Everyone is used to news items about dead celebrities that begin with conditional sentences, like this January 8 would have been Elvis’s 73rd birthday. Crucially, these sentences leave out the “if” clause, so the resulting fragment implies that if only Elvis had survived the night of August 16, 1977, he would still be singing “Blue Hawaii.” But as we all know, even if the King had made it through that fateful day with huge doses of eight or more drugs in his blood, still, his heart was due to explode at any second, and his colon was the size of a large dog. Barring some equally massive medical intervention, his days were numbered. Instead, it would be correct to say this January 8 would not have been Elvis’s 73rd birthday.
Consider Jim Morrison. If the Doors’ singer had not died of heart failure in 1971, but immediately put himself in a doctor’s care, gone on a diet, cut down on the booze and drugs, taken up jogging, and avoided fire, flood, famine, murder, manslaughter, accident, and disease for 37 more years, it would be possible that he might have celebrated his 65th birthday on December 8, 2008. Yet, the West Hollywood restaurant Barney’s Beanery marked that arbitrary and totally imaginary occasion by unveiling a plaque on the spot where, some 40 years before, the Lizard King had pissed on the bar. The Doors’ old office at Santa Monica and La Cienega had been a short walk away from Barney’s, and Morrison often walked proudly past the “NO FAGS ALLOWED” sign at the door on his way to getting stuffed and shitfaced. “Here sat Jim Morrison: Poet, Artist, Legend,” the plaque reads, omitting at least two important facts: that Morrison was famous for singing, and that he pissed right where your plate of chili and spaghetti is.
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Jim Morrison plaque:
Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek helped the restaurant’s owners find the very spot where he remembered Morrison’s urine splashing so the plaque could be installed there, and he and Doors guitarist Robby Krieger (no Densmore) celebrated the plaque’s unveiling on the day that probably would not have been Morrison’s 65th birthday. The ceremony was broadcast on KLOS-FM, hosted by Jim Ladd, who interviewed Manzarek and Krieger.
(Before Cumulus Media canned his ass last week, Ladd was a long-running FM DJ in Los Angeles who encouraged his listeners to smoke trees between Pink Floyd album tracks. His 1979 “audio documentary” about, or “innerview” of, the Doors has since been released as a four-CD set on the band’s label. He sounds just like he looks.)
About ten minutes into the interview, Manzarek confidently announced that president-elect Obama was going to take the human species into outer space. “We are goin’ all the way¬—we are goin’ into outer space. Obama’s gonna take us all the way.” Earth media had reported during the campaign that, if elected, Obama planned to cut NASA’s funding, but apparently Ray had a more reliable ætheric, astral, or rectal source. If so, it looks like Obama is saving the great interplanetary migration for a second-term project, since his administration ended the space shuttle program this summer. But, if Obama had ever intended to take “us” to outer space, and had, once elected, immediately invented and manufactured the means to take everyone there after appropriating the necessary funds, this would have been the human race’s third year of cosmic travel.
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