Poison Idea__1983__Elvis is on the back

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Color of the Blues__Elvis Costello

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(Isn't that bluish mess of pixilated and broken-up imagery beautiful? It even pulses as if it inhabits it's own mechanical life, although it's electronic. Well done. Of course, the original version by George Jones is one of the all time sad songs, and must have spun on the record player, over and over, as many a teenager in Knoxville or Beaumont cried themselves to sleep in 1963. Suicidally depressed alcoholics can really bring it).
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Girl Talk__"Still Here"__Bunnygreenhouse

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Irish Tunes

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The Last of England_Derek Jarman

Song is sung by Diamanda Galas

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Derek Jarman footage with Smiths' I Won't Share You

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Don't Fuck with Bette

Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1934).


It's obvious this guy lives with his parents and he recorded this video in his boyhood bedroom. The cute little look he gives the camera upon the song's finale is the stuff of entertainment genius. I'd say the world needs a new "King of Pop" and here he is.


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Beck and Jane Birkin

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Barbara with the Callas Eyes

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Hi-Hat Solos

I've tried to be flexible about this economic downturn stuff. First I had to lasso my pissed-off feelings against Wall Street financiers, Capitalists, and generally anyone who had more money than I, or at least a better haircut. Then I lost my job and tried to substitute my previous activities into porn sites, books on Japanese bondage, and after some excruciatingly dull "alone time," began this blog.

Unemployment insurance was a great help and though rather paltry when compared to my actual bills, I carried on until I spent my entire allottment. Luckily, the state government (which is also broke) instituted an extension of funds for a few more months which is keeping me in tortillas and Trader Joe's frijoles. I sold some old SLR cameras and lenses which I no longer used, but in a digital world no-one was was interested in paying much for film cameras. I used the money on a decent seat at The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and watched a performance of Wagner's Die Valkyrie. It was good, but about 3 hours too long. I'm used to movies being too long, but it's usually a matter of thirty minutes of over-indulgence on the director's part. Watching a Germanic blow hard musically masturbate for 6 hours is tantamount to water-boarding no matter how amazing the performance. I must admit, however, the singing and orchestration was certainly thrilling, though actual wars have been started, fought and concluded in less than 6 hours.

Anyhow, the cameras are gone. I also cashed-in my only attempt at "saving for quality retirement" as the bank's advertisement referred to it: a $5,000 dollar I.R.A. account, which had been advised by my tax accountant about 3 years ago. The tax mess will get thornier this year, much thornier. I'm planning to begin a religious conversion to deal with it, but I'll hold off until the end of the fiscal year.

So, eventually I decided to rent-out a room in my apartment. Though my place is technically a one-bedroom abode, there is a small ante room which could be referred to as an office. I call it my music room, with floor to ceiling books, vinyl, cd's, cassettes, vhs tapes and dvd's. Near the room's only window sits a bad replica of an Eames chair in sky blue naugahyde which includes a matching foot rest with a missing metallic stand which I prop atop a box of books left unopened since moving into the place 8 years ago. I know it's not much of a room to offer, but there's space for a small bed, and I didn't ask much rent in return either. I just needed a few hundred dollars to help defer my end-of-month rental commitment. Hell, I've lived in tents, cars, boats and everyday I see homeless people in my neighborhood who call a slab of sidewalk pavement home. Times are tough.


Sometimes to comfort myself, I rent movies which were shot inside the Iron Curtain. Made in the 1950's through the 1980's, these films provide a backdrop of gray, spiritually bankrupt locales--any example of which Kenneth Tynan might have referred to as a "fetid yawn of a city." LOVES OF A BLONDE by Milos Forman would be an example. The musician love-interest lives with his bickering parents in a cramped apartment in Prague, his bed pushed against the wall in the common dining room/living room. Upon the arrival of a one-night stand girl from the provinces who expects to stay with him, the household is cramped even further with the musician joining his parents in their bed, allowing the girl to commandeer his sleeping space just beyond the square table and chairs used for meals. It's a story of love however, not one of deprivation. What I, at the time of my first viewing, saw as poverty has visited me 30 years later. I'm not alone in the decaying home of the brave, but this isn't the time for my usual diatribe on class war.

