WEIRDLAND: "Saving Capitalism", Memories Storage, Cheap Living in the Sixties, The Doors from the outside

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

"Saving Capitalism", Memories Storage, Cheap Living in the Sixties, The Doors from the outside

Robert B. Reich begins by recalling fondly how his father’s small business was able to provide for their entire family to live comfortably in the sixties. Since the 1970’s, however, the market has been restructured, leaving wages for most Americans stagnant and upward mobility more unsure. The rate of new business formation has fallen by half, from 1978 to 2011, partly because longer patent protection, mergers creating larger firms with greater scale/scope economies, and the increased political power available to larger firms. Between 2000 and 2014, quarterly corporate after-tax profits rose from $529 billion to $1.6 trillion. By 2013, the median household inflation-adjusted earnings were less than in 1989; job security also declined. During the 1970s, only 13 hostile takeovers involved companies valued at $1 billion or more; during the 1980s, the number reached 150. In 1980, over 80% of firms gave workers defined-benefit pensions. Now the figure is less than 1/3. Fifty years ago, G.M. was the largest U.S. employer, and its workers earned $35/hour in today's dollars. The percentage of total income going to the top 1% in the U.S. rose from 10% in the 1960s to over 20% by 2013; in Germany, it remained constant at about 11%. Leading political economist and author Robert B. Reich presents a paradigm-shifting, clear-eyed examination of a status quo that no longer serves the people. Visionary and acute, Saving Capitalism illuminates the path toward restoring America’s fundamental promise of opportunity and advancement. Source: www.amazon.com

Beginning in the 1950s, studies of the famous amnesiac patient Henry Molaison, then known only as Patient H.M., revealed that the hippocampus is essential for forming new long-term memories. Molaison, whose hippocampus was damaged during an operation meant to help control his epileptic seizures, was no longer able to store new memories after the operation. However, he could still access some memories that had been formed before the surgery. This suggested that long-term episodic memories (memories of specific events) are stored outside the hippocampus. Scientists believe these memories are stored in the neocortex. A more recent model, the multiple trace model, suggests that traces of episodic memories remain in the hippocampus. These traces may store details of the memory, while the more general outlines are stored in the neocortex. Further studies are needed to determine whether memories fade completely from hippocampal cells or if some traces remain. The research was funded by the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the JPB Foundation. Source: news.mit.edu


In the late sixties/early seventies when Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson were struggling with their own demons, people did not go on national television and air their dirty laundry; personal problems, real or perceived, were kept within the home or within the individual. Women who worked outside the home were still an exception rather than a rule. So if Jim kept certain traumas from his past a secret; if Jim’s bandmates turned a blind eye as his alcoholism escalated or if Pamela was supported by Jim—none of these things seem unusual in the context of the era. “He always came on weekends, a very attractive lad,” recalls Tom Reese, who continually tried to convince Jim to model nude for the club’s Life Studies class, offers Jim continually declined. Reese, asked if he had been Jim’s lover during this time (as it had been speculated) he chuckles: “Well, let’s put it this way: everybody wanted to.” But when pressed to disclose further details, Reese hedges around the subject, indicating nobody should  speculate. As had been the case with Tandy Martin, one of the first official girlfriends of Jim, he would invest all his pent-up emotion in his feelings for Mary Werbelow, an intensity she found both compelling and frightening. “At that particular time he was really, totally enamored with her,” says Bryan Gates (Jim's classmate at St. Petersburg College): “And unlike virtually everybody else he was around, he was polite to her, considerate, never provoked her like he did the other people, and sort of wanted to be not only her friend in the boyfriend/girlfriend sense, but somewhat of her mentor and intellectual coach. It was a nice relationship.” With subsequent girlfriends and lovers, Jim seemed more interested in playing with their emotions or push their buttons; for instance The Doors' secretary Ginny Ganahl confirmed Morrison just had a liaison with Jazz & Pop magazine journalist Patricia Kennealy because her review of an interview with Morrison in January 1969 had been scathing.

Early photos of Jim and Pam taken from Pamela’s scrapbook show the two gleefully clowning around in a photo booth, Jim wearing a leather jacket, Pamela looking well scrubbed and glowing. But in spite of their seemingly idyllic happiness, at least one person had some instant reservations about the couple’s relationship. “What are you wasting your time with this guy for?” Pamela’s older sister, Judy, reportedly asked Pamela in 1965. “Get yourself someone with money!” Jim and Pam's love for each other was a constant thread that appeared throughout Morrison’s writing, and even some of their fights were immortalized in the pages of Jim’s notebooks. January Jensen says: “We were going down Highway One headed to L.A., Jim always carried a notebook with him. And every time we’d come to a restaurant, a general store, or a gas station, he’d have to stop and call Pam.” Jensen, Babe Hill, and Paul Ferrara would tease Jim about his obsession with Pam. Mirandi Babitz remembers, “The first time Jim actually got some money for singing, he and Pam went wild! They bought Chinese food and had a feast. Anyone would have thought that Jim had brought home a million dollars, but I think his cut had been about twenty bucks!” “That was the great thing about Los Angeles at that time,” says Mirandi Babitz, “you could live so cheap. People had these little scrappy apartments so nobody was ever really on the street because you could get by: You could make it on unemployment, you could make it on a waitress’s salary.” —"Angels Dance and Angels Die: The Tragic Romance of Pamela and Jim Morrison" (2010) by Patricia Butler

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