Quote of the Day (Robert Armstrong, on the 'Bills' for the Freedom to Drink and Take Drugs)

“We need to remember, as our bongs gurgle merrily, how our society and its rituals have been shaped around the original legal drug. We teach the young about its dangers. We have an entire subculture, in Alcoholics Anonymous, that has grown up to help the people who have a deadly relationship with drink. And still we bury 140,000 Americans a year who die from drinking too much; guns kill only a third as many. This is what we pay for the freedom to drink. The bill for the freedom to take drugs is yet to be presented.”—Financial commentator Robert Armstrong, “How America Got High As a Kite,” The Financial Times, Nov. 18-19, 2023

The image accompanying this post shows Nicolas Cage in his Oscar-winning role as a depressed alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas.

Quote of the Day (David Crosby, on His ‘Terrible Mistake’ in Using Heroin)

“Heroin is a beautiful high the first time. And then it's just a horror of trying to recapture that beauty, which you can never do. At a certain point, it defeats you completely.  Your life becomes useless because you're driving a car where the steering wheel is not attached. You have no control. Me becoming a junkie was the worst thing I did to my partners. That's how I let them down, where the rift between us started. I so wish I had avoided that, but there's no point in being dishonest about having made a terrible mistake.” —Rock ‘n’ roller David Crosby quoted in Alan Paul, “Weekend Confidential: David Crosby—A Legend Faces the End by Making Music,” The Wall Street Journal, July 6-7, 2019

Singer-songwriter David Crosby was born 80 years ago today in Los Angeles. A founding member of the influential bands The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, he might also be their most infuriating.

Crosby is only half right about drug addiction driving a wedge between him and his bandmates. That substance abuse was so protracted, so embarrassing, and so life-threatening that one is tempted to accept it at face value.

What tends to be forgotten is that ego and lack of impulse control over his tongue did the rest.

 Before the pandemic, Roger McGuinn—surely recalling tensions that led to Crosby's firing from the Byrds in 1967—issued a statement dismissing Crosby’s trial balloon of a Byrds reunion: “DC is not hated but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to work with him.”

As for Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, at last report none is speaking to him anymore, making any notion of a get-together with them even more unlikely.

All of this comes at an increasingly difficult time for Crosby, in terms of his health and finances. His struggles with diabetes and heart disease have been known for some time. But now, the musician notes in a June 30 interview with Rolling Stone, tendonitis in his hands has affected his guitar playing to the point where “I’m down 20 percent from where I was at my best, and it’s deteriorating pretty steadily.”

Ordinary people might wonder how an artist who recorded some of the bestselling music of the rock era could hit financial trouble, but Crosby also admits that the inability to tour has impacted his bottom line enough that only the sale of his song catalog prevented him from losing his home. (As a corollary, he might also have observed that his arrests and detox efforts in the Eighties—not to mention his recent health issues and the lack of a payday from CSNY tour or even concert in the last several years—combined to put him into this predicament.)

If I sound impatient with Crosby, it is because I judge few people more severely than those who have wasted their talents—and, having seen Crosby four decades apart, I have little doubt that he has them in abundance, even when he has been prodigal in their use.

Even before Cameron Crowe’s 2019 documentary, David Crosby: Remember My Name, I had seen just the year before (as I observed in this post from the time), in a concert in my hometown of Englewood, NJ, that the musician remained not only in good voice but committed to writing intriguing new material.

This summer brings fresh confirmation of the latter trend with the release of Crosby’s new CD, For Free. (Yes, the title cut is his cover version of the song by his old lover, Joni Mitchell.) Consider that this CD is his fifth solo collection since 2014, while in the 30 prior years he released only three.

I am glad that Crosby is releasing so much good work at last. Too bad it took the prospects of insolvency and mortality to do so. And too bad if that fine content came as the music industry, like Hamlet, discovered that “the time is out of joint”—with the old Geffen-like “starmaking machinery” unable to reach a younger generation that, like the one which made Crosby and his contemporaries stars, is all too forgetful of the singers and songwriters who came before them.

Quote of the Day (Edward St. Aubyn, on Heroin As an End to ‘Unanswerable Questions’)

“No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.”— Edward St. Aubyn, Bad News (1992)

This weekend, Showtime kicks off its five-part Patrick Melrose. If the cable TV adaptation is anything like the quintet by English novelist Edward St. Aubyn, it should be spiked with all kinds of irony. Part of the challenge for its creative team will simply lie in providing a visual equivalent of the kind of virtuosic prose in the passage above.

Those sentences should, by all rights, fail. In the old days, when The New Yorker used to fill up spaces at the end of articles with picked-up filler, some wag might have put the sentences under its “Block That Metaphor!” department. They seemingly violate one of the cardinal rules repeatedly propounded to aspiring authors: Find one metaphor or symbol and stick to that rather than muck it up with multiple ones.

St. Aubyn will have none of that, comparing heroin to seven different concrete items. But it doesn’t feel like the kind of mistake that you and I might commit if we tried this at home. After all, the mind of a heroin addict is inherently unstable anyway; St. Aubyn only captures that reality.

