Looking for Harry.

Ask the average person who Harry Nilsson is, and if they're of a certain age they'll probably scrunch up their face and say, "The name sounds familiar..." and if they're under 40 they probably won't have the faintest idea.

But mention "Me and My Arrow," or "Without You" or "Everybody's Talkin'" or say "Put de lime in de coconut," and odds are good that no matter their age, their eyes will light up with recognition: "Oh, that guy! I love that song!"

Recently while digging around the Internet I stumbled across the fact that Harry, who died in 1994 just before the big L.A. earthquake, was buried at Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village. I drive past that place all the time -- it's next to our local Costco, Pet Smart, and Staples -- and I never knew Harry was there.

A little further digging revealed that in the final years of his life, Harry lived right here in my hometown of Agoura Hills. Agoura seems a strange place for such a successful musician to have lived; it ain't exactly Malibu -- it's not even Westlake Village. On a little more investigation, I learned that Harry, whose career had taken a sharp downturn in the late Seventies owing to his general iconoclasticity, his refusal to tour or play concerts, and his notorious carousing with John Lennon, was financially wiped out when his business manager embezzled all his money, for which she did two years and never had to make any sort of restitution.

I never met Harry, but I've occasionally met people who knew him (including Lennon, and the great Van Dyke Parks), and my producer/co-conspirator on nine years' worth of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was Fred Wolf, who single-handedly animated Harry's film The Point, which is awesome and full of win and which you should see immediately. For some reason, discovering that Harry had lived here made me want to pay him a visit.

I'm not a terribly morbid person by nature. The only time I've been to a celebrity grave was to see Oliver Hardy, who's buried near the old Disney TV animation building, where I used to work. But as someone who has loved Nilsson's music his entire adult life, I felt compelled to pay him my regards.

And so Audry and I headed out this morning, armed with the exact GPS coordinates of the gravesite, and went looking for Harry. We found him at the top of this hill, just east of Lindero Canyon Road.



Audry put a flower on the stone.


The notes of Harry's song "Remember" were transcribed and hand-etched on the stone by Van Dyke Parks himself. Among the many musicians at the funeral was George Harrison.


Turns out the several famous people are buried here, including Artie Shaw, Jack "King" Kirby, and Karen Carpenter. On our way back, we encountered one of them:


Strange thing about being in a cemetery: you think about the people there, and wonder what their lives were like, what worried them, what was important to them, what upset or delighted or enraged them -- and you instantly realize that none of it matters now. It reminds you that whatever you're worried or upset or angry or afraid about ultimately is going to be meaningless. And maybe that's a good thing to think about once in a while. Gives you perspective.

Apropos of that, here is Harry's song "Think About Your Troubles," from The Point:

Fine Culture: My Part in its Downfall

Walking around London on our last day here, I couldn't help but notice the "Transformers" and "Star Trek" posters on virtually every bright red double-decker bus.



All that was needed was a new TMNT movie, and I'd have had a perfect hat-trick. It got me thinking about the influence I've had on culture, and my strange place in it. I have been involved in myth-making and character creation for some of the biggest pop-culture phenomena of the 20th century. Nobody knows who I am. But when they find out, they frequently start doing the "we're not worthy" bows. (Seriously. This has happened to me in places as desperate as the Electronic Arts office in L.A. and a subway in Tokyo.)

I never cared much for adulation or fame. But I'd kill for a way to monetize my influence! Suggestions welcome.

Dreams and all that stuff.

The other night I dreamed I met Barak Obama. He was having lunch at the food court of our local mall, with some advisers and a bunch of Secret Service guys. For some reason I had to return his phone book to him. Afterword, I wondered how I would talk about this. After all, it's a pretty big deal, meeting the President of the United States. In my dream, as I left the mall, I started mentally composing a blog entry. The dream blog entry began like this:


(Click to enlarge if you actually want to read it.)

Then I woke up, somewhat disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to write my awesome blog post about how I met the President. For the rest of the night I dreamed about how my meeting with Obama was just a dream not worth writing about.

But I'm blogging about it anyway. Aren't you glad?

Classics

So I have been re-reading H.P. Lovecraft, mainly because I haven't read him lately, but also because I felt it was time to upgrade my tattered old Lancer paperback collections from the 60's with the spiffy collections from Penguin that feature copious annotation by HPL expert S.T. Joshi. So eager was I to jump into the lair of the Elder Gods that I only just now noticed two little words on the cover that I find absolutely astonishing: "Penguin" and "Classics."

