Berkeley Flaneur

The Solstice Zone

2011-12-16T14:44:00.000-08:00

The Flaneur looks back at the year of 2011 through the crystalline lens of December, starry oddities are detected.

Here it was December the first as I made my way to the outlet on San Pablo avenue for medical marijuana. I walk the back streets South of Dwight wending my way through the morning calm. I have to play hopscotch with street-repair crews through this area lately--no telling what infernal machine will be employed in spoiling my meditation if I allow myself to blunder onto the wrong block.
I dig little make-believe sidewalks as I approach the denouement of a ball field. In a moment's respite from all the enclosed streets the great sweeping clouds of a wide open sky. I close in on my objective--an always-bustling enterprise with it's own patrol here it was open on St Stephen's day. It's a Googie-style drive-in building with mirror windows that slope upward and outward surrounded by a serious javelin fence.
I have brought with me a letter from my recommending doctor in order to gain entrance. I don't spend the additional fee for the fast pass "patient ID card" although they do come in handy if one is ever persecuted by police. The cost of a letter has come down for me appreciably. After four or five years with a high-profile doctor, an early crusader, I now go to the cheapest offer in the newspaper. This is after all a racket to enrich opportunists who operate between the rights of man and the sacred plant, but a venal capitalist society must be negotiated after all ideologies are said and done.
Inside you provide your driver's license and they check you out again on their screen. Then you're free to move about. You pass a counter selling small cannabis plants. They are all so adorable I want to adopt one and take it home. But as with all pets, it's a lot of responsibility, adjustment, landlords, etc. This counter also sells the various accoutrements that facilitate cannabis use--the pipes, the papers, the vaporizer bags and the like. It is situated in the rotunda room where one is invited to sit at a window-side counter or at one of a few tables and consume one's new-bought herb. Complimentary coffee is supplied, water, and the little ovens that vaporize the herbal matter are available along the counter.
The innermost sanctum is the herb counter. Music plays and the custom is brisk. Generally I make my selections from the All Star group whose potency, flavor and charm is a fairly safe bet. A card allows one to accumulate kick-back points--slow as they may come, they can add up. Next it's out to the rotunda where I meticulously prepare my smoke. I bring small Fiskers scissors and chop the solid bud over a small tray adorned with Italianate designs relating to the renown Club brand cigarette papers. They feature Le Professeur a Victorian gentleman smoking at a cafe table while reading a copy of Revue Scientifique. This variety of cigarette paper which I prefer has no glue but adheres to itself quite admirably. I add a rolled up inch of card stock as a recess and carefully assemble my airplane, tucking, tamping, and trimming until it is as good as I can make it.
I usually have a coffee and a water at hand as I take my two or three expert inhalations. I hold the smoke for ten to fifteen seconds before exhaling in a series of four puff-outs interrupted by brief hold-ins. This works wonderfully and I gaze out at waving trees and passing clouds in a deep state of peace.
The oddity this day was that the only other patrons of this usually busy and somewhat young scene are senior citizens. I especially enjoy one elderly lady perched on her walker-seater deal and puffing a long luxurious spliff. Social Security payments came today.

Meanwhile Occupy Berkeley vacated the pocket site on bank of amerika plaza. Before that happened a wider occupation had sprung up in Provo park (aka Civic Center park). In October it began with a few tents quixotic in their idealism, lit-up at night. Food service followed as did more and more tents. By early December the entire park was filled with tents and their itinerant population. Political statement seemed to fade out--the only ostensible sign spelled 'occupy' incorrectly. It seemed little more than a homeless encampment with hard-luck characters forming a village with its own rough customs. The drinking fountain became funky with dish-washing and the central feeding station began to resemble a civil war bivouac with grouchy exhausted people feeding in ankle-deep mud.
Then as suddenly and as naturally as it had grown it was gone. The lawn of the park had been taken an enormous beating--tents had blocked sunlight and formed puddles, multitudes tramping the wet earth in between wigwams had finally put paid to the project. The city put up a temporary orange plastic fence and dozens of workers began rebuilding the turf. Disgruntled die-hards huddled near the high school watching for a day.
As I passed by yesterday I talked to one of the workers-- an easy-going cat with his dreadlocks tucked into a hat. "It wasn't political anymore it was just homeless people," he said. Yeah, if they want to be radical they should go camp out across the street on the policeman's front lawn , I replied.

As I walked past a house on Allston recently, a couple were out front loading things into a car and bickering over insignificant details. I'd noticed the place before: it stood out with its various items of Judaica and posters for the Jewish film fest. It was in fact Jewish trade-show items that they were loading-out. Then, startlingly, the tenor of their argument escalated by a leap. The man could only make a inchoate shouting sound, like an old dog that had barked too long-- it was hard to understand what he was saying. The woman had it all over him. She could scream in a intelligible manor--rather like opera-singing only hella harsh-sounding. They continued as I turned onto Roosevelt and were audible for quite a distance. A guy working in his garage came out to see what mayhem could be causing this disturbance. It's a married couple, I told him, in that house on the corner. He seemed to get it but he kept looking down the street with concern. It did sound borderline homicidal.
She was like George's mother on Seinfeld. Times ten.

I found myself invited to an unusual outing. Events started to domino on December 3 when I invited a friend to a authentic baroque performance of Handel's Messiah by the estimable Philharmonia Baroque . I was an old afficionado having attended a number of performances by them between 2000 and 2004 when I was working in the classical CD biz and their label supplied me with season tickets. I learned early on that my acquaintances were generally blase about accompanying me to concerts they found rather sleep-inducing. Selling or even giving away an extra ticket the night of the show was a very long-shot with the well-heeled, silver-haired crowd that turned-out.
Oddly, I had won the tickets by phoning-in to a jazz program on KPFA. I was glad my friend was jazzed to go with me and delighted to discover the seats were up front. Distance from the stage mattered tremendously for this performance which was completely without microphones. They are better suited by their standard Berkeley venue the much smaller First Congregational church than by this gig at cavernous Zellerbach auditorium.
Disregarding the fact that I regard Handel's Messiah, with its lamentations--"He was rejected, He was despised," as an Easter Oratorio not the Christmas standard it has become, the concert was enthralling. It was great to see elven director Nicholas McGegan again and I found the countertenor Daniel Taylor particularly moving. In the men's room on the way out, a sour old professor type in a tweed jacket was repeating his view that it was "a nice polite version" but not what the Messiah should be. I heard him say it again to his wife by the drinking fountain as if his critique was so important that it needed a town-crier.

In reciprocation my friend invited me to a gala Christmas concert complete with a meal and Yuletide gift to boot. It was on December 1oth we met with another friend bright and early at Ashby BART station to begin our expedition.
At a church center in Oakland we made rendezvous with a vintage deco bus that would transport us to the Neighborhood Church in Castro Valley. Lovely wan sunlight on the wintry hills flanked our passage East. The "neighborhood" aspect of our destination was somewhat lost on me as we arrived at a hilltop complex quite remote from any of the surrounding homes. A non- denominational catch-all it is comprised of at least three large buildings distinguished by its erection of three gigantic white crosses grouped together in a tight circle. The girder-like crosses looked like something that survived the collapse of the World Trade towers.
After a detour in the parking lot to peep some sheep in their open trailer who were awaiting their stage cue for the manger scene, we entered the complex. A very square meal followed, actually a robust and enjoyable turkey dinner, copious servings and leftovers packaged up for those interested in some. Decadent cheesecake and mocha mousse pie followed on before some semi-absurd prayer. The guy leading it seemed mainly intent on making announcements to the assembly--"and we'll use the left exit as we leave, Lord."
Yet everyone was kind and considerate as we were ushered into a large auditorium for the spectacular Christmas show. Happy to be a little stoned as the elaborate lighting and changing stage sets, costumes and singers, sustained a winter wonderland of the mind. I loved an effect achieved by hanging lights over us that continued into the stage's firmament of stars. The large orchestra seemed to style itself on the Tonight show band, plenty of swing and lots of punch. The highlight was , yes, the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. With a Buddy Rich-wannabe on drums, it went "King of Kings, boom bam boom, and Lord of Lords, batta bip bang boom." The old sourpuss from the Zellerbach show would have loved it.

At my own chapel during Christmas week, nine Dominicans in white cassocks with red stoles stood before a small sea of red poinsettia for the Transubstantion. After receiving the sacraments of bread and wine, I felt a strong current of renewal as I walked out and began my long way home in the early darkness of the Solstice-time.

Darkening Days

2011-11-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

On the eve of the erased hour, the Flaneur looks back on a week of celebration and transition.

The last delightful days of October fell like dominoes as All Hallow's came and went. It was chemise weather with large butterflies and huge garden spiders, thrumming humming birds and desultory crows. Eager beavers saw their premature jack-o-lanterns melt on sunny front steps. Earthquakes epicentered a few miles away, started October 20th the eve of yet another last day of earth, end of times--forget-it-get-ready-for-work-tomorrow apocalypse.

Occupy Oakland has been in the world news after the bumbling mayor turned loose the ferocity of riot cops on a peacefully-resisting group of demonstrators. A young man a veteran of Iraq debacle had his skull fractured by a canister of tear gas fired at him by one of these degenerate thugs in uniform. When friends came to his aid another cop lobbed a flash grenade into their huddle. The police state whip comes down. But hey they caught the guy planning to fly a model airplane into the pentagon, and the used-car seller who may have plotted with Iran to assassinate the beloved Saudi envoy, didn't they? Homeland security. Time to start another war.

Of course, Oakland's heavy hand came back to slap the mayor in her pie-face. The movement rallied regained the campsite and by November second realized a general strike in Oakland that culminated in the shut-down of the second busiest port on the west coast. Time to rock the boat on a system in which authority figures routinely acquit horrifying widespread police abuse of citizenry. God help the poor immigrant in this vicious climate.

The fall of the holidays at the beginning of the week occasioned a felicitous dissipation of adult mayhem by monday, October 31st. The urge for decoration seemed rather subdued this year. I perceived more of an old-fashioned children's holiday foremost on my rounds. I would see kids coming from school in outlandish costumes in broad daylight, from grammar to high school ages. On Roosevelt I walked past a mad kids party on Saturday. The front of the house was all lit-up and had every inch decorated with masks vampire portraiture skulls witches pumpkins and spooky evocations of every kind. This area was entirely deserted while unseen behind a tall fence the party sounded intensely in gear. Laughing talking trumpets blowing the elf-folk of Samhain were having the crack. I caught the vibe while not seeing a single one.

I flew some ghost effigies under the eaves outside my window and strew a few hoary talismans around the pad. Walking about my neighborhood I was struck by the dedication evidenced by kids who want to add their own drawings and assemblage to already profuse home decoration. They are abetted and thrilled by the commitment of the life-long lovers of Hallowe'en--such as a house on Jefferson with a large articulated marionette of a bat that stirs in slow motion hanging in the front porch.

Early in the evening of all Hallowed as I was returning home, I passed by an industrious fellow designing his own haunted realm. He had installed three seven foot shrouded figures around his gate and was hanging huge green teardrop-shaped skulls on either side of his front door.

I told him it was already too spooky for me.

After dinner I looked out from my own haunted aerie as the street came alive for the trick-or-treating. The young father across the street dressed as a pirate was lining his driveway with illuminariums (bags with candles) and nicely turned-out jack-o-lanterns. His barefoot scooter-riding son joined him and he was also dressed as a clean little pirate. The slightly older daughter came-out after they'd gone inside. She had apparently tired of waiting for the other kids to show up and presented herself in a black fringed flapper outfit and began to shimmy. I was her only audience just then and yet she danced well--I was honored and quite cheered.

Then as groups of fanciful little ones and their guardians began to appear for door-to-door visiting, I decided I would adorn myself with a concomitant spirit of fun.

Black trousers and boots, a white wing collar shirt with a flowing black cravat, my Baudelaire greatcoat from Paris, and beret comprised my ensemble. I burned the cork from a wine-bottle to sketch a wide handled mustache, beetle brow, and a false widow's peak to my blacked-up and slicked-back hair. The general effect was sort of Snidely Whiplash via Edgar Allen Poe.

Off parading a bit I stopped for a wee smoke on the corner. Little kids came whipping around and rather than be frightened they wished me hello. A cheerful exchange of "Happy Hallowe'en" ensued with the passing crew. I added large round black glasses when extra disguise was advantageous--as when I greeted neighbors who failed at first to reconnoiter who it was.

Around to the extravagantly transformed house I had seen going up. Completed now and seen at night, it was like a theme park attraction--the green skulls hung like shrunken heads on the vertiginous porch. I hung back on the sidewalk and watched parents dispatch their kids up the stairs. There a formally attired fellow, face painted black and white, wearing long Egyptian-style bird wings on his arms, would emerge to dispense the bon-bons. A macabre candelabra six-feet tall stood in occultation of the view from the sidewalk as I joined in with parents peering to see what transpired. A young black mother carried her son maybe three-years old up the stairs as he pleaded, "no I don't go...no mommy I don't want to go" the whole way up and back down. Everyone laughed despite his entirely justifiable trepidation.

So I circled around back by Parker street past a house where I knew they specialized in tableaux vivants--characters in costume who remain motionless until someone enters the grounds. Funny how effectively uncanny even something so obvious and stagey can work. Teenaged girls ventured in in order to act more frightened than they should really be and provide a contact frisson for their more cautious companions. They all scream and laugh. I'm a contact buzz junkie now it seems.

So weary from a rather enormous day I headed back, my brief Hallowe'en parade already ending. But I stand in the window with my ghosts and my own candle-lit illuminarium. Several times kids notice me and do double-takes or, like little Rowan from next door, just gaze with wonder at me. Some say wow. I have become an impromtu tableau vivant. Family groups trick-or-treating are in a hysteria of delight, like stoned teen-agers. One lady points me out to her brood repeating incredulously, "It's a real person... it's a real person." Well yeah, lady, I try.

All Saints and all Soul's the last of a run of seasonally warm days. This year the litany of my deceased relatives and friends, what I conceive of as the communion of the saints, includes my friend a poet named Mary. Her death was not unexpected she was in her nineties. We had corresponded within the last year but hadn't seen each other for a number of years, but I thought of her often. I just noticed in a recently-published bay area literary history (one that highlights the author and his equally obscure cronies), the literary milestone of her final book "Pious Poems," a book I edited and published ten years ago. He were good friends and occasional companions at her place or after Mass.

She died this past September. It was a difficult time for me but I made it to her requiem Mass if not to her vigil or wake at the church the night before. That day had begun at the early hour of five and had spent its first half at a hospital where my tooth was extracted. I was still wiped-out the day of her funeral but I abstained from the tylenol with codeine to try to be in a more prayerful state--a mistake perhaps.

I made the scene with an alert from my friend Bruce. He offered to pick me up whereupon we proceed to Alameda to get two ladies he knows before returning to St Albert's in Rockridge by noon. He showed up with barely enough time to accomplish this generous and fairly outlandish task under the best traffic circumstances. We have our best time on the way out-- the time-warp tunnel from Oakland to Alameda. It's a Navy town with a 20th-century throw-back twilight-zone quality.

So it's a bit hectic on the home-stretch. We roll up at the prick of noon who apparently works for a funeral home and is put upon that we've stopped right in front of the main gate to the chapel as if to park. This is where the hearse will resorb the casket in like an hour, so he's a little nervous.

We get inside at the last minute and I try to reach the restroom after landing myself a spot. On the way I pause at Mary's coffin which is occupying the center aisle. I subtly hold a small leather pouch holding rosary beads that my Mother gave me to Mary's casket. Let it absorb all the holiness and the prayer between us and maintain that bond. But have to turn back from the water closet as bells rings and through that same passage comes a very formal procession of priest and servers.

Arriving late we found the programs all taken and at this point I am to realize that this is to be a Mass in Latin. Two Dominicans stand at the rear of the chapel and chant the entire mass while the priest faces the tabernacle the entire time. I remember some of the responses from my childhood latin masses but mainly it's their show anyway with a great deal of ancient singing and chant. The priest gets to speak mainly during the homily and it's of course in the vernacular of the English language. He met Mary in the 1960s and had various charming anecdotes from the period made all the remarkable by the observation that on most days at that time Mary would attend Mass at St Domenic's in San Francisco in the morning and at St Albert's in the evening. All it takes to be a saint is the desire to be a saint.

Then reaching back again to the 1960s we have an old-fashioned sacrament of Communion that involved the mortification of kneeling on the cold marble of the altar step and withheld the ordinary swig of wine for the host alone. Funny how you miss even so wee a bit of alcohol.

The pall bearers paced outside as the quite lengthy service wound down. After the casket was wheeled out in a procession sanctified by incense and holy water, we all made ready for the long ride to Benicia for the interment.

Mary once described me as a martyr and so I felt in the hot afternoon cemetery, much more arid and hot than the coast. The site was within a section reserved for members of the Dominican lay order. After more formal prayer led by the priests we each took a small shovel full of dirt to fill in her grave.

I spoke to the Dominican in charge of the cemetery and he led me over to see the grave of the celebrated poet William Everson. He and Mary had been married and it was she who converted him to Catholicism. After their marriage he had taken vows and his first literary acclaim was as Brother Antoninus.

Afterward we drove to a little Inn where we had been after the death of another saintly friend from St Albert's last year. The wine helped me maintain in the face of my post-operative exhaustion. Driving out there under the big skies over hurtling highways is a challenge in and of itself to me these days when I aspire to be as simple and elemental as an old Indian. Or to be as patient intelligent and aware in a simple humble life as my departed friend Mary.

These were my thoughts this year on All Soul's Day of someone I recently lost.

On November 3rd rain came followed by cooler weather. A large tendentious parliament of crows floated between elevated islands formed by the tallest trees. Wooly clouds sailed beneath the illuminating moon.

Occupied Berkeley

2011-10-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur can't help but take some delight in the increasing street demonstrations against the Plutocratic Police State of America.

"Some people just like to protest" said the billionaire mayor. Historically many in Berkeley do like to protest. Naturally, a suitable site amid the banks downtown has been seized as Occupy Berkeley in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and similar protests in cities everywhere.

Berkeley always seems occupied these days. Whenever a demonstration of any size of any legal sort takes place on campus or the surrounding streets, they fly helicopters over the town. This goes on sometimes for hours. Not only does it bear down punitively on the protest in question it sends an oppressive signal out to the population at large. Add to this frequent visits by news copters and you have a lot of unnecessary and nerve-wracking noise.

When I learned the location of Occupy Berkeley one day last week, I walked over to check it out. With a little sneaky feeling I stopped at an ATM belonging to a fellow crook bank which is located across the street from the bank of amerika where the local occupation was at. The corner of the block is the fortress-like BoA building, designed no doubt while it was under regular attack in the late sixties. Out of the very corner of its concrete slab is carved a semi-circle of benches which is handy to two bus stops. Too gloomy at night for many people, it's a temporary refuge for the lost.

But it was now a liberated zone with tables and signs, some food and supplies around back, and rain tarps suspended over it all, more festive than bleak. I greeted the familiar Berkeley ward captain of the streets Ghostchaser who was holding the fort. In fact few others were present on a lovely October day. She told me the recent history of the movement. I surmised that any of the real hell-raisers would go to San Francisco or Oakland where someone told me the adrenaline is high. Protest in the city of Berkeley is so anticipated and so tolerated that Occupy Berkeley is no challenge.

Ghostchaser wears a rhinestone cap over her long white braided-hair and has cute bunny teeth. She has a good sense of humor when you can hold her attention, but is more content to give you simultaneous multiple personal accounts in detail which fortunately are often funny. She has the floor now with her all-night tales of installing the village.

I've noticed another occupant stationed in the street-most seat. Ghostcatcher soon brings her up only to complain that she keeps asking her to bring her food. And yes, as if out of film made by John Waters starring Eddie Murphy, it's an enormous fat black lady who radiates helpless need and profuse gratitude as people do indeed bring her food. She is like the poster child for the danger of dependancy and, while she is certainly a victim of the society that Occupy aims to protest, she puts a unrepresentative face on it.

(And in that spot she remains while the nice weather holds up. When I visited on Monday she had a transistor radio cranked to distortion playing AM radio. For several minutes a hyped-up voice, spieling, "MacDonalds and Coke what a combination," rang out across the plaza. It seemed to defeat the purpose of a protest against corporate power.)

A few street fellows come and go. A tall black man in dashiki-wear plays a strange flute. Passersby tend to either ignore or sympathize with the scene, no unwelcoming looks. Quite a few stop to read to talk to anyone available, to put some money in the jar; others donate food.

Saturday was of course world Occupy Wall Street day and was a big day at the Berkeley microcosm. I set out with leisure and stopped for a while in civic center park where flags flew wildly over the fountain area. A Latin band in crisp shirts provided dance music for enthusiasts and first-timers. The farmer's market quite filled center street offering the cornucopia of autumn to the shiny shoppers.

There certainly were snacks as well at the Occupy site. Ghostcatcher and another lady with long platinum hair were coordinating a larger group of protestors and interested pedestrian traffic. Observing the available materials, I made a sign using a slogan I'd seen on-line adding a little tweak of my own. In careful poster lettering it read:

"I'LL BELIEVE THAT CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE WHEN TEXAS EXECUTES ONE"

(The sign was moved to a prominent spot and remains there after a week. People take photos of it. The line has also turned up in a Doonesbury cartoon.)

As I finished with it and attached it to a humble position on the all-but-buried map-kiosk, the main body of the protestors were heading back down toward the park. They were bound for the old city hall to hold a general assembly. I went along part way and was going to remain in the park until I saw the little clutches of bike cops. I decided to increase the numbers showing up just to annoy cops, or whoever it may annoy.

I'm not annoyed myself, but tiring quickly of a new phenomenon. Before leaving the main location people had been addressing the crowd using what I read was called "the human microphone." Popular at Occupy Wall Street where loud-speakers are banned, a person speaks a line and stops while everyone who heard him repeats the line so everyone else will hear it. It's very spirit-of-the-beehive and a no doubt a useful tool, but it got a bit twee when the general assembly commenced and a speaker began using a microphone and loud-speaker. They all fell into the same call-response pattern repeating what he said even though everyone could easily hear it. It begins to feel a little group-mind creepy at that point.

It was time for me to shuffle anyway so I did. Leaving by the southern walkway I quickly observed that another gaggle of bike cops was having a pow-wow at the end of it. Would I defer to them and scramble across a bumpy lawn to exit or would I walk on forcing them to move for me?

Anarchist or not I expect courtesy from cops.

Tonight after dinner I walked around the neighborhood as the crepuscular light deepened into darkness. I kept an eye for homes decorated for Hallowe'en and saw a few. They mostly bore the gleeful signs of children--a handmade colorful sign reading, "Beware of graveyard!" for example.

As I returned home I observed odd bright lights stationary in the southern sky. They were not UFOs though, but helicopters hovering over Oakland where the whip has come down.

(draft--more to follow)

The Scarecrow

2011-10-10T12:35:00.000-07:00

The scarecrow emerges tatterdemalion from dreams

Mommet in Somerset and Berkshire's hodmedod

He's known as tattie bogal in the Isle of Skye

Scotland's old man of the rocks--bodach rocqais

Kuebiko protrudes from the oldest book in Japan

Knows everything about the world yet cannot walk

Wurzel Gummidge adorned with black plumage

Casts a long shadow with a panache of chard

Feathertop of old Salem whom the witch cast into life

Days grew short when he saw in his soul a sinister intent

The bogeyman from the top of the clock, the dawn of time

The moggy, the rook-scarer, the guy, the Bogle himself

In Highsmith a man hid his neighbor's corpse in a scarecrow

It stood up until trick-or-treaters came to burn him down

The inanimate made uncanny by an all-seeing eye

All the crows know where you go and tell the Bogle so

In Dymchurch on Romney Marsh the Flaycrow rides

Backwards through the high street his blindfold steed

Couples disappear into hay bales behind the barn dance

Scarecrows stuck between the bonfire and a powdery moon

Jack-o-lanterns float slow down the creek, candlelight nightclub

Little jittery bats follow tight on the black water

Skeletal wreaths suspended 'mid trees, the spiders' wet webs

Some wind stirs the cornfield a burlap head nods and knows all

10 October 2011

Le Flaneur Noir

2011-09-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur appreciated this excerpt from "Pseudonymously Yours,"a consideration of the Irish writer John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. It was written by Johanna Kavenna and published in a July 2011 issue of the New Yorker.

Banville's exploratory monologues owe much to the modernist idea of the disaffiliated flaneur, Poe's "man of the crowd," who creeps through the teeming city, or through dreamscapes of his own mind, trying to "understand and appreciate everything that happens," as Baudelaire put it. The "mainspring of his genius is his curiosity," Baudelaire added, and this description could also describe the average noir detective. Indeed, the meandering flaneur and the solitary noir detective have so much in common that they could even be dark brothers. [They] creep through their own lives, and the lives of other people, amassing fragments, shards of experience, trying to understand something--anything--of death, disappearance, the past, or why we live and perish, or the bizarreness of what we call ordinary life. They share a refusal of the world of "other people," a sense that exclusion is the only option. To be an insider is to be an enemy or a fool.

Meta-merzbau

2011-09-12T23:46:00.000-07:00

Early in August the Flaneur made the scene at Berkeley Art Museum to dig the freshly-installed Merzbau replica.

It was a club house for reading and performance created by collage-artist extraordinaire Kurt Schwitters. The occasion for this reconstruction from photographs is a Schwitters retrospective show. Although associated with the Dada movement he was more or less kindred and concurrent. He made association with Dada Zurich only after not doing so with Dada Berlin. His work is constructivist, cubist, and it fits into a broader avant garde as much as it does with the provocation of Dada.

Yet if Dada can be considered as design or style--the disordering of the typographical senses is there, the endless chance juxtapositions available to an artist's eye in mass produced printed matter. Assaults on figurative elements, leading to the illustrated dreams of Surrealism, are very rarely present in the works by Schwitters on display. One in which a traditional religious image is lost in his patchwork collage is as close as it gets and you must look hard to notice it as possibly somewhat scandalous or transgressive.

But so gorgeous are his collage tapestries -- tickets tearings and scraps all over-colored by pigment mixed with glue that dried to appear so timelessly old yet with a frisson of the new--simultaneity intact. His weaves of rich old papers are virtuosic works of pure color and pattern as profound as a great Persian rug.

The Merzbau united Schwitters life and art in a living space. Despite whatever inhibitions of movement in space it creates, like a cave, a tepee, a lean-to, the cathedral ceiling effect is in play. The lights change every few minutes inside and outside the chamber. Outside the windows an artificial verisimilitude prevails. Inside it's slow to recognize familiar enough objects in the Doctor Caligari-like expressionistic architecture --only it's white and chapel-like instead of a noir underworld nightmare. It would make a fine bedroom for a child. Did I dream that there was a transporting soundscape going on as well? Was there a glacier scouring a moraine of the mind? I can vouchsafe that it is a nice place to be inside a wee bit stoned.

Kurt Schwitters created the original Merzbau on property owned by his parents. Fleeing the fascists he relocated to Norway and attempted to replicate a merzbau there. He later dwelled in a rustic version while living in the rough. A smattering of remnants exist from these latter structures and only photo-documentation exists of the original work.

After a few digital image-capture sound effects had emanated from the Merzbau while I was the only occupant, a demure museum guide came in to tell me that sort of thing was not in fact encouraged.

Here's the Merzbau as seen from outside and above (at right).

Before I left I was gauche enough to take another photo of this Tibetan Buddha who forgave me.

Traffic

2011-09-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur considers one of the the central tenants of American society that are "off the table"and may never even be discussed by elected officials. We must never expect fair taxes on the rich, meaningful reduction in military spending, regulation of firearms, or any real remedy to the relentless destruction and death caused by automobiles.

In Berkeley, there is no more appalling manifestation of hypocrisy than the pompous pronouncements by municipal or university officials regarding "getting people out of their cars." It is always obvious that they mean getting rid of the other cars not their own. They long for an end to excessive traffic, the competition for roadways and parking spots that other people represent. They never intend to suggest that they themselves would forego driving. They are after all the elite conducting important business. In short, what they are thinking is "If only we could get people out of their cars, we'd have the roads to ourselves."

Add to this the fierce depredations continually mounting against those of us unfortunate or principled enough to be pedestrians. In recent years the city of Berkeley has lowered fines for riding bikes on sidewalks. The excuse was that police were never writing tickets because they did not want to impose such a penalty on poor bike-riders. Now even with the lower fine they still don't. These bike-riders too often are people wearing helmets as they endanger those walking without helmets by zipping past them from behind, callously gambling that this person won't turn into their path. They routinely rob you of your right of way by driving at you on the sidewalk. They are moving at a rapid clip on a steel frame while wearing a helmet. When they get where they are going they almost always block pedestrian traffic by locking their vehicles to racks thoughtlessly installed right in everyone's way. Or if racks are not handy they lock their bikes to benches preventing their intended use, or to wheelchair ramps, handrails or any other fixture. Let those not as nimble as themselves "go around." Frequently you see bike users parading the fact that they are not using cars at that moment as evidence of their nobility. They are largely also not using the street as the law mandates vehicles must.

But we know the cops don't care about bikes. It is also glaringly apparent that they don't much care about pedestrian endangerment by automobile either. Once every few years they make a show of pulling over drivers who don't stop for people in crosswalks but this is just for show. Day-in and day-out cars drive into crowded crosswalks right under the noses of the cops and the cops ignore it. A great deal of housing has been built downtown and the denizens whip around the blocks like maniacs unimpeded by law enforcement, scattering like pigeons the people who have just waited to cross. You wait for cars and the traffic signal then you wait again for cars who roll at you to menace you out of your right-of-way. A right-of -way only granted at most intersections if you press a button to request permission to continue down the street.

Cars park on sidewalks, crash onto sidewalks from driveways, drive up on sidewalks all with an impunity born of scant protest or consequences. Many other encroachments are commonplace often on the busiest sidewalks. Some hustlers with more nerve than brains set up a huge obstacle course right on the access to the central Berkeley BART station, peddling shoddy earrings and other junk jewelry. They create a choke point on the sidewalk in front of Tully's coffee, one made worse by the mob of often rowdy street people who congregate there and panhandle. Next to them is a florist stand who puts his plastic urns twenty feet out into the apron of the busiest spot in town. Sidewalk cafe tables are equally bold in their privatization of public space--"Thank you for letting me traverse your restaurants, all you surly hash-slingers on Center street."

Now if we could only get people out of their cars.

Last week I had a brutal reminder of the mindless aggression that automobile users represent. I was walking North on Adeline between Alcatraz and Ashby. A middle-aged black man had ventured into the traffic lanes in an attempt to halt traffic. I looked where he was and there was a small dog flopping around like a fish out of water as he attempted to find his legs again after having been struck by a car. The guy a little worse-for-wear perhaps, poor perhaps, was having a difficult time getting the incessant flow of cars to stop and was nearly being hit himself. After reconnoitering the situation I joined him in the roadway then returned to the sidewalk to get a wooden palette to use as a stretcher to move the dog to the grassy median strip.

The dog had a tire mark on his hide quarters and blood and saliva was issuing from his mouth. Just the sweetest little lap dog with a furry face, he seemed somewhat relieved by our attentions. I placed my hand on his back and intoned "poor little guy" in a deep and calming voice. A young couple had showed up and attempted to give him water.

