000 Man” with the Rolling Stones’ eponymous song as the theme music in – yes, 2000.

The Firesign Theatre – Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Philip Proctor and Phil Austin – landed a recording contract with Columbia and made some great albums. The first was “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him.” In a skit poking satirical yet serious fun at the exploitation of the American Indian by the European “white brothers,” a Spanish priest runs up to a tribe and exclaims, “Domini, domini, domini, you’re all Catholics.” As it closes, a hippie confides that his people think Indians are cool, then says, “Got any peyote?” In another work, “Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him,” perhaps anticipating today’s inane reality TV, a contestant on a game show called “Beat the Reaper” is injected with lethal diseases, which he must identify before they kill him. Kinda like getting kicked off  ”The Bachelor,” don’t you think?

Perhaps the classic Firesign record is “How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All,” [pictured] where Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin are parodied on the record jacket with photos of Groucho Marx and John Lennon. Side One is a real and metaphorical trip, wherein a guy is kicking tires at an L.A. motorhome/RV dealership called Ralph Spoilsport Motors. As he flips through the RV’s climate control settings, he travels to that environment. At one point he encounters the Chinese army marching and chanting the classic left/right/one/two/three/four – in Chinese. The side ends with a psychedelic rendering of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. Like, wow, man. These guys were far out.

Side Two is the relatively coherent “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye,” a surrealistic detective story that demonstrates the foursome’s vast knowledge of old-time mystery and detective radio shows. Allusions and puns to the golden age of radio drama appear again and again. And lo and behold, at one point Nick, who has lost his place in the script, encounters the Chinese soldiers from the flip side of the record, now chanting backwards – and, wonder of wonders, it’s in exactly the same groove on Side Two as it is on Side One! I’ve listened to “Nick Danger” hundreds of times and still get off on it. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the Firesign commercial for Loosener’s Castor Oil Flakes breakfast cereal – yep, the one with real glycerine vibrafoam.

The Firesign continued making records – some good, a few great – and in the 1980s got into video. A short film, “Eat or Be Eaten,” was a celebration of a kudzu harvest festival in a small town where Betty Jo Fertilizer is to be sacrificed to the kudzu god. “Zachariah,” a full-length surrealistic Western, starred Don Johnson [who was much more entertaining in "A Boy and His Dog"]. But I think audio was really the Firesign’s true medium.

In the 1980s, David Ossman came to Boston for a year to develop a series of radio dramas for WGBH, a public radio radio station. I was excited to hear what he came up with, and had several phone conversations with him to discuss a meeting and a feature story I planned to write. It didn’t happen, but I have the two-hour radio dramas preserved [sort of] on cassette tapes. [I need to get them transferred to digital...soon....] Anyway, his magnum opus was “Doc Savage,” a recreation of a 1930s “Adventures by Morse” serial David wrote and produced, which was even better than the originals.

Not only did I love their humor but their perspective on life, which might be summed up by the title of another of their great records, “We’re All Bozos On This Bus.” They never took anything too seriously, and saw the folly and irony in everyday life events. That had a deep and lasting influence on me, which led to one of my two favorite aphorisms: If we can’t kid each other, who can we kid? I also felt close to these four guys because I shared being a fire sign with them. That was back when we were all into astrology. But maybe you don’t remember that.

Last week, Peter Bergman passed on at age 72, and I wonder what will happen to the Firesign Theatre. Never one to fall behind technologically, Peter reinvented himself with David’s help as the “Radio Free Oz” website/podcast. Here are his final words from that show.

The Firesign will certainly live on in recorded history; you can get a better idea of them and their work here. They’re all over the web as well. The guys made some crazed TV commercials for Jack Poet VW, and you can watch some of them here.  (The bald guy is Peter.) Recordings of the old radio shows are becoming available on a DVD as “Duke of Madness.” And you will surely want to visit the Firesign website.

Peter, your spirit lives on, and I hope to always continue my creative endeavors in the spirit of your spirit. And now, “Forward, into the past!”

It never ceases to amaze me how technology companies – Apple in particular – give birth to entirely new products and industries. Apple’s introduction of a new iPad last week is going to create new apps, not just because it’s a complete redesign – it isn’t – but simply because it has a few new bells and whistles. As David Pogue mentions in this week’s New York Times column, there are at least 200,000 apps for the iPhone and iPad. [He may be conservative - Apple says over 500,000.] All you need is a good idea, a programmer, and Apple’s permission [although an accompanying website doesn't hurt].