Even from this isolated paragraph in the second novel of the Patrick Melrose sequence, we sense another difficulty in adapting this fiction to the small screen: the nature of self-medication.  Sexual abuse in childhood by Patrick’s aristocratic father leads his grown-up son to avoid the “unanswerable questions” posed by this horror. Heroin constitutes the phantom replacement for something “missing” in his life: robbed innocence.

Picking up the ashes of his now-deceased father in New York sends Patrick on a downward spiral of drug-induced self-loathing and misbehavior, as in this section: 

The four Valiums he had stolen from Kay had helped him face breakfast, but now he could feel the onset of withdrawal, like a litter of drowning kittens in the sack of his stomach.

For all its brilliance, the tone of this novel sequence (based, as St. Aubyn acknowledged in this interview with The Guardian 12 years ago, at least partly on his own cycle of abuse and recovery) is pitch-black—one reason why I stopped after the second in the series. But I hope to return to it at some point in the not-so-distant future, just as (since I do not get  Showtime) I want to see how Benedict Cumberbatch (shown in the image accompanying this post) takes on the author’s witty but self-destructive protagonist when the series makes it to DVD.

TV Quote of the Day (‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ In Which Dr. Johnny Admits the Obvious)

“Doctor” Johnny Fever [played by Howard Hessemann]: [slumped at his desk, then finally drowsily speaking into the microphone to his music listeners at the radio station]: “The Doctor is not feelin' too good today. The Doctor was a bad boy last night. The Doctor overmedicated!” — WKRP in Cincinnati, Season 1, Episode 22, “Preacher,” original air date June 7, 1979, teleplay by Bill Dial, directed by Michael Zinberg

Quote of the Day (John Barrymore, on How Movie Lenses Treat Faces)

“If you stay in front of the movie camera long enough, it will show you not only what you had for breakfast but who your ancestors were.”—Stage and screen actor John Barrymore, quoted in Peter Hay, Movie Anecdotes (1990)

The last couple of days, like much of America, I absorbed the nonstop coverage of Whitney Houston’s death. Aside from the changes in the once-glorious voice before her passing, I pondered her altered looks in the last decade, including a TV appearance late last year on Access Hollywood. Her face--once thin, then downright gaunt--had grown heavier. Did her more-mature hairdo set off the face differently? Did she appear fleshier because she was (temporarily) healthier? Or, as was rumored at the time, had she undergone Botox treatments or more radical plastic surgery to camouflage the cumulative effects of aging, alcohol and cocaine abuse, and violence at the hands of ex-husband Bobby Brown?

We don’t know, and even with the saturation coverage of all things medically related to her now, I’m not sure we ever will. But something had happened to the once-radiant face that burst on the music scene in videos for “Saving All My Love for You” and “How Will I Know?” It signified the abuse of a talent as much as the snuffing-out of joy.

With John Barrymore, born on this date in 1882, there was no need to speculate. The stage and screen idol knew just what he was talking about in the quote above. He might have been one of the consummate substance abusers of all time, but he was also as skilled at every aspect of his craft as they came. (Laurence Olivier, who went an Oscar for his own interpretation of Hamlet in 1948, recalled decades later the electrifying effect of seeing Barrymore in the role of the melancholy Dane onstage in the 1920s.)

Barrymore never felt the need to resort to Houston's pitiful evasions and denials of substance abuse. It would have been pointless to do so. After all, in the decade before his alcohol-hastened death in 1942, the camera had been recording the deterioration in the austere good looks that had once earned him the nickname “The Great Profile—and the art of plastic surgery, still in its relative infancy, could not camouflage, let alone reverse, the relentless damage.

In his silent films, Barrymore’s face is still unlined. By the 1930s, however, he was seguing into character roles by necessity. His eyes often pop--no surprise, perhaps, as he was consulting cue cards more frequently because of his failing memory. By the time he played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1936), the face looks puffy and tired, and he appears by far the senior even in a cast notoriously older than their characters.  By Midnight (1939), the lines crowd around the eyes.

Two films made earlier in the decade forecast where matters were headed for The Great Profile. In A Bill of Divorcement (1932), his eyes fill with anxiety as he describes the madness he dreads. The actor might have been channeling his own worst terrors: his father’s insanity had resulted from venereal disease, and Barrymore worried that his alcoholism would produce the same result.

Dinner at Eight (pictured here), made only a year later, was, then and even now, one of the most nakedly terrifying self-portraits an actor ever put on screen. The original George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play modeled the character of alcoholic matinee idol “Larry Renault” on Barrymore. (The script even refers to the actor’s nickname.)

It’s impossible to resist the conclusion in his final scene, after Lee Tracy’s cynical publicist has scolded him as "a corpse," that Barrymore is peering into his own abyss. His features slackening, the actor pulls on his face, as if to disprove Tracy’s contention that he is “sagging like an old woman.”

But terrible self-knowledge has overcome Renault/Barrymore, and there’s nothing for him to do, once he’s turned his gas-jets up, than to arrange himself so that when his body is found, “the Great Profile” will manage to look, once again, to its best advantage.