I rented the room to the first one who called me to look at it, a Chinese guy in his 20's whose parents live in Seattle and who has a job in a skateboard shop in Hollywood. The guy is quiet, he rarely talks to me and if he receives a call on his cell phone, he quickly takes it outdoors for privacy. He has hardly any possessions and rides his skateboard for transportation. He has told me his name on a few occasions, but I'm bad with names and I couldn't understand him very well, so for the time being I refer to him in the universal appellation of "dude."

He was with me about 2 weeks when he brought home a high-hat--one of those sets of cymbals that drummers use, mounted on a stand with a pedal that clamps the brass plates together or modulates the tone. Players also use drum sticks on them for individual effects to compliment the percussive architecture of all those drums one sees behind the guitars in a rock band. "Dude" graciously doesn't seem to play drums, but his use of the high-hat is quite enough. I'm not someone who can say if he's good or not, mostly it sounds like unique noise. But I can say that its influence on my apartment is not agreeable. Not by a long shot. I can't read, watch television, listen to the Lakers game, check my email, or shuffle through porn web sites without the steady sound of his ringing brass prosthetic of noise. It makes the extra few hundred dollars a moot point when I consider the cost of therapy that may become involved.

I've never understood people who allowed their dogs to bark uninterrupted all through the day and night, or parents who don't seem to notice that their child is screaming and has been screaming the entire time they've been in line at the bank or grocery store. I understand having a problem and not knowing how to resolve it, but these people seem to have trained themselves to neglect that there ever is a problem: the 3 Akitas with mouths tortured in snarling and fierce attack are silent to them, though everyone else on the block is imprisoned in their houses with the windows closed, their earplugs in place, humming the Star Trek Theme to counter the dogs' incessant barking. Obviously the examples are many. It gives modern living a bad name.

Anyhow, I've been tempted to ask "dude" to leave, refund the rent money he hasn't yet given to me and call it a noble failure in a communal experiment. But that seems too cold somehow. Instead, I've dragged out my digital camera and recorded him playing. I hope to put it on YouTube and instigate some interest in his talents from a local homeowner that may have living quarters more compatible with his musical expressions. A music fan with an empty garage would fit the bill, someone with a soundproof basement or maybe one of those people who own ugly mansions in the suburbs so large that the sound from one bedroom doesn't carry the football field length of distance between it and the next habitable room. Anywhere but here.



It's a little like having adopted a pet from an Animal Shelter with all the self-congratulatory pride one accumulates at those times, only to realize later that it urinates all over your bedspread at every opportunity and is incorrigible in it's rebuke at contradictory training. There are over 6 billion people on this planet certainly someone likes pets enough to ignore the stench and wet bedding involved in caretaking this pet. But who? And where to find them?

This video I've attached is my advertisement to anyone who would like to amass enough good Karma to build a backfield of Buddhas. Like the music? He can be yours. Name's "Dude." Just give me a call.

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"212 Marguerita" . . . The Hold Steady

What is it about this band? Middle-aged guys from Brooklyn by way of Minnesota doing the rock n roll life. Nasally, nerdy, graduate student-looking singer with smart lyrics and a beatnik delivery style in a time of stove pipe pants and metro cool, is a pretty interesting transgression. They certainly turn back the clock in regard to their sound as well; a neo-Spingsteen-ish quintet with classic rock hooks and a tinkly piano. They've even been known to break out an ill-advised saxophone. But instead of the urban mythologies of Jersey life, we're brought slacker musicians from a borough who seem to tour anywhere that offers an ice chest full of beer.

I don't suppose they're on any cutting edge of expanded musical horizons, but they're fun and kinda eloquent about being stupid, which is where rock lives (think Replacements in button down madras short sleeve shirts). Their fans must squeal like drunken sorority girls. If Daniel Johnston were coherent, he might write these songs. Or maybe some guy channeling Lou Reed 15 years after the Velvet Underground, on his way to an AA meeting in a back room at The Stone Pony.