Case in point: My son Josh and his wife Jamie. They’re both gamers – in fact, they met in a face-to-face gaming group, before we even had the iPhone or an App Store. Jamie sneaks a few minutes from her busy day taking care of two little daughters to play a game or two. She got hooked on LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean, but found she needed to keep some notes for play moves and remembering where she left off. Before long, she had a 17-page Word file of these notes. She showed Josh, and he put his uber-programmer skills to work and it Lo! A new app was born.

They call it “CheckThrough: LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean.” It’s similar to a walk-through but with lots more features and tools. The name comes from the ability to check off each thing you do during the walk-through. CheckThrough helps you find every item, character, and accomplishment in the game without frustration. And it includes tips for play as well.

Apple vets everything, so they had to get approval – mostly it was assuring they weren’t encroaching on LEGO’s IP, so it was a no-brainer. Within two months, idea to implementation, they had an app for sale in the Apple App Store. And without a lick of marketing or advertising, a week later they had sold several hundred copies. Now it’s also on their website, and Jamie and Josh are working on versions for other LEGO-movie games. Here’s a screen shot:

Sometimes, entrepreneurs and/or established companies develop peripherals or accessories that are static in nature. I think of anti-glare screen film or a protective cover or a capacitive stylus for when you’re wearing gloves. They’re all cool, but they can’t hold a candle to the wildly creative and imaginative apps available, often for free. And if you didn’t think apps as a concept are hot, consider that Apple is redesigning its OS X operating system to more closely resemble the iPhone and iPad interface. Perhaps this signals the approaching death-knell of the file-based GUI we’ve used since the 1970s. I hope so.

Amazing. Congratulations, Josh and Jamie. I hope you make piles of money with your CheckThroughs and retire to Tasmania before you’re 40.

My friend and colleague Signe Nichols sent me a link to this UK site where the best 100 first lines from novels are posted. For all you novelists, as well as readers, it’s worth a look. The first sentence is the hook for the reader, but also for the agent and the editor at the publishing company. It’s hard to nail down because, as NPR reviewer Allan Cheuse said once, it’s all about “je ne sais quoi.”

In writing my novel, Wild Blue Yonder, I’m sure I revised my first sentence at least a hundred times:

In the first draft, these three sentences opened Chapter 1: ”I stood at the Greyhound bus terminal in the Chicago Loop with my mother under an umbrella in an unrelenting snowstorm. Huge wet flakes fell on our black canopy, sending cascades of water off the edges to splash on the pavement below, slowly soaking my shoes.”

The final, published version: ”I stood outside the Chicago Loop Bus Terminal with my mother, huge, sopping wet snowflakes striking the umbrella I held above us like mallet blows on a kettle drum. Icy water cascaded over its edge, soaking my shoes. I hated getting wet feet. I hated the cold. I hated everything about being here, waiting for a bus that would take me to San Antonio, Texas, to begin my four-year prison sentence in the United States Air Force.”

A great first sentence (or two or three) engages you with the character, the story, the atmosphere, and compels the reader to continue reading.

Here’s my nomination for the 101st best first sentence in a novel. It’s from James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

What’s your favorite? Leave a comment and share it with us!

I just read a review in the New York Times of Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last, the fourth and last novel of four that tell the story of Patrick Melrose. The quartet concern themselves with and upper-class English family, but this isn’t Downton Abbey: no, this is, as Michiko Kakutani writes, more like “one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos….” The first three are available to American readers in one volume, The Patrick Melrose Novels, either as a paperback or a Kindle.

I was immediately struck with the parallel between St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose and John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels, four of each. Updike, however, doesn’t sneer upon his subject, even though Rabbit is far from being a likeable man. More to the point. sometimes an author gets really involved in his characters, and one novel isn’t enough with which to explore their lives.

After writing Wild Blue Yonder: A Novel of the 1960s, I came to feel the same way about Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers. It’s a rite of passage story, but the youth has to do so without his father, who died suddenly. He has to cut the apron strings with his mother, but she’s making it difficult. He needs to learn how to get along in the company of men, but the military makes that confusing. He’s never had a girlfriend, so he’s clueless when Jane falls in love with him. All this going on and the ’60s, too, what with the Vietnam War, social unrest, the hippies, and the political assassinations.

