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Last night I was half-listening to a 1974 recording of Joni Mitchell singing "Both Sides Now" when something grabbed my full attention: she'd begun talking about an episode of Star Trek. At the link below, you can hear Mitchell launch into a seemingly spontaneous, impassioned monologue after the first chorus: "Did you ever used to watch that show called Star Trek? I just had a flash of this show, that I saw while I was singing this tune. It was the only show where Dr. Spock ever got any emotion, right? You remember that one? It was really great because... well, for those of you who never saw it, anyway, the premise is this: they're supposed to go and rescue an agricultural colony that's on some planet. They've been there for a while, they took some horses and they took some grain, they took a lot of that stuff, and they were going to experiment up there, maybe as an alternative planet, you know? When we mess this planet up too bad we'll have to go some place, right?

"So they were up there working kind of scientifically and all of a sudden, a message comes to Dr. Spock and the Star Trekkers that this planet is being bombarded by some kind of rays which are, uh, not very good for any kind of animal, vegetable... they're okay for mineral that's it--mineral life can live. So, it's getting bombarded so they all go down to check it out. First thing they notice is that there are no insects around, then they notice there are no animals around. And just when they're about ready to say that there are no people around, they discover this colony of people in the euphoric state, and not only that, when the doctor checks them out, every uh... history of any kind of disease that they've had, including things like appendectomies, has all disappeared, right? And they're in perfect heath. Well, what happens is, the reason Dr. Spock suddenly becomes a compassionate-feeling creature is 'cause one day with the youngest and the prettiest member of the scientific team, of course, he's walking through a field and he comes upon a whole kind of row of sunflower-looking creatures. And as he's walking through these sunflower-looking creatures, one of them explodes and shoots things all over him and then you see Dr. Spock lying down on the ground and looking up at the clouds--that's what made me think of this. He said to her, 'Wow! I never looked at clouds like that before.' He said, "There's a dinosaur up there, there's..." Then he turned to this girl and he said, 'I love you.' Meantime, his little radio is going 'bleep bleep bleep' and he's supposed to get back to the ship and you know what he does? He shuts it off."

Mitchell sounds giddy, and the audience at Temple University's Ambler Campus sounds absolutely thrilled. And we, perhaps, will never hear the song in quite the same way. Very little is lost, but something's gained. Listen, she sings of love so sweet:

plus, links to various other sites

Here's a page from "Good Days for Black Rock," a Hit Parader article from 1970 that goes beyond the requisite Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix mentions and and makes room for not just the Bar-Kays and Charles Wright but also Black Merda and Willie Feaster and the Mighty Magnificents. Sadly, none of the artists are interviewed, but has that Funkadelic image been published elsewhere?

I'm reading Norman Mailer's 1991 doorstop Harlot's Ghost, and its descriptions of the infamous Camp Peary had me wondering about when "The Farm" first entered the public consciousness as a CIA training camp. After a little bit of poking around, it would appear that it came to light in an interview with author Joe Maggio, following the publication of his novel Company Man. The front-page headline of the December 22, 1972, edition of Williamsburg's Virginia Gazette (motto: "Containing the freshest Advices, Foreign and Domestick") was plain: "Camp Peary Exposed as CIA Training Base." A four-week investigation by the Gazette's staff writer Ed Offley and news editor W.C. O'Donovan included a phone conversation with Maggio, who'd barely disguised the center as "Camp Perry" in his book. He had been, he said, a contractor with the CIA's Special Operations Division (SOD). "My cover was that of a civilian training advisor for the Department of Defense," he told them. "I was part of an outfit called the "United States Army Technical Training Advisory Group." Maggio told the Gazette that Camp Peary hosted training for assassination, demolition, parachuting, wiretapping, and even experiments with LSD and "mini-nuclear bombs." If a blue-ribbon committee investigated, he promised, "they'd find a whole new world, a Disneyland of war." He predicted that the base would one day suffer a catastrophic "Dr. Strangelove explosion that really is going to rock that area."

"The book could never have been published as non-fiction," Maggio said. But even though it was labeled a novel, CIA policy called for him to submit the manuscript for approval. Maggio did not, he said, and as a result, the agency "screamed at my publisher," especially about the descriptions of SOD "kill teams." "The entire cadre that caught Che Guevara was trained at Camp Peary," Maggio said. "Those were the guys who went to Fort Sherman in the Canal Zone and trained the people from Bolivia. They were all agents."

