On the sweltering afternoon of Friday September the fifth, the University of California cut and destroyed the lives of all but a handful of the trees at Memorial Grove. In an upcoming entry, I'll write the story of my sojourn there the Sunday following. Now I want to remember the intervening Saturday and an escape to the seaside...
The September heatwave ensued and I saw my escape plan beckoning from the back deck---San Francisco under clear skies. Ever the noirish gentleman, I was dressed nattily in an l.l.bean long-sleeved blue striped cotton shirt, boxer shorts, black cargo shorts worn with black cotton socks and blundstone boots, black sunglasses and a black beret. I brought with me my city lights canvas book-bag, with water, some raisins, prescription cookies, and an extra whole foods bag to carry the boots on the beach. That's it--all rations and gear accounted for.
I intended to wait until I was aboard a street car headed for the ocean before I devoured my almond shortbread cookie. It was created with butter containing the active ingredient from quite high grade cannabis. But to keep travel fun until then I had a few quick puffs of a blend of four or five different varietals before leaving. My lovely radio program, "Thistle and Shamrock" hosted by the endearing Fiona Ritchie, had just commenced at 2 PM when I plunged out into the heat. High 80s.
The students had recently repopulated, young people were everywhere--generally not wearing much clothing. Down the chute through campus, and into the downtown BART station. A busy and slightly cheerful Saturday crowd fills the train to San Francisco. I spied a friend among the standees across the car. He is an Oakland poet, thirties, sort of patrician Irish-American background, from Massachusetts like me, we were both friends of the late Beat Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. Despite his doctorate in English from UC Berkeley, he still has his long thick mane and he reports on hip hop for the institutional local alternative free-weekly. Tall and good-looking, he reminds me of the young John Wayne. Leaning up by the door, he was reading a book entitled The White Tomb.
He got off at Embarcadero, my stop, so I was able to catch up to him. I had decided that the extra half cookie I had brought with me would go to him. I told him that he was looking too serious otherwise--don't forget that the White Tomb is where we are going to put McCain. It was a enjoyable moment before we hurried off on our separate ways. He was headed to work, poor lad.
In a moment I was down at the Muni platform waiting on a train. I impetuously hopped aboard a present "N-Judah" rather than wait a few minutes more for the "L" train to the Zoo. But that was not to be. The driver somehow forgot what train he was driving and followed the tracks for the "L" rather than the "N." In short order the local crowd sounded alarm when they realized this.
The driver stopped at the next station and most got out and dashed over to the other side for a return to the "N" line. The driver just looked flummoxed and didn't really have advice or even an announcement for the remaining crowd. Just the "L" arrived and before much longer the purported "N" slid off. I packed myself into the cannery of a crowded car for a hot ride, now standing up. I had begun my cookie before the mishap and it was happening before the long ride ended.
I relish touring the wind-worn precincts along the neighborhoods approaching Ocean Beach. I look for remnants of the 20th century in architecture and in the nostalgic signs of the out-lying neighborhoods of old San Francisco. From the West Portal with its tidy branch library, the Philosopher's Bench bar, the enticingly-named "Squat and Gobble" eatery. The forlorn pet stores that serve a largely Asian clientele; the "Irish Home Care" service for the dear old inhabitants of the neat quiet cottages one sees passing by; the look of the locals in this part of town, I see all, I notice all, on this long ride culminating in quietude at the ocean and the zoo.
The "L" to the Zoo stop is a convenient conveyance to the beach. As far as the managery itself is concerned, I have not visited it or any other zoo in decades. I hold animals too dearly to enjoy seeing them imprisoned. Even knowing that it is the only way I will see the esteemed lemur face to face, I can not indulge myself at the animal's expense. That said, I am not above, and I was not this day above, going to the open fence by the entrance where one can see some of the captive animals ranging across a hillside. As I walked over finishing the shortbread I spoke to a young black boy who was sitting next to me at Embarcadero station. "You came all the way to see the animals?" He dug it when I said I loved them too. I told to enjoy himself and went to see the cheapskate's view of the zoo.
Off in the distance I did see a young giraffe move past, but mainly I observed various Ibex resting in sort of a kneeling position with horns ten feet in the air, some somnolent storks, and some restless ostriches all fairly close by. Best of all was a glorious zebra who stood at the closest point looking back at me. He seemed glad to see me and to respond pleasurably to me, swiveling his ears to my sweet talk:"What a nice zebra! You're nice!" Of course most animal pleasure in one's company is intimately connected to their expectation that one may have food to give to them.
The San Francisco Zoo gained new infamy last Christmas day. Three wannabe gangstas taunted a Siberian tiger to the extent that it leapt from it's enclosure and attacked them. They had stood on a railing while yelling and waving their arms in a primate danger display that is beyond archetypal all the way to instinctual. And the tiger responded out of instinct to their threat at the threshold of its meager domain. The two older brothers, hostile ne'er-do-wells apparently, had lived. When rescued they had been cowering outside the snack bar where the tiger had stalked them. They had induced an under-age friend to join them for intoxicated animal-baiting on Christmas. When the boy's father reached them by phone they denied knowing his whereabouts. He did not survive the attack. Nor did the exquisite female tiger, one of only 500 left in the world, survive the police.
I happened to have been at the Cliff House a few miles from there when it happened. At 5 PM that day as the zoo was closing, I watched the sun set turn the windy cold sky blood red. In contemplation of a wildly faint possibility, I say, as I have always said, I would forgive a great beast such as the tiger if ever circumstances compelled it to devour me.
I continued to the beach, negotiating the pent-up lanes of traffic of the "great highway." Fully be-cookied by this point, the sheer exhilaration of the ocean vista of glorious breakers made my heart feel too large for my chest. From Mount Tamalpais and the headlands of Marin to the mysterious and dim southern coast all the land and sea was shining in the bright daylight.
Doffing my boots to skim the wet sand, I began my northward walk. A sizable crowd flocked around the immediate vicinity but began to thin as I covered ground. Delighted children danced around my gait in time with the sea's ebb and flow. Not just surfers but a good many swimmers were off on the wet side of me. Despite the absence of life-guards, going myself began to seem a lot safer with so many around who might see me if I was snatched by the waves. I watched a guy with a big belly rolling in the breakers and decided if he could endure it I could as well. Careful readers may recall that I had not brought with me a swimming outfit-- but I was to be undeterred.
I walked on until the inevitable fishing poles were planted and fewer people were encamped. Just a nearby group of young men incessantly throwing a football, catching it while falling in the water, fairly oblivious to the people nearby. I sat on the edge of a small wall and let a little time pass. Then, after determining no one was observing me, I took off my walking shorts and headed for the water in navy and gray-striped boxer shorts.
My feet and calves had met the cold saltwater but all the more cold-sensitive parts of my body needed to be introduced. Having grown up on the Atlantic I have been an ocean swimmer all my life--I have the idea of how to enter cold water without inducing a heart seizure. This involves quickly leaning over and splashing water on one's chest, the back of one's neck, and finally over ones head. Then you must dive in full-length as soon as possible. All this I did in rapid order--and it felt like being born. A transitional return to the original primordial soup from where all life came. Instantly I evolved into a renewed version of the organism I used to be.
While this was happening--as I sprung back to my feet recovering from a situation in which my undershorts gave into the persuasion of the waters--I noticed one of the fisherman, a middle-aged Chinese guy, was gaping at me in a mild show of disbelief. Let's see him try to do it--then he may form his opinion of my behavior. Another plunge and that was enough for me, I walked back to my spot on the wall--my circulation thundering, the inside of my head chilled and resplendent.
More people moved into the area and the fisherman, ostensibly unsuccessful, gave up the turf. People might have noticed what I had done--but sincerely, on both sides, who cares? I waited to drip-dry a while (no towel recall) then put my shirt over my lower half and lowered the wet boxers. The walking shorts were soon back on all was beyond criticism.
I stayed for hours smiling the whole time at the children, at the beach-walkers and the humorous dogs. A beach patrol vehicle pulled up to the young athletes and began to address them over a rooftop megaphone. Two other security figures waited nearby on cartoonish beach motorcycles--these days there is always plenty of funding for security. They drove off and after a few minutes I went over to one of the young men to ask what they had said. "Haven't the slightest idea...couldn't hear 'em." He sounded like he was Irish. The entire time I was there, the four of them were in an ecstatic world of constant motion on a sparkling beach in their youthful health. It was a place I could only gaze at in appreciation and vaguely recall.
I climbed the rough dirty "dune" in search of a discrete leak then stayed up high to gaze endlessly at the sea and at the frivolity. A lady on a fairly distant blanket saw me up there smiling. She kept looking and seemed to show a little concern, nudging her male companion.
As fetching as her green plaid bathing-suit bottom was, she need not have worried. I'd seen it before plenty. They lost interest in me soon enough and I skied back down the cascading sand.
So, hours drifted past, the waves got closer to me, and I knew I should resume my beach walk and go home. I headed North to catch a "N" train at Judah street. As I walked on past the section of the beach where the concrete wall and the highway are visible, to where dunes get bonny and the beach is busy again, I noticed a family of surfers having dinner wearing wet suits--father, mother, older sister, kids playing catch in little wet suits half-peeled-off.
My stride was a source of pride as I glided through innumerable scenes. Sweet little sandpipers combed the vacant stretches; a translucent jellyfish fell from outer space; a naked little boy ran by me giggling; pretty girls looked innocently aware of admiring eyes; a squadron of pelicans crossed the sunlight on the sea out where the surfers hung. I smiled and the world seemed to smile back.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Another Visit to the Oak Grove
This entry continues a thread still in progress on the Berkeley Tree-sit protest in Memorial Grove on the UC campus, also still in progress...
Every night for a year and a half something looms in the Eastern sky--either the bleached black of a clear night or else a brilliant night fog or white ominous clouds, all three illuminated by the extreme light pollution used in the police occupation of Memorial Grove as a form of slow torture.
And now what could be a sea-change in events was augered by the court date looming on Monday 25 August. The weekend of the 23-24th seemed like it might be the last time to make a video showing what "Guantanamo Berkeley" was like on an uneventful night, before any actual endgame was in play.
The police siege was just about a year old. It had started one razor-topped fence, stated to be for the mutual protection of football fans and tree protesters. Prior to this the grove had become a jolly meeting spot for many supporters and the curious. Wearing an impromtu but disturbing paper mask I toured the scene on the night of Hallowe'en. The area was filled with boisterous students--the grove was quieter but for the relentless traffic that passes below it, relentlessly dumping CO2 and particulate matter. That night there was an unusual lot of noise 11PM Hallowe'en. One could sit on the stone stairs which were cut off by the fence. A few cops milled around in the background, embarassed to be there one might think. Without interference I could call up my customary "God bless you, tree-sitters," into the leafy dark and they would generally answer back.
After the first fence came additional police barricades, followed by two fences with the barricades in November. I suppose motivated in part by the long nights and traditions of a Festival of light, around December the University set up its own light display among the stately oaks, a scene familiar to campus for 80 years. This year they hauled in the new anti-terrorist klieg lights in batteries of four, all pointed up into the trees where the little elves dwell. And to run such industrial light and add to the magic two large diesel generators for round the clock air and noise pollution enhancement. They positioned these as well right below the arboreal sleepers.
