SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE : LIVING, DYING, and PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE DOORS by ROBBY KRIEGER : CHRISTINE TRZYNA AUDIOBOOK REVIEW

SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE : LIVING, DYING, and PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE DOORS by Robbie Krieger   "Listened to on an Audio Book"

First, this book is read by someone else, not Robbie Krieger, but the reader's male voice was not terribly unlike Krieger's which is a good thing because I had no trouble believing I was listening to Krieger. The reader did a good job of following the intent of Krieger, the emotions of the telling. So when I think about Krieger's writerly "voice" I mean both the reading of it, and the telling of it.

Unlike many memoirs, this one does not proceed from start to finish in the telling but rather each chapter is topical. The story telling is a circling, a dipping and flying again, adventure, going back to Jim Morrison and the Doors often and Krieger's personal experience and life - before, during, and after being part of one of the most famous music groups in American history, made more famous, I feel, in years after their time with Jim Morrison, the singer. He answered the question "How did being in The Doors effect your life?"

Krieger comes off as genuine and frank. He includes his heroin addiction and what that meant when it came to being a father. That all the doors managed to evade the draft for the Viet Nam war. His honesty includes that he thinks Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist, expressed some strange, if not esoteric, notions in his own memoir.  He says he cannot imagine the Jim Morrison he knew indulging in any "witch wedding." He thinks resistance to using Door's music for commercials makes no sense. He also thinks some of those who wrote books about the Doors, especially those who were not there, are - did he use the word "bullshit"? - I think he did.  Overall, Krieger's memoir is one that takes issue with reportage of the past, including that of film-maker Oliver Stone's exaggerated and erroneous take on Morrison and the Doors.  Importantly he says that Jim Morrison did not expose himself on stage in Florida - or anywhere. And the backstage problems with the police also did not happen as the film suggests.  But, significantly, he was amazed by actor Val Kilmer's interpretation of Morrison.

Krieger wrote Light My Fire, perhaps the most famous of all the songs the group recorded long ago. It's been years since I heard that song blaring out of a radio, and I feel that the Door's music has what can properly be called "a cult following."  

Like most of the music that I find on YouTube and embed into this blog, I became of that music as an Oldie.  I was not aware of the Doors when they were actually a group. There was one kid in my high school who was into their music and supposedly had all their albums, a too skinny kid who was also a genius and once took a brief stroll as an opportunity to give me a gentle kiss. But my best friend was accumulating Beatle's albums. So I came to the Door's music late and like many, mostly after the film. I must also admit that I saw Oliver Stone film in Hollywood on a triple wide screen and thought it was fantastic, that it captured some energy that had come out of that era. I've seen it on smaller screens since, at least twice, each time noticing something new. 

It's been a while since I traveled the canyon and went past the renamed Love Street, in Laurel Canyon, but we all knew that house with "Jim Lives" spray painted on a foundation behind the store, was where he and his girlfriend Pam had lived. So, I feel it is near impossible to be an Angeleno and not learn about the Doors.  And, there is something about their music that IS Los Angeles at a certain time and place - the beach at Santa Monica - Sunset Strip - which is evocative. 

Krieger came from an advantaged family and credits his dad as being especially supportive of his efforts and The Doors as a group. He says that Jim Morrison and his dad could really talk because of his dad's acceptance, unlike the relationship Morrison had with his own father.

After finishing this book, I went onto YouTube and listened to videos of the Doors for a while, including their performance for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

How many of your friends from your twenties do you still know?  How many of the people you creatively collaborated with do you still?

C 2023  Christine Trzyna

GREENLIGHTS by MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

McConaughey first states that this is not a memoir, but that is the best genre the book fits. A memoir, unlike an autobiography or biography, does not seek to cover an entire life and more detail, though the author does give us the basics, choosing scenes or descriptions that pretty much say it all about his parents and their parenting.  That's important because it moves the story along.

Frankly, I personally find it difficult to think of people who are abusive as also loving. Does he ever say the word abusive?  No. Perhaps there's an argument for people not knowing better.  Or that his dad was a Texas 'Good Ol Boy' : I had hoped such characters who use violence and extreme control to teach or discipline or get even with their friends and family had been left behind in the Wild Wild West and were capable of the (admittedly slow) progress of intellect and understanding.  However, who deserves their parents?

Personally I think McConaughey's family of upbringing was dysfunctional and that causes me to have anxiety: I hope he is not duplicating this in raising his own children. You see, McConaughey says that from a young age the only role he ever wanted in life was to be a father. He repeats that.  Also, but, however... he tells his story without apology or over-explanation.

As for women, apparently this celebrity used his fame as an advantage and had many every which way but when he met his wife, who he calls a mermaid, it was love at first sight. He says there never was and never will be any other woman for him.  (Never was? He was in his thirties when he met her. Did he not break hearts as he had many women every which way?  No insight into that expressed.)

