it all seems so bizarre now, being seventeen and wandering around north beach san francisco, mike's place, the co-existence bagel shop, not really part of the beat scene, a literature student at berkeley.
last night i spent the whole evening on netflix creating an even longer instant queue for myself, bouncing from anime, to french thrillers, documentaries about butterflies and beautiful insects, collecting a long list along the way, longer than i will ever be able to watch.
this evening i wandered down the stair of movies, trying to find a landing, and nothing stuck til i stumbled across a movie about alan ginsberg and the obscenity trial for his poem HOWL, and began watching it without high hopes, but having listened to most of ON THE ROAD last summer and remembering the sad death of neal cassidy by the railroad tracks outside san miguel, mexico, the police coming to the author of EPISODES pierre delattre to ask if he knew this body of the man who'd been given divinity by jack kerouac and he said yes, i let the movie pull the memories out of me.
at that time (1957) i studied modes of fiction in a thomas parkinson class, a friend of ginsberg, the prof had him come speak to us, and alan pensively read part of KADDISH, a requiem for his mother, which he'd been working on out in the courtyard while waiting for class to begin, not shaggy haired and bearded but a young fifties guy in normal clothes, just like in the movie.
one kid in the class demonstrated outside the courthouse during the trial, very nervous about being arrested himself and what what would happen, and i don't know what did, but it's all like yesterday, years later alan coming up to me at a table in the new school for social research where i was helping with registration and asking where he should go, limping for some reason.
and then when he read at the city center in santa cruz, jingling his bells - he'd been to india in the meantime and wore the white of a guru - when the loudspeaker called out someone had planted a bomb and we all filed out while alan cheerfully kept chanting and told us to be calm.
alas, too many of my ideals come from these guys, the movie PULL MY DAISY, local readings by gary snyder, who lives in the area and who lost his sense of humor after his first book of poems RIP RAP as did alan after HOWL, both becoming sages who couldn't make fun of themselves.
since i'm just a clown stumbling through the universe, i can't say i've done the same, a ridiculous hold-out from the rebellious boys of the fifties and still trying to find my own voice up here on the mountain where the coyotes howl.
now i don't relish having beer cans thrown at me, especially with a camera in my hand, which i'm constantly covering with my straw bonnet. a friend of the lead singer, johnny rotten, in the seat next to me, and of course, he ultimately has the booze running down his face, as rotten peppers him with cans and dowses him in alcohol.
the artistic director had asked the audience to keep it calm for the cameras. that seemed to unleash even more shouts and missiles, the theme of the show basically fuck you! in this punk epic, 'sid & nancy'. actually, i'm not sure what it is all about. the foam earplugs cancel most of the dialogue and i never can understand the lyrics of songs. plus, i'm clicking and flashing away.
obviously, sid has a fatal attraction to nancy, and nancy keeps bouncing back from any rebuffs. looking at the pics www.pbase.com/wwp/sn you can sense the visceral impact. if a show well-directed, the visuals tell the whole story. i figured the director, martin chavira, must be a lapsed catholic. characters in his shows love to destroy themselves, as well as buildings. sid revives from his own death at the end to sing and fire a forty-five into the audience.
all this could have been completely false and lackluster, yet this production sucked me in (and spit me out). afterwards i just wanted to escape with my life and my pictures. the next morning the evening's memory depressed me. yet as i worked on the photos over the next three days, i gradually felt a thrill. this no ordinary endeavor.
after all, sitting in the front row, i got raped by sid's electric base. another time he nearly fell on me as he lurched around the stage in a drug-induced state, grabbing my foot to save himself. how and where they managed to draw the line, i don't know. they did, and that the ultimate art. another night they might cause a riot. we'll see as they go on the road.
as a preacher's kid, i always attempted to do so, mainly to make it easier on myself, yet i've found my new rules as tough as the old, if not tougher. they say when a follower attacks his/her own religion, the desire is for more restrictions, not fewer. i'll do my best to entertain the fallacy.
