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Regardless of genre, an interesting subject or theme is not always alone sufficient for a writer. Most authors also face the challenge of having characters or individuals the reader will care about, whether for good or bad. Therein lies the problem with Robert Greenfield’s A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, and the End of the Sixties.
 A Day in the Life tells the story of Tommy Weber and his wife, Susan Coriat, who were among the hip, glamorous couples in the London of the Swinging ’60s. Yet other than as voyeur, it is difficult for the reader to really care for either of them as their lives spin into chaos. In fact, about the only sympathetic people in this otherwise well-researched biography are their sons, Charley and Jake, who grow up amidst the wreckage of their parents’ lives.
Both Weber and Coriat, called “Puss” by her family and friends, were children of Britain’s privileged class, thanks to their mothers. While their fathers may have been of questionable character, Tommy and Puss, born in 1938 and 1943 respectively, were both trust fund babies. Granted, their trust funds weren’t so large as to withstand their hedonism, but they had the looks and wherewithal to become part of the London scene. When they married in 1962, they were not only tabloid fodder, they became one of the hippest couples in the city. The book drops plenty of names of the people with whom they associated, such as Steve Winwood, Jimi Hendrix and members of the Beatles, to name just a couple.
Although they dabbled with careers — Tommy in auto racing, real estate and filmmaking and Puss by modeling and opening a hip teahouse — they were far more interested in simply enjoying life. Both fell into drugs and by 1969 they had separated and divorced, although there is little doubt they remained in love with each other. The flip side of their journeys of pleasure was the impact on their children.
For example, following the divorce, Puss spent quite a bit of time dragging Charley and Jake around India, Turkey and Greece on her personal search for enlightenment. Letters written before, during and after this trip revealed her growing detachment with reality. By the end of the trip, seven-year-old Jake — now an actor on the television series Medium — was taking care of her and his younger brother. Not long after their return, Puss would be committed to a mental institution before committing suicide in 1971.
Back in Tommy’s custody following their mother being institutionalized, the boys didn’t fare a great deal better. Tommy had been smuggling hashish from Afghanistan for several years but 1971 saw him and his sons living with the Keith Richards entourage in a villa in southern France during the making of Exile on Main Street. Two things solidified Tommy’s place in that world. Puss had become friends with Richards’ girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, in a mental health facility. Sealing the deal, though, was that Tommy smuggled in a kilo of cocaine as a wedding present for Mick Jagger (all of which was consumed long before the wedding). How did Tommy do it? He taped the cocaine to his sons’ bodies, figuring they were least likely to be searched by customs officials.
Although Tommy would live until 2006, much of the balance of his life was spent in the throes of heroin addiction and he would spend time in prison. His sons, meanwhile, ended up living with relatives. Charley and Jake somehow survive their upbringing and become primary sources for author Robert Greenfield. Greenfield, who has written extensively about the Rolling Stones, met Tommy at Richards’ villa during the recording of Exile on Main Street. Puss provides the most direct insight, though, as a variety of her letters have survived. They clearly portray her crumbling mental state and her love for Tommy and her children.
While Greenfield does a good job of biography, it still remains hard to really care about Tommy or Puss. To some extent, their story could be a metaphor for their era, a tale of promise that, with liberal doses of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” devolved into self-absorption and self-ruin. Yet, aside from hanging out with famous people and being part of “the scene” themselves, their journey of self-destruction often doesn’t even rise to the level of the car wreck you can’t look away from. Instead, it is more like pricey cars rotting from the inside.
…my generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
Camille Paglia, Sept. 19, 1991
Blogging, including both the regular Midweek Music Moment and a book review, are on hold for another day or so. Youngest daughter graduated high school Sunday evening, flew to Massachusetts Monday, toured one of her two final college choices Tuesday, then drove to Vermont so we can tour finalist two this morning. Thus, no blogging until probably Friday at the earliest (absent serendipity between now and then).
All robot servomechanisms and computers are bastards.
Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer
Achievement Awards
Blog headline of the week: World Realizes Internet Has Free Porn, Stops Caring About Playboy
Bookish Linkage
Ro, ro. A federal court in Russia ordered a local newspaper reporter to pay compensatory damages of $1,000 “to a writer who did not like a review of his book published in the newspaper.” The author sought $150,000 in damages for severe mental suffering and damage to his reputation. (Via.)
Evelio Rosero’s The Armies, about life in Columbia during its ongoing civil war, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Nonbookish Linkage
Space Porn Astronomy photo of the day.
Microsoft no longer recognizes a law firm named “Gates” as a preferred provider.
Makes sense to me: “the State has no duty to defend when a judge knows or should know that the conduct of which he or she is accused is unethical and therefore not an official act.”
100 obscure and remarkable album CD covers.
The blogosphere’s version of pay to play.
The secret to happiness? “Employing mature adaptations,” education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. I find the last two depressing. (Via.)
When it comes to “police state,” no one’s surprised if China, North Korea, Belarus or even Russia show up on the list. But the U.K. ranking 5th and the U.S. 6th? (Via.)
