Zack Dennis is back with another installment of Exit Music — and this week, he uses the closing credits of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a starting point for a discussion of Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, and the Kentucky Derby, all set to the strains of “Jumping Jack Flash.”
What would rock and roll be without drugs? Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the death of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD-25. Hoffman’s tale is one of the most celebrated stories of chemical discovery; he discovered the compound in 1938 but shelved it after preliminary tests on animals showed no particular pharmacological benefits (aside from “restlessness”). A “peculiar presentiment” prompted Hoffman to revisit the substance five years later, and during the synthesis process he found himself sufficiently disoriented to discontinue work. Three days later, on April 29, 1943, he intentionally subjected himself to what he thought would be a threshold dose of 250 µg (which is actually from two to five times the typical recreational dose), and the well-chronicled adventures that followed have been subsequently celebrated as “Bicycle Day” amongst the psychonaut community.
In 1998, Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi” was first performed in New York City. It wasn’t hard to predict that portraying Jesus as a promiscuous homosexual living in Corpus Christi, Texas would inspire vehement condemnation from religious groups – and it most certainly did, as “Christians” spewed death threats against the members of the Manhattan Theater Group that first produced the play, and when the play opened in London in 1999 a British Muslim group issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the playwright.
A few clues exist in the gospels that suggest Jesus’ sexual preferences might have made it a little easier to ignore the charms of the prostitutes he was willing to defend. Mentions of the “disciple who Jesus loved,” and “the kiss of Judas” provide fodder for interpretation, but in a larger sense, I think Jesus’ sexuality is entirely irrelevant with regards to the core message of his teachings. Whether Jesus had any sexual nature at all affects his legacy no more than Morrisey’s sexuality affects his lyrics or whether Kevin Spacey’s sexual preference influences the roles he inhabits.
Conceptually, counting cards is incredibly simple. Take a deck of cards. With a full deck, the count is zero. Deal the cards out one by one. Each time you see a card numbered 2 through 6, add one to the count. Each time you see an ace, a face card, or a ten, subtract one from the count. That’s it. You’re done. You’ve learned the basic high-low counting system, a system that mathematician Edward O. Thorpe developed and proved by winning huge money during a single weekend.
On the technical side, the hardest part of counting cards exists in playing with perfect strategy. There are essentially 250 situations that can occur while playing blackjack, and you need to know how to play your cards in each of them. Memorizing 250 different responses might sound intimidating, but it’s no harder than memorizing the multiplication tables, and you managed to accomplish that before you were nine years old.
Put these two basic techniques together, and you’ve got an edge on the casino. All you need to do is increase the amount of your bet when the count is positive, and over the long haul you’ll win money. Of course, any dealer worth the meager wages the casinos begrudge them can count cards as easily as you – so with a basic high-low system, what you’re doing is completely transparent.
I saw Ocean’s Eleven (2001) at a special screening in Mission Valley for Qualcomm employees and their friends. I had a roommate who was working on their digital cinema collaboration with Texas Instruments. The film was a fun bit of fluff, obviously as enjoyable for the actors to produce as it was for us to watch. The engineers at Qualcomm were deservedly proud of their work, which was absent of lint, spots, jitter or cigarette burns. It was a fun evening – the Qualcomm folks were still enjoying the tail end of the giddy stock price heights of the 2000 dot-com bubble, and I was on the tail end of my own experience at pilfering money from a Las Vegas casino. (more…)
In 2002 I decided to cross one of the items off my bucket list (I hate that expression – if someone knows a better one please leave it in the comments) and took a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. My boss didn’t want to sign off on the vacation time because he was anticipating some sort of crisis during that week, so I almost had to quit my job for it. It was one of the few times I actually played hardball – I was playing chicken with a $2000 Christmas bonus that wouldn’t be awarded unless you actually worked for the company the day they handed out the checks – but I eventually got my way and flew out to Austin to join my college friend F****. Our plan was to rent a car and drive from Texas to Louisiana, stay at an as-yet undetermined hotel on the outskirts of Louisiana and drive into town each day for parades.
F**** and I didn’t have a great track record of traveling together. During our senior year in college, we’d embarked on a cross-country journey from Virginia to California in an aging Ford Taurus that my parents had given to me. After a single day of being on the road together, we came to an unspoken agreement that if we didn’t make it across the country as quickly as possible, our journey might outlast our friendship. We ended up driving in shifts for 34 straight hours, from Asheville, North Carolina to Las Vegas, stopping only for food and gas. We survived, and our friendship survived (that particular trip, at least – we’re no longer friends today), and it didn’t seem like a bad idea to try it again four years later.
