It’s not BP’s fault that Americans have squandered the lessons of the three-decades-old oil shortages of the 1970s. It’s not BP’s fault that we as a nation went from producing and purchasing smaller cars for a brief period of time, to buying larger and larger vehicles as if dinosaurs were still dying every day and bleeding barrels of oil into our Ford Excursion’s 44-gallon gas tank. It’s not BP’s fault that it took the Japanese to introduce hybrid cars while our failing auto manufacturers were lobbying Congress to keep CAFE standards low so that they wouldn’t have to retool their factories. It’s not BP’s fault that somehow, after all these years, we stupidly still equate big cars with big dicks.

If big dicks are synonymous with small brains, then the dick-car equation is probably true. But the time is long past for letting those with small thoughts call the shots, because we are all suffering now. Like the great flood of the bible that wiped out the non-righteous, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a symbol that we need to examine as a parable for our current lives.  When we make decisions based on our selfish, personal needs and don’t take the welfare of the rest of the world into consideration, we sow the seeds of larger disasters. What we need now is to realize that we are all just tiny parts of the organism that is the earth. Each decision we make determines the future course of that organism. A John Lennon put it, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” Goo goo ga joob.

Maybe you understand all of this and want to make better decisions. You no longer want to be a cancer invading the organism; you want to be an antibody. You use canvas shopping bags. You eat organic foods. You don’t buy air fresheners that require electricity to fill your rooms with chemically derived nature scents. You even want a new car, but frankly, you can’t find one that drives well, looks good and saves gas.

For decades the auto manufacturers have been making Americans choose between the things that look good and the things are good. Let’s face it, it’s not just the carmakers, it’s true of all retailers. To get the nice-looking, status items as a decent price we’re always being asked to fund near slave-labor, environmental degradation or something else that isn’t wholesome — and I mean wholesome in the Merriam-Webster sense meaning: promoting health or well-being of mind or spirit. The only really attractive small car to be developed during the last decade is the re-vamped Mini-Cooper. The few available hybrids were designed to look like rolling freak flags, which has a certain appeal, but will never pull in the car-as-cock crowd. It’s a dilemma.

There are a few things that we can do to tackle this problem right now. The first is that, no matter how they look, whether or not they can get from 0 to 60 in the blink of an eye, or are named after a stud horse, we have to choose small cars. And I don’t mean smaller cars; I mean the smallest cars we can find that will allow us to get our families and ourselves from point A to point B. The money we save in gas — which, by the way is going to skyrocket the closer the straw gets to the bottom of the glass — will allow us to pay the Home Depot truck to deliver bulky items. We don’t all need to drive mini-mansions on wheels because we occasionally buy lumber or transport boxes from IKEA. There are alternatives.

Second, we need to begin to lobby the automakers to give us the cars we want. If Americans can put a rocket on the moon, blah, blah, blah, then certainly modern industrialists can figure out how to make lovely, gas efficient cars. They could have done it three decades ago, but there was no will to do so. Look, we bailed out GM. They owe us. Tell them we don’t want their 20-MPG Buick LaCrosses, we want more things like the 30-MPG Chevy Aveo — and that’s not even good enough. We want an Aveo, but we want it to look and handle like a Camaro with an average of 40 miles per gallon. Plus, we want every car to be a hybrid, and not just the Escalade that still only gets 20 MPG. In fact, we don’t want any SUVs. Those cars should only be for people who live on farms or have to keep tools for their plumbing business in the back. Tell GM to stop making big cars almost entirely if they don’t want to go bankrupt again.

Don’t just pick on GM. They have sucked for a long time and their inability to build reliable cars lost them business to the Japanese, who could and did. They have made shortsighted blunder after blunder, but they’re not the only ones. Ford didn’t need a bailout, but they built that inexcusable gas-guzzling SUV, the Excursion. And, if the best thing they can think of is to bring back the Mustang, at least make that a hybrid. Tell them! We’ve relied on Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Mazda to innovate. We appreciate the gas-efficiency and superior engineering. But they can step it up, too. How about a good-looking hybrid from the Japanese? How about it? The Germans also build attractive, reliable cars, but they’re still stuck on performance. Kilometerleistung, nicht performace! They made the Volkswagen Bug, they invented farfegnugen and they can do this.

