Daydreaming Disorders, Researching Jim & Pam

Frederic Bartlett demonstrated in his book Remembering (1932), no two people will repeat a story they have heard the same way and why, over time, their recitations of the story will diverge more and more. No ‘copy’ of the story is ever made; rather, each individual, upon hearing the story, changes to some extent – enough so that when asked about the story later – they can re-experience hearing the story to some extent, although not very well. This means that each of us is truly unique, not just in our genetic makeup, but even in the way our brains change over time. It is also depressing, because it makes the task of the neuroscientist daunting almost beyond imagination. For any given experience, orderly change could involve a thousand neurons, a million neurons or even the entire brain, with the pattern of change different in every brain. Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch. Either the brain keeps functioning, or we disappear. What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised. To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. Recently, the neuroscientist Kenneth Miller suggested it will take ‘centuries’ just to figure out basic neuronal connectivity. Meanwhile, vast sums of money are being raised for brain research, based on faulty ideas and promises that cannot be kept. The most blatant instance of neuroscience gone awry, documented recently in a report in Scientific American, concerns the $1.3 billion Human Brain Project launched by the European Union in 2013. Convinced by the charismatic Henry Markram that he could create a simulation of the entire human brain on a supercomputer by the year 2023, and that such a model would revolutionise the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders, EU officials funded his project with virtually no restrictions. Less than two years into it, the project turned into a ‘brain wreck’, and Markram was asked to step down. We are organisms, not computers. The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key. Source: aeon.co

It has been suggested that Maladaptative Daydreaming may be a dissociative disorder, a disturbance of attention, a behavioral addiction, or an obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder. Relating to the first possibility, although phenomenological descriptions of MD and the suggested diagnostic criteria of the condition include symptoms that are pathognomonic to MD and different than the characteristics of existing dissociative disorders, MD does indeed seem to contain several dissociative elements. Specifically: (a) detachment from external reality in favor of internal experience; (b) absorption—a state of total attention; and (c) via their daydreams, individuals may temporarily adopt alternative (non-self) identities (while acting out characters' behaviors or dialogues in their minds). Additionally, some individuals have described the initiation of excessive daydreaming during childhood to avoid an intimidating or traumatic social environment. In other words, individuals suffering from an abusive environment or those who suffer from social anxiety disorder may develop MD as a means for escaping from the harsh reality into their safe internal worlds. Indeed, one study found that social anxiety and childhood trauma were correlated with MD. Such findings may point to a stress-diathesis model for MD, whereby individuals who have an innate talent for immersive and fanciful imagery may develop MD if they are burdened with stressful life events. Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

"There is nothing more spectacular as a rainbow/and nothing more mysterious than the absence of color./This other world seems by far the best/till its other jaw reveals incest and obedience to a vegetable law/I prefer a feast of friends to the giant family." -Jim Morrison

Patricia Butler: The stress of the Miami trial, together with a viral infection, had triggered Jim Morrison’s childhood asthma, leaving him with a deep cough that he was making worse by chain smoking. John Densmore has never addressed ex-wife Julia Negron's claim that Jim Morrison didn't phone called him from Paris. Pam's sister Judy had been running the Themis store for quite some time before Pam moved to Paris. Letter to Bob Greene, The Doors' accountant (received on July 3, 1971): Hello Bob, how are you? Paris is beautiful in the sun, built for human beings. Speaking to Bill Siddons a while back I told him of our desire to stay here indefinitely. Will that be possible? Could you write and give me an idea of how long we can stay on living at our present rate, a sort of financial statement in general? Also, a copy of the partnership agreement, if it was ever completed. We have decided to turn the shop (Themis, Pamela's boutique) over to Judy and Tom (Pamela's sister and her husband). Eventually, we'd like to be completely clear of any involvement. Any luck on the credit cards? We could use them made out in both our names. Please send us $3,000 for the bills. Give our best to all, later, Jim. 

Like many of the rumors about Jim and Pam, when you trace them back to their source, they're invariably nonsense. Danny Sugerman did admit to me, shortly after his cancer prognosis, he had concocted part of his story with Pamela. In my knowledgeable opinion Danny and Pam were not friends. All of my sources made it clear that Pamela would no more hang out with some starstruck teenager than Jim would. Of her family, Pam seemed closest to her dad, she often liked to torment her mom, and was often tormented by her sister Judy. In fact she'd had such a major falling out with her sister that she wasn't planning to go home for what turned out to be the last Christmas of her life because she said she couldn't bear to be in the same room with Judy. Pam was declared Jim's legal wife by the State of California in 1973 and was awarded a stipend of 1500$ per month. There's tons of evidence to contradict Kennealy's contentions about Pamela, but she conveniently chose to overlook all of it. Instead Kennealy took the most obscure stories and pumped them up to suit her own purposes. Kennealy is a delusional egotist. Not to mention that her actions pretty much confirm that if Jim Morrison had been just as smart and handsome, but hadn’t been a rock star, she wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Pamela gave Jim attention, care and love when he was an unknown misfit. My agent for about 10 years Jonathan Dolger (Jim Morrison's editor at Simon & Schuster), is still laughing about the nonsense attributed to him. Mr Dolger said that he did receive a telegram from Jim about the cover of his poetry book The Lords & The New Creatures. But he said everything else written about Jim's uncontrollable moods is complete fabrication. No one ever called him asking for the telegram which, Dolger says, is still in the file in New Jersey. Both Dolger and McLure attest of Pam Courson's importance in boosting Jim's poetry talents. Modestly, I think my book is the most comprehensive published work on Jim's and Pam's lives to date. Jerry Hopkins said it was. Despite my exhaustive research, I'm afraid Pam Courson will remain an enigmatic and elusive figure, due to the scarce documentation about her whereabouts. For what I deduced from her psychiatrist, Pam was an unstable woman whose emotional wounds were caused by a dysfunctional home life. When she first met Jim, she felt suddenly connected to a very wounded artist who she could identify with. For Jim, it was fate, and they would only separate by death. And this was not your typical rock and roll publicized affair like Sid & Nancy or Kurt & Courtney. Theirs was a real love story, and for that reason Pam Courson is maybe the only case in the annals of rock and roll who could keep her anonymity and mystery intact alongside Jim Morrison. Diane Gardiner didn't discard the idea of a suicide pact between Jim and Pam in Paris. Nobody can demonstrate such thing, but it's possible Pam decided to wait to be 27 to reunite with her soulmate.