Buddy Revel, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a bully in Three O’Clock High (1987), isn’t actually a bully. Bullying is a tool used to establish or enforce social dominance. And Buddy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the social dynamic at Weaver High School. As he clearly states to Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) when the hapless young journalist attempts to engage him while they stand in front of a row of urinals, Buddy doesn’t want anybody to know anything about him. The enigmatic and elusive science fiction writer John Steakley wrote “Bullies don’t want to fight you. They don’t want to fight at all. They just want to beat you up.” And the exact opposite is true of Buddy Revel. He has countless chances to beat Jerry up. But he’s not interested in beating Jerry up. All he wants to do is fight him.
As it turns out, Buddy is more like the monster in a horror movie. He seemingly has the ability to be everywhere at once. Traditional authority figures are incapable of stopping him. And except for a moment of greed at the very end of the film, he seems to be motivated by nothing more than pure malice. He’s more of a caricature of a bully than an actual bully, which is absolutely necessary for the story to unfold as it does.
Why is gold valuable? Why is it worth anything at all? Sure, it’s yellow and shiny. But so is brass. It’s scarce, but so is osmium, and you don’t see anybody making jewelry out of that (actually, osmium is kind of poisonous, which is why it’s rarely used, and in those cases only as an alloy). Gold has got a low melting point and is very malleable, which makes it nicely workable, but also means it’s easy to scratch or dent. And it’s pretty damned cumbersome, too. So what’s so great about gold?
Actually, what really makes gold so great is its resistance to corrosion. It’s virtually impossible to dissolve, and doesn’t oxidize easily – meaning that it won’t rust, tarnish, or become discolored under normal circumstances. Remember the old redox potential tables from your high school chemistry? Gold is right up there near the top. Gold doesn’t get old. Sunken treasure can languish at the bottom of the ocean for centuries without losing its luster. Platinum has the same characteristics – except it’s more rare, and hence more valuable.
A few years ago, my dad took a vacation to Hawaii. While he was there, he tried surfing for the first time. Even though he’s a good athlete, and solid swimmer (a former lifeguard), he didn’t have much luck. As he explained it, he was able to get to his knees, but couldn’t progress upwards from there and stand up without losing his balance. During the few times that I’ve tried to give people surfing lessons, kneeling on the board is one of the mistakes I strongly caution beginners against (the other is to never, ever, ever let the board get between you and an incoming wave). It’s an understandable habit for anyone to develop – it makes sense to progress from your stomach to your knees – but I think members of my father’s generation are much more susceptible to this tendency, due to a fundamental difference in the way they approach athletics in general.
Stacey Peralta’s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) contains a few very important pieces of information that help explain the evolution of modern skateboarding. Chief among these is the illustration of the relationship between skateboarding and surfing, and how early skateboarders were attempting to imitate maneuvers that were performed in the water (something that is fascinating to me personally is how a reverse has taken place and now surfers often try to emulate maneuvers that were originally invented on skateboards). Equally important is the documentation of how a severe drought in the mid-seventies in Southern California led to the evolution of vertical skateboarding. And of course, the film pays a great deal of attention to the lifestyle that was associated with the early days of skateboarding, particularly amongst the original members of the Zephyr skateboarding team from Santa Monica. But something that the film isn’t quite bold enough to assert, but I think can be fairly argued, is that the physical orientation of a person riding a board – the very stance itself – served as a line of demarcation between generations. (more…)
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally soured on his hero John McCain, but I’m willing to predict that within a few weeks he’ll have decided that McCain has somehow regained his honor, and that Obama has committed some unforgivable transgression of campaigning, and at this point Cohen will happily resume shilling for the Arizona senator. Cohen is as much of a turncoat liberal as Joe Lieberman, and soon enough he’ll return, tail between his legs, to genuflect at the altar of power.
One of the most sickening episodes during the Bush administration, one that betrayed so many members of the Washington press as nothing more than sycophantic lapdogs for the establishment power structure, was the conviction of Scooter Libby and the commutation of his sentence by President Bush. Among the litany of abuses of the basic principles of both democracy and constitutional government, this was the one example that stood out to me as an unmistakable signal that our system of representational government, as articulated in the Constitution, was in dire jeopardy.
I’ve seen a number of lists of questions that the press should theoretically be asking Sarah Palin, if they ever get a chance to query her outside of a very strictly controlled setting (such as Charles Gibson’s interview, which was surprisingly adversarial). But I’ve got one question that’s been bugging me that I’d really like to see someone ask John McCain: “Did you think it was appropriate for the President to commute the sentence of convicted perjurer Scooter Libby, and would you have done the same thing?”
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
Satire is Mike Judge’s strongest suit, and the disintegration of American society into various facets of stupidity is a topic he confronted more broadly in his following film, Idiocracy (2006). But the focus in Office Space was much sharper, where work life in general was the target, but the workplace managers came under the heaviest fire. Playing a cameo as the manager of Chotchkie’s, Mike Judge himself is willing to step in as the target of ridicule, repeatedly castigating Peter’s girlfriend Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) for her insistence on wearing the minimum number of pieces of flair. It’s meaningless minutiae such as this that are clearly a source of such exasperation for Judge; cover sheets on TPS reports and pieces of flair are not important to how a business functions, and are a waste of time for management to concern themselves with.
