Oakland, It's a Happening

Ultra Iris

Iris outside Fairyland




April going's on

from Fun to Funky

you know RAY man's a junky

1.

Uptown

Oakland's golden age

bleeds through

 WTF?

 A massive new mural

arrived here by chance myself

Heads hung low,

looks like the culprits 

The next day I chanced to hear

on an unfamiliar radio station 

That a big free party for the unveiling

was to take place Saturday April 1st

Something about the Oakland A's, music and food,

That evening rolled around

with a vigorous cold shower right at 6PM

I stayed in and played my radio

 

Hats off to

Illuminairies 

2.

Larry Beckett

sound check at reading

He co-wrote most of Tim Buckley's

great early songbook

New mural

a siren of sorts

 Turn right off Broadway

onto 22nd street

Glass front,

 an office building
like comic book action art,
 Webster street in the new

new-capitalist part of town

The Octopus Literary Salon

A swank new performance space

no over-crowding, no fires

And an approachable

bookshop and café

as jolly well

Michael Goldberg

years and years of his solid

writing on Music for Rolling Stone

I have read

 Tonight he's reading from a fiction trilogy

His piece is about waiting to get off on LSD

while smoking the quaint cannabis of the era,

He had a professional taking loads of photos

but I suspect none would better encapsulate

his orange sunshine rhapsody than this image

And it's a gallery of sorts

Lots of pleasant

unpretentious artwork

hanging around

The great Larry Beckett

he read from a compilation

of his tall-tale telling

concerning Paul Bunyon,

in sort of a filled-out

 Richard Brautigan-like style

 

He even had trout-fishing

the story of a trout

who was trained not

to need to be in water

He moved around quite a bit

so perforce I got action shots

I have been a zealous fan

of Tim Buckley and of Larry song-writing

for now fifty years,

Larry had me pull up a chair

when I told him at age 15 I had memorized

all the lyrics to "Good-bye and Hello"

and on my sixteenth birthday

attended Tim's live set

at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival

I told him my girlfriend dragged me out

to go rest in some meadows

before the evening program,

before Tim's set was over,

I remember turning to walk backward

 up the aisle as Tim implored me to stay

with his so very expressive eyebrows,

I motioned to the girlfriend to explain,

I think she sensed I was falling in love

with him and she was right,

Great pleasure to meet Larry

a happy time inside my mind

at a typically sparse end-of-the-month

I mentioned how the comments
on the Tim Buckley video
Live on the Monkees show
doing Song to the Siren
always insist it's good but not as good as
This Mortal Coil,
He said he had just written it
and was standing off camera coaching Tim
He mentioned it's been called
 the greatest song ever written,
I replied, "Who can resist it?"




3.

Rhododendron show

Meditating Rhododendron forest

Over dusty hills I ask you

What it's been like being you-

                                Donovan "Epistle to Dippy"

It's like arriving

in electric lady land

In ultra-Springtime

 Sweet old cat

who greeted me at the door,

sun hat indoors

sign of a real gardener

So sensual,

so deep

 I began to know Rhodos

nearly forty years ago

when I re-located to California

A lady gardening at St Mark's in Berkeley

told me it's getting too hot here

for healthy rhodos who dig shade

 The old cat replied

in that case we'll just grow

 warm weather rhododendrons

For fifty years I've

lead a psychedelic life,

 Mystical and proto-psychedelic

before that

Outside a little bunny book

fell down a rabbit hole

 Forever seeking

the great awakening

 Approaching true and pure

 color

March-April 2017

Metaphysical Grounds

Rather than follow a more-or-less linear narrative I expect to fashion tesserae in an envisioned mosaic...

I'll describe a typical peaceful walk around my vicinity. But as Yeats said "peace come dropping slow" in "the bee-loud glade." And were that bees were allowed to be loud in this world, the vital yet threatened bees. It was a blessedly quiet day due to the Memorial Day holiday. The record store/cafe downstairs was closed, so no sound-bleed of classical music greeted me with the day. The University was closed for business and the traffic on Bancroft Way was very light. It was nearly tranquil until the early afternoon when a representative of the new student majority came to the little concrete breezeway between Lower Sproul Plaza and Bancroft. It functions as an echoing box for the insect-like robotic disco that a group of students gather there to dance to. Today not a troupe but a lone wannabe dancer showed up with some sort of small but super-sonic boom box and cranked that. As he did his little hops and assorted cliche dance moves. I decided to yell something figuring my neighbors were all away. He heard me and may have lowered the volume infinitesimally. And fortunately he lost interest after a while. No one else had shown up to join him--sometimes they are there past midnight. They are worst and most persistent recreational noise nuisance here. The triumphalist taiko drumming is more maddening but generally is not as frequent or as die-hard as these slithery dance cadres.

The day was cool and only intermittently sunny. People not familiar with the Bay Area may be surprised to learn that one often appreciated hat, scarf, and gloves even in late May. And so attired I set out. Even the main entrance to campus facing the terminus of Telegraph Ave. was relatively quiet. As usual appeared to be individual loitering in an inconspicuous vantage point as if keeping surveillance on a free people. They are always in evidence when the right of free speech is being exercised as when every Friday the kindly older Jewish ladies for justice for Palestine assemble around an information table as the Women in Black. At this safe distance in time the University likes to acknowledge the legacy of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. They of course ignore the reality that the administration and its police force did everything it could then and has ever since to undermine free speech.
A few years back on a quiet unused lawn near Boalt Hall, we demonstrated against John Yoo and the shameful policies he abetted . As indifferent students walked past blown-up photos from Abu Ghraib, speakers addressed the small gathering over a microphone connected to a small amplifier. A UC cop stood anxiously looking at his watch until an hour had passed and he could insist the mic be turned off. The dignified Daniel Elsberg who had been speaking softly over it was thereby rendered inaudible over the nearby incessant University-driven automobile traffic. This is from the same police who see little problem with the insane levels of noise pollution that goes on for hours on Upper and Lower Sproul including their own piss factory The Bear's Lair, a malodorous campus bar. But then that deafening racket, unlike the quiet speech we listened to, doesn't proclaim the University complicity in vast war crimes. Maybe it celebrates it by obliviousness to it.

So I walked past the deserted fountain and on uphill. There was Barrows Hall under renovation, its exterior marked with squiggly loops of paint, looking like a vast sketch by Dubuffet or Leger. There was the fond familiar green metal pelican statue. There was the striking new music library in green slate shingles with scattered burgundy windows. I crested the hill alongside and ambled down an incline to visit a notable dogwood tree. Its old growth trunk, half-hollowed out and burled resembling a Dali figure, was crowned by a flowering canopy of newer branches. It looks frail and precarious. But as I have noted when I've climbed it and when I regularly stretch my back by hanging from a branch, it is solid and sturdy. Just past it in a small grove of rhododendron, is the statue of the last Dryad. It is a likeness of a beautiful long-haired young girl amazing for unabashed open-legged pose showing her body's own flower. As if to emphasize her timeless free spirit, people place flowers in her cast bronze hair. Unhappily the rhododendron flowers burn away very quickly these days. A lady gardening at St. Mark's Church told me Northern California has become too hot for "rhodos" as she affectionately called them.
I remember a song from my youth by Donovan in which he sings of "meditating rhododendron forest", a point of transcendence. And I often visit the splendid rhododendron grove in Golden Gate park, if only in my mind. Then I am compelled to recall a comment by the California poet Gary Snyder, rather Zen and austere. Someone was bewailing a possible future extinction of Redwood trees. "Something will replace them," Snyder replied. Some of us, however, don't always find it as quite as easy to think in terms of geological time.

More on this walk later on.