Pamela Courson's white dress she wore in 1968 for The Beard premiere at the Coconut Grove dinner party. -Patricia Butler: During my research I ended up being pretty shocked about how easily some people would lie, and for very little reason or return. There were people with different memories, who had differing impressions and different agendas for how they wanted their place in Jim Morrison's story to be written (or, in many cases, rewritten). About confusing memories, one example that comes to mind is Paul Rothchild, who told me that Pamela had ballooned up to nearly 200 pounds, and that he'd seen her in this condition within six months of her death. Now Pamela was 115 pounds when she died. That would've been one helluva big weight loss (not to mention the gain in the first place) in a short period of time. Then I talked to her friends. While Pamela was certainly heavier than she'd been pre-Paris, she was still at her ideal weight (she'd actually been 20 pounds underweight before Paris). There's a photo of her in my book that shows her in that six month period before her death, and she looks fantastic. I liked Paul Rothchild and trusted him; he had no reason to lie to me. So do I report that Pamela gained 75 pounds or so in the last year of her life, since I have a reliable witness to that fact? No, of course not. Was Paul lying to me? No, of course not. That's just how he remembered it. Somehow over the years that healthy gain multiplied in his head until Pamela was, in his memory, overweight. This example illustrates the main problem with relying on one person's memory of anything, even someone you know to be trustworthy. You cast the net as wide as you can, then try to find that "one true thing" in what you bring back. And it's helpful to find and talk to school teachers, classmates, roommates, neighbors -- all the folks whose names people don't recognize. They pretty much always have interesting things to say, just that no one's ever bothered to ask them. In the case of those things that remain murky, all you can do is present as many sides of the story as you can and let others draw their own conclusions. Try walking those myths backwards, painstakingly, step by step, and more often than not you'll find they'll disintegrate before you get very far.

In the spring of 1973, Pamela Courson was living in San Francisco with a man named Michael Verjaska. She had been friends with Michael for a few years but they became lovers after Jim died. She was also dating Randy Ralston. These images came from a personal home video from one of Pam’s friends in San Francisco. The submitter said “Pamela Courson and her boyfriend in the early 70’s” and asked to remain anonymous. Looks like she was growing out her bob at the time. My sources of information about Pamela not being a heavy heroin user before Jim Morrison's death are: the LAPD report; Pamela's autopsy report; an independent analysis of Pamela's autopsy; January Jensen and Ellen Sander's recollections; Ellen Sander hastened to refute Pamela's rumored heroin addiction while she was in Paris, and after. "When she stayed with me, I did not see her do anything like that. And if she was a heroin addict in Paris -- it's awfully hard to hide it. It's not like you can put it down for a week. I saw no evidence of any kind of hard drug usage while she was at my house, and I was with her almost constantly." January Jensen, who lived in nearby Sausalito and became Pamela's confidante, echoed Ellen's observations. 

"During the time that she was here in Sausalito, she wasn't doing anything but smoking pot every now and then." I know it's human nature to want to believe the worst of these characters, but in this case there just isn't any evidence to support it. It's also doubtful that Pamela would have bothered lying to her shrink, who she had been seeing for many years -- since the time Jim got famous. Due to the professional secret with his patient, to learn information about Pam's mental deterioration was like pulling teeth, but I gathered Pamela, like Jim Morrison, suffered from borderline disorder. Alcoholics, heroin users, and prescription pain killer addicts like to be down. They like to feel comfortable, warm, drowsy and unconscious. I doubt that any but the strictest sect of AA would classify Morrison as an "addict." People confuse his image with his reality. He experimented with a lot of drugs when he was younger. But by the time he went to Paris he was just your garden variety alcoholic. Now I'm not disagreeing that alcohol is a drug that people do get addicted to; but when someone says someone else is an "addict," that's not usually what they mean.

Diane Gardiner, The Doors' publicist and Pam's confidante, booked press interviews with Jim at the Phone Booth, the bar next to The Doors office. “Jim was interested in strip dancers and how they felt,” Diane said. “He had a real empathy for them. He would go to those places and he would applaud. He’d be a great audience.” Diane also remembered Jim's drunken advances towards her: “Jim had fallen across the bed drunk and he just looked up at me and he said, 'I want to fuck you.' There was that old part of me going, Gee whiz, 'I’d like to fuck you, too.' So I just said, 'Sure, Jim.' I found out he didn’t like women who weren’t feminine. He didn’t like it when women got kind of brash. Later I found he thought I was being too mechanized. Anyway, we didn’t fuck and he went back out into the front room.” Maybe that was the reason he appreciated Pam's femininity and not Patricia Kennealy's brashness. Source: satireknight.wordpress.com

Dreaming, Fiction, Simulation, Jim Morrison as metaphor of the 60s

Dreaming, Fiction, and Empathy: Aside from the considerable evidence that dream content is related to waking social life, a further component supporting a link between dreaming and empathy is that the dream acts as a piece of fiction, which is explored by the dreamer and others as part of the sharing process, and that, like literary fiction (Oatley and Veltkamp, 2013), can induce empathy about the life circumstances of the dreamer. Veltkamp showed that empathy was increased for people who read a fictional story, in comparison to a non-fictional piece, but that this effect only occurred if the reader was fully immersed into the story, “transported into this narrative world.” The emotional response is greater with fiction than with non-fiction, because of the freer involvement with the characters and story, and because “the focus of fiction is primarily on eliciting emotions, rather than presenting factual information.” Drawing a comparison between dreams and literary narrative does raise two questions, on the measurement of the narrative structure of dreams, and on the difficulties associated with deciding what is literary about literary narratives. Nielsen et al (2001) quantified narrative progression in REM and NREM dreams using a story grammar tool to parse dream reports into their constituent components (actions, scenes, and characters) and to identify the causal precursors and consequences of the constituent actions. The two types of sleep did not differ with respect to the mere presence of story components. Episodic progression, that is, the minimal story unit, was defined as the occurrence of at least one character action for which both an initiating event and a consequence were also identified. A greater proportion of REM than NREM stage 2 reports contained at least one episodic progression, proportions were, respectively, 0.66 and 0.43. This significant difference was accounted for by the proportion of dreams with episodic progression being much higher (0.79) for late REM dreams of frequent dream recallers. On the question of what is a literary narrative, Mar and Oatley (2008) include in this category novels, films, TV shows, and theater, and they state these narratives model the human social world, with the viewer or reader undergoing a simulation of events. Some of these characteristics of literary narrative obviously do not hold for dreams, but the crucial characteristics that they have in common are that literary narratives and dreams are simulations of the waking social world, and that both can elicit engagement and emotion when told. The main basis for story production in dreams is detailed in Dr. Edward Pace-Schott’s study Dreaming as a story-telling instinct (2013).

The similarity between dreams and fictional stories is explored by States (1993), with dreams doing “much the same thing as the fiction writer who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our deepest concerns. And it does this by using real people, or scraps of real people, as the instruments of hypothetical acts.” States proceeds to describe “such narratives contributing to our formulation and recognition of patterns of experience,” and including scriptural violations or scripts in conflict. He compares dreams to two types of narrative, life itself, from which the dream borrows its content, and fiction, which is “waking dreams designed for other people,” and he cites Calvin Hall’s conclusion that people incorporated into dreams are those to whom we have mixed feelings, or some tension. In their paper The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience, Mar and Oatley (2008) state that “Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.” They conclude that “In much of literature, the author challenges readers to empathize with individuals who differ drastically from the self,” and they propose that narrative fiction represents “learning through experience.”

