9/26/05

9/19/05

Remix Owls
Later that evening, one of S's compositions evinced some unexpected universal appeal. She'd put together a remix of various natural sounds, thunder, rain, wind and the like, along with pieces of our windchime orchestra in high bang and some screech owl samples she found on the web. The whole thing is her tribute to our back yard, and she played it last year in the hospital to help her feel less alone and afraid at night. Now she plays it every night at home to soothe us to sleep. This particular night, the back yard sang along in the person of one night singer screecher hoohooing in the cedars back of our bedroom. Once again, the outdoors leaking into our space.

Plastic Hippie
Oh yeah, baby, I was a plastic hippie, solid polystyrene, through and through, cooked by the media til I was done done done. Why do you think I'm so cynical now? I fell for the music industry's version of flower power so thoroughly that all it takes is a Cowsills single on an oldies station to change my complexion from white to rosy red and drive me cringing under the nearest paver.

The Box
In the midst of her last illness, my Ma asked me to take over a box, familiar since my childhood, containing the extant writings my father had managed to produce during his short but busy life. It sits on a top shelf in my office, a source both of pride and inspiration and of regret and occasional despair. I have no notion of what to do with that literary funerary except to write a Gazette or two about it and, eventually, consign it to the scrapheap that Betty was trying to save it from. Someday I might have an adopted or adapted volunteer descendant from among the numerous TNGs we've aunted and uncled to over the years who'll take on the burden of all my foofty stuff, box included, but it's entirely possible that, as a member in good standing of the Last Leaf Brigade, all I'll leave behind is a cloud of dust and a hearty hiyo silver.

Self-Employment
San and I were young and cute and on the loose in 1980 San Francisco. We'd been run out of an apartment we shared with a psycho ex-marine and his willing wife and were residing in a seedy room-by-the-week hotel we nicknamed the Tenderloin Hilton. This was well before the days of the real Tenderloin Hilton, and that particular part of town had a reputation only slightly less ripe and fragrant than South of Market. San bought me a leather hat in a thrift store and taught me to walk like a predator -- shoulders back, arms at side, erect posture, looking straight ahead except the occasional scan to each side, sorta like Schwartznegger in Terminator. I referred to the stance as the Arnie Walk. It kept the small potatoes looking for easy spoils away, and the big fish in the hood weren't interested in me anyway.

As budding musicians, we went looking for places to street perform, our preferred mode of remuneration. SF is famous for buskers, but the better known locations like Fisherman's Wharf and Girardeli Square were full of career whiners with guitars who seemed to have made secret deals with the cops to run anyone else off. Eventually we found our own sweet spot: Castro Street. Despite the Moscone and Milk murders the previous year and the first cold rumors of "gay cancer," the party scene in the district on Saturday night, the apotheosis of queer culture up to that time, was still going full tilt, a ribald freeforall where a hundred variations on the Village People walked the sloping streets looking for love, or at least a tender piece of ass. Dressed in our best formal wear, we'd take our appointed spot near the top of the street in an acoustically friendly storefront and blast out hyperkinetic versions of swing and jazz classics with mile-a-minute scatting and plenty of vaudeville jive. The boys loved San's voice and our humor and tolerated my determined straightness, reasoning that I had an excuse by being with such a hot chick. We coined money. Once we lost a whole night's take, stuffed into a sock, while riding the bus back to our crappy little room and just went back and earned it again the next night.

We succeeded in part from San's understanding of the subculture and in part from our fearlessness. One night a particularly obnoxious cutie in leather chaps decided he wanted to upstage the show and, after hanging around San far too much, moved in during a particular fast number and began rubbing his ass against her crotch. Not to be outdone, I immediately jumped in front of him and did the same, the while strumming swing chords and scatting in harmony. We pushed the doofus away for the last chorus and it rained tips. Leather Chaps retreated sulkily -- we'd out-Miz-Thang'd him.

That may have been the same night that the older gentleman in a cowboy outfit stopped by to listen. After a couple numbers he moved towards us in alcoholic intimacy. "You know," he drawled to San, "you're a lady. And you," turning to me,"you look a whole lot like a man. And you know what? I'll bet you two are the only people on this whole street who know what they are." Dropped a twenty in the case and sailed off into the night.