The Gazette also includes a mention that Maggio had spoken to Seymour Hersh the previous week, and related charges that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was provoked by "a series of massacres of North Vietnamese fishing villages by CIA gunboats disguised as U.S. Navy vessels." [This sounds like a more violent variation of Plan 34A, which had been revealed with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971.]Joe Maggio's name is pretty annoying to search on databases, which will often scoop up mentions of a certain center fielder. But I have figured out that Joseph A. Maggio was born March 19, 1938, in Atlantic City to Peter and Marie Maggio; graduated from Pleasantville High in 1956; detoured to the Citadel and then the Marines before attending University of Miami. He spent time in Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, and the Congo. He was also apparently a Vietnam War correspondent for UPI. He wrote for the Miami Beach Sun and sold his book to Putnam under the title What God Abandoned. He lived on a schooner. Curiously, he appeared on Larry King's WIOD radio show in October 1970 to promote the book, although it wouldn't come out for another year and a half. Putnam published The Company Man on August 17, 1972. Had he submitted it to the CIA for approval, it may well have been drastically altered. Just weeks earlier, the agency had persuaded Harper & Row to submit Alfred McCoy's manuscript for The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia—after a personal visit to the Harper offices by Assistant Deputy Director of Plans Cord Meyer. The Justice Department had recently obtained an injunction against Knopf, the prospective publisher for former CIA employee Victor Marchetti's nonfiction book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. And, as a result of the Pentagon Papers leak, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were on trial for violating the Espionage Act.In the meantime, Maggio's disclosure about "The Farm" was scooped, sort of. A letter to the Washington, DC, underground Quicksilver Times revealed its CIA ties in early 1972, about ten months before the Virginia Gazette story, and purported to give the names of officers there. The letter was signed by one "Cosmic Charlie."

There's an excerpt from my new book, Agents of Chaos, now up at Rolling Stone. The excerpt is entitled "."

Let me know what you think!

“…Now let’s try it. This is Wednesday, May the 14th, and here in the home of Stan and Joan Lee in New York we are privileged to have as our guest Alain Resnais, world-famous director and cinematographic great, who is just about to make a statement about his study of English as it pertains to Marvel Comics! And now, for all of our fans here and abroad, we present Mr. Alain Resnais!��

Stan Lee met the French filmmaker Alain Resnais in Manhattan in the spring of 1969. The director of Hiroshima Mon Amour was a fan of Marvel Comics—passionate enough to buy an English dictionary, so he could understand Lee’s ten-dollar words—and had initiated an epistolary friendship with Lee. When Resnais planned a trip to work on his next film, Lee invited him to dinner at his apartment, which he recorded on tape.

��What type of movie is it?�� asks Stan.

Alain says it’s about the Marquis de Sade, and they discuss the relative qualities of recent theatrical adaptations. Stan and Joan were from the Bronx and Newcastle upon Tyne, respectively, the cumulative effect of which is a kind of haute suburban dinner-hosting style.

“Do you like liver?�� Joan asks, and Alain says yes, of course.

“Will this be a “sexy�� movie?�� asks Stan.

Alain does not know, but if it succeeds it will be on the “mysterious side of sexy.��

A doorbell rings; it’s their daughter, Joanie.

“Alain Resnais, dear?�� Stan offers.

“My daughter is studying to be an actress,�� says Joan.

“I’m finished studying, Mother.��

Stan says she’s just finished at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts. “She’s an accomplished actress!��

Joanie volunteers that she saw one of Alain’s movies at a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective of his work.

“I wish I had known I was going to meet you,�� says Stan, “I would’ve gone there! Let me know if they want a Marvel Comics day!�� He offers Alain a cigar.

Marvel was a commercial phenomenon by the spring of 1969, and even though it hadn’t yet stormed museum halls, one of its cultural benchmarks was just around the corner. Already shipped to the printers—but not yet on stands—was an issue of Captain America that introduced the Falcon, Marvel’s first African-American superhero. It was past due, but it was also, in the world of comics, at the vanguard.

Even Stan Lee’s down-the-middle liberalism required a skillful balancing act when it came to publishing comics—keep the heroes away from Vietnam, don’t endorse angry protests but don’t demonize them, don’t ask too many tough questions. He had tried to keep politics at a distance, but the late 1960s forced him to choose a side, or at least gently nod in that direction. When you’re speaking at colleges, it’s harder to ignore campus strikes. And Lee loved speaking at colleges.

“They pay a few hundred dollars a lecture,�� Lee tells Resnais. “And you don’t have to make a speech—I’ve learned the trick, I do quite a bit of it—you talk for just a couple of minutes, you introduce yourself, or tell a joke, say something to get them laughing, and then …nobody likes to listen to speeches. Nobody in the world likes a speech! So what you do, after you’ve spoken for a minute, you say now I hate to make speeches, and you hate to listen to them, so let’s have a question-and-answer period. And they will ask you a million questions, and it’s fun! You don’t know what to expect next, you can’t say anything wrong, any answer you give is interesting, and the hour, the two hours, just goes like”—fingers snap—“that. I’ve done that a few dozen times and each time it’s better. I wish I could do it more. I don’t have the time…but you get a new perspective on what people want. I’ve learned a lot.��

“But I am on the shy side,�� says Alain. “I decided ten years ago that I will always refuse to appear on TV. So if I broke that now, I fear I will become less free.��

“Does freedom matter to you?�� Joan asks. “Are you very much a free individual?��

“I like to do what I like when I like…��

“You’re just the opposite of me.�� Stan says. “I’m not at all free because I live with these deadlines every day. If I had the time I would be interviewed, and if they wanted me on every TV show, on every radio show, I’d stand on soapboxes in the corner! I would much rather be an actor than a writer.��

“I’m a very shy extrovert!�� pronounces Stan.