We emphasize that the functional SST (Social Simulation Theory) and non-functional William Domhoff views of dreaming both see the dream as fiction. Dreams are fictional because they have events that only very rarely copy waking life episodes (Fosse et al., 2003). Furthermore, in Vallat et al. (2017), an unknown dream environment occurs in just over 40% of dreams, and is significantly more frequent than an environment that is wholly or partly taken from waking life. In contrast, other characters in the dream are more likely to be known than to be unknown or mixed. Oatley (2016) in Fiction: Simulation of social worlds, states that people who read fiction improve their understanding of others, because fiction has complex characters and circumstances that we might not encounter in daily life. He concludes: “While some everyday consciousness can remain inside the individual mind and be externalized in small pieces during conversations, fictional stories can be thought of as larger pieces of consciousness that can be externalized by authors in forms that can be passed to others so that these others can internalize them as wholes, and make them their own.” The present paper is proposing that dreams can, like fictional stories, be passed to others who internalize them as wholes. But what is being said of dreaming consciousness could also be said of the scenarios and narratives present in waking consciousness. Source: www.psychologytoday.com

"We cripple ourselves with lies. In times like these we need men who can see clearly and speak the truth." -Jim Morrison, Wilderness (1970)

Patricia Butler: Oliver Stone wanted to use Patricia Kennealy's real name in the film. The only way she would agree to that is if Stone let Kennealy rewrite her character the way she wanted it. According to Jerry Hopkins, Kennealy then took what was hardly a scene in the film and blew it up to something like 15 pages of script, making it seem like she was Jim's "other woman", which she never was. Pathetic doesn't begin to cover it. Kennealy did first meet Jim when she interviewed him at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1969 and the only motivation I think Morrison had to make this liaision with a rock journalist was to promote his self-published poetry book The Lords & The New Creatures. Randall Johnson (who was the original writer of The Doors' screenplay) was very helpful to me throughout my research and he endorsed my book. And the Doors film Stone directed wasn't like the film Randy wrote. Seeing the difficulty of translating the intrincacies of Morrison's life to the screen, Stone decided to reduce his story to "a metaphor of the 60s."

Stone basically took Randy's script -- which, by the way, was far more honest and did use Jim and Pam's relationship, their real relationship as a focal point, and he ripped it to shreds, creating his own little fantasy of Jim the bad boy of 60s' rock. Randy Johnson's original script was really quite good and would have made a far superior movie than Stone's eviscerated version. "There was never a question of my not meeting Jim. I knew it was going to happen the instant I laid eyes on him, long before I got the job at 'Jazz & Pop' magazine," Patricia Kennealy said in 2013. This suggests an obsession towards Jim Morrison before their "fateful" meeting. It almost sounds like a fan laying siege to their favorite rock star, rather than a self-described "intellectual" or an "accomplished author". It seems the great, self-professed trailblazing feminist's true motivation for taking the job with "Jazz & Pop" was to sleep with a rock sex-symbol, after all.

Kennealy started her bohemian lifestyle in SoCal dancing as a go-go in roadhouses while she studied journalism. She experienced with a lot of drugs, too, and she yet has the nerve to criticize Pam Courson's choices. Each chapter begins with a variation of "Jim and I we were having dinner with others..." She, very conveniently, never names "the others". This is pretty much the gist of this book. Claims made by Kennealy, claims that cannot be verified by anyone else but her alone. Who were "the others", Miss Kennealy? Why do I get the feeling there was no "dinner" and therefore no "others" involved? Her book contains claims by Kennealy that only be verified by Kennealy herself. Despite having 50 years to do so, Kennealy has never produced one iota of souvenirs she claims Jim Morrison "showered" her with, she has never identified the minister who, according only to her, performed the "ceremony" and only has a "marriage certificate" with a lot of redacted information on it with a signature that does not look like Jim Morrison's handwriting. Regarding that picture of Jim Morrison's childhood friend Tandy Martin? There appears to be something of a backstory concerning that picture, from "Tiffany Talks. Patricia Kenealy: Your Ballroom Days Are Over Baby!", by Janet M. Erwin: "She's at it again. She left Jim a valentine today, a big black and white picture of her with Tandy Martin, his high school girlfriend. Stuck it under the windshield wiper on his car. She says she's going to keep doing things like that 'to make him crazy'." Very creepy. It's the same with so many other sad cases I've encountered hovering around the Morrison periphery: they were looking for attention and a perverse sort of "respect" from people not bright enough to know better, or so desperate for someone to worship in lieu of Jim, they'll believe almost anyone who claims to have met him. Simply read "Your Ballroom Days Are Over" by Janet Erwin, and will get a much more accurate telling of Patricia's fake relationship with Jim Morrison. When confronted with Erwin's memoir, Kennealy acted like a blinded deer in headlights and never mentioned it. Something unusual, indeed. Janet Erwin corroborated about her relationship with Morrison: "I dated Jim Morrison around 10 days in two weeks. About what most of his girlfriends had. In other words, Jim really was true to Pam in his own way. All I know is that Jim loved her the best." Even all his other girlfriends will admit this, except Kennealy.

As Danny Sugerman recalled in 1993: "Pamela was a beautiful lady. Jim continually returned to her above all others. Pam was Jim's cosmic mate. Although I saw him with other women, I never heard him speak about any other woman except Pam. And I never considered he was with any women other than Pam. Pam was the one with the power as Jim's woman, no other woman ever possessed that power."  Sugerman fell in love with Pamela but he was not reciprocated. Pamela's last boyfriend was Randy Ralston. Pam called him and she asked him if he wanted to go with her to a concert at the Palladium. Randy Ralston went with Diane Gardiner to pick up Pam. Randy recalls: "She was all dressed up and looked unbelievably gorgeous. It was bizarre. Diane would be whispering in my ear as people came up to pay homage to Pamela, the rock and roll princess." At one point Randy and Pam went to Las Vegas and they talked about getting married: "We always were really very enamored of each other, but I don't think anybody could fill the boots of Jim Morrison. I don't think there was any guy who could do that in her life for her." In December 1973 Randy and Pam were preparing things to make a camping trip, they were very happy until Pam talked about her family. Pam felt so hurt about her sister Judy's remarks about her and Jim, she decided not to spend her last Christmas with her family. Randy tried to convince Pam to go with her family but she made the decision of staying with him. Source: groups.alt.music

Mulholland Drive, Wild at Heart, Permanent Midnight

Mulholland Drive (2001) is filled with sex, violence, decadence, dark humor and an almost unintelligible plot. David Lynch's films are magnets for perforated misfits who think that his films are celebrating their own decadence and snickering along with them at wholesome, traditional American values. However, Mulholland Drive, like all of Lynch’s movies, is a categorical indictment of the decadence of modern American society by a man who truly believes in traditional American values. David Lynch would love to live in Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet‘s Lumberton. In Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and The Straight Story, he celebrates the independence, resourcefulness, and Eagle-Scout virtues of ordinary, sincere, straight-arrow Americans. But he knows that their world is constantly threatened by evil forces. These evil forces work through the channels of culture and politics, but they are not merely cultural and political. They are spiritual.

