Berkeley Flaneur: Oakland, It's a Happening

Ultra Iris

Iris outside Fairyland

April going's on

from Fun to Funky

you know RAY man's a junky

Uptown

Oakland's golden age

bleeds through

WTF?

A massive new mural

arrived here by chance myself

Heads hung low,

looks like the culprits

The next day I chanced to hear

on an unfamiliar radio station

That a big free party for the unveiling

was to take place Saturday April 1st

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

That evening rolled around

with a vigorous cold shower right at 6PM

I stayed in and played my radio

Hats off to

Illuminairies

Larry Beckett

sound check at reading

He co-wrote most of Tim Buckley's

great early songbook

New mural

a siren of sorts

Turn right off Broadway

onto 22nd street

Glass front,

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

new-capitalist part of town

The Octopus Literary Salon

A swank new performance space

no over-crowding, no fires

And an approachable

bookshop and café

as jolly well

Michael Goldberg

years and years of his solid

writing on Music for Rolling Stone

I have read

Tonight he's reading from a fiction trilogy

His piece is about waiting to get off on LSD

while smoking the quaint cannabis of the era,

He had a professional taking loads of photos

but I suspect none would better encapsulate

his orange sunshine rhapsody than this image

And it's a gallery of sorts

Lots of pleasant

unpretentious artwork

hanging around

The great Larry Beckett

he read from a compilation

of his tall-tale telling

concerning Paul Bunyon,

in sort of a filled-out

Richard Brautigan-like style

He even had trout-fishing

the story of a trout

who was trained not

to need to be in water

He moved around quite a bit

so perforce I got action shots

I have been a zealous fan

of Tim Buckley and of Larry song-writing

for now fifty years,

Larry had me pull up a chair

when I told him at age 15 I had memorized

all the lyrics to "Good-bye and Hello"

and on my sixteenth birthday

attended Tim's live set

at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival

I told him my girlfriend dragged me out

to go rest in some meadows

before the evening program,

before Tim's set was over,

I remember turning to walk backward

up the aisle as Tim implored me to stay

with his so very expressive eyebrows,

I motioned to the girlfriend to explain,

I think she sensed I was falling in love

with him and she was right,

Great pleasure to meet Larry

a happy time inside my mind

at a typically sparse end-of-the-month

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

3.

Rhododendron show