A Berkeley meter maid was also present but did absolutely nothing to help. Even when we moved him onto the palette to carry him she made no attempt to hold the traffic at bay despite her uniform-- the black guy and I had to do it. As I lifted him I dropped my shoulder bag in the street and after setting him down I turned to see the traffic driving over it. I had to fearlessly halt them again to retrieve it --luckily it hadn't been hit and my phone and reading glasses were still intact.

Another girl started calling animal hospitals and before long a cop arrived. He said the usual animal rescue was occupied and was not coming. A dog & cat hospital was reached and they agreed to take him. So we determined that the cop would carry him to his car and drop him off there. I crossed the street with a uniformed policeman holding a wounded dog and it was just hellish trying to get the cars to stop to let us cross. One Chinese lady scowled an angry look at us and would not stop, playing chicken with us until I had to yell at her to stop and stay stopped.

But after all she had the green light, why should she have to stop? Get out of her way! The traffic mandate is the law of the land!

The Fourth of July

2011-07-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

Independence Day inspires the Flaneur to board subterranean trains to ride out to the San Francisco Zoo then to hike ocean beach back to the N-Judah line and ride downtown by nightfall to see the pyrotechnics from a pier

I have never entered the Zoo again after a couple of visits thirty years ago. I love animals too much to enjoy seeing them in captivity. I do however walk by the entrance area for random sightings from the Serengeti.

The entrance to the seashore where animals do range freely. Unfortunately many of them are dogs.

Not as cold as it looks but a certain heartiness does one well.

A wind-sheltered spot where I reclined a while and had my lunch.

A traveler's repast consists of raw cauliflower, carrot, olives, wild california sardines, whole wheat bagel with neufchatel, hard-boiled organic egg, ryvita crax, dried fruit and chocolate.

An impromtu throne where I bided quite a while as the sun at last burned through the clouds.

A ritual pit alongside.

Into the mystic.

Sunlight on turbulent waters.

The marbleized waves.

As nights falls...

Twilight on the Bay

Moon over San Francisco

People light up in anticipation.

Then the incarnadine fireworks of the fourth of July

Coit Tower presides over parallel festivities

Double image capture.

San Francisco on July fourth.

4 July 2011

The Story Behind the Fourth of July

2011-07-10T15:47:00.000-07:00

Despite my mile long walk to BART and my beach hike of several miles more with side trips climbing in the dunes, I was slightly weary but not worn-out. The long train ride on the N-Judah was restful and once I disembarked downtown I immediately ducked into a coffee shop and tucked into a coffee laced with enhanced brandy. The brandy was enhanced by being ported in a jar that had held an eighth of an ounce of very robust cannabis. The potent resin had coated the inside of the jar then had been dissolved in the brandy.

I stayed there an hour or so as the place got crowded with people recharging in anticipation of the fireworks display fast approaching. Then as the twilight thickened I ventured out to Market street, the main drag.

Though no traffic occupied the block I was on I could see cars waiting at a light. Sensing I had the time I leapt into the street to dash across while I had the chance. But they build the curbs quite high along there as a disincentive for people to jaywalk as I was attempting to do. As I landed my right leg got wobbly and I knew I was probably going down. In an act of sheer will I pumped my legs like the roadrunner to try to maintain an upright posture and at the very least not to hit the pavement head-first.

I was unable to avoid the fall entirely and down I went. Shaken I looked up from the surface to see if the cars were approaching with the lethal mindlessness of a cattle stampede. Stunned but determined to survive, I managed to get up and make it across. Slightly embarrassed, I made a hands up gesture of what-can-you-do? A young man loitering nearby watched it happen intently and impassively. No one made the slightest movement toward offering help. What can you do?

Stunned I continued south of Market passing two patrolling cops on an otherwise deserted sidewalk as I flexed my hand. Perhaps my face showed the pain I was in. I was still wearing my black beret and sunglasses--a look that occasionally inspires dogs to bark at me and their spitting-image owners to suggest, "must be the hat." In this case it may have inspired one of these canine cops to attempt to rattle me by turning abruptly to glare at me a second at the moment we passed each other. It takes real courage to walk down the street under the cover of authority, armed and accompanied by another armed goon, to show you are not intimidated by a possible terrorist in a French hat.

Well, fuck all cops forever and ever. I waited until they were around the corner and publicly urinated (behind a wall actually). My middle finger showed a weird swelling on the lobe at the tip and certainly hurt but I could still bend the joints and there was not spot that caused excruciating pain so I figured I would carry on.

My favorite pier had lowered it's gate so I followed along and settled on the pier behind the Ferry building. A small crowd milled around there while a disco upstairs provided the bass heavy soundtrack and an eerie purple glow. A slender moon hung over the Pyramid building and an exquisite crepuscule spread over the Bay.

I chatted with a gal my age and them with two younger girls I helped claim a spot on the railing. Overall I felt better than one would expect someone with a sprained finger to feel--the brandy and cannabis helped.

Then just as darkness prevailed, the show began. There are two launch sites both considerably down the waterfront from my position. I shifted to a better angle only to find myself behind very tall blonde nordic young men with no space between them. So I hopped up on a bench usually populated by alcoholic street denizens and this night was no exception. In front of me was a short hispanic guy and underfoot was his nervous chiuaua.

As things went on in the usual manner a small contretemps began brewing between the short fellow standing directly in front of me and one of the aryan supermen next to him. Short guy was making a video of it and apparently the young man bumped him once or twice. Short guy warned him not to bump him in a rather threatening manner. The young man laughed at him. In truth he and his friends could launch the little guy about ten feet away from the edge of the pier without a lot of effort. Short guys wino buddies would be of little to no help to him. But then he may have had a machete stashed nearby as well.

Before things could escalate I reached over with my priestly hand of kindness to touch each man's arm and say. "peace, peace, please fellows." It diffused the stand-off. I helped the little guy save face despite his short-fused machismo. He decided I was his friend and went into a nearby shopping carriage and got me a can of beer which I accepted. The cold can brought some relief to my inflamed finger.

The pyrotechnical exhibition was rather brief and soon people were moving everywhere in all directions. I caught a fast train to Berkeley and walked on home. The emergency room could wait until the morning.

A Day of Two Bridges

2011-07-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

On the cusp of the Summer Solstice the Flaneur journeys out to see the ocean breakers and then comes back to the Bay.

The Geary bus all the way from downtown came to an unfamiliar end of the line. I found myself walking down Seal Rocks lane.

The remains of Sutro baths once a Victorian pavilion arching over heated sea water pools.

Seal Rocks just beyond the location of the old Cliff House here at the very Western coast of the continent.

The Pacific with the dim headlands of Marin.

The glittering sea and the wind-swept trees of land's end.

Cargo ships and sailboats pass by and do not collide.

Away from the beaten by-ways, this weathered log affords me a chaise on which to recline and smoke a bit. I dream of a far-off land, the here and now.

The rocks at land's end.

Standing in the surf for eons perhaps underwater again someday.

The Gold Gate bridge comes into view.

The Golden Gate before the bridge.

Rock sculpture

Up the silent hillside trail

A cliff-side hideaway, visited over thirty years.

A traveler's repast consists of carrot, organic hard-boiled egg, whole wheat bagel with neufchatel & a packet of hot sauce, dried fruit & chocolate.

With companions or in solitude, ever a place of peaceful enjoyment.

A last grand view of the bridge.

Up past the august Museum of the Legion of Honor

Closed for deep thought. Some of us are doers.

Equestrian statues ride off over the hills.

At this hour in six months time the lion will stare out into darkest night.

Evening thoughts like lengthening shadows. A golf course built on old burial grounds.

Must return to the urban center

To the palaver downtown.

For an evening pilsner out on a pedestrian pier.

The nimbus of time

The Bay Bridge towers nearby

A vast expanse

Yerba Buena island anchors the bridge facing East.

Tile boat and golden gate.

A vintage streetcar faces East, as does my BART train, back home under the Bay to Berkeley.

18 June 2011

Solstice Twilight

2011-06-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur had been asleep and went out into the pearlescent crepuscule to spend an hour with a small smoke.

As I walked north on Jefferson past Bancroft I left behind what traces of everyday blues ever existed. I entered the shallows of peace and continued on.

Above me amid the densely flowering spheric trees, a bird caught my attention by perching on a cable across the street. I could see only it detailed silhouette. It appeared to address me with a series of cheeps. It seemed friendly towards me like a house pet bird, a parakeet though it was not.

I cheeped back mimetically and we had a brief rapport. After a moment its mate flew up onto the cable. The first left to a close-by rooftop chimney. The second took its place with me volleying chirps. I began repeating phrases in a human voice sort of cooing to it. I might have said "aren't you nice?" in the kind of a voice I would use if I was doing drag (which I have not done nor hold any interest in whatsoever). As I moved on I immediately passed by the bush where I'd been standing and noticed a young girl who must have heard all this. She was standing on the top step of her front walk with wet hair, barefoot, wearing only an oversized T-shirt and talking on a cell phone. In fact she was softly cooing or whimpering into it. Oblivious to me yet not completely. Relaxed and at peace with me perhaps even comforted by my presence subconsciously. She looked up demurely through her lashes. The dual consciousness of both telephonic scene and the scene at hand has become her second nature.

I thought of the love for young people I feel yet conceal. How they need my love just as I need their love even if only for an fleeting moment. The osmosis of love for other people obtains. Benign people who walk past and could be of help when the parents are late from work, overwhelmed, or any number of other excuses for absence. People feel safer in their homes when the passing strangers appear to be kindly.

She looked alright maybe over-coddled on the whole for all I know. As with most young people, she's enthralled by today's wild ride. And she's none the wiser for not having had the old-fashioned way of life that never really was but is only imagined in nostalgia.

Returning back by rounding Saint Joseph the Worker church, I thought of a little boy I encountered on McGee street a few weeks ago. I passed him by on my twilight walk as he got out of a car. He looked up at me and said "whoa." I laughed and said "what"?

Was it the way I looked? My semi-unearthly vibe, what? He just stood smiling and looking at me like I was the fireworks on July fourth. "You're gonna make me self-conscious," I jested as if he would know what that meant. I continued off with a smile. Was it my black beret, my ray bans and my stealthy hearing aid? To him I was a fantastic character apparently-- I imagine a cartoon version of myself.

Well, that's right my boy. We can be kindred spirits for an instant or as long as need be. Think of me like a grandfather, like the hippest grandfather there is.

As I write it of course dawns on me that, in their mild way, the two birds were most likely expressing dissatisfaction that I was walking too close to their nestlings. The peaceable kingdom being one thing, and trusting an adult male human around one's offspring being another.

About Town in the Maytime

2011-05-31T22:30:00.000-07:00

Flaneur accompanies his free play of thought with digital photo captures of the evanescent.

Out of doors and into the May.

Cool air this Spring the jet stream is close, good for the rhododendrons

Great to sit outdoors and watch the sky go by

Clever to measure a day only by the earth's clock

Always something new downtown.

Interesting people

Interesting things to notice

Colors everywhere you look even underfoot

Take care not to step on them

Flowers are forgiving

Escape to the Berkeley pier

To a peaceful bench

While away the time with a vista majestic and serene

Return to happy hunting grounds

To come home amid the long grass

To fall asleep in a house of clouds

May 2011

Easter Sunday we were floating

2011-04-29T23:43:00.000-07:00

24 April 2011

The Outing at Indian Rock

2011-04-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

A spate of rather hot days occurred this week--temperatures only in the high seventies but it felt every degree of that with brilliant sunshine. By All Fool's day friday the Flaneur saw fit for a little lacuna in an impacted week. The prospect of an escape out to north Berkeley to scale the mineralogical heights of Indian Rock seemed agreeable.

Perhaps I'd ramble round town a bit before going northward. I hop a bus in the opposite direction --the 49 counter-clockwise down Dwight way that boomerangs back up Ashby all the way to College Avenue where I'm initially bound. The familiar driver looks like Andy Kaufman's alter ego and appears nearly as dissipated--we're cordial. It's an oven but I risk my neck opening windows while in motion and things are then fine. Everywhere I look outside along the way are sativa-colored flowers burgeoning in the copious sunshine.

Pretty ladies in brief sunny outfits abound on College. I'm into the post office to check my box. There's both a letter from an British poet I admire and a welcoming check. Next it's off to the paranoid precincts of a large Wells Fargo bank. Apparently this one gets robbed a lot so I must negotiate hearing a teller through the air-holes in a thick plexiglass structure of bullet exclusion.

They hand you a slip with the amount you're depositing but no balance printed on it. To get around this annoyance, I stop at the ATM for some cash on the way out only to discover the balance line on the receipt is inexplicably blank. I remark on this novelty to a lady and learn that she was perplexed about it too. Another girl comes over to us who is also non-plussed. They even tell you there's a charge to print your balance at the ATM--it's as if they don't want you to keep track of your balance. Is it so we'll spend more recklessly and stimulate the economy that the banks and their fellow-traveling brokers looted? And of course stumble in writing overdrafts that earn them lucre.

Next it's down to the Claremont library on it's next to last day before a long closure for renovations. It's a great funky place that like most branches has had quite a few pungent eccentrics shelter there for long hours. It does so with Berkeley's stiff tolerance for down and out people. There was one memorable lady who used to sit and space over a magazine dressed in a fur coat and a broad hat with silk scarf over it. She also wore shades and a palpable cloud of rose perfume. Patchouli is another air one often encounters among the reading room's denizens some clearly confirmed soap-dodgers.

This is not to imply that the indigenous indigents don't leave the staff a little edgy. I chat with one librarian. I'm certain he dislikes me but is constrained by the presence nearby of his supervisor, a sweet lady who directs the children's wing. I predict the place will be better with new carpet and paint and ignore the social-engineering that will no doubt accompany them. He grimly concurs.

This fellow is not the only irrationally hostile library worker I have observed in fair Berkeley. It has caused me to list "to go librarian" next to "to go postal" in my lexicon.

A brief wait back at the post office bus stop is followed by a pleasant ride downtown. The bus follows budding College avenue through the hive-like precincts by campus. Before I deboard downtown in front of Peets, I'm met by another sight on my tour of the grand malaise, the dysphoric morass into which society has slid. An empty bus lies across Shattuck diagonally as if entering the bus stop lane. My bus must inch past around it to discharge us and then the view for the on-coming buses is nil. Ah but this too passes as the #18 rolls up and I move on.

After a glide through north Berkeley with the gourmet ghetto. It had been my neighborhood for two months last Summer. I would stand on my hotel balcony after midnight and drink in that native quality the town can exude when the rat race subsides for a moment. How I would have thrilled to have seen the mountain lion that prowled around there a few weeks after I had vacated. Of course, the tale ended very badly when a Berkeley cop responding to a sighting ran for his rifle and shot the noble native animal that had menaced no one. This is a place that makes a remarkable mosaic mural of a mountain lion on Addison--but if one shows up in the flesh...

I hop off just before the traffic tunnel to Solano Avenue. I am bound for the elevations it tunnels through. Walking backwards up the pedestrian ramp offers me good exercise and an impressive view along the way. Cresting I bisect the roundabout up top. I cut across the roadway for a moment's refreshing pause at a fountain adorned with effigies of the bear, our beloved totemic animal--but if one shows up in the flesh...

Traffic is fairly incessant up there and it takes my extensive skills as a pedestrian matador to be able to walk across and not have to outrun the unrelenting. One more vigorous hill to climb via Indian Rock avenue and I am at the foot of fabled bolite.

Stairs have been carved into the rock by the WPA during the depression. As I go up them I realize I shall be alone on the massive boulder. The day has heated-up considerably and the sun can be rather merciless up there so it's not for the faint of heart. I soldier on.

Indian Rock Park in fact occupies both sides of the street. There is a complex of smaller rock outcrops and patches of grass on one side and the massive bifurcated Indian Rock on the other. They are all rhyolite rock formations, volcanic in origin and further examples exist all along this ridge including those in Mortar Rock Park. Mortar Rock is so-named because of the surviving basins carved into the rock used originally by the Huichin branch of the Ohlone people. Mortars can be found at Indian Rock as well.

The formation has long been a practice spot for rock-climbers as it was for the late Galen Rowell a celebrated photographer of mountain wilderness. I once worked with him on a book event for down at the long gone Whole Earth Access store on seventh street. Handsome and intense he spent no time on small talk. An Oakland native he and his wife were killed in a plane crash-- an ill-considered flight back from Alaska with an inexperienced pilot.

There is also a right-angled bench carved near the top of the rock. Unless it is already occupied this is my traditional perch on the vertiginous rock face. The vista is quite clear despite the heat today. It extends from way north on the Bay across the verdant sweep of Marin the apron for Mount Tamalpais, then across the gossamer Golden Gate bridge to the alabaster city of San Francisco, and onto the silicon South. Before this skyline stretched the glorious fastness of the Bay, the Berkeley/El Cerrito flatlands with Oakland looming way off to the left. Behind rise the Berkeley hills moist and undulating in the breeze.

After ten minutes of uninterrupted solitude during which my black t-shirt and dark green trousers absorb all those incessant sun assassins from Pomo Indian myth. And before I overheat after me hike, I go native and doff my clothes. This is not to say I sat there ball-a-dangling naked-- I kept my boxer shorts on. They are somewhat notable in their own right with the four suits of playing card as a motif. The label which sits fetchingly below one's navel reads Lucky and when you part open the fly there is another label sewn on reading "Lucky You!" to someone presumably at eye-level. This last detail I failed to notice until I got them home. I realized that I had my first article of "gag" clothing since seventh grade when I bought a straw Bob Hope hat with golf tees and little beer cans on the brim. The only drawback at the moment is that they are basically white underwear and pretty easily identified as such.

There I sat hoping to stay lucky I suppose. I could hear kids climbing the other rock mass across the small ravine. I figured kids don't look twice at oldsters. In fact an older kid did slightly notice me without any reaction. Luckily I have started to lose some of burdensome so I didn't feel too self-conscious should anyone arrive suddenly. And naturally they did--two young men and a girl. They may have seen me as they climbed up but they had foot-holds on their minds. I unhurriedly put the pants back on. They were students at UC from Iran I deduced. They were soon joined by more friends who fit the same description. They formed a circle down the rock from me snacking and talking. Soon one little kid after another appeared and climbed past. It's quite a bracing elevation with many precipitous drops yet these kids were unfazed as they covered the surface like exploring ants. One little girl seems to have re-traced the ascent from primate ancestors walking on all fours. She just leans over and scoots up the rock face on all fours. An adorable little hippie, she has a tie-dyed t-shirt and the lovely shiny brown hair of early childhood..

There is no adult on the scene to oversee these kids. At one point I stand up and notice an older boy of maybe nine together with a few of these four or five year-olds at the highest point on the other half of the rock. "Please be careful," I plead. Between us is a sheer forty-foot drop.

It's a climb I never even endeavored to make myself & a precarious perch once attained. But I relax and continue to mind my own business, which is the scrutiny of being itself. This begins in an unfocused gaze at the vast bay and the land around it, and out beyond the gate at the pacific ocean.

There is other foot-traffic mostly just passing through. I have a delicious banana and some water to refresh in this lizard-like sun-bask. Then I decide a puff off my shorty would be fun, only to discover I have neglected ignition. So follows a slow bare-foot climb to the Persian encampment. They anticipate my intrusion but I wait until I'm close-up to ask a young man for a light. Another provides a butane lighter and I ask him if I may keep it a moment. The early-arriving girl who may have observed me in my boxers, says keep it, keep it to get rid of me. I say that I just need one light and insist I return it. This is less awkward for me than lighting the herb while hovering near them.

Back at my stone seat the little kids, are around where I sat. I step off a little to smoke while they don't even look at what I'm doing. In the meantime a lady has climbed-up who is thankfully in charge of the kids. She has an even younger one with her and a tiny dog. I wonder if she'll show any sign of annoyance at me smoking with the kids around. But after I return the lighter and come sit by her, we're quickly in a friendly conversation. Half of the brood are hers half are her sister's. She agrees it is a bit disconcerting to see how intrepid they are on these steep inclines but says that they love it and haven't been hurt yet.

I reply that at least they'll never grow up to be adults who can't climb a rock. The kids urge each other on especially the boys and they somehow find the pluck. They've taken the dog up to a the highest point on this half of the rock and he's nervous. A shelter-rescue he's as adorable as a little dog can be. I help untangle him as they pass him down. The kids talk to the woman seated above me and the older boy stands with his crotch pressing into my thigh. I move a bit and the woman apologizes as if I wouldn't be perfectly happy to hug all this kids.

However they do need guidance as when they attempt to take the poor ton ton (Parisian for "little dog") back down. The boy leader wants to carry him down the steepest descent disagreeing with the Mom's better idea. I have to step in and say "yeah, you can do it but the dog would be too scared." Solved by the kind older cat with the buzz on.

The lady goes with them but says she will come back in a minute. The path below leads down and around the rock ending in a pedestrian pathway that leads eventually to the Solano avenue high street. I see the lady and kids walking down there maybe seeking a place for them to pee. She doesn't arrive back on top before I split but the kids do. They appear in small rock-climbing bands, yes, like big-headed kids in a newspaper comic strip.

I summon my courage and steady myself to climb to that high spot and to stand shirtlessly aloft in the stunning panorama. I notice the Iranian student girl looking at me with some slight curiosity, wondering just how nutty I was perhaps. I'm just trying in my humble way to set my spirit free. A world of struggle lies below but for the moment you project yourself over the trees and later it seems less formidable as a result.

Yet escapism is not the motive and we are called to remain in the world and to help each other as we may. My example follows.

As I prepare for my descent and savor my last moments there, I become aware that the kids are behind me again at that frightening highest spot. A younger quite boyish boy, second in kid command, has ascended the other rock and is urging two little girls to traverse the last precarious rock edge to the tippity-top. One of the girls is the hippie child who just strolls up on all fours. The other little girl hangs back terrified and who could blame her? It's a very serious risk that very few parents would even think of allowing her to take. But the lassez-faire lady is not even around. The boy is unwavering, and proposes that they help her up. The little blonde girl is verging on tears of fear. So old white man has to intervene once again. "Don't make her do it. She's scared." Even then he doesn't concede audibly but I broke the stalemate nevertheless.

Then four o'clock rolls up and the students are splitting too as I get a move on. When I pass by the kids are having a confab in which the little girl's reluctance to risk death is on trial. It's as if it was a matter of crucial importance that she conquer the rock. But the tree at which she firmly stood was far from the edgy rock formation in the middle of the air where she last had been.

"My World is a Town Called Berkeley"

2011-03-06T22:29:00.000-08:00

mail art, postmark 2 March 2011

sent to Coffee Messiah's mail art project, "The World is a Town"

Jesus and the Children

2011-02-28T23:41:00.000-08:00

One Leaf at a Time

2011-02-20T00:29:00.000-08:00

For February the column goes LIFE magazine with all photos and succinct captions. The images derive from the acquisition of a new digital camera and what follows are the first result--the quotidian experience of the non-euclidian Flaneur in his element.

16 February 2011

Morning in the World

The pepper tree outside my bedroom window is storybook-like, as if it was imported from Middle Earth, over it tower examples of the dazzling cumulus clouds on February the sixteenth.

Ray's humble pad.

the Artefactual Altar

A moment's meditation befits an observant Surrealist such as myself.

Kitchen Buddha

See what's in store for breakfast. Rather than expand on the fascinating history of each and every object seen, I will just point out the vintage Lebanese hashish bag on the right. Back in the seventies a friend laboriously peeled this one off in one piece rather than ripping the bag to free the hashish as was customary.

Rooftops of the town

But it's too lovely a day to remain indoors exploring only inner dimensions like a latter day Doctor Strange---I've got to get out and into the town.

Bon Chance

Petrified Anaconda

The House of Vines

Sometimes you can easily enter a place that winds up difficult to leave.

Haiku

crowds of splendid clouds

hailstones in sparse winter trees

no one on the line

17 February 2011

A Visitation of Saint Mary Magdalene

On Thursday a very special spiritual event occurred in Berkeley. The upper tibia of Mary Magdalene, as authenticated a relic as exists, came to the Dominican parish of Saint Mary Magdalene church in North Berkeley. It was contained in a tube encased in a glass reliquary and placed on a table before the altar of this California Arts & Crafts movement-style Catholic church.

Pilgrims went up to view it one by one, to pray, to take a prayer card and hold it to the reliquary, to ask for the blessing of this most beloved of Jesus. Mary Magdalene was first to discover the empty tomb and first to meet the risen Christ. She didn't recognize him, until he spoke. Flooded with grace, she addressed him then as rabboni, signifying Great Master.

Skeletal relic of Mary Magdalene

When my chance came I went up for prayer and for a photograph. Flash reflections were inevitable with the glass, yet a clear view of the bone fragment is visible at center.

After Communion in the Mass that followed, my prayer was mystical and deep. Afterward I felt renewed as we spilled out into the brisk evening. All seemed tinted a shade of post-sunset purple.

Schoolyard Jesus

I walked around the church to the yard of the parochial school for this statue. I had a mental note to try to get a photograph of it one day.

Miraculous Weeping Statue

Catherine Tekakwitha a Native American saint (I think).

House of Gravy

Across Shattuck avenue from the bus stop, this house has displayed a large lighted peace sign for decades. I suspect it is where Wavy Gravy resides. If you look carefully into the upstairs window you can discern his face looking out of a large wall poster. (click on image to enlarge)

Peace to all in this peaceful belt of town where I waited in the love-laden nocturne.

Nearby Bodies of Light

2011-01-15T23:45:00.000-08:00

Ever-feline, the Flaneur finds himself mesmerized into mock hibernation by the lights visible in the chilly night.

As the microcosmic constellations of Xmas lights blink out one by one, the year waxes in whack. Gray nights of penetrating mists alternate with clear colder nights when my vision swims toward the little dipper. The big dipper so omnipresent and huge seems about to topple this way. Orion's belt lines up with the pyramids in Giza. There's a sparse little tree a few doors away still lit with a nimbus of tiny purple lights that feels like a hallucination or retinal afterimage when we're lit-up after dark.

In the meantime a golden light appeared on yonder university hillside. I thought for a moment that it was a flame, it seemed so incongruous and sudden. But it remained and undulated in my contemplation, unexplained even through daylight scrutiny with field glasses. All I could discern was that it continues to burn day and night. Only after a few weeks have I spied hard enough and deduced from its proximity to what looks like Lawrence Hall of Science what it could be. It is attached to a small rectangular building with an apparent tower alongside. As if it was an experiment monitoring or monitored out of the ether. It is in a grassy field a short distance from the concrete-slab retro-futurist Hall of Science, with its secular churchy look.

But why the incessant light-polluting yellow light? Are they attracting extra-terrestrial attention? Do they harvest the moth-like creatures drawn to the lamp I mistook for a flame?

Some metaphor for scientists or university students in there--suckered in by that eternal lamp of knowledge LED billboard bullshit.

Just below this in my eastern line of sight up to the hills, another battery of serious light pollution has reared its godzilla-like head up over the trees. High tension pylons of kleig lights have been installed at the high school sports fields. It's part of a make-over that includes a curvilinear viewing pavilion suitable for a dictator. Such moves were no doubt argued against by a hard-core few in the obscure meetings that usually precede the inevitable. It's never a question of money when it applies to football, or militarism in general.

So I accept it as the fait accompli it probably always was and I trust that they won't get away with lighting too much of the time. If they do abuse their welcome I know I will never have to rally myself to complain about it. There are many whose windows face that direction at much closer range and in Berkeley there is rarely a shortage of people willing to lodge a complaint.

These super-nova of conspicuous energy consumption go out fast. The center of my local milky way is quite nearer to home and it shines on brightly through the night. That locus is the art-lamp shop on the corner with it's ever-changing display windows filled with color, sculpture and light. This is the storefront and workshop of one of my oldest friends in California, Helen who sells lamps as Helly Welly. She lives in an apartment on the second floor and opens the whole place to musicians and other friends for folk-oriented jam session parties every New Year's Eve. Typically there are three or four different song circles in various rooms.

This year I fell by at 11:40 nursing a big bottle of Guinness stout. In the parlor upstairs I played harmonica joining in on some old swing tunes. Rang in 2011 with a brass bell, kissed a girl or two and I headed back home at 12:20. 40 minutes and I had just enough fun while avoiding solitude and self-pity at the over-hyped stroke of midnight. It was the end of a challenging year that didn't kill me but left me somewhat stronger and somewhat more secure. I walked off in the wet sidewalk away from the roisterous house of lamps.

A treasure cave of lamps it is too. There are as well numerous objects d'art some of which bearing incandescent elements but which are primarily works of assemblage. Her modus operandi is the judicious curation and juxtaposition of evocative keepsakes from the figurative attic of 20th century childhood.

A majority of her lamps incorporate these vintage, salvaged elements. Others make ingenious use of hardware repurposed as light-bearing structures. Her striking Tom Tom lamps are fondly remembered. Those began as light sockets installed in drums made of hand-made translucent papers stretched taut over tomato plant growers-- tapered, hooped frames made of wire. These evolved into similar wire and paper structures she built in more extravagant shapes. I owned two myself-- they threw the warmest light and evoked appreciation from all my guests.

Her latest creations center around two concepts: one is a column style, like a totem pole or an exquisite corpse, comprised of disparate thrift shop elements stacked-up on a center pole; the other style involves dangling beveled-glass elements to which she applies transparent color photographic images. The bevelled-glass style makes for dazzling chandeliers some of which alternate the glass with shrinked-plastic elements that are strangely expressionistic.

An example of he column-style led to a odd act of vandalism one dark and mysterious night last fall. I discovered it unbidden as I paused for a smoke on a midnight walk. Several of her columns had incorporated milk glass figures, some of storybook characters like Little Bo Peep and others, notably, included the Chinese goddess Quan Yin. The largest of these was arranged foremost in the display window left of her doorway.

I had stopped to admire them several times before that night, but when I looked again I saw that a circle had been inscribed in the glass window that framed the Quan Yin bust and above it was written "idolatry." It clearly wasn't scratched in because of the smooth almost snazzy lettering. An attempt to scrape off what could have been a white ink proved futile and I concluded that some sort of glass-etching pen must have been used.

I pondered what could have motivated this apparently puritanical vandal to damage her window in this show of apparent chastisement. Elsewhere all over town there are shops and yoga joints with unalloyed endorsement and display of buddhas, herukas, avatars and devi of all sorts. Why did her obvious secular artistic use of a such a figure draw this rebuke? It is apparent to me that whoever did it wanted to express something other than a mere accusation of idolatry and paganism. Neither religious christians nor muslims nor hebrews would wrong someone through such an obvious act of vandalism over so trivial a trangression of the interdiction against graven images in their respective creeds.

No, I suspect that it was foremost a vandal who saw an opportunity for a non sequitur, a punch line. I think it was likely an artist-anarchist type who laughs at all gods, the false and the true. I can't credit that anyone who goes around writing graffiti on windows with an etching pen gives a shit about "idolatry."

As time passes, due to the rain and perhaps to some scrubbing activity by Helen. The circle and the ironic charge of "idolatry" have all but eroded away. Meanwhile, to visitors and to automobile and foot traffic alike, Helly Welly's lamp-store has charmed for decades with its suggestion of warm interiors filled with suitably homey, dreamy and sometimes psychedelic lights. The entire place is sort of like a branch of the Smithsonian Institution of... the Twilight Zone.

The Fireplace Screen

2010-12-31T14:39:00.000-08:00

As the fuzzball sun nestles in scratchy southward trees on somnolent backstreets, the Flaneur, weary from the season of joy, captures his fleeting impressions.