Barred from the grove and eventually barred from the public sidewalk, my visits fell off. I would get annoyed and start annoying the increasing number of armed round-the-clock cops and other guards. I would yell out "Guantanamo!" from the other side of Piedmont as I walked by.
The excuse now for usurping the sidewalk and depriving citizens the right to use it for protest as well as everyday life was that because the UC cops had arrested people for crimes such as tossing a sack of food or as little as an orange to the tree-sitters--it was now a crime scene. Day by day as I see how a police state carries out the will of a secretive government owned by the wealthy who long ago abandoned the idea of a livable commons if they ever held one. It reminds me of the type of mistreatment of its citizens engaged in by the U.S.S.R. --stories they used to scare us with in grammar school. The idealistic rhetoric touting America's freedom and democracy was piled high in those days in contrast. This was before spying on US citizens without warrant was fast-tracked into the law of the land.
I had been to several demonstrations at the grove that had been publicized--as opposed to the daily struggle and occasional UC-created crises. The recent concerned attempts to continue to provide food to the protestors. A group of Berkeley grandmas had been succeeding for months despite the University's resolve to begin starving the tree-sitters out. When local humanitarian pressure and threat of legal proceedings applied sufficient pressure, UC agreed to provide them with nutrition bars and water, but firmly resolved to end all other supplying.
At this sad event a large number of well-paid uniformed cops formed phalanx to prevent the kindly old flower-children from giving the poor kids in the trees something wholesome to eat.
One of the these semi-starved young tree-sitters went as far as to climb across branches and down a telephone pole to try to grap a bag. The over-fed, flinty-faced cops would prevent this like it was do-or-die. The kid on the pole would then scurry back up un-molested at least. He looked somewhat thin and strained, but he was illuminated by his bravery.
The UC cabal not only built the so-called security fence but built an entire complex of fencing for their anticipate construction. This requires in their scheming minds guards every 20 feet along what is a very long stretch of fence. They are using the unreal cost of such "security" to add to their theoretical costs of delaying construction and in order to gain leverage over the plaintiffs, have asked the court to force the Ciyy and the neighborhood groups who sued to pay all these costs, real and imagined.
As I walked off home that day, I chanted in the direction of these champions of homeland security; "Food and water is a human right!". If I saw a middle-aged one I added, "Those poor kids."
On some afternoon as I walked uphill home, six helicopters were stationary at high points over the Southside of campus. There had been daylight homicides, bank robberies and such often enough these days--I assumed it was a very dedicated dragnet. I laughed with a passing skate-boarding teenager about the paranoid siege feeling such long-duration helicopter grids inspire. On my I learned from a resting street activist that it was an assault on the grove and that the majority of the choppers were news copters filming, co-ordinated no doubt with UC mouthpiece Mogulof and their over-funded police.
It turned out that they had sent in cops with professional-tree-trimmers who tried to grab the kids as the other guys sawed-off the limbs supporting their platforms. A great video image from below shows the resilient and feisty gal called Dumpster Muffin climbing to a little wooden box they built on the highest oak branch and just shaking the hell out of it as a cop in a hard-hat swoops in in a cherry-picker. He backed down.
But UC's recent onslaught of insult, deprivation, and torture had succeeded in reducing the heroic population in the trees. The craven Mayor and Berkeley City council had caved-in, choosing not to pursue their lawsuit. And the oak conservationist and neighborhood interest groups' situations seemed weakened. The Republican party has been stacking the courts with judges unsympathetic to democracy and equality under the law for the less powerful since 1980. And they fought every appointment a Democratic administration made with methodical ferocity. The recent disclosures of Justice department skullduggery in furthering GOP objectives only begin to scratch the surface. Their cynical attempts to make the playing field favor themselves and their cronies have run rapacious and rampant over everybody's everyday lives--especially when you have an exceptionalist corporate entity the likes of UC Berkeley.
Meanwhile Tedford, the coach who must be appeased, the highest-paid individual at UC Berkeley, has led the team on rather a losing streak recently hasn't he? Let's see.
All of this is to introduce the following video made by a colleague of mine who calls himself cheapsurrealist with urging and assistance from myself. In a future entry I'll tell the "making-of-the film" tale.
Every night for a year and a half something looms in the Eastern sky--either the bleached black of a clear night or else a brilliant night fog or white ominous clouds, all three illuminated by the extreme light pollution used in the police occupation of Memorial Grove as a form of slow torture.
And now what could be a sea-change in events was augered by the court date looming on Monday 25 August. The weekend of the 23-24th seemed like it might be the last time to make a video showing what "Guantanamo Berkeley" was like on an uneventful night, before any actual endgame was in play.
The police siege was just about a year old. It had started one razor-topped fence, stated to be for the mutual protection of football fans and tree protesters. Prior to this the grove had become a jolly meeting spot for many supporters and the curious. Wearing an impromtu but disturbing paper mask I toured the scene on the night of Hallowe'en. The area was filled with boisterous students--the grove was quieter but for the relentless traffic that passes below it, relentlessly dumping CO2 and particulate matter. That night there was an unusual lot of noise 11PM Hallowe'en. One could sit on the stone stairs which were cut off by the fence. A few cops milled around in the background, embarassed to be there one might think. Without interference I could call up my customary "God bless you, tree-sitters," into the leafy dark and they would generally answer back.
After the first fence came additional police barricades, followed by two fences with the barricades in November. I suppose motivated in part by the long nights and traditions of a Festival of light, around December the University set up its own light display among the stately oaks, a scene familiar to campus for 80 years. This year they hauled in the new anti-terrorist klieg lights in batteries of four, all pointed up into the trees where the little elves dwell. And to run such industrial light and add to the magic two large diesel generators for round the clock air and noise pollution enhancement. They positioned these as well right below the arboreal sleepers.
Barred from the grove and eventually barred from the public sidewalk, my visits fell off. I would get annoyed and start annoying the increasing number of armed round-the-clock cops and other guards. I would yell out "Guantanamo!" from the other side of Piedmont as I walked by.
The excuse now for usurping the sidewalk and depriving citizens the right to use it for protest as well as everyday life was that because the UC cops had arrested people for crimes such as tossing a sack of food or as little as an orange to the tree-sitters--it was now a crime scene. Day by day as I see how a police state carries out the will of a secretive government owned by the wealthy who long ago abandoned the idea of a livable commons if they ever held one. It reminds me of the type of mistreatment of its citizens engaged in by the U.S.S.R. --stories they used to scare us with in grammar school. The idealistic rhetoric touting America's freedom and democracy was piled high in those days in contrast. This was before spying on US citizens without warrant was fast-tracked into the law of the land.
I had been to several demonstrations at the grove that had been publicized--as opposed to the daily struggle and occasional UC-created crises. The recent concerned attempts to continue to provide food to the protestors. A group of Berkeley grandmas had been succeeding for months despite the University's resolve to begin starving the tree-sitters out. When local humanitarian pressure and threat of legal proceedings applied sufficient pressure, UC agreed to provide them with nutrition bars and water, but firmly resolved to end all other supplying.
At this sad event a large number of well-paid uniformed cops formed phalanx to prevent the kindly old flower-children from giving the poor kids in the trees something wholesome to eat.
One of the these semi-starved young tree-sitters went as far as to climb across branches and down a telephone pole to try to grap a bag. The over-fed, flinty-faced cops would prevent this like it was do-or-die. The kid on the pole would then scurry back up un-molested at least. He looked somewhat thin and strained, but he was illuminated by his bravery.
The UC cabal not only built the so-called security fence but built an entire complex of fencing for their anticipate construction. This requires in their scheming minds guards every 20 feet along what is a very long stretch of fence. They are using the unreal cost of such "security" to add to their theoretical costs of delaying construction and in order to gain leverage over the plaintiffs, have asked the court to force the Ciyy and the neighborhood groups who sued to pay all these costs, real and imagined.
As I walked off home that day, I chanted in the direction of these champions of homeland security; "Food and water is a human right!". If I saw a middle-aged one I added, "Those poor kids."
On some afternoon as I walked uphill home, six helicopters were stationary at high points over the Southside of campus. There had been daylight homicides, bank robberies and such often enough these days--I assumed it was a very dedicated dragnet. I laughed with a passing skate-boarding teenager about the paranoid siege feeling such long-duration helicopter grids inspire. On my I learned from a resting street activist that it was an assault on the grove and that the majority of the choppers were news copters filming, co-ordinated no doubt with UC mouthpiece Mogulof and their over-funded police.
It turned out that they had sent in cops with professional-tree-trimmers who tried to grab the kids as the other guys sawed-off the limbs supporting their platforms. A great video image from below shows the resilient and feisty gal called Dumpster Muffin climbing to a little wooden box they built on the highest oak branch and just shaking the hell out of it as a cop in a hard-hat swoops in in a cherry-picker. He backed down.
But UC's recent onslaught of insult, deprivation, and torture had succeeded in reducing the heroic population in the trees. The craven Mayor and Berkeley City council had caved-in, choosing not to pursue their lawsuit. And the oak conservationist and neighborhood interest groups' situations seemed weakened. The Republican party has been stacking the courts with judges unsympathetic to democracy and equality under the law for the less powerful since 1980. And they fought every appointment a Democratic administration made with methodical ferocity. The recent disclosures of Justice department skullduggery in furthering GOP objectives only begin to scratch the surface. Their cynical attempts to make the playing field favor themselves and their cronies have run rapacious and rampant over everybody's everyday lives--especially when you have an exceptionalist corporate entity the likes of UC Berkeley.
Meanwhile Tedford, the coach who must be appeased, the highest-paid individual at UC Berkeley, has led the team on rather a losing streak recently hasn't he? Let's see.
All of this is to introduce the following video made by a colleague of mine who calls himself cheapsurrealist with urging and assistance from myself. In a future entry I'll tell the "making-of-the film" tale.
I miss the Oak Grove.
Those who destroy life curse themselves
Saturday, August 9, 2008
I Walk On
Resuming the story of 2 August 2008, in which I visit San Francisco for an afternoon of diversion...
Coming back to myself, I was standing in the virgin vinyl aisle of Amoeba records on Haight street remembering Joe Strummer there six years on. I had arrived at three for an in-store set of songs and was enduring the final wait with a crowd of young folks who looked smart and sensitive. Then, the always precocious, only occasionally precious, troubadour Conor Oberst and his band men walked out to the general delight. He was in town playing two small sold-out shows at a club starting a tour behind dropping his new joint (to employ the linguistic hype of the jumpy record industry.) The album was recorded in Mexico at some distance from his Wisconsin base and his regular band, Bright Eyes. Like many Americans including myself years ago, he exhibited the telltale sign of having gone native and was seen in photos sporting a shirt from Michoacan.
