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)
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
A Christmas Stroll in Chilly San Francisco
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
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
Sunday, December 7, 2008
A Walk Up On Holy Hill
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.
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.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Elevations About Town
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 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.)
Monday, November 24, 2008
A Gift From God
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.
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.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Ode to Joy
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.
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.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
O Mom and Dad: Laurie Anderson 30 Years On
On a bright October Saturday I strolled over to hear a staged conversation with performance artist Laurie Anderson at Wheeler auditorium on the UC campus...
I first saw and heard Laurie Anderson perform thirty years ago this December. The occasion was a celebration of William S. Burroughs called The Nova Convention which took place in New York city. It was my first opportunity to see Burroughs whose works and whose persona I had been keenly investigating for the ten years previous. That year, 1978, I had been working on a land-surveying crew for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but the job had mercifully lapsed. It was just in time to avoid having to work outdoors in the cold weather and, any road, I was planning to leave for California the first week in January 1979. So I was free and had a little scratch for a change. I called the Intermedia theater for tickets and booked a room at the Chelsea Hotel.
What a thrill it was to meet our fearless leader at last--the mythic Hombre Invisible in person. Opening night was a Friday and it was fraught. After Bill's rather brief apparition on stage, came elusive exemplars of the 20th century avant-garde including Burroughs' doppel-ganger Brion Gysin. John Cage performance consisted of amplifying the sounds of himself brewing and drinking tea while Merce Cunningham minced around as if to music.
Along with these legends whom I was seeing for the first time there were other artists on stage most of whom were well-known to me. Others were completely new, such as the two striking women who were introduced at separate points in the show to do quite similar acts. They were both attired in man-tailored tails and both recited texts with sound effects added to their voices. One of them was Julia Heywood whose voice became a chorus of sped-up penguins. The other woman performed a gripping piece contriving to be the authoritarian voice of a pilot during a near plane-crash. She had sparkling eyes a wide smile and in those days brown bobbed hair and she made a rather wholesome overall impression. This was Laurie Anderson 1978. The shock of the new, the recognition of a new modality of expression, post-modernity before the word became a commonplace, all these premises were mingled in my unmitigated appreciation of her. How corny Ginsberg and Orlovsky's hootenanny seemed that evening.
I recall a few notices of Julia after that night but when Burroughs went on tour a year or so later it with John Giorno and Laurie Anderson. She was the one selected to filled the bill. By then she had had an international hit single with "O Superman" which actually entered the U.K. top twenty pop records. In that short time, it had become her fame that was helping to introduce Burroughs to the young and trendy. Her arsenal of special effects and electronic trickery was state-of-the-art and second to none. The charm of her demeanor and the unmistakable presence and yet ambiguity of her social and political critique of America served to support a big tent.
In 1986 I hosted a in-store appearance by Laurie at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco in support of the publication of the book of her project entitled The United States. A vast amount of people showed up to meet her and in the course of a long evening I became somewhat acquainted with her. I found her to be an authentic, genuinely sweet person who gave me the distinct impression of a school teacher type. She put a thumb fingerprint in ink in each book she signed and received much affection in return.
Twenty years later, I find myself interested in what she's up to but not terribly so. She turns up on the high-brow circuit in Berkeley and San Francisco every few years with an incredibly ambitious project such as an operatic treatment of Moby Dick. The reviews are always positive--fawning verging on yawning is how I would describe them. If someone gave me a ticket I probably would go to, for example, her latest opus, Homeland, a play on The Homeland Security Act one doesn't doubt. Yet I am not particularly curious about it. It was however a unusual opportunity to see her in the unrehearsed venue of this talk and one I was determined to sacrifice my Saturday afternoon to attend.
Minutes before the start time I was able to glide in and find a seat in the fifth row center. It may have helped that the ceremonial blood-letting on the grid-iron was taking place at the same time--worthwhile events with free admission tend to be packed hereabouts. The predictable preambles were delivered by operatives from the academic culture-crats. We were consoled for the difficulty in obtaining parking spaces on a "game day." Laurie came out with her interlocator for the occasion. She looked ever the same--a very-well preserved version of her perennial self. The interviewer was a fairly young guy from a campus office of art and technology.
He seemed to exhibit a trait I have often observed in the young scholars of today's academia--they throw out some undigested slab of something they read that they think may relate to a discussion at hand. After a loose citation, they then turn to the older person--a professor, or a distinguished visitor in this case, and expect them to make the sense out of it that they did not. Some of his thinking indicated that, while he might have the mind for an artist, he was not perhaps the best person for the present job. He had a sloppy note-pad full of semi-organized jottings rather than a set of questions. Everything was "fascinating" or "really, really interesting."
