Peter Bergman (1939-2012)

At the risk of having this blog turn into an obituary page, I am sad to report that Peter Paul Bergman, co-founder of the Firesign Theater, succumbed to leukemia this morning at the age of 72.

Born in Cleveland, OH, Bergman's talents for political humor and satire came early with school newspaper columns and a single, "Attention Convention," parodying the 1956 Democratic convention and made in a cut-up style similar to that of Buchanan & Goodman's humorous sound collages, that was released under the name The Four Candidates. He also lost a job as announcer over his high school's PA system when he announced that Chinese Communists had taken over and that a "mandatory voluntary assembly" was to take place immediately. He pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale, did six months in the Army, and toured Europe. He worked with Tom Stoppard, Spike Milligan, and the Living Theater, the latter two forming two poles of influence between which the art of the Firesign Theater was to take shape.

In 1966 he did a nightly free-form radio show in Los Angeles, Radio Free Oz, where he began to work with poet and broadcaster David Ossman and actors Philip Proctor and Philip Austin, and under the name The Firesign Theater (so-called because all four were, astrologically speaking, "fire signs") the four recorded their first album, Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him, in 1968. In this and subsequent albums such as How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, the Firesign Theater explored a form of surreal, stream-of-consciousness audio comedy-drama that incorporated the techniques of old-time radio, a counterculture sensibility, puns and wordplay, full of recondite references and allusions to high culture and low, absurdity and dystopian science-fiction and utilized the resources of the multi-track recording studio.

I first heard the Firesign Theater in college when one of the local radio stations played a few of the albums (I believe I remember hearing excerpts from Don't Crush That Dwarf, I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and In The Next World You're On Your Own) all in a segued, free-form mix that was hilariously funny and terrifying at the same time. I wasn't high at the time, but I could have been. It was one of those transformative moments, but I didn't know who the artists were until a year or so later.

To many, The Firesigns' humor was "head humor" and a lot of people lumped them in with acts such as Cheech & Chong, but their albums were mostly full-length plays for the medium of the long-playing record. If radio drama was the "theater of the mind," the Firesigns made full-on avant-garde movies for the mind, with a cinematic sensibility exquisitely translated into audio that somehow never got garbled in the presentation and always rewarded repeat listening.

In addition to Firesign, Bergman worked widely in radio and embraced the creative possibilities of high-tech and the internet early. He also worked in film and television, co-writing and appearing in the cult film J-Men Forever, which incorporated a great deal of footage from old movie serials, and Americathon, a dark satirical comedy about a future America attempting to stave off complete bankruptcy by holding a telethon. In recent years he worked as a speaker and lecturer and revived his old Radio Free Oz as a podcast. A dyed-in-the-wool progressive, his opinions were as fiery as his sign and his wit caustic.

Dear readers!

For me, it's something of an event when I manage to post twice in a month. The two most recent posts have been in various states of preparation for a number of months, and I hustled myself to finally post them and have done.

I think of myself as an essayist whose main medium is the weblog and who likes to use film as a springboard to talk about whatever subject moves me. But I do have a full-time job which pays little, gets less respect, and which I often find mentally and physically taxing. That and my constant diddling and overworking what I write means I don't post very often, though I am always on my own case to do more. I also have a touch of depressive illness or disthymia and that has an effect on my productivity as well.

If some of you have read my stuff here, have liked it and would like to read more, I imagine it can get rather frustrating to deal with months of silence before something comes up on the blog. It frustrates me as well, because it is a melancholy thing to see a seemingly abandoned website, and its air of ambitious ideas gone nowhere.

Now while I don't write for applause, I would like to keep any readers I have managed to get, and strongly urge those of you who don't use an RSS feed aggregator to start using one, so you don't have to constantly click back here, see nothing new, and then give up, thinking that I have stopped posting, because in spite of not posting often, I don't intend to stop posting. For those of you who don't consider yourselves web-savvy computer geeks, a feed aggregator monitors websites with frequently-updated content, letting you know if there is anything new on the websites you follow so you do not have to keep clicking your browser back. It's great to manage all the websites you follow, and for those like mine that tend to be inactive a lot, it also frees you from the frustrating experience of having to click back over and over before finding new content.