Appropriately, the opening song reflected this new Kerouacian figure. His singing voice and his band sounded more roots and country than his usual cosmopolitan sound. It was entitled "Moab" presumably after the town in Utah. Kerouac had naturally passed through there himself once or twice and wrote a line in a haiku, "Who's Moab?", trying to recall this lesser known Old Testament figure.
It's refrain was an aphorism, "There's nothing that the road cannot heal." I know what he's driving at: the liberation and responsibility for survival that the road can offer, as well as the distance it imposes, psychic and physical, between ourselves and the situation that made us feel ill. I was feeling somewhat in need of healing myself recently and by that point in the song the music hit me. And as most of us have heard Jah Marley sing:
One good thing about music
when it hits you feel no pain.
In my stonedness and in my not having gone to hear live music much in the last nine months or so, my aesthetic-emotional response was tender and acute. It was a mild struggle to hold down tears. Oddly, in my not profuse recent reading on him since the show, I happened to read that tears are frequently seen at his shows. Who knows why?
I also happened to see an interview with Conor in which he confessed that it was hearing Robert Smith of The Cure as a youngster that made him resolve to be a singer. A certain plaintive, keening quality in Smith's style that is also in Conor's, it's something that can touch the heart of some of whom I am one. My New England upbringing prohibits such displays, however, and I quickly resumed my groove in a composed manner. There is also the matter of having at least twenty years on the next oldest person, so the young scene-makers may already wonder if you're a bit daft.
The show consisted of all new material, as befits a prolific "new Bob Dylan" prodigy. It sounded fairly distinct from the songs of his I had heard before. Truth be told, I'd really only heard his television appearances and some radio play on KALX Berkeley's "college station." I found him quite talented and appealing, but hadn't felt that owning any of his records was essential to my appreciation of him. Meanwhile Conor seems intent on filling a hypothetical record shop with his discography. I was checking him out at this whistle stop in his progress.
Many of the others, it appeared, felt that taking a large number of photographs or phone-videos was essential to their own appreciation of the event. They want to preserve their memories of taking photos at it. I suppose some of the phones being held aloft were for absentees to listen in. It is difficult not to tell them to get a clue and be here now for once in their lives but I try.
That said, the music hit the spot. I did dig the new direction detecting notes of the time-honored music of The Band in the organ, guitar, and deliberately restrained drum sound. When Conor came out, he put on his sunglasses saying, "Just until my eyes adjust." He didn't remove them again until, in vigorous strumming huddle, they flew off. He put them on again immediately. At this summer afternoon gig, he came on like a friend to all, played with passion, waved, and was gone-- no autograph party.
A decent fellow, my hat's off to him.
But in fact my hat was back on as less than an hour after I walked in, I walked out again. A brilliant sunny and moderately warm day transpired out of doors, populated by the colorful cast of characters who are attracted to the area on a Saturday afternoon. My stride led toward the park, the great sprawling heavily-used patch of manufactured greenery we know as Golden Gate park.
Rested up on Hippie hill, where a considerable crows of people radiated out on the lawn arond a group of conga drummers. A guy blew a few bleets, panic notes of the Afrique, over the top of rhythm pulsating agreeably this summer day. Sitting in the grass over them, I devoured my cut-half segment of a bartlett pear. Walking up some tough but restful looking Mexican-Americans had lost control of a soccer ball on their blanket. It rolled downhill past me and I didn't try to kick it back. As I passed hem I said I was afraid I'd fall and hurt my back. they just returned silent serious looks. I kind of noticing them keeping an eye me afterward--might have pegged me for a cop. I understand this is a place where people come to stop and cop, which, of course, attracts cops who'd like it to stop.
I lingered not, I had another goal in mind. So by sidewalk, roadway, and dirt path, I found my way to the concourse to check out the two new buildings for the two old museums there. The Academy of Science is not yet open but I had seen a tour on television. Begun as a Victorian specimen collecting society for area professional and arm-chair scientists it then became a popular museum wildly loved by children. It looked vastly improved from the old funky but kind of cool set-up--most notably in the new deep-water observation tank with scuba-diving fish-wranglers. I'll go a year after it opens on a rainy week-day in mid-Winter, hopefully to won't be over-crowded by then.
As I reached the top of a hillock nearby, I got a great view of the other most remarkable new aspect of the place; the roof is comprised of several hills of earth with a multipicity of plant-life already growing on them. With it many round port-hole-style skylights, it looked both futuristic and like something out of the immemorial past, part Dune planet part Hobbiton. The structure's many complex rippling facets and facades make it plain that this is in a sense a time-machine. It is one that attempts to smuggle biological specimens, preserved and alive, archives of DNA into a menacing and uncertain planetary evolution.
Japanese tourists were snapping photos of an elaborate ceremonial bust in its own ornate marble gazebo which was being refurbished and was partially masked. I have to have it to them, they recognize the de facto surrealism of the West when they see it. Most of the locals walk right by.
And so onto my destination, the new de Young museum with its viewing tower open to all free of admission fee. (Free admission being a quality in many of my entertainments, a faithful reader may glean.) On the way in I passed a decorative pond with a column of blown and twisted yellow glass rising from its middle, a work by glass artist Dale Chihuly who had a big show in progress. Nearly 4:30 by then, I noticed I had just made it and that they began to prevent people from joining the line after me. We were then enclosed in a black-stone chamber with wire scuptures of bio-morphic forms. (Did I mention I once saw King Tut here?) It was mildly amusing to observe the art administration types having to marshal the tourist-like visitors to the tower while preserving their air of sophistication.
One waits in line as successive groups board one of two elevators up. It went quickly enough and as we stepped out an officious docent immediately asked us not to roam around freely but to step into the queue for the elevators back down. I laughed with a woman next me and we generally ignored this bit of social control. Wow and what an experience it was! Surrounded by a ground cloth of the park's tree tops, you look out and suddenly grasp a new, comprehensive perspective on the city of San Francisco.
Facing east, I saw downtown peaking in the Trans-America building with the the distant East bay and a vivid Mount Diablo over its shoulder. Turning west, I could see the miraculously vertiginous ocean hovers over the trees, mercifully spare of fog this day. Most thrilling of all was the section of the straits leading to the Golden Gate abutted by the Marin headlands soaking their feet. The bridge is visible only as two Loch Ness monster humps protruding over an occluding hill. All a heady and happy arrival and long enough after fifteen minutes before the graceful ride back down. The pretty, all-dressed-up docent was back as we boarded and said over-emphatically, "Have a really wonderful evening, all of you." "Yeah, buh-bye," said I as the doors closed.
I waited for a bus out front observing that band shell between the museums was also experiencing a make-over. A young male couple from France were having a discrete spat on the next bench--one walked off. The bus came-- the driver a self-possessed black man wouldn't let me pay to board it. But he did want to chat, literally asking me to stay up front with him, ostensibly so he could tell where my stop was. "Nice day in the park," I remarked. "I don't think about all of that when I'm working.'" He was a kick and he wouldn't stop talking when we got to Irving street and my stop. I was glad to relieve both of our loneliness for the few minutes it took to drive out of the park.
I walked up Irving enjoying it's commercial bustle, but I was tired. I bought a few fat-free whole wheat fig-newtons at a tiny shop--so small a bitty corner shelf held just one bottle of pepto-bismol, nevertheless something a neighborhood person in need would be gratified to find. Then I hopped the lively N-Judah train to the BART train for sleepy trance travel through tunnels toward home.
Coming back to myself, I was standing in the virgin vinyl aisle of Amoeba records on Haight street remembering Joe Strummer there six years on. I had arrived at three for an in-store set of songs and was enduring the final wait with a crowd of young folks who looked smart and sensitive. Then, the always precocious, only occasionally precious, troubadour Conor Oberst and his band men walked out to the general delight. He was in town playing two small sold-out shows at a club starting a tour behind dropping his new joint (to employ the linguistic hype of the jumpy record industry.) The album was recorded in Mexico at some distance from his Wisconsin base and his regular band, Bright Eyes. Like many Americans including myself years ago, he exhibited the telltale sign of having gone native and was seen in photos sporting a shirt from Michoacan.
Appropriately, the opening song reflected this new Kerouacian figure. His singing voice and his band sounded more roots and country than his usual cosmopolitan sound. It was entitled "Moab" presumably after the town in Utah. Kerouac had naturally passed through there himself once or twice and wrote a line in a haiku, "Who's Moab?", trying to recall this lesser known Old Testament figure.
It's refrain was an aphorism, "There's nothing that the road cannot heal." I know what he's driving at: the liberation and responsibility for survival that the road can offer, as well as the distance it imposes, psychic and physical, between ourselves and the situation that made us feel ill. I was feeling somewhat in need of healing myself recently and by that point in the song the music hit me. And as most of us have heard Jah Marley sing:
One good thing about music
when it hits you feel no pain.
In my stonedness and in my not having gone to hear live music much in the last nine months or so, my aesthetic-emotional response was tender and acute. It was a mild struggle to hold down tears. Oddly, in my not profuse recent reading on him since the show, I happened to read that tears are frequently seen at his shows. Who knows why?
I also happened to see an interview with Conor in which he confessed that it was hearing Robert Smith of The Cure as a youngster that made him resolve to be a singer. A certain plaintive, keening quality in Smith's style that is also in Conor's, it's something that can touch the heart of some of whom I am one. My New England upbringing prohibits such displays, however, and I quickly resumed my groove in a composed manner. There is also the matter of having at least twenty years on the next oldest person, so the young scene-makers may already wonder if you're a bit daft.
The show consisted of all new material, as befits a prolific "new Bob Dylan" prodigy. It sounded fairly distinct from the songs of his I had heard before. Truth be told, I'd really only heard his television appearances and some radio play on KALX Berkeley's "college station." I found him quite talented and appealing, but hadn't felt that owning any of his records was essential to my appreciation of him. Meanwhile Conor seems intent on filling a hypothetical record shop with his discography. I was checking him out at this whistle stop in his progress.
Many of the others, it appeared, felt that taking a large number of photographs or phone-videos was essential to their own appreciation of the event. They want to preserve their memories of taking photos at it. I suppose some of the phones being held aloft were for absentees to listen in. It is difficult not to tell them to get a clue and be here now for once in their lives but I try.
That said, the music hit the spot. I did dig the new direction detecting notes of the time-honored music of The Band in the organ, guitar, and deliberately restrained drum sound. When Conor came out, he put on his sunglasses saying, "Just until my eyes adjust." He didn't remove them again until, in vigorous strumming huddle, they flew off. He put them on again immediately. At this summer afternoon gig, he came on like a friend to all, played with passion, waved, and was gone-- no autograph party.
A decent fellow, my hat's off to him.
But in fact my hat was back on as less than an hour after I walked in, I walked out again. A brilliant sunny and moderately warm day transpired out of doors, populated by the colorful cast of characters who are attracted to the area on a Saturday afternoon. My stride led toward the park, the great sprawling heavily-used patch of manufactured greenery we know as Golden Gate park.
