And so, like Jerry Lewis at the exhausted end of a telethon, a telethon that has lasted years, TBogg takes that long walk into the wings under a fading spotlight, trailing laughter and tears, but mostly laughter, and mostly at the expense of the rightwing nutarazzi, for whom Sarah Palin is Snow Queen.

TBogg recently announced that he is waving goodbye to his blog and saddling up to ride off into the sunset, depending on traffic.

Clever person that you are, you no doubt may have inferred from the post title [My Opening Farewell, So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Oh the Places I Will Go, How Can You Miss Me If I Won't Go Away, Just Leave Already Fer Chrissakes...] that I will be leaving Firedoglake, which has been my home lo these past six years, in the near future. By which I mean ‘next week’, … by which I mean ‘Thursday-ish’.

Yup, let’s say next Thursday. So it is written, so it shall be done.

A few things about this turn of events because there will no doubt be some speculatin’ and hypothicatin’ and such and such. Regular readers are aware that I’ve been threatening to pull a Billmon for some time now only to be talked down off the ledge. I have been an internet presence and somewhat-popular blogger for about thirteen years which, in internet years, makes me “old as fuck” as my grandmother used to say. While I have done this blogging thing mainly as a hobby – since I have actual Real Life Skills that are monetizable in The Real World – it has also been a rather all-consuming hobby which has taken me away from my family, the outside world (why live at the beach if you’re going to spend every free hour in front of a computer?), and from reading actual books (in lieu of blogs written by idiots), as well as watching movies and the teevee and enjoying life’s rich pageant. What tipped the scales this time was the recent loss of  the brilliant and greatly missed Doghouse Riley whom, I will note, was younger than moi when he passed so suddenly. As was Jon Swift. And Steve Gilliard. And Jim Capozzola. For me, this was a mortality wake-up call.

The death of Doghouse Riley was indeed a jolt, that vital, crackling voice suddenly silenced, and there comes a time when a blogger has to know when to walk away from the keyboard, if only temporarily.

I'm going to miss TBogg, and not just because I stole from him so shamefully. His surrealist spoofing and damning ridicule was flat-out funny (as opposed to just snarky), sometimes two or three wisecracks detonating in the same sentence, and the sentences gathering momentum until the deceptively offhand powerhouse payoff. A blog post that begins "National vodka repository Peggy Noonan..." restoreth one's faith in comedy, and mankind. But it also wearying for a blogger such as TBogg to know that no matter how devastatingly a Nooner is zinged, there's no getting rid of her, just as there's no getting rid of David Brooks or Newt Gingrich or any other of the media pestilents that have been plaguing us since Ronald Reagan bronzed his hair. After awhile making fun loses some of its fun, and a blogger is danger of becoming bitter, and no one should become a bottler of Bitter Ironies, not when there's life to be led. After I hit "send" on this, I intend to walk barefoot into the backyard garden and inhale all that nature offers, assuming a gnat doesn't go up my nose, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Adios, TBogg, and thanks for the Shakira.

 

It is no doubt presumptuous of me, not to mention downright impudent and 'cheeky,' to be desecrating this sacred blog space to promote the just-released audiobook of my Seventies memoir Lucking Out, and yet since the book was originally excerpted in Vanity Fair, I believe I can float by on a technicality.

Narrated by Jeff Woodman, who read Life of Pi, this audio edition of Lucking Out is unabridged, which means that, yes, the Times Square porn section remains raunchily intact, and the punk chapters haven't been filed down to prison shivs. It's all there.

And at nearly 10 1/2 hours, Lucking Out the audiobook makes the perfect companion for that Kerouac cross-country odyssey across the bleached soul of America, with motel stops and gift shop visits included.

Or you hipster parents might want to play portions of Lucking Out to your genius offspring in their Ramones night-shirts as a series of bedtime tales of what New York City was like before it became a shiny bunkhouse for billionaires.

Lucking Out is also available FREE with a 30-day trial membership at Audible, whose editor at large is Susie Bright, who writes about the book here.

For more testimony from the blast site of the Village Voice of yore, be sure to keep up with the serialized memoir of fellow former Voicer Lucian Truscott IV, Dying of a Broken Heart:

It happened just over a week ago. I was lying on my med-bed on the third floor of the local Nashville nuthouse, waiting for the Ambien to amplify all of the other shit coursing across the blood-brain barrier: Zoloft…150 mg, a zonester of there ever was one…Ativan, a 10 mg mini-pill, clicking along the mellow mental interstate like an unloaded 18-wheeler dead-heading home…and my personal favorite, Risperdal, its 1 mg packing a punch like a lead-weighted glove aimed straight at the deepest wrinkles in the old medulla oblongata. Suddenly I saw them, in Technicolor on the insides of my eyelids, these words: I am dying of a broken heart.