The relationship between Sailor and Lula provides respite from the unpleasant life existing outside of it. It is harmonious, pure, and innocent, while the surrounding world is degraded, violent, and perverse. Wild at Heart breaks down the distinction between the merely private fantasy and the external world, allowing us to see how private fantasies work to shape the external world. Wild at Heart depicts a threat to this romance in the form of Bobby Ray Lemon and Marietta (who hired him to kill Sailor). Lynch concludes one of Wild at Heart’s sexual montages with a lyrical flourish that evokes the 1950s culture he adores: "It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways... there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were headed for a disastrous future."

In Mullholland Drive we see a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed woman, starry-eyed and grinning with joy as she arrives in Los Angeles. Her name is Betty, played by Naomi Watts. Betty has come to Hollywood to be an actress. She is a classic Lynch heroine: an earnest, wholesome, small-town girl from Deep River Ontario. She speaks in the G-rated cliches of old Hollywood. Later we discover that she became interested in acting after winning a jitterbug contest. She is next to an elderly, white-haired woman named Irene. They have met and struck up a friendship on the plane. Irene seems to be from the same wholesome mold. She and her elderly male travelling companion bid Betty goodbye and good luck. Then we see Irene and her friend in the back of a limousine, their faces insanely distorted with cynical, sniggering leers. The man has stereotypically Jewish features. (The actor’s name is Dan Birnbaum.) They are apparently enjoying a good laugh at the expense of this naive, corn-fed shiksa. Later they return as demonic apparitions.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s first screenplay was based on 1950s icon Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn and Elvis were the Queen and King of Lynch’s fantasyland, and he would honor their spirits in his film version of Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart. Lynch is said to own the rippling piece of red velvet on which Monroe posed for her career-launching nude calendar photo, the cloth emanating the ruddy glow that suffused millions of lustful dreams. The connection in the director’s mind between eroticism and velvet may have triggered the archetype of the crimson curtains draped throughout his work. Lynch and Frost wrote a script called Venus Descending (adapted from Anthony Summers’s biography Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe) which detailed the last months of Monroe’s life. Lynch and Frost consciously honored the spirit of this abandoned project in Twin Peaks, for in both works an outsider-investigator enters a community to delve into the mysterious final days of a beautiful dead blonde female icon (the sleuths of both scripts use miniature tape recorders in their quests). And Marilyn’s poignantly sad descent haunted Lynch for years: In 1990 he characterized her as “this movie actress who was falling down,” words that were like a blueprint for his protagonist Diane Selwyn in 2001’s Mulholland Drive.

I find Plato’s tripartite psychology to be helpful in understanding Wild at Heart. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that the human soul has to be distinguished into three distinct and irreducible faculties: desire - such necessities as food, shelter, sex; reason, which seeks truth; and spirit (thumos), which seeks honor. Plato associates reason with the head, desire with the belly, and thumos with the chest, which is where we feel pride and anger. Thumos is wildness of heart. Thumos is often translated as “spirit,” which makes sense if we understand it as “fighting spirit.” Thumos is also associated with self-sacrifice, since fighting over honor risks death. This is how we know that thumos is different from desire. Desire aims at self-preservation. But thumos is willing to risk self-preservation for honor. Socrates suggests that we can differentiate types of men based on which part of the soul wins out when different parts come into conflict. A man ruled by honor follows it, not reason and desire, when they come into conflict. Whenever men fight when fear or calculation would tell them to retreat, they are ruled by thumos. The thumotic man prefers death to dishonor. Thumos may urge one to fight in hopeless odds, but reason can say no. Desire may urge one to excess, but reason can impose measure.

Sailor Ripley has strong appetites for sex, drink, and cigarettes. But he is primarily ruled by thumos, which becomes apparent in the first scene. He and Lula are leaving a dance when Sailor is approached by a black man named Bob Ray Lemon, who begins verbally picking a fight with the intent to stab Sailor. When Sailor realizes what is going on, he’s clearly not worried about his own safety. He’s signaling that Lemon is crossing a line. When Lemon pulls out his switchblade, Sailor goes into full berserker mode, repeatedly slamming Lemon’s head into a rail and then into the floor, finally hurling his corpse against the wall, its brains spilling onto the floor. Sailor’s reaction clearly set aside all considerations of self-preservation or likely consequences. Reason and desire are totally overwhelmed by thumos.

After spending 22 months in jail for manslaughter, Sailor is released and reunited with Lula. Fearing the interference of Lula’s mother, though, the couple decide to break Sailor’s parole and head to California by way of New Orleans. One night as the couple are passing through Texas, they encounter an accident scene. Two young men are dead. Suddenly a badly injured girl staggers out of the darkness. Sailor and Lula both rush to her aid. They have to take her to the hospital. It is simply the right thing to do. But doing so ensures an encounter with the police, who might learn that Sailor has broken parole. Sailor sees this immediately, but he does not hesitate to help the girl. At this point, Sailor and Lula have less than $100. Practically every other character in this movie is a sociopath whose first instinct would be to rob the dead, but it does not occur to Sailor or Lula.

Another characteristic of thumotic individuals is the value they place on personal loyalty. Sailor speaks fondly of his public defender, who stood by him, but of course the most striking loyalty in the film is between Sailor and Lula. Sailor says that Lula “stood by me after I planted Bob Ray Lemon. A man can’t ask for more than that.” And the loyalty is mutual, for it is quite risky to resume his affair with Marietta Fortune’s daughter. Sailor’s trademark is his snakeskin jacket, which he says is for him “a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.” Lula says she has heard this line “about fifty-thousand times.” Sailor repeats the line in the very next scene, where he picks a fight with a guy who starts dancing with Lula and who challenges Sailor: “You look like a clown in that stupid jacket.” 

Neither Sailor nor Lula are particularly rational. Lula’s mind seems to move by association rather than reason. As Sailor puts it “the way your head works is God’s own private mystery.” When Lula refers to the world as “wild at heart and weird on top,” the words “on top” could just mean “in addition.” But they could also be in keeping with the physical association of wildness and the heart: wildness is to weirdness as the heart is to the head—“on top.” Thus Lula could be referring to her own proud and irrational character as well. Sailor himself is not too strong in the reasoning department, either, but he at least recognizes the necessity of making better decisions. At one point he declares, “Lula, I done a few things in my life I ain’t too proud of, but I’ll tell ya from now on I ain’t gonna do nothin’ for no good reason. All I know for sure is there’s more’n a few bad ideas runnin’ around loose out there.” 