Rested up on Hippie hill, where a considerable crows of people radiated out on the lawn arond a group of conga drummers. A guy blew a few bleets, panic notes of the Afrique, over the top of rhythm pulsating agreeably this summer day. Sitting in the grass over them, I devoured my cut-half segment of a bartlett pear. Walking up some tough but restful looking Mexican-Americans had lost control of a soccer ball on their blanket. It rolled downhill past me and I didn't try to kick it back. As I passed hem I said I was afraid I'd fall and hurt my back. they just returned silent serious looks. I kind of noticing them keeping an eye me afterward--might have pegged me for a cop. I understand this is a place where people come to stop and cop, which, of course, attracts cops who'd like it to stop.
I lingered not, I had another goal in mind. So by sidewalk, roadway, and dirt path, I found my way to the concourse to check out the two new buildings for the two old museums there. The Academy of Science is not yet open but I had seen a tour on television. Begun as a Victorian specimen collecting society for area professional and arm-chair scientists it then became a popular museum wildly loved by children. It looked vastly improved from the old funky but kind of cool set-up--most notably in the new deep-water observation tank with scuba-diving fish-wranglers. I'll go a year after it opens on a rainy week-day in mid-Winter, hopefully to won't be over-crowded by then.
As I reached the top of a hillock nearby, I got a great view of the other most remarkable new aspect of the place; the roof is comprised of several hills of earth with a multipicity of plant-life already growing on them. With it many round port-hole-style skylights, it looked both futuristic and like something out of the immemorial past, part Dune planet part Hobbiton. The structure's many complex rippling facets and facades make it plain that this is in a sense a time-machine. It is one that attempts to smuggle biological specimens, preserved and alive, archives of DNA into a menacing and uncertain planetary evolution.
Japanese tourists were snapping photos of an elaborate ceremonial bust in its own ornate marble gazebo which was being refurbished and was partially masked. I have to have it to them, they recognize the de facto surrealism of the West when they see it. Most of the locals walk right by.
And so onto my destination, the new de Young museum with its viewing tower open to all free of admission fee. (Free admission being a quality in many of my entertainments, a faithful reader may glean.) On the way in I passed a decorative pond with a column of blown and twisted yellow glass rising from its middle, a work by glass artist Dale Chihuly who had a big show in progress. Nearly 4:30 by then, I noticed I had just made it and that they began to prevent people from joining the line after me. We were then enclosed in a black-stone chamber with wire scuptures of bio-morphic forms. (Did I mention I once saw King Tut here?) It was mildly amusing to observe the art administration types having to marshal the tourist-like visitors to the tower while preserving their air of sophistication.
One waits in line as successive groups board one of two elevators up. It went quickly enough and as we stepped out an officious docent immediately asked us not to roam around freely but to step into the queue for the elevators back down. I laughed with a woman next me and we generally ignored this bit of social control. Wow and what an experience it was! Surrounded by a ground cloth of the park's tree tops, you look out and suddenly grasp a new, comprehensive perspective on the city of San Francisco.
Facing east, I saw downtown peaking in the Trans-America building with the the distant East bay and a vivid Mount Diablo over its shoulder. Turning west, I could see the miraculously vertiginous ocean hovers over the trees, mercifully spare of fog this day. Most thrilling of all was the section of the straits leading to the Golden Gate abutted by the Marin headlands soaking their feet. The bridge is visible only as two Loch Ness monster humps protruding over an occluding hill. All a heady and happy arrival and long enough after fifteen minutes before the graceful ride back down. The pretty, all-dressed-up docent was back as we boarded and said over-emphatically, "Have a really wonderful evening, all of you." "Yeah, buh-bye," said I as the doors closed.
I waited for a bus out front observing that band shell between the museums was also experiencing a make-over. A young male couple from France were having a discrete spat on the next bench--one walked off. The bus came-- the driver a self-possessed black man wouldn't let me pay to board it. But he did want to chat, literally asking me to stay up front with him, ostensibly so he could tell where my stop was. "Nice day in the park," I remarked. "I don't think about all of that when I'm working.'" He was a kick and he wouldn't stop talking when we got to Irving street and my stop. I was glad to relieve both of our loneliness for the few minutes it took to drive out of the park.
I walked up Irving enjoying it's commercial bustle, but I was tired. I bought a few fat-free whole wheat fig-newtons at a tiny shop--so small a bitty corner shelf held just one bottle of pepto-bismol, nevertheless something a neighborhood person in need would be gratified to find. Then I hopped the lively N-Judah train to the BART train for sleepy trance travel through tunnels toward home.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Walking the City
A walk today mainly in the fabled city of San Francisco...
In this unusually cool Summer, venturing out of the pad for me can be tricky. But I was determined not to loll around town--I needed some diversion. I often use a back deck at my home to gauge how warm it will be when I hit the street. It can deceive because it is wind-protected to the North and sunny. You can see downtown San Francisco like an arrangement of various geometric shapes in a drawing book. Saturday I could see that although the fog was looming behind it, it did not besiege the City as of mid-day. Nevertheless, in addition to long-sleeved shirt and black trousers I wore a lined wool shirt-jacket and my trusty black beret. People outside the bay area generally don't realize the precautions one must take her in mid-summer.
Down through the great twisting oaks of campus to Center street BART. I had been a little off my game due to a low-level bug that seemed prevalent lately--post-nasal drip, spaciness, and a stomach quease. But walking and seeing people were revivifying after a groggy wake-up. I had decided to have four puffs before leaving rather than wait until I neared my destination. It makes the train rides more interesting and I man-upped for a fun day.
A direct train dropped me at the Embarcadero station in short order where I descended again to the Muni station to await the phantom "N Judah" street car. It's borderline meta-reality is attested to by the fact that the robotic voice that periodically announced expected trains never mentions it. Yet it is quite a busy central line. The screen with information on the trains read that one was due in one minute--but I suspect it was at least a minute gone when I arrived. Odd but after a longer wait one came and I got a seat for the familiar ride.
You emerge into half-remembered daylight along the serpentine cliffs of the Old Mint. Then the tracks head along the populated streets. It passes the small hilltop park that I recognized the minute first I saw it from a Robert Frank photo in his book The Americans. In the photo a black couple reclining in the grass look at the camera with suspicion.
Another subterranean stretch goes by and there was Cole Street-- time for me to disembark. Many shiny happy people were also making their way toward the storied Haight-Ashbury as they have since time immemorial or at at least 1965. The brightly-painted shops sold a lot of very similar stuff to the psychedelic era shops; and the sweet young people walking around look much as they did when all of it was new. Naturally there are quite a few crustier, hard-luck or devil-may-care types too. They followed in the wake of the original flower children and stayed. It all went pomo along the way with a tough looking hippie-punk colony now floating at the edge of Golden Gate park across Stanyan street (& other sorrows).
My goal, and it seemed very well-timed and accessible, was Amoeba records on Haight street by three o'clock. There the prolific and charming singer song-writer Conor Oberst and his Lost Valley Band were about to play an in-store set. I sailed in into the hectic Saturday shopping and live-music scene at this huge enterprise in a former bowling alley, fashionably on-time. I knew the lay of the place, which has an actual permanent stage for these shows, and quickly got my spot in the last row of records off to the right of the stage. I had seen Gomez, Kelly Willis, and Richard Thompson perform here, others slip the mind.
I had also spent a few minutes with Joe Strummer here on my birthday, July 28, in 2002--we were both Leos of the same vintage. I missed his set with the Mescaleros that day, but I got a real heart-felt charge out of seeing him again. I had met him once before also at a record store. He and Paul Simenon of the Clash had showed-up at Berkeley's Tower records to sign records dressed like hoods. They had remained rather stone-faced behind mirror shades and seemed put-upon to be there. It was just before the first show by the Clash in the U.S. at the Berkeley Community theater, an incredible triumph. Following it I saw every West Coast tour the band did (except for the US festival) and they got better musically, but they never topped that first show for sheer excitement, just raw punk energy. I had used all my favors getting a lift home after the show that night back in January 1979, so I had to miss the one the next night. They played unadvertised as "the only band that matters"at a great punk venue in San Francisco, Temple Beautiful. Of course, the consessus in the demi-monde was that the second night was the one you really should have seen.
Amoeba had helped them out by discouraging Joe's fans from asking him to sign Clash items while they ignored the Mescaleros. But when I arrived they'd just had several hundred meet and greets and were tenderized. Joe was tender at least. He signed the Clash's Complete Control single sleeve and when he saw I had also brought an even earlier 45 sleeve by his band the 101ers, he wanted to sign that one first. The waggish one of the Mescaleros asked why didn't I get Joe's new CD putting me on the spot. I admitted I had just made rent and was skinned, that it was a grand a month per person to live here. "Sounds just like London...why don't steal it?" I told Joe that the producer of a Kerouac homage CD that he had contributed to had contacted me for my expertise on the subject. When he sent me an advance CD he said he thought maybe Joe's cut, an electro-rhythm behind an old home tape of Jack Kerouac reading, might not have worked. I told Joe that I had replied that it was the best track in the collection.
After all it was the only one with Jack's voice on it. Joe said he thought he did a pretty good job on it and I agreed. "It's appropriately spaced-out music for a spaced-out reading."
Before cutting out I gave Joe an original color photo of him playing with the Clash that someone had been selling as a postcard in a New Wave shop back in the day. He said, "Look at that shirt, I had just painted it." It was wild with slogans and Jackson Pollock red streaks. He signed another copy of the photo for me, fondly I thought.
Joe died later that year. God bless him. His eyes grew kinder over the years. He was unmistakably a big soul.
Well, this walk will continue in a future session...
In this unusually cool Summer, venturing out of the pad for me can be tricky. But I was determined not to loll around town--I needed some diversion. I often use a back deck at my home to gauge how warm it will be when I hit the street. It can deceive because it is wind-protected to the North and sunny. You can see downtown San Francisco like an arrangement of various geometric shapes in a drawing book. Saturday I could see that although the fog was looming behind it, it did not besiege the City as of mid-day. Nevertheless, in addition to long-sleeved shirt and black trousers I wore a lined wool shirt-jacket and my trusty black beret. People outside the bay area generally don't realize the precautions one must take her in mid-summer.
Down through the great twisting oaks of campus to Center street BART. I had been a little off my game due to a low-level bug that seemed prevalent lately--post-nasal drip, spaciness, and a stomach quease. But walking and seeing people were revivifying after a groggy wake-up. I had decided to have four puffs before leaving rather than wait until I neared my destination. It makes the train rides more interesting and I man-upped for a fun day.
A direct train dropped me at the Embarcadero station in short order where I descended again to the Muni station to await the phantom "N Judah" street car. It's borderline meta-reality is attested to by the fact that the robotic voice that periodically announced expected trains never mentions it. Yet it is quite a busy central line. The screen with information on the trains read that one was due in one minute--but I suspect it was at least a minute gone when I arrived. Odd but after a longer wait one came and I got a seat for the familiar ride.
You emerge into half-remembered daylight along the serpentine cliffs of the Old Mint. Then the tracks head along the populated streets. It passes the small hilltop park that I recognized the minute first I saw it from a Robert Frank photo in his book The Americans. In the photo a black couple reclining in the grass look at the camera with suspicion.