After he asked her what growing up among ten siblings did for her, she seemed to decide that she would set the agenda for what she said rather than fictionalize a narrative of herself as was expected of her. Laurie is one of the great crowd-pleasing school marm types of the era. When she saw how screwy things would be if she allowed this guy to bring up all his own baloney--I now know that his daughter's name is Odessa-- she told her own stories and only let him in now and then. Not to say she didn't show him a good time--when William S. Burroughs came up, he decided to perform his favorite quote of Bill's in a thoroughly lousy impression of him. Then Laurie who certainly knew better said "What a good imitation of Bill's voice." Was this stroke to humor him while winking to those in the know? Her work is characterized by no single thing more than the double entendre.
The defining moment came right away. He was one of these smug people at UC Berkeley who think that they are part of the anti-establishment associated with historical Berkeley. He said he had heard her brother was an alumnus. She said that was true and that he was here today with his daughter. Interviewer responded, " So you are one of us then." "Keep drawing those lines," she incisively relieved him of his unchallenged hubris.
When he continued to describe Berkeley as the last remaining bastion of resistance and free speech. She recollected her own time in the 60s and asked if it were still that way. I shook my head with a regretful expression. This was entirely visible to Laurie who was seated in a chair eye-level with me, and invisible to the hapless and naive interviewer. Just as well, I didn't dislike him and had no desire to put him off his game. Laurie on the other hand noticed and said she would like to hear more about how Berkeley has changed while appearing to look directly at me. In my fresh fade military haircut, my Lou Reed Raybans, my T-shirt and vegetarian build, and my hearing aid, maybe I looked like someone she could relate to, or maybe she actually recognized me from her book party at City Lights 20 years ago, or maybe it was just my delusion of reference, but she seemed eager to talk to me.
A very hilarious moment occurred next that would be difficult to describe and induce hilarity as such--but it may be amusing nevertheless. The ever homey interviewer mentioned that Laurie had recently gotten married. She said yes, she married her partner of 15 years. In her homey humble way she said, "He's also a musician, his name is Lou Reed." And a lady seated in the row behind us said "O-oh," sounding as if she thought she were having coffee alone with Laurie. I scour the world for laughs and was stoned, so I laughed, but the student-aged girl next to me, and even more so two guys in front of us, were all quaking with laughter. Laurie missed the lady but saw us laughing. She was a little non-plussed for a second, probably curious, but then just she assimilated it as welcome good feeling.
Laurie was very much on about the state of the Union so to speak. She remarked at one point that at least it looked like the Democrat would win and tried to raise a cheer. Small cheer it was too--one thing the interviewer got right was that Berkeley presents a tough audience. Many may think that Senator Obama is too little, too late.
We learned where she will be election night--in Tel Aviv. The intrinsic wrongness of it seemed apparent to many including herself. It seems there had been a switcheroo on the date pulled on her by the Israelis whose concern for American public relations is constant. Perhaps they want a prominent quasi-anti-US government artist to appear on the night Joe Lieberman's preferred War party loses the election. That was pure conjecture on my part. What she said next is more a matter of record. A Israeli official asked her to remove references to the occupation of Iraq from Homeland. He said the reason was that the War was very popular in Israel. It goes without saying naturally that nothing must ever upset or challenge the Israeli people. Her vacillation over this her latest career move--to play Israel-- was obvious. There was however no uncertainty in her following statement that it made it very angry when people try to get her to take things out of her show. I tried to say "Well?" with my eyebrows.
Then it was time for the questions from the peanut (and other assorted nut) gallery. Right away, a guy who eschewed the formality of lining up at the microphone asked her a version of the first question many of us were thinking: "What do you hope to accomplish by going to Tel Aviv?" She bristled slightly which is unusual for her and said she didn't think an artist should have to "accomplish something." In one of a couple of references to Bob Dylan*, she said it was like expecting Dylan to always write protest songs. She may have been a wee bit evasive.
All the other "questioners" really had no questions for her but wanted her response to a few minutes of them rambling on about themselves. The one-hour talk had already been stretched to beyond that and, frankly, I was ready for the out-of-doors. One girl whose point I actually liked--that upon coming in from the country she was struck by the militarization of society citing as an example greenery kept trimmed very short or tall trees with their low branches cut--just went on for too long. In a slightly exasperated but not at all hostile tone of voice I said, "q-u-ess-tion-n!" Nobody gave me a "You're mean" look. She did get to a question of sorts and Laurie picked up on the tree trimming in particular in her reply. "It's not for our safety it's to keep surveillance on us."