Seated next to me in the Berkeley BART station is a seventeen year old girl with blue and white flower-colored bangs and a little hipster soft hat. She is reading an old used book and it's the same edition of William Blake poetry that I read when I was her age. She is lovely and warm when I tell her so and we enthuse about Blake. I sing her a little of "The Tyger" to demonstrate how he tuned his poems. She opens to a color-reproduction of his illumination of the poem and dear William Blake is reaching across the centuries to two lovers of poetry. It's an epiphany of inter-generational conviviality and the feeling lasts after my train pulls in and we say goodbye.

big black crow sails up

in a yellow ginkgo tree

the noiseless back street

A warm December afternoon beckons so I grab my bag and head down to the Marina. A quiet scene awaits me there strolling past the forest of sailing boats on the docks, past the faceless hotels so remote from day-to-day Berkeley that they could be anywhere. Cruise boats with idle crews await their next batch of marks. My destination is the rolling hills where people fly kites or otherwise frolic about. I'm taking a shoreline route that traces the shape of this man-made peninsula. The vista of Berkeley is all-inclusive from the flatlands to the crest of the hills with all the landmarks from a weird little hill in El Cerrito to the Campanile to Mormon Temple in the Oakland hills. Way off to the right one sees the high-rise crowd in downtown oakland and of course over one's shoulder over the green hilly park lies the Bay, San Francisco and massive Marin culminating in Mount Tamalpais, and beyond that the Pacific ocean and vast sweeping Western sky.

As I traverse the topography in a brisk walk, I approach two bird-watchers carrying huge binoculars mounted on tripods. I see a large bird take off and lead the two fellows farther along the coast. They proceed after it and I continue along after them. When I catch up they are in observation formation focussing on a marginal area roped off to keep people away from wild life. Last time I visited we saw the usual rock-dweling squirrels, and subterraneous ground hogs there and also a dark gray hare with the long ears of a jackrabbit throwing elongated shadows on a large rock. Today a red-tailed hawk a foot-and-a-half tall is standing and looking back at the two motionless bird-watchers who whisper to each other excitedly. I continue past them and just past the hawk who scrutinizes me casually and sit down half-concealed by an earthworks wall. This situation continues for quite a while until two bicyclists pull up from behind me. One lingers back near me but the other your big typical blonde big-bearded self-satisfied guy who looms on the trail above the hawk on his bicycle oblivious to how threatening his bulk might appear to it. Naturally it decides there are too many loutish humans for its liking and it launches itself over the water as various diving birds all dive to avoid it.

I shove-off just then myself along the lonesome trail in the mild marine air. Then as I round the far point of the trail there on a lamp post is either the same hawk or another identical example of the species. I come very near to being even with it when it swoops down toward the water passing within a few feet of me and not without inspiring a trace of alarm. It's splendid reddish coloration and the speckled markings on every feather are displayed to me in vivid detail. It is a thrill and a vision of power elevates me, inspires me and somehow perhaps changes me forever.

Returning wearily to the bus stop after my long hejira, I witness the once-an-hour bus hurl past the desolate outpost and race away without me. So it's the long haul walking the bridge over the horrific highway to the Amtrak station bus stop. On the conspicuous and else-wise deserted bridge I occasionally gesture to drivers crawling underneath by pinching me nose with one hand and making a thumbs-down gesture with the other

Dig the little fire in the hearth.

This year's Christmas Ghost story takes the form of a spectral occurrence in the skies on the longest night of the year. It is the first time theSolstice and a full-linar eclipse have coincided in 372 years. The spooky tide of darkness interrupted only by a short spell of pale daylight takes on a portentous tone as anticipation of the eclipse hangs over the day. A thin veil of cloud fails to obscure the mighty full moon rise which I observe from my figurative tree house window. Then on night misty mild by most standards, sometime after ten the first bite is removed from the pie. The darkness of outer space eats itself and the moon is slowly devoured over the next ninety minutes or so. I bring my wrap-up down to the dark-end of the street for the denouement, the smoke curls into the fraught sky. Then it is gone. There was a moment of observation of its new roseate timpany that is almost immediately occulted by swelling clouds. In the dark night even the darkened moon is removed.

on the night of the solstice

full lunar eclipse

I saw a pattern of black ants

on the wall in a dream

Ray's smoking Grand-daddy

I have a dear friend I don't see very often though I pass by her home a few times a week. Her name is Mary Fabilli and she is a forthcoming saint. I became acquainted with her at the Roman Catholic Mass at 5 0'clock at the chapel at St Albert's college. For a long time it was Mary who prayed near me and with whom I began to walk to the bus stop after Mass. She was in her mid-eighties by then.

When she learned I was a poet and she surprised me by saying she had known Robert Duncan a poet of the Berkeley/San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the forties and fifties. And yet still I lingered in my obscured thinking. Even when I put a call out for new Catholic poetry and received a submission from another well-recognized poet of the Berkeley Renaissance Mary Fabilli, the coin had not yet dropped.

Finally after Mass one evening Mary said to me, "Well, what do you think of my poem?" I had only ever seen a couple of photographs of Mary Fabilli, and one which I had seen recently at that time was in a book entitled "Women of the Beat Generation." The photo showed a middle-aged poet with her hair piled-up on top, smoking a cigarette and it just hadn't registered that this bohemian poet was the snowy-haired saint I prayed alongside in church. She had dropped out of the poet's public life quite a while ago and never gave readings or talks. Her new work appeared in the small press traffic but received little notice anymore. Her name appeared mainly in the histories and biographies of herself and her associates. As a consequence, I had never laid eyes on her despite my twenty years in the San Francisco Bay area with an avid readiness to go and meet her.

We laughed that day in the peaceful chapel courtyard and a few months later I published her poem in a collection called Jubilation (even though her poem was more one of protest). What was more astonishing, she agreed to attend the publication reading at Moe's books on Telegraph Avenue. Astonishing not just because she once wrote in a poem of walking on Telegraph with Duncan many years ago and stating "I don't walk there anymore," but because she never read her poetry in public in her life.

The night of 19 January 2001 entered literary history when she was joined there by a dozen fellow contributors and by her contemporary poet Philip Lamantia. She and Philip had been colleagues in the Poetry Renaissance in the forties but had not seen each other in fifty years. The whole story would really merit another essay: how Lamantia read the same poems for a Catholic group in Washington DC that same day. He was ushered straight from the airport to the reading at the last moment and made his first eye contact with a radiant Mary only after taking the lectern himself. The night opened up like a cathedral ceiling when these two great souls met again and spoke.

I later edited a volume of Mary's recent poetry entitled Pious Poems. It was published at her suggestion by my own Beat Books imprint. We spent time together at her home where, with her hearing loss and my increasing hearing loss, we enjoyed quiet conversation. We very rarely do any longer but are planning a visit, when her age and frailty and my own various states of being permit. We have also written to each other across town quite a lot. I donated her letters and cards along with my other archives to the Bancroft library at the University of California in Berkeley. I received a long, fairly undecipherable multi-page missive from her as recently as this November and somehow I got through most of it.

So on the feast of St Stephen, a friend with a camera visited and we went over to her quaint and holy house to take a photograph of this place in the heart. She was no doubt with her sister Lily for Christmas and so I didn't knock. I'll write to her to arrange a visit and spare my blood pressure the effort of a semi-deaf phone call.

She has lived there quite a long time and lives there still as the year turns again. When I pass by on a bus as I often do I make the sign of the cross and say an Ave Maria as if I was passing a church, or, in this case, the home of a saint.

One night on my midnight walk, which now occurs more often at eleven o'clock, I noticed more than the usual clutter in front of the hallowe'en die-hard house down the block. A couple of plastic bags full of small paper boxes had been put out for recycling. Amid the dangling spiders, fake cobwebs, and half-buried bones were dozens of empty cartons for some inscrutable product, all with a printed pattern in one bright primary color. I selected all the red ones and came home to construct this year's impromptu Christmas centerpiece display. I assembled a toy fireplace festooned with vintage elements including my late Mom's home-made needle-point and knitted items that had come in the mail over the years. Arranged on top of the fridge, this little oven of Santa-anticipation with its glow-in-the-dark Baby Jesus halo candle crown has charmed visitors of all ages.

A Christmas Blessing to you.

The Slides of Samhain

2010-11-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

Hallowe'ek was kaleidoscopic this year: the dazzling illusion of depth, the vertigo, some "Jack Herrer" extra color-receptive 16%THC sativa, the foliage, the mad costumes and decorations--the works. The Flaneur observes a sort of autumnal holy week over the holidays.

Friday, 29 October 2010

Hallowe'en Studies

warm days cold nights...the abscission zone...the incarnadine leaf

As delightful weather as the area can summon this time of year, awaits me as I set out for town before noon. Last Saturday I had a brush with atrial fibrillation at a Berkeley hospital. The cardiologist advised less coffee (was up to six cups) and alcohol (one big stout a day is all I take), but he did not say the same about my medical cannabis enjoyment. I stopped at a little traffic impediment at Channing that functions as a commons of sorts to have a few puffs. Just over my shoulder loom two grotesquely tall cornstalks, each with untouched gargantuan ears of corn unpicked. They have lost their green in time for a traditional Hallowe'en which of course has more to do with crows and scarecrows than it does with many contemporary notions of the holiday--sexy nurse outfits or transient media characters.

Continuing on, my perception of the day enlarged, I savored the ripe smell of the trees. then I caught sight of a commotion some blocks ahead at McKinley St. Kids were amassed on a sidewalk and could only mean one thing--a Hallowe'en parade at an elementary school.

I quickened my pace and caught up with the general high spirits of the gleeful children. Quite a crowd of ghouls and cute novelty costumes, all so involved with the world of children the few adults grinning and walking alongside in the street were easily ignored. One parent type with a camera was posing a little pharaoh and a little girl who gets my vote for best costume. She was tasteful make up and a satin dress under a remarkable headdress of multi-colored snakes as the the Medusa of Greek myth.

I felt sympathy for the unlucky kids whose parents sent them to school without costumes, even though most looked so enchanted by the festivities that they were having a very good time nevertheless. I wanted to hug one of them he seemed so sweet and innocent. If I was a teacher there I'd raise money for an assortment of inexpensive masks and disguises so every kid could parade in style. But who knows maybe there are rules against "guising" children.

As they all poured into the schoolyard for more fun I shoved-off. A mom was arriving with a little Minnie Mouse who was coming to join the older siblings in the great North American children's holiday.

The earliest citations for trick-or-treating date from the 1930s, when it is believed to have begun in the Northern USA and in Canada evolving from the Irish custom of "guising," going door-to-door in costume to perform a song, a poem, a dance, a scene from a play, in return for sweets (and perhaps liquor or stout). Funny, it has been going on only since the 1930s, I might have thought George Washington went trick-or-treating.

Hallowe'en itself as most know emerges from Irish culture as well. It represents Samhain (pronounced sow-win) the old Gaelic new year which is aligned with the harvest. The veil between the living and the dead was thin at this time of the year, you could speak to your lost beloved ones. Ghosts roamed the earth and the fairy folk, benign and terrifying alike, ventured out into early darkness of the physical world.

The first jack-o-lanterns were carved out of turnips, and many of the old-fashioned games associated with the holiday began in the culture of the charming Irish folkways. Pranks and tricks are theirs as well. As is also plain, the basic anarchic, slightly revolutionary spirit of Hallowe'en is not unknown in the Emerald Isle. This is only to glance at the visionary not to say hallucinatory tendencies among Celtic people.

After the fortunate timing in encountering the parade, I continued on with business at hand. First to launch a work of mail-art, a detoured post-card entitled "Howl-o-ween", to my Crosstown Correspondent Joey Know, I needed today's mail and fell by the Post Office to drop it in an old wooden slot marked "letters only." On my way I notice my favorite new eccentric of the downtown scene: a tall thin clean-shaven loner who wears a dark suit, cowboy boots and, until recently, a cowboy hat. He somewhat resembles the country singer Lyle Lovett. Whenever I see him he is patrolling the lampposts of downtown and removing the various fliers that have been unlawfully posted on them.

Today, after I left the PO, when I saw him again, he seemed to be speaking to me as we passed on the sidewalk. Regrettably, with my hearing back in the 20th century, I missed it. I sensed it was the sly, "I'm-onto-you" type of thing. People like himself are often extremely sensitive to the observation of others and my interest may have registered on his radar. Hope he senses I wish him well.

From here into the City Hall where I pass the gun-detector and sign in to visit the somnolent city clerk's office. I explain that my meticulously filled-out ballot went into the mail box without stamps last week and hasn't been returned yet. A guy barely clearing his cubicle wall calls over--"it's guaranteed delivery, the registrar of voters pays the post." Well, the many years I was a clerk of polls here and in Massachusetts earned me a an eighty-one cent tip from the registrar. General amusement follows me out.

At rest in the park, let's call it Provo, signs of Hallowe'en spill out from the high school into the park. On the eve of a big vote for legalization of cannabis, which was trumped by Arnold with liberalization, Berkeley at least seems close to majority acceptance and normalization. So outside the campus in a circle in the grass student-age youth are passing the pipe, boys and girls socializing and learning. On the northeast side of the park the police station looms obliviously. As I leave I feel compelled to tell one of them to be careful to get enough oxygen. He was wearing a body and head stocking through which he was inhaling on the pot pipe right after running around the park. As I walk up the lead girl says a slightly too big hello revealing a slight bit of nervousness perhaps under her obvious bravado. The kid assures me he's getting enough air. Peace kids, little do you know that the old guy concerned about you is probably more stoned than you are. But then this Berkeley, they may have thought I was in fact too stoned.

Down Alston, approaching sirens drive a dog on a front porch to start howling, I howl too to encourage him. Kids in costume pass by talking soberly. Hallowe'en is coming on.

That night it was time to improvise a Hallowe'en display for my advantageously positioned front window. I had found an intriguing shopping bag from Ormand Jayne London Perfumery in our recycling bin. A sturdy paper trapezoid eighteen inches high that was pumpkin orange on the outside and ultra black on the inside. The cords I cut off tied together for a good garrot, but no stranglers this year. I cut a great old-fashioned jack-o-lantern face in it, a scary grin. Next I waited for nightfall to visit for the first time the Tempko tot lot on Roosevelt, one street up from our dark abode. Here I filled two black plastic bags from the Sacramento corner bottle shop with the gravelly sand from the playground. This filled bottom of the luminarium as such en-candled bags are known. Into I plunged a plumbers candle I keep for black-outs. It burns bright and long. The heavy paper of the bag allows very little light through so it becomes projector casts the semaphore of a jack-o-lantern face as rays of lights. Inside on my ceiling or when It shines into the window creating cobwebs of light it creates an effect that my housemate Ian perfectly and simply described as "spooky". By daylight this version of a luminarium, one that the bag itself doesn't light-up, has great effect of the deep black interior seen through the orange face. Odd and yet satisfying--for the moment that is.

Saturday 30 October 2010 "Hell Night"

Crib Sheets

My old comrade in arms Joe shows up after noon on another day seasonal and lovely. He's carted over some cartons that I asked him to store at the finale of my last pad. Most important for today's purposes, he has brought my small flock of surviving Hallowe'en talisman and my eldritch stag antlers. The antlers go downstairs on the mantle of the enormous but defunct fireplace. Placed before an ornate mirror with long white tapers they add to a self-portrait in reflection that is slightly extravagant and Dalian.

Joe and I hang a tad and fiddle with my out-moded browser. In an attempt to download a fresh one I lose both. I limp into an exploded view of my pseudonymous social network. This dilemma reminds me of that old Kennedy campaign song Frank Sinatra sang, the annoying one about a rubber tree plant.

As early darkness arrives the haunted fragments have all fallen into place. Heirlooms in needlepoint fabricated by my late Mom in Massachusetts, in ancient spooky Fall River. Home on a visit, I sketched her outlines on a plastic grid and she made a witch, a cat, a jack-o-lantern, and a ghost. She was in her eighties then and she added to the suite with a large round jack-o-lantern in needlepoint a few years afterward when it arrived in the mail. She sketched a jack-0-lantern face in high folk art simplicity and the original drawing on paper is still on the verso.

These I arrayed on a black wool scarf over a small table with metal legs and a top resembling wine barrel slats. I brought it into my NYC-sized room for my jack-o-luminarium. Over both I strung a small set of small white Xmas-style lights and added my set of six glass antique-replica Hallowe'en lanterns. They consist of witch, skull, ghost, scarecrow, and two jack-o-lanterns, are formed a festive and radiant arch below the curtain rod of my front window. Also seen in the vicinity is my bean-bag bat by Edward Gorey. It's a first issue in great shape I bought on its initial release in 1980. He has ruby eyes and a body of cloth printed with a finely hatched drawing by the mock-Victorian Goth master. The wings are ingeniously articulated by stitching, and he's an old cuddlesome friend. By the next year the printed cloth on other examples I saw on sale had gotten muddy-looking--so look for an early issue if you do look. A few other fond knick-knacks are placed around the snuggest of pads, notably a vintage hand-painted winking cat face on a spring like-wire loop, his origins as mysterious to me as they are to you, mon cher hypocrite lecteur.

At night I watch the disc of a film from the Hammer horror film factory of a half century ago called "Never Take Candy from Strangers." It, incredibly, concerns a demented, elderly molester of little girls and whose wealthy family controls the Canadian town where it occurs. It has a wonderful indictment of rigged local politics, a lawyer browbeating the victim in a trial sequence, but the actual scenes of stalking and menace are handled in the classic monster-in-the-woods Hammer film genre. I was laughing even while feeling real tension and hope for the little girls to escape the pedophile zombie with out-stretched arms. When they start downstream it blows "Night of the Hunter" level tension out of the water. A long rope from their rowboat is stilled tied to the dock where the candy man salivates.

On my late night stroll I survey the area for Hallowe'en activity. On the Parker I find myself walking on a moonlight sidewalk behind a couple masquerading as Homer and Marge Simson. Her towering blue wig barely clears the low branches of the trees like a dislocated countess at Versailles.

mail art 29 October 2010 postmark

31 October 2010 All Hallow's Eve

Howl-o-ween

It's the day itself. When you awaken you remember it is then forget it as unimportant to your shower and breakfast routines. But underneath every moment is an awareness of the subterranean holiday that only really begins at dusk. Hallowe'en flavors the day, it colors the entire few weeks before and afterward. And the flavor is not just the ubiquitous doses of the old-stand-by candies, the bag you buy "for the kids." It's the whole atavistic pleasure in and surrender to the Fall. Scents trigger deep feelings this time of year: leaves, apples and other fruit, fields and meadows, pumpkin and spices, and the fine cannabis of autumn.

Today the old dark house is abuzz with the impending children's pumpkin-carving party scheduled for late afternoon. I reconnoiter the festivities early on and it is a party of special things to do indeed. There's a preamble table full of striking exemplars of the world of pumpkins and decorative squash. I really dig one big squash that's pumpkin-shaped but has skin of so dark a green that in twilight it reads as black. Next is the old and honored picnic table with more pumpkins, house-mates and toothsome food. And best for last, on the little patch of grass beside the garden plot, a pow-wow of kids and moms working on jack-o-lanterns. I nosh a little home-smoked salmon then head back upstairs to try my latest edible wonderment.

Over a little coffee-milk so to speak, I open and nibble from a small gingerbread housed in a mylar envelope labeled "Super Potent/Cannabis Gingerbread." It is more moist and odd tasting than the gingerbread from your favorite bakery which you might prefer but which would not usher you so delightfully to the cheery wonderland of every moment.

I rejoin the rollicking party outside, wearing only my everyday beret as a daylight costume. Greet our neighbor Mahati with blue lipstick, hair and feather boa-- I later learn she was dressed as a river. I keep finding her blue feathers afloat around the block. Her son Rowan is, sorry no other way to say it, adorable. The baby downstairs wears a cuddly turtle outfit intended for a dog outfit, but she's working it. I meet a bug kid and say, a beetle, but Mom says a lady-bug. Everybody loves lady bugs.

And it's high spirits all around and high jinx as allowed. I brought down two bowls of beans: kidney beans lightly sauteed with olive oil and tamari sauce and another bowl containing my state-of-grace black beans. As I drop the beans off I state "with apology to your spouses, here comes the bean man." After my meal and some fun chatting with the hip all-ages-crowd, I begin to feel very high, enough so that I decide to rest and pass over the peak in my chamber. Moreover I neglected to bring my earplugs and my oldest pal Helen the lamp lady from the corner is starting a set on clarinet in a trio with my two house mates one on saxophone the other guitar. It's far too loud for my hurt ear so I dash past them between numbers.

On the way inside I see a Mom guiding and restraining a little boy whose obviously wants in through the glass doors, kind of in a spawning movement against the glass. I ask if she wants to use the facilities and she says no. Then up in my tree-house pad, I hear a little battering at the door. It's the amphibious kid from the back deck and his Mom. They had come up the back stairs into the apartment of the family whose little girl Sandiya and her parents are the hosts of the gathering and through it to the backdoor and onto my door. I admire the kid's exploratory spirit too great to be confined to a backyard do. I invite them in and of course in he comes, Mom hovers on the threshold. We try to call his attention to specific Hallowe'en tableaux but he mainly wants to go to the front of the house and turn back the wiser.

I greet him warmly clasping his back and saying, "I like you. You're nice" which I mean from the bottom of my heart. He likes me too and says stuff back that may have been words but I don't get. I tell Mom I have trouble hearing; she says that's all right he has trouble talking. Onward they go and I feel like an angel visited me.

I sleep away or deep trance or journey in inner space or something for an hour while the country music station plays soft and there's nothing really nothing to turn off. I wake again in time to see the still light-out treat-or-treat parade emerging from our drive-way after the party. Waiting for them a guy with the video spies me beaming down with my lantern and begins the sequence with me like a loony old neighbor. Not long after they mosey off, other kids start showing up and hitting the more decorated houses. I decide to bring the old mouth harp out on the front steps to play a while and maybe add an attraction to our side of the street. Obtaining a cork from the abruptly vacant backyard scene, I roast it and use the charcoal to sketch on a wicked monobrow, a small goatee and a mustache in the morphology of the branches of a tree. With my large diameter black beret and smock-like shirt, the simple heavy black lines have a Dali-esque affect.

So adorned I begin my macabre recital of a ghost train slow-blues sitting on the front steps with some gargantuan heavily carved hard "pumpkins." But it's also the time of the return of the trick-or-treat troop and there's some small disquiet among the kids and parents. Darling Rowan was cheered at first hearing of my train sounds but had a too-tired something-went-wrong crisis on his hands. Somehow a bottle of some drink had spilled on his spider-man outfit. I felt his pain. Whenever I have ingested cannabis-enhanced foods I can really play and sing at my current best. Hearing me for the first time my 22 year old neighbor said with surprise, "go, Ray!"

So I hung-out there after the children's hub-bub dispersed toward home and candy rationing. I am left in charge of the bowl of small candy-bars that the household had provided for treats. More lights, front doors closer together, and, as I was to dig later, a haunted attraction kept the heavy traffic opposite my door. Three smiling black girls politely accepted their candy and I really don't think that they respond with tricks much these days. Or rather boys gets old enough to abjure candy-seeking and turn themselves over entirely to tricks, to stunts, and to pranks. Sort of remember going through a stage like that myself, I confess.

Once we loaded a pile of unguarded pumpkins into a volkswagen bug and drove around bombing places including innocent civilian sites, an armory, and one war memorial. We began at the armory on Dwelly street used that night for a clean-cut dance when we projected one smashing pumpkin onto the front sidewalk as we sped by. Soon we were driving on South Main and came up behind a pedestrian, I learned out and more or less bowled him over. The orange spheroid hit him in the back of his knees and he went straight up in the air before making a soft landing in the massive wad of pumpkin debris. I cringe now and hope that in this life of my own suffering I've done some advance placement time in Purgatory for that mayhem.

That night long ago, we stuck the last of the purloined pumpkins on the rifle of a World War I doughboy statue at the busy intersection of Flint street and Plymouth avenue. It was still there on our way to school the next morning. All Soul's day, a day of holy obligation for us Catholics. It meant after Hallowe'en you faced the other side of the coin the next day.

When the household gets sleepy I take my nocturnal somnambule, as ever in search of the ineffable heart of Hallowe'en. I note that a huge pumpkin on McGee went uncarved despite surgical patterns drawn on it in marking pen. Many observant houses that I spied on earlier evenings are enhanced tonight. Lots of new decorations have risen from graves in attic and garage to spook again. I head for a Haunted House I was clued-to and find there a graveyard/cornfield tableaux. Folks are invited into it in pursuit of the candy. Then as they approach a trellis walk the scare crow with a pitchfork comes to life to growl and grab at the hapless trespasser. Effective. A loud-talking black lady, trick-or-treating minimally in costume, a little blown-out on the trails, narrates her experience as it happens. "Don't go near that! I was so scared!"

Continuing on in an aleatory manner I take the next street parallel to return to McGee. Only one house on it has decoration, yet in my big sensitivity to spooky ambiance evident in the greenery and houses, in the deserted dark quiet, I decide it's a much spookier street. Worlds away from the fun house atmosphere a block away. On McGee I cross paths with the family of the broad-comedy black lady and bid them a happy holiday. "Happy halloween," she says without a trace of mirth in her deep slow gravely voice. Now that was frightening.

Back at the shack I relax and restart some other-worldly Tibetan chant. I have it playing out of the window on a speaker hidden by a curtain next to my lantern. Two known neighborhood spooks show up after the party's over, eccentric Simon a former resident of the dark abode. Tonight he is in his element with his real long white chin beard and a huge floppy velvet wizard's hat festooned with tiny blinking lights. He arrives with his elf-folk companion Laurie who has also an extravagant velvet hat electric-- fucshia leopard-skin inside and something wildly different on the outside. With her flippity-floppity hat, her fashion and tat, I offer that she is a "fashion victim" but it doesn't quite name her. They dig the effectiveness of my minimalist but still painterly disguise.

Joined by a fourth reveler we all decide to go last-call trick-or-treating across the street. Our companion, whom I'll call OG Kush, is not wearing any costume tonight. He's the most benign of men and yet he if knocked on your door tonight you would not consider him rudely under-adorned to be asking for candy on Hallowe'en. He also wore a beret and with his earrings and full-facial tattoos and he rocked a sizable tooth through his nostrils. He's Queequeg 365 days a year.

We all look as if we had stepped out of where the wild things are tonight as we follow a path of small luminaria to the front yard of a back house. I prowled here earlier to check it out and now guide the grounds tour of an impromtu cemetery. It contains not only large mock headstones but the standing bottom-half of a real headstone. The perfect setting of its overgrown leafy October backyard was enhanced by a real looking graveyard fence. It gave me a nice frisson when I saw it alone and passed by the charming lamp-lit living window with bonnie little kids. Maybe they saw me pass by as they watched for trick-or-treaters but I was a mere wandering ghost as well as a recovered addict who tries to avoid candy. But now, led by our soigne sorceress, we accept their greeting and get to see the piece-de-resistance effect that I had missed. A substantial witch figure was suspended up near the second floor roof awaiting the kids command to swoop across the graveyard toward us. We cheered naturally. Then we bid the family the holiday, no doubt to let them watch a little more TV then go to bed.

Another house has transformed partisan campaign signs into gravestones by pulling a sock of fake spider web stuff over them, fitting really. It has loads of other holiday stuff strewn around it's cluttered vintage-funk yard design. But what I dig most is a string of small lights with a reddish interior and blue outer glow so that they are like psychedelic stars perpetually inventing the color purple. I dig that they keep the decorations lit every night as I do-- looking from my window I see their strange necklace floating in the pepper tree under Orion's belt.

Last stop is at the Tinker's house. There I actually do accept some of the dreadful sugar-stuff and it does keep you moving about. Then it's adult crash time. Laurie bikes away home and Simon the charming British-born crack-pot wizard and quack comes over to fiddle with my computer. Then he insists on some guided breathing to save my soul or my health or my life or something.

When he exits finally I wind down in blessed solitude after my first children's style Hallowe'en in years. The rest of the night involves a candle left burning in the lantern all night, chiaroscuro film archetypes, and sleep steadily approaching from not so far away.

All Saint's Day

Aftermath: Day of All Hallows

The heart's a little heavy after so much fun. I pin an antique holy metal over my heart on both my inner and my outer shirts. I try to remember to pray throughout the day. In some periods prayer comes easier than others. Today is the day of holy obligation, in which Catholics are expected to try to get to Mass, but I will go tomorrow for All Souls Day instead.

I have wearied long ago of my gentle attempts to induce people to understand the difference. The popularity of the Mexican customs of el Dia de Los Muertos with it's emblematic sugar skulls, "bread of the dead", and calaca toys and whatnot has only somehow added to the confusion between All Saints and All Souls days. This is found even among those who might have heard that the procession in the Mission district of San Francisco takes place on November the second. It's a procession that began to take shape in the early eighties, around Galaria de la Raza as a small community event and is now a wild SF carnival-like winding parade. I was there early on and loved to dine at the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor after the procession in which we painted our faces white with black skull features and wore suitably solemn clothes. I had a mail-art work called "El Alcade" a drawing of a skeleton judge in one year's Los Muertos show at the gallery. But I last attended in 1989 and glimpsed how big it was to become. I walked with a friend and her two or three year-old, a sweet little never-had-a-haircut punk-hippie boy who is an adult today I hope. Giant skeleton arches were over the street, a huge roisterous crowd of skull faces hooted, and outlandish skeleton and death-based side-shows abounded. Not to pine but I had enjoyed the old celebrations. Now it's an international known event like of course everything else.

Yet another memory of a night not long afterward comes to mind. It was a November first reading by my friend and colleague the widely-known Berkeley poet Ivan Arguelles and the major American poet Barbara Guest. It took place at the Claremont branch of the Berkeley Library in my old Elmwood stomping ground. As Barbara prepared to read someone exclaimed that it was the day of the dead today! I politely informed the ground that that it was in fact tomorrow and that today was All Saints day called Todos Santos in Spanish. A voice led others in maintaining that I was mistaken. Barbara said nothing but she looked mildly aghast. This facial expression and demeanor was not unusual for her in her dotage I came to notice. After the reading she signed a copy of her book The Blue Stairs with the inscription "for Stephen on Todos Santos."

On this holy day the fairest of weather continues. I walk the perpendicular route over Roosevelt street to Allston Way. Along the path I find the segments of an abandoned Hallowe'en costume hand-made out of cardboard. They consist of a cut-out sword, a large letter 'E', and the trunk, a painted and shaped box out-fit bearing the legend, "E-VIL ROBOT with SWORD." These I collect and arrange neatly on the sidewalk as a temporary folk-art installation.

As night falls I play liturgical music and make a quiet supper. As the clock rolls I watch a mild film before entering again the realm of spirit.

All Souls Day

Dia de los Muertos-Day of the Dead

Aftermath

The days of the dead occur at this point in the year in Catholic belief, in pre-Christian Celtic belief pre-Columbian meso-American belief and in other cultural traditions in the northern hemisphere. Death and rebirth, the afterlife and it's relation to the living, and the great mystery are universal in human thought and naturally are tied to nature. A process of synchretization takes place when a new religion comes to dominate in any people whereby ideas of the sacred in the new religion become aligned with the sacred in the old religion. Not only do elements of both survive in a new synthesis but they are perhaps turned a bit so that all fit in place. The Christian churches were built on the sacred sites along the mysterious ley lines in France and in Ireland and the British Isle. In Haiti the Holy Trinity, Blessed mother and saints became identified with African loas in Voudon tradition. With All Saints day one sees the techtonic wheels of the calendars of Eire and of the pre-Columbian world turning to arrive at the Church's official days of remembrance of the saints and the dead.