Matthew McConaughey is a highly successful actor, and it seems acting is rather natural or effortless to him, though he does explain the risk he took in staying firm: No more rom-coms.

I was impressed with the writing in this book flows, it delivers, and McConaughey seems also to be a natural writer.  It was, as they say, a good read. I recommend it - highly.

My biggest criticism of the book is that it also intends to be a red light, yellow light, green light (go) book, enlightening, sharing wisdom, and, in order to do that, excerpts from a long ongoing diary that the man kept are included and are near UNREADABLE. These excerpts are sometimes in small lettering printed on intense black and frankly my vision was not up to the task. It was annoying.  Also sometimes I did not get the point or the connection. There's probably important connections to the text, but I missed out. I'm sure this blackness was an attempt by the publisher for the book to look a bit scrapbook-like and arty. It was a waste of ink.

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : FAME AND FRIENDSHIP

 re Janis Joplin in previous paragraphs...

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates.  Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there's at least a precedent.) There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer.  Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were.  Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with.  They'll only give you "everything:" if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.

The kinds of friends you get when you have "everything" (after your old friends have decided to send you all their screenplays, so that you're afraid to run into them lest they wonder why you haven't read them) are either your immediate family or other famous people.  A lot of times your immediate family is what drove you into such excess in the first place.  So that leaves other people with "everything." In Hollywood, there's usually a special grace period when you're allowed to grab a few friends before you're pitched into only meeting other famous people ...

Excerpts pages 60-61 Published 1977

EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : LA AS A CHARACTER

It's well known that for something to be fiction it must move right along and not meander among the bushes gazing into the next county. Unfortunately, with L.A. it's impossible.  You can't write a story about L.A. that doesn't turn around in the middle or get lost. And since it's the custom for people who "like" L.A. to embrace everything wholesale and wallow in Forest Lawn, all the stories you read make you wonder why the writer doesn't just go ahead and jump, get it over with.

I love L.A. The only time I ever go to Forest Lawn is when someone dies.  A kid from New York once said: ""Look. Which would you rather? To spend eternity looking out over these pretty green hills or in some overcrowded ghetto cemetery next to the expressway in Queens?  L.A. didn't invent eternity.  Forest Lawn is just an example of eternity carried to its logical conclusion.  I love L.A because it does things like that.

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles.  People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do  to be able to stand it....    

Eve Babitz : Excerpt page 7  published 1977

VAL KILMER's SUPERNATURAL ENCOUNTER from his memoir I'M YOUR HUCKLEBERRY

Excerpt from Val Kilmer's memoir I'm Your Huckelberry

page 111 -112

 In my early trips to New Mexico I had, in addition to my connection with she of the wealthy swagger (a woman he names but it might be a fake name), another pivitol experience.  This one was seismic.  I encountered an angel  I was wide awake.  I was indoors.  It happened on my birthday.  I had just turned twenty-four.  I was asleep and awoke suddenly to an amorphous black figure before me.  It will ruin the absolute gravity of this moment but in truth this dark angel looked very like Darth Vader though without a helmet. The figure seemed to be covered in a black shroud that every now and again revealed the slightest outline of a face.  It took up space in an infinitely eternal way.  I was afraid.

I addressed it by saying in my mind, "I can feel you reading my mind."

He replied, "That's not what's happening."

Well, that proved it, didn't it?  It's indescribable when someone or thing can read your mind, and I said so - or thought it.

"I have nowhere to hide."

I knew this was a sacred encounter and yet, like Mary or Moses, I felt fear.  He then reached in, extracted my heart, and held it before me.  It had a purple blackish hue, leading me to joke, "Is it that bad?"

"No," he said. "I'm just giving you a bigger one."

The bigger heart, spinning rather than beating, was placed inside my body.

At first I thought it was the Angel of Death before realizing it was the Angel of Life. I wish I could elucidate the experience more than I have already done, but I can't. It simply happened,  I remember pinching myself as hard as I could in hopes of bruising myself, so that if I fell back asleep or was to to sleep by this dark angel, I would be able to prove to myself that this was a real experience  I looked at my clock and noticed it was moments before I was born that morning twenty-four years ago. Somehow the spell was over, and just as I thought, I did fall fast asleep and woke up the next day with a bruise on my arm. I have nothing else to say about this, except that I am grateful for the new heart.  It has served me well.  And I've only just begun to use it.