At another point he promises Lula that he is not going to let things get any worse. Then he promptly lets himself get talked into an armed robbery, which costs him six years in prison and nearly got him killed. He is duly decked. But in the end, it is not reason that saves him but a vision of Glinda the Good from The Wizard of Oz, who tells him, “Lula loves you . . . If you are truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams . . . Don’t turn away from love, Sailor . . . Don’t turn away from love . . .” If the Sailor Ripleys of the world only had reason to guide them, they’d be pretty much doomed. They need their personal Guardian Angel.

One villain like Marietta is really enough for a film, but in Wild at Heart there is another villian. Half way through the film, Sailor and Lula bump into Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru in Big Tuna, Texas. Peru has been dispatched by Santos and Reindeer to kill Sailor. Bobby Peru is one of the most repellent characters ever brought to the screen. Beginning with the title sequence—an extreme closeup of a match flaring up, followed by a vast, swirling vortex of flames, to the sumptuous opening strains of Richard Strauss’ “Im Abendrot”—Wild at Heart is one of Lynch’s most sensuously beautiful movies: a screen as wide as America filled with strikingly composed images filmed in a way that imbues seedy bars, cheap hotels, and bleak land-and cityscapes with a voluptuous shell pink or sunset or neon luster.

Viewers draw the line in different spots, but many people who watches this movie thinks “This is too much”—too much weirdness, too much violence, too much blood—well before the final frames. Lynch described Wild at Heart as “a picture about finding love in hell,” but for most people there’s too much hell there to be redeemed by love. My answer, though, is that these are problems with our world, not with Wild at Heart's world. And because the movie dives so deep into darkness, the ending is all the more satisfying. I have watched Wild at Heart more than 20 times, but in my last viewing I realized that I had never before watched it without looking away in certain spots. So it took me decades to finally look at every frame of my favorite David Lynch film. I think of all Lynch’s works, Wild at Heart is still the closest to the paradigm of Lynchian perfection, and that should count for something.

Does Wild at Heart have a political message—or at least a political lesson it can teach us? Yes, and it is a conservative one. First, it is a very bleak portrayal of the desire-dominated world created by liberal individualist snakeskin salesmen: a world swarming with criminals and freaks and awash in substance abuse, sexual libertinism, and obnoxious music. It is a veritable Garden of Earthly Delights. We sympathize with Sailor and Lula because we see that they have decent sentiments, but they were so poorly nurtured and educated that they might have been better off raised by wolves. Sailor didn’t have parental guidance because both his parents died while he was a child of cigarette or alcohol related illness, and Lula was raised in the midst of a gang of criminals, one of whom raped her at the age of 13.

Furthermore, neither Sailor nor Lula is particularly good at reasoning, so their desires and their thumos keep getting them into trouble, and in the modern liberal wasteland trouble abounds. Lynch clearly believes that there is a moral order to the world. Sailor and Lula are just too thick to know it by reason. But the moral order can capture their imaginations, shape their sentiments, and set them off in the right direction in the guise of a narrative, namely The Wizard of Oz. In the wasteland, the only myths we have are movies. When the moral order clothes itself in myths, we have religion. Only magic can redeem these characters, and only Christian or sentimentalists would want to. Wild at Heart is grotesque and obscene. But religious art has long employed the grotesque and obscene. Just look at Bosch. Thus Wild at Heart’s ultimate message is: Liberalism is the road to hell, not paradise—and only a Good Witch can save us now. Source: www.unz.com

A new meta-analysis study conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second. Results from Ortigue's team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, and adrenaline. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image. Ortigue is an assistant professor of psychology and an adjunct assistant professor of neurology, both in The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. Other researchers also found blood levels of nerve growth factor, or NGF, also increased when falling in love. Those levels were significantly higher in couples who had just fallen in love. This molecule involved plays an important role in the social chemistry of humans, or the phenomenon 'love at first sight.' "These results confirm love has a scientific basis," says Ortigue. Ortigue and her team worked with a team from West Virginia University and a university hospital in Switzerland. The results of the study are published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Source: www.sciencedaily.com

David Lynch thought of hiring screenwriter Jerry Stahl for the second season of Twin Peaks, and Stahl wrote the episode 4 (2nd season) where Donna is doing detective work along with Agent Cooper, and the secret diary from Laura Palmer she comes across reveals many dark details about Laura's other life. Jerry Stahl also appears in a cameo in Inland Empire (2006) playing Devon Berk's Agent. "I did drugs because there was another world, and I wanted to live in it. Because I preferred this Other World to the one I happened to inhabit. Because I could exist in imaginary circumstances with greater ease that I could in real ones", Jerry Stahl writes in his memoir Permanent Midnight (1995). Later, another reflection, "I have done everything, from slashing my wrists to shooting heroin, to stay the good little boy. Because, I see now, on some cringing level, that's all being a junkie was. Forget being cool, forget being underground. It was a way of staying ashamed." His book works as a Ebbinghaus cycle of learning & forgetting memory curve study. Living inside Hollywood's Falstaffian underbelly, the possibility of making a decent life evaporated for Stahl overnight. In Permanent Midnight (1998) directed by David Veloz (one of the screenwriters of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers), Ben Stiller plays the emotionally exhausted Stahl, costarring Maria Bello as an ex-addict who becomes his lover and confidante.

In the novel, Stahl meets Kitty in a rehab centre in Arizona (Progress Valley), where he's bound to pass the 90 days clean program, although he's busy writing unreadable stories at the library stacks and he's expelled of the center when he stops following the rules after two months. In the movie, Jerry and Kitty meet in a more cinematic style while he's working at McDonalds and she asks him for some matches. In the motel, he'll recount his rise and fail story to Kitty as response to her incredulity. In the book, Kitty appears more like a saviour figure, and their relationship is more romantic and tormentous ("I was so in love that it made my heart hurt", "I didn't realize how much I wanted to die until the first time I made love to Kitty. Nor how much I wanted to live". Stahl describes his heroine Kitty as wearing a long white dress and a straw hat with pink ribbons, a renewed femme fatale type.