And everyone loves a bonfire this time of year. Bonfires from the Celtic "bone-fires" burning the skeletons of the animals slaughtered after the Summer. The veil is made thin by all the dying plants and slaughtered animals in the season of Samhain.

I spend my evening hour tonight taking the bus to attend Mass at the chapel of small Catholic college. I hadn't been there for a few weeks after over a decade of weekly attendance. It's always a moving experience and it was for me particularly this night after my irregular heartbeat worries. It is the place I truly learned to sing, to sing without over-self-consciousness, to sing from the heart and to sing to God. The experience of faith regardless of how absurd the precepts may sound to a skeptic is profound and if you believe you are praying and singing to God other people's arguments are beyond irrelevant.

I dawns on me that I have not taken my pill before the Mass began at my customary med time of five o'clock. So just as the Gospel begins I crouch behind the brothers and dig my pill-box out of my book-bag. Then not enough saliva to swallow it's foulness I have to dive again to dig some dried pineapple out of the crowded clutch. But it kicks in and I'm able to feel well enough to get the full benefit of this beautiful and healing sacrament in this jewel-box of a sacred place, my San Chapelle. At the moment when the priest asks who shall we pray for I aloud say the names of my family and my friends who have died.

After Mass I realize in the fading daylight and advancing chill that my black beret is missing. Nowhere on the floor I deduce it must have been found and say again,"c'est la vie." Then we walked down to College avenue, my friend Barbara and I. She has a new hypertension diagnosis. I listen and offer the benefit of my experience as a sufferer. We are both cheered by friendship founded on the mutual lifeboat

I'm wearing in addition to my saints medal a little articulated skeleton in black enamel with rhinestone eyes. He hangs from the button-down button of my shirt collar. On the way to five-o'clock Mass I hopped off my local 49 bus when it reached the Haight-Ashbury of Berkeley, Telegraph and Durant. Students poured through otherwise quiet precincts. I'm bound for a haircut at the Intensity barber shop. Someone must have tipped the owner it was hip to say barber shop. But since my old-time barber quit the biz the only old-style place I know of is a weird vintage nostalgia-esque place on College Avenue that's never open--pile of mail inside.

Outside I see a striking tall gal on her way back inside. Are you the hair-cutter I ask with relief now that I see that it isn't a Chinese lady. It is she. I ask the cost and say I'll be right back --that I must hit the automatic teller. She seems to doubt me a little, whitish hair and all. But I do return pronto for a very stylish and I dare say hip cut by lovely Sandrine. Ah, Sandrine of an old guy's dreams. We talk fast friends the whole time. She extracts the story of my former marriage to a woman whose parents objected to my being Gentile. Little did I notice that a guy loafing, maybe owner, seemed almost Israeli to me when he too entered our chat. He seemed to actually run the new high-gloss falafel chain store down telegraph. I have tried it from a sidewalk sample drone--tasty but really not a fairly common food-stuff hereabouts to bet your shirt on. I sensed this while bemoaning with him the dearth of consumer foot traffic on the Avenue these days. Say I'll try to go some night before a Moe's reading and perhaps I may.

So adieu to my young friend I'll return another cut by her when I can.

Back at the ranch I go out to the pumpkin load zone in the backyard with the balance of my dinner stout in a glass. In a quick flurry of activity I recover a half-made jack-0-lantern from the behind picnic table and create my own from it. A kid and his Mom presumably had opened and emptied it and started two simple triangular eyes. I try to add nose and mouth then observe that earlier incisions had already occurred in the region. I give it a huge greedy grin and reattach a section for the nose. Next I rely on the garden to supply additional features such as a green skinned squash stuffed inside, its stem poking out like a tongue or a cigar. For eyes two cheery cherry tomatoes and out of his skull cap a jaunty marigold. All this rests on a broad squash leaf with a total of five tea-lights to light it inside and out. "The Producer" (see photo).

Here shared the picnic table with a two-foot wide orange hard-type "pumpkin."

Next I light a completed Jack or in this case Jill with spiral eyes to which I add a witch's hat with long black wig attached--the proverbial wig-hat of the blues. Surrounded by the un-carved squash collection and more squash leaves and candles it all made for a stunning backyard tableau. Later tonight I come back for a wee smoke under the stars with the silent chorus of vari-colored and illuminated gourds.

Hallowe'en ambiance continued all the following week past Guy Fawkes night on Friday through to the first Sunday after the Dark Hallows and beyond. I maintained our pumpkin flock out back and to some extent on the front steps too. There early jacks were succumbing to mild weather and fruit flies. In the mouth of a sturdier carved hard "pumpkin" with toothy maw was a smaller squash-face being devoured. Oddly when I looked again the next day the little pumpkin squash was missing. There followed a definite replacement example certainly not the same one. A miniscule mystery. I asked the folks downstairs when I next saw them. They had replaced the first one when it went missing. Odd.

Next morning as I rose before dawn to hit the water closet I see orange in the pepper tree and start to think o the sun is rising an orange ray has struck it. Look again observe that it is not the case. I squint at the color with too early to rise eyes and can't identify it. Later in the day I look again and it dawns on me it is the little missing jack positioned upright in the tree as if it were looking in at me.

Theories followed. Who would put it there? A trickster tossing it up until it stayed, as unlikely as the idea of an adult risking his neck to climb it. I began to suspect some kids from next door when I saw them inexplicably choosing the commencement of a rain shower to send one of them up the tree. Did they want to retrieve the pumpkin after putting it there themselves? I wanted to ask them but didn't want to frighten them. The girl was unsuccessful in scaling the newly wet trunk, walking up doubled over to use her hands as well. I started downstairs to go out and talk to them but they were gone by the time I arrived. Still perched in the tree the little jack grinned down not without a hint of derision.

As the days passed the solution that a squirrel had stashed it arose. It seems far too heavy for a squirrel, I could believe a raccoon. Then there were signs it was being eaten and soon it was gone. Another small real and apparently extra sweet pumpkin had been utterly demolished and ruling out the abundant but noisy crows or the raccoons it must have been the beefy squirrels one sees about. Down on the corner I see big juicy pine cones chewed by them and discarded like corn cobs. Helen who lives there says even the little ones run the trees with large cones.

So one is forced to concede that the notion any one placed the little voodoo jack there to spook me is utterly false and paranoid to even consider.

So as the week passed and most of the houses faded out in their orange glow. On my neighborhood walks I still see the odd display still lit, a notable one has eerily glowing white hands protruding from a column of viney leaves. There's another display close by my home, a lace that I have long suspected of Hallowe'en die-hard tendencies. They for example have the bones of a large plastic skeleton popping out of the dirt there all year long. I stop spark the herb frequently and chuckle over the orange and green lights spiraling up a tree the white-cloth ghosts hanging from the porch roof, and best of all the spider gate. Their wooden gateway is over-decorated with hanging lights, skeins of spider web stuff, hanging spider lights, and blinking googled-eyed bulging eye-glasses with eyes. This is their own private nightmare before Thanksgiving and counting

draft written entirely in three successive sunday sessions on super gingerbread. I will return to correct revise and edit some velvet morning when I'm straight.

"If you write stoned edit straight. If you write straight edit stoned." Timothy Leary

The Inward Empire

2010-10-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur resumes his regular feuillton from the tree-lined boulevards, the noirish back alleys and the bald pedestrian bridges of Berkeley. He has relocated to a long-familiar section of town called in its storied history the McGee-Spaulding District.

It unfolds its deeply Berkeley character to me as I observe it's mostly peaceful streets at all hours of the day or night. Like many of us, its vegetation could use a trim and there is an artful recycling of vintage elements. Amid the inescapable chatter and beeping of 2010 a strain of 20th century hip style remains--as artfully applied as the patches on Neal Young's old bell-bottoms.

The borders of my new part of town are set as between Sacramento Street and Martin Luther King, Jr Boulevard; and between Dwight Way and University Avenue. California Street is somehow it's center and on a traffic island at the intersection with Dwight, a sign marks its history.
It seems that in 1820, King of Spain granted the land to a Luis Peralta. His children sold it to a San Francisco businessman who in turn flipped it to an intrepid Irish immigrant named James McGee. On the land he ran a successful farm and he became one of the leading political voices around town. In an effort to promote his property values and his own prestige he funded the original St Joseph's Catholic church and proposed the area as town center. Newspapers ridiculed the idea of a City Hall built in the middle of a farm and before long the facts on the ground settled the issue as it stands today. City Hall landed not very far away from St Joseph the Worker as the church is now named and whose occasional bells toll a somewhat mournful sound in my solitude.
Fields of barley, orchards and livestock remained. Apparently the area stayed farmland through the 19th Century, long after the entire city was subdivided for housing. It was only after the San Francisco Earthquake of 1908 that real building took place, notably by 1912 when the Southern Pacific railroad ran a train down California street. A sort of grandness persists in the lay-out of very wide streets hosting rows venerable trees. There are some distinctive older houses and an occasional showy newer place but a rather humble middle-class architecture prevails.

And yet somehow in my perception the area retains a strangely rural flavor--an old fence, a raspberry bush, the noble, aged trees, the wild fauna and domestic gardens, the house cats strolling unmolested down the center of sidewalks.
I picture this central region of Berkeley as having an unexplained analogy to the Central Valley of California sometimes called the Inland Empire. In my solitude and contemplation I have come to regard my new neighborhood and my new abode as an inward empire. After my 30 year long habitation, after serious consideration of migrating elsewhere, in an outward direction, I had instead moved inward toward the heart of Berkeley. A less public nervous cerebral scary exciting happening dreadful crowded competitive part of town than university-side central Berkeley where I had been living for six years.
To digress perhaps on the Inland Empire... it has struck me for quite a long time that when seen from an aerial topographical map the San Joaquin Valley as defined by two long rather labial mountain ranges resembles the topography of a vulva. One can stretch the symbolism of this any number of ways, but in my own subjectivity the womb association extends from Inland Empire to my local Inward Empire. It has to do with the face I wore before I was born.

It is also a neighborhood that begins a more racially integrated Berkeley. Oddly, sort of a Mason-Dixon line can be detected after which, African-American owned homes begin to proliferate. There is still such a line discernible at Dwight Way and it determined what sort of activities took place south of it. The gun play has diminished as far as I can tell. I walk some of the blocks in that direction in tranquility. Most of the houses are attractive even if there is an occasional crime-watch tone, a grim suspiciousness, say a barred window. Even in the hot crack years, the action was outside the Spaulding-McGee district. This is not to imply that we don't see cops with flashing lights racing around the hood now and again. Berkeley is always ready to respond with profuse cops-in-cars, often just one cop per car. This policy is perhaps in inverse ratio to the idea of foot patrols as the most humanitarian and effective way to keep urban communities peaceful and safe.

So, bucolic, artisanal, educated yet working class, liberal, casual as the place is, there is still an edge. And in the general disappointment of the American dream, there is some anomie and friction among local residents as well, without doubt.
The trains sounding as they pass West of here are frequent and can seem loud. I happen to love the sound but there has been many over the years who object to the volume, frequency, and duration of the train whistles. In other words, they moved into West Berkeley alongside the tracks, presumably with knowledge of the situation, and then try to force the trains to "keep it down."
A similar disharmony exists between the newer not-in-my-back-yard residents and the older-style Berkeley residents over such Aquarian age hold-overs as People's Park and a free-box on Channing not far from my abode.
Thems-that-got never knew or have forgot what it's like to live and to have not. Some local home-owners are chagrined by the thought of having the needy falling by to look for sweaters or pants or children's clothes. They maintain that it's presence damages their property value. But many more residents bring their donations by the venerable old wooden box with a hinged top and some occasionally score something themselves from it. And many leave useful and interesting housewares in individual sidewalk free boxes as they move-out or merely decide the items are no longer needed. To me this represents an endearing folkway, one that I hope endures.

Recently, I have scored coffee mugs, an as-new audio cassette dubbing deck, a rocking chair, among other furnishings. My most astounding find of them all occurred only after I had rejected the idea of accepting any sort of donated mattress. I can't help but regard a second-hand mattress as the fossil record of other peoples effluvia, you dig? Yet I needed a replacement for the one I tossed-out as I left my last pad. I was dreading the hassle of shopping for a new one and then getting it home.
When, deus ex machina, the house two doors down put something out with the sidewalk shrubs-- a blindingly white oblong with a sign reading "free mattress." I stopped and looked it over. I fully expected to reject it only to decide it merited closer inspection. It has a pure cotton cover over firm foam layers, and overall can be folded once which I did to get inside under the lamp for examination. All the while blessed darkness obscured my ungainly task.
Incredibly, not only was it immaculate and seemingly never used it even had a quite recent date stamped on its tag. Brought home for guests, it may have been little-used and cumbersome to store. I had to accept it's suitability and to be grateful for the good fortune. It perfectly fits my deck bed with its subliminal drawers full of CDs and on it I have the peaceful slumber of the angels. In fact when I recline on it while watching a film on DVD, uncharacteristic for me, I fall soundly asleep.

My new situation is so quiet and dark at night after what I had been accustomed to, I no longer require earplugs and blindfolds. I sleep at any hour, the direct sunlight softened by the great shifting pepper tree; the lone streetlight absorbed by it at night. The burdensome strata of the care-worn years accumulated on my weary shoulders waft away in the billowing peace behind my eyes.

The Return of the the Flaneur: 14 poems of summer

2010-09-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

At last our correspondent can see his way clear to resume regular columns in October. Writings will be predominantly in prose and will fulfill the original intention of observing street life in Berkeley, California. The Flaneur has a new residence in a different part of town and he is eager to describe his comings and goings in anecdotal detail.
In the interim, here are a few lines from his lost and somewhat indolent Summer.

* * *

Two brownies alight
at the ashcan near me
Soundless weightless sprites
The lightness of childhood
in June
In sunlight between trees
Up there at this late hour
The rest sinks into deepest green
The nimbus of a squirrel's tail
catches a ray of sun
Crossing a cool glade
on a telephone line

* * *

on a distant hillside
an area still in sunlight
like an unreachable blessed state
an alternative day

floating over the town unaware
the town afloat in fog
a saber-tooth fog
in this never-warm summer

moments when the jewel-like
pepper tree moves in the light
bees coming and going
as seen through a panel of antique lace

hung-up in my tree-house window
receding into the monochrome
gray-green of the overcast world
timelessness the elongated dusk

* * *

asleep but where am I?
gradually zero-in on myself
dozing in a chair in my new pad
jazz drum solo on the radio

* * *

awake at some small hour
look out my new window
as a lone raccoon crosses McGee
backing up even as he walks forward
so sensitive, so cautious

* * *

Turkey in the Straw

chill sunday evening
pink ice cream truck jingles by
no children outdoors

* * *

skeins of clouds
cascade over the gate

break free of the vast
impending fog glacier

and form ghost columns
marching over the still sunny bay

others embody free white sprites
that lead on the immense onslaught

somnolent vales brace themselves as
on come the clouds the cold the night

* * *

a thought that life was over
a cloud skull
turns into a clown

* * *

Berkeley Marina

a hundred boats at rest
no one on them
the sound of the freeway
almost far enough away

to the westernmost point
choral wind in a dense pine
seagulls in cinemascope
sound like rusty hinges

distant fog hovers at the gate
kites never stop pulling
strollers are whisked off
in the wordless wind

in the orchestral quietude

* * *

a line of sailboats scoots
this way across the bay
fleeing a thick marine layer
disappearing into it

* * *

Notes on an Old Dark House

The house cat sleeps out back and is owned by no one
with no fixed name
A dozen years old he has exquisite articulated markings
on his pangolin jacket
He wears a stark white waist coat after dark
lurking behind flowers hidden by leaves
At the far end of the gourdy garden
on ground strewn with straw
He takes a drink from a child's wading pool
under jupiter so brilliant and near

In the pantry a ghost moves one afternoon
shifts imperceptibly as I pass
like a ripple in a mirror
A moth enters in the window
in tranquil night time
Wings turn red on the lamp-lit wall
by the red smoking sign

An early land grant haunting
a house built of old growth trees
Vertiginous windows over the treetops
roof-top mammals look back in at me
Older arbors arch into the maxfield parish sky
the magazine sunset over the sea
Planets and the moon revolve this way
over the yellow hills, over my green green bed

* * *

low sunlight on trees
in front of the dark fog bank
hyper reality

* * *

Stars come into my bedroom
I can't keep them out
film loop of jupiter

* * *

Garden Rhapsody

dragonflies sew my eyelashes shut,
bees venture deeply into my ear canal,
lady bugs decorate my loincloth,
earthworms emigrate into my night soil,
spiders bind my ankles to hoist me perpendicular,
grasshoppers make me jumpy,
infinitesimal ants explore every inch,
butterflies alight on my lips,
clapping their powdery wings
they mock my every utterance

* * *

crows bum rush the sky
flying motorcycle gang
black leather feathers

* * *

The Loaf Love Tour (or How I Spent My Summer)

2010-07-27T15:59:00.001-07:00

mail art, August 2010 postmark

Big Dream

2010-05-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

Strange dislocations and a breakthrough in the Flaneur's fraught dream life.

Waking in an apartment in San Francisco where I'm now residing with room mates. I have to catch a bus downtown like in my old Berkeley commute days thirty years ago.
I walk up two blocks to the street where the bus-stop for that direction is located. A bus comes and I get on without checking the direction. I don't pay and sit up front. Then I remember I should pay and attempt to do so. The driver waves me off instead. Oddly the pay box is located to his left near the window.
Before long I realize he is not going on the intended route. It is a huge circuitous journey through non-descript industrial sections along the bay. Eventually we are driving along a flatland by the bay. The waves wash up and over the road but we plow through anyway. There are no more buildings and no other traffic out here. We come to the furthest point, the edge of a parking lot, and then turn back.
Then we are climbing and the view outside is of an Escher-like maze of girders and structures abstract in their complexity. I realize that we are under the Golden Gate bridge. At the apogee of this trajectory we turn back to climb down again. What I see outside the window now appears in a rhomboid-shaped portal surrounded by darkness. It is an astonishing vista of the bay waters and land, incredibly beautiful in color, movement and light.
Before long we are again on drab industrial streets heading in toward downtown, toward more familiar territory.

Cleaning House

2010-02-28T16:26:00.001-08:00

In an attempt to avoid burial in it, the Flaneur sheds his collector's morbidity to reach a lighter future.

The burden of the past and my tendency to accumulate photos, books, recordings, artifacts, objects of all kinds in addition to one's wardrobe, furniture, cooking equipment, and the many necessities of life, have all been on my mind of late.
Great when your writing criticism or doing research to have the vastness of an obsessive-compulsive library at yr disposal. And of course there is the aleatory joy of discovering a unread great or an old favorite book among one's shelves.
Then there's the insight and nostalgia available in old photographs and the myriad cultural souvenirs of an avid enthusiast's past. But really, it all ends up as the detritus of one's learning, thinking, and unconscious tides. It forms a weight, a dragon one's forward movement, like the Surrealist hero in Le Chien Andalou dragging his yoke of ropes, pulling an accumulation of bound priests, donkey cadavers and a grand piano through a bourgeois drawing room.

Woefully I concede that I am more of a 20th century man than any longer a man of my times. Yet I have finally seen the wisdom and resolve to roll with the new to the best of my ability. All the yellowing culture clutter I'll shed will still be with me and will resurface in my mind as needed. I can always research on-line now when I need to. Of course everything, including all information, will still decay or be lost or destroyed.
The digitally-stored will go just like even the carefully preserved books and drawing of Michelangelo and Blake, the great paintings in oil on canvas, and most art of all kinds will go. Somethings may be unearthed again intact but even the pyramids must one day come to dust.

A Year in Mourning

2010-01-12T15:18:00.000-08:00

On 8 January 2010, one year after my mother passed on at age 96, I sat outside in the sunshine musing over memories of her. Risking sentimentality, I transcribe here some of what I wrote which is in turn a mere glimpse of the remembrances that I didn't get down.

December nights my Mother and I would venture out in the cold night after supper to see the lights, to see how people had decorated their homes for Christmas. There was an abundance of trees, wreathes, and front porches outlined in the fat-bulb colored lights. Some homes had succumbed to modernist kitsch with silver trees and revolving color-wheel spotlights. We would walk a few residential blocks over to the vicinity of George B. Stone school and back home the same way. My Mother was well-read, intelligent and full of humor and we would carry on conversations as if we were both adults. She would inspire me with her sense of wonder at the adequacy and outright goodness of life, of the profound experience of viewing the starry sky. What ever inklings of wisdom I have today I owe to her nature and her example.

On my first day of pre-primary school at George B. Stone, my Mother stayed along with the other mothers through the morning. The idea was to gradually get the kids used to being apart from their mothers who generally were home with us during our first five years.
When we came in from a recess in the schoolyard, I looked around and quickly saw that she was now gone. I ran straight out of the classroom, out of the front door of the school, up Globe street, and around the corner to Garfield street, yelling "Ma"! I caught up with her mid-block. With her typical good-nature she dutifully walked me back to school. She stayed a while maybe until school was out, but by the next day I had accepted the fact of our separation and was dropped -off while many mothers were still required to stay and placate their jittery kids.

Once we were walking with my brother at an undeveloped area known as the circus grounds. It was a Summer night and dark there--we may have been there for the Fourth of July fireworks. Then without warning my mother stepped in a hole and fell down onto the long grass. It was a new experience for me, a frightening realization that even adults were subject to spills. She was the ship, the rudder and the mast that kept our family afloat. I think I came to a new maturity with the realization that I needed to help her and try to protect her from hazards.
She later told me that when she was a little girl a man had appeared in broad daylight at those circus grounds and attempted to entice her and a friend. She said he eventually exposed himself to them as they ran away.

I remember vignettes from that old disappeared way of life in the 1950s--such as the Christmas parties at the American legion Hall downtown. Refreshments and entertainment of the homiest sort prevailed. They gave us kids those old-fashioned red-mesh Christmas stockings, packages for candy and toys that were made-in-Japan. My Mother occasionally spoke, giving a report or something and she was later elected head officer, but I think we were able to skip going ourselves by then.

She would take us, three boys and herself, downtown in a taxi. We would ride as far as a certain beauty salon on Second street and then walk the rest of the way to save funds. We would shop for clothes at McWhirrs department store with it's great wall-plaques with taxidermy sailfish and swordfish. We always had finery for Sunday Mass and other best wear events, and generally were dressed nice enough to draw comments from others.
The downtown then was thriving, lively and a great deal of fun. Huge Christmas decorations were attached to the facades of buildings. The five-and-dimes were packed with everything from 45 RPM singles to pet shops. We always seemed to have parakeets or a canary or two at home and plenty of records which somehow we never got tired of playing.
On occasional Sunday nights, she and I would take a cab to the beauty shop and walk another block to St Mary's church for Mass. Afterward we would go to Adams' drugstore where I would get a reward of a candy bar and a comic book or a Mad magazine.
Some nights after church, I would escort her to the Eagle Annex restaurant. It was sort of a soigne affair. It was my introduction to "fine dining" and I would always get the fried clam plate. We would leave as the orchestra began to play and my Mother's impeccable sense of decorum dictated that it was the right moment. The eagle was transforming into a nightclub for couples, adults only.

On one night still vivid in my memory, we were walking on Stafford road, a high road that capped our street. Our destination was a firehouse where she was turning in the proceeds from some door-to-door appeal she had volunteered for--the March of Dimes or the heart fund or something similar. Men were gathered in a vacant lot across the street, silhouetted against a large bonfire of branches and leaves. She shared my sense of wonder and enjoyment of the nocturnal, autumnal scene slanting toward Hallowe'en.

At some point in my early childhood she began to cook for the nuns at the convent attached to the school I attended, St Patrick's. A half-day's work brought her a small stipend and some foodstuff from the school larder to take home, helping to sustain her three sons. It was strange on the odd occasions when I would see her there, outside of her familiar context, when we were both on best behavior. She enjoyed the increased circulation and became dear friends with a saintly nun named Sister Matthew who didn't join the other nuns as our teachers but stayed at the convent with Mom. Sister Matthew died while I was still at school there, as I was for eight long years. They marched us kids through the convent to see her in her coffin I believe. I know we had done so for Sister Vincent my first grade teacher who died the year afterward--I was in the second half of the baby boom and my class finished off many an out-moded teacher and teaching as we passed through the system. Sister Vincent had been rather mean to me after the unconditional love from my Mother and after the sweet old-maid Miss Taylor who had been my pre-primary teacher at George B. Stone and who lived in an immaculate house on nearby Garfield street. I cannot say I felt terribly sad when I saw Sister Vincent in her casket.
When my Mother started working there, the nuns eased up on punishments for my brothers and me, saying they would tell my Mother instead-- she who rarely punished at all. That was most agreeable to us.
And my Mother's presence at the convent was a great help in one singular incident from my youth. One day a week, we used to withhold the twenty-five cent payment for a cafeteria meal and, under the banner of going home for lunch, go out to local diners. The food was more fun and we would have freedom on the open streets until the bell rang. This sometimes led to a little trouble as it did one frigid winter noon.
Two daring pals and I had walked out on some recent ice over a pond connected to a factory complex. I was recklessly pounding my foot on the ice testing its strength, when it broke though plunging me into the drink. I pushed myself toward the surface only to find a ceiling of dim daylight through the opaque ice over my head. Somehow I struggled and found the hole I came through. I endeavored to push myself back into this day-lit world only to have the edge break again followed by another shallow plunge. One friend came back on the ice to try to help but the whole ice surface began to break up with my desperate activity. I had not even learned to swim by that age, yet somehow I persevered and made it to bank where the friend pulled me up. The other continued to laugh hysterically, because, in that sociopathic way boys can have, he thought it was unbelievably funny.
Dripping wet in the cold noon, I made it back straight to the convent where I knew Mom and the most certain rescue would be. we rode home in taxi and I was dried, rubbed with rubbing alcohol, and given a little brandy as I was put to bed. The brothers came in hear what happened and to laugh at my wet proto-beatle boots. I gained the name "Swampy" from their snarky friends. I didn't mind... everyone knew they admired me for saving my ass with valor.

The next day the nuns busted me for not coming to them first to ask permission to leave school. While I was soaked in ice water walking back in the twenty-degree day I had made a line of survival to my Mom and so questioned their authority. This was despite the fact the nuns knew, my Mother certainly called, and the two other rascals were back in class to tell the tale of my absence.

"Look at the sky tonight, Stephen! Look at that sunset!" My Mother would say.
And I still do. With the love she gave me.
In perpetuity.

(more to come)

Peace Comes Falling Slow

2009-12-31T17:14:00.000-08:00

The familiar strange quietude descended on Berkeley as soon as the students decamp for elsewhere.

Today the poignant skies are calling me--solid violet-gray to the north, the evocative light of broken Southern skies. Trees reveal their skeletal complexity, the beauty of organic design. I sit and savor a particular art nouveau tree, a favorite roost of the now-abundant crows. It's behind a stop-light and it goes largely unnoticed by the heedless traffic.
In Peoples Park people sleep in broad daylight, covers pulled over their eyes. Damp ground perhaps but the absence of rain keeps them from more dire straits.
I move along to Willard Park and rest on a bench where a fellow slightly older than myself plays airs from an old Joni Mitchell song quietly on his acoustic guitar. we talk and soon learn we have Massachusetts roots in common, going back to Canada as well.
The Beat generation comes up and he turns out to be a fellow child of beatitude. He mentions a film on a Beat poet he'd recently seen. How he shared the philosophy of his poem he half recalls. I paraphrase it for him: all that matters is to do the work, to lessen suffering, the rest is drunken dumb-show.
He tells me he is living in his car again. He had been taking care of a disable person in Marin but had to quit due to the person's crazy roommate.
I clue him into the network of free meals available to the needy hereabouts.
Off we go, I'm bound for a hospital visit but somehow don't find my friend Faye who has respiratory difficulties. En route I sent off a flock of cards to my late-arriving Christmas correspondents. Afterward, I join the avid consumers at the natural foods supermarket, I'm one of the more careful, frugal ones as I observe conspicuous purchases of all the delights available by those heading for New Year's celebrations. I'm headed there too in my own discrete way.
But I can't help but notice those souls whiling away the afternoon at bus stops and innocuous perches along the way. One bearded young fellow with soulful eyes lingers in my mind.
May God bless us all. May peace and the other necessities of life remain in reach for us all.

An oddly moving documentary on the band Flaming Lips, "Fearless Freaks," ends with a outtake/deleted scene of a new Year's Eve countdown. It leads to a version of "Seven nation Army" by the Lips combined with the White Stripes. Just as it finishes the bells of the campanile begin to strike new Year's midnight. They never toll ordinary midnight.
So I dress and go outside with a mug of Raven's eye organic imperial stout (an Xmas gift from Joe). I have time to prop open the outside door and step out just as last bells are tolled. They continue on in a carillon concert commencing naturally with "Auld Lang Syne."
Another nearby church begins striking midnight as the carillon chimes on and widespread firecrackers and gunshots volley into the distance for a half an hour. Signs of life erupt all over the otherwise ghostly town.
Earlier I'd eaten half of a cannabis caramel, and as twelve neared I refreshed with a few puffs and more stout. I would describe my state of being as a perfect buzz, far from over-indulgenge, as the year ran out. Overhead the about full moon is evanescent in the racing high clouds of a warmer air mass. In a clear view of San Francisco I can see the fireworks off of the Embarcadero. Red and blue predominate in the pyrotechnical blooms. helicopters can be seen flying above them, filming no doubt.
It is really a joyful moment so often scarce in these days of plentiful woe.
Just then a romp of slightly intoxicated chines student girls comes out into the backyard next door. "The full moon, the full moon..." they enthuse. We are invisible to each other behind the intervening avocado tree. They giggle awhile then go back inside.
I head back into my fleeting house myself. There follows a light midnight meal and yet another film-- undersea and outer space with Werner Herzog. The film unspools, the DVD spins, and the stars revolve into the as yet unknown.

Feverish Dreams of November

2009-11-29T16:38:00.000-08:00

In which the Flaneur opens his unconscious toy-chest for the exploration of the over-soul.

Amid a tide of challenge and loss, there occurred to me this month not the least of them--a bout with the swine flu. I remained active despite a Dante-like tour of successive ailments and one of the side-effects was that I began to experience and remember lucid dreams. Here are a few I wrote down.

Dream #1

A group of ape-men ranging a a hillside with dim sunlight. They become confused, fearful and angry when Jesus of Nazareth walks nearby. One gets agitated enough to attempt to bite the arm of Jesus. But he is either impenetrable like superman or he is incorporeal as the Risen Christ. The ape-man is unable to sink his teeth in our Savior's arm, instantaneously my arm.

Commentary: This dream may show an over-active self-association with Jesus. I never see his face and he goes from observed to observer. This dream may be related to a recent nightmarish encounter with some ant-abortion extremists on the University campus. The lesson of this parable is that even if one attempts to conduct oneself in a saintly manner there are bestial individuals who may still attack.