RSS feeds are not a new thing by any means, and as said, I was a little intimidated at first by all the talk about feeds and such, but take a little time to Google and learn about it, and I think you'll find that it'll be worth your while. Just to get you started, if you are a Windows user, you might want to try Newzie, a free standalone client (though there are lots of other freeware feedreaders out there), and if you like podcasts, as I do, you might also want to check out Newzie's sister client Ziepod, a client that allows you to manage and download all the podcasts you follow, though, again, there are many podcast aggregators you might want to try out.

This way, if there is something new here at Plastic Exploding, you'll know about it without having to make extra effort. Meanwhile, I'll try my best to post more often. Is it a deal?

For those of you who observe the end-of-year holidays, I hope you have a great holiday season.

Where the hell have I been?

My laptop suffered another failure and it has been somewhat difficult in my current hand-to-mouth existence in order to get it fixed. I hope to have it up and running by the New Year and to continue Plastic Exploding for both of you loyal fans, and to have a kitty started for a spare after that. I am just glad the damn thing is still up after all this time.

My Father, Harlan (1936-2006)

My father Harlan passed away on March 21, 2006, at the age of 69. He had recently been moved to a nursing home after an automobile accident in January in which both his legs and his ribcage were broken and his shoulder was badly damaged. Though stable enough to be moved to a nursing home, he was in a weakened state and was vulnerable to bloodclots and strokes, and he had a very long period of limited mobility and dependence on caregivers to look forward to. Many people who are seriously ill "give up" at a certain point when they feel that further life will be a burden to them, and I think that that might have been the case with my father, whose independence was very important to him. Consequently his death was not quite a surprise when my brother called and told me.

My brother arranged for the memorial March 30 at Patrick's, a bar in my hometown of St. Peter, Minnesota that was a constant haunt of Harlan's, and where he had assembled a group of friends who were loyal and loving. He had a reputation as a "geezer," a colorful and garrulous eccentric. He was a member of the "mug club" at Patrick's, which meant that a beer mug was kept there for his use, and this held his ashes while my brother made some prepared remarks and some of his friends told stories and shared reminiscences. My brother is a practitioner of Asatru, a heathen spirituality based on Norse mythology, and he performed a couple of Asatru-style toasts with homemade honey mead supplied by one of his friends, and general socializing followed. It was an unconventional and informal and a not at all emotionally demanding sort of funeral, and it all went very well. The mead was very good too: strong but with a delicate champagney flavor. I had not been close to my father for many years, for reasons that are rather personal, confusing and complicated, and while for all my adult life I found him difficult to tolerate and it was easier to simply disconnect from him and live my own life, I was often nagged by guilt for this, and it was heartening that he had his friends and his own de facto family, who were as close to him as any blood relations. The feelings for my father were real and profound as we said goodbye to him together.

Harlan was remembered by his friends and family especially for his hammy, performance-oriented streak. He had more or less appropriated Hal Holbrook's performances in the role of Mark Twain and performed this material a number of times for family gatherings and in a couple of small venues, and people appreciated these performances as though he had created the role himself. A video of one of these performances was played at the gathering, and a copy of a flyer and a newspaper clipping displayed. I was always slightly embarrassed about the Mark Twain thing, especially the fact that it was essentially plagiarism, but his peers found his turns as Twain entertaining, and they were clearly not being judgemental on theatrical or artistic terms.