Don’t get me wrong. It had nothing to do with the drugs, and certainly nothing to do with checking myself into the nut for a much-needed life-recalculation and some chemical cell-tuning. No, it had been coming for a long, long time, and the only thing that had saved me until then was that tried and true foxhole fixation, Denial. I’ve been real, real good at it, Denial. After all, I’m a Truscott.

My grandfather, General Lucian King Truscott Jr., died of a broken heart. So did my father, Colonel Lucian King Truscott III. And so did my brother Francis Meriwether Truscott,  who took his life with a Tokarev pistol taken from an NVA Major in Vietnam.  The war finally got him, his wife Debbie told me on the phone the morning his body was found on the back steps of his local funeral home.  Broken hearts in the Truscott family follow broken bodies and lost lives right to the bloody fucking end.

I’ve had friends, too, who died of broken hearts. Hunter Thompson, who shot himself in his kitchen when he finally realized that what he loved as much as life itself — the fun — was over. Gore Vidal, who died in his bed never having been able to bring himself out of the Final Closet: he was for the entirety of his life a terminal romantic who lost his first love and could never allow himself to love again. And Bill Cardoso, who died with a tall Dewars and soda in hand and his loving companion Mary Miles Ryan at his side, still raging against a world in which he had no place left to write, no place that would publish his marvelous wit which he wielded with a rapier, nearly intolerable ego.

The weird thing about lying in the dark full of drugs in a nuthouse realizing that you’re dying of a broken heart is how good it feels.  It’s soft and psychically comfy to finally realize that where you are and what you are feeling has roots in family tradition, and looked at in that way, there’s really nothing wrong with you. You’re a Truscott. Of course your heart is broken...

Anthony Weiner should just knock off politics and devote himself full-time to performance art, practicing the fine craft of dickography that is clearly his metier. As a politician he is without distinction or deep conviction, always more of a self-promoter than a team player or policy advocate, his stint in the House of Representatives notable mostly for the roaring-mouse noise he generated on his own behalf and his Chuck Schumer ability to toss peanuts to the press and get himself on camera.* As his groin-region selfies indicate, Weiner has a compulsion to be on camera even if no one else is around--an overeagerness to share. It would almost be endearing if he weren't so otherwise awful. In a kinder, hairier era, such as the Seventies, Weiner might have gone straight into the adult entertainment field and become one of the notable Jewish porn studs who went the extra inch for you, the viewing public. No, he never would have been another Jamie Gillis--Weiner doesn't have the sweat sheen of leering, louche menace that made Gillis so impactful on screen, so warlockish--but he might have given Bobby Astyr a run for his towel, the two of them having similar builds and goofy grins that make their mouths look hollow. For the uninitiated, Astyr was a New York porn actor who, apart from stud duties, specialized in mangled foreign accents and crazy characters that were what passed for comedy in those reels of the damned that everyone now looks back on with such affection and ointment. Weiner's choice of "Carlos Danger" as a pseudonym shows that he has a wacky, multiethnic side too. Indeed, Anthony Weiner may have more of an inner Jerry Lewis than Astyr did, and if he were to release that ribald irrespressibilty in the service of performance art, well, he'd still be a wanky nuisance but at least he wouldn't be mayor and have the fate of the city at the mercy of his penis's desire to make new friends over the Internet. 

As for Huma Abedin, I don't quite get what gives with her, if I may speak clinically, but I don't want to get in the marriage-analysis business unless some publisher offers me a big advance, because offering a layman's opinion with no publishing advance behind it would be tacky. I do think the proper stance for Weiner to have taken this week was to show up at the press conference alone and announce, "I asked my wife to stay behind to spare her the embarrassment of standing up here beside me while I try to explain my sorry-ass self, because she's been through enough and I'm the one who fucked up."

That would have been the gentlemanly, Lord Grantham thing to do.