Dream #2

Returning from the Elmwood neighborhood along Benvenue avenue. Families coming home are on the sidewalks. Dusk is descending.
Then I am on the far side of Oakland crossing from the east past lake Merritt toward downtown. As i walk I realize that I am wearing women's clothing--even low-healed light brown pumps. It dawns on me that my route will take me past tough guys loitering on International boulevard. dressed as I am in drag. But they don't notice me among the many the crowd walking in the same direction. The sidewalk takes a diversion toward the entrance to a tunnel.

Commentary: I have never worn, nor do I ever wish to wear women's clothes. I had watched Kubrick's film "A Clockwork Orange" the previous night with similar tunnels and similar urban dysphoria and threats of gender-related violence.

Dream #3

Speeding downhill toward the East bay from mountains and foothills. The driver is a wild young man, possibly irresponsible. Trees whip past close to my open window.
At a gallery behind Zellerbach auditorium--an art exhibit, objects set up on a hardwood floor. There is a large tableaux of little men and other toys set up on the floor. But most notable is an animatronic pig the grey white color of computer terminals. It is free-standing on pinty hooves and it is giving a talk whether anyone listens or not. It is like a cartoon that has entered actuality but at the same time very palpable and "real."
As I walk past it the pig is saying, "...whether or not the CIA released this information intentionally, we can never know for certain..." is apparently a conspiracy theorist.

Dream #4

I'm giving a lecture on Edgar Poe. It seems to be taking place in the same gallery as the previous art exhibit. A silent attentive class takes notes. Then I conclude and make ready to go. At this point I notice many in the class were wearing headphones and watching a screen to my right, the notes that they were writing were based on that. Of those who did listen to me none respond to me or indicate whether they appreciated what I said or not. When I look toward someone I was thionking was an old friend--I see it was merely someone who looked like him.

Commentary: Reflects perhaps my unease as a write and artist about a diffuse and unresponsive on-line audience and on friends one rarely sees.

Dream #5

I arrive early for a stage performance that I am to take part in. Nevertheless I am asked to pay the fifteen-dollar admission. I resist but they insist so I do. The impresario of the event is Joseph Spencer, aloof and authoritarian. Then I am naked and as the show begins i am informed by him that there won't be time to include me in the show. I get very steamed especially in light of having paid admission to get in. As I rant I try to get dressed. As I begin to don my boxer shorts, I notice that I have a worn and torn pair. I try to put them on without anyone noticing. But, as is human nature, everyone sneaks a peak when someone is putting on underclothes.

Commentary: The emotions involved and the circumstances of this dream make it apparent that it relates to an Over the Edge radio program I was part of last August. I lost my temper as it was beginning, due to unrelated reasons. Joseph is clearly a stand-in for Don Joyce whose program it is.

Dream #6

A horizontal commode--the kind of toilet you see in modern buildings. It juts straight out from the wall. Marie the cat slowly lowers herself into the basin, submerging even her head (which cats are extremely loathe to do). She settles down to the bottom of the basin and remains there sphinx-like while I grow increasingly alarmed by this. She is apparently holding her breath, at least she is not drowning. After a few long seconds I know I must reach in and pick her up. This I proceed to do and I notice that the water is quite yellow.

Commentary: While taking care of this my neighbor's cat I would occasionally see her poised on the toilet seat and leaning in to have a drink. This behavior alarmed me and I discouraged it. Marie recently moved away with her owner.

The Passing Parade

2009-10-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

How I love to sit inconspicuously in a public place and observe people passing by, especially children and young people...

Today I slipped out into the cool sunshine in the late afternoon around 4:30. I looked for a likely perch where the sunshine was still present and decided on one of the new metal benches on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Durant. Telegraph Avenue on Saturdays is as it has long been, a magnet for young folks for miles around who mingle with the University students situated throughout the South side of campus. It's not the Mecca it once was, but a few of the over-size record stores survived the down turn in that business and they still attract the kids as do the clothes stores and the other life-style suppliers.
I see deeply into people even at a glance. I have always had the knack and it has only deepened with the passing years. Given a mild cannabis cookie as I was today, this pass-time can be utterly fascinating for me. It has been said that the charm of young people is that they smile even when there is no particular reason to smile. It's their default mode as it were. Particularly when they are walking around a busy youth scene and styling the current look.
They make me smile and they see me smiling and smile back. It is a heart-sustaining loop for a loner like the Flaneur. Oh, of course some are sad. These I look at with acceptance and, dare I say, love too. Most dazzling are the little kids, their eyes so brilliant and content. And sometime they are too tired and want to go home, and that's adorable as well.
I enjoy noting the outfits people wear--young and wanting to be sexy and au courant. No matter that many of the styles are laughably ungainly--like the ones who try to get the new tight jeans to hang low on the derriere like the fading baggy hip-hop look. Rebellion is no doubt served as their parents try to get them to listen to reason and "dress nice."

The population of genuine street people has diminished these days. These are full-time denizens, usually distinctive as such in some way, not the younger summer run-aways. The reasons are many and of course an civic effort persists to run them off. One guy goes by with gray beard, thermal leggings and a skirt or dress flapping. This clearly a genre and one I don't fully understand. I have heard of radical fairies bearded old hippies who cross dress somewhat theatrically but this guy seems more understated and survival oriented-- not a show-off but someone who wants to set himself off from the squares right away. He looked lonesome. Then the loneliest loony in town bounded past my green metal vantage point. He is quite tall with a wild shock of dark hair, with sun-worn skin. He always wears a sport coat and, under his high-water fitting pants, he has his long feet jammed into too small shoes. Today the shoes achieve his absurd extreme. They are open-back sneakers meant for a small child that cover a small part of his foot. He races all over town and the shoes stay on by his momentum. With his craggy profile he resembles Disney's animated Ichabod Crane gone to advanced seed. His eyes are frantic and haunted but his activity seems to keep him preoccupied, to shield him from the fear that may catch up if he ever stopped to rest. May God have mercy on him.

I note that the new Asian majority has its own idiosyncrasies of attire. Whereas I often spot girls who are somewhat obvious in their intent to bring the sexy, the Asian girls occasionally go way over the top. I don't mean the girl with a sweep of thick hennaed hair, T-shirt torn to hang off her shoulder, hot pants, and fetish-evoking tapered wooded platform high-heels with hobnails so much as some of the really nutty stuff. Two girls bounce past in tiny flouncy skirts, lace leggings, silver high heels and scores of other tarty tat, the kind you see on manikins in store windows in seedy urban ethnic shopping districts.
I wonder if they spotted the stylish turquoise leg-warmers worn by the homeless black lady asleep on the bench I'm sharing as they skirt by her shopping cart. I was chuckling as they went and I noticed that a guy on the next bench was watching them and chuckling too.
A wholly different type of Asian went by in a flock wearing some distinctly codified out-landish gear. Several have big yarn-like wigs of pastel pig-tails. They resembled the die-hard trendies one sees in photographs of the Ginzu district in Tokyo.
A cafe-au-lait rasta with four-foot dreads put up cards for capoeira. People with clipboards asked for signatures. I conceal myself behind my ear-plugs. People came and went from the ATM windows of credit doom. And I very rarely recognized a soul even after thirty years in this town. Where does everyone go? Elsewhere, I suppose.

A chilly fog sent tendrils in this direction. As the sun faded my observation point got a little tiresome and I must push off. I bless all I see the young and old, rich and poor, disabled and able-bodied alike. May they all be given friendship and sustenance, and myself as well. And as the poet Bob Kaufman once wrote, let us give places to the homeless and kindness to the forlorn.
Amen.

Scary Monsters

2009-09-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

In which the Flaneur examines two recent stories in the news that extend close to home...

In a town in New Jersey, a police officer, a young woman, approached an unfashionably dressed individual who was walking in the rain. He wore a raincoat with his hood up and black sweat pants tucked into rubber boots.
Someone had phoned in suspicions about an individual who seemed to be prowling. He had entered the yard of a house-for-sale and looked in its window. The man who turned out to be sixty-eight years of age was asked for his name and identification.
He lacked an ID but he gave his name as Bob Dylan. The police officer later said that she had heard of this well-known name. Although she was not particularly familiar with what he looked like, she was pretty sure that this weather-beaten fellow was not him. She assumed that he was playing cute or was delusional, or both.
He told her he was in the area to play a concert. He said he was just walking around. This neighborhood was where Bruce Springsteen had been living when he wrote his first two albums of songs. It is not known whether he offered this as an explanation at the time.
The officer disregarded his claims and demanded that the police accompany him back to the concert venue where his identification would have to be produced.
This was done with no objection from the rainy night-walker. Back in his own environment Bob Dylan's passport was shown to them. The police accepted that they had been told the truth and departed. Mr. Dylan said he harbored no resentment over the incident.
He apparently had been making an effort during his down-time while touring, to visit the homes of fellow song-writers he admired. He had gone to see the childhood home of Neil Young in Ontario. In Liverpool he had joined a regular tour bus group to visit the old home of John Lennon.
Perhaps this supplies evidence of Mr Dylan's eccentricity. Some people enjoy having their smug assumptions confirmed. The sight of celebrities who have lost it is very popular--look no further than the hilarity surrounding celebrity mug-shots. Just think, there was nearly a new one of Bob Dylan. Everyone looks like such a loser in a mug-shot.
To me it says more about the bizarre conditions prevalent today in these united police states. Cops think their primary duty is to menace anyone who looks poor or alone in the world. To subject them to floating check-points, to make them feel unwelcome wherever they are, and to prevent them from finding peace and rest. Most of all to target those who complain, who don't have their ID, who exhibit any contempt for these bullies in their squad cars, those who don't bow down to "His majesty, the Policeman."

Berkeley likes to think it is different from the other more intolerant reaches of the country. That's why the slippery eel of a mayor and his cohort piped-up loudly when a study identified Berkeley as one of the ten meanest cities to the homeless. He actually defended laws targeting the homeless by unintentionally paraphrasing the old French tongue-in-cheek canard. The one that says that the State in its justice enforces the law against sleeping under bridges equally to both the rich and the poor. Meanwhile you see multiple police cars roll up to disgorge burly cops scowling at one malnourished guy sitting on a sidewalk.
On campus, they have a plaque commemorating the Free Speech Movement, but there's scant free speech these days. If you attempt to voice anything anti-establishment you will be observed by agents and cops who will slyly videotape you for future use. That is unless you are at an "Israel wants Peace" table or at a demonstration demanding regime change in Iran. If you want to demonstrate against, oh say, John Yoo's presence on campus you will be strictly monitored and regulated. And videotaped.

But cranks and crack-pots continue to turn out on Sproul plaza nevertheless. Most are paranoid enough to assume that they already are under constant surveillance anyway. I live nearby and I walk there often so I sometimes see them, and on occasion I encounter them.
So it was on a recent Summer afternoon.

I recall the cartoons of Basil Wolverton in the old Mad magazine. He specialized in drawing portraits of the ugliest gals and goofiest guys in minutely cross-hatched pen and ink. He was really a modern master of the Boschean grotesque.*
On one late afternoon as I crossed busy Sproul plaza, an individual walked toward me extending some printed matter. If Basil Wolverton was given an assignment to render his most devastating portrait of a "super-creep," it could easily look precisely like this creature.
He approached under a shadow of his own malodorous tidings, staring with a needy, beseeching look as if at a target, as if at prey. He rapidly tried to get me to take a copy his screed. I gave him my Irish cop look, fixing him in a scrutinizing glare. "What the hell do you think you are doing here?" read my unmistakable thought balloon as I ignored his gesture.
I was stirred to smite this demonic thing, like any saintly knight would do.
He pivoted away after another easier-going passerby. I watched him a little then went on in my intended direction, disturbed to a real but fading degree.

Was it two weeks later in August when word that a girl taken eighteen years ago had been recovered in the hands of her kidnapper? She had borne him two daughters while confined to a semi-concealed backyard compound in Antioch, California. Not far away.
Another cruel story of the bizarre that at least resulted in continued life and in triage for the years of psychological trauma. Yet as the story unfolded, how utterly bizarre it evidently all was. Subject to grandiose delusions, the perpetrator, Philip Garrido, was a cut-and-dried sexual criminal of long-standing well-known to the authorities. The police and probation officers had visited his home while on-duty a number of times. Yet somehow they never had been troubled to actually look around to the back of the house. To the squalid shacks and tents where the girl lived with her two daughters by the lord of the manner.
"Repeat sex-offender with a secret backyard compound, that sort of thing doesn't interest us."
The police were informed by a neighbor of his that a "psychotic with sexual addictions" lived there and had children living in tents. Even then he received only a front-door courtesy call concerning laws about inadequate housing.

Then lo and behold! The on-line version of the old Oakland-based local news ran the in-court photographs of this maestro of hill-billy grand guignol. That skull the way the upper-jaw looks balanced on a severed spine and then reanimated. That protuberant artery snaking down his temple...
Then the camera caught his eyes! It was the demoniac from Sproul!
"Phil the Creep" as he was known to his neighborhood kids. He'd been nabbed when he showed up to ask the UC cops for a permit to hold a religious recruitment event. He had apparently arrived with two little blonde home-schooled stepford children. Obviously unstable, he nonetheless agreed to come to another meeting. In the meantime they at last connected his horrendous record as a sex-offender to the reality of his current daily routine life. The next time he came in he brought his "older daughter" along too. She was in fact the twenty-nine year old mother of the two young girls. She had taken by him outside of her home near Lake Tahoe, on her way to school when she herself was an eleven-year old girl.
The children are said to have cried when they learned Garrido had been arrested.

A miscreant named Carpenter who they called the Trailside Killer, made taunting phone calls from a Telegraph avenue public phone. The Unabomber once lived on a nearby street behind the supermarket. And of course the infamous Charles Manson visited Telegraph avenue in its hey day. They all seem to come here and sometimes you pass them on the street. You are usually unaware of it when it happens. Or perhaps you may be momentarily put on guard as instinct tells you that you are in the presence of one who has given himself or herself over to evil.

*Wolverton's work evolved into a visceral, Hans Bellmer-like pop surrealism with figures said to look like atomic radiation casualties. He prefigured Zap comics in going over the top whenever possible.

15 haiku poems Summer 2009

2009-08-25T00:53:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur returns to his seemingly inexhaustible trove of three line poems of enigma and epiphany, of mystery and mirth.

...

Crow in a furrow
on the vacant playing field
a drink and a bath

Three police squad cars
with elaborate roof lights
on prowl for lodgers

Little cautious cat
hides on the vacant plaza
vague lightning tonight

A place in the grass
long shadows move up the hill
bells fall through the trees

That yellow hornet
looks like a catamaran
resting on water

Kites swim in place
a helicopter tours the coast
the climax species

The bottle-picker
rattles his carriage under
a pendulous moon

Angelic sunset
all those violet wings
outlined in gold

In the vast twilight
a hawk drops from a high rise
summer remains cool

The eucalyptus
at the edge of the graveyard
are like old white bones

A hummingbird drinks
from the morning glory gate
on my way outdoors

Out over the Bay
ships sit on the horizon
the terns parliament

The students moved on
left this victory garden
green onions won't wait

Geologic clouds
one stratum across the sky
jewel-bird on a wire

Over the golf course
comes a far cry from Saturn
an erratic bat

...

The Scanned Cat, a Postscript

2009-08-17T16:22:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur concludes the science-fiction tale he began in the earlier blog entitled, "The Shiver of Original Sin." In a pulsing saga ripped from today's headlines, he survived storms of radioactivity to allow his heart to be imagined in a kind of virtual reality. In this concluding chapter he lives to see the actual virtual artifact itself.

After I was lowered from the particle laboratory again, I left without an appointment for a follow-up. When I called Cardiology the next week, they spent a good many of my phone minutes before telling me to call the general appointment number. This led to ten minutes in voice-mail limbo and a hang-up before my phone service cut-out.
So when I saw my regular doctor and she heard my dilemma, she gave me an office with it's own outside line where I could call and wait as long as it took to follow through. When the hospital appointment operator suggested a late October date, I was mildly astonished.
The CAT scan had been such a radical experience for me that to be kept so long in suspense afterward was comparable to going to the moon and being asked to wait four months to see the film clip.
The operator sensed that I sounded less like the average county hospital patient and more like staff. She switched me over to cardiology again. There followed a strange moment with the nurse saying that there was no record I had received any treatment at radiology. Again one pleads nolo contendere in such matters. One can't speak about what the records say with any authority, but one maintains one's belief in something one really thinks did take place.
She suggested that they call me back. I told her to take her time, that I was at my primary care clinic. This seems to do the trick quite well as the actual cardiologist called back. He is a big beaming avuncular fellow, German maybe Jewish, in his sixties. I certainly didn't expect himself to call.
"Your arteries are fantastic!" he declared, "really in fantastic shape." It was delightful to hear this. We talked good-naturedly a moment then he suggested I come to see him in one week for the follow-up.

I finally decided to reach the hospital by taking BART to Lake Merritt where a free shuttle zips you up the hill. Even with a walk downtown to BART station it was really quick for a change after all my previous trips by bus. An afternoon appointment, despite the glacial slowness of the wait, meant I could just mosey-in--no early-hour stress. In the waiting room, my earplugs in place, I finished an Elmore Leonard novel that I found on campus. It was the source material for a Tarantino film and many of my present company looked like they might have stepped out of it.
Then at last my name was called. I went from the crowded room into the sparsely populated precincts to wait on in quietude. A preliminary interview with a different doctor awaited me, this time an Indian lady. They take their time with you here and I had never been more thoroughly listened to via stethoscope. Talking about myself I eventually mentioned that my elderly mother passed away this year. In our reverie on mothers, I wondered rhetorically if anyone else on earth would ever really care about me. She agreed and said even though she was married and had family she sometimes asked herself the same question. It was the human condition we concluded.
This visit I was better prepared for the moment when the patriarch himself arrived. Last time I was spaced from a long wait and a lack of refreshment. So this time I jotted-down notes ahead of time and I ate a banana at the last moment.
He immediately announced that there was nothing physically wrong with my heart, that you could drive a truck through, that you could sail a boat through my arteries. There were no signs of disease present or prior. No tobacco, very moderate drinking, exercise, and a low-salt, low-fat diet--there's no secret to it. He said I have a large and slow heart, which is good. The old notion is still true--that we are only given so many heart beats in a lifetime.
"Like a humming-bird," I riffed. I also mentioned that I'm a Leo and known to be big-hearted. General amusement at this--the first doctor hangs-out for the chat with the big doc. I ran through my questions then I finished with, "Can I see the CAT scan?"
Well, it isn't the policy...
I said that was alright, I had just thought maybe he could twiddle a few keys and it would come-up on the computer screen next to us. And what do you know? He agreed. After expressing regrets that this station didn't have all the colors of own set-up, he brought up the screens. And there was my big art pay-off.
At first the image was of my ribs swathed in red-purple muscle. "That's my breastplate," said I. "Hang on a minute," quoth the snowy-haired physician.
Then he clicked on the "remove bone" option, and the naked, sacred heart itself is revealed. The colors are all deep, intense and jewel-like. There indeed were my fantastic arteries looking like massive rivers seen from space. Then, mind-blowingly, he turned my heart in virtual space. Like a magnifying satellite we sail around the south pole of my heart and note more of my arterial splendor. I feel like I am in some meta-world sitting in front of a visionary simulacrum of my heart and mind. Both of which are encompassed by my soul which itself emanates from a universe of love.

"OK, I'm going to restore your bone. Do you want you bone back?"
"I still have to get home."

Climax Mime Troupe

2009-08-01T17:37:00.000-07:00

Berkeley lends itself to advanced people-watching on yet another mild summer afternoon. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is in Ho Chi Minh park which is now renamed Willard park after someone no one remembers. The Flaneur is there providing his eyes to a readership worldwide.

After 1 this afternoon. Wasn't there a reason to get up? The day's vague plan materialized in front of me like the room I left last night to venture off in the dream time. Just time for a bagel with almond butter and a coffee before I dash off outdoors. I'm bound for the park where today the SF Mime Troupe is putting on its yearly free show in the parks, this one entitled "Too Big to Fail." You wouldn't call it agit-prop any more. In these days of melting glaciers and an even slower thaw from Dark Side of the previous eight years--more like liberal persuasion.

Have you wondered why the investment banker crooks are getting all the money with no comprehensive work programs in sight and only a watery health bill coming down the pike? Have you asked yourself why the president doesn't want to hear about the serious crimes recently and still committed by this nation, why Cheney is still affecting US foreign policy instead of being on his way to prison, and why the corporate media continues to manufacture consent and suppress dissent?
Why is all the self-righteous anger still only on the right? The right never compromises; liberals always do.

Anyway, back to the pleasant afternoon.
Or first to last evening and my first encounter with the troupe this year. For whatever reason they didn't schedule the usual two afternoon shows at 2 PM that they always do. They were doing a Friday evening performance instead. So I was pleasurably surprised when I stumbled on the scene on the way to my post office box in the Elmwood. I was enjoyably entertained during my customary rest stop at a Willard park bench. There was the stage and there was a rehearsal with the live band. The stage is not a transformer this year but it's nevertheless a charming representation of a village presumably in North Africa. I watched for a while as a few early birds took up positions in front of the stage. To the south two young women and a guy were in a circle doing yoga asanas in the grass.
Beyond them was a more hyper-active zone where dozens of little kids were playing games. They were all running around like frolicsome gazelles amid day-glow traffic cones. I love to see them and I certainly wish them well but the situation does claim a large portion of the park for a day-care operation. This is on top of the generous fenced-off playground by the tennis-courts. It seems to me that a more suitable place with a schoolyard of it's own is located nearby right behind the Willard school. But again oddly the city seems to have leased that out to a Chinese Christian group. At the same time, yahoos play over-aggressive sports and the area of the park open to any peaceful use continues to shrink. This is the only park for miles around in a fairly densely-populated town. Add to this the arrogant cops on bikes who demand identification from anyone who lingers too long looking poor. One simply has to face the fact that the old warm-hearted Berkeley is gone.

Off in the distance over the Bay, an ominous gray mass of marine influence was heading this way. Onward. I passed the yogis picking up a move from the obvious initiate who led the others. My route takes me past the front gate of an amusingly festooned property on Hillegas.
The owner adorned his mailbox and gate with first a wooden apple and snake (gone now to vandals), photos on wood of jazz singer Anita O'Day, and numerous bendable white poles with messages attached. Lots of other kookie objects and signs--Pebbles Flintstone, a ceramic jack-o-lantern, various indicia of European origin--enamel plagues with French writing etc. Looking down the driveway gives one the sense that the whole place is decked-out with fun in mind.
I took care of matters in the Elmwood including a stop for DVDs at the Claremont library on Benvenue, then by my post office box. Next I stroll College avenue to look at all the different businesses that have come in--a wine store notably. The travel place that typically features great window displays doesn't disappoint with its current offering. On the wall behind a selection of globes is a giant hand-painted banner for the 40s film, "Now Voyager." It features an iconic portrait of Bette Davis in a nautical travel outfit. Painted on heavy canvas, it could be a reproduction but it certainly looks like an original item.

Two sweet little boys come out of the toy shop with Mom. I turn down Russell and land on a bench for a moment. The mother and kids come by that way too. She stops near me for some reason and I say hi to the two little boys when we find ourselves on eye level. One--he's holding a glossy box of Star Wars toys, is so dear. He says to me "I saw you before." Oh yeah? ... I had to have a rest. I feel like the wee ones instinctively love me now that I have snow on the roof, maybe I look like their grand dad. They know that oldsters are often gentle and kind, and not the task-masters and disciplinarians parents must be.
The mother ignores me and herds them away. I cross the street to a shadier bench this one made from a redwood burl. A Chinese elder and his daughter come by soon afterward walking their little boy. They stop right by me to load the kid on Grandpa's back--he's like four years-old I'd say. He sees me smiling and says a strong "hi". Hiya...you're getting a ride now. "Yeah!" he laughs loudly, "...Bye!" So aware and full of life unlike his dour, dutiful guardians who, once again, don't acknowledge me. They seem instead to be silently reciting warnings to themselves to drill into the kid later. Talking to strangers and all.

So I follow my own bliss, revivified by the clarity and brilliance of the kids. I note all the splendid flowers evident in the moist cool summer we're having. Back at Willard park, I sit on the hula-hoop rack occasionally still used as a bench. The stage is far away but the sound is still good . The musicians are often the best part of the show and I savor the live music in such a casual atmosphere. Considerably more people have arrived. Earlier Ed Holmes and the tall black lady who can actually sing were on stage running through moves and musical notes. Now it's overture section.
A table representing a satellite installation of Food-Not-Bombs has been set-up. I am heading home for tofu vegetables and rice in black bean sauce, and I'm peckish. A snack would help me linger a moment longer, so I beat it over to the table. A nice couple of young folks man it and have pizza-bread, punch and great pickled squash available to everyone at no charge. I chat a bit then go over to the bench ring-side to back-stage and refresh. A silent gal in a mime troupe t-shirt sitting next to me reads intently over her kindle.
A fairly large tortoise is walking around near us. Ed Holmes walks past and I ask him if he saw the turtle. "Don't know what kind of crowd you people attract..." I quip. It's a great vibe and nice sunlight for the moment, but it's getting cool and I have other plans.
Just as the play begins I can be seen leaving the lower park for home. I give me best serves-you-right smile to the dog-slobs. They are forced to look on from the margins as the park they usually take-over has, for this night at least, been taken-over from them.

So it is that I find myself approaching the same scene today in somewhat warmer sunshine. Before I reach the park I pass the baseball diamond behind the school. No games there this summer as the whole place is torn up for a refurbish. I think of the strange midnight last October when I passed by and the moist earth of the field was covered in big geese.
Today clouds of dry dirt rise up around a bulldozer and several manual shovellers. This marvelous city with all it's highly-paid planners and bureaucratic aparatchiks evidently couldn't arrange for the work to stop when the adjacent park was filled with local citizens. The entire time I was there they were kicking up a lot of dirt just on the windward side of all those unprotected lungs.
I circle around back of the stage to my trusty bench. Can I squeeze-in here without making things awkward? The same kindle-reading girl from yesterday is back and gets to share the bench with me again. Then I hastily dig into my coffee and cannabis cookie, a shortbread with a blackberry jelly pool on top. Then I turn my attention to a sidelong view of the stage and the lively amplified sounds emanating from it. The high comes on like going up in a hot-air balloon as opposed to the jet-like take-off of smoking.
There's a view of a lot of the process from where I'm sitting--you see the costume changes and the characters before they enter, including actors crawling under the stage to emerge from a trap door. I spend as much time watching the audience as the stage play. Living as I do in a district of adults and young adults, I find children, so rarely sighted, completely charming to observe. The ones here with their mild and educated parents are so very sweet. Wearing hats with big sun-visors they pay rapt attention to the often slapstick antics on-stage, even the ones too young to fully understand the words. One little guy lying on his stomach with his chin resting on his fist looks so thoughtful as he rests his bare feet over a pair of rubber shoes made to look like toy cars.
Dragonflies criss-cross the air-space over the crowd seated on the lawn. A great yellow butterfly appears and almost seems to ride the music. Later, just as the play reaches its anti-capitalist crescendo, the sputtering engine of a plane dragging a Geico banner pollutes itself in circles overhead. Think you can sit in a public park and listen to free speech without being advertised to? Well, think again.
Before long I have removed my shoes, pulled-up my pants, and half-unbuttoned my shirt. Then I can no longer resist joining the others in the grass in front of the stage. At this point there is only the very front of the stage available. You really can't attend half-way from that vantage.
The play is a parable or allegory of how profit insinuates itself into human life and makes slaves of all. How people become consumers on credit and lose their freedom and prosperity.
It takes place in an ancient Middle-eastern land in a time immemorial with the profuse inclusion of tell-tale anachronisms should anyone be uncertain exactly what society it is talking about.
I depart from the stage-front to stand a while in the shade of a tree still watching, then I return to my favorite bench for the conclusion. It has a cool scene where Holmes dressed as a demon in a business suit lays-out the whole royal scam for the innocents in the play and as a sermon to the choir. Then a little mad dancing and singing and it's over for another year. The hard-working actors grab buckets and, without a pause to catch their breathe, are out among the crowd collecting donations. Clearly they like meeting this crowd too. The mutual admiration is also reflected in the rip-snorting business at the t-shirt booth. These shirts, black with a red star, are seen around the world. Young and old snatch them up.

The dirt is still billowing amid the green belt of trees below the park. I don't linger long after the show is over and the crowd slowly disperses. I take Hillegass and experience a sidewalk garden profuse with July violets in a state of suspension of ontological fixity.
On Dana I watch a young man skateboard slalom, zig-zaging along the street while holding a bouquet of flowers. I am in a smiley frame of mind and can't help but watch this big lug in a t-shirt with his incongruous nose-gay. He looks tired, bags under his eyes, and he's frowning. He notices me watching and maybe is a little embarrassed that another guy sees him with flowers. He only wants his girlfriend to see how sweet he is.

Poetry Now

2009-07-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

Inspired by an friend's poetry blog, the Flaneur shakes more lines from his notebook. Apology where it apply.

...

"Antaeus who speaks and wears no chains
He will take us to the bottom of sin"
Dante, Hell

...

my wind-up clock's broken
the second hand can't make it
to midnight
makes a slight noise
a moth on a window screen

...

the shade of a venetian horse
crosses my window shade

a young boy asleep on the waves
clinging to a carved wooden figure

some mahogany crayfish effigy
marine in his lower extremes

the part of the world now under sea
the boy feeding on his carapace of wood

...

we are the pure white people
white of hair white of skin
saint peter will wave us in
where we will all be restored
as colored people as negroes
and walk on streets of gold

...

morning glories send
tendrils over everything
the sun gets up too early
birds crank up the merry-go-round

...

dime-store on mercury
a roman noir

I contacted every known planet
looking for something legit
ended-up covering a crossword puzzle
another sad sack in scrabble town

I received periodic balloon payments
until that blew up in my face
had to dummy up and take the battery
until my shins splintered under me

I gave them all the names I had

...

little hamlet

envenom with his envy
a prison of poison
dies in his own too much

...

in dante's hell
the sinful know who they are

...

martin luther
appeared before the diet of worms
as sort of an appetizer

...

the case of the open and shut bookcase

faraway nowadays

the post-mammalian review

ash wednesday the anti-hallowe'en

code breakers of sumatra

lunar vacuity

...

1912-2009

mom by the heater late at night
thinking in the dark
mom sitting on her porch
surrounded by trees smiling

...

ghost natural

vinegaroon
the spider's missing link

baboon metaphysics
a spill on the causeway

...

Bromides

My skull holes feel like an old bowling ball.

People stretch their faces over their emotions.

Light bulbs turn my fingertips into paper.

I can see my hand with my eyes closed.

We slip into the unworld slowly.

...

2009

The Shiver of Original Sin

2009-07-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

In which the Flaneur suggests his age by telling of himself as a 20th Century man in a 21st Century scenario in medical technology.

Like most days in general I began by walking away from my abode. As on the two days previous, I was bound for the nearby stop for the #1 Rapid bus for a long ride-- to the Fruitvale section of Oakland.
This early morning like the others, I was proceeding to an appointment at Highland Hospital. What I thought would be a one-day affair had stretched to three. Today was to be the Fourth-of-July fireworks finale--a CAT scan of my heart.
The Rapid makes fairly good time, at times exceeding comfortable speeds for the unforgiving seats. But no one complains--we're making time. The longest stretch is the ride nearly the full length of Telegraph Avenue. I am hypnotized easily when roused at this hour and the familiar decaying landmarks and other newer developments put me into a right trance.

