"I Know the Hole in Baby's Head"

The drug-damaged '60s rock legend might be a well-worn social figure, but Keven McAlester's 2005 documentary You're Gonna Miss Me devoted to The 13th Floor Elevators guitarist and lead singer Roky Erickson breathes new life into the caricature.

You're Gonna Miss Me, while situating The 13th Floor Elevators and Roky Erikson as important formulators of the psychedelic rock'n'roll revolution that took a sledgehammer to 1960s middle-class popular culture, is foremost a masterful portrait of familial dysfunction, brilliantly captured in Erikson's spoken-word piece, "I Know the Hole in Baby's Head" (above).

Family is the primary source of love, but it is also the locus of illness, squalor, regret, violence, self-mutilation. Society prefers a sanitized version of the family -- neat yards, tidy homes, loving fathers and nurturing mothers -- to the undeniable reality of uncommunicativeness, filth, regret, mental illness, and hatred, all accompanied by the soundscape of televisions blaring in the background. No wonder post-familialism is catching on. It is the rational thing to do. Good for one's psychic well-being and good for the planet.