Another subterranean stretch goes by and there was Cole Street-- time for me to disembark. Many shiny happy people were also making their way toward the storied Haight-Ashbury as they have since time immemorial or at at least 1965. The brightly-painted shops sold a lot of very similar stuff to the psychedelic era shops; and the sweet young people walking around look much as they did when all of it was new. Naturally there are quite a few crustier, hard-luck or devil-may-care types too. They followed in the wake of the original flower children and stayed. It all went pomo along the way with a tough looking hippie-punk colony now floating at the edge of Golden Gate park across Stanyan street (& other sorrows).
My goal, and it seemed very well-timed and accessible, was Amoeba records on Haight street by three o'clock. There the prolific and charming singer song-writer Conor Oberst and his Lost Valley Band were about to play an in-store set. I sailed in into the hectic Saturday shopping and live-music scene at this huge enterprise in a former bowling alley, fashionably on-time. I knew the lay of the place, which has an actual permanent stage for these shows, and quickly got my spot in the last row of records off to the right of the stage. I had seen Gomez, Kelly Willis, and Richard Thompson perform here, others slip the mind.
I had also spent a few minutes with Joe Strummer here on my birthday, July 28, in 2002--we were both Leos of the same vintage. I missed his set with the Mescaleros that day, but I got a real heart-felt charge out of seeing him again. I had met him once before also at a record store. He and Paul Simenon of the Clash had showed-up at Berkeley's Tower records to sign records dressed like hoods. They had remained rather stone-faced behind mirror shades and seemed put-upon to be there. It was just before the first show by the Clash in the U.S. at the Berkeley Community theater, an incredible triumph. Following it I saw every West Coast tour the band did (except for the US festival) and they got better musically, but they never topped that first show for sheer excitement, just raw punk energy. I had used all my favors getting a lift home after the show that night back in January 1979, so I had to miss the one the next night. They played unadvertised as "the only band that matters"at a great punk venue in San Francisco, Temple Beautiful. Of course, the consessus in the demi-monde was that the second night was the one you really should have seen.
Amoeba had helped them out by discouraging Joe's fans from asking him to sign Clash items while they ignored the Mescaleros. But when I arrived they'd just had several hundred meet and greets and were tenderized. Joe was tender at least. He signed the Clash's Complete Control single sleeve and when he saw I had also brought an even earlier 45 sleeve by his band the 101ers, he wanted to sign that one first. The waggish one of the Mescaleros asked why didn't I get Joe's new CD putting me on the spot. I admitted I had just made rent and was skinned, that it was a grand a month per person to live here. "Sounds just like London...why don't steal it?" I told Joe that the producer of a Kerouac homage CD that he had contributed to had contacted me for my expertise on the subject. When he sent me an advance CD he said he thought maybe Joe's cut, an electro-rhythm behind an old home tape of Jack Kerouac reading, might not have worked. I told Joe that I had replied that it was the best track in the collection.
After all it was the only one with Jack's voice on it. Joe said he thought he did a pretty good job on it and I agreed. "It's appropriately spaced-out music for a spaced-out reading."
Before cutting out I gave Joe an original color photo of him playing with the Clash that someone had been selling as a postcard in a New Wave shop back in the day. He said, "Look at that shirt, I had just painted it." It was wild with slogans and Jackson Pollock red streaks. He signed another copy of the photo for me, fondly I thought.
Joe died later that year. God bless him. His eyes grew kinder over the years. He was unmistakably a big soul.
Well, this walk will continue in a future session...
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
My Bohemian Life
"A man does not set out saying, 'I am going to be a Bohemian,'" Arthur Ransome said, "he trudges along, whispering to himself, 'I am going to be a poet, or an artist, or some other kind of great man,' and finds Bohemia like a tavern by the wayside."
From a quite young age to the present day, I have enjoyed walking in solitude.
I recall rather distinctly an episode from my fairly early youth. It involved my decision to skip the predictable activities of the group of boys my age whom I usually played with, and to go off on a walk by myself. I was already something of an outsider from the common experience of these boys, because every school day I walked the half-mile to my Catholic school. I usually walked alone or with kids my age since my two older brothers had no patience for walking with a younger kid. It was a great walk with a splendid comic book selection and a pinball machine in a corner store, two parks with baseball diamonds (empty on school days), and a row Dickensian tenement buildings looming over the final stretch, all along the way.
I had followed those brothers to the park in our neighborhood as well, again without encouragement from them and their age group friends but tacit protection nevertheless as I was quickly labeled the "wise punk." My mother was also a walker and never acquired a driver's license. We would take cabs and buses, and also walk home from downtown, or from her old neighborhood church and its great park, with a bandstand and a pavilion to bay views, and fireworks on Independence Day. So I was used to walking from a young age.
There is a natural joy in walking. We see it in the toddler struggling to remain erect, and in the child that begins purposeful walking toward a destination. The joy of walking deepens when we begin to walk for edification or for recreation. It is an emotion that I have tried to retain throughout my life. I remember for example the enjoyment in taking a walk with my mother after dinner, bundled up on a cold December night, to walk a few blocks and survey the neighborhood Christmas displays.
My mother was middle-aged when I was born and she was the memory babe and the reader of her family of seven kids, and she passed immeasurable knowledge onto me as well as ineffable, intuitive qualities, and always had an abundance of time and attention for us. Kerouac was known as "Memory Babe" in his French-Canadian American youth, and was called "Ti Jean" at home in not too distant Lowell. My mother's name at home was "Ti Noire."
The great story of my right of passage into the age of reason, as always precociously, involved me getting separated from my mother and brothers in the crowd one day in front of Ste Anne. It's an admirable neo-gothic church built by the French-Canadians who came to South-eastern New England. There had been a parade that day and in the hurry afterward I found myself alone. Resourceful and prematurely mature, I never did panic, though I was very young at the time. Neither did I ask for help--I had walked the route before with my mother and I started up it again. I climbed precipitous Middle street to Second street with its view all the way to Swansea, then past the ceremonial great rock and down wide Plymouth avenue
Almost home, I was walking alongside it when Mrs. Wolstencroft, the lady who lived next door, drove past and spotted me. Naturally there was rejoicing upon the arrival of the remaining family unit. They were of course much more frightened than I think I had been.
A few years after this, I was sent off in a cab with a large bill to stop at an art supply store then continue on to a Saturday art school at a local college next. The building was next door to the crenelated granite armory and stately "People's University" Library downtown. I seem to remember the pleased amusement of the art supply store proprietor to serve such a self-possessed young kid. The downtown was fully operational in those days with a towering City hall and Granite Block of stores all fashioned out of local stone. This was before the sixties came along and a huge interstate highway was plowed through the middle of the city. I remember it then, looking from the art class window out over the landscape falling toward the bay. I remember a nightclub visible from there, maybe called the Americana Lounge, with paintings of silhouettes dining and dancing, a puzzling and sophisticated veneer, a world long-since disappeared.
I return to the day I ditched stick ball or some such pursuit to go on that walk by myself. My thoughts and my direction was entirely my own, and they were comprised a great new state of being. Freedom is second only to the love of God as the experience that brings the greatest feeling of growth to an individual. And I can still revisit the freedom and joy I felt that day as I toured familiar streets under my own steam. In my mind's eye, I can see the "Little Woods" I walked past that day, a place of minor intrigues and much Tarzan or Tonto impersonation. It was at this precise point, as I reached the wood side and was out of sight of my immediate neighborhood, that I place the beginning of my Bohemian life.
The old guys who worked at the local magazine, candy and tobacco shops would comment that I was a man about town when I showed up solo to score licorice babies and flying saucers.* It helped matters that my mother trusted her children. By no means did she bind us to the immediate vicinity of her kitchen window as many of our mates' mothers did.
Although the myriad of crime, confession, scandal, and girly magazines suggested a world of transgression just beyond my reach, I gravitated to more intellectual and more humorous rebellion. The comic books gave way to Famous Monsters of Filmland, then to Mad magazine, then to Beatle books, Bob Dylan, Howl, Kerouac, Kesey, Evergreen Review, Ramparts, Tim Leary and so forth. It represented a progression from images disapproved of by the authority figures in my life, to underground expressions proposing a whole forbidden way of life, not necessarily sinful but certainly more outlaw and erotic and so even more threatening to repression and status quo morbidity.
I became so independent that one evening toward the end of summer a small delegation of my old chums from the backyard gang came and knocked at our door looking for me. They missed me and wanted me to come outside and regale them with my ostensible new hipness.
* Flying saucers was a type of candy with sugary pellets inside two "saucers" of starch dyed pastel-colors. They had a texture like the little unleavened bread rounds used for the Holy Eucharist which we received at Mass. they were not good to eat but they were sputnik weird. Thirty years later, I bought one in a tiny shop in Westport, Massachusetts and kept it until it collapsed.
Memories of the world of penny candy stores deserve their own journal entry. As an example of how different that world was, those little doll-shaped licorice candies were called "nigger babies." For similar candies in printed boxes, the name read "black babies". The penny-candy style were much better.
I will resume this thread concerning my early Bohemian formation before long...
From a quite young age to the present day, I have enjoyed walking in solitude.
I recall rather distinctly an episode from my fairly early youth. It involved my decision to skip the predictable activities of the group of boys my age whom I usually played with, and to go off on a walk by myself. I was already something of an outsider from the common experience of these boys, because every school day I walked the half-mile to my Catholic school. I usually walked alone or with kids my age since my two older brothers had no patience for walking with a younger kid. It was a great walk with a splendid comic book selection and a pinball machine in a corner store, two parks with baseball diamonds (empty on school days), and a row Dickensian tenement buildings looming over the final stretch, all along the way.
I had followed those brothers to the park in our neighborhood as well, again without encouragement from them and their age group friends but tacit protection nevertheless as I was quickly labeled the "wise punk." My mother was also a walker and never acquired a driver's license. We would take cabs and buses, and also walk home from downtown, or from her old neighborhood church and its great park, with a bandstand and a pavilion to bay views, and fireworks on Independence Day. So I was used to walking from a young age.
There is a natural joy in walking. We see it in the toddler struggling to remain erect, and in the child that begins purposeful walking toward a destination. The joy of walking deepens when we begin to walk for edification or for recreation. It is an emotion that I have tried to retain throughout my life. I remember for example the enjoyment in taking a walk with my mother after dinner, bundled up on a cold December night, to walk a few blocks and survey the neighborhood Christmas displays.
My mother was middle-aged when I was born and she was the memory babe and the reader of her family of seven kids, and she passed immeasurable knowledge onto me as well as ineffable, intuitive qualities, and always had an abundance of time and attention for us. Kerouac was known as "Memory Babe" in his French-Canadian American youth, and was called "Ti Jean" at home in not too distant Lowell. My mother's name at home was "Ti Noire."