There are the curios, a little windmill and a tiny log cabin, remnants of the roadside stands of quainter times. There's the liquor store with its art brute "Okla-hickory" mural. The 'Lectric Washhouse laundromat sails past... Roots Hobby Hut's old oblique sign is now draws a blank. Nails, skin, and beauty are serviced and supplied regularly hereabouts. Casper's hot-dog island is long defunct as is the huge old spaghetti barn across the way. But there are similar anachronisms still around, hold-outs kept alive by sugar-teeth-- Hooper's chocolates, Neldam's bakery. Other more stately buildings of a gone culture serve new purposes. Some are like the ornate wooden church painted the color of wine--obviously a valuable historic building but who comes around here to attend this church these days?
Then there are the Afro-centric Ethiopian blocks where business looks rather thin. Following this, one travels past cafes and ramshackle galleries, the kind of scenes I used to make back in the youthful day. The bus turns at the old Emporium now half-lit as a Sears, then turns again on Broadway. There, as the buildings climb toward the dead center of town, I note Oaksterdam University with a warm feeling of a change is gonna come. Named for this section of Oakland which was one of the leaders in the struggle to have medical marijuana become a normal part of life. I joined the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club at a place near here when I first received a doctor's letter of recommendation back in 2005.

Next, the bus heads out around Lake Merritt which is actually a salt water estuary of the San Francisco bay. The bus is really traveling here as it plunges into a tunnel near the Oakland museum's Babylonian gardens. There's the Oakland auditorium where I went to see shows by the Patti Smith Group, Bunny Wailer and Blondie way back when. Don't think it is used as a concert venue often these days.
Years ago my ex-wife and I came out of an event there--a Catholic event with music --and walked smack into the Bishop and two other members of the ecclesiastic elite in full ceremonial attire. They held onto their mitres as their impressive chasibules snapped in the gusty wind from the harbor while a Mariachi band played full throttle behind them. As we giggled at this scene almost second-hand from a Bunuel film, it was apparent that they wanted us to talk. First question, what parish are you from? I was still lapsed at the time and Lucy was a Catholic-admirer but not a baptized Christian. "Saint Augustine's" we fibbed--after all, it was the closest church to us, the parish we lived in. Naturally it was also the parish that Bishop had led for years, did we know? You really can only dig yourself in deeper in these sort of situations. Yet, it concluded with smiles all around as the sombrero-wearing musicians cranked it up a notch.
Today I craned out the other way across the lake to see the sweeping lines of the new Cathedral. It was built at the opposite end of the lake and finished within the last year. The Cathedral looks silvery in the distance with arcs converging at the high point. I haven't been to it yet, but if I do run into the Bishop again I'll be charming and all ears.

Next, International avenue which I was introduced to when it was called East Fourteenth. It begins in a little Vietnam district then gradually becomes more and more Mexican in character. I notice a small place whose large sign reads:

El Gato
Negro Bar

It looks like its a time-traveling segregated bar at first glance.
There are always children on the bus through here and many more on the sidewalks. A lot of the medical places we pass are geared toward maternity. It's a fast breeding populace many of whom live on small incomes. The Mexican kids seem particularly obedient and affectionate toward their silent Mothers. They remind me of a way of life from what seems like long-ago.
With every time I take the trip, it seems not quite as distant and remote. At Fruitvale I dash down through a little shopping center to hop another bus which winds up though the hilly neighborhoods to the hospital. Before it heads up, the bus passes blocks where Mexican day workers loiter in hope of jobs. Later in the morning I respectfully note their resignation as the day's chances grow thinner. I try to feel encouraged by people's struggles to get over another day. I find my mild amusement looking at the kids on a grassy ball field, some Victorian houses, and some bee-flower trees in bloom lining side streets in my slow summer time passage.

Then the bus stops on a steep hill top and it's all go. Down the ramp where smokers, often in hospital gowns, ignore signs warning of stiff penalties for violations. They must know how the enforcement, if any, works and roll the dice on but one more risk of smoking.
I headed straight for radiology and resumed sitting as soon as the reception staff got over the scantness of my paper-work and other undone administrative matters behind-the-scenes.

In a waiting room yesterday I endured a brief exposure to a popular television show on which disagreeable women raise their voices at each other between even louder commercials. Today it's considerable more time in a different crowded waiting room while a program on which audience members were encouraged to applaud or jeer at a young couple "dealing with commitment issues." The volume made it impossible to escape despite my earplugs. At other local clinics I have encountered TVs playing health advice between incessant pharmaceutical promotions. My regular clinic used to play low-brow movies which can help pass the time. But this is the most obtrusive I've ever seen TVs in a hospital setting-- playing hyped-up TV shows between ads for food products. They have an interesting therapeutic rationale no doubt.

Eventually, all things must pass and I hear my name called. A jovial black lady with a flowery cap leads me into a prep-room. Yolanda, I'll use her name, got me in a gown and stuck a number foam disks on my chest. Each bore a red heart symbol and that's what we were aiming to make, a high-definition, three dimensional color digital image of--my still beating heart.
Next came the IV stent in my arm. She voiced concern that I hadn't taken my regular beta blocker since midnight--that my heartbeat might be too fast for optimal imaging. She thought she would have to give me additional medication. Then a machine began to read my beat and soon beeped to indicate that, on its own, my heart beat was below 50 bpm.
"I'm a yogi, baby" I had to confess. Left alone in a comfortable setting I am a very calm being. I was also not letting the possible hospital anxieties get a grip on me there that day.

Next I climbed down into a wheel chair, my jacket and boots were bagged-up on my lap, and we started out to another location. Before I knew what was happening I was outside in the sunshine in my gown being wheeled past all sorts of people. Some seemed to sneak little morbidly curious glances at the sick cat--here but for fortune go all you who are able-bodied and free. I remark on a beautiful headscarf worn by a Muslim girl playing.
We go up a ramp parallel to the entrance and stop on an elevator platform under a canopy. She talks to Rueben inside the trailer over a speaker phone. The whole structure seems metallic and radio-active as we vibrate upwards. Up we go to the time tunnel tube. I am laid on a movable bed and given last minute instructions. At some point I will be injected with iodine and will feel heat from it immediately. Otherwise pay attention to breathing instructions you will hear as you are moved back and forth in a series of scans.
The process begins. If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to be "beamed-up", molecularly scrambled and reassembled, or just generally tele-ported I think I now have an analog in my experience. A spiral whirring noise envelopes you as you travel short distances in and out of the tube--another analog springs to mind for this movement. In and out like fiddler's elbow? Um, something slower, more overwhelming than music, that leaves you wiped-out and exhausted.
Meanwhile the staff hides behind a lead wall and watches it on computer screens as the charged particles ping around the space I'm in. The robotic female control voice, familiar from tawdry science fiction utopias, comes from no discernible direction and says, "Take a breathe and hold it now .................................................you may breath normally." I recall a woman's voice but I also seem to recall a male voice giving instructions too. I don't mean the old Chinese technician, whiskered and thin, who came up behind me at one point and asked how much I weighed. He was like someone from Through the Looking Glass. I glimpsed him in my peripheral vision; I don't believe I was hallucinating, but freely admit that I had entered an altered state of consciousness.
Then just when I wondered what happened to the threatened injection, Rueben was back askant with it. I felt the aforementioned heat, mainly in my groin and nether regions. When he came back I told him it felt like I wet the bed."...Hey, maybe I did wet the bed, " I added to scare him.

Afterwards, it's over. Yolanda reappears when I start to writhe--the urge to urinate is an imperative I can't ignore. She says I did very well the images look fantastic. There is a poster nearby showing spooky organs like realistic sci-fi animation digital images. I ask if they look like that. "Pretty close." Kind of scary is all I can say.

There is the unmistakable frisson of being on the cusp of what is human and natural and what is super-human and preternatural. Mankind demands ever more powers once thought to be god-like, in this case to see so vividly inside a living body. Another small technological miracle in a march to decipher the genome of the tree of knowledge. Yet so rarely do we demand that wisdom and benefit for all be the guiding philosophy when we expend vast amounts of the energy and the other resources of the one and only living world.

This time I get to don shades and shirt and boots for the return trip outdoors. By this point we're old friends and she's telling me about her kid. After a respectful hush on the elevator I get up from the chair to dive into the first men's room we come to. She leaves and I have to wander through the featureless corridors of radiology until I find her room again.
After a brief recovery, I finish getting dressed and get gone.

Postscript

After I was lowered from the particle laboratory again, I left without an appointment for a follow-up. When I called Cardiology the next week, they spent a good many of my phone minutes before telling me to call the general appointment number. This led to ten minutes in voice-mail limbo and a hang-up before my phone service cut-out.
So when I saw my regular doctor and she heard my dilemma, she gave me an office with it's own outside line where I could call and wait as long as it took to follow through. When the hospital appointment operator suggested a late October date, I was mildly astonished.
The CAT scan had been such a radical experience for me that to be kept so long in suspense afterward was comparable to going to the moon and being asked to wait four months to see the film clip.
The operator sensed that I sounded less like the average county hospital patient and more like staff. She switched me over to cardiology again. There followed a strange moment with the nurse saying that there was no record I had received any treatment at radiology. Again one pleads nolo contendere in such matters. One can't speak about what the records say with any authority, but one maintains one's belief in something one really thinks did take place.
She suggested that they call me back. I told her to take her time, that I was at my primary care clinic. This seems to do the trick quite well as the actual cardiologist called back. He is a big beaming avuncular fellow, German maybe Jewish, in his sixties. I certainly didn't expect himself to call.
"Your arteries are fantastic!" he declared, "really in fantastic shape." It was delightful to hear this. We talked good-naturedly a moment then he suggested I come to see him in one week for the follow-up.

I finally decided to reach the hospital by taking BART to Lake Merritt where a free shuttle zips you up the hill. Even with a walk downtown to BART station it was really quick for a change after all my previous trips by bus. An afternoon appointment, despite the glacial slowness of the wait, meant I could just mosey-in--no early-hour stress. In the waiting room, my earplugs in place, I finished an Elmore Leonard novel that I found on campus. It was the source material for a Tarantino film and many of my present company looked like they might have stepped out of it.
Then at last my name was called. I went from the crowded room into the sparsely populated precincts to wait on in quietude. A preliminary interview with a different doctor awaited me, this time an Indian lady. They take their time with you here and I had never been more thoroughly listened to via stethoscope. Talking about myself I eventually mentioned that my elderly mother passed away this year. In our reverie on mothers, I wondered rhetorically if anyone else on earth would ever really care about me. She agreed and said even though she was married and had family she sometimes asked herself the same question. It was the human condition we concluded.
This visit I was better prepared for the moment when the patriarch himself arrived. Last time I was spaced from a long wait and a lack of refreshment. So this time I jotted-down notes ahead of time and I ate a banana at the last moment.
He immediately announced that there was nothing physically wrong with my heart, that you could drive a truck through, that you could sail a boat through my arteries. There were no signs of disease present or prior. No tobacco, very moderate drinking, exercise, and a low-salt, low-fat diet--there's no secret to it. He said I have a large and slow heart, which is good. The old notion is still true--that we are only given so many heart beats in a lifetime.
"Like a humming-bird," I riffed. I also mentioned that I'm a Leo and known to be big-hearted. General amusement at this--the first doctor hangs-out for the chat with the big doc. I ran through my questions then I finished with, "Can I see the CAT scan?"
Well, it isn't the policy...
I said that was alright, I had just thought maybe he could twiddle a few keys and it would come-up on the computer screen next to us. And what do you know? He agreed. After expressing regrets that this station didn't have all the colors of own set-up, he brought up the screens. And there was my big art pay-off.
At first the image was of my ribs swathed in red-purple muscle. "That's my breastplate," said I. "Hang on a minute," quoth the snowy-haired physician.
Then he clicked on the "remove bone" option, and the naked, sacred heart itself is revealed. The colors are all deep, intense and jewel-like. There indeed were my fantastic arteries looking like massive rivers seen from space. Then, mind-blowingly, he turned my heart in virtual space. Like a magnifying satellite we sail around the south pole of my heart and note more of my arterial splendor. I feel like I am in some meta-world sitting in front of a visionary simulacrum of my heart and mind. Both of which are encompassed by my soul which itself emanates from a universe of love.

"OK, I'm going to restore your bone. Do you want you bone back?"
"I still have to get home."

Requiem and Reckoning

2009-07-04T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Flaneur strays from his usual localized musings to comment on a recent passing...

"Jacko Lantern" mail art, postmark August 2009

When I look at a photo of the so-called King of Pop dangling with one arm a little baby over a balcony, I believe I am looking at an image of one of the most decadent individuals on earth.
His face had been bleached and carved into a severe mask-- an androgynous, Caucasian Disney cartoon. And it's obvious now that the three children are seen without the suffocating disguises, that they show no outward sign of sharing any of his African-American genes. Apparently he snatched the middle-child out of the hospital where she was born, before the hired surrogate wife could even see her. A bombed-out superstar and his muscle rushing off with a still unwashed new-born its placenta still attached--it's quite a picture.
An employee of his who was present during the baby-dangling has since stated that Michael was completely "doped-out" at the time. This was "Blanket" a baby to whom he neither contributed genes, nor as much as met his Mother, nor even ever legally adopted.
Like all corporations, he had long been permitted to function above the laws that apply to those less wealthy. He made his decadence a normal way of life. In paranoiac seclusion he consistently asked his public to sympathize with him for having had a cruel father and a childhood lost to fame. He asked them to buy into a fantasy that he was more than harmless, a saint and a free spirit regressed back to the pre-sexual state of a twelve-year-old.
So when the keeping of other people's children became a problem for him, he simply procured some of his own. He proceeded to share bed and bedroom with them subject to no-one's prying questions. This private life was perhaps made easier by living in a place like Bahrain where a very wealthy person in modest women's attire is very rarely a source of any concern--even if he did make them nervous when he used a restroom for women.
Then the children got to grow up in seclusion and close intimacy with a heavy-drug-using parent. They joined him in his paranoid evasion of private scrutiny while he maintained his publicity as a commodity in the marketplace. The children are said to have have been allowed no long term relations with other kids. They do and say as told with the great sense of importance and remoteness that narcissistic pop-stars with bodyguards bathe in. Moreover in recent years he seems to have been enveloped in a relation with the Nation of Islam. Secrecy self-importance, and a quick-draw on the race card seem to come with that territory.
And so despite all those years of suspicion, evidence, pay-offs, charges, acquittal and admitted addiction, he never seems to have had to face his pedophilia or drug abuse. Certainly he didn't in any clinical psychiatric setting. Otherwise he wouldn't still have talked such fairytale-innocence nonsense while holding hands and nuzzling with a dreamy little bed-mate on TV. This was the one who later charged him with sexual improprieties. Was this a surprise to anyone coming as did from the man who had built an entire amusement park to groom and select children for sleep-overs in the magic bunkhouse in Neverland?

As those huge Disney-esque eyes began to sag with age and with an inevitable pharmaceutical toll, they became as much a mask as the rest of his face. He was rarely seen without the dark glasses of the opiate eater. At the last press conference he finally given up the breathy drag queen whisper and he looked like an animatronic skeleton version of himself. He had cast a lingering look at his chances for a last lucrative spectacle and agreed to some wildly implausible number of concerts. "This is It" was presented as a closing gesture to his grandiose career.
Yet, fifty is fifty after all. Some may be able to dance feverishly after fifty, and some may be able to survive as heavy-drug users after fifty, but few are able to do both. Within a week of his death a film of his last rehearsal was available all over. It almost appears to be a posthumous marketing campaign--like he knew that they would film the best he had left in him.
Then he would be free to inject some ending to himself after which he could be packaged and sold. The sub-conscious death-wish attached to his use of what were apparently very heavy drugs is inarguable. The one that may have snuffed him is a sedative so powerful it can only safely be used with an anesthesiologist and oxygen. Called "Milk of Amnesia" it vacuums away all psychic and physical pain and induces a deep sleep with pronounced sexual dreams in males.
Sounds made to order for someone in certain imagined outer realms.
Deepak Chopra, an acquaintance of Mr. Jackson, has said since his death that it was reckless to have stockpiled opiates without having the obvious drugs for opiate over-dose on hand.

From the corny but cute Jackson Five, with their version of familiar Motown showmanship to the heavily-produced hits and the glittery, morphed-but-still-attractive character that dominated the Reagan eighties, I have generally enjoyed his music and performance. He was never a lot more than that for me. James Brown worked his wonders for me, or Sly and the Family Stone when I saw them as a teen-ager. Jackson's hey-days didn't coincide with my interest in either teen-pop or sexy dating music.
Even though they may have turned into trade-mark tics and gimmicks to some extent, his talents were impressive. At one moment in time he had it, the glittering zeitgeist. Even so, he was ultimately a performer and singer, a musician of limited invention, a pasticheur. Increasingly the music itself stalled out while the creepy show-biz royalty recluse took over the whole story. In all his contrived artificiality, the mask the actor wore became his face and eventually his facade. Recall the cover of his "Dangerous" album: his eyes peer out from a sickly ornate facade over fun-house tunnel from which a little boy in underpants emerges. What could he have had in mind? The thrilling suggestion of molestation to polymorphously perverse under-age fans?

If I note some of the mountains of evidence of his decadence it is in part to counter the usual refusal of the corporate press to call a spade, a spade. (Forgive the usage viz a viz Jackson's whitened negritude.) I refer to reports of Jackson camp excuses that are so incredible as to be insulting. I refer to the right-wing radio host notorious for his own opiate addiction. This radio blow-hard came to Jackson's defense on the issue of over-lavish medication, luxury drugs provided by personal physicians.
If I see the burden and wages of sin in his life, the apparent lostness, it's hopefully in order to have sympathy and kindness for Mr. Jackson. "As you judge others so shall you be judged." This I do believe, I and try not to judge. Yet I do think there is a lesson there for any of us with an unmoored desire to be rich and famous and to have the world at our bidding.

"I'm Not There (1956)" Meta-Bootleg Series

2009-06-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

from God Nose Runs Again
on Over the Edge KPFA radio

June in a Twilight Region

2009-06-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

The weather has been cool for weeks. Chilly marine fog envelopes the mornings and the early evenings. The sunset is late this time of year and it is often occluded for the hours before dark, gray ambiguous hours. Certainty disappears like the horizon in a painting by Tanguy, the vague horizon between night and day.
The streets are newly deserted by the departing student hoards. The hills light up in a strangely prominent way when the sun is low and often dramatically re-emergent from the clouds.
Flowers dominate sidewalks and yards, looming hydrangeas and squadrons of fragrant roses. I stand transfixed by some mauve crocus-like flowers near a wet spider web fantasy. Jasmine drifts down the block.
Today's almond shortbread cannabis cookie is fully circulating after I have just been dancing in People's Park. The starring act was closing the Telegraph Avenue World Music festival there today at 4:30. I remembered just in time to make the show. They were Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited from Zimbabwe. Their music is called chimurenga meaning struggle. Deep reggae-style grooves with Afro-pop guitar filigrees had everyone dancing happily. They finished with a long discursive tune that had an unmistakable feeling of protest and woe. It is after all a fitting place to bring this universal panacea, one that calls you to "forget your troubles and dance." Then abruptly it was over for the day at 5:30.

The clouds lately in the clear plein air have been like paintings. At times they are like zen abstract brush-strokes and at other times, like the monumental orchestrations of epic skies in 18th century French art. In general there has been greater apparent complexity in them. Great seasonal shifting air-masses have produced odd thunder storms.
There are fewer lights at night from the tower blocks, and there's less traffic from the blockheads. The moon has been bright and crisp. It shines in from the back deck though the security screen-door amid nocturnal morning glories. And afternoons red-finches sing assertively on phone cables in this new quiet country life.
It's a time of abandoned furniture and curbside boxes of belongings that no longer belong to anyone. Along Benvenue last evening, I rested in a curbside reclining chair and lit my after-Mass shorty. Across the street hummingbirds threaded through some red flowers as intense as Xmas lights. I shoved-off again on a slow walk home. When I commented on a bed of succulents to a guy gardening, he wanted to talk about them in a cordial way. It was as if people had time for each other again.
I was carrying two artichokes I foraged on Chabot. Someone planted them along the sidewalk and suddenly there were dozens, not quite best quality perhaps but not bad either.
At St Albert's there were boxes of strange oranges. There was even a sheet to explain their origin. They were from a tree in St Albert's grounds, one I noticed many times--small with abundant fruit. It had been brought from Rome and moved to several Dominican houses by a priest who also wound up here, planted like his tree. Someone recently brought a sample of it to an arborist who marveled at it. He said that it was a very ancient type of orange-- it even grows thorns on its branches. It had never been cross-bred with more recent types--it was essentially a hold-over from the very old world. They taste like sour tangerines, like marmalade, far from the orange as we know it.

This was the second of two extraordinary plant varieties I had recently encountered at St. Albert the Great. The other was a Mr. Lincoln rose bush. Its flowers are classically formed and of the deepest velvety red. Most astonishing of all, its scent is as full and deep as any rose I have sniffed in my long life of always stopping to smell the roses. There is something almost epi-phenomenal, or miraculous, about them.

Meanwhile across town, the turn-around point of my nightly walks is currently surrounded by fencing. Overhead, Sather Tower, more popularly known as the Campanile, is wearing an elaborate ziggurat head and neck brace. It seems that even marble wears away in the wet winds and unforgiving sunlight at that altitude. The ghostly Flaneur, who walks through it's plaza late at night, who meditates on a sun dial pedestal by starlight, or who dreams mysteriously on its benches during carillon concerts, will not be seen there again until September of this year.

And when I walk down Bancroft, returning from the mail box after midnight, there are no cars in sight, no one walks the streets, and the distant trains say it's late, it's time to sleep. The world bids me peace and I reflect the same aspiration.

Pussy Willows: 18 haiku poems

2009-05-17T00:46:00.000-07:00

O the last day in May
It soon comes our way

Spring fever compels the Flaneur to a voluptuary's pursuit of poetry.

...

Alone in a courtyard
a hummingbird drinks rain drops
on the fly

Alongside the creek
light reflects on shady trees
so real so unreal

Hot wind in the firs
that red amid the green brush
golf ball bumble bee

A loop of birdsong
rhododendron round-about
all the leaves have eyes

2007

...

Purple chalk powder
accumulates to the west
illusory sky

Louder than the sea
wild wind in the tall pines
everything moves

Huge clouds billow
over the welling green hills
'danger falling cones'

A fallen flower
dangling in a spider's web
interests the cat

Two bright lady bugs
revolve on blue balustrade
vacant lot smells fennel

Stoned alone in church
like a wonder-cabinet
deep silent prayer

Morning glories bob
birds hurdy-gurdy the trees
forget I'm outdoors

A heat-wave in May
magenta arabesque clouds
lone bat passes by

The leaky faucet
a wee bird knows to drink from
all for survival

A crow flies over
with a bird bone in its beak
business is business

2008

...

Cats listen to birds
and hear the carillon bells
but not as music

Bench under the bells
a panoply of teardrops
valley in the clouds

The bat cat out back
hunts bugs in semi-darkness
friday night traffic

Behind our chapel
the deepest scent of roses
in a deep red whorl

2009

...

Springtime Notebook outtakes: 18 short poems

2009-05-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

...

In Tenebrous Time

Faces in the trees
every cloud every sky
reveals my mind to me

Floating purple clouds
of rhododendron
In a barkless red hollow
the tree associated with Mary
Showed me her apparition
then became something else

The price of every disaster is renewal

The Moon knows three words:
seen, reflected, hidden.

The Lord is life and lamp unto me.
Early Easter AM

Stone walls bridge the air
Bells come down the creeky

Leafy mazes map the buildings
Pow wow on the third story

Postcard view of a re-enacted forest
In tall windows over the drum circles

Bulky evening star
vertiginous balcony
O the discus moon

Despite heavy rain
hummingbirds bounce in trees
flowers are forthright

Sign nailed to a tree
says danger falling acorns
wooden bench nearby

Tilden Park Easter Sunday

Crows in the Oaks
The twisty old Oaks

Always a peak reached
When you follow thoughts

Slow glides the owl
Over the sunny meadow

Over the heads of children
No one looks up

A path--trillium and mossy roots
A patch--serrated clouds blue sky

Pitch black crows in the Oaks
The twisty old Oaks

A cat is wary when it's drinking.

A dream of a bear wearing a black leather sport coat in my apartment.

Occasioned by a BBC TV news bit about "Krishna," a black sloth bear
adopted by a village in India. When they had tried to chase off his
mother and cubs, he was left behind.

birdsong/flowers/the stoned boat

A deuce of moons this May
silent fir trees in mist
fairy folk fold their cards

Marbled red and green
that deeply-colored glass vase
is a soft flower

Roadside stand in Sunderland

The farmer taps
on the car window of memory
The ghost of a sycamore
moves through the dust

At the heart of things
red dots in the conifers
the last of the moon

undersea egypt pours into the vacuum left by an hour glass

...

Festival Days: Earth Day

2009-04-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

April is like a clock ticking. The student celebrations get frantic as that scene winds down. Meanwhile greater Berkeley had a few Spring events in the parks including Earth day deferred to Saturday and People's Park's 4oth anniversary on Sunday. As ever the Flaneur is there and herewith reports on what went down.

Saturday morning and the lone pathetic taiko drummer on lower Sproul blams out bursts of uninspired rhythm every so often. There seems to be a sporting event or some other chauvinist pageant for them to say they are drumming about. Actually the increasing nuisance of the taiko idiots is more about Asian triumphalism and about individuals calling attention to themselves than anything else. Here it is eight hours later as I write, the drums drag on with utter disregard to the peaceful enjoyment of others.
"Boom boom da-boom boom, boom boom boom"
It's the same dumb marshal tattoo over and over, again and again, no music, no expression except, "here I am I have a drum and I make loud noises"--strictly low chakra stuff. Then they slow it down to just "boom-boom-boom..."-- our army is approaching, fear us and surrender.
The taiko drums along with the increased alcohol-driven mayhem late at night--the screaming drunk girl at 2AM this morning for example-- are the two most sickening developments in social behavior in the area. Both are tied to the onslaught of the new student majority.

I get to my feet around noon and make ready for a minor excursion. Celtic songs concerning the love of the natural world waft from the radio as I roll me a shorty with the latest blend. Then it's off, not in a hurry but rushing nonetheless. A beautiful, cool and windy but sunny day--the temperature doesn't break 60 degrees. I drop by the library to return DVDs and divert past the post office to drop another one in the mail. I'm headed for the Civic Center park where the Earth day program is in full swing. I pull up a bench and sit down for one of the most charming parades of passing humans you can find. Lots of sweet children in states of enjoyment, little ones look at me seriously from strollers and I give them all a smile. Older kids and adults also wear their springtime finery. Two lovely girls walk by with a guitar, tiny flowers in their hair, wearing wispy dresses that look like slips. I'm beaming and in general I get a good return on the vibration.
Background music is provided by an anonymous band on a stage way down at the far end of the park. The lawn is loosely filled with folks camped-out in the grass. Young men exhibit lion-like manes of chestnut dreadlocks. Near me is the hemp clothes booth, and I can see the sign for the Cannabis Action Network from where I sit. I also spy some old acquaintances of mine at a table hawking their new book. A husband and wife team, they had already done a book on eccentrics, and one on loners. The new one was a scavengers handbook with a market eye on the new trend in poverty. "Another holiday in someone else's misery," as the old Situationist shibboleth sung by the Sex Pistols put it. I am tempted to go over and say hello, but I don't want to break up the tranquility of their signing table.

I notice that some anticipation seemed to be collecting over on Alston way. The street is cordoned off and a swelling cluster of cops is in evidence. I read a large hand-made banner in the wind from behind--what, "Berkeley Welcomes the Dalmatian"?...wait, "the Dalai Lama"? Who knew?
I learn from two lovely young women that he is in town for his speech on campus and apparently he is putting in an appearance at an unpublicized event at the Berkeley Community Theater. He'll be arriving across the street at the stage entrance so I find a little grassy knoll directly across from it with a nice sight-line.
More cops show up, more than twenty-five in all. In the type of grossly unconstitutional invasion of of privacy that people have resigned themselves to in America, one lard-ass cop starts panning over us with a video camera. I very much want the Dalai Lama to be protected from his vicious detractors but there is no sign of protest or even any Chinese people who might turn hostile. Well, maybe there is one annoying couple. The diminutive male comes and holds his camera directly in front of my face a few times until I tell him to fuck-off in a decidedly un-Buddhistic manner. More gently, I have to tell a little boy to stop what he was doing too--methodical pounding a rock on exposed tree roots to strip away the bark. His Earth day-attending dad ignores or apparently sees nothing wrong in the activity. "That hurts the tree," I tell him.
There's mainly just parents and kids around and a few Buddhists, all Earth day types. But of course, as a lone male in sunglasses and black beret, I can soon sense these armed and mustachioed officers mildly directing their scrutiny at me. What else to they have to do, really? And I do have the logistical sweet spot. It's between me and the little girl in the tree branch overhead.
Then a fire truck blocking the street is moved and motorcycle cops roar up with sirens on. A black SUV arrives followed by a limo. Ceremonial items including a bread basket stupa are in position and a troupe of snow leopard dancers kick into their act. A half-dozen men-in-black hit their marks and the limo door opens. I recognize the Dalai Lama first, the shape of his head, the unmistakable color of his robe, and I hold up my arms in a pranam greeting. Everyone cheers and applauds--maybe a hundred people in all scattered around watching. Certainly, many in the park don't even investigate what's going on. The old school R&B group just grooves on without notice.
The Dalai Lama turns to onlookers and gives us all a warm, smiling pranam turning in three directions. A final round of applause and cheers after he stops at the little altar. He waves and then proceeds inside escorted by city-councilman Worthington. Then it's just a battery of easy-paycheck cops and secret-service guys with frozen hard looks behind shades. We get to leave them to their duties and mosey away to nibble on free Clif bars.
I am reminded of the time I caught a glimpse of the Queen of England in Newport, Rhode Island for the Bicentennial. As that happened Ford and Kissinger flew over in a helicopter adding to everyone's anxiety-level. The Queen came out of the rear door of Trinity church and slightly waved. My glimpse of her was at around same distance for about the same length of time as my glimpse of the Dalai Lama. Only this is better by far, and unexpected, uncrowded, and painless. This is a blessing for us all. Everyone feels it, it is plain to see.

"We gonna pitch a wang-dang-doodle," sings a big gospel lady on stage projecting sort of a mellowed-down, middle-aged notion of what a wang-dang-doodle consists of.
Some more people-watching from my bench. A westerner walks past wearing the robes of a Buddhist monk. He is escorting a glitzy lady in a golden spangled skirt who looks more like a Thai prostitute than a Tibetan nun. Two kids go by in camouflage fatigues, one with an army helmet. Were they out to embarrass their liberal-looking dad?
Two teen-aged guys in amusing costumes ride up on scooters. The shorter blond kid has a long cape, and a plastic Roman breast plate, other kooky stuff. The taller kid wore things like a loose-knit tunic and a cowl over his head that gave him teddy bear ears. They chat with the straight arrow at the solar-panel table across from me. I love how young people can be so casually non-conformist in these times, in these parts. They obviously don't fear being made fun of, but believe in having fun regardless of what squares may think.
As I leave the taller one is crossing Milvia at the same time I am. He stops at a vehicle-- driven by a parental unit I'd say, and removes his mad gear, tossing it into the hatch. As he comes round to get in next to the driver, he faces me a second and we smile. I say to him, "How Berkeley can you be, baby?"
"Yee-ah" he laughs.