Sweet fancy Moses, the world has turned! Was there ever more of an outsider than Lovecraft? Yet this writer of cheapjack pulp horror, whose work was so obscure that his friends had to create their own publishing house to keep it in print after his death, has been placed -- by the editors at Penguin, at least -- on the same shelf as Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, Austen, Twain, and Ben Jonson! There couldn't be a greater recognition of his work if Kazuo Ishiguro were to take a stab at writing a Cthulhu Mythos story. Not bad for a guy who never saw any of his work professionally published in book form while he was alive.

(I realize this mainstreaming of genre fiction has been going on for a while -- probably since the 90's, when Vintage Books started publishing guys like Alfred Bester and Phil Dick. But it hadn't really penetrated my thick, defensive skull until I looked at that Lovecraft cover.)

In my subsequent lonely wanderings on the Internet in search of Lovecraftiana, I came across a website called The Modern Word, which may be the most brilliant literary website or the most pretentious, I haven't quite sorted it out yet. It contains a section on "experimental writers," and there to my delight I found listed not just the usual suspects, like Barthelme, Borges, Becket, Pynchon and Robbe-Grillet, but also a host of friends and idols: Chip Delany, Mervyn Peake, Mike Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and, of course, Lovecraft. Not all of them considered "experimental" writers by the cognoscenti, but they all should be. (And frankly, Sturgeon, Ellison, Tom Disch, and quite a few others belong on the list.)

Is this proof that the phantasmagoric (by which I mean fantasy, horror, and -- don't hit me -- SF) has become the dominant literature of the past hundred years? Some of the most mainstream of writers have tried their hand at it -- Updike, Phillip Roth, even J.D. Salinger stuck his toe in the pool of the fantastic, so to speak. The past century has seen such tectonic shifts in technology and culture -- a million eruptions of information, the destruction of cultural space, the rise of hyperlogic. Who else can vanquish the tyranny of the rational and speak of the true human condition, other than crypto-surrealists like Lovecraft, Tolkein, Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Lord Dunsany, James Blish, Roger Zelazny, Angela Carter, Alfred Bester and Phil Dick? Or for that matter, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Len Wein, Alan Moore or Wendy and Richard Pini? And if you were to stand up and shout that J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition" was the greatest book of the past 50 years, well, I for one would stand beside you and help you duck the brickbats.

So does Lovecraft deserve to be placed in the same league as George Elliot or Thomas Hardy, as Penguin's designation suggests? In my mind, he has always been there.

Oh, Howard Phillips, you outcast, you leper, you proud and self-designated amateur, you whom Edmund Wilson called "a hack," if you could have just a glimpse of what you have wrought with your provincialism, your xenophobia, and your horror of miscegenation. If you had known that one day your work would have sold in the millions, that your name would be as synonymous as Poe's with a specific brand of existential horror, that children would play with stuffed Cthulhus, would it have fractured your mind? Or has the world itself succumbed to the madness which devoured so many of your narrators?

Wow.

I stumbled across myself on the Internet Movie Database tonight (they actually list only about two-thirds of my credits, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to add info), and was fairly stunned to find this post.

Kinda chokes me up.

Three Short Pieces About My Father.

So I mentioned my father's last years of senility to Rob Shearman the other day (god, I'm such a pathetic name-dropper), and it started me thinking I'd like to write something about him here.

One.

My dad ran a paint company until the early 1950's when, shortly after the death of both his father and his first wife, he sold the company and determined to devote his life to art. He attempted painting, but wasn't much good at it. His talents lay elsewhere. He had a knack for business and organization, and a vision for the future of art. So he started an art gallery, right on the cutting edge of modernism, displaying abstract expressionists such as Milton Resnick. In a Midwestern industrial town like Cleveland, this sort of thing went over like a lead balloon, and most of his exhibitions were met with derision by the press and the public.

So my dad up and moved the gallery (and us) to New York City in 1961. He quickly moved past "traditional" painting and sculpture (even the non-representational kind he had favored) toward a new type of art that utilized leading-edge technology. As a gadget freak, and someone whose early life was greatly shaped by the industrial revolution, he had a fascination with the nexus of art and science. During the Sixties he presented exhibitions of kinetic art, light art, "op" art, and even the first-ever gallery exhibition of computer-generated (CG) art. In 1968 he presented the first exhibition of video art, called (perhaps a bit snarkily) "TV as a Creative Medium," which ultimately led him to the conclusion that art had outgrown the boundaries of conventional exhibition space. Two years later he closed down the gallery and created Electronic Arts Intermix, a nonprofit organization for the support and distribution of video art. EAI distributes works by artists as diverse as Nam Jun Paik, Ed Emshwiller, and Jean-Luc Goddard.