The great story of my right of passage into the age of reason, as always precociously, involved me getting separated from my mother and brothers in the crowd one day in front of Ste Anne. It's an admirable neo-gothic church built by the French-Canadians who came to South-eastern New England. There had been a parade that day and in the hurry afterward I found myself alone. Resourceful and prematurely mature, I never did panic, though I was very young at the time. Neither did I ask for help--I had walked the route before with my mother and I started up it again. I climbed precipitous Middle street to Second street with its view all the way to Swansea, then past the ceremonial great rock and down wide Plymouth avenue
Almost home, I was walking alongside it when Mrs. Wolstencroft, the lady who lived next door, drove past and spotted me. Naturally there was rejoicing upon the arrival of the remaining family unit. They were of course much more frightened than I think I had been.
A few years after this, I was sent off in a cab with a large bill to stop at an art supply store then continue on to a Saturday art school at a local college next. The building was next door to the crenelated granite armory and stately "People's University" Library downtown. I seem to remember the pleased amusement of the art supply store proprietor to serve such a self-possessed young kid. The downtown was fully operational in those days with a towering City hall and Granite Block of stores all fashioned out of local stone. This was before the sixties came along and a huge interstate highway was plowed through the middle of the city. I remember it then, looking from the art class window out over the landscape falling toward the bay. I remember a nightclub visible from there, maybe called the Americana Lounge, with paintings of silhouettes dining and dancing, a puzzling and sophisticated veneer, a world long-since disappeared.
I return to the day I ditched stick ball or some such pursuit to go on that walk by myself. My thoughts and my direction was entirely my own, and they were comprised a great new state of being. Freedom is second only to the love of God as the experience that brings the greatest feeling of growth to an individual. And I can still revisit the freedom and joy I felt that day as I toured familiar streets under my own steam. In my mind's eye, I can see the "Little Woods" I walked past that day, a place of minor intrigues and much Tarzan or Tonto impersonation. It was at this precise point, as I reached the wood side and was out of sight of my immediate neighborhood, that I place the beginning of my Bohemian life.
The old guys who worked at the local magazine, candy and tobacco shops would comment that I was a man about town when I showed up solo to score licorice babies and flying saucers.* It helped matters that my mother trusted her children. By no means did she bind us to the immediate vicinity of her kitchen window as many of our mates' mothers did.
Although the myriad of crime, confession, scandal, and girly magazines suggested a world of transgression just beyond my reach, I gravitated to more intellectual and more humorous rebellion. The comic books gave way to Famous Monsters of Filmland, then to Mad magazine, then to Beatle books, Bob Dylan, Howl, Kerouac, Kesey, Evergreen Review, Ramparts, Tim Leary and so forth. It represented a progression from images disapproved of by the authority figures in my life, to underground expressions proposing a whole forbidden way of life, not necessarily sinful but certainly more outlaw and erotic and so even more threatening to repression and status quo morbidity.
I became so independent that one evening toward the end of summer a small delegation of my old chums from the backyard gang came and knocked at our door looking for me. They missed me and wanted me to come outside and regale them with my ostensible new hipness.
* Flying saucers was a type of candy with sugary pellets inside two "saucers" of starch dyed pastel-colors. They had a texture like the little unleavened bread rounds used for the Holy Eucharist which we received at Mass. they were not good to eat but they were sputnik weird. Thirty years later, I bought one in a tiny shop in Westport, Massachusetts and kept it until it collapsed.
Memories of the world of penny candy stores deserve their own journal entry. As an example of how different that world was, those little doll-shaped licorice candies were called "nigger babies." For similar candies in printed boxes, the name read "black babies". The penny-candy style were much better.
I will resume this thread concerning my early Bohemian formation before long...
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Laureate of the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance
To arc back to the beginning of this journal, I recall my first encounter with a luminary of Berkeley's rarefied realm of Poetry...
On my third day in California, I arranged for a solo outing. The brother with whom I was staying in nearby Contra Costa county took me into Berkeley in the morning with a plan to rendezvous after his work day was over. I began the day in the Telegraph Avenue area taking in an assortment of its offerings--in the form of capucino cafes, record shops, a Japanese lunch spot, and most of all various bookstores.
It was a dim day in early January, yet it was ravishing to me a few days after the frozen New England I'd just left. Only the year before, 1978, a blizzard had left so much snow private automobile travel was banned for six days--it was sort of heavenly though. Trains and buses were running and I traveled sixty miles to explore the streets of Boston and Cambridge, bustling with foot traffic alone.
Winter can get old and wearying in Massachusetts, and I had twenty-five of them under my belt by then. Here in California the growing grass was green and some flowers were actually in bloom. In a text book style store on Bancroft Way, I found books on separate shelves devoted to individual publishers. I gravitated to the New Directions shelf and encountered some interesting titles for the first time, ones I had only seen listed in the back-lists included on the end pages of beloved books--Rimbaud, Borges, Bob Kaufman.
Upon leaving the store I crossed over to the UC student union building . Within minutes I observed something that fulfilled my most naive notions of stepping into scenes from a Kerouac novel the minute I got here. It was a person famous in the world of obscure poetry browsing around the student stores-- Robert Duncan, a name synonymous with the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance. He was a forebear of the Beats and a real high-artifice poet of an even older type. He had an expansive forehead with long white sideburns and wore a coat with a built-in rain cape. His "frontispiece" included a jeweled art-nouveau bolo tie on a flowered shirt, anachronistic even then. His eyes were remarkable and are much-noted--they were as large and sensitive as can be imagined; moreover, one eye was slightly lazy and seemed to look off into the poetic marvelous at all times.
He in fact was a mystic of sorts descended from California theosophists. His florid early poetry was celebrated and he was indulged from an early age as someone profound beyond his years. Young Robert Duncan put in his mandatory Rimbaud phase, finding his way to New York city as a desperate young poet. He published an early crie-de-coeur entitled "The Homosexual in Society" that was a milestone in the queer rights movement. It alone would entitle him to a place in cultural history. He quickly established relations of one sort or another with all the poets and poets manques of his time--Pound, Patchen, Anais Nin. Avant-garde poetry was and is a quite small pond.
Eventually, he returned to Berkeley where he became the biggest fish of his school rivaled only by Jack Spicer (who actually emerged as more of a group leader after he had decamped to San Francisco.) I had become interested him along with the rest of poets identified with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance which followed and flowed into what became known as the Beat generation. Two other well-known poets of this group were Mary Fabilli and William Everson a.k.a. Brother Antoninus. (I will devote a future entry to Mary with whom I became friends.)
Most of the best-known Beat poets were also Berkeley dwellers including Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, and Jack Kerouac who even moved his supportive mother here for a period.
Duncan's poetry was elegant, classical in ways, reflective of European modernism and somewhat old-fashioned because of that. His work is like California Surrealist painting somehow. And his life partner Jess could be roughly described as belonging to that movement.
Diane diPrima had called Duncan the greatest living poet at a reading of hers I attended at the Smith College library in 1975. (People smoked a big joint of gold Columbian at that reading without any conflict---ah, those were the days). I had been reading more of him following that and had even bought a rare book of his by mail order from City Lights books in San Francisco. It was his Selected Poems one of the more scarce volumes in the Pocket Poets Series from 1959. The series had made a considerable seismic waves the previous year with Ginsberg's volume Howl & other poems. I was collecting them, interested in every forgotten copy of any underground poetry press I could find.
I thought immediately of the tried and true method for graceful meetings with authors one esteems. And I recalled that the New Directions rack I had just examined had included one of his best books, The Opening of the Field. Before hailing him, I dashed over to obtain a copy of it to ask him to sign it. He seems almost startled to be recognized by a young person out of the passing stream. This was despite the large number of his books and papers in the Bancroft library a stone's throw away, despite his prominent role in local literary history.
To be a success at poetry is like being a failure at any thing else, I once heard a perspiring acolyte of Duncan's admit. This particular poetry maven has Duncan's old hat on his old hat-rack by the front door of his home today.
As a young poetry hustler myself I naturally had my own self-published chapbook to press on Duncan. He may have even had me sign it to him, though it seems doubtful in retrospect. We spoke for a while, a conversation now lost in time, and bid a friendly adieu. He said perhaps he see more of me in the poetry scene.
And he did. Following what was reputed to be a reclusive period, he seemed to be making a lot of appearances in the following year. There was even talk of forthcoming new books from him, something he had declined to publish since the Viet Nam war. I was at the majority of these events--generally with an estimable old book. He signed them usually with some drawing and noted seeing me again in the inscription. I saw him give an art lecture at the Oakland museum; I attended a reading by him at the UC Alumnus hall, and before long we became acquainted.
This was until the afternoon I was talking to him and a few other poets at the Berkeley Art Museum (now UAM). The event was a Wallace Berman retrospective. Berman's Semina artwork/magazine had published Duncan, as well as diPrima and Michael McClure who were all there to read and talk about him.
An anthology of English language Surrealist poetry that included Duncan's work had been published by Penquin. It also had the work of my poetry professor and friend of a few years earlier, James Tate. Tate had always disowned the identification of his work as Surrealist yet had agreed to be included. I wondered how Robert felt about the designation, adding that I hadn't thought of him as a Surrealist. This possibly did not sit very well with he who is Poet in all Poetry.
One poet who was long recognized as a Surrealist was the aforementioned Philip Lamantia. He was one of the models for what I wanted to pursue in poetry. I was influenced not only by his poetry but also by his essays and his association with the American Surrealist movement centered around Franklin Rosemont and Arsenal, The Journal of Surrealist Subversion out of Chicago. Lamantia had been an early associate of Duncan's but somewhere in the volatility of their storied lives, they had experienced a decisive split.
Philip was discussed in the introduction to that Surrealist poetry anthology, as both the perfect exemplar of its subject and also because of his pointed refusal to be published in it. The Surrealism he adhered to came with well-defined doctrines and a revolutionary ideology. These were not major concerns of this collection nor were they precepts owned by Duncan in his many essays and interviews. I will devote at least another entry to Philip who died in 2005.
In those days you really could hear and get to know many of the renowned Beat poets. The Bay Area poetry scene was still happening and a monthly Poetry Flash newletter listed readings galore. Gary Snyder's statement around then was that since the Six Gallery reading in 1955 there had not been a day here without a poetry reading of one sort or another, and it was true.
I got to know even the reclusive Lamantia and was once sitting next to him in City Lights basement, a rather close catacomb of books and odd chairs even a church pew. It matched the strange holy roller left-overs painted on the walls, "Remember Lot's wife!"
The event was an exceedingly rare reading by the legendary David Gascoyne, one of the greatest poets let alone Surrealist poets in the English language. After achieving high regard for his books in Britain, he had slipped into a depressive state. He was eventually living in a clinic without speaking. Then objective chance brought a woman to his clinic to read to the patients. Without knowing he was present, she read one of his poems aloud and it brought him back from his lost place. It was an unmistakable triumph of l'amour fou (mad love) that charged the occasion of this reading at which the woman, now his wife, was present.