-Val Kilmer

VAL KILMER on SPIRITUAL SEARCHING from his memoir I'M YOUR HUCKLEBERRY

Excerpt:  page 42 

At a ridiculously early age, I was spiritually ambitious, devising five-year plans to achieve self-realization and change my life forever.  I'm convinced that every plan worked even as every plan failed,  I carried heavy books in my outings into nature. When they became too heavy to lug any longer I left them at my favorite sights, imagining that a fellow wanderer would find enlightenment at the very spot where I had laid my burden down...   -Val Kilmer

VAL KILMER QUOTE

"God wants us to walk but the devil sends a limo" - Val Kilmer

Not sure if he made this one up or not... it's in his memoir I'm Your Huckleberry

MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT : LOOSE CANNONS : TALKING TO STRANGERS

Went to the library to order in some books. A memoir and a biography.  It seems these are the two genre's I read mostly these days.  Distanced from fiction.

But every few hours I check the news on the war being staged in UKRAINE.

I try to imagine what it would be like if there was combat in the streets here.  If apartment buildings were being hit by missiles here.  If thousands of women and children were taking shelter in the subways, without food and water. If men eighteen to sixty were told they must not leave the country but must stay and fight in any way they can. 

Reports that Putin is actually mentally ill.  Suggestions that he has been affected by a Covid infection - something wrong with his brain - not thinking straight.  Notions that he wants to recreate the Soviet Union as his last effort before he leaves office.  Notions that he will never resign or retire.

Sean Penn in Ukraine filming.

At the library there was a woman who told me that she had just gotten out of a mental hospital. She said so much was going wrong in her life that she just couldn't take it any more.  She's been trying to find her adult son.  She suggested that he was involved in criminality and was an addict.  She had to find him.   He was somewhere in LA. I had to wonder if he was the main cause of mental distress or if she hoped he would help her.  Too many people lost to the maze of drug addiction.  Too many criminals, sociopaths, who deliberately seek out those who need escape, to hook them, to traffic them.  Too much evil.

A boom goes off in the neighborhood.

Somewhere down the street - possibly in a house - there is someone who likes to shoot off something once in a while.  A gun or perhaps something in the category of a firework. This person always does this at the exact top of an hour.  I imagine this person to be a man and imagine the man going outside into a yard. And usually at a time when many people are sleeping. Just one loud and unexpected boom.

Does he feel relieved after he destroys the sleep of others?  Is he discharging an emotion?

Is he someone who should be bearing arms?

"I feel overwhelmed," I said to the woman at the library.  "It's all so much bigger than me."

On the walk home I encountered some workman blocking a sidewalk in front of a house that looked like it needed some refurbishing.  Old trees had been beheaded months ago and their trunks stood in front of the house. I asked a man," Are the trees dead? Is there any sign that they are going to sprout?"

"It's been six months.  No leaves," he said in accented English.

We agreed that the trees were too traumatized from beheading to be alive.

"Where are you from?"

"Hungary."

The man told me he had gone back and forth to Hungary for some years and then one day he realized he was not going back.  He was from the southern part and had been born in what is now Yugoslavia.  He talked about Hungary being chopped after World War II, so that it's now one third the size that it was before.

I knew about that.

"Do you think refugees from UKRAINE are going to flood into Hungary?"

"No, they will go into Romania.  The border with Hungary is small.  Romania," he said.

What is it like to flee with nothing but a rolling suitcase, not knowing where you will be safe, where you will sleep, where you will find a bathroom when you have to use one? 

Here in America, our refugees are the homeless.

One place to go is the library.

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

ALL THINGS MUST PASS : GEORGE HARRISON

THANKSGIVING TURNS OUT NOT TO BE A BUST AFTER ALL

A well, what did I hear on the radio but a program in which people were calling in to describe BAD THANKSGIVINGS.  Really. 

But actually mine turned out to be one in which I felt cared about and included.

Went to a potluck noonish with Gracie.  She enjoyed some turkey as well.

Took her home and went back out to join some nice people at a restaurant where  I ordered SOUP.  All the turkey I wanted already.

Most amazing thing was that I was invited to 2 more...

9/11 as I REMEMBER IT - VIOLENCE REDEFINED

The morning of 9/11 I was listening to KFI - Bill Handel on the radio.  Bill is still on the air but I don't listen to KFI much anymore.  (Audio Books suffice.)  He is known for a sort of jokey sarcasm - and an exaggerated way of telling stories - on himself - and on others.  For instance, he once gave a blow by blow account of a death row inmate being fried that was compelling.  So Bill is a character - a personality - and when he started talking about what was happening in New York, there was a question in my mind - it's a joke right?  But it was not.  The television set confirmed it and of all people to call first, I called my then building manager. He didn't believe me. Then I called my best friend - who didn't answer the phone. Like everyone else, I was riveted to the television set. 

And then, then I became depressed.

Someone gifted me something I really needed, something that no one else on this earth at the time would have thought to gift me, something that no one else I knew at the time could afford, and probably the most generous gift I ever received, but the box sat there unopened.  I wasn't even curious to open the Apple box.  I was moving through molasses. I awaited word that we were going to war, that war had been officially declared and called war, rather than a "military action."