In David Veloz's film this romantic encounter is instead more of a post-modern love story in development, in which Maria Bello plays Kitty as Stahl's witty counterpart ("You're too darn sad-looking to just be another retard in a pink visor... I get it. You're the angsty, arty, Hemingway type who sold out to Hollywood, hit the needle and ended up in rehab”) to an emotionally distant yet highly ironic Stahl: "Trust me, on smack I was a real stud". Eventually, Jerry Stahl accepts a dark truth about his life: "What is heroin, really, but every junkie's teddy bear? Shooting dope is all about getting warm and fuzzy. Heroin may kill you, but it'll never break your heart, although you're just generating more pain, more penance for the one sin you couldn't help commit. The sin of being born". Source: blogcritics.org

Emotion and Gender, Jim Morrison

Emotion and Gender Typicality Cue Sexual Orientation Differently in Women and Men: Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men—a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Here, we extended this to judgments of women’s sexual orientation. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women’s faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians; however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Compared to men’s faces, women’s faces varied less in their emotional expression (appearing invariably positive) but varied more in gender typicality. These differences align with gender role expectations requiring the expression of positive emotion by women and prohibiting the expression of femininity by men. More important, greater variance within gender typicality and emotion facilitates their respective utility for distinguishing sexual orientation from facial appearance. These findings thus provide the first evidence for contrasting cues to women’s and men’s sexual orientation and suggest that gender norms may uniquely shape how men and women reveal their sexual orientation. Men are not meant to express as much emotion as women (who are stereotyped as hyperemotional), but are expected to express more dominant emotions, such as anger, to a greater extent than women. Gender inversion theory proposes that gay men and lesbian women have the minds of the opposite sex, thereby explaining their same-sex attraction (Katz, 2007). Specifically, gay men are expected to be like straight women, and lesbian women like straight men, in a plurality of their thoughts and behaviors that includes their emotional expressions (Geiger, Harwood, & Hummert, 2006; Tskhay & Rule, 2015). Although gender inversion is an exaggerated stereotype, particularly as the association between sexual orientation and gender typicality is not always straightforward, it does bear a kernel of truth. Future research could expand to examine how gender typicality and emotion cue men’s and women’s sexual orientation across cultures. Such efforts might also consider target ethnicity, given featural overlaps with emotional expressions (Zebrowitz, 2010) and as sexual dimorphism also varies across ethnic groups (Hopder, Finklea, Winkielman, & Huber, 2014). Source: link.springer.com

Janet Erwin: Jim Morrison was a wonder of man, the best and most considerate lover I have ever had. He was straight and in my opinion, if he insinuated anything different it was indeed to get a reaction from others, to push people's buttons. He was a prankster. Jim had 20 paternity suits filed against him throughout his career. He told me he was being sued by women he'd never even heard of, let alone had sex with, and when I asked him how he felt about gays--after witnessing his intense discomfort at being hit on by a gay man at a bar--he said he didn't mind "as long as they don't try to compromise me." He also said he couldn't imagine "how men could do that to each other." Stephen Davis dared to paint an imaginary scenario featuring the owner of a local coffe shop in Florida, Tom Reese, whose denial of an affair didn't stop Davis' twisted fantasies. The problem is, Tom Reese mentioned Jim Morrison frequently in the talks he gave to his coffeeshop audiences--adding in every instance that there had never been anything of a sexual nature between them--and how he detested those rumors. 

Patricia Butler: My interview with Jeff Moorehouse led me to the conclusion Jim Morrison was straight, nor bisexual. I talked with the Morrisons and their attorneys, Brian Manion and Louis Reisman. Despite the offensive nature of some of the material with which I approached them, the Morrisons were unfailingly gracious and timely in their responses. I had more problems with the Coursons, who didn't want my book about Pamela published. I interviewed Pamela Courson's psychiatrist who treated her during 1967-1974 (Dr. Paul H. Ackerman). Also I talked at length with Eve Babitz, Mirandi Babitz, Pamela Des Barres, Paul Ferrara, Brian Gates, Bob Greene, Babe Hill, Jac Holzman, Jerry Hopkins, Randall Johnson, January Jensen, Christopher Jones, Robby Krieger, Rich Linnell, Frank Lisciandro, Kathy Lisciandro, Ray and Dorothy Manzarek, Anne Moore, Jeff Morehouse, Herve Mueller, Julia Negron, Barbara Stewart Noble, Randy Ralston, Thomas Reese, Paul Rothchild, Raeanne Rubenstein, Ellen Sander, Bill Siddons, Cheri Siddons, Danny Sugerman, Cathy Weldy, Officer Darryl Williams, and Gilles Yepremian, among other insiders from The Doors' circuit. Dr. Michael W. Kaufman, the pathologist who analyzed Pamela's autopsy report, wrote: "Her weight, state of nutrition, and state of hydration would indicate that she was living a normal existence. Of significance was that examination of the endometrium and that the ovaries demonstrated evidence of recent ovulation. This evidence of ongoing reproductive functioning is frequently absent in drug abusers. The liver, likewise, did not show changes suggestive of alcohol abuse on either a chronic or acute basis. The lungs did not demonstrate changes which would be expected in chronic intravenous drug abusers." John Mandell’s statement to the police that Pamela had been using heroin for “approximately one year” seems to corroborate January Jensen’s and Ellen Sander’s observations that Pamela was not using heroin during the year she lived in Sausalito, whis is also confirmed by Dr. Kaufman’s report. “Yes, I can substantiate that,” Pamela's psychiatrist Dr. Ackerman says in response to this assessment of Kaufman’s report. “She did use heroin, but it was not a heavy habit. She didn’t start frequent use of heroin until after Jim Morrison died. And it wasn’t very heavy use, just enough to be worrisome.” 

Virginia Flagg: Jim Morrison was an outlaw in a lawless place. He had the guts to be what everyone won't face they are.... and he took it to the limit, looked at it with brazen and fearless wonder and it all broke his heart. He chose Pamela because she inspired his best instincts and she was someone who remembered him who he really was. Their relationship was wild, strange and romantic, a very tragic romance.

Babe Hill says, “Jim had not only one-night stands, but other girl friends, certain women he was fond of if Pam wasn’t around or if they were fighting. Whatever was convenient, a place to crash, a soft shoulder.” Babe Hill had asked Jim in Miami if he had handfasted Patricia Kennealy, and Jim conceded it was possible, saying, “I don’t know what I did! I was drunk. Maybe I did, but there was no emotional involvement with her.” Jim told Babe he was going to have to confront Kennealy. Babe Hill, “Jim’s attitude was, 'I was indiscreet in my past, and now I have to go pay for it,' because he was such a gentleman. He would never just tell any woman just to fuck off. So, whatever it was, he had to see her and confront it.”

