Thursday, August 26, 2004
(11:34 PM) | Anonymous:
How Come Bobby Dylan and Louie Reed..They're Never Seen In Short Sleeves..
Did I miss the switch back to the 60's somewhere? I ask mainly because, within the past 2 days, 2 jobs have crossed the counter of the print shop, both of which were basically acid tabs minus the acid part, but still decorated as such, and still seperated into the small squares on the back. One was just art that the guy sells at grateful dead concerts for $60 (doesn't the real thing only cost about twice that?) and another was a business card for a graphic designer. I ask: what the heck? I thought we were all into marijuana and crystal meth now adays. Are the cool kids of today really reverting back to the ways of our parents before us?Don't get me wrong - if you have to choose a hallucinogen, you might as well choose one with no dependency issues, and no withdrawal time. You also can't go wrong with the fact that there's no permanant damage, and there's only ever been one overdose worldwide. I'm also all about seeing sounds and tasting colors every chance I get. But..come on..LSD is so..so...40 years ago. Suddenly it's going to become the next hit thing again?
Okay - I remember in high school, this kid brought, what I thought, was a mediocre drawing of Bart Simpson on a strange type of paper once. They all laughed at me because I was like "Oh, did you draw this?" So, perhaps that's all there is to my hostility to this, the most "harmless" of the hard drugs.
In a final spin, rage all you want against kids and their influential music today - but I know I personally never had a second thought about such things until I read classic literature. Recently reading the complete Sherlock Holmes, I'm shocked by the fact that the good sleuth is always shooting up. One such quote (of many):
"Which is it today," I (Watson) asked, "morphine or cocaine?" He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume he had opened."It is cocaine," he said, "a seven per cent solution. Would you care to try it?""No, indeed," I answered brusquely. "My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw away any extra stain upon it."He smiled at my vehemence. "Perhaps you are right, Watson," he said. "I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of a small moment."
I now remember that in reading about the comic for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I'd seen that they depicted Holmes as a drug addict. But, I figured this was just loosely and vaguely drawn from the text. I had no idea that Holmes would be shooting up to cure the pain of an idle mind every 10 pages. And the sad thing is - I think I bought this exact same volume for my nephew for Christmas a couple years ago. Luckily, no one ever reads books that you give as gifts.
So, if I ever end up in a dumpster behind K-Mart, please blame Arthur Conan Doyle, Ken Kesey and Aldous Huxley long before The Violent Femmes, Lil' Kim, and D-12. Unless you can somehow twist it to get Lil' Kim banned from the air.