9/12/05

It's a pretty stiff read, replete with both the triumphs and undercarriage-gouging bottomings-out of that consummately creepy genius. To put it simply, Frank wasn't always a really nice guy. Faintly yucky though his personal life might have been, though, likely as not his music will still be listened to in a couple hundred years, both for its seminal anticipation and confluence of any number of trends in pop and alternative music and its sociological content, portraying the blue-white underbelly of late 20th century America in all its gleaming splendor.

Reading any biography will trigger a few days or weeks of being hyperaware of my own life, the inexorable writing engine in my head cranking out constant pompous commentaries on whatever I happen to be doing. "His difficulty in resolving this problem of the brakes ended in a quick and dirty disk pad replacement on the morning of September 9th, performed with one eye on the clock anticipating a gig at a local nursing home his wife had previously been a patient at..." Especially when I've had a bit more coffee than usual, this embarrassing autohagiographic feature churns away without any attendance from my consciousness. I can blunt my endless self-obsession a little through writing (hello, tg), and I've kept a journal since I was 16. Mostly, though, I just have to tell it to go drive through a carwash with the top down.

This week, however, I got a dose of the kind of treatment that can exacerbate the most reticent personality into full-blown narcissistic frenzy. A journalism professor from Eugene writing a history of the Oregon Country Fair (heaven help her) contacted me during the summer with an aim to interview me concerning my early experiences in the circus there. We set a date for after the summer madness, and on Thursday she showed up, tape recorder in hand, to mine the untapped fields of my youthful follies.

Ahh, yass, my halcyon golden days of youth, yass indeed, a time of innocence, a time of confidences, a time of total fricking lameass jive., honey. But boy do I have the mouth to let fly about it. Which, natch, I did. I took so long at it that her sweetie had to come and rescue her. What the heck, she asked for it, and I was rotten eager to deliver.

Most of the material we covered was the usual boilerplate -- hacking the site out of the brambles and poison oak, the 19th-century style hand-pegged stage constructed by the Wobbly carpenter and tuba-player, how I wrote the Chumleighland March in a Volkswagen beetle I'd refitted to live in, the arrival of the Flying Karamazov Brothers on sidecar motorcycle powered by a car engine and piloted by Tim Furst, Chumleigh's reincarnation as an ex-fire-eater, the scary spectacle of the first Midnight Show -- standard issue mythology, stuff I'm fairly certain I remember with at least marginal accuracy.

But let the verbal centers out and there's no telling where they'll wander. I thought out loud about the origins of OCF, its background in the culture of the California Renaissance Faires, themselves an outgrowth of the cloistered, classical atmosphere of liberal arts colleges in previous generations, that isolated, incestuous culture that led to so many strange fads and town/gown conflicts in the 20's and 30's. The desire to recreate the Elizabethan world in all its full Shakespearean bloom probably engendered the first campus ren fairs, which in turn were stump-whipped into a paying proposition by the creators of the Novato version.

Whence this desire for other worlds? In another book Artis loaned me, a series of interviews with Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and statesman (boy, that's Europe for you -- the juxtaposition of those two occupations in America would be slightly less likely than flaming meatballs raining from heaven) discusses modern civilization and contends that we have by and large lost any larger allegiances than those of merely human nation and culture, both of which have become grotesque and impersonal. He suspects that the only secular salvation we may achieve is to "discover... a deeper sense of responsibility toward the world, which means responsibility towards something higher" than mere consumerism or socialist ideology.

In the search for meaning, many of those charming misfits tarred with the brush "bohemian" (RIP Maynard G Krebs) have concluded that, in the sainted words of FZ, "People suck," and that the ways of the ordinary human world, soup to nuts to judicial appointment hearings, are venal to the point of intractability. Desperate for anything remotely resembling an alternative, they turn to amusement parks of the mind like the Ren Fair or OCF as a refuge from the Great Meat Grinder that all too often is life among the smooth-shaved apes.

It's ironic, then, that these self-same refugees from human life bring with them to their intended havens all the standard aggression, competition and mind-games they seek to escape. All the fairs, festivals, craft shows and enclaves I've ever rubbed up against have a veritable salad bar of all the same shit I saw back in high school, right down to the cheerleaders getting it on with the football stars. The bulk of human interaction, sad to say, appears to be prewired, and not very elegantly, probably by Gibson's "bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." Intelligent design my ass. If you're wise, it's less abrasive to stay aloof, even from the other aloof-stayers.

O'course, none of that made it into the interview. Hey, I've got my legacy to think of here.

9/5/05

*********

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The Thaddeus Gazette isn't a blog.