Last, we have to begin teaching kids that big is not better. When the government and the people put their will to it, children get the right messages. Nancy Reagan told kids to say no to drugs. Michelle Obama is telling them to get off their obese butts and exercise. They learned to reject smoking and to care about recycling. Now they need to learn that big cars do not mean big dicks. Big cars do not mean success. Big cars mean oil-coated pelicans, dolphins and really greasy popcorn shrimp. If the kids get the message, we know they will nag their parents for the next decade. More importantly, when they become adults — or hit driving age — they won’t want an SUV. They will think an SUV is an animal-killing, ozone-destroying, uncool way to get around. They will be right.

The problems we face on the globe are complex. There is no one solution. Obviously, it would be better, in many respects, to take public transportation rather than having everyone drive their own vehicle — no matter how fuel efficient. But, we’re not there yet and if you begin to look at all the difficulties humans face at this crossroads, you will become overwhelmed and paralyzed. Choose to change what is close-at-hand. Make new decisions. Ask the government and corporations — who want you to consume stuff — to give you the things you really want.

Remember, the decisions you make today really are a matter of life or death. They were thirty years ago, too, but we put them off — like we put off exercise or quitting self-destructive vices. But it’s not just about you anymore. It’s about me and your friend’s children and the pelicans. Start the change somewhere, but start, because there’s a flood coming and we all have to start building an arc to the future. Small cars are the new big dicks!

You are the walrus. Goo goo ga joob.

Don’t they like me? Don’t they look at upcoming events? Wait, I’ll meet you in a minute, I just have to check my wall again.

Instead, I spent the day in a national park, scaling a mountain. I had no cell phone reception for two days. I had access to email, but didn’t read it. It was the nicest time I’d had in months. In the parlance of television, it was like the episode of The Simpsons in which the “Itchy and Scratchy” show becomes so boring that all the kids in Springfield turn off their TVs and go outside to play in the sun.

There are many reasons to log off of Facebook. While I have spent many pleasurable hours perusing photos of friends and feeling a detached sense of connection with the many acquaintances I’ve gathered throughout my life, I’ve also felt a growing dismay at how much time it takes to keep up with the flotsam of other people’s lives and random thoughts. If I had a dollar for every hour I’d spent reading about what others ate for lunch, how their dental appointment went or what their cats vomited on the rug that day, I would have, let’s just say, a lot of dollars.

Lately, people have been complaining about Facebook’s lack of privacy. But, let’s face it, the minute you interact with any website, your privacy is compromised. If you don’t want anyone to know what’s going on in your life, don’t go online. I’d already stopped posting anything but the most blatant self-promotional items anyway. No, this abandonment of social networking wasn’t due to privacy concerns.

It came about as a result of watching how one of the most successful people I know leads her life. She spends her days working, attending classes and calling or getting together with her flesh-and-blood network of friends. She does not have a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account. She barely answers emails unless they are vital. In short, she does not live life in front of an illuminated screen. Studying her, it occurred to me that I might be doing something better with my time. Like writing a book, watching a sunset or even looking for work. And didn’t I used to have hobbies?

I began to feel about Facebook the way I felt about being an arts critic. I’ve spent a good deal of my life reviewing movies, books and music. It seemed like an honorable tradition when I began, until the day it occurred to me that I didn’t want to dedicate myself to reviewing other people’s art — I wanted to make art. Similarly, I am relinquishing the pleasures of watching the lives of others — at least, the edited version they want me to see — in order to live my own.

The friend with whom I spent my birthday suggested that I should blog about the experience of leaving my Facebook family. I guffawed at the idea that we’d come to a point in society that the mere act of quitting one form of contrived social interaction was news — and possibly a means to commerce.