*Richard Kim, in The Nation:

As a congressman, Anthony Weiner was a spectacularly ineffective buffoon. A recent New York Times review of his tenure in the House paints a devastating portrait: Weiner was megalomaniacal, narcissistic, bad at navigating the political ropes, alienating to potential allies, alarmingly disinterested in making actual change and really, really mean to his staff (one former aide likened him to Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada). In his twelve-plus years in Congress, the Times notes, Weiner “sponsored and wrote only one bill that he steered to enactment: a measure pushed by a family friend who gave his campaigns tens of thousands of dollars in donations.” When Democrats controlled Congress in 2007–08, Weiner introduced fifty bills but didn’t get so much as a cosponsor on thirty-nine of them. According to a former staffer quoted by the Times, “He just never tried…. The point was to be able to say he introduced a bill.”

Sunday's episode of The Killing (AMC) was the best yet of the new season, evoking director Michael Mann in its meditative flow, its dreamy, nocturnal synesthesia (car lights, store lights, street lights, LED lights of electronic devices glancing and playing off each other), its sense of sprawling chaos contained within an urban grid. Linden (Mireille Enos) being held captive at the steering wheel by an abductor in the back street was like a dark inversion of Mann's Collateral. In Collateral, the kidnaper was Tom Cruise's psychopathic hit man, a gray wolf of grinning, vicious proficiency, with charisma and cold charm that could be turned on and off with a switch. Linden's abductor was a virtual abstraction, a floating head in the rear view mirror in a pool of darkness bisected below the chin by shards of glassy reflection; his voice sounded disembodied, ghostly, as if it belonged to an abusive phone caller. The helicopter shots of the car moving through nighttime Seattle: also reminiscent of Collateral, Heat too. But perhaps the most Mannish thing about The Killing this season is its hulking awareness of the internal subcontinent that dominates so much of American life while being barely acknowledged: our prison complex, the great American gulag. Think how largely prison looms in Mann's work, from TV's The Jerico Mile to Public Enemies to HBO's Luck; prison culture and codes of male survival saturate Heat and provide the white supremacist tattoo skinscape of Miami Vice. The teenage junkies and prostitutes in this story arc are warped products of the juvenile justice system and family breakdown and many of them will end up in prison (if they live that long), where they'll meet such charming new friends and learn ever so useful new skills. Peter Sarsgaard's Ray Seward, on death row for a murder he probably didn't commit, represents the cursed, violent, wasted-opportunity end-result of our crime and punishment production line, where his father is also a con in an orange jump suit and some of the guards are as cunning and brutal as the hard cases in the cells. The overhead establishing shots of the prison in The Killing remind you of a military base, or a secret government installation in The X-Files: an occupation camp. The Killing is a study of how power relations play out on the murky fringes, feeding in and out of the penal fortress.

Hardly anyone I know personally seems to be following The Killing and it gets scant mention on my Twitter timeline (compared to the orgy spasm over Sharknado or the weekly bull sessions over Mad Men), and I get why so many are unable to get into it. It's so somber and monochromatic in mood, look, and weather, so hunched over and muttery, so full of pondering pauses, with none of Breaking Bad'sdeclamatory rhetoric, savage moments of Road Runner cartoon slapstick ("Magnets"), and parched, expansive mock-Sergio Leone horizons and standoffs. Its humor is very sidelong and sly, nearly all of it due to Joel Kinnaman's genius line delivery as Holder. But it's very compelling and it's drilling deep into the American dysfunction of drugs, infrastructural decay, discarded children, the hustling for smaller and smaller sums in the lowest tier of the underground economy, the garbaging of the human body, the general blech happening below the underpass. (Converting the underclass into zombies is taking the easy narrative way out.) Given its forbidding load of foreboding, The Killing wouldn't work if it didn't cast a visual-aural spell, and I'm finding the trance strengthening as the season goes on. I also think Sarsgaard's performance--crafty, bluffing, nasty, anguished, at times defiantly opaque (as if the hood of his thoughts has been pulled down)--deserves way more attention and commendation than it's gotten.

The things some Times writers take for granted. I was reading Alessandra Stanley's review of a NBC summer series--i.e., sacrificial fodder--called Camp when I came across the following shard of reflection:

Given how indelible many people's memories of childhood camp can be, it's surprising that so little about that universal rite of passage has shown up on television.

"Universal rite of passage," --well, for some, maybe, but believe it or not there are millions of Americans who never rowed across the fucking lake or told ghost stories around the fucking campfire, not that I'm bitter, I preferred staying home watching soap operas on the couch, reading Marvel Comic books and drinking 16 oz. Royal Crown colas as insects screamed in the grass and the future loomed like a long runway.