One of of the most overlooked films of 2006 (a terrible, terrible year for movies; with redemption only brought by the likes of The Departed, Borat, and Casino Royale) was the noir high school murder mystery Brick. The independently produced film took a story and characters that would normally belong in a Dashiell Hammett novel and deposited them in the setting of an Orange County high school. The movie features the familiar face of Joseph Gordon-Levitt filling the role of the hard-boiled detective unraveling the conspiracy that resulted in the murder of his dame, and he inhabits the role so brilliantly that his performance instantly erased all of the ill will I’d harbored towards him for all those years he spent on Third Rock from the Sun.
While occasional films will address the tense high-school relationships between children and their parents or other authority figures (Rebel Without a Cause, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society) most teen films conveniently relegate adult characters to the periphery, only letting them occasionally affect the events of the film. A variety of techniques can be used to ensure that adults stay out of the picture; they can be on vacation (Risky Business), absent (Napoleon Dynamite), dead (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*), or simply invisible (Lucas). In Brick, the only adult figure (aside from a brief glimpse of the Pin’s mom) who becomes involved in the narrative in any way is the Assistant Vice Principal Gary Trueman (Richard Roundtree). And even AVP Trueman doesn’t really affect how the story plays out; he inhabits the hard-boiled detective novel equivalent of the local police chief who reluctantly agrees to allow the private detective the freedom of movement he needs to solve his case. And despite a number of scenes taking place during the school day, the high school campus is virtually deserted.** It’s these aspects of Brick that are the most challenging to an audience in terms of willingly suspending their disbelief.
In 1998, Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi” was first performed in New York City. It wasn’t hard to predict that portraying Jesus as a promiscuous homosexual living in Corpus Christi, Texas would inspire vehement condemnation from religious groups – and it most certainly did, as “Christians” spewed death threats against the members of the Manhattan Theater Group that first produced the play, and when the play opened in London in 1999 a British Muslim group issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the playwright.
Conceptually, counting cards is incredibly simple. Take a deck of cards. With a full deck, the count is zero. Deal the cards out one by one. Each time you see a card numbered 2 through 6, add one to the count. Each time you see an ace, a face card, or a ten, subtract one from the count. That’s it. You’re done. You’ve learned the basic high-low counting system, a system that mathematician Edward O. Thorpe developed and proved by winning huge money during a single weekend.
In 2002 I decided to cross one of the items off my bucket list (I hate that expression – if someone knows a better one please leave it in the comments) and took a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. My boss didn’t want to sign off on the vacation time because he was anticipating some sort of crisis during that week, so I almost had to quit my job for it. It was one of the few times I actually played hardball – I was playing chicken with a $2000 Christmas bonus that wouldn’t be awarded unless you actually worked for the company the day they handed out the checks – but I eventually got my way and flew out to Austin to join my college friend F****. Our plan was to rent a car and drive from Texas to Louisiana, stay at an as-yet undetermined hotel on the outskirts of Louisiana and drive into town each day for parades.
Buddy Revel, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a bully in Three O’Clock High (1987), isn’t actually a bully. Bullying is a tool used to establish or enforce social dominance. And Buddy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the social dynamic at Weaver High School. As he clearly states to Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) when the hapless young journalist attempts to engage him while they stand in front of a row of urinals, Buddy doesn’t want anybody to know anything about him. The enigmatic and elusive science fiction writer John Steakley wrote “Bullies don’t want to fight you. They don’t want to fight at all. They just want to beat you up.” And the exact opposite is true of Buddy Revel. He has countless chances to beat Jerry up. But he’s not interested in beating Jerry up. All he wants to do is fight him.
Why is gold valuable? Why is it worth anything at all? Sure, it’s yellow and shiny. But so is brass. It’s scarce, but so is osmium, and you don’t see anybody making jewelry out of that (actually, osmium is kind of poisonous, which is why it’s rarely used, and in those cases only as an alloy). Gold has got a low melting point and is very malleable, which makes it nicely workable, but also means it’s easy to scratch or dent. And it’s pretty damned cumbersome, too. So what’s so great about gold?
A few years ago, my dad took a vacation to Hawaii. While he was there, he tried surfing for the first time. Even though he’s a good athlete, and solid swimmer (a former lifeguard), he didn’t have much luck. As he explained it, he was able to get to his knees, but couldn’t progress upwards from there and stand up without losing his balance. During the few times that I’ve tried to give people surfing lessons, kneeling on the board is one of the mistakes I strongly caution beginners against (the other is to never, ever, ever let the board get between you and an incoming wave). It’s an understandable habit for anyone to develop – it makes sense to progress from your stomach to your knees – but I think members of my father’s generation are much more susceptible to this tendency, due to a fundamental difference in the way they approach athletics in general.
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally 
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
One of of the most overlooked films of 2006 (a 
