Not sure if the embedded video will work in Facebook (which at this point is where this sporadic blog's readership often finds it). So here's a link, just in case.

Atkins gave birth to a son while living at Spahn Ranch, an old movie set, with other members of the Manson family. While she was on death row, she wrote, he was legally taken from her because no one in her family was willing to raise him.

"His name and identity have been changed and sealed, so I have no idea where he is or how he is doing," she wrote. "I have since been told his name was changed to Paul, and whether or not that is true I like it. ... My continuing separation from my son, even after all these years, remains an incredibly poignant and enduring loss."

Ironically, Sharon Tate planned to name her unborn son Paul.

Idolized him and Basketball Diaries as adolescent. Finally got to meet him on junket for the film version with Leo DiCaprio. Table of dickhead critics -- who had just been asking DiCaprio if he was concerned about playing "gay" Arthur Rimbaud in his next film -- is completely silenced as Carroll and I talk Frank O'Hara and William Blake.

As a novice at these things, I was frankly appalled at the slippery and toxic combination of cynicism and sycophancy in my alleged journalistic colleagues. They would knife these actors and directors with words behind their backs, while unctuously sucking up to their faces.

Posts on the order of, "We Interrupt This Litblog For a Very Special Announcement of My Thoughts about Health-Care Reform" won't do much for me. But though I'm not much of a socialist, I like reading Scott McLemee's writings from that perspective on his (too rarely updated) blog, Quick Study.

Not quite able to accept the realization that Loveless is now almost twenty years old, I just spent a few minutes looking around for discussions of it online, and came across the following at Pop Matters, which reminds me why I have kept a safe distance from most rock prose for some while now:

At first, what streams from the stereo may appear an indecipherable code, a foreign cacophony. It can be appreciated for its pure otherness just as one not fluent in a script may be seduced by its graphic qualities. The lettering becomes an impenetrable surface to ponder. Consider the convolution of slashes and lines of Kanji or the blocky clarity of Hebrew or the celestial curvature of Arabic. But in hearing a piece plucked from the hazy bulk of Loveless and presented on college radio, bracketed by the requisite indie-rock banality, it becomes some spectral broadcast. Not to say that this tangle of pitches and tones once considered too thick to unravel suddenly comes into focus and becomes intelligible. Rather, like all great art, one may begin to see, or in this case hear, the work on its own terms. Every sound is no longer translated into some comfortable clearness. Rather, one begins to love its pure, dense sonance.

Oh yes, one do.

Over a decade has passed since I have lived with this album, literally thousands of others have passed through my hands and shelves. Loveless remains the only sacred tome. Acquired on the cusp of adolescence it traced my awkward, giddy ascension into the realm of adulthood. And, most importantly, inoculated me with that insatiable need to attain further sonic knowledge, to listen with a ravenous, poriferan sentience. Even for its makers it remains insurmountable, a glorious flash that produced a long, slow fade.

Listening with "ravenous, poriferan sentience," I think I can hear the sound of Walter Pater throwing up in the background.

Here he is with Mary Ford playing "How High the Moon," circa 1951:

Unfortunately the Washington Post is not the only case of this sort of thing that comes to mind.