Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (4 page)

Many well-intentioned psychologists have acknowledged a debt to General Semantics: Fritz Perls (Gestalt therapy, Esalen), Albert Ellis (cognitive therapy) and Neuro-Linguistic Programmers Richard Bandler and John Grinder were all heavy Korzybski-ites. So were Buckminster Fuller, S. I. Hayakawa, Alvin Toffler, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, philosopher Alan Watts, literary theorist Kenneth Burke, and the originator of
The
Tonight Show
, Steve Allen (
smock-smock!
). Additional science fiction writers who were influenced by General Semantics and/or A. E. van Vogt: Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick (very big on amnesiac mutants), Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Robert Anton Wilson, Poul Anderson, Philip José Farmer and many more. In recent years, a new generation of sci-fi writers has been exploring the latest pimp-my-human movement. It's known as Transhumanism and has a logo every bit as snappy as Null-A: H+.

After
Science and Sanity
became a runaway hit with the egghead crowd, in 1938 the Count established the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago (it moved to Connecticut in 1946). In attendance at his summer lecture series of 1939 was Harvard student William S. Burroughs, the future writer of
Junkie
,
Queer
,
Naked Lunch
and other works. Several of the core concepts that Burroughs would preach to his flock—the idea that language is a virus, the routine about the “IS of identity” and the “EITHER/OR” problem—certainly had their origins in General Semantics. So if we are alert to the fact that Burroughs was an idol of both J. G. Ballard and William Gibson, we can trace Null-A's influence back through three generations of sci-fi greats.

A note: In the mid-sixties, Burroughs joined the Church of Scientology and was a member until 1972 when, disgusted with Hubbard's increasingly megalomaniacal statements and behavior, he moved on to higher ground, so to speak. Apparently, he was still quoting Korzybski through his last days.

•   •   •

I
never did get the hang of that cortico-thalamic pause or grow golden tendrils out of my head like the mutants in van Vogt's other classic,
Slan
. It seemed that, if you wanted to go mutant, you had to be born into a family of superhumans or join a political group or a religion. And the truth was, I was never much of a joiner.

2

In September 1966, when I was a student at Bard College, my formerly tweedy, graying poetry professor, Anthony Hecht, showed up for the new term in gray-and-white-striped Uncle Sam bell-bottoms, a bright paisley shirt, a suede vest and Beatle boots. My friends and I discovered that these, along with a new laid-back, goofy expression, were the souvenirs of a summer spent among the flower children of Haight-Ashbury, a section of San Francisco that was just starting its climb to glory. Of course, we had to check it out as well. So, a few months later, a few of us drove out to the coast.

The scene, made eerily vivid by the combination of psychedelic drugs and its own outrageous novelty, was pure science fiction: all these dazzling young girls dressed up in homemade outfits inspired by Pocahontas, Maid Marian, Annie Oakley, whoever. Tall, bony drug dealers with ponytails would walk
past you muttering the names of their wares without the vowels, just in case you were a narc:
Hsh!—Grss!—Zd!—Spd!
Blue Cheer, a group that touted itself as the loudest band in the world, was playing down the street at the Straight Theater.

It was fascinating, for about a week, anyway. Then you started to notice that a lot of the kids looked all waxy and wild-eyed and that they were talking much too slow or much too fast, and then you got that
Oh shit
feeling like Lou Costello thinking he's talking to Abbott and then realizing he's talking to the Wolfman. On the corner, you'd spot the hustling predator (whose consciousness hadn't been raised as yet) looking to score off the middle-class kids who'd walked right onto their turf. It was over, bro, before it even hit
Life
magazine.