Please pardon the YouTube version with the odd advertising at the end, but the quality is better than other available live versions with terrible sound and earthquake cams.

Björk interviews Arvo Pärt

In addition to the YouTube piece, I came across an interesting interview of Steve Reich from 2004 which appeared in THE GUARDIAN UK. Reich, known as an early exemplar of serial music, speaks of influences Perotin, John Coltrane, and his friend Arvo Part.
Click here for article

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Bondage Yoga

Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA from the Tennessee Williams play, directed by John Huston, 1964.


I'm not sure why I started this blog. In some measure it was probably to use up my spare time during a long stint of unemployment. However, I never understood just what a blog is designed to accomplish. I still don't. At first it was nerve-wracking trying to overcome the technical difficulties. Once those became somewhat tamed, I realized that I must maintain some degree of responsibility on the internet. If I put up sex pictures of children I go to jail (I learned that from Pete Townsend); if I write something tasteless and mean-spirited there's every reason to believe someone may use the comment box and write something even nastier pointed at me; but mostly I'm learning that there is an audience, a reader, someone other than myself. We all know Sarte's chestnut that "Hell is other people," but what does it mean? We Probably all need (or desire) to belong, be apart of something larger than ourselves. We want to be adored (as the Stone Roses say), but we want to be adored by not trying--that's the tough part. Each of us wants to be a genius of attraction. I do. But on the internet there are millions of people trying to be the one and only genius of attraction. Some are better than others.

I see blogs which combine interesting subjects, interesting photos and video clips as adjuncts to their writings. Some inform, some are humorous, some sexy, and I've even come across those who's intention is to make us all millionaires. Cool. But I'm stymied about what it is that I want to use this systematic billboard to do. Maybe I should just beg for someone that looks like Ava Gardner in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA to come and convince me that she loves me, loves my taste, loves my spirit, thinks I'm funny and that I'm not too fat. Maybe.

What I'm trying to explain is this awakening I've had that other people exist--even on the internet, and if this blog isn't to be totally selfish and exclusively ego driven, I have some obligation to an invisible and imaginary someone--that's you. Why do you put so much fucking pressure on me? I just wanted to muck around with stolen images and ideas and off-the-cuff remarks, maybe some music once in awhile. Now you want me to spell correctly, attribute each image to the source (which I never remember), be topical, witty. In short, to be in competition with everyone else who writes a blog. Oh fucking bother!

Swami Vivekananda ( 1863–1902) tells us to consider it all as Karma-Yoga (another name for work, ugh), "We see that the whole universe is working. For what? For salvation, for liberty; from the atom to the highest being, working for the one end, liberty for the mind, for the body, for the spirit. All things are always trying to get freedom, flying away from bondage." Well, uh . . . okay. He does dust off a common human polarity though: freedom vs bondage. So what's this blog to be? Who knows. But, if you see someone who looks like Ava Gardner in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, you might mention this http address. Hey how about freedom and bondage?



Obviously, not everyone flees from bondage. The BDSM underground has been an active community for decades, gay and lesbian leather players have been involved in kink at least since WWII and before. Europe has a legacy going back centuries. More recently, Japan has given the world lots of new ideas on sex, power dynamics, freedom and stricture. Shibari, the art of knots, tying, suspending with rope has become very popular in non-vanilla groups. It's a good bet that every sex shop in the world sells ropes, cuffs, collars, chains, gags, and lots of other goodies to make consensual bondage a de rigueur sideline in bedrooms and hotels everywhere.