At this time I went to a number of coffee houses in order to write.   I went over to one where I had a coffeehouse friend who was an artist, a painter of dog portraits, whose work was even published in a book not of his own making.  The artist told me his own mother had been in the building that the first plane hit.  In fact it probably hit her very office.  His family in New York City wanted him to get on a plane and fly there right away.  They were in denial.  They wanted him to go to the hospitals looking for their mom.  He didn't go.  He knew there was no chance she was alive.

The impact of the loss of his mom in such a horrific way was so strong that this artist could not paint.  He could not hold a brush.  Months later he was trying another form of creative expression - writing songs - to overcome the paralysis. He was clearly not in his normality for a long time.

A couple weeks after 9/11, while still feeling angry and powerless, I went ahead and opened the gift.  It was a laptop computer and I needed it to write.  It was intended as a practical gift but it became one in which self expression was also a way of maintaining the healing I needed because of this horrible event.

While the construct and enormity of 9/11 made it a special attack on an icon of the United States of America, I realize also that it was the closest thing to a military attack ON OUR TURF since Pearl Harbor.  Imagine though what it was for the Japanese when the United States dropped the atomic bomb.  Or enduring the Holocaust.  Or any other violent events that have taken place on this earth - and do now.

Is the world really getting more violent?  Mass shootings for no good reason beyond someone's hatred or insanity seem to happen with regularity.  Would they be as appealing to their originators if it were not for the fast global news coverage made possible not just on television but internet and cell phones?

A recent foray into a Fundamentalist Bible Study - long story as I know you know this is not like me - has been interesting in that just about every other woman there believes with certainty that we are in the End Times. Some people there think that President Donald Trump is in place, no matter how he screws it up, to usher in the End Times, citing his recognition of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Trump and those like him are, to me, believers in the Prosperity Gospel, a kind of  New Age defilement of Christ's message. Christians feed the hungry, cloth and shelter those who have none, and there is a traditional acceptance and embrace of the poor as worthy human beings. The Prosperity Gospel to me is more like Janis Joplin singing Mercedes Benz.  I guess it could be argued that God gives prosperity to those who HAVE so they can give to the poor, but let's not talk about Amazon's unlivable wages, or that Google's blue collar employees live in RV's near the Silicon Valley "campus."
.
Some think President Trump can do just about anything, because it's really Vice President Mike Pence who is the Real Believer and the Next President, one way or another.  There is lots of talk in this group about which politicians are "Believers" or not.  I'm not there to question the class or the teacher's belief system, just to absorb differences as comfortably as I can and learn some things that I didn't know about the lifeways of the ancient people of Bible times, particularly the few women mentioned.

As a more liberal Christian friend of mine said, "There have ALWAYS been wars.  So it's always the End Times."

One day in the class, someone said that Oprah Winfrey was leading millions of people straight to hell.  (On the list of deceivers was also Shirley MacLaine.)  So what is that if not intolerance?

And this is CALIFORNIA? 

I have no answers at the moment.  I just know that 9/11 became a pivotal moment in our history which marked a change of consciousness about our vulnerability and need for defense.

As a child in Catholic grade school we often prayed for the President, to make good decisions for us all, just as we did the Pope.  If you're a praying person, this is a good time to do so.

C 2018 Christine Trzyna  All Rights Reserved

I CAN'T KEEP MY OWN SECRET : SIX WORD MEMOIRS BY TEENS A NEW POETRY

Remember straining to write a haiku?  Severe boundaries (from another - Japanese culture) sometimes bring out beauty and eliminates BS.



If you want to laugh and maybe even find a tear in your eye,  try I CAN'T KEEP MY OWN SECRETS, SIX WORD MEMOIRS by TEENS FAMOUS AND OBSCURE edited by Smith Magazine. (Some of these are actually memoirs.)

A selection:

Jesus saves, my ass,  comma justified. -  Hali H.



Afraid I'm crazy, Bell Jar style. - Annikka T.



I found hope in clinical depression. - Jonathan E.



Read the thesaurus on the toilet. - Dan R.

PENNY MARSHALL Quotation

... "On stage you have to tie up the loose ends neatly and send the audience home with a resolution they like. In real life, as was evident, that's not easy.  I was familiar with indecision. My life was like a play in the midst of a rewrite.  But was that bad?  I didn't think so." ... - Penny Marshall



From "My Mother was Nuts", a memoir by Penny Marshall C 2012, new harvest Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt publishers, which I read and considered light reading over the holidays,  even though Penny covered some heavy topics in her humorously matter of fact way of seeing life.

GOT A QUESTION FOR YOU WRITERS OUT THERE!

Do we really have BETTER MEMORIES than most people?

I've long heard of the "long writer's memory" and I believe I am one of those people who has a very good memory. This doesn't mean I never forget anything or that I don't write things down. I often make lists of things I have to do, to try and stay on track with the ambitions of my day.