The last questioner was the farthest out. Laurie had just advised artists to try changing their voices to discover sides of themselves heretofore unseen. A tall gray-haired woman approximately the same age as Laurie began to address her in a deep, "sexy-knickers" sort of voice. Absurd from the git-go, when she between piling on the ambiguous sexual innuendos it became a humorous performance art act. Laurie, a lover of stories, never cuts people off and seemed interested, maybe she was somewhat flattered. Then the lady said, "It's really great great when we can bounce off each other like this." I had to remark to the young lady next to me--"There's an attempt at seduction to this." "Oh totally," she laughed. "Laurie Anderson taught me to see everything as a double-entendre," I joked.
Then it was smiles all around as the conclusion seemed foregone. Interviewer jested that he could have gone on another few hours. As I shook my head and mouthed "no," Laurie spoke up to say "Don't worry that's not going to happen... and I want to hear from you how Berkeley has changed." It was few only hours before her big show that night and I wasn't joining the scrim of fans eager to chat. I gave her a hearty pranam with arms extended, then I hit the aisle leading toward the rest of the afternoon.
Postscript:
Four days later phony "former-Arab terrorists" were allowed to spread disinformation in the same Wheeler auditorium where Laurie appeared. The University Republicans were allowed to put on this foulness despite the fact that these guys, who toured around the time they were first selling the occupation of Iraq, have already been exposed as frauds in in the NY Times and in the Israeli press. But the people who sold America the bogus "war on terror" wanted another propaganda event to scare voters one more time on the eve of the election. Huge expensive color posters covered the neighborhood. They showed eyes behind an Arabic scarf with "Why We Want to Kill You" written large. I tore down a half-dozen myself.
The reason I mention this is to contrast it with the delusions expressed by Laurie Anderson's interviewer regarding the legacy of free speech at Berkeley. The campus paper The Daily Cal reported that the night of the unwelcome appearance of these evil stooges, UC Police lined the walls of Wheeler. They intimated many out of freely challenging these lying propagandists, and escorted off any who took the microphone to express outrage at government support for toxic Zionism.
*The other mention was to say that Dylan romanticized the loser, made losers cool. In my own thinking, that is why "Like a Rolling Stone" is not a put-down song but a song endorsing personal liberation, the abandonment of bourgeois values.
I first saw and heard Laurie Anderson perform thirty years ago this December. The occasion was a celebration of William S. Burroughs called The Nova Convention which took place in New York city. It was my first opportunity to see Burroughs whose works and whose persona I had been keenly investigating for the ten years previous. That year, 1978, I had been working on a land-surveying crew for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but the job had mercifully lapsed. It was just in time to avoid having to work outdoors in the cold weather and, any road, I was planning to leave for California the first week in January 1979. So I was free and had a little scratch for a change. I called the Intermedia theater for tickets and booked a room at the Chelsea Hotel.
What a thrill it was to meet our fearless leader at last--the mythic Hombre Invisible in person. Opening night was a Friday and it was fraught. After Bill's rather brief apparition on stage, came elusive exemplars of the 20th century avant-garde including Burroughs' doppel-ganger Brion Gysin. John Cage performance consisted of amplifying the sounds of himself brewing and drinking tea while Merce Cunningham minced around as if to music.
Along with these legends whom I was seeing for the first time there were other artists on stage most of whom were well-known to me. Others were completely new, such as the two striking women who were introduced at separate points in the show to do quite similar acts. They were both attired in man-tailored tails and both recited texts with sound effects added to their voices. One of them was Julia Heywood whose voice became a chorus of sped-up penguins. The other woman performed a gripping piece contriving to be the authoritarian voice of a pilot during a near plane-crash. She had sparkling eyes a wide smile and in those days brown bobbed hair and she made a rather wholesome overall impression. This was Laurie Anderson 1978. The shock of the new, the recognition of a new modality of expression, post-modernity before the word became a commonplace, all these premises were mingled in my unmitigated appreciation of her. How corny Ginsberg and Orlovsky's hootenanny seemed that evening.
I recall a few notices of Julia after that night but when Burroughs went on tour a year or so later it with John Giorno and Laurie Anderson. She was the one selected to filled the bill. By then she had had an international hit single with "O Superman" which actually entered the U.K. top twenty pop records. In that short time, it had become her fame that was helping to introduce Burroughs to the young and trendy. Her arsenal of special effects and electronic trickery was state-of-the-art and second to none. The charm of her demeanor and the unmistakable presence and yet ambiguity of her social and political critique of America served to support a big tent.
