This Week in The Hoodie

Welcome to the Flaneur's patch

It's in a classy part of town

 An endless supply of beverages on a hot day,

But there's no such thing

As a free glass of water

 

 The coolest young people,

 A place where the trees are truncated,

 Where when elevator doors open,

You're face to face with the Port of Oakland

 Where you can float out on sunlight and water

And reach a sea of tranquility,

Inside

So you want to be a bird? *

I kept traveling as the gull flies,

And crossed the new Eastern span of the Bay bridge,

I have sailed under it several times 

But this is my first time on it,
The long stretch of unimpeded bay view is superb,
We saw a stirring vertical rainbow

Joey and I were on our way to SF Jazz
In order to dig the great Charles Lloyd,
I felt like I was on OG Kush, oh wait, I was

Miles away.... miles away..... **

* "Bird Song" (1969) - Holy Modal Rounders

** "Miles Away" (1980) - John Foxx

I hear music when I look at my image captures

"The Bird Song" is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwq55kt8x4g

"Miles Away" is here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUxp5pE3HIc

23-30 April 2015

Strolling Oakland: Monkey Man

I see no sign of you,

Only hear that you

 Hugging up a big monkey man,

 It's not lie, 

It's not lie,

Hugging up a big monkey man

 Now I know that,

Now I understand,

You're turning a monkey on me

Aye, Aye Aye,

Aye Aye, Aye,

Hugging up a big monkey man

It's not lie,

It's not lie,

Rubbing up a big monkey man

***

See you in the rear-view mirror,

Wonder if you can make any money replacing

Broken car windows in Oakland?

Original lyrics by Toots and the Maytals,

The Flaneur recalls seeing them perform in their prime,

Wasn't it the Stone on Broadway SF, early eighties?
Dig it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zsZKfoy9-Y

19 April 2015

P.O.O. #4 The World's a Temporary Stage

The Psychogeography of Old Oakland #4

You be what you want to be

On Plan 9

You're a million miles from reality

 Ever notice it's always today?

Arthur Rimbaud said he wanted

the free freedom,

Imagine what he means

 And for heaven's sake,
Boogie, children,

While you still can

Life means carrying your own burden,

Singing laughing and keeping on,

Because everybody's already gone

22-25 April 2015

Berkeley Post Office Blues

 RAY visits often to retrieve his mail art

cultivating insight and awareness

 Spanish boots of Spanish leather,
The facts formerly on the ground

 From the Pony Express

To the Nova Express

 Hey old Christopher Columbus

Sailed the world without a compass

 Le Flaneur Noir

RIP

22 April 2015

420 UCB 2015

The Berkeley Flaneur checks in with his figurative grandkids

4:20 PM, April twentieth, 2015;

Students gather to proclaim, demonstrate, and celebrate
smoking marijuana,

Ray Man is there again this year.

I commenced my participation with two healthy inhalations

of a hand-roll blending OG Kush, Indica dominant,

and Strawberry Kush, a Sativa

4:30 PM:
Everybody's high,

I wanted to ask if I could crawl in with them,

Dig the cat with the joint and two girls

Who think everything he says is funny

 4:38 PM:

At this point these kids are baked

Look at the guy with the light blue shirt,

Baked

 Look at the girl front and center,

I heard her tell her friends 

She can't find her sunglasses,

Baked

 6:15:

I came back down this way,

I had wandered up to the campanile plaza

And attended a transporting carillon concert,

Suspended in the sky 

While crystalline notes floated past,
Baked

6:20:

I left campus via this gate,

Nice to see a white ass around here for a change

White boys
Seem to walk on air
 When it's Four Twen-day on Telegraph

Afterthoughts:
I felt like old Santa Claus checking out the young folks to see who's being naughty and who's being nice.The nice ones wre the people who smokes and sat peacefully on the grass looking into their friends eyes. No music was playing, nobody drew attention to themselves, well not counting parachutes.
The naughty kids were the ones who really didn't appear to smoke anything but were there in case cannabis becomes a legal thing; they want to be able to add that they attended the UCB 420 rally on their resumes (omitting the detail that they themselves weren't smoking)

20 April 2015

Footnote:

In the crowd image with the guy in the blue shirt, look left of him and between the two girls. The well-toned guy middle-aged guy in the orange cap is a police spy.
In the following image, I reached the far side of the crowd and take out my camera you'll notice him again keeping a steady eye on me. I had obviously just caught his attention when I walked past.
 He appears as well in the Campanile photo, never engaging anyone, certainly never smoking, standing attentively with an apparent earpiece.

Another Side of Berkeley

One of a a dwindling number,

A continuously-occupied  Hippie house,

Living members of the original Hippie population 

Are believed to still inhabit its quaint premises

 

The Flaneur discovers a ley line and follows to its illogical conclusion

This tree is a helpful reminder

That the mushrooms are coming on now

  "Watermelon Smile"

A grotesque oak

 Twenty years ago I took part in symposia

 On the Beat Generation held by the Bancroft library,

A Jewish psychology lady proclaimed, 

"I'm not seeing enough Jewishness!"

 I replied, "Not enough Jewishness?!

You've heard of the "White Negro"?

The Beats were the Goy Jews!"

Goes double for the hippies

(Dylan, Lenny, Balin, Graham, et al)

Kerouac was the original Beat,

Ginsberg was the original Hippie

 A rack of Tallises, a scarf or shawl,

Worn for morning prayers and at Yom Kippur only

Above it some merchandise from the gift shop

A Shofar horn-trumpet just like the one

 Joshua used to topple the battlements of Jericho,

A menorah, an image of the Temple in Jerusalem,

Russian-style Passover ritual objects

Once a month the congregation provides

A copious meal for the poor with extra to food take home

Heap load of mitzvah on that

From those dizzying heights

I glided back downtown,

Taking refuge in an empty Buddhist roost

19 April 2015

The Bone Knob Land

" an obeah man/

revered throughout the bone knob land"

Don van Vliet/Captain Beefheart
"Those Little Golden Birdies"

The Flaneur inhabits a surrational realm
where the mundane becomes mysterioso

I come in via 

Jefferson Pterodactyl

 Hey, look out,

Jurassic Porker!

 Thanks to this genome rebirth project

Everything prehistoric is Anthrozoic again

 Homo sapiens drove Neanderthal to extinction 

When wolves learned to read 

The whites of our eyes

 Our ancestors retained this perennial lesson,

 It's the tooth

      It's the motherfucking tooth

 

 Survival as a genomic heirloom

 Passed along the neon branches

Of our family tree

On another stratum

 Triceratops are stirring again

In the anthropic twilight

 He was here at the same time as Adam,

But we're still around,
Should we fear?

The cyber-light source failed,

Sub-sonic rumble in the old bones tonight

March 2015