By 1968, the paranoia was thick. The Vietnam War was escalating, Kennedy II and King were assassinated, and both the right and the left were caught in a cycle of fear and fury. Several gruesome murders (the “Groovy” murders, Manson) broke the spirit of the alternative community. Almost immediately, the counterculture, this alliance of aspiring mutants, seemed to have a nervous breakdown and fragmented into claques devoted to one authority figure or another: you could sign up with the Maharishi, Meher Baba, Rajneesh and his Orange People, Sun Myung Moon, the Sufis, the Jesus Freaks, the Hare Krishnas and various sects of Buddhists. In addition, there were the human-potential movements already mentioned, plus EST, Arica, primal therapy and scores of others. In the political sphere, you had the Panthers and the Weathermen. All this provided me and my droll companions with a lot of great material for after-dinner analysis, with or without
herbal mood augmentation. Not that we all weren't feeling a little shaky ourselves. Now everyone had a map, but, as the Count liked to say, the map is not the territory. After a while, there wasn't any territory, either.

3

There were a few SF writers, like antiauthoritarian satirists Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, who wouldn't buy into John Campbell's dream of a mutant utopia. In the early fifties, when Philip K. Dick tried to sell Campbell a story about a postatomic mutant—a perfect being who turns out to have no use for the human race—Campbell wouldn't allow it. Dick's comments:

Here I am also saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr., deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us. Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn't seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as to where we would wind up going. It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren't.

Predictably, Campbell thought Dick's stories were “not only worthless, but nuts”; Dick, as much as he enjoyed van Vogt, eventually came to see both Campbell and his pal Heinlein as dangerous right-wing loonies.

In the same anthology that contained “The Father-Thing,” there was a complete novel,
The Stars
My Destination
, by Alfred
Bester, a young, hip Manhattanite who also wrote for radio, comics, the slicks and early TV. In 1953, “Alphie” Bester won the very first Hugo Award for his novel
The Demolished Man
, a dark tale of a powerful, wealthy man who is defeated by his own self-annihilating Id. These two novels (as well as some terrific stories) were distinguished by a manic style and an arch urban humor that were not lost on the cyberpunkers to come.

Like most of Campbell's young colleagues, Bester idolized him, though they'd never actually met. Shortly after Bester sent Campbell a few stories, the great man called and asked him to come into the office to talk about some changes. Bester was psyched. Being more of a midtown gent (or more naïve) than most of the geeks in the field, Bester was astonished when the “editorial offices” of
Astounding Science Fiction
turned out to be a small, scuzzy room in the bowels of an industrial printing plant out in Jersey. Campbell told Bester he liked one of his stories, but was unhappy that the main character's behavior was driven by unconscious, “Freudian” impulses. Years later, Bester described the conversation:

“You don't know it,” Campbell said, “you can't have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished . . . destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time.”

“What's that?”

“Dianetics.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard and he will win the Nobel peace prize for it,” Campbell said solemnly.

“The peace prize? What for?”

“Wouldn't the man who wiped out all war win the Nobel peace prize?”

Campbell then handed Bester the galley proofs of Hubbard's first Dianetics piece, which was to appear in the next issue of
Astounding
, and told him to read it. Afterward, he took Bester downstairs to the printer's cafeteria for lunch, where, then and there, Campbell tried to “clear” him of his “engrams” (emotional blockages). Desperately trying not to laugh, Bester finally begged off, explaining that his emotional wounds were too much to bear. He raced back to the city and consoled himself with “three double Gibsons.”

While it's true that Bester's plots tended to follow a psychoanalytic model—which is another way of describing classical heroic tragedy—he never seemed to care much for systems or politics. His self-made supermen are lone wolves, and their rebirth is always acquired by trial and error, and at great cost. Gully Foyle, the brutish protagonist of
The Stars My Destination
doesn't have a clan or a training manual to help him on his journey toward cosmic destiny; all he has to work with is his rage at the Vorga, the passing cruiser that left him to perish after being shipwrecked in deep space. In Bester's twenty-fifth century, there's nothing like a tradition of General Semantics to hold society together. People are as they've ever been: greedy and impulsive, vicious, self-interested, loving and scattered. Here is Bester's mock-Dickensian prologue:

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a
future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it . . .