According to Technorati, the blog tracker, about 175,000 new weblogs are created each day and many of those blogs are started with the express intention of making money. “Do what you love and the money will follow,” one self-help tome from the 1980s told us. So, if what you love is your collection of Victorian buttonhooks, or tracking chem trails, the idea is that you can just start writing about it and the users and advertisers will flock to you. Using that logic, writing day-in and day-out about the hardships of withdrawing from something as ubiquitous as Facebook should yield a bumper crop of attention and revenue.

Still, what would one say about it? I could 12-Step it. I admitted I was powerless over Facebook and my life had become unmanageable.

I could talk about the withdrawal. What are people eating for dinner? How are they doing in Mafia Wars?

I could brag about how I’m going to the beach or learning to cook gourmet meals instead of reading about other people doing those things and posting the photos to prove it.

In the end, isn’t this kind of blogging just trading one version of blather for another — one version of virtual living for another? Furthermore, how does this get me off the computer?

The reality is, I miss the events feature of Facebook. I like knowing what’s happening and where to go to see art or attend a festival. Facebook has become the single best source of free advertising for those who previously could not afford publicity. But, that’s about all I miss.

When I retuned to civilization after my birthday trip, I listened to some phone greetings, read a few congratulatory emails and texts and even opened a couple of cards that came in the mail. Almost everyone I would have liked to hear from contacted me in the numerous ways still available. Almost everyone. (Don’t they like me?)

Am I going to keep a continuous blog about what it’s like to take back a measure of psychic freedom? I doubt it. Will I reactivate my Facebook account one day? Maybe.

Right now, I’m going outside to join the kids playing in the sun. See you later.

Victory Tischler-Blue, Palm Springs, 2010. Photo by: Vern Evans ©VTB

Runaways’ veteran, Victory Tischler-Blue chats about the new band biopic; her 2003 documentary, “Edgeplay: A film about the Runaways;” and Andalusian horses

In 1977, when 17-year-old Vicki Tischler joined the all-girl rock band, The Runaways, she had no idea that she was becoming part of a sisterhood that would influence the rest of her life. The Runaways, best known for the song “Cherry Bomb” and for launching the musical careers of Joan Jett and Lita Ford, was the brainchild of rock impresario Kim Fowley. Rechristened, Vicki Blue by bandmate Joan Jett, Tischler toured with the group for nearly two years and recorded the albums: Waitin’ for the Night and And Now, The Runaways.

After landing a small part in director Rob Reiner’s classic rock mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap [1984], Tischler-Blue began to switch her focus from music making to filmmaking. She eventually settled into a role behind the camera as a television and film producer and founded the production company Sacred Dogs Entertainment Group. In 2003, she made her documentary debut with a labor of love titled, Edgeplay: A film about the Runaways.

The gritty, behind-the-scenes band documentary enjoyed critical acclaim, despite relentless legal obstruction from Jett — who refused to appear in it and actively blocked the filmmaker’s ability to use Runaways music in the film. Edgeplay survived the setbacks and ran for two years on the Showtime Network.

And now, there is a new Runaways movie — this one sanctioned by Ms. Jett. Written and directed by Floria Sigismondi, and loosely-based on Cherie Curry’s torrid memoir, Neon Angel: The Cherie Curry Story, the feature film follows the fictionalized rise and descent of the band. The Runaways stars Kristin Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Scout Taylor-Compton (as Joan Jett, Cherie Currie and Lita Ford, respectively).

Since the movie’s January debut at the Sundance Film Festival the band’s members have been back in the spotlight; Urban Outfitters stores are selling Runaways T-shirts; and Twilight bloggers can’t stop marveling at Kristen Stewart’s transformation from lamb to lesbo; and all of this fuss, before the film has hit a single multiplex screen.

Victory Tischler-Blue is sanguine about the current commotion. She’s been here before. In an interview from her ranch in Palm Springs, she discusses filmmaking, music, horses and her ongoing journey as part of the karmic sisterhood she joined as a teenager.