The fictional Little Otter Family Camp is a typical, all-American lakeside camp, with hazing, brutal capture-the-flag competitions and young, sex-obsessed counselors, but also a humane guiding ethos.

No, there was no humane guiding ethos for the likes of me during those campless summers, just the sink-or-swim eat-or-be-eaten law of the jungle that made us breed of suburban cat particularly mean and wary once we got to punkass places like Bethesda or Timonium.

I was even more taken aback by Stanley's discussion of a drive-by joke in the script invoking Christopher Hitchens. "Mack"--played by Rachel Griffiths, who's always made me nervous--"has a resteless married friend who one night reminisces about her wild youth and reports that she had a one-night stand with the writer Christopher Hitchens. She airily describes him as a 'total blowhard' who was nonetheless great in bed. ('The guy had a tongue like Gene Simmons.') Hitchens, who died in 2011, would no doubt been amused, but his is a jarring name for a network series to drop posthumously and so salaciously."

I'll say. You spend decades writing about politics and literature, lead a tempestuous life, face your illness and death bravely and eloquently, and this is your pop culture reward: reduced to a lewd, dumb punchline. Camp might want to work on improving its own "humane guiding ethos."

There ought to be a term for boycotting something you never intended to watch in in the first place, because it would do quite nicely here.

Arrived back in Manhattan this afternoon after a week at the shore shack, where the insects seemed to take a liking to me. Went down to West Side Market at B'way and 110th to stock up on provisions, then waited with my shopping backs on the sultry platform, among the defeated and depleted. Train pulled up, stepped into car, and was met with a solid block of heat: no air conditioning, which explained why those not fanning themselves looked like the background extras in a Hieronymous Bosch painting. My eyes moved nimbly to the next car, where there were empty seats surrounding a man who seemed to have exploding mattress hair all over her his body and was wearing three or four more extra layers of clothing needed on a day like this. He was also quite verbally animated, and I decided not to stick around and sample his authentic frontier gibberish, as they call it in Blazing Saddles: no, this subway train and I were simply not meant to be. 

I set down my bags, waited a moment, and out of the periphery of my vision I saw a family-sized rat make an exit along the platform and into the dark portal of industrial decay. It was at that moment I questioned the wisdom of returning to New York to catch ABT's Sleeping Beauty tonight at the Met. The things I do for ballet, not that I expect a battle ribbon or anything, though it would be nice.

But the Met better have the AC "cranked up" tonight, that's all I can say.

Your assignment tonight--don't pretend you have something better to do, I've peeked at your "daybook"--is to watch the Anna Nicole Smith movie on Lifetime cable, debuting at 8 PM Eastern, 7 PM Central, and sometime tomorrow on a Pacific atoll. It's your pop culture homework for the summer and I expect you to take studious notes on it in an incandescent sparkly pink ink, because that's how Anna Nicole would have wanted it. Anna Nicole is directed by Mary Harron, best known for American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page, The Moth Diaries, and her still critically unheralded mini-masterpieces for the PBS/BBC series "Edge" featuring myself and Elvis Mitchell, which MOMA hasn't gotten around to "collating." Mary and I go way back, to the our days as candy stripers at CBGB's, but she's probably tired of me bringing that up and besides you can read about it in my memoir Lucking Out, soon to be an audio book, hurray.

The late Oliver Reed was the Lionel Asbo of acting, a one-man wrecking crew who put a head-sized hole through any door, wall, or window unfortunate enough to get in his way. There are those who find Reed's brand of roaring, brawling, drunken ballistics the stuff of Viking lore, a hairy-knuckled blow against propriety, if you're into that. But just as other sacred monsters such as The Who drummer Keith Moon and the actor Klaus Kinski now seem less like party animals and more like pathological cases (Moon strutting about in a Nazi uniform, Kinski accused of incestuous sexual abuse by his daughter Pola), Reed's bad-boy behavior looks much uglier once you start turning over all of the rocks. A new biography of Oliver Reed--What Fresh Lunacy Is This?, by Robert Sellers--knocks Reed's posthumous reputation down several notches through its sheer amassing of incidents and collateral damage. The irony, according to reviewer Roger Lewis in The Spectator (UK), is that the biographer seems unaware of the repulsion effect he's having as he trots out Reed's off-camera greatest hits. Lewis:

Myself, I find no amusement in dissipation, but Sellers seems always to be impressed and tickled by Reed’s nasty pranks: sticking a lit candle up his nose for a bet, chewing light bulbs or putting cigarettes out on his tongue. He loved to climb up a pub chimney and leap into the grate as a demonic Santa Claus. He liked to beat up waiters, hoteliers and chauffeurs. ‘He was always trying to test a person to see how scared they were of him.’ He would dangle people over balconies or insist on swordfights. He said to a restaurant manager in Austria, ‘I’m coming back tomorrow night. If you haven’t got a Union Jack by then, I’m going to trash this place.’ They hadn’t. So he hurled chairs through the window.

There was real violence in him. On location, there’d always be ‘knife wounds, hospital visits and stitches’. Reed urinated on foreign flags, on Mercedes limousines and on anyone standing below him on the stairs. He vomited over Steve McQueen, and Bette Davis said that he was ‘possibly one of the most loathsome human beings I have ever had the misfortune of meeting’ — a wide field in her case. Of the directors he worked with, Reed put laxatives in Michael Winner’s coffee, head-butted Terry Gilliam and  on numerous occasions threw Ken Russell across the room in judo tackles.

The Neanderthal behaviour — or riotous horseplay, as Sellers would have it — was present in childhood. Reed was born in Wimbledon. His grandfather was Herbert Beerbohm Tree. His father’s brother was Carol Reed. He was always being expelled from school for his angry outbursts, and he flourished as a bully. He threw a pet dog over the banister, broke his own brother’s nose, and hit a neighbour with a garden hoe.

[snip]

With the proceeds of the junk he appeared in — six films with Michael Winner! — Reed was able to afford an Edwardian mansion near Dorking, where he was very much the dissolute lord of the manor, filling the halls with road diggers, carpenters, builders and ‘people he’d meet in pubs’ — people he could easily dominate and from whom he did not have to fear intelligent conversation. His best pals were Hurricane Higgins, Keith Moon and a bruiser and personal bodyguard called Reg, whom Reed pushed off a wall for a laugh. Reg broke his back in two places.

And how was Oliver Reed when it came to women? Not great, Bob!

Reed seemed to have no respect for the craft or vocation of acting, a form of self-hate a number of once-studly, life-force actors seem to succumb to, stewing in their own pissiness and sinking deeper into hooded gazes and self-caricature punctuated by paroxysms. It's a species of stardom that doesn't exist much anymore and I don't miss it a bit.

Nothing quite like getting a CAT scan in the emergency room on a Saturday night to dampen one’s weekend. I had no idea “mothing” could be so dangerous.

Earlier in the day my wife Laura Jacobs, whose article in the latest Vanity Fair on Mary McCarthy and the 50th anniversary of The Group out to be spread out on your reading table or breakfast tray, treated a few of the trees in our New Jersey shore house backyard with a fermented concoction to attract moths and other insect friends. Laura feels, as do I, that moths don’t get near the media acclaim they deserve, or the aesthetic appreciation. We had gone out earlier in the evening to check on the trees with our X-Files flashlight and seen a few tiny things fluttering, nothing large-winged and mandala-patterned, along with a slug-like creature or two and the usual industrious ants.

Then, as a half-moon beckoned, we decided to take one last inventory before cashing in for the night. I slipped out on a pair of moccasins before heading out the front door. One of the moccasins skidded or slipped on the middle step and down I inelegantly went, hitting the paving stones at a diagonal that sent my head sideways into the oak tree that shades our porch during the day and gives the birds a place to hang. I don’t know if you’ve crashed into an oak tree lately, but there isn’t a lot of “give.” My head took a hit from this nasty spill. Closer inspection of the impact area revealed blood, not deep red rich ooziness, the real Hemingway goods, but blood the color of tomato paste. There wasn’t much of it, but mindful of what had tragically happened to Natasha Richardson, we thought it prudent to treat possible head trauma with the respect it deserves. So around 12:30 we got into the Subaru and headed off to the nearest county hospital. As we looped around the parking lot to the emergency room entrance, I of course thought of the final scene in the movie Miami Vice when Crockett (Colin Farrell) is shown in mid-shot entering a hospital late at night (having earlier packed off Gong Li in silver-gray afternoon light), such an evocative, tactful ending.