I first saw some rope play in a Japanese Roman porn film (pink film) years back, WIFE TO BE SACRIFICED by Masaru Konuma. The film was very odd, perverse and smart. The attractions of dominant and submissive characters were original, dangerous and oddly sexy. Since then I've seen quite a few Japanese films with elements of Bondage and assorted bizarre sexcapades. The French film, ROMANCE by director Catherine Breillat was another film which used rope play attentively. I'm not really much of a Catherine Breillat fan, most of her films are boring diatribes on sexuality rather than actually sexy films of believable characters. I've always considered her someone who's been too influenced by Godard, but who never commanded his trenchant analysis, balance or artistic eye. ROMANCE, at least the sequences which involve lovers engaging in rope play, was very interesting and illuminating in a psychological depth never seen before or since in her films. Of course there are scads of porn sites and dvd's available with bondage as an integral ingredient of the kink world. It's politically incorrect to be sure, but hot sex is most often about taboos.




















Merzbow, the musical project name of Japanese noise musician Masami Akita (秋田 昌美 ,Akita Masami), has a few albums with bondage as themes. He's also a tireless author, editing magazines and writing books. He's written widely on contemporary Japanese culture, S&M and pornography. I believe he's directed some porn for Kinbiken Video, for which the album shown above, MUSIC FOR BONDAGE PERFORMANCE, was used. He tours internationally and has played with many notable noise, metal, drone and ambient musicians. In 2000, Extreme Records released a 50 cd box set of his music titled Merzbox. I like his ideas a lot, though the noise is intentionally brutal. Another Japanese noise band I've heard recently and that I like is Boris, and still another is Ghost. They take your brain to the Laundromat.



Bondage, ropes, restraints, are all tools for hardcore and theatrical sex play, but of course bondage is also a major metaphor in the arena of dominance and submissive exploration. Swami Vivekananda was a wise man, but there's much to be learned by not always fleeing physical bondage "when descending into the sex pit," as Samuel Beckett put it once--at least if partners are of like mind. Political and non-consensual bondage, well, that's a much different story. Luckily, I'm not going there today. The YouTube video from Lorde Awesome is a mystery to me, except it comes from a video artist named spacemetalizer. Nice videos.
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Sin Fang Bous

I like this video from Sin Fang Bous, which is a pseudonym for Icelandic musician Sindri Mar Sigfusson, formerly of SeaBear. Can't say I like the music as much as the artwork in the video though. The word "fey" comes to mind, or "overly innocent" in some cloying way. It was directed by Ingibjorg Birgisdottir for Morrmusic.

I suppose it reminds me of animated films I've seen before, but incorporates some Junior High School looking methods a fan might use while doodling on his/her notebook during a boring lecture. That in itself encapsulates an integral element of pop music: youth and a huge desire to escape boredom. I'd like to see the artists who were involved create a Main Title for a movie. Though I probably wouldn't see it when it hit the theaters. Scott Foundas would give it a rave review in the LA Weekly because it was directed by some Hollywood kingpin's granddaughter; and there would be pop-up movie trailers on internet sites, which annoy me; maybe even ads on that terrible LED outdoor billboard that rises above the auto repair shop adjacent to Spaceland here in Silverlake. That would certainly insure that I'd never see the movie. But maybe the main title would be cool. We have to take any little appreciation we can find don't we?


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Songs For Drella

The other day I was in a bookstore on Vermont, a rather hip bookstore, and was taken aback by all the images one is confronted with while browsing. The store has a large supply of current magazines: art, fashion, music, film, literary. It was heady and uncomfortable to see all those professional photos, designs, ads staring out at me. In the world at large, how many are published each month? Millions? To what avail? Ultimately selling stuff, or informing the ignorant? What value does a published photo have and what is its life expectancy?

I like images a lot. Merely walking the neighborhood, seeing Liquor store signs, graffiti, half-torn political action posters, hand drawn flyers for lost pets, pasted ads for upcoming concerts . . . well, you get the picture. Lots to look at. But in the bookstore, the images seemed featured in some more hallowed way--not quite a gallery wall, but not stapled to a telephone pole either. Anyway, the sheer quantity of eye candy is kinda staggering. How much input can we take until our brains get overly cluttered and quit paying attention? I think Andy Warhol might have had some ideas on the subject.