Patricia Butler: Danny Sugerman's whole focus was always to further the Doors' myth as concocted by him and Ray Manzarek. I told Danny once, when I was having trouble juggling everyone's conflicting interests in my book, that it was hard to make everyone happy. He said that when he was preparing NOHGOA, he just had to choose who to be loyal to. And Danny chose Ray Manzarek. It is something to think about. However, I decided to be loyal to Jim and Pam, and it made all the difference. In fact, Danny pointed some of the things out to me that were not true in NOHGOA before I could bring them up, and he asked me to leave some things out of my book because he didn't want these stories to continue. Source: groups.alt.music

Dissociative Identity Disorder, Jim Morrison

As many as 75,000 Americans could die because of drug or alcohol misuse and suicide as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to an analysis conducted by the national public health group Well Being Trust. The group is sounding the alarm that the growing unemployment crisis, economic downturns and stress caused by isolation and lack of a definitive end date for the pandemic could significantly increase so-called "deaths of despair" unless local, state and federal authorities take action. "Unless we get comprehensive federal, state, and local resources behind improving access to high quality mental health treatments and community supports, I worry we're likely to see things get far worse when it comes to substance misuse and suicide," Well Being Trust's chief strategy officer Dr. Benjamin F. Miller told CNN. Miller emphasized the data is just a projection, and that actions taken could change the number of deaths. "We can change the numbers -- the deaths have not happened yet. However, it is on us to take action now," Miller says. "Unemployment during the Great Recession was associated with an increase in suicide deaths and drug overdose deaths," according to the Well Being Trust. For instance, deaths from both suicide and drug overdoses rose along with unemployment during the 2008 recession. Unemployment went from 4.6% in 2007 to a peak of 10% in October 2009 and declined steadily reaching 3.5% in early 2010, according to the group. Changes also must be made to medical and mental health care to ensure that those who need care can get it, the group says. That includes relaxing some privacy standards surrounding technology to improvise care options. "This screams for an opportunity to examine what wasn't working about mental health delivery prior to COVID and examine new strategies to create a new and more integrated approach to mental health post-COVID," Miller says. Earlier this week Vermont, which has been plagued by overdoses, reported that opioid deaths decreased for the first time since 2014. "The state saw a 58% decline in deaths attributed to opioid misuse between 2018 and 2019," Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said. There were also fewer deaths involving fentanyl, but the percentage of opioid-related fatalities involving cocaine continues to increase, Levine said. "We've responded to the opioid crisis in this country as if it was only about opioids when, in reality, it's driven by deeper issues associated with mental health, addiction, pain and suffering," Miller says. "Virtual community may not be enough to hold off the impact of isolation and loneliness. And finally, uncertainty. The stress of uncertainty has a serious impact on the emergence and worsening of mental illness," the group said. Source: edition.cnn.com

Patricia Butler: At some point Patricia Kennealy wrote a serie of exaggerations about Pam Courson and her heroin addiction, citing Alain Ronay as her source. I called Alain and asked him if he had actually told her these things and he started crying and denying his allegations. Ronay also said that the article that was published in Paris-Match magazine was very inaccurate and that everything he'd said had been skewed. In the interviews Agnes Varda and Alain Ronay gave to Paris-Match magazine in 1991, both say that when they arrived, they went up to the second floor apartment where Jim and Pam lived. There is a contradiction in the Ronay and Varda stories at this point. Varda remembers clearly that when they arrived, Jim was still in the tub, surrounded by members of the fire brigade. On the other hand, Ronay says that Jim was already on the bed and that he never saw the body. Varda's accurate description of the death scene in the bathroom gives credence to her story over Ronay's. When Albert Goldman started his first draft, he simply wrote down the same old clichés about Morrison. 

The Doors Companion (1997) by John Rocco, included Albert Goldman's article "The End" which launched the most sleazy speculations about Jim Morrison's last hours in Paris. Albert Goldman, who appointed himself as my mentor, was not exactly known for his accuracy in reporting. In fact, the reason some people wouldn't talk to him (including Alain Ronay) about Morrison was because he had such an incredible reputation for yellow journalism. Goldman made no bones about the fact that he wasn't interested in what was true, just what seemed most provocative. Actually, I thanked Albert Goldman on my book credits along with my other sources, but not on a professional basis. My exact words were, "'To Uncle Albert Goldman, who told me I was too stupid to live to be 30." Albert Goldman was a dear man to me personally, but professionally he was a shark.

I thought Goldman was a nice guy to me personally, but I didn't trust him professionally and wouldn't want to collaborate with him. It would be good for people to consider the possible agenda of an author. My book is told almost entirely through the words of the people who were actually there, and all sides I knew are presented. Since I wasn't there and I don't have a personal stake in the story, I had no reason to lie or mislead the reader. If you interview enough people you start to get a sense of when people are being straight with you and when they are lying. It's not that difficult to tell when folks have their own agenda to pursue (i.e., those who have nothing to gain from lying are more believable than those who do). Also, unless all these people know each other and get together to coordinate their stories, pretty soon you can see if one or two stories seem oddly out of line with the rest and that's a red flag. Babe Hill did initially get angry with me when I told him I'd be writing about Jim's child abuse allegations but he later apologized for his reaction and encouraged me to write honestly about what I'd found in the manuscript of Max Fink, and just be sure I presented all sides and opinions (including the Morrisons), which I feel I did. Also I discovered Danny Sugerman was never romantically or sexually involved with Pamela. The problem with Sugerman wasn't in the details, but rather with the fact that entire passages were made up out of whole cloth. Many insiders had quite a lot to gain from lying ($$$), and Sugerman most of all. It is, after all, the nonsense that Danny added to NOHGOA that made it a bestseller. Jerry Hopkins tried for years to sell his book. Then he teamed up with Danny, who did a lot of editing on it, adding a lot of very dramatic and also very false information, and it's then when the book got sold. 

I talked to Mirandi Babitz quite a length about the rumors of Pamela working as a call girl on Melrose Avenue. When we traced her basis for saying such defamatory things, she realized that she never knew any of this firsthand, and she got it all from shady gossip from wannabes and rivals around the rock scene--the same gossip that had once painted Morrison turning tricks in Florida when the most probable situation was Morrison earning some extra dollars by dealing acid tabs to college students--. Ms. Babitz was repeating essentially third-hand speculation without basis in fact. My theory is Mirandi was jealous by proxy (her sister Eve Babitz had unrequited designs on Jim Morrison). Pamela actually called Eve Babitz "just a groupie" to her face and that apparently struck a nerve. Pamela was erratic, mentally unstable, flirtatious, but she was never a "semi-pro". That's patently nonsense since Morrison was very generous with Pam financially. By late 1970, Patricia Kennealy was stalking Jim Morrison; that's precisely how he saw it. Jim tried to pacify Kennealy to protect Pamela. Kennealy was maniacally jealous of Pamela and didn't understand her relationship with Jim. Her disturbing obsession with Pamela could even be confounded with lesbian attraction.

Jerry Hopkins: "Patricia Butler has worked six years on her book, and because she's turned up so much new material, my ego insists that the extra time she spent on research is why. I spent two years researching and writing No One Here Gets Out Alive; it was finding a publisher that took forever. Patricia, on the other hand, continued plugging away on this project nights and weekends. She slowly developed relationships on the phone and got her sources to tell stories they never told me, and then, adding insult to injury, uncovered some secrets Danny Sugerman and I never knew. Patricia Butler's exploration of Jim Morrison and Pam Courson's love story--and her surprising retelling of the Jim Morrison history-- should be the final word on the matter."

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think Pamela was material-minded?