1. LOVE THYSELF.otherwise your neighbor will have hell to pay. remember the golden rule?
2. BE PREPARED TO IMPROVISE. if you can't light a fire with a couple of sticks, you won't survive the next millennium.
3. AVOID FAME. the reason for this obvious. yes, extremely difficult if you're mildly talented in a world of mediocrity. didn't i say these new strictures would be painful?
3. GIVE FORM. this is something i discovered for myself. it's better to create castles in the air or in sand, than not to create at all. it will make your day.
4. KEEP MOVING. death finds it more difficult to hit a good circulation.
5. DO WHAT YOU WANT. ultimately, nobody cares. and in a hundred years, nobody's bloody likely to know.
6. BE AN EXPERT. they get paid.
7. DON'T JUDGE YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE. actions tend to reveal their true meaning and value days or years later.
8. ALWAYS LOOK BACKWARDS. see how your shadow follows you? if you don't know history, you're unprepared for today.
9. PRACTICE WHAT YOU DID AT FIVE YEARS OLD. you followed your instincts before school and the devil got hold of you. (look at the first commandment again.) why else do we lose our sensual perception as we grow older?
10. DON'T LET GO OF YOUR OWN MYTH. when you get away from it, the world turns black, a sign of your depression and straying from the true way. only you can renew your world every day.
yet that has to do more with luck than money. true, i knew to have a family meant being broke all the time. in the montana parsonage it meant closing off all the rooms in winter and sleeping with a warm brick. in germany we didn't have money for a candy bar. my poor working bachelor uncle in indiana, walter pease, footed a lot of the bills.
as for houses, my god, it's not the payments, it's the broken sewer lines and leaking roofs. you never know what's going to happen. so i decided for a shiftless life. fifty years ago i entered the invisible profession of fire lookout. i'd hiked to one in pinnacles national monument at age ten. the view of the salinas valley took my breath away and the lookout had a ham radio. my god, up in the clouds and able to talk to the world. that was for me. eventually one fell into my lap, bunker hill.
taking a two year break on a greek island, a berlin basement, and an oxford rented room, i returned to california at the behest of the coast guard reserve. i fell into a fun half-time job with arts and lectures at uc santa cruz. those were certainly my most sensual days. summers i returned to the towers.
luck, i mean it. europe a bargain in the 60's, yes, on five dollars a day. santa cruz almost a slum when i arrived, later one of the most expensive communities in the country. since i live off the interstates in a college town, i've had lovely rooms with trees outside. and during this time travelled the world before gas prices soared.
i just watched a video on a lookout for rent in montana:
strange to see it near one of my many childhood homes, once a bevy of small towns now a booming ski-resort country. how amazing to have kept ahead of the trampling herd. and i really am grateful. for a couple days i've created designs for fire prevention posters. my hope, the forest service will pick up the ball. they've a PR goldmine in fire towers which they've never exploited.
i've gotten into a strange habit in the last six months. probably i can blame it on my friend dennis palumbo, whose thriller mirror image arrived on the shelves a while back. he's such a fan of the crime novel i figured they must have something special. (he's got another coming out this fall.)
this, i must confess, against my own instincts. as a teenager i read a lot of the nero wolfe stories - and ultimately found the whole genre depressing. the mystery may be quite an adventure, yet at the end the hero rarely gets the girl and it's a matter of stopping something that shouldn't have happened at all (rather like standing up against a government out of whack). lying, cheating, stealing, i've tried them all, my father caught me filching candybars at the local grocery and pouncing on the collection plate sunday evenings after a service. i guess those lessons must have sunk in. if i'm not honest, i feel lousy about myself.
so, if it's dostoyevsky, crime and punishment, or the brothers karamazov, i can see the point of the whole endeavor, larger metaphysical issues at stake. that was until i listened to a few contemporary thrillers on cd while driving back and forth from the mountain. michael criton's next, frankly hilarious, especially read aloud. a send-up of genetic engineering, the real topic. and the forgery of venus by michael gruber, fascinating in its details of how to fake a famous painting, and the hero actually flashes back to being valazquez.
