Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a great quote from Norman Mailer, who recently managed to revive his career by dying:
I always felt [Timothy] Leary really was a sort of bland asshole. What was it: “Turn on, tune in, drop out?” I thought he absolutely was wasting a generation. So I have nothing good to say about him, and I felt that with all the excitement being liberated, there also were some very bad things happening, including the finer sensibilities of a generation being exploited and finally consumed, consumed for too little. . . . I felt rock & roll was just monotonous compared to jazz and never liked it. I always felt like it was taking over and it was the equivalent of LSD in a way. That everything was getting cheapened. I think this is true to this day. We live in a cheaper environment now than we used to.