Past the magazines and expensive art books were shelves of music books from the 33 1/3 imprint, a collection edited by David Barker for Continuum Books. Each book is about one influential record album, written by one author. Though I've only read a few, they are fun and filled with more contemporary information than I care to research on my own, though I'm glad someone (the writer) is excited enough to do so. They cover some great titles by some interesting bands. I wondered what albums I think are interesting enough which haven't already been covered by the 33 1/3 aegis. One I came up with is SONGS FOR DRELLA by Lou Reed and John Cale. It's essentially a thematic song cycle in memory of their mentor Andy Warhol. The name Drella is a conjunction of "Dracula" and "Cinderella," and was a nickname for Andy Warhol used by intimates (or so I read).

It was released in 1990, but prior to the studio version the songs had been played by Reed and Cale in two live shows in Brooklyn in late 1989, comminssioned by The Brooklyn Academy Of Music and The Arts At St. Ann's. One of the shows was filmed by Ed Lachman, a masterful Director of Photography who has lensed many interesting films and art projects. If you can find it, I recommend the video as a great way to essentially "watch" the album. Years back I had a coveted cassette of SONGS FOR DRELLA which I kept in my car and played over and over. The music is an insight into Andy Warhol's personal life, his career and the myth that he carefully created as an adjunct to his art work. But that alone doesn't make for a great album, the songs themselves and the duo's music is precise, adventurous, balanced, and yet quirky. Cale plays keyboards and viola, Reed plays guitar. Both sing. The songs don't seem like collaborations, but a mixture of two independent voices which remain insistent on their ideosyncratic styles. Of course they played together in the heyday of the Velvet Underground and afterward for a time with Nico, but each had been conducting a solo career since the late 1960's. They also seem to disagree on musical paths, which makes this album so interesting. You can hear the clashing of styles and yet the communion of efforts, one supposes, in deference to the importance of their memorial goal, that being a personal paean to a man they admired and respected, Andy Warhol. I love this album.
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Lee Scratch Perry is talking L-O-V-E . . . I think.

Lee Scratch Perry interview at Amoeba Records

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Jump On That Washboard

The Washboard Serenaders, 1934


Liberace playing Dixie

When I was a kid growing up in Sherman Oaks, we never saw Black people, never. Except for one Rams game at the Coliseum, or one Stars game at Wrigley Field, I don't think I saw a Black guy until high school. I believe there were one or two upperclassmen at my school, but they graduated before I ever spoke with them. It was an all boys' Catholic school and we did have a teaching Brother of the Holy Cross who was a black man, Brother Joseph. I also remember seeing some members of SNCC (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) at a cardboard table in front of Bullocks Department Store on one occasion. They were dressed like preppy college students and were answering questions and giving literature about civil rights marches and voter registration in the Deep South. I remember being impressed by the romantic notion of underdogs fighting for their rights against severely lopsided odds. On our block we probably called them Niggers or Spooks until the mid 1960's. We also called Jews, "Kikes," Chicanos we referred to as "Beaners," there were "Japs," "Chinks," "Spics," and "Greasers." as well. Casting your fishing line at a lake with a float was called Nigger Fishin', and Brazil nuts were known to me as Nigger Toes. Forget that Uncle Remus was on television on Sunday nights and Aunt Jemima was our dream maid/slave.

At my High School we played organized sports in a Catholic league. Some schools ranged as far as Long Beach, East L.A. and Downtown L.A. Before Friday night football games, There would be a pep rally in the auditorium. The cheerleaders and pep club would make banners on butcher paper and hang them around the gym, and later use them at the game displayed on the bleachers. One school which was Downtown and had many Black and Chicano boys playing were the Cathedral Phantoms. We called them the "Spooks," and had cheers "Kill the Spooks," along with similar sayings on the butcher paper banners. Once a hooded white-sheeted figure was even hung in effigy at a rally. Yes, this was a Catholic school in the San Fernando Valley. This would be the early 1960's. In a few years many of us would graduate, join the Army and kill the Gooks.