Writing made Lee feel lonely, Lee once said, and his wife and daughter had little interest in comics.

Joan goes back to the Marquis de Sade movie. “He said that this movie would be mysterious.�� Turning to Alain, she says, “I think you like...��

“Magic. That’s why I like The Fantastic Four. It’s so free, and…the art of Kirby of course…��

“Oh absolutely!�� Stan agrees.

“His machines are��.��

“His art is beautiful,�� Stan says, just as Joanie excuses herself from the table to walk their dog, Charlie Brown.

“I’m taking my child!�� she exclaims.

“We have a new puppy…�� Joan tells Alain��

(“She’s mine…she loves me,�� Joanie interjects.)

“…that my husband bought to guard me when we’re on Long Island.��

“We took this apartment,�� Stan says, “just to be near my daughter a few days a week. We spend most of our time here in these two rooms.��

“One time,�� Joanie says, “I’m not going to come back at all with her.��

Stan Lee didn’t know it, but a month earlier, his longtime collaborator Jack Kirby had also hosted a dinner, in Southern California. The editor of Marvel’s rival, DC Comics, had trekked out to the Kirby home for a Passover dinner. Kirby—who’d created or co-created Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Black Panther and many more—felt that he was not getting enough credit, and not enough creative control. It all went to Lee.

The DC editor floated the idea of Kirby jumping ship and coming over to the other side. Kirby was interested.

“I can’t understand people who read comics!�� Lee tells Resnais. “I wouldn’t read them if I had the time and wasn’t in the business. I might look through them and read something good in comics but I’ve got so many other interests!

“I was just an employee of the publisher, Martin Goodman, and I worked as editor. Everything I wrote I got paid extra for, so I had two incomes: I got my salary and I was writing, so I made a lot of money. I always made a lot of money, but it didn’t mean anything, because as long as you make money that way, the taxes are very high. The only way you can save money is if you own your own business, and you have capital gains taxes. With me, everything I make, about 60% goes to the government, so I had a lot of pride in knowing that my salary, my writing fees were very high and I earned probably as much money as anybody around, but I can’t keep any.

“I’m not underpaid. I make a lot, but I can’t keep it, you see. I don’t have any ownership. Everything I’ve written, nothing belongs to me. If somebody wants to reprint one of the stories they pay the company, they don’t pay me. It went on this way for about 29 years. Last year my publisher sold the whole company to one of these big conglomerates. I had to sign a contract for five years saying that I would work there for five years. The contract could be broken and I can break it at anytime but there’s a clause in the contract that if I leave I must not do any comics work for one year. All the time that I worked there, I never thought of leaving because I was loyal to this publisher but now it is owned by another company, and I figure, for the first time, at my age, I feel it’s time I started thinking of other things.��

“You must feel obliged to continue,�� Resnais says. “You must have friends…��

(Joan brings out olives. “Very salty!�� she warns.)

“…John Buscema, Gene Colan…if you leave them, they would be sad?��

“I’ve thought about that,�� says Stan. “The thing is, these men are so talented that I think if I do movie work, I could take them with me. Jack is great at set design and things like that. And they’re good at storyboards. They could even stay where they are and do well, but I would like to take them. In fact, Jack is living in California…�� Lee shows off some of Kirby’s recent work, and the tape recording ends.

In March 1970, Kirby quit Marvel Comics, and began working at DC.

In January 1971, at a closed comics industry event, Lee appeared on a panel with other professionals. In an odd twist, he played the role of the skeptic.

“I would say that the comic book market is the worst market that there is on the face of the earth for creative talent, and the reasons are numberless and legion,�� Lee said. “I have had many talented people ask me how to get into the comic book business. If they were talented enough the first answer I would give them is, ‘Why would you want to get into the comic book business?�� Because even if you succeed, even if you reach what might be considered the pinnacle of success in comics, you will be less successful, less secure and less effective than if you are just an average practitioner of your art in television, radio, movies or what have you. It is a business in which the creator, as was mentioned before, owns nothing of his creation. The publisher owns it.��

Months later, Lee took a sabbatical from comics, for the first time in thirty years, to work with Resnais on a film called Monster Maker, about a frustrated schlock-movie producer who tries to redeem himself by speaking out against societal ills. The film was never made. Lee returned from his sabbatical, and in 1972 was named President of Marvel Comics.In 2015, Stan Lee was asked if the comics industry had treated its creators fairly. ““I don’t know,�� he said. “I haven’t had reason to think about it that much.��