Temescal Dig

 A primordial glade.

The Flaneur interprets some occult findings in a section of Oakland undergoing metamorphosis.

1. 

I haven't driven a car in the last ten years. It's also been ten years since I had to go the DMV to get a new driver's license. One likes to keep one's options open, however, for whatever emergency may arise in the always soon-to-arrive end times.
They thumbprint everyone now. In the name of the security state, everyone who wants to drive now has to have his or her fingerprint print available to the FBI data base. Nice.

Afterward I ambled across the street to entered a zone where no cars go.

An ancient mortar and pestle 

Melded into the rock for evermore.

Eucalyptus are an introduced species in California. 

This specimen with its multiple-personalities 

appears to have been an early arrival 

A right of passage for local youth. 

Dig the Warholian rendition of the 7-UP logo.

Newspaper reports say that it's going away
 like the old porn palace next door--
demolished decades ago

for fenced-off vacant lot vacuousness,
with the ghosts of Soul Brothers Kitchen 

Under the spreading chestnut tree,
something mediaeval about a blade shop

Nature and its double,
some see a crow in this image

15 July 2014

2.

Cultural Archaeology

Temescal and me go way back. That's where a place called Ollie's used to be. Ollie was an old-fashioned bull-dyke who ran a bar for ladies with its entrance on Telegraph. She rented out the back room to a group I was associated with calling itself CAVAN (Commitee Against Visual and Audio Numbness, I think it was.) All our bands performed there--Negativland, Fake Stone Age, and my own duo at the time the (original) Red Aunts (name later used by an all-girl Drag-strip Punk rock band). As well as the likes of Ian Underwood, Pell Mell, and, memorably, The Meat Puppets. We had trouble getting people to show up and the night the Meat Puppets were to play it poured and they were late. Most of the small audience had fled but nonetheless they played a scorching 45 minute set for those of us still there.

Had friends who lived in an artists-only house nearby on Rich street. And the Negativland studio/ apartment of my old colleague Don Joyce is right there on Telegraph,; his building newly festooned whimsical murals. Have recorded and brainstormed there many a night in its nicotined precincts.

 I recall when all this quaint roadside Americana
was still open for business

Amazing how old signage can survive
long after a business has closed down

 Well, this place is still in business
get all the carbon you can out of those old fossil fuel burners

July 2013