Festival Days: 40th Anniversary of People's Park

2009-04-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

Sunday rolls around peacefully. KPFA is also having a round birthday--their 60th. Mary Tilson spins "America's Back Forty" one of my favorite programs. She reminisces about migrating to Berkeley from Michigan during another hard scrabble period in the USA--the early 90s.
I don't have time for a louche brunch today--festivities await out of doors.
It's cool again, less windy though. The park is very pleasantly full of people. On the east side of the lawn, there's a large gold-lame "god's eye" on a pole with dry reeds radiating out from the central orb. I go on up to the Southeast corner near the peace pole, a white column printed with messages of peace in several languages. Some slices of tree trunk arranged in a peace-sign next to it make good seats. Remarkable flowers abound here--big, upthrust, purple-blossomed flowers.

I think back to my first encounter with People's Park in 1979. I was on my way to see an apartment for rent on Benvenue. After a few months staying with my brother's family in a suburb, I was eager to get closer to where the action was and to have my own place to partake in it. As I made my way there, along with the impressive architecture of the Julia Morgan church across the street and a red brick school of divinity on Dwight, I noted the absence of architecture and the humanist divinity in a bordering park. Music was in progress on a small stage in front of a crowd of hippies, real hippies in those days.
My own days of enjoying such outdoor rock boogies were decidedly behind me at the time. I was intent on more thoughtful and avant-garde a pose than in the frivolous rut this represented to me. I remember sitting in the grass briefly and thinking such things.

Over the years, though, I have forgiven myself and others for our hippie ways. In the process I've gained some affection for good old People's Park. It was only ten years old back in 1979, and this weekend it is forty years old. I applauded its foundation in 1969 and it was a cause celebre in underground newspaper everywhere. Many communities with youth populations across the country saw similar attempts to create "liberated zones" where free music and food, pot-smoking and free speech, replacement of the smothering concrete with democratic seedlings could take place. Police were decidedly not invited or welcome.
The Provos in Amsterdam, the Diggers in San Francisco, and the Yippies in New York, all tried to organize something Utopian that could last a while. For the most part the communes, the free food, and the idealistic ideology faded out. Yet somehow People's Park, a prize morsel in every university vulture's eye, remained in the hands of the populace. This alone is reason to cherish it and to celebrate.
The marginal and the down-trodden that make up its more constant residents and visitors, can also provide a useful social barometer of how hard the haves have made it for the have-nots. The battle to discourage these people being waged by the UC and Berkeley police includes continual removal of the free box where clothes are donated for those who need them. They insist that foliage and shrubbery always be cut to a minimum so they can enforce a Draconian no-visitors-after-dark policy. And they try to disrupt or ban the feeding of the poor by groups like Food Not Bombs and the Catholic Worker.

Today the feeling is so bright it is hard to recall such issues. It came easier on all the recent overcast wintry days I walked through and just the usual alcoholics and monochromatic down-and-outers were here.
On this brilliant afternoon, a guy strums out songs of freedom away on the stage. Once again, I'm listening to it but I'm more interested in people-watching.
The sheer preponderance of colorful weirdos ain't what it once was. It is really mostly young people in their twenties and younger who are sympathetic with the hippie ethos and can use some free entertainment. There are also quite a few families with small children, which I like. Happily all are being fed regularly today with yet more free Clif bars. But whereas yesterday you went to a booth where generous pieces were available, today several strapping young guys go around giving away as many as people will accept. They are even dumping piles of the various whole-grain-and-fruit energy bars in the grass. I remember someone doing that with joints one year. So far I haven't seen that happen today, but the pot smoke is delightfully steady.

I decide to take note of remarkable freak-flag-fliers as they pass me by. The guy I notice straight off and want to award People's Park man of the day, is about 60-65 dressed plain to shabby, sunglasses, and with a sloppy but radical black-dyed "Mohawk" haircut. There are several other more flamboyant panache-style haircuts around but this guy is punk.
Dying one's hair jet black is back it seems, as seen on the next guy I spy. I'll call him, in his dark renaissance fobbery, "Brian Jones noir."
Another apparent mat-black member of the court shows up just then. Wearing a purple and gold monarch's crown, a black ballet dress and fish-net stockings, he provides his own high contrast with very blond hair and fair skin. He walks past me to rest out of the sunshine, sitting cross-legged on a rail in some nearby shade. Quite refined really.
Then there's a young hipster girl with tawny sylvan braids and a large cookie basket. I guessing it's cookies rich in cannabis-butter, there little red riding hood.
Assorted others add local flavor to the scene--there's the old gray woolly hippie wearing an American flag jacket over a priest's chasuble bearing a full-length Easter cross. There's another younger bearded guy who has a furry animal-ears get-up on top of his straw hat. He may be from the same tribe as the teddy-bear headdress youngster from yesterday .
A lonely guy with enormous hair, whom I couldn't help but notice yesterday as well, asks me if I have a bottle-opener. I would attempt to describe his hair as a farah-fawcet hairdo needing a trim caught in the wind after a shower. I regret that I don't have an opener. As with matches or rolling papers, I enjoy supplying such things. I have been many times in a similar position.

Next a young cat handing-out the local anarchist tabloid Slingshot comes by. One of their loose collective was nearly-killed by an IDF-fired high-velocity tear gas cannister at the apartheid wall in Palestine very recently. Tristan Anderson was a brave Berkeley tree-sitter last year and is now in a vegetative state in a hospital overseas. The table they operate offers massage for donations to his fund. May God bless him.
This group the Long Haul Collective also had a grossly unconstitutional police raid on its premises and computers in the last year. It was stated to be in connection with recent animal rights activity, but it was a fishing-expedition for information on such things as grassroots protest plans for last summer's GOP convention.
Then, on page 2 of Slingshot there's an obituary for an old colleague of mine, Franklin Rosemont, Chicago's lion of labor history and surrealism. We were in touch for quite a long time beginning around 1975. I admired his example of surrealist subversion and we collaborated on a few projects.

An obese rainbow clown is inclining down toward the stage. I figure this is Wavy Gravy. It's him alright and before long he is on the mic from a seat stage-side. I don't understand what he says but I do recognize the voice following his. It's Jonathan Richman strumming an acoustic guitar with a drummer backing him up. I make the proverbial bee-line to this nectar, right to stage front. Only a few people are dancing so it's easy to join without jostling. Naturally, considering where we are, a few of the dancers are quite smelly or somewhat lacking in self-control, or both. One bearded porker is fairly omnipresent at such hippie remnant events. He seems to be vying to be elected bull-goose hippie when Wavy departs. A very eager dancer, he franticly moves to the other side when he can't get the ground that others and I occupy. And a lot of the body odor seemed to go with him. I later see him getting shoddy-looking body paint with other flabby exhibitionists.
But it's all in hand and it would take a great deal more to spoil the good feeling Jonathan Richmond puts out without fail. He runs through a short set with his arabesque grooves, his witty lyrics and warm voice. His stage moves are really good too--a very seasoned performer. He keeps acting as if he only had been given a brief amount of time. Wavy keeps him from cutting out too fast though. He requests a song, a poor choice for dancing but one that goes over very well with the infants. Several parents are holding them aloft near me. (I think I represented a safe dance zone). It's a children's song about a dinosaur. A mom standing next to me signs the song for her baby who pays avid attention. Another tot sitting on her dad's shoulders behind me is really into the music, entranced by it. The way Jonathan sells his lyrics with facial expressions and schtick really puts him over with the kids.
Richman has always had a child-like demeanor himself and seems born to perform. He looks incredibly young and healthy. He's a year older than I am too. Staying happy has carried him a long way. He is a subtly swank dresser to boot in his cool rock-a-billy jacket. Too soon he calls it a set and waves bye-bye. He justly gets a sizable cheer from the mob.
A carpet is rolled-out next and a rather amateurish troupe of belly-dancers go to work to canned music. They have a slow hip-hop section but it seems to me to defeat the whole idea. While I'm watching this, Jonathan walks by for the second time, this time by himself. I can't resist and reach out to say hello. He's from Natick, North shore of Boston. I tell him he's a hero to me.
"I'm from Massachusetts and I remember when Roadrunner first came on 'BCN in the mid-70s...music hasn't been the same since." He smiles graciously and wants to know where I'm from. When I tell him Fall River, he says he's playing there soon.
I mention that I was just checking out Josh Ritter on YouTube and he had a video that was made in Fall River. I said, oh, Fall River's hip now. More laughter. Actually it always was, I add, but nobody knew it.
As we say goodbye I tell him, "You're like a beacon to me...like a buoy...you buoy us up...you're like a life jacket, that's it." Thinking out loud I'd hit on the right simile. A big smile and sincere thanks from a real sweetheart. He has lovely eyes.

After this I find an incline that's fit to recline on and have some more of a Clif bar. A Belgian girl takes the stage for one French song in a nice voice. Others are not as easy on the ears when they get the stage for their statements. Rarely do they seem to realize that they needn't yell into a microphone. Often they adopt a tone of such nervous urgency that they render their spiel ridiculous.

There's half an acre of people of similar age who all seem like they know each other. Seated close together they are charming to me the way a flock of birds or a family of lowland gorillas can be. Recent studies have proven that young people who smoke cannabis have better social skills than those who do not.

The next act is a blues band modeled on the Hendrix experience with the effects-laden guitar in the hands of Shelly Doty. The prominent bass resonates especially well with the assembled stoners. Acid flashback music still rocks a lot of souls, it must be said, who stand up and dance.
There's that old white hippie in a dashiki from years gone by. While dancing he walks back and forth portentously while playing psychedelic charades. There's a fat gal with a rat's head hat--she's available and her standards are easily met, I'm guessing.
There's the huge guy with a long white beard, leather vest, and pirate's hat, handing-out flyers of some sort--for the Biker-Pirate-Burner Ball perchance? There's an aging black queen with a flaming red hat and the brightest clashing colors of anyone here. There's that pale retired rock-star guy with dyed-black hair of course and today some flowery out-door pajamas. There's an authentic-looking railroad hobo.
And these are the people of People's Park.

Another one of these rocking souls made himself known just then. He is my selection for first runner-up People's Park man-of-the-day. A dready and beaded black man he wore a huge rainbow flag-winged cape with an Obama family portrait on a velvet rug attached to the front. Each color stripe was separate like feathers. There was also a "No on Prop 8" gay marriage-ban election poster attached somewhere in his spreading penumbra. Frolicking around with a huge grin, he was chanting, "Freedom at last." I only wish the first black president could actually be the super-hero of this guy's vision.

Younger folk are out in regalia as well---there's the guy on stilts in black silk chinese pajamas, or the girl with pink fairy wings. A cute young girl with fuchsia hair alights on a group sitting around a "911 Truth" placard. She has classic body painting and a wild paisley hippie-dress. And of course there's the very hip little kids who always take to the Aquarian vibe without hesitation. They don't even seem to be alarmed at all by a few saggy nudes around them. And the free food thing is their expectation. I watched with amusement as one little boy walked up to a Mexican ice cream-vendor's cart and opened the cooler. The sharp-eyed ice cream man sitting close by on a bench shooed him away firmly.

A black girl lying next to me was snoring away under her coat--I moved away a little. There, a line was forming a short distance away. From it all sorts of people emerged with paper plates of free cooked food. I had eaten several energy snacks and decided to leave the food for others. This is not to mention my fussiness. I'd actually had some lentils and vegetables from this group recently, hardy but gloppy. But it is a blessing for the hungry and for those who serve them.

Diamond Dave next seizes the mic to deliver his mummified rap. He was an early friend of Bob Dylan and may well have been Bob's first source for works by Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, and others integral to his trip. Bob also kidnapped Dave's actual carnival experiences to fold into his own early fictional bio-notes. When Dave is motoring away like this, it leaves little doubt that he was in fact the one who left home and found work as a carnival barker.
After yet another impassioned plea follows, that this crowd personally stop the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's dangerous expansion in Strawberry canyon. That left only one more performer on today's bill. I moved down behind the stage to listen better.
Country Joe MacDonald, internationally known for cheer-leading at Woodstock, came on with his fascist-killing acoustic guitar. When I first moved here thirty years ago, his dad used to set up a table on Telegraph to sell a book called "An Old Guy Who Feels Good." Joe, who I first saw as the radical-edgy young front-man of Country Joe and the Fish in the late 60s, is now the age his dad was then. He mainly performs the old songs that feel good by Woody Guthrie these days. Today he plays "This Land is Your Land" as one of a fairly brief handful of tunes. He also performed the Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth", demanding and getting a sing-along out of the crowd. One can't help but wonder why he doesn't do any of the more lyrical stuff from the first Fish LP. Instead we get the most obvious choice and the best-known of their songs, "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag." Yeah, let's stop this Viet Nam.

That happens and it's getting past my bed-time for this affair. I bid fond farewell for another year and start home. In front of the empty carapace of the old Cody's, the same tropicalia jam band that was here last year is playing again. A little lady sings and shakes her maracas and seems to be good at getting the party started. I linger on the opposite corner and listen a while. They launch into an Amazon-inspired number replete with vocal impressions of birds and monkeys.
As I wonder why this scene can't be at least this funky and fun all the time, the singer asks, "How many of you want music to be here every week? Raise your hands!"
Everybody put their hands in the air and wave 'em like they just don't care.

Postscript:
Yes, it was bedtime for the park that Bonzo built and that in turn built Bonzo. By Bonzo I of course mean the late Ronald Reagan, c0-star of "Bedtime for Bonzo" and former Governor of California. He built the park by rallying its supporters after his initial brutal repression of it. He called in the National Guard, many were injured, and James Rector was killed.
People's Park in return built Reagan by making him a national reactionary hero. This led to critical mass for his presidential ambition. He was then able to spearhead through congress his "trickle-down" economic policies that vastly widened the gap between rich and poor. This insured that there would be a sizable permanent underclass for whom such a place is a haven of last resort. Without a doubt, the casualties of Reagan's whole crack-for-Contras thing sure beat a path to this place.
Today, while the merchants and neighbors may rail against the "nuisance" of People's Park, the police make regular use of it, telling unfortunate people to get off the street and go there.
"Go sleep it off in People's Park," I heard a cop instruct a guy passed-out on a Berkeley sidewalk near Peet's coffee shop. That kind of society leaves everyone with an ashtray heart.

(Note: Each part was written and originally posted the evening of that day's events. I'm re-posting them separately to make them into columns that are easier to read.)

"Ghost Town" Meta-Bootleg Series

2009-04-08T14:48:00.001-07:00

The Last Barbershop

2009-03-27T03:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, although it's still today because I haven't gone to bed yet, I went for a haircut and found a proverb...

As I climbed into the chair at Frank's barbershop, I told him I had just been reading a Chronicle that didn't look like the Chronicle, and I saw a picture of all the sidewalk mailboxes that they've taken away, while sitting next to a sign for his retirement party. "It's a new era," he laughed.
He's been in Berkeley since 1962. I started getting my hair cut there in the early 80s.
It was several years after I moved here. In that time I'd become familiar with Moe's seeming omnipresence at his bookstore. Moe's face was the face of Berkeley. But he's been absent a dozen years now. So from my perspective, after twenty-five years, Frank is today the face of Berkeley.

Frank is not very tall, bald, white of hair, not stout but nearly so, and quite pleasant but not always easy-going. I have not patronized his shop exclusively all those years by any means. I used to feel a little bit of an ambiguous vibe there at first. I was also concerned that some of his haircuts made me look too square. But square in a way he was--"I'm not a stylist." And that's why you went--nobody can give a white man a better "fade". I think he perfected his trademark cuts while in the military.
When it comes to short hair there is, of course, a fine line between square and not square. What I would usually do was to doctor the haircuts up a little when I got home. What was crucial was the professional short sides and back. If the somewhat longer hair on top made me look a little like a game show host, that was easily remedied. I could make slightly oblique and angular chops in it with my own barber sheers. With it gelled-up, I looked like an Interview magazine stylist had had his way with me.
Yes, I have cut my own hair when I felt like it. I actually cut my ex-wife's hair a few times too. A hairstylist was too timid to give her the cut she wanted, very short with a long forelock, so I did. She got compliments-- especially from some Japanese friends who ran a little restaurant in nearby Albany called Sakura. They dug my advanced design. My career was brief, however--hair-cutting is a headache and eyestrain for a crude perfectionist like me.
Nowadays I attempt to tend things when I need a trim between haircuts. Of course Frank notices the trail of my mutilations but doesn't mention them. I told him this week that I knew I looked like an overgrown vacant lot. I am tempted to paraphrase the old saw about acting as your own lawyer, and say a man who acts as his own barber has a fool for a client. But then I was reminded when watching Henry Fonda in the film "Young Mr. Lincoln" that old Honest Abe used to cut his own hair too. It kind of restored the nobility of it in my sight. The actual Lincoln has quite artfully messed-up hair in many photographs.

When I started going to Frank, he had his deluxe old shop next door to the UC Theater, which was then central to the local social scene. It was a familiar lay-out with all the classic barber furniture and equipment. The surrealism of everyday life abounded in these places, as with the vats of antiseptic with combs in them. They were always rather evocative of the barbershops, soda fountains and drug stores of...the twilight zone. The past as seen in the distorting mirror of memory.
While he sometimes had partners in those days as I recall, he's worked solo for two decades since. I seem to recall there was an elderly barber with him at first, and an awkward but routine decision by most people to wait for Frank. The old guy would sit quietly and read.
I even remember the period he shared the place with a woman barber, for once breaking with tradition. It never seemed quite workable but, like many unwieldy marriages, it went on for quite a while. She was incongruous in the same way the wall of framed posters by David Lance Goines was. But that was able to hang much longer. After all, Goines' deco-moderne posters for local high culture are echt Berkeley. He had a studio shop nearby for ages and probably got his hair cut at Frank's as well.

I recall experiencing a Proustian moment the first time Frank applied hot shaving cream to my temples and neck to shave me for the real aviator fade. It was something I had experienced regularly as a youth in the pre-Beatle-haircut days. It feels terrific.
A lot of the stylistic appeal of Punk and its aftermath, one of retrospective and revival, had to do with the charm of things lost in the hippie end of the sixties. This would include primitive rock and roll, tattoos, flat-tops, hot-rods, make-up, vintage clothes, low-budget movies--the whole morbid psycho-billy 50s-early 60s shebang. Frank's place still had illustrated cardboard racks of pocket combs and copies of Playboy with the reading material---it was the real thing, not some phony LA retro-style marketing concept.

Then, in the transformation of that UC Theater block, I lost track of Frank. His old shop between the theater and the corner cafe was closed-down. Another regrettable step downstairs for the city scene. But only some of us will feel the loss of habitat and resources. And with extinctions come new species.
That said however, I was pleasantly gassed when I picked up an issue of the New Yorker and read a full-page color comic by Adrian Tomine telling the story of a somewhat stern barber who looked exactly like Frank. And, of course, it was Frank. This fact was confirmed for me when I discovered that Francesco Caramagno was still open for business on University avenue, a mere few blocks west of his old place. And there on the wall was the New Yorker page in a frame.
In the comic, Tomine's character comes back to face Frank's consternation after having gotten his last haircut elsewhere. Many of us know the look. The story shows his utter trust in Frank's opinion and skills. I should say that this view is nearly unanimous among a multitude of his customers.
Though Tomine eventually moved away to New York on a more permanent basis, he started off his career locally. I used to see him walking along College avenue and frequenting the same Elmwood post office I did. We both had mailboxes there, and so did another star of alternative comics in the 90s and beyond, Dan Clowes. I became acquainted with Dan but never met Adrian. I believe he noticed me too though, observing me from across the street even. We were each noting another bright-eyed Berkeley-dweller at large and on foot in the mid-afternoon. He is the comic artist of his generation who has impressed me the most. I enjoy the precision and humor with which he draws subtle moments of emotion and behavior.

During the nineties I grew my hair long again and tied it back, "like Punk never happened." But not really, any moreso than that Punk was "like the Beatles never happened," as one slogan went. Nevertheless, for money-saving years all I required was the exchange of an ends-trim with a gal pal of mine. I had long hair like it in the seventies and it was a nice return to having it again. Long hair is spiritual and sensual, a blast and a bother. It's also amusing to see how differently people treat you with it and without it.
However, in recent years, with more snow on the roof, I try to keep it quite short. I have come to depend entirely on Frank to get my hair cut. More often than not it is not only worthwhile, a good cut at a fair price, but more fun and more informative than ever. After 47 years beside a big window on University Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Berkeley, he knows quite a bit about the life of this city. The "How Berkeley Can You be ?" parade goes by once a year, but really it's here every day.
Frank is unusually wise and always insightful on society and politics. I speak freely when I'm there and, even if I'm sometimes slightly tendentious, more often than not I find general amusement and a majority in agreement with what I say.

This visit, I was the last customer in the shop and said, for example, that I wanted to change careers, to become a bee-keeping monk in Hawaii. "The monks in Hawaii wouldn't get the property near the beaches," Frank replied.
At another point the mayor of Oakland came up. We'd seen him on TV airing some ceremonial rhetoric after an ex-con killed four cops in a traffic stop followed by a shoot-out. "I watch a lot of Western movies and it's not exactly honorable, but for the bad guy to take out four is certainly memorable." I took his silence as assent.
The conversation turned to cooking. I tell him that even though I am largely vegetarian I regularly use Israeli chicken consomme cubes in my cooking. I confess that I don't tell my vegetarian friend it's involved and he thinks I'm a really great cook. "Now I don't like Israel politically...at all...and I would just as soon boycott their products..."
"...but they are too good to do without!" he finished my thought.

There's just no one else I know of hereabouts who can cut hair like Frank anymore. Even his fellow old-timers rarely have the quality control that he has shown consistently. And that is after the decades of standing-up to work have made his walk a little slow and ponderous. My dentist once treated Peter Townsend who had broken a crown while he was here on tour with the Who. I doubt if Frank would care if he had a famous customer unless it was like Jerry Vale. I'll bet he has though, even if he didn't always recognize them. University Avenue used to be hip--the Berkeley Square (Mission of Burma, Robin Hitchcock), Keystone Berkeley (Jerry Garcia, Hugh Mundel), Lookout records (Green Day, X) to name a few lost locales whose scenes I used to make. Of course, there are many more I missed in the days, for example, back when there were "psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street." In it's heyday the old UC Theater next door to his shop was a magnet for the alternative film audience.
Ah the 20th century, how naive and complacent we all were back then.

From his barber's chair today, I could see the building for Trader Joe's going up on the corner of MLK. There is mercy in Frank's timing in that he will no longer be there when that Gordian knot of traffic starts tightening. Maybe it will be good for the locksmith next door or the hot hot-tub place across the street. Hope springs eternal hereabouts. I noticed a nice new whole wheat artisan pretzel place a few doors over. And I recently caught an art show by Mark Mothersbaugh, artist/composer and beautiful mutant, at a tattoo gallery in this patch. Naturally Frank himself will be fine, at home with his family, attempting to replicate his aunt's recipe for white beans with tomato.
Until then, he still occasionally smokes a cigar even after a local ordinance said no, again like Moe. I'd find him puffing and sitting in his chair on a slow day and other times he'd take a hefty puff while cutting your hair. I have never minded the smoke and it's a tiny place that airs-out in no time with the door open. The music is always at a good volume and is always on a radio tuned to a classical station. A real Italian, he has a authentic zest for life, a sense of humor and an open laugh. He can voice advice or opinion on anything. Or not. That's the wisdom.
Hat's off to Frank.
(He's open until May 2009 if a reader is interested)

As always with human destiny in this material world, the only constant is impermanence. It means one less cool attribute to Berkeley, at least it does for me. Like all substantial changes to dependable things: you can't imagine it could happen; it happens; you go on.

Au Printemps...

2009-03-25T04:29:00.000-07:00

Poster for a poetry reading
Stephen Ronan and Nanos Valaoritis
Drawing by RAY with digital color-design added.

The Enchanted Tree and the Gate of Gold

2009-02-20T17:39:00.000-08:00

I was indoors working this afternoon when I felt the bonny day slipping away...

After a week of rain and cool weather, we have resumed the sunny and mild days that have been the norm this year. Even when it is stormy, when the over-heated newscasters marvel at helicopter films of a mere dusting of snow in the hills, the plum blossoms and the green, green grass make February the first full month of Spring around here.

I broke free of my desultory work at 4:30 to walk on campus among the young and in the sunshine. Cadres of exercise comrades were beginning their routines in lower Sproul. A lone soul drummer began a timbales-style tattoo, beating his bongos with a drumstick, out-numbered and defiant. I scurried on to protect my ear drum.
Out of curiosity, because any nostalgia has long faded, I ducked into the ASUC studio-gallery. It was where I first met two of my oldest California friends who were connected to it a long time ago. The occasion was an art exhibition I had put some works in. I'd found the place after first stopping by to use their color-xerox machine. It was still a novelty then and was utilized widely in the popular art of the new wave/punk scene. (In those days "new wave" meant the more pop side of the punk movement like the B-52s, not the hairdo synth bands of the 80s for which it became a marketing term.) Color xerox was in vogue not just for fliers, zines and postcards, but for jewelry, badges, and clothing.
Nowadays it looked more focused on digital graphics and ceramics and less on printmaking and old-fashioned photography. Except for a couple of cases of craft work, the gallery aspect looked non-existent--but that was a quick impression. Too often these days things can look a little dry or unexciting to me, perhaps because I'm no longer young.

Managing to avoid areas of shade, I continued on in the warm air. A being passed me by--blond, sort of feminine, tall, androgynous fisherman's sweater--and I could not decide whether it was a man or a woman. There was no apparent attempt at gender confusion on this person's part but, even though I am as observant and as intuitive as anyone can be, I did not have even a conclusive guess. I turned around after a discrete moment and looked back just as my enigma vanished into white sunlight.

Up at Faculty glade, the scene was festive. A big circle of students sat in the hillside grass quietly playing what I assume was folk music. They were just north of the music department and maybe somewhat shy as a consequence, not like the avenue buskers who try to attract listeners.
Downhill at the Dalian dogwood tree, three little children were climbing through it's symbolist lacunae and even up into the branches. Until today I had ever seen anyone else climbing in it. I sat above on the split log bench and watched them for a while. My figurative tail no doubt was wagging, and when they climbed down to stroll on with the mom-figure, I gave into my own urge to climb.
Clouds of steam billowed out a grating between the tree and the creek, adding to the fairy tale effect. I went down and mounted the black rock at the base of the tree to stretch a moment by grabbing on a lower branch. Next, I kicked of my boots and then ascended into the smooth boughs in my stocking feet. Once again, I saw smiles of amused appreciation from passing students after I went straight up without pause. One of the two little girls with a big cute face like Shirley Temple immediately came back to the tree to join me. I asked her to be careful but, as it turned out, all the kids were confident climbers who showed real instinctive caution and balance up in the tree. It was sheer delight to talk to them a little in this situation.

More mirthful passersby reacted to the sight of an older cat and three wee ones grooving in the second story of the world. Even the youngest, a boy of two or three years, was no longer content to crawl through the hollow trunk. He insisted his Mom lift him onto a lower branch. The other little girl had meanwhile climbed onto a branch just below where I was perched against the trunk. I exchanged pleasantries with the Mom who just then got a phone call. It was for the little girl nearest to me from her friend in Pennsylvania who was having a birthday. The nearby Campanile struck five just as she took the phone and said hello. The kids all appeared to take for granted that you can talk to a friend in Pennsylvania while you are sitting in a tree in California.
As she told her friend what she is doing, the first little girl remarked that this tree is like a house. I said it is an enchanted tree, like a story-book tree. The Mom liked that notion. She told me she appreciates the enchanting weather too, that they are here only for a year, hailing from snowy cold upstate New York. Whereas this burled old survivor was already putting out its new green leaves.
This play-time went on for at least a half hour. Feeling protective of the children, I gently asked the Mom to intervene when the little girl chatting on the phone stood straight up in the tree without a hand-hold. The girl told everyone not to listen as she whispered a secret to her far-away friend. "I know the secret--her name's Rachel and your name's Anna," yelled the other little girl. The little boy meanwhile had been loaded into a stroller but he kept saying, "no, no, no..." When he was released he came right back over and said, "I want to go high, Mommy, real high." It was like being in a real-life cartoon for this contemplative loner who never gets to hang out with the under-five crowd.
Despite my genuine enjoyment, I soon had to urge things along and get down. Again, and with almost Taoist delicacy, I suggested that the Mom take the phone so Anna could have both hands free to climb back down. And so I could be free to descend from the tree myself--my feet were beginning to feel the strain. These things we did. Then I put my boots on and said my good evening. As I started to walk off, the first little girl called loudly, "good bye," and we all waved, secret best friends forever.

On tentative legs went the Flaneur, over the creek via the ziggerat bridge and around to the Campanile. There bay and bridge came into view in a blast of sunlight. Already wearing shades, I pulled my beret down half way over them to be able to look. (Biensure, le Flaneur wears a black beret.)
How far the sun has come back in the two months since the winter solstice. The clear sky was softened by ethereal clouds. It was one of those times when the entire Bay reflects the lowering sun in a vast field of light like white gold. Today this effect of a golden bay of light within the larger watery bay extended all the way under the bridge and out to sea for a distance. Then it ended at a remote band of metallic-looking ocean before another lake of light appeared beyond that. It seemed to float in the air over the Pacific horizon. I squinted into to see if I could descry the Farrallones, a wild group of islands visible from here on very clear days. I couldn't see them however. There was too much light; a different form of clarity prevailed.
Although the sun was still fairly high and warm as the giant clock hands reached 5:30, I was tiring. I had a lot of retinal after-images from trying to look at the view. I began to hear the call of my nearby pad. To which I repaired, to commence cooking a cauldron of lentils and vegetables. And over a cup of coffee and a taste of medicinal caramel, to type up another day's expedition.

Night-crawler

2009-01-11T23:35:00.000-08:00

Night-crawlers was the name given to the large worms that appeared only on certain summer nights. The long bulbous worms stretched themselves across a particular moist green lawn under a street light in our neighborhood. They were prized by the older guys as bait for fishing and we learned how to catch the worms from them. It involved grabbing the worm's exploratory end before it could rapidly retract itself back into the earth. Once grabbed you had to ease out the rest of its length or risk snapping it in two. It was marvelous game for a young boy and for once the somewhat cruel treatment of small creatures had a redeeming purpose.

The worms only came out later in the evening when it finally gets dark. Although any boy would have loved to take part, really only those of us with cool enough parents could be out that late. My Mother was among the coolest and my brothers and I gained the status of kids who could stay out late in the summertime. By association we were ourselves night-crawlers, and I have always remained one.
In this column allow me to ramble around in musing and anecdote on the subject of night-life. Perhaps I should confess right away that, although I on occasion still night-crawl, as I have matured I have evolved into something more aptly called a night-owl.

From quite a young age I was in competition with brothers two and four years older than I was, to postpone having to go to bed. As they conquered new later hours, I griped that I should be allowed to stay up late as well. As a last resort, I would sneak out from my darkened bedroom to watch TV from the threshold behind a chair. Because it was almost always television, that great opponent of wholesome bed times, that was the crux of the matter.
I remember the wild style of Friday night horror movie showcases on TV when my Mother would bail out early and my brother and I would stay up until midnight, the breakthrough of staying up that late. This naturally led to the nocturnal sybarite's other requirement-- sleeping late the next day.

And of course many more of the night's thrills would follow.

