February 23, 2006

BOOK REVIEW
What is the Sound of One Hand Jerking?

One Hand Jerking: Reports from an Investigative Satirist
By Paul Krassner
Seven Stories Press, 2005

Review by TIMOTHY HARRIS
Contributing Writer

I was a ’60s guy. Born on the cusp of the Baby Boom in 1960, it didn’t matter that I missed the real thing by a good decade. The counter-culture arrived late to Sioux Falls and overstayed its welcome, sustained by a consumer glut of beaded curtains, incense, and bongs. At 12, I entered the New World Rising headshop and found love at first sight.

By high school, I was a “burn-out,” which mostly meant skipping classes to get high, hiding behind my hair, and wearing carefully faded elephant bells. I became a runaway, living on sex, mescaline, and Frisbee. Work was a mobile home rafter factory. Fifty an hour, hour after hour. It helped to be stoned.

One night, hanging in the stairwell of my SRO with Cliff and Daisy — the booze-ravaged couple from downstairs who were the genuine article — Daisy looked deep into my eyes with her prematurely-aged, unfocused gaze and asked, “Tim, do you believe in Free Love?”

“ No,” I decided. That was where I drew the line.

In another four or five years, the high life would get very old. I recently caught a glimpse of my former self in legendary literary journalist Martha Gellhorn’s assessment of some hash-addled American hippies: “They were bored to death, and didn’t know it.”

I somehow got into college, ground my gears a bit, and shifted into the other side of ’60s counterculture. My heroes during those Reagan years were the previous generation’s New Left. I wanted to be Mark Rudd, the angry, anarchistic leader of the prairie power faction of SDS. My asshole moments were legion.

Eventually, thank god, I started to learn who I was and slowly lost the need for a pose. By the mid-’80s, I finally left the ’60s behind. Looking 20 years over my shoulder, I can finally say it: they weren’t all that great.

All of which probably explains why my gut reaction to Paul Krassner’s new book of essays, One Hand Jerking, was annoyed boredom. Current events are interpreted through the lens of years past with the rosy tint of a smog-filled L.A. sunset, as seen perhaps through the bottom of a bong. The ’60s are so over. If only counter-cultural icons had mandatory retirement.

Krassner — who got his start at Mad Magazine during the ’50s — was, of course, the editor of The Realist, a satirical newsletter that published from 1958-2001. This co-founder of the Yippies combined participatory journalism, satire, and politics to create something exciting and new. When People credited him as the “father of the underground press,” he famously demanded a paternity test.

Later, when he expressed some doubts to a friend about his ability to write fiction, she reminded him he’d been making things up his whole life. “That was different,” he said. “That was journalism.”

This, his first book in over a decade, kind of makes you wish he’d resisted the urge to compile. There are a few stand-out essays here — his treatment of the life of Lenny Bruce, for example, is an intimate portrait drawn from his years as Bruce’s friend and biographer and is worth the price of the book alone. There is also a wonderful assessment of the career of Steve Earle, done, interestingly, without access to Earle himself (“What part of ‘I’m in recovery’ do you not understand?” said the rock star to the journalist writing for High Times).

But mostly, this collection of previously published essays on the erosion of civil liberties, the war, various psycho politicians, the right to abortion, and “the war on some people who use drugs,” among other topics, is composed of clever but predictable rants. Occasionally, there is the descent into hackdom.

You get this image of an old man doing the Sixties Circuit of conferences, lectures, and stand-up gigs, living off the legacy. It’s like Peter Pan has turned 74 and insists on taking his clothes off. Who wants to see that? Not me.

Krassner strives for relevance but comes off as a relic. No one needs to pepper their prose with references to The Dead, Ram Dass, and Ken Kesey. No one. But like Hunter S. Thompson and a small handful of others, he helped redefine what journalism could be. In that, his legacy as one of the greats of the alternative press is secure. n