Also present was another major visionary poet of the epoch, Robert Duncan who sitting a few feet away from us. Now, that he seemed somewhat disinclined to greet me a few years after our slight acquaintance was unremarkable to me. This was especially so since I was sitting with another person who seemed mutually disinclined to say hello to him. But that was what was illuminating to me to see-- how calmly these two poets well-known to each other for forty years could ignore each other. It was a lesson in the ways of poets for me that is now a familiar drill whenever it occurs. Harold Norse was there too, a good but I'd be reluctant to say visionary poet. A few other poets had turned out for this poet's poet who was almost completely unknown in this country, but rather few civilians. A couple sat in front and polished off a quart or so of the cheap wine on the house. They would occasionally ask him to repeat his name which Gascoyne, between exquisite dream-like poems, would do.
There are photos of Duncan with Lamantia from that day, and there is no unfriendliness implied by my description of their demeanor together. A few years later, Philip's wife and long-time City Lights second-in-command, Nancy Peters described to me the experience of flying to a poetry festival seated between the two. Both talked continuously, listening not to each other but each expecting her to hear himself in full. But she said that they were friends again if a little precariously so at times.
Since I quoted one San Francisco poetry scene-maker, mover and shaker, (without naming him) I will include an exchange with another. This was at Tosca on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, the customary poets' drink after yet another reading, that day at Canessa Park.
"Hey, Adam, is hell other people?"
"Hell is other poets."
Those last books of Duncan's came out in 1987. Groundwork: Poems Before the War, Vol. I and II, they were actually off-prints of his own type-scripts so no typo or spacial change could occur. Frankly, it rendered a typographic dullness on the page as a result. I went to a publication party for it at a bookstore in Berkeley. I brought my old hard bound first edition of Roots and Branches, one of my favorites, not expecting to be among the many people buying his new one that day myself. I was an old book collector--a few excerpts of Groundwork would suffice.
There was a nervous and expectant staff; there was a table of respectable victuals; there was a free letter-press broadside of a new poem; and there was not at that moment any other apparent attendees. Berkeley being what it was, people may have been en route and arrived soon after. We greeted him, got the broadsides signed somewhat solemnly, and had to cut out. I had made an prior agreement to just pass through the event. For my companion meeting Robert Duncan had even less of a thrill than it still held for me at that time.
A year or so later the obituaries for him ran. Poetry Flash devoted an issue to this pater familia of the scene, second only to Kenneth Rexroth for that title. At an event at Fort Mason cavalcade of poets read their work in homage to him. I made a table display of my collection of his books, obliging interested parties to handle only the sturdier editions. And in an adjourning room a videotape of Robert Duncan speaking played on to an empty chamber.
I continue to hold Duncan's poetry in high regard. An interesting biography of him expanded my reading. At one point I re-acquainted myself in order to give a tutorial on him to a student of diPrima's who wanted to impress the teacher. I am grateful for the fleeting access fate granted me to him and to his performance. As if by objective chance, other than family, the first face I knew in California was his.
"In sound and sense it is the music of inner relationships that moves me."
Robert Duncan
On my third day in California, I arranged for a solo outing. The brother with whom I was staying in nearby Contra Costa county took me into Berkeley in the morning with a plan to rendezvous after his work day was over. I began the day in the Telegraph Avenue area taking in an assortment of its offerings--in the form of capucino cafes, record shops, a Japanese lunch spot, and most of all various bookstores.
It was a dim day in early January, yet it was ravishing to me a few days after the frozen New England I'd just left. Only the year before, 1978, a blizzard had left so much snow private automobile travel was banned for six days--it was sort of heavenly though. Trains and buses were running and I traveled sixty miles to explore the streets of Boston and Cambridge, bustling with foot traffic alone.
Winter can get old and wearying in Massachusetts, and I had twenty-five of them under my belt by then. Here in California the growing grass was green and some flowers were actually in bloom. In a text book style store on Bancroft Way, I found books on separate shelves devoted to individual publishers. I gravitated to the New Directions shelf and encountered some interesting titles for the first time, ones I had only seen listed in the back-lists included on the end pages of beloved books--Rimbaud, Borges, Bob Kaufman.
Upon leaving the store I crossed over to the UC student union building . Within minutes I observed something that fulfilled my most naive notions of stepping into scenes from a Kerouac novel the minute I got here. It was a person famous in the world of obscure poetry browsing around the student stores-- Robert Duncan, a name synonymous with the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance. He was a forebear of the Beats and a real high-artifice poet of an even older type. He had an expansive forehead with long white sideburns and wore a coat with a built-in rain cape. His "frontispiece" included a jeweled art-nouveau bolo tie on a flowered shirt, anachronistic even then. His eyes were remarkable and are much-noted--they were as large and sensitive as can be imagined; moreover, one eye was slightly lazy and seemed to look off into the poetic marvelous at all times.
He in fact was a mystic of sorts descended from California theosophists. His florid early poetry was celebrated and he was indulged from an early age as someone profound beyond his years. Young Robert Duncan put in his mandatory Rimbaud phase, finding his way to New York city as a desperate young poet. He published an early crie-de-coeur entitled "The Homosexual in Society" that was a milestone in the queer rights movement. It alone would entitle him to a place in cultural history. He quickly established relations of one sort or another with all the poets and poets manques of his time--Pound, Patchen, Anais Nin. Avant-garde poetry was and is a quite small pond.
Eventually, he returned to Berkeley where he became the biggest fish of his school rivaled only by Jack Spicer (who actually emerged as more of a group leader after he had decamped to San Francisco.) I had become interested him along with the rest of poets identified with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance which followed and flowed into what became known as the Beat generation. Two other well-known poets of this group were Mary Fabilli and William Everson a.k.a. Brother Antoninus. (I will devote a future entry to Mary with whom I became friends.)
Most of the best-known Beat poets were also Berkeley dwellers including Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, and Jack Kerouac who even moved his supportive mother here for a period.
Duncan's poetry was elegant, classical in ways, reflective of European modernism and somewhat old-fashioned because of that. His work is like California Surrealist painting somehow. And his life partner Jess could be roughly described as belonging to that movement.
Diane diPrima had called Duncan the greatest living poet at a reading of hers I attended at the Smith College library in 1975. (People smoked a big joint of gold Columbian at that reading without any conflict---ah, those were the days). I had been reading more of him following that and had even bought a rare book of his by mail order from City Lights books in San Francisco. It was his Selected Poems one of the more scarce volumes in the Pocket Poets Series from 1959. The series had made a considerable seismic waves the previous year with Ginsberg's volume Howl & other poems. I was collecting them, interested in every forgotten copy of any underground poetry press I could find.
I thought immediately of the tried and true method for graceful meetings with authors one esteems. And I recalled that the New Directions rack I had just examined had included one of his best books, The Opening of the Field. Before hailing him, I dashed over to obtain a copy of it to ask him to sign it. He seems almost startled to be recognized by a young person out of the passing stream. This was despite the large number of his books and papers in the Bancroft library a stone's throw away, despite his prominent role in local literary history.
To be a success at poetry is like being a failure at any thing else, I once heard a perspiring acolyte of Duncan's admit. This particular poetry maven has Duncan's old hat on his old hat-rack by the front door of his home today.
As a young poetry hustler myself I naturally had my own self-published chapbook to press on Duncan. He may have even had me sign it to him, though it seems doubtful in retrospect. We spoke for a while, a conversation now lost in time, and bid a friendly adieu. He said perhaps he see more of me in the poetry scene.
And he did. Following what was reputed to be a reclusive period, he seemed to be making a lot of appearances in the following year. There was even talk of forthcoming new books from him, something he had declined to publish since the Viet Nam war. I was at the majority of these events--generally with an estimable old book. He signed them usually with some drawing and noted seeing me again in the inscription. I saw him give an art lecture at the Oakland museum; I attended a reading by him at the UC Alumnus hall, and before long we became acquainted.
This was until the afternoon I was talking to him and a few other poets at the Berkeley Art Museum (now UAM). The event was a Wallace Berman retrospective. Berman's Semina artwork/magazine had published Duncan, as well as diPrima and Michael McClure who were all there to read and talk about him.
An anthology of English language Surrealist poetry that included Duncan's work had been published by Penquin. It also had the work of my poetry professor and friend of a few years earlier, James Tate. Tate had always disowned the identification of his work as Surrealist yet had agreed to be included. I wondered how Robert felt about the designation, adding that I hadn't thought of him as a Surrealist. This possibly did not sit very well with he who is Poet in all Poetry.
One poet who was long recognized as a Surrealist was the aforementioned Philip Lamantia. He was one of the models for what I wanted to pursue in poetry. I was influenced not only by his poetry but also by his essays and his association with the American Surrealist movement centered around Franklin Rosemont and Arsenal, The Journal of Surrealist Subversion out of Chicago. Lamantia had been an early associate of Duncan's but somewhere in the volatility of their storied lives, they had experienced a decisive split.
Philip was discussed in the introduction to that Surrealist poetry anthology, as both the perfect exemplar of its subject and also because of his pointed refusal to be published in it. The Surrealism he adhered to came with well-defined doctrines and a revolutionary ideology. These were not major concerns of this collection nor were they precepts owned by Duncan in his many essays and interviews. I will devote at least another entry to Philip who died in 2005.
In those days you really could hear and get to know many of the renowned Beat poets. The Bay Area poetry scene was still happening and a monthly Poetry Flash newletter listed readings galore. Gary Snyder's statement around then was that since the Six Gallery reading in 1955 there had not been a day here without a poetry reading of one sort or another, and it was true.
I got to know even the reclusive Lamantia and was once sitting next to him in City Lights basement, a rather close catacomb of books and odd chairs even a church pew. It matched the strange holy roller left-overs painted on the walls, "Remember Lot's wife!"
The event was an exceedingly rare reading by the legendary David Gascoyne, one of the greatest poets let alone Surrealist poets in the English language. After achieving high regard for his books in Britain, he had slipped into a depressive state. He was eventually living in a clinic without speaking. Then objective chance brought a woman to his clinic to read to the patients. Without knowing he was present, she read one of his poems aloud and it brought him back from his lost place. It was an unmistakable triumph of l'amour fou (mad love) that charged the occasion of this reading at which the woman, now his wife, was present.
Also present was another major visionary poet of the epoch, Robert Duncan who sitting a few feet away from us. Now, that he seemed somewhat disinclined to greet me a few years after our slight acquaintance was unremarkable to me. This was especially so since I was sitting with another person who seemed mutually disinclined to say hello to him. But that was what was illuminating to me to see-- how calmly these two poets well-known to each other for forty years could ignore each other. It was a lesson in the ways of poets for me that is now a familiar drill whenever it occurs. Harold Norse was there too, a good but I'd be reluctant to say visionary poet. A few other poets had turned out for this poet's poet who was almost completely unknown in this country, but rather few civilians. A couple sat in front and polished off a quart or so of the cheap wine on the house. They would occasionally ask him to repeat his name which Gascoyne, between exquisite dream-like poems, would do.
