6/20/10

I simultaneously read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Hampton Sides' Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin and though they both focus on America in the late sixties, you wouldn't know it was the same country; Steve Martin lived an odd life you couldn't invent, getting his start at Disneyland doing patter in the magic shops and slowly evolving his act towards the avant-garde while he drifted through the Flower Power era . . . meanwhile, Dr. King was organizing a general revolution among the poor, hoping to bring them all to Washington to camp out and make the rest of the country understand their plight, and he was being stalked by both J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as well as a shifty man that went by various names, including Eric Galt and James Earl Ray, who-- after assassinating King, led the FBI on a wild hunt that required detective work across the South, in Mexico, Canada, and, finally, London, where he was captured by Scotland Yard's finest (which annoyed J. Edgar Hoover).