then the dragon tattoo girl came along. the first movie craven compared to the actual novel, the violent deaths emphasized over larrson's real motive - he wanted to call the series crimes against women. yes, i actually read the first volume. afterwards, to get the whole pie, i speed-read the next two volumes, going for the story, skipping a lot of the subplots, sitting in my bookstore cafe and watching the plot pass as though i were watching a movie.
thus came about this bizarre habit of reading thrillers this way, and discovering i like the ones that do more than solve the specific villainy. of course, nazis and wwii a fairly easy mark, though stephen kerr in the berlin trilogy and follow-ups makes the most of it, revealing gas-chambers for jews in argentina, for example. and in his futuristic novel a philosophical investigation he questions genotyping of individuals. gradually the themes of these writers have gotten more interesting.
one of my favorites is the devil's trill by gerald elias where a blind, irascible violin teacher exposes the forcing of young children to practice until they can win contests, yet fail in life. yesterday, one of my two hour jaunts with james patterson and liza markland in the postcard killers where they examine the carrying of art to the extremes of murder, the victims posed like paintings. (damian hirst, you can run, but you can't hide.)
these don't depress me like the mundane examples of the genre cause they serve a higher purpose, interesting larger violations of humanity.
that thought occurred to me long before the technology existed. when i was 14 i realized a god wouldn't be necessary if there were no beginning and no end. in other words everything goes in circles. like a laser beam my consciousness travels along a groove.
this does play into the old saw of predestination. well, let's say i'm a stack of dvd's, one playing now, another later. theoretically i'd have many cross tracks, new music constantly created from the old matter. and, of course, 5,999,999,999 other tunes would be in progress, and that's what makes the planet pretty messy.
however, let's simplify: one disk at a time. here i am a story recorded on hard matter. my thoughts travel in familiar territory (deja vu). if the boom box big bang working correctly, i could be re-started anywhere, beginning wherever my mind happened to land. thus, time as we know it, doesn't exist. it's not time-travel, it's my-travel. as you ask, is there any wiggle room? does the disk get worn out, played over and over? can it crack?
hmm, maybe that's a way into the problem. no, that assumes time exists. time only exists if there is a beginning and an end. our humanity based on an error, in that case. we suffer not knowing we'll never be born and never die. alas, this flies in the face of science, it throws us back into a cyclical view of the universe. am i discovering already known moments! can we really say the film can't be played backwards? i keep asking myself the most obvious questions. ah, i'm already leading a virtual life.
i've carried this aphorism around for years. tough to practice, as by nature i'm a wimp, non-confrontational, get along, don't make waves kind of guy. i can only think of three times in my adult life where i may have practiced it.
the first shouldn't count. i joined the coast guard reserve to avoid being a foot soldier in vietnam. arriving at bootcamp on government island , alameda, california i had no idea what i was getting in for, not until i reported to the duty desk, lowering my arms to rest them, when the second mate yelled, "get up against that wall, face it! stand at attention and don't move until told to do so." during the next three months i learned what it was like to be a convict and a slave. a very valuable lesson, and maybe a bit of courage did help me get thru it.
the second rather tame by comparison. the first time i landed some unemployment compensation, my girlfriend said, "get some therapy." i didn't have to ask why, i already knew. okay, i picked a name out of the phonebook, and as i stepped across the threshold, i said to myself, "my god, i'm actually asking for help." that first session disappeared into limbo, but not the feeling in my chest when i exited. i realized i was experiencing fear and that it more than likely had been with me my whole life.
the third example also a false one, perhaps. in 1995 i felt isolated and at loose ends. what could i do to get out of myself and rejoin humanity? theater, of course, came to mind, my second great love, yet i hadn't practiced it in a very long time. CITY OF ANGELS, PREVIEW TO AUDITIONS. that notice at the university kindled a bit of a spark. so i went, listened to the director and his assistants outline the musical and the process to be. INTERMISSION. i walked out on campus, under the moon and trees, and thought, "i can't do this." but for whatever reason i re-entered. actors practiced the songs around the piano, and a miracle happened. bill johnson, the director, strode up to ask who i was and struck up a conversation. little did i know, of course, he wanted some old guy to lie in an iron lung on a big stage in a 1200 seat theater, which i ended up doing. this led to another bout of theater for twelve years.