There are photos of Duncan with Lamantia from that day, and there is no unfriendliness implied by my description of their demeanor together. A few years later, Philip's wife and long-time City Lights second-in-command, Nancy Peters described to me the experience of flying to a poetry festival seated between the two. Both talked continuously, listening not to each other but each expecting her to hear himself in full. But she said that they were friends again if a little precariously so at times.
Since I quoted one San Francisco poetry scene-maker, mover and shaker, (without naming him) I will include an exchange with another. This was at Tosca on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, the customary poets' drink after yet another reading, that day at Canessa Park.
"Hey, Adam, is hell other people?"
"Hell is other poets."
Those last books of Duncan's came out in 1987. Groundwork: Poems Before the War, Vol. I and II, they were actually off-prints of his own type-scripts so no typo or spacial change could occur. Frankly, it rendered a typographic dullness on the page as a result. I went to a publication party for it at a bookstore in Berkeley. I brought my old hard bound first edition of Roots and Branches, one of my favorites, not expecting to be among the many people buying his new one that day myself. I was an old book collector--a few excerpts of Groundwork would suffice.
There was a nervous and expectant staff; there was a table of respectable victuals; there was a free letter-press broadside of a new poem; and there was not at that moment any other apparent attendees. Berkeley being what it was, people may have been en route and arrived soon after. We greeted him, got the broadsides signed somewhat solemnly, and had to cut out. I had made an prior agreement to just pass through the event. For my companion meeting Robert Duncan had even less of a thrill than it still held for me at that time.
A year or so later the obituaries for him ran. Poetry Flash devoted an issue to this pater familia of the scene, second only to Kenneth Rexroth for that title. At an event at Fort Mason cavalcade of poets read their work in homage to him. I made a table display of my collection of his books, obliging interested parties to handle only the sturdier editions. And in an adjourning room a videotape of Robert Duncan speaking played on to an empty chamber.
I continue to hold Duncan's poetry in high regard. An interesting biography of him expanded my reading. At one point I re-acquainted myself in order to give a tutorial on him to a student of diPrima's who wanted to impress the teacher. I am grateful for the fleeting access fate granted me to him and to his performance. As if by objective chance, other than family, the first face I knew in California was his.
"In sound and sense it is the music of inner relationships that moves me."
Robert Duncan
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Son Trouve
Thinking of my three favorite environmental sounds of Berkeley, the ones that summon a strong sense of place...
In earlier entries to this journal I gave voice to my resentment of several noise sources in my immediate vicinity. To refresh, they were the loud disco boom-boxes employed by the Asiatic dance gangs that collect around lower Sproul plaza, the trucks and tour buses on Bancroft way that idle their engines far beyond the legal time limit, and, the most intolerable but least frequent annoyance, the Taiko drummers who bang out their identity politics in the same general area.
But really, despite any impression I may have yet made, I actually celebrate more than I find fault. In that vein, let me praise my three favorite sounds of this locality. These would be sounds I dig in particular, as opposed to the more universal salvation of sounds as widely defined as let's say bird song.
And they are: the sound of morning doves calling especially in the early twilight of a summer's eve when the fog is vigorously rolling in; the train whistles along the tracks through far West Berkeley as they echo off the hills; and the life-enhancing music that peals off the carillon bells in the Campanile on the UC campus.
I lived for fifteen years in a much quieter residence on Woolsey street, the last street in South Berkeley. The place was locked in the center of block, flocked by rich trees, and it was reached by a long driveway separating it from street noise. It was there that I grew so accustomed to the plaintive but somehow encouraging sound of the doves calling back and forth in the cool of an evening. The fragrant smoke from an outdoor mesquite grill frequently accompanied what is now a vivid sense memory. I see less of the once ubiquitous morning doves and hear them still less of them these days in my more urban part of town--I hope it is not because they have become more scarce in this habitat.
The trains, the trains-- they won me over to Berkeley in a strange way. I relocated here but intended to settle in San Francisco. Berkeley can often seem somewhat dull and insular in comparison. But over time the things we see everyday become sacred and that goes for the sounds we here. I have long had a love affair with trains and many of my heroes were train-riding, or at least train-identified, from Alfred Hitchcock to Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan etc. To me there is nothing more evocative than the sound of trains as they pass in the night, suggesting unknown realms of possibility. And the sound of trains are profuse in the great night that envelopes the populous eastern shore of San Francisco Bay.
There once was a sense of solidarity among most residents of this chilly and saintly shangri-la. Like-minded people had gravitated here with a strong shared sensibility that included an appreciation for what was right with the place. This was followed by the coming of the nimby-
the not-in-my-backyard type, often a property speculator. Several such bought homes along the railroad tracks in Berkeley, knowing full well what that entailed. Then they proceeded to complain to the powers that be that they were egregiously disturbed by the train whistles. Just as with the lobby against legal medical marijuana dispensaries, long-running street fairs, and San Francisco's traditional night life, the East Bay nimbys tried to get restrictions on the train whistles. These are the house-flipper types who were a big engine of the latest economic crisis in the "Highway 61 Revisited" brand of late capitalism that characterizes the current US scene. Well since this latest bubble burst perhaps we can relegate them back to the democratic margins where they belong. Thus far they have failed in their attempts to stifle the trains.
The romantic siren call of all my years living in earshot of those ever-traveling trains, the summons on the precipice of sleep so many nights, eventually inspired my own far-reaching adventure by rail. In 2005, my North America travel pass in me pocket I crossed North America, including Canada the wide part, twice in 28 days. As I left this part of the world on the 11 o'clock Starlighter to Seattle, I thought of how I was at that moment boarded on one of those poetic, oneiric trains. Moving past the Marina, sounding off the hills, and drifting through nocturnal chambers of the town, I had joined the sound that had stirred my soul for decades.
And the bells, the bells, the bells that toll from a glorious towering perch atop the campanile. They are essential and intrinsic to my perception of where I live. They were recently the raison-d'etre for a carillon festival held on campus. Players from far-flung places came to offer their grooves. The sound of these fabulous bells underscores all that is pleasant about the controversial campus. I came to a liminal point sitting on a wooden bench on the Campanile plateau, and listening to a carillon-playing adept perform one of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies." I reached the conclusion that classical pieces and other old chestnuts played on these great bells was my purest and best loved form of music. It is just waves of sound emanating from percussion on a tuned metal bell-- no opportunity for distortion, no amplification, and no pro-tool sweetening of wrong notes.
Just the ringing of the hours alone is important to me. But again this has been constrained in cranky over-wrought Berkeley--another fuss-budget crabbed about the "disturbance" caused by bells tolling the time. So they only toll to nine in the evening or some such. While for myself, having grown up in a city of Catholics, where the bells tolled the hours, called us to church, and gave us an agreeable and sustaining sense of community--I say, like Bob Dyan sang,
"Ring them bells.'
In earlier entries to this journal I gave voice to my resentment of several noise sources in my immediate vicinity. To refresh, they were the loud disco boom-boxes employed by the Asiatic dance gangs that collect around lower Sproul plaza, the trucks and tour buses on Bancroft way that idle their engines far beyond the legal time limit, and, the most intolerable but least frequent annoyance, the Taiko drummers who bang out their identity politics in the same general area.
But really, despite any impression I may have yet made, I actually celebrate more than I find fault. In that vein, let me praise my three favorite sounds of this locality. These would be sounds I dig in particular, as opposed to the more universal salvation of sounds as widely defined as let's say bird song.
And they are: the sound of morning doves calling especially in the early twilight of a summer's eve when the fog is vigorously rolling in; the train whistles along the tracks through far West Berkeley as they echo off the hills; and the life-enhancing music that peals off the carillon bells in the Campanile on the UC campus.
I lived for fifteen years in a much quieter residence on Woolsey street, the last street in South Berkeley. The place was locked in the center of block, flocked by rich trees, and it was reached by a long driveway separating it from street noise. It was there that I grew so accustomed to the plaintive but somehow encouraging sound of the doves calling back and forth in the cool of an evening. The fragrant smoke from an outdoor mesquite grill frequently accompanied what is now a vivid sense memory. I see less of the once ubiquitous morning doves and hear them still less of them these days in my more urban part of town--I hope it is not because they have become more scarce in this habitat.
The trains, the trains-- they won me over to Berkeley in a strange way. I relocated here but intended to settle in San Francisco. Berkeley can often seem somewhat dull and insular in comparison. But over time the things we see everyday become sacred and that goes for the sounds we here. I have long had a love affair with trains and many of my heroes were train-riding, or at least train-identified, from Alfred Hitchcock to Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan etc. To me there is nothing more evocative than the sound of trains as they pass in the night, suggesting unknown realms of possibility. And the sound of trains are profuse in the great night that envelopes the populous eastern shore of San Francisco Bay.
There once was a sense of solidarity among most residents of this chilly and saintly shangri-la. Like-minded people had gravitated here with a strong shared sensibility that included an appreciation for what was right with the place. This was followed by the coming of the nimby-
the not-in-my-backyard type, often a property speculator. Several such bought homes along the railroad tracks in Berkeley, knowing full well what that entailed. Then they proceeded to complain to the powers that be that they were egregiously disturbed by the train whistles. Just as with the lobby against legal medical marijuana dispensaries, long-running street fairs, and San Francisco's traditional night life, the East Bay nimbys tried to get restrictions on the train whistles. These are the house-flipper types who were a big engine of the latest economic crisis in the "Highway 61 Revisited" brand of late capitalism that characterizes the current US scene. Well since this latest bubble burst perhaps we can relegate them back to the democratic margins where they belong. Thus far they have failed in their attempts to stifle the trains.
The romantic siren call of all my years living in earshot of those ever-traveling trains, the summons on the precipice of sleep so many nights, eventually inspired my own far-reaching adventure by rail. In 2005, my North America travel pass in me pocket I crossed North America, including Canada the wide part, twice in 28 days. As I left this part of the world on the 11 o'clock Starlighter to Seattle, I thought of how I was at that moment boarded on one of those poetic, oneiric trains. Moving past the Marina, sounding off the hills, and drifting through nocturnal chambers of the town, I had joined the sound that had stirred my soul for decades.
And the bells, the bells, the bells that toll from a glorious towering perch atop the campanile. They are essential and intrinsic to my perception of where I live. They were recently the raison-d'etre for a carillon festival held on campus. Players from far-flung places came to offer their grooves. The sound of these fabulous bells underscores all that is pleasant about the controversial campus. I came to a liminal point sitting on a wooden bench on the Campanile plateau, and listening to a carillon-playing adept perform one of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies." I reached the conclusion that classical pieces and other old chestnuts played on these great bells was my purest and best loved form of music. It is just waves of sound emanating from percussion on a tuned metal bell-- no opportunity for distortion, no amplification, and no pro-tool sweetening of wrong notes.
Just the ringing of the hours alone is important to me. But again this has been constrained in cranky over-wrought Berkeley--another fuss-budget crabbed about the "disturbance" caused by bells tolling the time. So they only toll to nine in the evening or some such. While for myself, having grown up in a city of Catholics, where the bells tolled the hours, called us to church, and gave us an agreeable and sustaining sense of community--I say, like Bob Dyan sang,
"Ring them bells.'
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)