-Babe Hill: She wasn’t material-minded; that’s what Jim loved about her. She realized the beauty of his soul and what he was trying to do. She didn’t care about the material aspect of any of the stuff. That was her whole thing about being against the other Doors, and the office, and everything else. It didn’t have to do with that they weren’t making any money; it was just that they were wasting his creativity. I figure she had a very supportive influence on his poetry and never missed a chance to rag on him when he went off the track.

RiderontheStorm69: Severe depression was very obvious and it seems like it was something Jim Morrison struggled with his entire life. I think Jim Morrison might have suffered from DID. Thinking about it always makes me pause about  a few things that Jim wrote: "He felt he had to drink to silence the voices," the seeming separate identities presented in the Hitchhiker screenplay, and in the poem "The Changeling." On the flipside of that though, he could have been drinking as false courage because he was shy; His separate identities in the Hitchhiker screenplay perhaps could be archetypes, because archetypes interested him. I was just reading about DID and the article said that people who suffer from this disorder sometimes experience amnesia. And when a person suffers from the resultant amnesia, they usually try to make up a "story" for it afterwards. Jim's life can be seen as a flight from his past and from himself. The hitchhiker's journey being a metaphor for this. Sometimes, under great duress, people literally forget who they are and just start traveling. In psychiatric parlance this is called a fugue state. Morrison was definitely interested in forgetting; "Learn to forget", "Forget the world, forget the people", "Can we resolve the past?" His story is an internal drama. The family represents past memories Jim must destroy, or repress, at all costs. But as they are his past memories, the family, like the hitchhiker, is an aspect of Jim Morrison. So martydom or self destruction reappears. I tend to wonder if the film HWY was based on this premise, the two lead characters appearing two be adversaries, but actually representing aspects of one person, the life urge and the death urge.

I think the DSM IV has a category for those who consider that their changed consciousness and perception is the result of "shamanistic possession". It's called Dissociative Disorder. The difference between it and Dissociative Identity Disorder is that the person with DID experiences pronounced differences in memory, perception, consciousness, and what we call "personality" with each different part. There are typical "personalites" for DID--the angry protector, who remembers the abuse and acts out abuse on others; the child, who has less access to memories and skills; the member of the opposite gender; the older, wise counselor or nurturing figure; the provoker, or "clown." If Jim was dissociative, his memory of such an event would have been intermittent. If he had Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), he'd only remember it when he was in a particular mood. Specifically, an extremely angry mood. But the incident could still affect him on subconscious levels. Those who have DID tend to have survived abuse from a very early age. Just like in the song "Five to One" Jim alludes, "When the morning wakens/Then may I arise/Pure and fresh and sinless/" This leads me to an aside: The experience of having DID is a broken, shattered state of consciousness. The person experiences "coming to" or "waking up", or "coming up" abruptly, in unfamiliar surroundings, without context, sometimes without recognizing friends or even relatives. The person becomes very adept at covering up memory gaps by joking, making nonsense statements to throw the "strangers" off track, and outright bluffing--interpreted by others as lies--to fill in missing material. Source: groups.alt.music

The Wonderful World of Walt Disney, The Beatles

The Beatles' 12th and final album -- the making of which is the subject of Peter Jackson's forthcoming documentary, titled Get Back -- is as suited for the unsettling moment we found ourselves in now as it was for the transition from 1969 to a new decade. Iger raved that the Get Back film (distributed by Disney) would revisit the creation of Let It Be by giving audiences a "front-row seat to the inner workings of these genius creators at a seminal moment in music history, with spectacularly restored footage that looks like it was shot yesterday." When you ask Beatles fans today to name a favorite song from the group, chances are you're going to hear at least one title from Let It Be. The reason why is the same reason that, when McCartney resumes his touring schedule post-coronavirus, his concert setlist will almost certainly include the same four songs from the Let It Be album that have been staples of his live show for years now. Because Let It Be, for whatever its flaws, tidily wraps up the Beatles' legacy in one 12-song capsule. The Walt Disney Studios will release Peter Jackson's documentary "Get Back" in theaters nationwide on September 4, 2020. Source: www.popmatters.com

ABC is bringing back “The Wonderful World of Disney” so you can watch some of your favorite Disney movies at home this summer. The network announced Thursday it will air “Moana,” “Thor: The Dark World,” “Up” and “Big Hero 6” over four consecutive Wednesdays starting May 20. These titles are currently available to stream on Disney+. Here are the summer movie lineups for ABC and CBS; all show times are Pacific. Kicking off “The Wonderful World of Disney” on Wednesday, May 20 will be Moana, the animated adventure about a spirited teen who sets sail on a daring mission to fulfill her ancestors’ unfinished quest. On June 3, things are looking Up with the Academy Award-winning animated feature about a retired balloon salesman. Then on June 10, Big Hero 6 tells the animated tale of Baymax, a lovable personal companion robot who forms a special bond with robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada. Source: www.latimes.com

Snow White had had a salutary effect on Walt’s immediate family too. His years of obsession with the film, the days and nights and weekends spent at the studio, had taken their toll on his relationship with Lillian, who had never been especially interested in Walt’s work to begin with and who once called herself her husband’s “severest critic” and “I can’t stand the sight of dwarfs.” Lillian certainly seemed to resent her husband’s preoccupation with work and the avalanche of attention he received, but she was no silent, long-suffering helpmate. Lillian would erupt. Diane remembered coming down for breakfast one morning and seeing a large brown stain on the wall. She later learned that her mother had hurled a cup of coffee at Walt. “Mother was a well contained, poised person who never lost her temper with us children,” Diane would say, “but also she would not let herself be put upon.” Things seemed to improve with Lillian after she suffered her third miscarriage and the couple, at Walt’s instigation, decided to adopt. On December 31, 1936, just as Snow White was reaching its most manic stage, Walt and Lillian received their new six-week-old daughter, Sharon Mae, though a bout of pneumonia sent her back to the hospital for a month’s recuperation. Both parents were devoted to her. They made no distinction between her and Diane, and Walt would always bristle at any mention of her being adopted.

Lillian had never been one to accept Walt’s decisions meekly or his status unquestioningly, and she admitted that he was always telling people “how henpecked he is.” “Heavens, Mother had quarrels with him!” Diane recalled. “Good healthy ones. Nothing was ever under the surface in our family. If there were any irritations felt, there was an explosion.” And Lillian was usually the one to explode. She was unimpressed by him. Speaking of a negative magazine profile of himself, Walt told Hedda Hopper that Lillian didn’t care what reporters said about him. “In fact, she usually agrees with anybody who writes things like that,” he continued. “I keep reporters away from her. She’d give them the lowdown.” When Harry Tytle’s wife mentioned to Lillian that Walt was a genius, she cracked, “But how would you like being married to one?” “She was sort of unconscious, oblivious,” Diane said. “She moved in her own circle of beauty parlor appointments, reducing exercises, dressmaker appointments, and occasional shopping sprees…. Always had to redecorate the corner of some room. That was her life.” Walt called her “Madam Queen.” -Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (2006) by Neal Gabler