1969 – “Been Down So Long…”, “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” and My First and Only Trip to the Half Baked Shrink

[JMac1949 Memories]

“Been Down So Long…”  I’m not sure but I believe it was Mick White who gave me a copy of Richard Fariña's novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and I fell under the spell of Gnossos Pappadopoulis. 

http://www.richardandmimi.com/beendown67.jpg

Bigger than life, the portrait of that rambling wastrel who followed in Kerouac’s footsteps, stands out in my mind to this day.  With the title taken from a line in the 1928 blues song "I Will Turn Your Money Green," by Furry Lewis, Fariña sculpted composite characters from the people of his own life to create a story that his Cornell classmate Thomas Pynchon described as "coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch... hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time…"

With the name of Gnossos (in my mind a homophone for the Greek gnosis - knowledge) Fariña’s protagonist grabbed my attention while getting drunk and stoned at a frat party when he quoted poetry, "Dear to me is sleep...While evil and shame endure, not to see, not to feel is my good fortune," and then followed that up with, “I've been on a voyage, old sport, a kind of quest, I've seen fire and pestilence, symptoms of a great disease. I'm exempt.”

It was the concept of exemption through cool that put the hook in me, "I am not ionized and I possess not valence…" and I read the book twice without ever putting it down.  Then I read Pynchon’s preface and discovered the sheer poetry of Fariña’s death.  On April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his novel, he left his wife’s 21^st birthday party on a late night joy ride down Carmel Valley Road.  At the S-turn less than two hundred feet from the spot where on the Carmel River where John Steinbeck sent his denizens from Cannery Row on their infamous frog hunt, the driver lost control and Fariña fell from the back of a motorcycle, “…traveling ( by police estimates) at 90 miles per hour even though "a prudent speed" would have been thirty…”

http://www.richardandmimi.com/mimi-bio.html

…“Pack Up Your Sorrows,”…: Survived by his wife Mimi, the younger sister of Joan Baez, I later discovered that they’d performed and recorded one of my favorite songs:

“No use crying, talking to a stranger,

naming the sorrow you've seen

Too many bad times, too many sad times

Nobody knows what you mean.

But if somehow you could pack up your sorrows

and give them all to me

You would lose them, I know how to use them

Give them all to me.

The lyric and chorus seemed to fit my state of need:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4LbU8w7Th4

… and My First and Only Trip to the Half Baked Shrink: I  don’t remember how it happened.  All that I can recall is that somehow, “Mac” persuaded me to go see a psychiatrist.  I have no recollection of who he was, what he looked like, what we talked about or what, if any, diagnosis he may have prescribed; except…

http://www.biography.com/people/sigmund-freud-9302400

…that while we sat in the waiting room of his office listening to inane Muzak, I scribbled this bit of verse in the margin of whatever book I was reading:

“We sit…

  and wait…

  for a…

  half baked…

  fascist shrink…

  to treat…

  our head…

  for his own sickness.”

And now let’s skip over Joni Mitchell’s more famous cover and go to the original Twisted source: Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, for some perspective on the scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXwMgIlmoaM

Next up on JMac1949 - Memories, 1969 – March - Driving on PCP & the Art Museum, Dan & Mick, Marxist Philosophy Professor & Black Panthers.

 Except for attributed video, photos and text, all content is copyrighted © 2013 JKM (an apparently ineffectual boilerplate joke?)

[Zanelle]

Lots of unique twists and turns here.  Great videos. My mom sent me to a shrink about that time too.  He told me to tell her to come in.  ha.  Im glad you remember so much as the sixties were such a blurrrr to me.

[Rob Neukirch]

That Carmel Valley is a strange maelstrom of a place...I've had some strange encounters there.  So sad that farina died so early in his life, after such a great success.  Sigh.  There's just no understanding some things.  Always a great read...

[James Mark Emmerling]

hm.

like this...I go so far as to say it encapsulates me, sort of..

"Dear to me is sleep...While evil and shame endure, not to see, not to feel is my good fortune," and then followed that up with, “I've been on a voyage, old sport, a kind of quest, I've seen fire and pestilence, symptoms of a great disease. I'm exempt.”

 

my exemption from the disease means keeping my soul pure.

reading good shit only,  talking  to good people only.

 

~

ha freud was mistranslatd  and misunderstood.

he said

"Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love."

and

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

 

and

 

 

• The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1916)
• The ego is not master in its own house.
  • A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917)

"

[Christine Geery]

My sister thought I should see a shrink when I was 20. I guess she figured I was nuts cause I had spent the summer in Nassau. Little did she know that this guy encouraged me to move to the States. So, HAHA sis.

[Matt Paust]

I still have the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross album I bought in college after seeing them perform live at the U. of Wis. campus.    Oddly, altho I've read several of Pynchon's novels, I never read Farina.  I remember seeing it in the bookstore and thinking it was probly too clever by half, I guess I'm gonna hafta break down one day soon and read the damned thing. 

[Jan Sand]

We each have our own sixties. It was the flower of my life, no drugs, but I fell in love with my wife and we had two wonderful kids. It was very sharply downhill after that.

[Jonathan Wolfman]

Of course, The Farinas' House unAmericn Blues Dream is among the most powerful of any number written in this country. And that novel is remarkable.

[Steel Breeze]

R & L.....

excellent....

[Rodney Roe]

Thanks for the videos.  I had never heard that rendition of "Twisted".  Also, Mimi Farina's voice is nearly indistinguishable from her sister, Joan's. 

Good stuff bringing back memories of my youth.

[Rodney Roe]

Also, I can't believe Furry Lewis has been referenced twice in as many weeks.