Q. What are your feelings about the new Runaways movie?

A. I think it’s fantastic on more than one level. I love that this current film is bringing more eyeballs and awareness to our band and to all of our personal projects as well. After 30-something years — how amazing is that? For me, the Runaways has become the gift that keeps on giving.

When Lita and I were in Lake Tahoe filming some scenes for The Gillettes [an upcoming reality series executive produced by Tischler-Blue and starring Ford], Scout Taylor-Compton, who plays Lita in the film, drove up to meet us.

She said that the way the actresses learned about the Runaways — despite the near-constant presence of Joan Jett and [her business partner] Kenny Laguna on set — was that they sat down together, on their own time, without the director and learned about everybody from watching Edgeplay. In fact, even the director mentioned in a recent L.A. Times article that she pulled the film’s most talked about and anticipated scene — the Joan/Cherie lesbian pussy bump — from Edgeplay.

That said, I’m not really sure why the filmmakers felt the need to create a composite bass player character named Robin — when they had Jackie [Fox] and me to pull from. It’s also ironic that the only two band members who actually remember everything, because they didn’t get high or drink, are the two that are excluded from the story. It’s a well-documented fact that Joan, Cherie and Lita have very few, if any, memories of being in the band.

Personally, I’m amazed at how much sweat equity these actresses invested in the project and how much it meant to them. Scout was also incredibly forthcoming when she told me and Lita about how oppressive the atmosphere was on set. I really want to acknowledge what the actresses went through because they were paid far less than they would normally earn, but it was important to them that they do it right. Much like it was for us in the band.

Q. There was a lot of press coverage of Joan Jett and Cherie Currie at The Runways film premiere at Sundance in January. Where were you?

A. I was in Palm Springs, Lita was in Miami and Jackie was in Los Angeles. We were not invited to any of the screenings. There’s a running joke within the band that the subtitle for the new Runaways movie is “Revenge for Edgeplay”.

Joan and her partner have serious issues with the fact that I popped the Runaways movie cherry with Edgeplay and have spent a lot of time and resources trying to legally derail my projects and me. And it’s not just me; she’s gone after Jackie and Lita too.

The Christmas before last, Joan Jett sent me a gift in the form of a lawsuit — with regard to the domain therunaways.net — a site I’ve always owned. The claim was that I was operating the site in bad faith. FYI: the “site” was a one-page placeholder that was a memorial to Sandy West, our drummer who passed away in 2006 from cancer.  But my story isn’t unique. The bottom line is that Joan is known throughout the music and film industry as being extremely litigious with claims that don’t hold water — especially when there’s been a lull in her career.

Q. What is it about The Runaways that you think people are still responding to 35 years after the band’s breakup?

A. I don’t know. I’m really surprised by it. Jackie, Lita and I are all kind of shocked about the attention this is getting.

I think there are a couple of things people respond to. First, The Runaways captured teen spirit. I have the double-edged viewpoint of having watched them as a fan and later having been part of the band. When I used to watch them, I thought they epitomized all the things that I was about and loved — the rebel thing. When I made Edgeplay I tried to capture that same rebel feeling.

Also, I think people like to watch teenage girls morphing into middle-aged women. Whatever it is, I’m fascinated, grateful and blown away by the interest and attention.

Q. You’ve recently reunited with Lita Ford to make, The Gillettes: An Extreme American Family — a reality show about Ford and her rock ‘n’ roll clan. Whose idea was it and what can viewers expect to see on The Gillettes?

A. The idea came out of a conversation I had with Lita and her husband. They asked me to produce it. So, I came up with a concept, wrote the treatment and we started shooting footage last December. What you can expect to see is the daily life of a family that is outwardly extreme but really, pretty conservative and normal. The show follows Lita pulling it together to go back on the road after ten years of living on a Caribbean island, home-schooling her sons and making sure everybody’s Mohawks are standing stiff.

Q. You’ve had a passion for horses since childhood. What’s in your stable now?

A. I raise, breed and train Andalusian horses. They’re a beautiful breed and somewhat rare in the U.S. The three I currently own are from the purest Spanish bloodlines and worth a small fortune. But, I made a huge mistake – I got attached and fell in love with them and can’t look at them as commodities anymore. They’re my children.