In 1986 I hosted a in-store appearance by Laurie at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco in support of the publication of the book of her project entitled The United States. A vast amount of people showed up to meet her and in the course of a long evening I became somewhat acquainted with her. I found her to be an authentic, genuinely sweet person who gave me the distinct impression of a school teacher type. She put a thumb fingerprint in ink in each book she signed and received much affection in return.
Twenty years later, I find myself interested in what she's up to but not terribly so. She turns up on the high-brow circuit in Berkeley and San Francisco every few years with an incredibly ambitious project such as an operatic treatment of Moby Dick. The reviews are always positive--fawning verging on yawning is how I would describe them. If someone gave me a ticket I probably would go to, for example, her latest opus, Homeland, a play on The Homeland Security Act one doesn't doubt. Yet I am not particularly curious about it. It was however a unusual opportunity to see her in the unrehearsed venue of this talk and one I was determined to sacrifice my Saturday afternoon to attend.
Minutes before the start time I was able to glide in and find a seat in the fifth row center. It may have helped that the ceremonial blood-letting on the grid-iron was taking place at the same time--worthwhile events with free admission tend to be packed hereabouts. The predictable preambles were delivered by operatives from the academic culture-crats. We were consoled for the difficulty in obtaining parking spaces on a "game day." Laurie came out with her interlocator for the occasion. She looked ever the same--a very-well preserved version of her perennial self. The interviewer was a fairly young guy from a campus office of art and technology.
He seemed to exhibit a trait I have often observed in the young scholars of today's academia--they throw out some undigested slab of something they read that they think may relate to a discussion at hand. After a loose citation, they then turn to the older person--a professor, or a distinguished visitor in this case, and expect them to make the sense out of it that they did not. Some of his thinking indicated that, while he might have the mind for an artist, he was not perhaps the best person for the present job. He had a sloppy note-pad full of semi-organized jottings rather than a set of questions. Everything was "fascinating" or "really, really interesting."
After he asked her what growing up among ten siblings did for her, she seemed to decide that she would set the agenda for what she said rather than fictionalize a narrative of herself as was expected of her. Laurie is one of the great crowd-pleasing school marm types of the era. When she saw how screwy things would be if she allowed this guy to bring up all his own baloney--I now know that his daughter's name is Odessa-- she told her own stories and only let him in now and then. Not to say she didn't show him a good time--when William S. Burroughs came up, he decided to perform his favorite quote of Bill's in a thoroughly lousy impression of him. Then Laurie who certainly knew better said "What a good imitation of Bill's voice." Was this stroke to humor him while winking to those in the know? Her work is characterized by no single thing more than the double entendre.
The defining moment came right away. He was one of these smug people at UC Berkeley who think that they are part of the anti-establishment associated with historical Berkeley. He said he had heard her brother was an alumnus. She said that was true and that he was here today with his daughter. Interviewer responded, " So you are one of us then." "Keep drawing those lines," she incisively relieved him of his unchallenged hubris.
When he continued to describe Berkeley as the last remaining bastion of resistance and free speech. She recollected her own time in the 60s and asked if it were still that way. I shook my head with a regretful expression. This was entirely visible to Laurie who was seated in a chair eye-level with me, and invisible to the hapless and naive interviewer. Just as well, I didn't dislike him and had no desire to put him off his game. Laurie on the other hand noticed and said she would like to hear more about how Berkeley has changed while appearing to look directly at me. In my fresh fade military haircut, my Lou Reed Raybans, my T-shirt and vegetarian build, and my hearing aid, maybe I looked like someone she could relate to, or maybe she actually recognized me from her book party at City Lights 20 years ago, or maybe it was just my delusion of reference, but she seemed eager to talk to me.
A very hilarious moment occurred next that would be difficult to describe and induce hilarity as such--but it may be amusing nevertheless. The ever homey interviewer mentioned that Laurie had recently gotten married. She said yes, she married her partner of 15 years. In her homey humble way she said, "He's also a musician, his name is Lou Reed." And a lady seated in the row behind us said "O-oh," sounding as if she thought she were having coffee alone with Laurie. I scour the world for laughs and was stoned, so I laughed, but the student-aged girl next to me, and even more so two guys in front of us, were all quaking with laughter. Laurie missed the lady but saw us laughing. She was a little non-plussed for a second, probably curious, but then just she assimilated it as welcome good feeling.