My father was a talker, a drinker, a reader and collector of music. At one point he studied for the Lutheran ministry, but his faith lapsed and he worked a strange succession of jobs, including stints as a stagehand in Lake Tahoe (where my brother and I were born) and a disc jockey in South Dakota before the State of Minnesota, through a scheme of services for the blind (he had lifelong vision problems and was legally blind) got him started in a small business running a canteen in the Security Hospital in St. Peter, where my mother, who passed away five years ago, also worked as a nurse. Harlan was a man of varied and eclectic tastes in music and books: his record collection included what might be called "belly-dance" music, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, country music, bluegrass, a sprinkling of jazz and an assortment of other odds and ends. He liked nineteenth-century novels, history, Sherlock Holmes, movie Westerns, old radio programs, and old comedy. On occasion, he experimented with musical instruments: at various times, he owned a concertina, a banjo, a mandolin, a Dobro (a guitar with a metal resonator played with a steel), and an electronic keyboard from Radio Shack. He was not a disciplined individual, and tended to abandon these when they got too difficult. He also had a couple of pets while I was growing up, a small bad-tempered parrot named Percy and a very large, very timid and possibly not terribly intelligent dog, a mastiff named Guenevere, who I usually just called Gwenny, and who was, to her befuddlement, constantly being scolded for any misbehavior by the senior dog of the family, a mutt half her size named Tina.

My own problems with my father tended to do with his drinking and also his often rather bitter views of life. He was a great talker but a less good listener, and there was a deep and abiding sadness underneath the jokes and irreverence. I thought of him as a deeply wounded man who spent his life nursing his wounds without healing them. Many of my own flaws, as well as my strengths, I inherited from my father, and from a young age I found the darker side of his character terrifying, though not in any physical sense. He was a sensitive man from a rural working class background and he must have felt the loneliness of being an outsider in such an environment early, and I occasionally caught glimpses of his hurt, anger, and wounded pride, glimpses of what I feared I would not be able to escape myself. I shut myself off from him after a couple of alcohol-fueled scenes upset me terribly as a teenager, scenes that resulted in my parents being separated, and finally divorced. As I became older, I felt guilty at feeling I had to escape from him without being able to find it in myself to initiate any sort of reconciliation. Such reconciliation would have most likely meant, my father being the stubborn man he was, that I would have been obliged to bury, regardless of the cost to me emotionally, the real hurts of the past. Now that he is gone, the possibility for reconciliation on any terms is lost, and I am deeply sorry for that. No doubt I was not terribly fair to him myself in all this, and I regret that too.

In our home there were always books and records, and we were always free to browse them: Harlan was not what I would call an intellectual, but it was clear that culture was not a dirty word and that it was always okay to explore new ideas. Neither he nor my mother felt that their jobs as parents were to program us with preconceptions, and they did not attempt to limit our intellectual or spiritual curiosities. While they would worry about our progress in school, they were not concerned about engineering our lives into conventional paths if we did not wish to follow them. More than the parents of most of my peers, they respected us as individuals, and my brother and I are grateful that they did.

I come from a stoic Scandinavian family where the nursing of grudges and open feuding is not considered proper. Not all the things I have to say about my father are good, and out of consideration for them I am not giving his full name here, though I would much like to, since there will be no grave, no tombstone; he asked that his ashes be scattered on the farm in northern Iowa where he grew up, and as flawed an individual as he was, as we all are, he deserves to have his name somewhere, so that people may remember. I hope that my family will understand that I cannot remember my father properly, or grieve him, or forgive him, if I leave his faults, which were too much a factor in our relationship to be ignored, out of account. In me there is not only love and grief for him, but also anger, guilt, embarrassment, regret, pity, annoyance and fear, and those cannot simply be buried. Even though I loved my father often without liking him, the loss of a parent is like the loss of a moon in the sky: life is changed in a profound way without his presence.

My father was a kind, sad, often silly, eccentric and proud man who loved his children. He will be missed. My thanks to all who expressed their good wishes to me and my brother at his passing.

In other news: There are a few people out there who know about this blog that I started and have probably been frustrated that there hasn't been much added to it. My energy hasn't been very high over the past few months, and perhaps the spring will bring more activity. I have been going through my DVD collection, and I will be posting some notes about some of these films in the near future.

Is this thing on?

Uh, hi. Miles here, and this is my blog which is definitely a work in progress. I send out a big hello to both of you out there, don't forget to post a comment and stroke my ego, and we'll see what happens with this damn thing.