Q. What’s your next project?

A. I’m currently executive producing an episodic television drama titled Rarebirds. I’m also developing a film and book project celebrating the life and work of 1960’s male physique photographer, Mel Roberts. Plus, I’m putting together a book of Andalusian horse photographs titled Pura Raza Testosterone and having a gallery show to launch the book.

Q. Knowing everything you know now, what would you say to a teenage daughter who ran away to join a rock band?

A. Have fun and don’t take it too seriously!

Story in Record Collector News, March 2010

Read about Runaways drummer Sandy West in LA Weekly.

Yet, whatever our losses or setbacks, as Americans we believe in redemption. We are the country who puts our trust equally in both God and in the promise of a comeback. We believe we can resurface after being pulled under by scandal, illness or heartbreak — and we can come back stronger and better. However, before we can ascend from our ashes, protocol requires us to confess our sins — just ask Bill Clinton.

Love Junkie, is Rachel Resnick’s confession to forty-plus years of looking for love in all the wrong places, and the devastation in almost every area of her life, to which that obsessive search led. She begins the memoir with her “ah ha” moment. This is the instant known in twelve-step programs as “hitting bottom.” Resnick’s goes like this: One night she comes home and discovers that her house has been broken-into and vandalized by an ex-boyfriend. Instinctively she calls a friend for support who consoles her, in part, by telling her that her ex is a “psycho.”

“Her words comfort me, though there’s a dull nagging thought — who’s psycho? I picked him. I kept him. I kept him even after he began debasing me, just as I picked and kept a lifetime of other men who seduced and then debased. So, if he’s a psycho, aren’t I a psycho, too?”

Ah ha!

As Resnick shows, a breakthrough in consciousness is only the beginning. Transformation happens only after painfully honest self-examination, and she devotes her narrative to just this kind of self-scrutiny. How did she get to be a forty-something with an Ivy League education and little more than a string of failed love affairs to show for it? Well, kiddies, as Freud once one said, it all starts in childhood.

Employing a well-crafted, deceptively conversational style, Resnick’s memoir uncovers the roots of her compulsion to pursue serial, abusive relationships; namely, her parents. She was born to an alcoholic, love-addicted mother and an emotionally (and literally) abandoning father, and then shuttled between various foster homes throughout her adolescence. Her narrative alternates between past and present to illustrate adult situations and then compare them to the childhood traumas from which they sprang. If she has, as she suspects, an attachment disorder, its basis is abundantly clear.

She is fearless in telling stories that others would not tell to their priest. Resnick admits, in detail, to submitting to serious sexual and emotional degradation. She explains how her addiction to having a partner at any cost made it difficult to pursue her career, financial security or motherhood. Instead of working on her paid writing, she admits to crafting dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of obsessive emails to men — like the one she calls, Winchester, who tells her point blank, that he does not love her.

“Winchester — who fits perfectly, chemically, into my crazy need — writes back just enough to keep me going. And periodically, of course, he comes over for mind-blowing sex.

“Winchester is like pure heroin. But that’s only because I am an addict.”

Obsessive emailing is only the tip of the iceberg of self-defeating behaviors that Resnick finally recognizes are classic symptoms of love and sex addiction. At least that’s what they call it at the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) meetings she finds herself in after getting out of the long, brutal relationship that is the centerpiece of her story. And while the program she enters helps her personally, as an author she is too thoughtful to rely on hackneyed twelve-step jargon to tell this tale.

In the end, it is this innate thoughtfulness, searing honesty and self-effacing humor that save her from blindly plunging down a path that leads to irredeemable tragedy. And, those same qualities save her book from the dull, self-obsession of lesser memoirs.