Nate emerged as an interesting character, and I became curious to know what happened to him after his four years in the Air Force. As soon as I finished WBY, I immediately set to work on Madrone, the sequel, and hope to publish it this fall. It only covers a year in Nate’s life, so I know there will be one or two more novels chronicling his life to follow.

Novelists have a lot of fun, living in their imaginary worlds!

As I walked into my local Newbury Comics today to buy a copy of Wilco’s new album, “The Whole Love” [I’m a huge Wilco fan] the first note of The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today” blasted from the store’s audio system. My knees weakened as this magnum paean to 1960s consciousness-raising took off. As I came to the counter, a young female clerk looked at me and smiled. I smiled back and said to her, “I can’t believe you’re playing this.” She smiled even more and said, “Yeah, well, my dad’s been telling me how great it is and that I should to listen to it.”

Her dad.

She went on describing how it was a lot different from what she usually listened to, but that she was really digging it, and just then the boys sang, “And my soul’s been psychedelicized.” I sang the line with them. I mean, hey, I know every word, every note, every drumbeat of this song, man. We both started laughing.

I said, “I’ve just finished a novel entitled Wild Blue Yonder about growing up in the 1960s, and two of the main characters listen to this while they’re on an acid trip.” She nodded enthusiastically, acknowledging that the song is indeed about a psychedelic trip. Or at least a trip all by itself.

But “Time Has Come Today” is also about the  spirit of the 1960s and the socially radical change in young people’s thinking about society, race, and war – to name a few. “Now the time has come/young hearts can go their way.” It’s worth noting that the Chambers Brothers were in fact four black brothers, accompanied by a white drummer named Brian Keenan.

I found my Wilco CD and went back to the counter, where a tall young man began ringing me up. The instrumental centerpiece of the 11-minute musical trip was revving up for the big screaming session. I said to the guy, “I still get goose bumps when I hear this.” He nodded appreciatively, sympathetically. The girl walked up beside him and he turned to her. “You know, some music never gets old. And you forget you heard something like this from the long ago past and how good it is.” She agreed. So did I. As he gave me my change I said, “Well, guess I’ll have to go home and listen to it all the way through.” He grinned. She grinned. I grinned.

Click on the link to listen to “Time Has Come Today.” But be prepared: your soul may be “psychedelicized.”

First published at http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/2011/10/a-deep-musical-connection-across-generations/#more-33242

Fascinating article by the artist and writer Hanif Kureishi in last Sunday’s New York Times: “The Art of Distraction.” It can be summed up in this sentence: “Biological determinism is one of psychology’s ugliest evasions, removing the poetic human from any issue.” He argues that staying focused all the time is an impediment to creativity, to thinking outside the box. Getting distracted is now frowned upon because one doesn’t “fit in,” and fitting in, conforming, not causing problems or troubles for parents, teachers, society, is the desirable state.

Yuk. If there had been Ritalin or ADD meds when I was a kid, I would have been put on an IV of them. I was distracted – no, make that fascinated – by the world at large. I had a hunger for knowledge, new experiences, everything. My mind exploded with thoughts and curiosity. I read incessantly, and wrote my first short story at 14. By 16, I’d gotten bored with rock and roll and was listening to jazz. I invented solutions to all kinds of things. Life was fun.

Of course I learned some self-discipline as I grew older and was able to concentrate on things that mattered, but at the same time I was always jumping off the page, so to speak, thinking and feeling and acting around the periphery. I wrote an introductory college textbook on computers, but added value by discussing ethical uses.

Kureishi writes, “As we as a society become desperate financially, and more regulated and conformist, our ideals of competence become more misleading and cruel, making people feel like losers. There might be more to our distractions than we realized we knew. We might need to be irresponsible.”

I recommend his article. It’s an interesting alternative perspective on how to live your life.

Gee, kinda says it all, doesn’t it? I’ve dropped the price for the Nook edition to $4.95 from $8.95. For a while. I haven’t decided how long. So download yours while it’s cheap. And don’t forget, review it on Amazon or Goodreads and get a free Wild Blue Yonder dog tag!

My alma mater, California State University at Sonoma, recently honored me with a profile in “The SSU Connection,” the alumni newsletter.  I’m very proud to be a graduate of this excellent educational institution, and the scholarship for writers which I sponsor each year.