All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the twenty-fifth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution . . . that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the solar system was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform man and make him the master of the universe.

Back in my room, in Kendall Park, reading by the light of a tensor lamp, I thought: he's describing the twenty-fifth century, but . . . maybe, out there somewhere, across Route 27, just around the next curve of space-time, the second half of the twentieth century might be just as exciting—even though nobody thinks so. The remarkable technologies, intrepid spacers walking on the moon, the loud, wild music, the sex, the social and cultural upheavals, the colors, the freaks, the fun—in short, the adventure.

I was introduced to Shep, as his fans called him, by my weird uncle Dave. Dave, who was a bit of a hipster, used to crash on our sofa when he was between jobs. Being a bookish and somewhat imperious twelve-year-old, already desperately weary of life in suburbia and appalled by Hoss and Little Joe and Mitch Miller and the heinous
Bachelor Father
, I figured Dave was my man. One night, after ruthlessly beating me at rummy, he put down the cards and said, “Now we're gonna listen to Shepherd—this guy's great.” The Zenith table radio in the kitchen came to life midway through Shepherd's theme music, a kitschy, galloping Eduard Strauss piece called the “Bahn Frei” polka. And then there was this voice, cozy, yet abounding with jest.

I
f you know Jean Shepherd's name, it's probably in connection with the now classic film
A Christmas Story
, which is based on a couple of stories in his book
In God We Trust: All Others
Pay Cash
. He also did the compelling voice-over narration. Every Christmas, TBS presents a twenty-four-hour
A Christmas Story
marathon.

There are annual fan conventions devoted to the film—released thirty years ago this Thanksgiving—and the original
location, a house in Cleveland, has been turned into a museum. But long before
A Christmas Story
was made, Shepherd did a nightly radio broadcast on WOR out of Manhattan that enthralled a generation of alienated young people within range of the station's powerful transmitter. Including me: I was a spy for Jean Shepherd.

In the late fifties, while Lenny Bruce was beginning his climb to holy infamy in jazz clubs on the West Coast, Shepherd's all-night monologues on WOR had already gained him an intensely loyal cult of listeners. Unlike Bruce's provocative nightclub act, which had its origins in the “schpritz” of the Catskills comics, Shepherd's improvised routines were more in the tradition of Midwestern storytellers like Mark Twain, but with a contemporary urban twist: say, Mark Twain after he'd been dating Elaine May for a year and a half. Where Bruce's antics made headlines, Shepherd, with his warm, charismatic voice and folksy style, could perform his most subversive routines with the bosses in the WOR front office and the FCC being none the wiser. At least, most of the time.

He was definitely a grown-up but he was talking to me—I mean straight to me, with my twelve-year-old sensibility, as if some version of myself with twenty-five more years worth of life experience had magically crawled into the radio, sat down and loosened his tie. I was hooked. From then on, like legions of other sorry-ass misfits throughout the Northeast, I tuned in every weeknight at eleven fifteen and let Shep put me under his spell. Afterwards, I'd switch to an all-night jazz station and dig the sounds until I conked out. Eventually, this practice started to affect my grades and I almost didn't graduate from high school.

Listening to Shep, I learned about social observation and human types; how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; “slobbism”; “creeping meatballism”; nineteenth-century panoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in “trivia”; bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone.

Shepherd's talk usually fell into one of four categories. Fans of
A Christmas Story
will be familiar with the basic comic tone of his Depression-era tales, elaborations on his experience growing up in Hammond, Indiana, a Chicago suburb in the shadow of U.S. Steel on Lake Michigan. These stories featured his manic father (“the old man”), his mother (always standing over the sink in “a yellow rump-sprung chenille bathrobe with bits of dried egg on the lapel”), his kid brother, Randy, and assorted pals, bullies, beauties and other neighborhood types. While the film preserves much of the flavor of Shep's humor, not much remains of the acid edge that characterized his on-air performances. In the film, the general effect is one of bittersweet nostalgia. On the radio, the true horror of helpless childhood came through.

