By Marilyn Brennan Santa Monica
Regarding the weekly “Hey, Mikey” column written by Michael Tittinger, the editor of the Santa Monica Daily Press that appeared in the Nov. 14 issue (“Raising a glass to the maligned”), I would like to make a few comments.
First, as regards to the (Santa Monica College) student journalists who were not allowed to compete because they drank beer in a public place: If this was against the rules of the competition and they knew of the rule and broke the rule, then they must accept the consequences. Case closed.
I’m not saying that their having a few beers was a bad thing — just bad timing.
What I really want to address is “Hey, Mikey’s” premise that booze and journalism/writing is sort of a romantic go-together situation and cited Hemingway and Hunter Thompson as examples. Hemingway and Thompson both blew their brains out as well — Hemingway because he could no longer write; and to Thompson’s drug-fogged mind, it was simply time to go, or so his friends say.
My premise is that I am so so tired of the glamorization of drugs and alcohol as an almost prerequisite of creativity. No one can convince me that someone operating on two cylinders (the drugged mind) is more creative or brilliant than when they are operating on all eight cylinders. I would wonder at what any famous alcoholic writer, artist, performer, comic genius could have produced if not brain addled. That’s a loss for us all.
A friend of mine... used to drink with Dylan Thomas in the White Horse, a pub on Hudson Street in New York. He said he never knew Dylan Thomas was a brilliant poet when he was drinking with him. That is the truth about alcohol and drugs. It reduces everyone to the same level of being a boring drunk who repeats sentences 10 times and vomits on your shoes. Stephen King said when he was drinking, he looked the same as the truck driver when vomiting in the gutter.
I know the horrible aloneness of writing and being in your own head that can drive you to the nearest pub just to get away from yourself — but watch that predisposition of artists to carry things to the Nth degree. Then we won’t have to mourn the stories, the paintings, the performances we’re all denied by an early death of the product of the self.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 17, 2007. Read the original PDF.