SSU Alumni Spotlight

Jack B. Rochester, B.A., M.A., English

“Like many English majors, I always dreamed of seeing my name on the cover of a book,” says Jack Rochester. Little did he imagine he would see his dream come true, not once but 11 times during his career as a professional writer. After transferring from Cal State Fullerton and graduating from Sonoma State, Rochester began working in college textbook publishing. He learned the business quickly and was promoted to editor in less than two years. A few years later, a publisher asked him to write his first college textbook, Computers for People. It was a departure from typical introductory texts: “I believed computers were interesting because of how people used them, not simply because of the technology. Every chapter had a story about a real person using computers, and another on the ethical use of computer technology.”
Last month, Rochester reached his last writer’s goal– his first novel– Wild Blue Yonder, a coming of age story about a bright but sheltered boy who is abruptly forced by a draft notice to confront the “Real World” at the height of the Vietnam War. Rochester spent four years working on the novel, and is now halfway through its sequel. “Transferring from Cal State Fullerton to Sonoma State was one of the best decisions I ever made. And it wasn’t just that I was closer to the earth. It was the quality of education here at Sonoma. I had some of the best teachers one could hope for: bright, interesting, committed to teaching and mentoring. I received a first-class education here.”

“I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes,” said the Chinese Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, just prior to going to jail for ELEVEN YEARS for writing a pro-democracy manifesto, Charter 08. It put forth the idea of having more political parties in China, in addition to the Communist Party. He didn’t advocate overthrowing the government, just the existence of other parties. The Commie government called that “inciting subversion of state power” and it got him thrown into prison until 2020.

Liu has long been a human rights activist. This isn’t even the first time he’s been jailed – it’s the fourth. He’s 55 years old and has written many works of non-fiction and poetry. His most recent book of poems and essays, No Enemies, No Hatred, embodies his humanitarian principles and objectives. The title pretty much tells you what this man is about.

It’s hard to imagine a country of China’s power, influence and potential for greatness strapped into such a narrow, dogmatic political and social order. [Until, I guess, you think about North Korea.] But having said that, I find it hard to imagine that China won’t grow more democratic and less autocratic as time passes. [And Korea? Now that's anybody's guess.]

More to the point of this essay, how many of us – whether speaking, acting, or writing – are willing to put our values on the line and risk public or political dissent or displeasure? This was a question I grappled with as I wrote Wild Blue Yonder. We Americans have lived in a society where the government has sponsored a “war on drugs” since Nixon was president. [Obama recently decided not to use the term any longer.] The war on drugs tried to convince the American populace that any drug use was bad. Sadly, alcohol wasn’t considered a drug.

Yet in the 1960s, the era in which my novel is set, using pot and psychedelics was considered by many a way to strive for higher consciousness. That’s what Nate and his buddies are into. They don’t shoot heroin or snort cocaine, which are not what I’d call consciousness-expanding. The boys follow in the tradition Aldous Huxley described in The Doors of Perception, his seminal book about his own experiences with mescaline.

The Doors named their group after Huxley’s book.

I took the risk of writing about the boys’ drug-use experiences because I thought their experiences contained valuable insights, while adding a rich dimension to the story. I wrote about them in a detailed, intense manner, so readers wouldn’t think I just threw them in as cheap thrills. While it might be fun or entertaining to read about them smoking hash from a gilded 400-year-old, three-foot tall hookah with two old ladies in their 60s, the reader learns some other interesting stuff at the same time. As Pete Dexter recently wrote in a New York Times book review, “…keep in mind that a book that entertains without enlightening can still be a guilty pleasure, but a book that enlightens without entertaining is algebra.” I love that.

What I’m saying is every conscientious writer takes chances when telling their stories. Liu took chances – big, risky ones. Because we Americans live in a society where words are not a crime, my risks were not as great.

More about Liu can be heard here.

I’ve dropped the price on the Kindle edition of Wild Blue Yonder from $8.95 to $4.95. My motivations are simple and promulgated by, as the Brothers Click and Clack would say, shameless commerce. When Barnes and Noble dropped the price for the paperback from $13.95 to $10, Amazon followed. Both sold a lot of copies. I figure there are a few [sic] folks out there who prefer to read on the Kindle, and so I’m following suit. Grab ‘em while they’re cheap.

As always, $1 for every book sold goes to our veterans, and if you write a review on Amazon or Goodreads, I’ll send you a dogtag, which is proving to be the Fashion Statement of the Year. Maybe even the millennium.