Then there were the stories culled from his three years in the stateside army during World War II (a juvenile ham radio and electronics freak, he was assigned to the Signal Corps). The third hunk of material was informed by his adventures in postwar radio and TV. He seems to have done every possible job, from engineer to sportscaster to hosting live cowboy music
broadcasts. Finally, there was the contemporary stuff, comments on the passing scene.

In between, he'd sing along to noisy old records, play the kazoo and the nose flute, brutally sabotage the commercials and get his listeners—the “night people,” the “gang”—to help him pull goofy public pranks on the unwitting squares that populated most of Manhattan. In one famous experiment in the power of hype, Shepherd asked his listeners to go to bookstores and make requests for
I, Libertine
, a nonexistent novel by a nonexistent author, Frederick R. Ewing. The hoax quickly snowballed and several weeks later
I, Libertine
was on bestseller lists. (Shep and sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon eventually codged together an actual novel of that title for Ballantine Books. I owned a copy.)

Hilarious as Shep's tales could be, one sensed a tough realism about life that ran counter to the agitprop for the Leisure Revolution that the media were serving up in those years. With the Soviets flexing their muscles and the constant specter of global nuclear war, the government was going to fantastic lengths to convince everyone that things were just peachy. From Bert the Turtle's exhortations to “duck and cover” in the face of an atomic blast to the endless parade of new products hawked on the tube by Madison Avenue, Americans were feeding themselves a line of hooey that was no less absurd than the most hard-core Maoist brainwash. “Relax, life is good,” we were told. “Your government and Walt Disney have got the future well in hand.” To skeptical
Mad
magazine–reading little stinkers like myself, it was this mendacity on the part of adults that was the most sinister enemy of all.

Because Shep made it clear he was just as dazed, enraged and amused as you were, that he noticed what you noticed, he established himself as one of a handful of adults you could trust. (Others were Mailer, Ginsberg, Vonnegut and
Realist
publisher Paul Krassner.) Night after night, Shepherd forged the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a whole generation of fans into an axiom that went something like “The language of our culture no longer describes real life and, pretty soon, something's gonna blow.”

Toward the beginning of the show, Shepherd frequently read news clippings that listeners, his “spies,” had sent in. These were mostly odd little fillers he called “straws in the wind,” indicators of the prevailing mood. Once I mailed Shep an article from our local Central Jersey paper about a guy who, after being fired for some petty infraction, got loaded and tossed a Coke bottle through every store window in the local shopping mall. A couple of nights later, I'm listening to the show and Shep does his usual bit: “So, this kid sent me a piece . . .” And he ACTUALLY READ MY CLIP ON THE AIR!
Wham
: I had connected. My life as an independent consciousness had begun. I remember scurrying down to the TV room and announcing this amazing event to my parents. Having always considered both Shepherd and my uncle Dave to be half-cracked, they were greatly underwhelmed.

As grateful as I am that Shep was there for me during those crucial years, my idealization of Shepherd the Man was not to survive much longer. In December 1965, I came home from my first year of college for Christmas break and noticed that Shepherd was going to be appearing at nearby Rutgers University.
On a frosty night, I drove my used Ford Galaxy to New Brunswick, where I sat on the floor with a congregation of Rutgers students and watched Shep walk into the spotlight to enthusiastic applause. He had neat but stylishly long hair and was wearing a green corduroy sports coat with the collar up over a black turtleneck tee.

Onstage for almost two hours, he had the young audience in his pocket from the downbeat. But, for me, something wasn't right. On the radio, speaking close to the mic, he was able to use vocal nuances and changes in intensity to communicate the most intimate shadings of thought and feeling, not unlike what Miles Davis could achieve in a recording studio. Live onstage, he spoke as though he'd never seen a microphone in his life, trying to project to the back of the room. Moreover, he blared and blustered like a carnival barker, as if he had the scent of failure in his nostrils and was ready to do anything to get the crowd on his side. It was obvious that the guy I thought was so cool had a desperate need to impress all these people, whom I assumed to be casual listeners at best.