Rachel Resnick’s Love Junkie, with its stark examination of a rarely discussed addiction, heralds the next wave of mass psychological awareness in the U.S. It took decades for Americans to expose the closeted skeletons of alcoholism, drug addiction, rape, spousal abuse, child molestation, eating disorders and co-dependency. As each of these issues stepped into the light of media scrutiny and spawned a cable television movie or Oprah appearance, it seeped into the mass consciousness and began to be seen for the pervasive problem it had always been. And, like some kind of national group therapy, once a problem had been named, it could finally be owned and treated.

With books like Love Junkie, television dramas like Californication (and actor David Duchovney’s admission to real-life sex addiction) and the VH1 program, Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, love and sex addiction is about to become the new black. And while, as Resnick discovers, “No one is going to save you,” this cumulative closet-opening will likely move many suffering people one step closer to recovery.

Now, we just need Oprah to get on board. After all, no one likes redemption better than Oprah.

Peyton Place tells the story of that eponymous, small, New England town and its inhabitants during the last years of the Depression and into WWII, but is focused primarily on the experiences of two girls, Allison MacKenzie and Selena Cross. On the surface, they are strikingly different. The former is the daughter of Constance MacKenzie; a single widow who owns a respectable business, and the latter is a “shack dweller” who lives in filth and poverty with her syphilitic mother, Nellie, and a violent, drunken stepfather, Lucas Cross. While the girls begin the story as best friends, their differing temperaments place them on separate trajectories. Allison is bookish and immature. Selena is world-wise and world-weary. One derives her comfort from fantasies, the other from cold reality.

Yet, they are not as different as the prudish Allison would believe. Hidden skeletons in their respective closets bind them to each other and to their small-town neighbors. And, as Metalious reveals, what spectacular skeletons they are. Incest, illegitimacy, cuckolding, alcoholism, abortion, venal acquisitiveness, power wielding, pettiness, religious hypocrisy, sexual deviancy and murder are all happening just behind the whitewashed picket fences. There is not a deadly sin left unearthed in Peyton Place, and it is from the strangely contemporary-feeling scandals depicted throughout, that the novel derives its ability to shock more than 50 years after its publication.

Metalious accomplishes this trick by first setting up the superficial, moral parameters of the townsfolk and then systematically throwing each character into a crisis. For instance, the neer-do-well town scion, Rodney, gets a girl pregnant and then has his father pay off the girl’s family to get her out of town. Norman, a cloistered mommy’s boy who is given “medicinal” enemas — well into his adulthood — peeps on a man performing cunninglingus on his pregnant wife and never recovers from the illicit shock. Allison MacKenzie finally discovers that she is a bastard and that her fantasies of a princely father are just that. Most shockingly, Selena Cross becomes pregnant after being raped by Lucas, and the town’s upstanding doctor gives her an illegal abortion. Selena later murders Lucas, when he tries to rape her again, and buries him in the sheep pen.

The descriptions of sex, the inquisition of the era’s mores and the dialogue hold up as well as anything from fiction written by more accomplished and respected authors. This might be because two unsung editors at Julian Messner purportedly rewrote the book before publication. But, who writes their own books anymore anyway?

While it would be easy to scoff today at the uproar caused by the publication of Peyton Place in Ike’s America, there is no theme explored in this story that isn’t still being beaten to exhaustion on the Lifetime Television Network or in the media generally. The recent disapproving uproar caused by Mackenzie Phillips’ revelations that her father drugged and raped her when she was a teen, and the flock of apologists who descended upon the world’s stage to protect that other child rapist, director Roman Polanski, illustrate that the plight of Selena Cross is just as relevant today as it was in 1956. (See related story in the New York Times.)

In 2006, it was reported that actress Sandra Bullock had signed on to portray Metalious in a biopic about the author. Nothing has been reported since, but, given the utterly-contemporary feel of her 50-year-old best-seller, a fresh look at the author seems relevant — though hopefully Bullock will do a better job at depicting Grace Metalious than she did with her uncomfortable rendering of To Kill a Mockingbird author, Harper Lee, in the film Infamous.

Peyton Place is worth another look; if only to realize anew that, though American women have come a long way, baby, we still have much further to go.