The stars and the planets were closer in those days, before night-time illumination pushed us into a mole-like existence, into a tunnel of ambient light pollution through particulate mist. One night we looked up at a designated time and saw a tiny traveling blip that was Sputnik or a maybe it was Telestar, the data flickers in the mists of time. This all took place in the common back yard of a housing development where a floating community of kids flourished. We were united in the egalitarian order of the night world, maybe after a game of hide-and-go-seek.
Sunday night when Walt Disney came on one or another kid's Mom would call him for it and all the kids would disperse to very similar home lives.

Trick-or-treating was a gas, a lot of home-made costumes in those days. The Hallowe'en archetypes frequently encountered included gypsy fortune tellers that could be boys in drag, hobos with burnt cork beards that could be girls, and candy-driven pirates, as well as the witches and ghosts. I remember my particular delight in seeing a backyard kid in perfect a beatnik get-up--striped boat neck shirt, fake goatee, sunglasses, sandals, and a black beret. "Hey, Daddy-o" he yelled to me. I suspect there was some sort of foreshadowing of my destiny in my immediate fondness for the Beat generation--their art-loving laziness, their kohl-eyed women pale as vampires, their rejection of the square life so full of tedium.

Just beyond the dark end of the street was a rough-hewn lot known as "the rocks" where Xmas-tree snowball forts were built and untold illicit kid rituals took place out of sight of parents. Alongside was an old New England estate with stone walls and a tall stand-alone wooden tower where actual bats were seen swiveling about. This was locus of our most haunted nocturnal imaginings. I can still feel the frisson I felt at the time while regarding the Goodrum house under a bright moon with its great trees newly bereft of leaves in the expressionism of the vast nights of childhood.

Once a week, on summer nights for a few years, block dances were held in the next yard. I stood still for a hair-combing and gleefully donned my Sunday pants to make the scene. I remember a friend getting red chino slacks and all my Mom scored for me was a black pair, being miffed about it-- what was I thinking?
These affairs consisted of light bulbs on wires strung between clothesline fences to create an enclosed "dance floor." The people running it hauled a record player outside and spun 45 rpm singles--""I Want to Walk You Home" by Fats Domino was huge. They operated a concession table next to it selling bags of potato chips and small bottles of coca cola.
I loved everything about it. I loved the suspension of everyday dullness and the great American pop and rock'n'roll music of the period. I enjoyed observing the ardent teen-age couples dancing and the bonhomie of the older, less steamy couples. And I wasn't one of the boys who watched shyly and did nothing--I got out there with a little girl and tried to learn to dance myself. An incipient Dionysian, I was again setting a pattern for life.

(more to come soon)

A Christmas Stroll in Chilly San Francisco

2008-12-31T20:46:00.001-08:00

A new tradition has taken root in my experience over the last three years--the solitary Christmas walk in San Francisco.

The holidays and a cold have slowed me down on writing this column. Also there's work to do on my latest blog, "Trans-Canada, Trans America," so I may take a temporary hiatus on Flaneur columns presently. I thought perhaps the best way to to fulfill this one now would be to transcribe the fairly raw notes from my notebook for Christmas day. They were written late, late at night and don't pretend to poetry or prose. Make of them what you may.

The first section concerns a walk on campus after midnight Christmas morning; the second was a midnight musing; and the third section describes my sojourn in San Francisco the following afternoon.

Christmas Quietude

1.
not one person
until an umbrella man
in a black suit
white shirt black tie
newsprint photograph
rain water rushing under
the footbridge
I think I spooked him
praying at a sundial in the rain
under a black umbrella myself
a few mesmerized cars venture past
storm clouds from over the sea
the Gate still has its teeth
blurred Xmas lights on Telegraph
no insight, no key
just rain sounds in drain pipes
all else even the hard luck cases
are still tonight, are not at all
flags snap furiously
high over a vacant facade
no explanation
a night of rain

2.
poetry is incense smoke wafting
over broken glass

poetry is the incense
is the wind
is the broken glass

3.
the key is the Christ we seek in ourselves
and find in others
across railway expanses
the enlightened clouds
cold sunlight delineates all
the wind awaits in hollowed streets
clang clang clang went brittle sound-scapes
almost hysteria hand claps
"I'll fly away O Lord"
every few feet a hustle
my head's up on buildings
so sharply printed
Union square aflutter
with shutterbugs
can't avoid my picture taken
last shaft of sunlight between
Christmas tree and skating rink
the kids go 'round and 'round
to Enya's "silent night"
blow into St Francis hotel
a golden castle encircled by a train
big teddy bears over the desk
open seating in the warm lobby
rested braced by brandy
and back into the wind
life-size iron lions
on Grant street sidewalk
new euro-kitsch emporia
at the dragon gate
the impending bells of St Mary's
totem tower of a monk
in the frigid square
too cold for the lonely few
who dart across the pavement
today no children play
in the spongiform playground
only lonely Chinese windows
gazing out of red brick buildings
for a hundred years
the black clock face strikes four
but St Mary's is locked
in the Christmas cold
so it's the film noir tunnel
through fun-house Chinatown
toward the shrine of Saint Francis
to kneel a while and pray
in his Porziuncola
a painted chapel
transported from his mind
before our eyes
the docent is one Redwood Mary
from Berkeley a kindred soul
from this highpoint
I start to descend again
through ages past
Columbus Avenue City Lights
"No Money for Bankers"
scrawled on wrapping paper
in upstairs windows
approaching the underground
entrance somewhere
behind the pyramid through
the prehistoric redwood grove
trunks studded with bulbous light
cryptozoa in rainwater blobs
on a great glass slide
over Sansome street
and down all the way
to the submarine trains
to the lights and the decorations
of a crepuscular world

A Walk Up On Holy Hill

2008-12-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

On the second Sunday of Advent I take my archetypal restorative hike up to the theological library and environs...

At last the seasonal crispness seems to have set in; maybe now we'll see rain. Folk music and beyond on the radio helps comb the sleepiness out of my eyebrows in early afternoon. Outdoors, streamlined gray clouds dominate the dry sky. I note that a dog at one of the sidewalk cafe tables is wearing a sweater today.
The campus ceremonial assembly line has another yet graduation going on at Zellerbach hall. Black gowns and bright bouquets dot the concrete landscape. It is after all good for local business--Telegraph opens its maw wide, a tunnel of Christmas lights and consumptive traffic.
I walk rapidly along the central campus path, doing some upper body exercises like the somewhat oblivious person that I am--I behave the same way here at 1AM during vacations when there is not another person to be seen. I have had to reinsert my ear plugs due sensitivity and someone pulling a metal hand truck alongside me. So I'm in my own world as usual, the inner life always close at hand.
In no time I am cresting on the North side of campus, passing the cool geological sample slabs and I'm not out of breath. Friday at a doctor's appointment I learned that I weighed 143 pounds--a personal best for my mature years and nearly 40 pounds less than four years ago right after Thanksgiving. My new doctor viewing a recent blood test marveled at how low my cholesterol was--yeah baby. I mention all this not to flaunt it, but in the hope of inspiring others. You feel so much more in tune with life when you are not dragged by excess weight.
The key to shaping up for me was primarily a return to the vegetarianism of my young adulthood, but with greater understanding and cooking skills; and secondly, a determination not to eat more than I need. Another big help was my decision, after a lifetime of indulging a sweet tooth, to eliminate cookies, pies, cakes, pastries, ice cream and candy except in rather infrequent social settings. When I was a child I ate from the candy-booze food group and now I am an adult. I even like my coffee black.

In previous decades, the North side of campus seemed to be a more lively place. There was a cool record store here back in the day, Rather Ripped Records on the western corner of Euclid. It was a great place for underground platters--the Clash's "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" 45 was my first cop there. Among the many underground musicians who passed through it, Patti Smith and Jim Carrol had once made the scene.
There was an atrociously small cinema then, the Northside I believe it was called. Despite its dimensions, it showed hip stuff and could be fun. These days mainly various eateries seem to thrive on the business end of Euclid. One place looked crowded, a cafe that kept up the time-honored tradition of campus-side establishments everywhere by having a "clever" punning name, the "Brewed Awakening."
And the Seven Thieves variety store still held its corner; whether it is still called that I know not. A ridge of the Berkeley hills looms precipitously over this part of town. Autumnal reds highlight the deep green of the trees that shelter a latticework of the wooden buildings, homes and residence halls of this slightly nervous version of Hobbiton.
Christmastide hereabouts seems a little slow in coming on this year. But there is a fragrant green wreath welcoming me at the door of the Graduate Theological Union library. The population of soulful scholars today is sparse. I glance again at vitrines and gallery walls which displaying abstract paintings comprised of woven colors that themselves represent walls. I had already taken a close look at them on my last visit in October.
My object, quickly located, is a 1992 English language edition of The Gospel of Thomas, The Hidden Sayings of Jesus. It has en face facsimiles of the original scrolls, legendary papyri uncovered at Nag Hamadi in Egypt. That is to say, they are not in the canon of the New Testament. It is entirely comprised of quotations of words of Jesus without any of the back-story or on-going narrative. It offers a Jesus who is the enigmatic, proverbial teacher of the Gospels but without making a claim of His divine identity as the Son of God who was crucified and rose again from the dead to redeem mankind. One can if one wishes not involve oneself with the divine Jesus. Here one encounters Jesus solely as a mystical teacher, offering one hundred or so maxims on to how to gain God's kingdom and how to recognize the chosen of God. In a commentary to the edition I read, Harold Bloom, a rather pompous Shakespeare professor from Yale, describes this gospel of hidden sayings as "creedless, proto-gnostic, Orphic, and post-Christian." He sort of tips his hand on the last term--he wishes.
The Gospel of Thomas is held by tradition to have been written by Judas Thomas the Twin who was Jesus identical twin brother. It's prologue begins with his words:
"And he said , 'Whoever discovers the interpretation of these saying will not taste death.'" This great but apocryphal document affords the intrigue of discovering an esoteric teacher in Jesus almost as if He was outside one's own more orthodox faith background--like reading Ramakrishna, or maybe more like Kahlil Gibran. The goatherd found the scrolls in a cave at Nag Hamadi housed in a large jar. When he broke it open, he later swore, a numinous golden spirit, a guardian djin, emerged from it and rose up into the air. The archaeologists later insisted it was merely tiny fragments of the scroll stirred up into the sunlight by breaking the vessel. By way of stating my approach to this Gospel, I will say that I prefer the former explanation.

49. "Fortunate are those who are alone and chosen, for you will find the kingdom. For you have come from it, and you will return there again."

That sort of thing can make a stoned loner, mystical and contemplative, feel quite a bit better in one's overcast Sunday afternoon solitude. For folks like myself, it is one of the original self-help books of affirmation. With this visit I begin to incarnate my spirit of Advent--tonight the manger goes up. Recalling the words of Arthur Rimbaud, I ask,"When will it be Christmas on earth?"

Lifted up and back out of doors into the last muted daylight. I follow the crisscross sidewalks to go out to the end of the plateau of sanctity, enveloped by divinity and by school. I note the symbols of various religions carved into the stone wall outside a chapel--signs in stone planted for the amusement of the archaeologists of the future.
At the view spot, another stands silently gazing out at the distant sky over the sea beyond the Gate. An unseen sun forms an intense gold dish on the waters. Leviathan cloud continents have fissured enough for a celestial curtain of sunlight to fall for miles and miles across the middle distance. It is the picture that inspired the idea of heaven, the darkening world and the light that saves us.

Postscript: Reading this a week later I observe that I had, as usual, made myself into more of a loner than I actually was. I left out a pleasant meeting and conversation that took place at the view spot at the western end of the divinity school courtyard. When I arrived I found that the view of the emergent sunlight on the Bay was best from a spot off to the right of the walkway--so far south does the sun set around the solstice. From one spot alone, one could see the direct light of the sun's reflection on the water. While above one could look straight at the clouds where the sunlight poured through, this body of reflected light, gold and miraculous, was too bright to look at for very long.
As I contemplated this quantification of the spiritual in the physical, an older woman came climbing with the support of a cane the substantial concrete stairway from the street below. Past the age of eighty, she seemed frail yet noble in her determination to reach the higher level of the lawn. There she turned with satisfaction to see the Western sky. I greeted her in a neighborly way, and shuffled over to encourage her to see the vista from the optimal standing point. She had glimpsed that light on the Bay and came right over to see it. We struck up a conversation--she was from Chicago, lived a long time in Hawaii, and now lived here. We chatted about the weather in these places and my native New England, our experiences of them, and how for me Hawaii remained terra incognito. I told her that when I confessed to my doctor that I thought I was burned out, she told me I wouldn't be if I lived on a beach in Hawaii. Sometimes I ponder how I could manage to switch to that life--a sustaining myth, I suppose.
This kind of talk arises among locals hereabouts as soon as the weather brushes forty degrees.
I append it here to defeat easy diagnosis of this columnists apparent self-isolation. Many more such encounters occur on walks that I later write up but I tend to leave them out. One neither wants to appear to be vainly painting an over-nice portrait of oneself, nor do one want to blow the concept of a deliberately uninvolved observer that a flaneur is rightfully assumed to embody.

Elevations About Town

2008-11-29T18:19:00.000-08:00

If you see something beautiful don't cling to it, if you something horrible don't cling to it, the Buddhists suggest...

A deep sleep washed up on the shore of the afternoon. Jean Richie is on the radio with Fiona already, I'm reminded where Richard and Mimi Farina got their dulcimer song style. My breakfast is boiled milk to which I add cooked brown basmati rice and raisins, some honey. A recent close-out score of Fior di miele organic forest honey from Italy brings it to another level.
It's almost 70 degrees out so by my second cup of coffee I part with the music to sit on the deck outdoors. This is a ritual that involves a cut-glass plate with my medicinal cookie for this Saturday and a china cup of coffee. The cookie is delightful: a gingery pumpkin cookie with cranberries. The girl at the dispensary mentioned that it was quite potent--and yet so delicious.
Sunshine prevailed in clear skies, nothing much happened, I contemplated the slow motion shift in consciousness. Then by overlooking the parking lot on the West side of the building, I could observe a succession of children in amusing routines with their parents. Three little boys herded to a van, one finds a glasses case, that sort of thing-- the delight of children giving life to the quiet scene in front of the vast wall of red ivy on Stiles hall. They must have cranked up the Nutcracker at Zellerbach already. The children remind me of the little birds hopping around up here on the deck yesterday; "uccellini" I called them--like the composer. It means "little birds."

The Campanile bell rings four and I want to wander, to see more people and events. So it's over to the Durant post office to mail back "The Naked Spur." It's a frontier noir with Jimmy Stewart and Robert Ryan, a worthy story of how the hard-boiled West was won. The black guys begging in front are more insistent than they used to be. Bitter salutations of "merry christmas." I am not exactly one of the food courtiers or the shoppers barely spending around here today, a distinction sometimes lost on spare-changers. But I understand that prolonged hardship can make people bitter toward anyone who doesn't provide help immediately.

I next pass the big wooden, art brute-esque crucifix. Life-sized, it's attached to a little used Anglican church building. It's across the street from the always-busy Top Dog, where someone got shot dead in broadest daylight a year or so ago. Not to imply that my mood was anything but splendid.
Continuing up Durant I turned into the back gate of the Berkeley Art museum. At nearly 5 PM the doors were locked and I could but glimpse a few photo blow-ups inside. However, as I came up through the sculpture garden, the large plate glass wall gave me a good look. The bright lights were still on a big installation piece I could see close-up with more remote views of other works. It was all Mah Jong! a big show of Chinese contemporary art and frankly it all looked junky to me. The installation work had crude plaster effigies looking like props at a protest, situated in the middle of piles of international newspapers, some in bundles. One of the plaster busts seemed to be of Clinton--how risky. Hundreds of toy airplanes hung over the whole thing, creating an effect spoiled by other stupid toys --a small plush alligator--hanging with them. It was the kind of go-crazy with toys in a loose uninspired environment that was commonplace in the US 25 years ago.
Just making it out of the Bancroft gate before it was locked, I walked round to view the scene from the area of front doors. There you are greeted by a grinning, larger-than-life, fun-house cartoon Chinaman statue standing on the floor by the desk. In a gallery right behind it you see a large wall work of another Chinese face also grinning dementedly. Regardless of the artists' original intentions, what works like these mean in this context is rather difficult to miss. In an institution where white students have been replaced as both the majority and the dominant influence by students of predominantly Chinese extraction, the art works appear to wear the impudent grin of a poor sport who has finally won the game.

The cookie worked its magic as I continued uphill, my circulation rushing. A recent virus had left me somewhat diminished in vigor and, by College avenue, in need of a rest. I noticed some rustic benches in a little landscape in front of a tony restaurant on the corner. A waiter inside watched me come up and sit down without any apparent annoyance. Slightly overwhelmed for a moment, I caught my breath while looking the place over.
The building was in the Berkeley-as-Disneyland style, a style that conjures castles and Renaissances faires, fantasy structures for the endless childhood of scholars. This one has a shapely slate roof and I slowly became fascinated looking up over it at a tall beech tree, yellow leaves of autumn always moving in the light wind. I experienced what I take to be the state of being described by the Buddhist word sunyatta or suchness. My contemplation verged on becoming. As I leaned my head back a little more to look up at the blue sky a gleaming red jet leaving a red vapor trail crossed my mind.

So, upward, I continued my climb. To the Piedmont crosswalk where a huge silver truck was slinking by. I crossed over to reach the little balcony spot where the view of the Golden Gate is best. Not only was someone already there in the sweet spot, but the huge dumb truck, driven by a huge black guy who was involved in a personal call on his cell phone, pulled up and stopped just short of the view. Nevertheless the view remained, with room for all.
A profound wine-color pervaded the sunset over the bridge, the Bay shown steel blue the atmosphere contained in it like a moire mirror. In this translucent sky two bright beacons hung together ahead of the stars--Jupiter and Venus, at an angle to make them seem close together to the eye. Moreover, in this same Western firmament lowered the big bright hoop of a moon, looking like a carved-out coin with just a ridge left to it. Cosmic coins at varying distances in the imagination dropping into a glass of burgundy held by the Gate.
I stood there and then sat on an outdoor bench for quite some time. People coming and going would catch the view and stand in wonderment for all of a second before hurrying on. Next, I shoved-off along Piedmont to walk along a local civil war battlefield--the old Oak Grove.
It is today a shocking debacle to one once familiar with that formerly peaceful and benign arbor. With the exception of a few marginal decorative trees, it is now a clear-cut. Stubble and rubble surround a tower of chain link fencing wrapped in big plastic sheeting printed with the emblems and likenesses of Cal's football warriors.
The Oak Grove cemetery is the name of the location where my father is buried back in my hometown in Massachusetts. My associations with the phrase are now doubly sad.
Massive barbed wire fencing surrounds this new emptiness all the way to the iconic bear sculpture at the far end of the phantom grove. All that would be needed now to compound this cruelty, would be for the funding to build the advanced sports training facility to fall apart. But naturally there are always funds for things war-like in our late-Romanesque empire.
Yet I go undaunted. I sneaked a leak near the bear monument and moved on, through the Michael and Alice Cronk gate and down precipitous stairs into campus. Various framing of the planets and moon caught my eye as I meandered downhill and lingered a while at the Campanile plaza. An Indian family at the view spot, digging the sunset and the moon, were elated when I pointed out the planets to them. Then an old couple came up to ask which planet was which from the guy whom they heard "knows about planets."

In the early darkness of late November, fondly retracing old lines of behavior, I headed indoors for something warm by the reading lamp. Music on the radio became a catalyst to further explorations in my inner life.

(This column was written and edited with the aid and enhancement of having consumed a prescription cookie and two cups of coffee.)

A Gift From God

2008-11-24T19:35:00.000-08:00

How I love to walk over to my Patients Care Collective and stock up on high quality cannabis to help with pain and infirmity and increase enjoyment of life...

In May of 2005 I walked down a block to a Durant avenue building I had passed a thousand times before. It's a white-painted red-brick building on the corner of Ellsworth and it houses the offices of Dr. Frank, a general practice physician. He had also been a pioneer in recommending marijuana to some patients. He did this only after undertaking studies in the clinical application of cannabis for people with serious illness. He and another Berkeley doctor who has since passed away, were the first in California to make such recommendations. This was in the face of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency threat to revoke licenses of any doctor who so followed the will of the people to enable ill people to access this efficacious and harmless herbal medicine.
I had been diagnosed with chronic illness approximately six months prior and I was in transformation from my old unhealthy behavior into a new way of life. I had long been accustomed to regular light use of marijuana. In countless ways have I felt its benefits.
The only unintended side effect I can think of is a restless or insomniac mood following on from sudden unavailability.
The two most widely-known and unarguable propensities of one who ingests this plants active ingredient are appetite and enjoyment of food, and a tendency to sleep deeply and soundly after its use. Nutrition and sleep are the two fundamental ways the body heals and endures, what benefits to person, what a disaster when either is disturbed or lacking for any length of time.
The inclination toward dreaminess, toward over-imaginativeness--I say, so what? Not your cup of tea? Fine but deny or ridicule others this beneficent state. he experience is not like many people's memories of it from college--smoking in groups and acting somewhat silly. When you are older it is more like, you feel better and life is more interesting.
I see endless cupidity in the media concerning how many issues are reported. Many people who disagree with prevailing philosophies of so called vital national interest are usually characterized as extreme outsiders in blatant ideological biased language. The "far left" is one term often used. Another such cliche that one sees even in a paper such as the Onion that endorses stoner movies and music, that runs many cannabis-related ads and so forth, is "pot-addled" for anyone who has ingested any amount of marijuana. This is the very regrettable stereotype that people who should and do know much better gleefully perpetuate that allows the willfully ignorant to corn-plaster their lack of conscience for the many people who are persecuted, fleeced and jailed for possession of a bountiful and beneficial plant. For me the image popularized by Cheech and Chong is as unwanted a legacy as the ones popularized by Amos and Andy.

Reputedly, in the wake of Dr Frank and others like him who took substantial risk in first recommending cannabis, some doctors have arrived who are less strict about a patient's need. That has never been the case when I go to see him for a yearly examination. On my first visit, a careful examination of my medical records, was followed by a physical exam, and in-depth conversation that lasted for 45 minutes--unlike the usual 10 to 15 minutes my regular clinic visits generally last--I left with a letter from him recommending medical marijuana for my condition. This signed, dated and stamped document legally entitled me to purchase, possess, or grow marijuana for my personal use for the following year.

Next, I followed what I thought was the route as planned and went next to downtown Oakland to obtain an ID card. I had read that a few blocks that had just come to be called Oaksterdam in honor of the city that has led the world in normalization of marijuana use by adults-- Amsterdam. Downtown Oakland can be daunting to an infrequent visitor on a bland day--let alone that day as I conducted such heady business. A few street cats were around, inevitably drawn to any action spot with any potential for them no doubt. Without much bother I obtained a Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative card at the address I had been given by the doctor's receptionist. There was a solicitous headshop concern out front and a rather more taciturn office scene around back where you were photographed and laminated. I saw others delighted by their felicitous fate--some middle-aged, some quite young. If some were not really seriously ill, it matters not in the larger picture--there's no harm in its use--but it did make me wonder how long the forces of repression can be held off if they can make that case effectively.
I think anyone over the age of 16 healthy or not should be able to enjoy marijuana if they so desire.
Recent studies have proven that young folks who smoked pot in high school had better grades and better social adjustment, rather the opposite results that the bugaboos would have you swallow. Smart young people tend to love marijuana--hence the indelible association it has with college education. And as everyone has seen countless times young stoned people love to socialize-- passing the smoking vessel about and laughing, listening to music together, munching food together, kissing on and on.
Sure troubled loners and others who may be seeking self-obliteration in intoxication made add marijuana to their menu, but marijuana alone is the slowest boat to oblivion that there is. The fastest and most widely destructive vehicles are meanwhile available at every convenience store, it seems--tobacco and alcohol. You can get a tank of gas at the same time.

The Oaksterdam trip seemed to be geared to funnel you into their dispensary around the corner--I think it was in that great blue tile Art Deco building that I recall as a florist shop. I am certain that it is not an unrewarding place to buy leafy materials now either--but I beat it back toward Berkeley. When I do transact, I usually buy enough stash to last a while and, for my thinking, neither cash nor stash mix well with public transportation in jolly old Oakland.
I had in fact seen a one-time ad in a San Francisco alternative newspaper for a place boasting eighty varieties of high quality buds all priced at a mere $40 per eighth ounce. At long last, a legal, dependable supply of affordable high-quality herb, in my lifetime: it appeared a dream had come to pass. I had taped the clipping in my address book at the time. This was where I was determined I would investigate the next day--the fabulous and storied treasury of herbs, The Green Cross, already glowing.

The tale told by this column will continue soon.

Ode to Joy

2008-11-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

Election night erupted in joy and relief on Bancroft way, my colleague Joe was over at my pad to witness history...

When I look into Barack Hussein Obama's face I see no evil there. I regard the Republican party, on the other hand, as a conspiracy of traitors with an agenda of unbridled white-collar criminality. Their enablers, the Democrats, are guilty by association. The Republicans bulldoze throguh tax cuts for the wealthy; the Democrats make a show of resistance but then, wealthy themselves, ultimately benefit from the cuts. Bad cop, nice cop comes to mind.
The last president to talk about the environmental crises and the unsustainable way of life that necessitated radical changes in society was a Democrat--Jimmy Carter. (Of course a more recent vice-president did so as well, even making it the horse he now rides in on.) The obvious truth of Carter's statements was vehemently denied by demagogic cynics, many of them elected to office but in the employ of the same poisonous industries who endlessly profit from the degraded status quo. Without questioning their short-sighted selfish motives, the American public was having none of this "lowered expectation" stuff. Apparently one would have to pry their SUVs, big screen TVs, disposable consumables, wasteful bad diet, large heated rooms, and inexhaustible electronics from their cold dead hands before one could expect any substantial change. Maybe slapping a "Save the Planet" bumper sticker next to your exhaust pipe would help.

The most ruthless of these cynical politicians were the Neo-cons, arch-Zionists all. They were able to seize power in 2001, after an election was stolen by the new total surveillance society's insidious machines. Money and vicious reprisals enabled the plutocracy to demand utter fidelity from the moral voids they puppet-mastered into office. Then the core villains who had grabbed the reins of moral turpitude green-lighted the attack that took place 11 September 2001. They had turned their backs on the warning signs and silenced any Paul Revere-types who might "fuck with their hustle" in Louis Armstrong's immortal phrase.
This administration immediately put into motion long-standing plans to invade and occupy Iraq. They bullied any and all into their march to war. Accompanying this was their scam to gut the constitution and to make the president into a dictator. Couple this with a steady massive transfer of the public wealth into the hands of the wealthy, removal of all public protection regulation through new laws or neglect of the old ones. At the same time they threw fuel on cynical wedge issues whereby the populace was pitted against itself over personal religious and reproductive matters and by means of atavistic racial resentment.

Think about what all those same-sex couples in Massachusetts and San Francisco are doing on their honeymoons! After all isn't that morally worse than bombing civilians, imprisonment without trial, or torture? The Israel lobby wants us to add a war with Iran to our things-to-do list? Well, didn't Ahmadinejad say he wanted to destroy the State of Israel which is only the fouth greatest military power in the world. Does the US not owe the Israelis a debt that cannot be payed? After the State of Israel has done so much for us, by inventing all that surveillance technology like lethal smart fencing, and by providing experts to do things run airports like Logan in Boston! Graciously they have accepted mere billions every year from the US and are our greatest partner in the endless struggle against "Islamo-fascism" in the "War on 'Terror.'" After all! A parade of experts appeared ant-like across the broadcast waves of America to agree with this sound assessment of our national interest. And if a hurricane hits your town or your city's bridge is collapsing, well the government had other spending priorities.

So into this hellish dystopia, came a calm, thoughtful mulatto politician in his mid-forties. Tall thin and attractive, he was a freshman senator from Illinois. He had given a speech prior to his election, and stated that, while he did not oppose all war, he strongly opposed a dumb war like this. To paraphrase the old saying, no one ever got elected by over-estimating the intelligence of the American people--but, God is merciful, fortunately Barack Obama did not.

I didn't vote in this historic election, but I considered it. In the end it was apparent that it would be a big turn-out on a long ballot--too much trouble just to vote for Ralph Nader again. In 1992 I voted for the Democrat against Bush the first, since then it's been Nader with a previous abstention from voting in 2004. I just saw Nader in one of the rare moments in this campaign when he was allowed to speak on television. He addressed the "bail-out" calling it the vast transfer of the public wealth to the privately wealthy, which is of course all this administration has ever done. This was W.'s parting shot. I agreed with every word he said. How could I then vote for Obama whom I agree with 10% of the time, when I agree with Nader 90% of the time? However I certainly would have if I thought Barack needed my vote to win.

Way back in 1980, I went to some trouble in order to vote for Carter's re-election. On the way home, and still before the polls closed, I learned from a voice on the BART intercom that he had conceded. It was not a pleasant experience at all. But I, in turn, did not mind hearing this Tuesday night as I put away the dinner dishes at barely 8 o'clock, that the GOP contender-- "that one"-- had thrown in the bloody towel.
Joey Know was over and we had lifted some big bottles of Kilt Lifter, a Scottish-style ale from Marin that lives up to its name. I had also rolled and we had puffed one of my one Club paper shorties rolling a blend of several varietals of high quality medicine.
I just started to whistle as loud as I could when from every direction in the neighborhood a mass vocalization of utter relief and joy just welled-up and louder and louder. I threw open all my big old-fashioned windows and unplugged the TV. We cheered along with every person in the vicinity. Instantly, Bancroft way and this end of Telegraph avenue were closed to traffic as the streets not only filled but over-flowed. More and more people came running uphill from downtown where a rally had started but was being absorbed in this direction..
The continuous cheering, and whistling, and shouts of "O-BA-MA" continued to build, higher and higher, and it didn't subside for more than an hour. The feeling in the air was an electric zeitgeist, a spirit of deliverance from presiding evil and dread.

As I whistled and yelled out of my bathroom window, my reading glasses flew out of my pocket. We wasted a minutes outside looking for them before deciding it could wait-- we had to join the flow. The exhilaration just kept growing as crowds kept coming up the street.There was a center to it, half the way up to Telegraph, but it appeared to just be the bee-hive effect occurring among the predominantly student-aged crowd--it was just pure vibing and swarming. I heard someone shout "We're sick of those fucking Republicans!" But it wasn't a political rally as much as spontaneous expression of emotion. Joking on my doorstep, I held up my finger and said in a weak voice, "But McCain had some good ideas..." Everyone who looked twice to see if I was putting them on laughed either way.

It may be too much hope. It may be something fleeting, bound to fall. And it may contain some hysteria, but perhaps that can be understood. It was happening just down the street from John Yoo's office at UC's Boalt Hall law school. It was Yoo who argued so forcefully for torture and dictatorship, let us not forget. UC still uses his name in their fund-raising as an important White House connection. The end to this cruel and despotic rule was an instinctive democratic wish fulfilled.

What can Obama can accomplish, given the nakba (disaster) he's being handed? I trust him not to disgrace us and, to to the extent he is able, to protect us from the depredation of the rapacious dinosaurs of end times capitalism. That deeds create destiny, it is to me completely inarguable. To the extent that a nation can be said to have a collective karma, the election of an African-American to its highest office is good for America's karma. It is as well a healing for the whole wide world.