I have no horror stories to impart about the emergency room, which seemed strangely unpopulated on a Saturday night in an area where substance abuse is on an upward bounce (intensified by a major influx of heroin). The one TV in the waiting area was tuned to the Food Channel, where a rerun of some sort of chef competition was in progress. I was admitted quickly and the night-shift staff, which I anticipated to be young, was younger still, like the prequel cast of ER: The Early Years, everyone breezily efficient and piquantly cute. For personnel and ambience, it beat the emergency room I was ambulanced to in Miami Beach in the early 90s, where there seemed to be a Hieronymus Bosch production going on beyond the curtain, a cacophony of cries, groans, and squeaky wheels of gurneys on the move.

The bleeding had diminished, I didn’t require stitches, and the answers to the questions most pressing in a case like this were all in the negative: I hadn’t lost consciousness, my vision wasn’t impaired immediately after or now, my speech wasn’t affected. But to be on the safe side, we decided to go with a CAT scan, since my head had taken a thunk and its contents might have been unsettled. While we waited, Laura and I were reminded of the dead robin we had found in the backyard that afternoon, which had been sitting in a birdbath set flat on the ground. It seemed stunned and Laura moved it to a shady spot under some plants, deputizing me to make sure no neighborhood cats got at it. (I work at a picnic table on the screened-in back porch that affords me a wide view of the bird-butterfly-squirrel-intruding cat traffic.) Perhaps it would recover and fly off, as another stunned bird did a few years ago after colliding with window glass. It didn’t. I went out to check on it an hour later and it was lying on its side, its eye gray, its right wing drawn across it like a blanket, dead. I hoped it wasn’t an omen. I didn’t want to end up as a dead robin on a Saturday night.

In a shiny lab-white room that would have made Stanley Kubrick proud, I was loaded into the CAT scan, listened to its alien whirrs, then wheeled on the gurney back to the admitting room, where we had to wait for the results. We tried to nap during the interim--it was now around 1:30 AM--but there was a dash of psychodrama going on beyond our visual range that didn’t promote a brief siesta. Around 2 AM the doctor gave us the word that the CAT scan was fine, nothing to worry about, and we were discharged into the Miami Vice digital-grainy night, where the illuminated signs of closed convenience stores and fast-food places cast the desolate brightness of abandoned outposts.

This afternoon the hummingbird whose arrival we had been awaiting finally dropped by. It had been paying us regular visits last year before migration and we wondered when and if it would be back. And then here it was, dipping into the bee balm. This I take to be a good omen, and my policy is that good omens are the only ones worth respecting.

In preparing my memoir Lucking Out and a forthcoming collection of reviews, essays, and other immortal whatnot, I did much wading in the magazine archives and one of the things I was reminded of was how electric a presence the Black Panther Party was on the newsstands and the TV screen when the Sixties truly began to burn (the period Mad Men is in now with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the police riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago--what a film critic at The New Yorker* in 1968 called the Fascist Autumn).

Ramparts, Evergreen Review, the underground press--all of them lavished coverage on the Black Panthers, so ominous, inspiring, and charismatic in their sunglasses, black leather, and berets, especially Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Soul on Ice author Eldridge Cleaver, who later became a menswear designer. Cleaver was even imported onto the cover of Esquire on the cover of its December 1969 parody issue imagining what the November 3rd 1976 edition of The New York Times, depicted wearing a cap and gown: "Eldridge Cleaver, President of Columbia University, has declared amnesty for all white students."

Then, just as quickly as they had commandeered the headlines and sent shock waves through the country's collective amygdala, the Panthers went down in a blaze of police gunfire, recriminations, factionalism, COINTELPRO rat fuckery, and punk criminality. The brutal swiftness of their rise and demise ensured them an outlaw status in Sixties iconography, though, like most outlaw legends, this one is cemented with self-serving bull and popular misconceptions, making the historian's detective task a daunting one of sifting through fact and fabulism to arrive at a proper measurement.

A new history of the Black Panther movement, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Walter E. Martin Jr., is a heroic, strenuous, conscientious effort, according to Steve Wasserman's review in The Nation, but it suffers from academic myopia.