Laurie was very much on about the state of the Union so to speak. She remarked at one point that at least it looked like the Democrat would win and tried to raise a cheer. Small cheer it was too--one thing the interviewer got right was that Berkeley presents a tough audience. Many may think that Senator Obama is too little, too late.
We learned where she will be election night--in Tel Aviv. The intrinsic wrongness of it seemed apparent to many including herself. It seems there had been a switcheroo on the date pulled on her by the Israelis whose concern for American public relations is constant. Perhaps they want a prominent quasi-anti-US government artist to appear on the night Joe Lieberman's preferred War party loses the election. That was pure conjecture on my part. What she said next is more a matter of record. A Israeli official asked her to remove references to the occupation of Iraq from Homeland. He said the reason was that the War was very popular in Israel. It goes without saying naturally that nothing must ever upset or challenge the Israeli people. Her vacillation over this her latest career move--to play Israel-- was obvious. There was however no uncertainty in her following statement that it made it very angry when people try to get her to take things out of her show. I tried to say "Well?" with my eyebrows.
Then it was time for the questions from the peanut (and other assorted nut) gallery. Right away, a guy who eschewed the formality of lining up at the microphone asked her a version of the first question many of us were thinking: "What do you hope to accomplish by going to Tel Aviv?" She bristled slightly which is unusual for her and said she didn't think an artist should have to "accomplish something." In one of a couple of references to Bob Dylan*, she said it was like expecting Dylan to always write protest songs. She may have been a wee bit evasive.
All the other "questioners" really had no questions for her but wanted her response to a few minutes of them rambling on about themselves. The one-hour talk had already been stretched to beyond that and, frankly, I was ready for the out-of-doors. One girl whose point I actually liked--that upon coming in from the country she was struck by the militarization of society citing as an example greenery kept trimmed very short or tall trees with their low branches cut--just went on for too long. In a slightly exasperated but not at all hostile tone of voice I said, "q-u-ess-tion-n!" Nobody gave me a "You're mean" look. She did get to a question of sorts and Laurie picked up on the tree trimming in particular in her reply. "It's not for our safety it's to keep surveillance on us."
The last questioner was the farthest out. Laurie had just advised artists to try changing their voices to discover sides of themselves heretofore unseen. A tall gray-haired woman approximately the same age as Laurie began to address her in a deep, "sexy-knickers" sort of voice. Absurd from the git-go, when she between piling on the ambiguous sexual innuendos it became a humorous performance art act. Laurie, a lover of stories, never cuts people off and seemed interested, maybe she was somewhat flattered. Then the lady said, "It's really great great when we can bounce off each other like this." I had to remark to the young lady next to me--"There's an attempt at seduction to this." "Oh totally," she laughed. "Laurie Anderson taught me to see everything as a double-entendre," I joked.
Then it was smiles all around as the conclusion seemed foregone. Interviewer jested that he could have gone on another few hours. As I shook my head and mouthed "no," Laurie spoke up to say "Don't worry that's not going to happen... and I want to hear from you how Berkeley has changed." It was few only hours before her big show that night and I wasn't joining the scrim of fans eager to chat. I gave her a hearty pranam with arms extended, then I hit the aisle leading toward the rest of the afternoon.
Postscript:
Four days later phony "former-Arab terrorists" were allowed to spread disinformation in the same Wheeler auditorium where Laurie appeared. The University Republicans were allowed to put on this foulness despite the fact that these guys, who toured around the time they were first selling the occupation of Iraq, have already been exposed as frauds in in the NY Times and in the Israeli press. But the people who sold America the bogus "war on terror" wanted another propaganda event to scare voters one more time on the eve of the election. Huge expensive color posters covered the neighborhood. They showed eyes behind an Arabic scarf with "Why We Want to Kill You" written large. I tore down a half-dozen myself.
The reason I mention this is to contrast it with the delusions expressed by Laurie Anderson's interviewer regarding the legacy of free speech at Berkeley. The campus paper The Daily Cal reported that the night of the unwelcome appearance of these evil stooges, UC Police lined the walls of Wheeler. They intimated many out of freely challenging these lying propagandists, and escorted off any who took the microphone to express outrage at government support for toxic Zionism.
*The other mention was to say that Dylan romanticized the loser, made losers cool. In my own thinking, that is why "Like a Rolling Stone" is not a put-down song but a song endorsing personal liberation, the abandonment of bourgeois values.
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