"That night I learned for the first time that my face to the world was not necessarily the face in my mirror. "
Title : White Album
Author: Joan Didion
Date Published: 1979
Type: Classic
Description
The White Album is a 1979 book of essays by Joan Didion. Like her previous book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album is a collection of works previously published in magazines such as Life and Esquire.
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First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s.
Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
BOOK EXTRACTS
Comments on Pop Culture
The doors music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation
…jim morisson, a 24 year old graduate of U.C.L.A who wore black vinyl pants and no underwear and tended to sugest some range of the possible just beyond a suicide pact. It was Morrison who had described the Doors as “erotic politicians.” It was Morrison who had defined the groups interest as “anything about revolt , disorder, chaos, about activity that appears to have no meaning “. It was Morrison who got arrested in Miami in December 1967 for giving an indecent performance. It was Morrison who wrote most of the doors lyrics , the peculiar character of which was to reflect either anambiguous paranoia or quire unambiguous insistence upon the love-death as the ultimate high.
Someone once brought Janis Joplin to a party at the house on Franklin Avenue: she has just done a concert and she wanted a brandy and Benedictine in a water tumbler. Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake or champagne cocktails or tequila neat.
Spending itme with music people was confusing and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired. Ion the first oplace time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven thirty , or we could order in later. We would go down to U.S.C to the Living Theater if the limo came at the very moment when no one had just made a drink or a cigarette or an arrangement to meet Ultra Violet at the Montecito. In any case David Hockney was coming by. In any case Ultra Violet was not at the Montecito. In any case we could go down to U.s.C and see the living theater tonight or we could see the living theater another night, in New York, or Pragues. First we wanted sushi for twenty, steamed clams, vegetable vindaloo, and many rum drinks with gardenias for our hair . first we wanted a table for twelve , fourteen at the most, althought there might be 6 more , or 8 more, or eleven more, because music people did not travel in group of “one” or “two”. John and Michelle Philips , on their way to the hospital for the birth of their daughter Chynna, had the limo detour into Hollywood in order to pick up a friend anne marshall. This incident which I often embroider in my mind to include an imaginary second detour to the Luau for gardenias, exactly describes the music business to me.
Witness linda kasabian (manson murder trial)
The Getty Museum LA
The getty tells us that the pas was perhaps different from the way we like to perceive it. Ancient marbles were not always attractively faded and worn. Ancient marbles once appeared just as they appear here; as strident , opulent evidence of imperial power and acquisition. Ancient murals were not awayls bleached and mellowed and “tasteful”.
Here was a museum that would be forever supported by its founder alone, a museum that need never depend on any city or state or federal funding. a place forever “open to the public and free of all charges”
The getty – built by the late j paul getty to house his antiquites and paintings and furniture manages to strike a pecular nerve in almost everyone who sees it. From the beginning , the getty was said to be vulgar.
The getty collection is in certain ways unremitting reproachful, and quite inaccessible to generations trained in the convinction that a museum is meant to be fun.
In short the getty is a monument to “fine art” in the old fashioned didact sense , which is part of the problem people have with it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia o keefe photo by Stieglitz
She appeared to be dismissing the rather condescending romance of extreme good looks and advanced age and deliberate isolation
“It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest” Georgia okeefe
Sky above clouds painting
Style is character
“that evening star fascinated me” she wrote. “it was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star. “ Georgia o’keefe
Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moments high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams….
Flowers
Flower : rhodesdendrons
Flower oymbidium orchids
Flower phalaeopsis ( moth orchid)
Flower gladioli
Authors
Book : briefing for a decent into hell
The golden notebook
Four galed city by doris lessing
Book victory by axel heist
The wings of the dove by milly theale
Wild palms by charlotte rittenmayer
Camus and henry jame authors
Book heart of darkness Book the deer park by norman mailer.
Ezra pound “ in a station of the metro “
Author norman mailers
Bikers
Movie the wild angels 1966
Furst and in many ways the classic exploitation bike movie
Biker movies : hells angels on wheels, hells angels 69, run angel run, the glory stompers, the losers, the wild angels, violent angels, the savage seven and the cycle savages
To have seen on bike movie is it have seen them all, so meticulously observed are the rituals of getting the bikes out of the town and onto the highway, of “making a run” of terrorizing the innocent “citizens” and fencing with the highway patrol, and finally meeting death in a blaze, usually quite a literal blaze of romantic fatalism.
We interpret what we see , slect the work the most workable of he multiple choices. We live entirely, especially, if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmacsoria which is our actual experience.
Patient’s thematic production on the Thematic Apprenception Test emphasizes her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalist and depressive view of the world around her. Its is as though she feels deeply that all human efforts is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended , and above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.
After this scrutiny the visitor was, or was not, buzzed in.
…the instant of jerky camera that served to suggest at what risk the film was obtained.