Too often there is an airless quality to their prose, and the human factor, sadly, is sometimes lacking. Thus, the story’s inherent drama is diminished, inert. Bloom and Martin have inexplicably chosen to ignore much that illuminates but which lies hidden in plain sight in the memoirs of several former Panthers, works they cite in the book’s endnotes but whose most revelatory nuggets remain buried. For example, among the things you will not learn from Black Against Empire, but would from Elaine Brown’s hair-raising account in her indispensable A Taste of Power (1992), is how Newton viciously turned on Seale, his comrade and peerless organizer. You will not learn in detail from Bloom and Martin how Newton succumbed to his cocaine-and-cognac-fueled megalomania; how he ordered Big Bob Heard, his six-foot-eight, 400-pound bodyguard, to beat Seale with a bullwhip, cracking twenty lashes across his bared back; nor how, when the ordeal was over, Newton abruptly stripped Seale of his rank as party chairman and ordered him to pack up and get out of Oakland. Hilliard, too, Newton’s friend since they were 13, would be expelled, as would his brother, June. As would Seale’s brother, John, deemed by Newton to be “untrustworthy as a blood relative of a counterrevolutionary.” Newton became what he arguably had been from the start: a sawdust Stalin.

You won’t learn from Bloom and Martin the hard truth about Flores Forbes, a trusted enforcer for Newton, a stalwart of the party’s Orwellian “Board of Methods and Corrections,” and a member of what Newton called his “Buddha Samurai,” a praetorian guard made up of men willing to follow orders unquestioningly and do the “stern stuff.” Forbes joined the party at 15 and wasted no time becoming a zombie for Huey. Forbes was bright and didn’t have to be told; he knew when to keep his mouth shut. He well understood the “right to initiative,” a term Forbes tells us “was derived from our reading and interpretation of Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.” What Forbes took Fanon to mean was “that it is the oppressed people’s right to believe that they should kill their oppressor in order to obtain their freedom. We just modified it somewhat to mean anyone who’s in our way,” like inconvenient witnesses who might testify against Newton, or Panthers who’d run afoul of Newton and needed to be “mud-holed”—battered and beaten to a bloody pulp. Newton no longer favored Mao’s Little Red Book, preferring Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, which he extolled for its protagonists’ Machiavellian cunning and ruthlessness. Nor will you learn from Bloom and Martin how Newton admired Melvin van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the tale of a hustler who becomes a revolutionary. Military regalia was out, swagger sticks were in. Newton dropped the rank of minister of defense. Some days he wanted to be called “Supreme Commander,” other days “Servant of the People” or, usually, just “Servant.” But to fully understand Huey’s devolution, you’d have to run Peebles’s picture backward, as the story of a revolutionary who becomes a hustler.

Several years ago, I spent an afternoon with Seale, renewing a conversation we’d begun some months before. He’d moved back to Oakland, living once again in his mother’s house, and was contemplating writing a book—the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as he put it to me, about the rise and fall of the Panthers—on the very dining room table where almost a half-century ago he and Newton had drafted the Panthers’ Ten-Point Program. No one was getting any younger, and he felt he owed it to a new generation to come clean. At his invitation, we jumped into his car and, with Bobby at the wheel, drove around Oakland, visiting all the neighborhood spots where history had been made: here was the corner where Newton had shot and killed Officer Frey in October 1967; and there was the former lounge and bar, the notorious Lamp Post, where Newton had laundered money from drug deals and shakedowns; and over there were the steps of the Alameda County Courthouse, where thousands, including myself, had assembled in August 1970 to hail Newton’s release from prison and where, beneath the blazing summer sun, Huey, basking in the embrace of the adoring crowd, had stripped off his shirt, revealing his cut and musclebound torso, honed by a punishing regimen of countless push-ups in the isolation cell of the prison where he’d done his time, a once slight Oakland kid now physically transformed into the very embodiment of the powerful animal he’d made the emblem of his ambitions.

As Seale spoke, mimicking with uncanny accuracy Huey’s oddly high-pitched and breathless stutter, virtually channeling the man, now dead more than two decades—ignominiously gunned down at age 47 in a crack cocaine deal gone bad by a young punk half his age seeking to make his bones—it became clear that, despite everything he’d endured, Bobby Seale was a man with all the passions and unresolved resentments of a lover betrayed. There could be little doubt that, for Seale, the best years of his life were the years he spent devoted to Newton, who still, despite the passage of time, loomed large. Seale, like the party he gave birth to, still couldn’t rid himself of Huey’s shadow.

Megalomania, Machiavellianism, sadistic machismo--Huey Newton's shadow cast a long barrel. But there were less celebrated stories connected to the Panthers that weren't case studies in gangster sociopathology, and Wasserman tells one of them at the end of his review, so read on.