A blog is a website devoted to reprocessing links to other sites, or to commenting on events from a web perspective. It is a web log -- an ongoing catalog of the author's exploration of the internet.

The Thaddeus Gazette started life as a chatty little e-letter, sent to friends and acquaintances to keep them posted on Me, Wonderful Wonderful Me And My Exciting And Fulfilling Life And Navel. As it progressed, I reached a point, exactly when I may never know, where I was no longer just sending News From Lake Thaddiegone, but actually cohering what my sister and numerous others praise with faint damnation as "rants" into palpable essays, little bodies of writing with beginning, middle, end, and hopefully a point, exercises in explanatory discourse.

Whether I ran out of gas or just got too busy to continue the original tg is a matter for my biographers to consider; suffice it to say that I just stopped. And then, a couple years later, I started again.

When I recharged the tg in 2002, I decided to save spamwidth for my loyal followers and reconstitute as a website. On occasion, I even threw in a list of links. Perhaps that was when the misconception crept in. But this still ain't no blog, people. I haven't got the time. I'm willing to use events as a source for babble, but I'm not prepared to make every day current events day.

This week, though, current events are overtaking my ability to churn out yet another humdrum, speciously-argued theory. We're standing in witness of the death of a city. New Orleans, Louisiana is about to cease to exist.

By all accounts, hurricane Katrina is on target to scrub The City That Care Forgot right off the map, and possibly half the Mississippi delta into the bargain. A natural and civic disaster of this stature is a ghastly mockery of anything you can say about it. It's a heavy hobnail boot coming down on the face of normal life, of reasoned discourse, of gaily spinning wordy words about airy air. It's the ultimate party pooper.

And all our vaunted technology, all our glorious spy satellites and predictive supercomputer models, all our communications and interstate transport and thermonuclear weaponry is completely useless to prevent or mitigate it. All we can do is watch and wait, pray for the people in its path and hope there's something left to clean up afterwards.

It's an ugly commentary on the essential nature of our highly organized civilization that the most significant achievement we've accomplished in the realm of the big problems of reality is a more panoramic perspective of their awful, inexorable advance. Helpless to avoid the fatal stroke, we can yet tune in to watch it crushing its way northward, the executioner's axe descending.

The least awful news is that our predictive skills enabled a large percentage of the population of the affected region to get the fuck out of Dodge. So much for any craphead fundie trying to evoke G-d's wrath against erstwhile "sinners" -- they're alive and well, thank you very much.

We in America have been spared most of the more exciting events countries fall prey to, the devastating wars and plagues and depressions and disasters we watch on tv or online and cluck at like so many overfed chickens roosting comfortably in our luxury henhouse. Well folks, we're about to get a solid dose of reality. It remains to be seen if we can handle it or not.

*********

As it turned out, I wasn't nearly dire enough, even if my original supposition (that the hurricane would devour NO in one gulp) was incorrect. But never in my wildest, most paranoid dreams would I have predicted what actually occurred: the failure, not by misfortune but through gross incompetence, of the chief federal emergency response agency of the richest country on earth. FEMA, once a proud symbol of the strength and generosity of our way of life, has blood on its hands.

I have no words to convey the disgust I feel at this contemptuous debacle. They've all been used up by every other wordsmith on the web.

Women and children dead in the streets, not from the storm, not from the flooding, but from dehydration. Hospital patients and invalids left to drown. I have seen the future, and it ain't pretty.

Here I sit in gleaming Seattle, Jewel of the Northwest, the Emerald City. Built, like many west coast cities, smack on top of a fault system. Kinda hard to avoid if you want to build by the coast. Way overdue for The Big One. We had a taste of it back in 2001, a 6.8 jobbie 30 miles down that only knocked a few dozen flimsy old buildings down and caused a puny couple billion damage. Nothing special.

What can I expect from the federal government to which I contribute so much in taxes and citizenry when -- not if -- a real catastrophe occurs? Right now, with the evidence before me, I can answer that question: nothing.

I can expect to starve or freeze to death unless I've made preparations of my own. I can expect to watch my wife die from lack of medication. I can expect my neighborhood to dissolve into rampant chaos and anarchy. And I can expect the government in the other Washington to fulfill its duty by issuing stentorious assertions that Everything Is Fine, that Help Is On The Way, or perhaps that the descent of the Dark Ages on my little part of the world is All Their Own Fault -- Why Don't They Just Leave?

Really, given the circumstances in Louisiana, what else can I expect?