Why do I even bring any of this up? Maybe just to remind myself where I originated and how. Certainly on television I saw some Black people: entertainers mostly, many of them were accessories in old movies playing maids, slaves, tap-dancers and bug-eyed comedians. By the mid 1960's Dance programs like Soul Train which broadcast from Chicago and then Los Angeles certainly had Black teenagers, but it was left to music and sports--always music and sports. During these same years the Watts riots occurred (1965). I remember one night borrowing my folks station wagon and taking a girl up to the Hollywood Hills. We found a vantage point and watched as South Central L.A. burned far below. I had a stolen cat-gut guitar and was singing early Bob Dylan songs to impress my date. The flaming streets of Watts and South Central were merely a fortuitous backdrop.

Where does systemic racism come from? From people like me I'm afraid. As far as I can see, American social and economic climates during my formative years were solidly racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and class-based. I grew up feeling somehow superior to people I didn't even know. As a White, Male, Christian, Middle-Class, educated American, I felt superior to almost everyone--everyone, that is, except the wealthy, who I grew to despise. I took what we call "advantages" for granted. It never dawned on me that my grandmother was a maid in a Los Feliz mansion, that my grandfather was a house painter and had previously worked at a garden nursery in San Fernando. I'm told my paternal Irish grandfather was often an unemployed salesman with a taste for liquor who died early and left my maternal grandma to live in a small two bedroom apartment with her mother, my great aunt, and her husband. They had followed us from Chicago when my parents moved to Southern California. I often saw my grandmother working at the local pharmacy as a clerk, and later at a cigar and cigarette shop across the street from my high school. There were years my father worked two jobs to make ends meet; and my mother spent some years of my upbringing working a graveyard shift so that she could be home during the day and attend to her 5 kids when we returned from school. I never had any money and began shoplifting clothes and incidentals at an early age. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that I felt endowed with any special privileges which would mark me as singularly special. I was a mutt. But the climate of 1950's America when I grew up was one of suburbs and the unspoken lust for success. Everyone looked for an edge to help carry them up that ladder. Racism was a tonic for white people. Anti-Semitism was a course in Christian fundamentalist ethics, after all, Catholics taught and perhaps still teach that anyone not baptized is condemned to never enter Heaven. Jews were being punished for killing Christ and for the other stereotypes grown into dogma spanning the last 2000 years--unless one needed a doctor or lawyer of course. Competition demands that we twist our method of looking at those we are vying against. We had the Cold War to use as a blackboard of instruction on how to hate others for no good reason, but hate them we did. And each Sputnik launch, or Olympic competition, or Cuban Missile showdown, or Berlin Wall controversy engendered our ability to depend only on "our kind." The space race and nuclear armament deployment were our training in social consciousness. We were selfish, hate-filled, duplicitous global citizens to be feared, and continue to be so.


So, even today I can't say that I'm immune from these ills of difference. I don't believe people who say otherwise. I've heard men talk about women, I've heard Christians or agnostics talk about Jews, I've heard Christians talk about Muslims, I've heard Jews talk about Muslims, I've heard White people talk about people "of color." So when I see Liberace on an old clip from his television show singing "Dixie" with all the anemic blood of a soulless white entertainer, it reminds me where I come from. We watched Perry Como, Lawrence Welk, Ed Sullivan, Andy Williams. The city was constructed of zones or cantons where color codes were strictly delineated, policed either legally or by subterfuge.