Doesn’t surprise me at all: 60 percent of Twitter users abandon it after a month.
Illegal Curve has an excellent beginning to a list of hockey jargon. My personal favorite is the second part of the “Cup” definition.
Reality is an acquired taste.
Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz, The Managerial Moment of Truth
Do you feel it? We South Dakotans have the most personal freedom in the country, at least according to a new study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Technically, we are third but the two political science professors who authored the study say South Dakota is in “a virtual tie” with New Hampshire and Colorado and “citizens of all three states should be pleased to live in the freest states in the Union.” New York ranks last, followed by New Jersey, Rhode Island and California. The winning states prevail because they “feature low taxes and government spending and middling levels of regulation and paternalism.” Which, of course, is the first reminder that the definition of freedom may be in the eye of the beholder .
How did this study determine which states it considered to have the “ideal regime of maximum, equal individual freedom”? It looked in large part to a definition from an article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies: The proper normative values are “a belief in the efficiency and morality of unhampered markets, the system of private property, and individual rights — and a deep distrust of taxation, egalitarianism, compulsory welfare, and the power of the state.” I don’t want to prejudge, but I would venture a guess that there may be a rather significant number of Americans who might question whether “the efficiency and morality of unhampered markets” is setting them free.
Yet the seeming predisposition toward free market economics appears to help South Dakota’s ranking. We ranked first in “economic freedom” but 24th in “personal freedom.” For the two other components, South Dakota ranked second in fiscal policy (government taxing and spending) and eighth in regulatory policy (“labor regulation, health insurance mandates, occupational licensing, eminent domain, the tort system, land and environmental regulation, and utilities”). Again, though, definitions are important.
For example, economic freedom is determined by summing the fiscal and regulatory policy scores. Thus, they plainly outweigh personal freedom, which the study discusses under the subtitle “Paternalism.” What are the three most important issues in assessing personal freedom? Education (which focuses heavily on regulation of home and private schools because those who support regulating these areas justify it “on the claim that parents do not know how or where best to educate their own children”) is about 17 percent of the personal freedom score, gun control (on a less is better standard) is 14 percent and liberal marijuana polices (full legalization of both growth and sale is “the optimal policy choice”) are worth just more than 10 percent. The latter two would tend to reinforce that this is a libertarian approach as opposed to one that can be classified by liberal or conservation ideology.
And here’s why South Dakota is so free:
South Dakota is highly fiscally decentralized for its size, and it is among the best states for taxes and spending. Sales taxes are, however,
rather high. Transportation spending is also a little higher than expected, even when corrected for the state’s low population density. On personal freedoms,
South Dakota scores well on gun control and asset forfeiture but relatively poorly on marijuana laws. The state allows several kinds of gambling but has prohibited Internet gambling. Unfortunately, victimless crimes arrests as a percentage of all arrests are two standard deviations above the norm (24.8%).
Private schools are highly controlled, with schools having to choose between a state accreditation process or detailed curricular oversight. Home school
requirements, particularly on standardized testing and notification procedures, could also be relaxed. On economic regulation the state scores well. Labor
and health insurance laws are generally very good. The state’s liability system is among the best. Land-use planning is largely local. Eminent domain has
been reformed extensively, but the reforms have not yet been written into the constitution.
Don’t like the standards the authors used? Well, they say, if “individuals desire to ‘tie their own hands’ and require themselves to participate in social insurance, redistributive, or paternalist projects, they should form communities by contract for these purposes.”
So, you are now free to celebrate — or to create a community by contract.
A hungry man is not a free man.
Adlai Stevenson, Sept. 6, 1952
Book Gluttony! Are your eyes bigger than your book belly? Do you have a habit of buying up books far quicker than you could possibly read them? Have you had to curb your book buying habits until you can catch up with yourself? Or are you a controlled buyer, only purchasing books when you have run out of things to read?
If gluttony is, in fact, one of the seven deadly sins, my book addiction is undoubtedly a nonrefundable ticket to hell.
How bad is it? Well, I would venture that I bought a dozen books in April. That doesn’t include any of the review books I’ve received in the last four to six weeks. But that’s just one measure. For the heck of it, I recently began considering how many of the roughly 1,100 books I have remain unread. The figure I’m coming up with is right around 15 percent. In other words, there’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to 200 books on my shelves that are unread in whole or in part.
Now some of those are reference works but I would be surprised if they came close to 20 percent of the total unread books. And to top it off, even though knowing I have books stacked up may cause me to pause in a book buying decision, it never brings it to a complete halt. Still, I find it quite easy to rationalize.
For example, I used to smoke a carton of cigarettes a week. Based on what I see in convenience stores and the like, that would run me $50 or more a week these days. In the last few years, my wife and I haven’t spent a quarter of that per year buying books for ourselves and our kids. I don’t think any of us — or my doctor — would complain that I was feeding my book gluttony instead of a cigarette addiction.
Still, it’s a rough road for a glutton. After all, I have a trip upcoming to a couple cities I’ve never been to before. That, of course, requires checking our their bookstores.
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is.
Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
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Disclaimer 
Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
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