I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors., there were stories . Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin” this sense that it was possible to go “too far” and that many people were doing it – was very much withus in Los Angeles in 1968-1969. A demented and seductive vertical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall at time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was full. On august 9the , I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister in law’s swimming pool in Beverly hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Celo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined and had bad trips blamed. I remember all of the days misinformation very clearly and I also remember this, and wish I did no : I remember that no one was surprised.
Many people I know in los angeles believe that the sixties ended abruptly on august 9 1969, ended the exact moment when wordf of the murder on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled. In another sense the sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971, when I left the house on franklin avenue and move to a house on the sea.
I aslo know that in 1975 paul ferguson, while serving life sentence for the murder of ramon novaro won first prize in a PEN fiction contest and announced plans to “continue my writing” writing had helped him, he said, to “reflect on experience and see what it means”
A passion for knowledge
Museum of man in paris
Nothing in heaven or hell could have stopped him. In his mind “ tom , and Gatsby, daisy, and jirdan and I , were all Westeners” as Nick Carriway said, “ and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to eastern life.
A pool is mnisapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body, actuallty a pool for many of us in the West , a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful and is as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
Victorian gothic house
That night I leanred for the first time that my face to the world was not necessarily the face in my mirror
“Jim never cleaned up after himself,” a friend notes, recalling his habit of opening a shirt and letting the cardboards lie where they fell, and this elan seems to have applied to more than his laundry. Here was a man who moves though life believing that he was entitled to forget it and star over, to shed women when they became difficult and alliegiances when they became tedious and simply move on, dismissing those who quibbled as petty and “judgemental” and generally threated by his superior and more dynamic view of human possibility.
The freeway became a special way of being alive….the extreme concentration required in los angeles seems to bring ona state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical
1971 los angeles the architecture of 4 ecologies
(he) sat between them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in understandable but rather theatrical agony.
Of course there was nothing crucial about that night at Eugenes in 1968 and of curse you could tell me that there was certainly no harm and perhaps some good in it. But its curious vanity and irrelevance stays with me, if only because of those qualities characterize so many of Hollywoods best intentions.
Raw talent and vitality
ther was the belief in business success as a transcendent ideal. There was the faith that if one tranforms oneself from “introvert” into an “extrovert” if one learns to “speak effectively” and “do a job”, success and its concomitant spiritual grace, follow naturally.
It seemed an anachronistic ambition wanting to be a movie star.
Eccentric and quixotic passion
“Nobody ever so much as mentioned” to susan edmiston “ that when you say “I do” what you are doing is not , as you thought, vowing you eternal love, but rather subscribing to a whole system of rights and obligations and responsibilities that may well be anatheman to your most cherished beliefs” to ellen peck “ the birth of children too often means the dissolution of romance, the loss of freedom, the abandonment of ideals to economics”
(her) deeper sense of reality is not the result but the definition of her madness.
Certain places seem to exist mainky because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to ernest Hemmingway. Oxford Mississippi belongs to William Faulkner
Many mean guilts had been recalled and exorcised
Erasing ( army) hatred by indulging in smoke and drink…
That in fact I spent one or 2 days a week almost unconscious with pain seemed a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but all of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrong think…
Books seduction and betrayal by Elizabeth hardwick
Time was money, motion was progress
Everyone in new York had opinions. Opinions were demanded in return. The absence of opinion was constructed as opinion.
Maybe that is the one true way to see bogota, to have it float in the mind until the need for it is visceral, from the whole history of the place has been to seem a mirage, a delusion on a high savannah, its gold and emerald unttainable, inaccessible, its isolation so splendid and unthinkable that the very existence of a city astonishes.
…the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in a man’s own blood.
( I remember a teacher) who drank too much one night and revealed his fright and bitterness
Royal horticultural society
Sometimes you wait 4 years and it opens and it isn’t what you expected , maybe your heart wants to break, but you love it.
By the time we left ( Malibu) , sever years later, I had come to see the spirit of the place as one of shared isolation and adversity…
Film fellini and Truffaut
Film the last tycoon
Fitzgerald book adaptation
Film alex in wonderland 1970
A paul mazurksy picture which , whatever its faults, portrayed with meticulous accuracy that level of “young” Hollywood on which the average daily narcotic intake is one glass of 3$ mondavi white and 2$ marijuana cigarettes shared by 6 people
“Hollywood wives” as women “ whos jaws get hard set from the night when they sit soberly at parties waiting to take their sloshed geniuses home”
Judy bloome kids book
“I think of sergius o shaugnessy, who sometimes believe what he said and tried with its cactus, its mountain and the bright green foliage of its love and its money
Hollywood comprises of a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is a taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.
In his mind “ tom and Gatsby and dany and Jordan and I , were all westerners “ as nick corraway said “and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to eastern life”
Joan Didion the white album
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