I've often heard well-meaning people my age agree that our youth was distorted by a certain lack of perspective, but that the 1960's had somehow alleviated our poor vision. These same people may also have you believe that they were at Woodstock and shared a joint with Abby Hoffman in Chicago at the Democratic Convention in 1968. The myth of the 1960's is just that--a myth. The ones who marched in the streets of large demonstrations usually did so for entertainment and often long after any danger had passed. The dangerous civil protests took place in the South, and those marches were populated by much smaller and more committed crowds than the anti-war marches which came later. Remember that the actual ramrod of the Civil Rights movement in the halls of Washington was not Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Bobby Kennedy, Stokely Carmichael,or Malcolm X. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a hard-nosed, White, Southern, Conservative Democrat and probable racist himself. A man who gave no more interest to racial equality than he did to killing hundreds of thousands of Asian civilians in Vietnam. The Civil Rights legislation was a matter of political expediency. True, the country made some positive changes during that era, due largely to some of those advocates listed above, but the underlining racism continued. I think certain celebrities were iconic in our small liberalizing evolution: Richard Prior being one, Muhammad Ali another, Dick Gregory, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and others. However,even now with a Black American President we would be foolish to think that the government is by any means different than it was under Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Carter, Reagan or Nixon. Capitalism runs our lives, divisive antagonisms run our social orders. We trot out token examples of equality, but refuse to acknowledge our prison system, our judicial system, and currently our Federal abuses against Muslims regardless of evidence or habeas corpus. An American politician, no matter the color, gender, religion, or up-bringing, has entered a pit of unscrupulous cronyism and indebtedness to the powerful. A wise man once called them "cheerleaders of capitalism." Unless we change the corrupt system which elected them to office and which defines them, there is no possibility for a government who's mission is to aid and protect its citizens under equality. Obama is Bush.

Gay and Lesbian politics has made larger inroads partly because it straddles the economic classes of wealth, race and gender. It skirts a heterodoxy because it is a preferential exclusion whose numbers have grown large within the confines of original groups. That is, a gay, white, professional man or lesbian woman that was born and raised in prior classifications has already been accepted or rejected by the old battle lines. A gay infant isn't born into hatred, because they haven't chosen their sexual preferences yet, whereas systemic racism involves the infant even before birth. Pregnancy and birth rate being chestnuts which are often tossed into the fire by the Conservative Right to attack America's ethnic minorities. This excludes the argument of genetic disposition to same-gender sexuality, but I've never believed it's an altogether important distinction. Though certainly there is suspicion and inequality in the view of our dominant culture toward "queers" regardless of their age.

As for the YouTube music clip of The Washboard Serenaders from the early 1930's, didn't they rock? Wasn't there an infectious groundswell of emotion in the kazoo and washboard, and a Jazzy/Jive coolness to the piano and vocals. Fuck racism, fuck superiority, fuck terminal self-involvement--LET'S DANCE!

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Strawberry Season

They look like little bloody hearts: strawberries. In fact, the image is equally as weighty in my personal preference as the taste. The taste is not so much different from very sweet blood, especially those that are picked at the peak of their season—late Spring, early Summer. Each one looks like it should have a tiny hammer and sickle in its side, it’s a proletariat treat and currently you can purchase a box at the .99 cent store. That’s right, for the last few weeks, good strawberries grown here in California have been available for a buck. Life is good.

As a kid, it wasn’t chocolate that I preferred, but strawberry. I remember that as a very special gift, my mom might buy us powdered strawberry to add to our milk. After school we would return home and flip on the television (fuck homework, we were free), and either my sister or I would concoct some of those strawberry drinks. Of course they had nothing to do with actual fresh strawberries, the chemical powder was a laboratory experiment in commerce, but it was pink and sweet and special. Not the muddy, oily murk of chocolate sauce staring back at us from the bottom of the glass, but lighter, almost as if they’d captured some essence of Spring—the short haul before Summer’s desultory harnesslessness.

It went for everything, my preference for strawberry, but especially ice cream. When my mother brought home those rectangular boxes of cheap Von’s ice cream, she had 5 kids to consider and so Neapolitan was her compromise. You know those vertically layered triplets of Vanilla, Strawberry and Chocolate: they were the Holy Trinity of flavors-- a metaphorical sermon on sacrifice and reward. I’d have to dig around the bordering flavors to scoop the rose heart from the center of the container, leaving the tasteless bean-derived Vanilla and Chocolate to my unknowing siblings. Think about it a second, would you rather a gooey, sticky cold taste of berries, or the brackish, hard aftertaste of crushed beans? I distanced myself from the rest of my family, I exhibited a rarefied knowledge of the “better things.” Strawberry was definitely not for dopes. I need only mention Strawberry Pop-Tarts to prove my point.