Two.

My dad was born in 1903, in Ohio, a few weeks before the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk in the same state. He remembered the day the Titanic sank (people were out in the streets crying, he said, even in Cleveland). His parents took him to visit Charlie Chaplin's studios, and home movies exist of the family taken there. He spent part of the 1920's living in France, and became enough of an expert to write a book about the restaurants and wines of the south of France. During this time he reputedly had an affair with Josephine Baker, who supposedly broke up with him when she learned he was not actually French.

In the 1930's he spent time in Weimar Germany and saw the effects of the hyperinflation there. He used to tell the story of going to a restaurant in Berlin and, not knowing exactly what to order, handed the waiter a five-dollar bill. This resulted in the staff bringing him mountains of food, more than he could possibly eat. Finally he had to tell them to stop bringing food, but a few minutes later the waiters rolled out another cart of entrees, explaining "They just devalued the mark again!"

He played tennis with the Marx Brothers in Hollywood in the 30's. He lived through the Great War and WWII, and of course Korea and Viet Nam.

He had seen so much. And when, near the end of his life, his mental faculties began to slip away, we in the family were kicking ourselves that we had never gotten a first-hand account of the details of his life (something he himself had done with many artists and intellectuals with his trusty color video recorder a decade earlier). But by then it was too late. My father had taken a left turn into some strange forest of tangled memories, never to return.

Three.

In the last 15 years of his life, my father started taking up causes. The first was the Pritikin diet, which was the first low-fat diet. He met Pritikin and stayed at his institute in 1976, and became convinced that people were poisoning themselves with butter and other fatty foods. He quickly became one of Pritikin's main proselytizers, and would never hesitate to criticize the eating habits of his immediate family if they did not live up to the Pritikin principles.

In 1977 he was extremely disturbed by a book called "The Limits to Growth." This book was a godsend to compulsive worriers, as it used detailed computer models to predict that the planet would run out of oil, food, and just about everything else by the year 2000. The book has undergone two revisions but, like any good End of Days soothsayer, it is still making the same dire predictions, albeit on a slightly altered timetable.

My father worried even more about the proliferation of nuclear arms, a fear that was exacerbated by the Reagan arms buildup of the 1980's. He was in his eighties by then, and he increasingly devoted all his energies to the cause of nuclear disarmament. He made documentaries, joined organizations, and rallied people to aid the movement. He worried endlessly about the possibility of nuclear war. Ironically, a few days after his death, in 1989, the Union of Concerned Scientists turned back the hands of the Doomsday Clock for the first time in 20 years.

I've known other powerful men like my father who in old age become convinced that mankind is hurtling toward destruction and become obsessed with saving the world. Perhaps this is their way of fighting the knowledge that oblivion will soon be upon them. Or perhaps some misguided sense of vanity makes them refuse to believe that the world could possibly survive without them. Whatever the reason, they, like my father, seem desperate to put their mark on this world before they depart it.

My father believed that his work for disarmament was the most important thing he'd ever done. He was quite wrong, of course, and all his worrying about some impending nuclear holocaust was completely futile. In the end, it was his love of art that did the world the most good.

Off we go, then!

About 75% of my "day job" (running this here publishing company) is responding to emails. Seriously, I get on average 35 non-spam emails a day, from distributors, from printers, from licensors in Japan, and as a result my ability to keep up with emails from friends and family has really suffered. And since I am now stealing time to work on a novel, it's only going to get worse. There are already several unanswered emails that are nagging in the back of my mind, and at the rate things are going, some may never get answered. So it occurred to me, why not start a private blog as a way of keeping in touch with people?

Now I've always sort of detested the whole notion of blogs, and I have no desire to be part of the endless static of "the blogosphere." (Q: Why did they come up with the word "blogosphere?" A: Because the word "blog" wasn't ugly enough.) But the idea of a private blog as a way of staying in touch with friends and family, through posts and comments, has suddenly started to make sense to me.

So I hope you'll subscribe, I hope you'll read. I hope we'll chat often in the comments section, I hope we'll feel a little closer to one another, and I hope I'll be able to get my novel finished!