In truth, even at home, listening on the radio, I'd noticed a strain of grandiosity creeping into Shepherd's routines. Apparently, he'd originally gone to New York with the idea of being a stage actor or making it big on network TV. But it's easy to imagine mainstream producers and network execs being put off by Shepherd's contrariness and intrinsic marginality. Supposedly, when Steve Allen retired as host of
The Tonight Show
, he'd suggested Shepherd as a replacement. NBC ended up giving the job to the eccentric but more cuddly Jack Paar. In any case, as the years rolled by, Shepherd rankled at being confined
to the ghetto of radio and must have come to see his crown as King of the Hipsters as a crown of thorns.

What I saw that night at Rutgers wasn't pretty. In the studio, his occasional abuse of the lone engineer on the other side of the glass could be seen as the petulance of an artist trying to make things work on the fly. But, incandescent under the gaze of all those kids, his self-indulgences looked more like straight-up narcissism and his “hipness” was revealed as something closer to contempt. By the end of the show, he'd crossed the line between artist and showman and then some. No longer wanting to meet the great man, I left before the reception, scraped the ice off my windshield and drove home. Anyway, the cool early sixties were over and the boiling, psychedelic late sixties had begun. Shepherd was no longer part of my world.

Not long ago, in the absence of any books, films, music, and so on, that seemed to give off any light, I started looking back at some of the things that used to inspire me as a kid, including Shep's old shows, many of which are now available on the Internet. Hearing them almost a half century down the line has been a trip. Despite the tendencies I've already mentioned (plus the gaffes one might expect from a wild man like Shep ad-libbing before the age of political correctness), much of the stuff is simply amazing: the guy is a dynamo, brimming with curiosity and ideas and fun. Working from a few written notes at most, Shepherd is intense, manic, alive, the first and only true practitioner of spontaneous word jazz.

I've done a little catch-up research: Shepherd stayed on at WOR until 1977, when the station did a makeover. His books, collections of stories based on the same material he used on the
air, sold well. He had a successful career on public television and continued to do his bit onstage into the nineties. And, of course, there was the collaboration with director Bob Clark on
A Christmas Story
. But I'm sorry to report that the narcissism thing kept getting worse as he got older.

Like a lot of fine-tuned performing artists, Shepherd increasingly exhibited the whole range of symptoms common to the aging diva. He became paranoid and resentful of imagined rivals, whether they were old ones like Mort Sahl or upstarts like Garrison Keillor. At the same time, he disavowed all his radio work, claiming that it was just a temporary gig on his way to some fanciful glory on the stage and screen. He even seemed to want to kill off his childhood, insisting that all those stories and characters were pulled clear out of his imagination. Old fans, for whom he had been almost like a surrogate father or big brother, were often met with derision when they approached him.

He didn't drink himself to death like his pal Jack Kerouac or OD like Lenny Bruce, but gradually succumbed to that very real disease of self-loathing and its accompanying defenses. Disappointed in the way the world had treated him, he retired to Florida's west coast and died in 1999.

Although Shepherd almost never divulged details about his private life, he wasn't shy about giving us a bit of unflattering self-analysis, as this fragment of a show from 1957 attests:

Protective coloration is extremely important in our lives . . . We are in the weeds all the time because we find it better down here in the weeds . . . Look at me . . . I am not at all what I appear to be . . . This is merely a mask . . . that more or less
covers up the real me that's underneath. The real me is a saber-toothed tiger. I couldn't dare go down the street the way I really am. I'd get shot in five minutes. They'd have me in a wagon with a bunch of Doberman pinschers.

To an adolescent back then, long before a therapeutic vernacular had entered the language, this was reassuring news. It's possible that Shep's greatest lesson to the gang wasn't just “Things are not what they seem” but rather “Things are not what they seem—including me.”