Years swept by:

*Strawberry Alarm Clock a band I once saw in a gym in 1967 complete with a “light show.” It contained the guy who now plays guitar in I SEE HAWKS IN L.A.
*Strawberry Statement with Kim Darby, Bruce Davison, Bud Cort (1970). Made me want to move to Berkeley, smoke pot and protest.
*Strawberry Fields Forever, Beatles
*Daryl Strawberry, troubled slugger on the tolerated Mets and the hated Dodgers
*Strawberry Shortcake Doll for my daughter
*Strawberry Switchblade, a Scottish girl band from the 80’s who had a hit, “Since Yesterday.” The song was played on the soundtrack for the 2006 Brit film THIS IS ENGLAND by Shane Meadows. Good movie.
*“Strawberry” a song by Boss Hog on that album where a girl in silhouette holds an umbrella
* As I recall “strawberry” was also a street term for a crack whore.
*Strawberry Panic, a Japanese manga about 3 exclusive girl's schools and the lesbian love affairs of the students. I think it's for kids, kinda.

But my best memories of strawberries came after I moved from Los Angeles to Ventura. Anyone who knows agriculture knows Ventura and its adjacent town of Oxnard. The BEST strawberries ever grown are from the fields of Ventura and Oxnard. Driving the back roads through the fields, one can always come upon a fresh fruit stand where some of that day’s pickings are offered for sale at very reasonable prices. They sell other fruits and vegetables in season, but it’s the strawberry season, especially the peak strawberry season that is important. Oxnard even has an annual Strawberry Festival Fair that was once probably an interesting event, growing out of the farmers' and buyers' pride in their product. Unfortunately, since then it's deteriorated into a crass money grab, you know the scheme: $10.00 to park, $10.00 admittance, a few rides for the kids but mostly booths run by the same people you see at the street fairs, Summer Days fair, art walks etc. Lots of wind chimes, portable kitchens selling teriyaki bowls, and tie-dyed t-shirts for the kiddies with a big bright strawberry in the center. The best souvenir we ever walked away with was a pop-gun for my son. It was memorable because our family was against all war toys, to the strident extent that I actually snipped the rifles and six-guns from the little plastic “Cowboys and Indians” set which I gave my son for Christmas one year. The pop-gun was hand-made from wood and shot a cork from its muzzle which was tied to a string. It seemed a piece of 1920’s Americana and I was beginning to feel pretty silly at the degree to which we had tried to hide guns from the children's lives. We’d lost balance somehow. The gun was cool.

Yes, Ventura’s fresh strawberries were plentiful, inexpensive and delicious. Luckily, Blake, my unmarried mate, lover, and mother of my son was an amazing pie-maker. She liked to experiment while in the kitchen, which wasn’t always successful when dealing with some dishes, but her home-made fruit pies were the stuff of gastronomic hallelujahs. And the funny thing was that she’d knock them out with seeming ease and frequency. The crusts were that late Summer color seen in the tall grasses which grew on the hillsides on the road to Ojai, and maybe included a spattering of darker rust here and there where she had brushed the top with soft butter midway through the pie’s exposure in the oven. The house smelled like a good J.D. Salinger story and she usually played some contemporary Klezmer music on the stereo, or practiced her piano or clarinet skills while waiting for the baked goods to cool. Strawberries were my favorite. The warm juices and molten sugar permeated the bottom crust so that a slice usually leaked a tiny amount onto the plate. The juice tasted of a Jean Giono novel from Provence, there was an earthy bite to the sweet berries and the perfect crust. I don’t know baking, I merely know eating, however I believe that the crust is of key importance to any pie or baked good. Blake had some mysterious proficiency with her crusts which never once failed. Never once. With the exception of the children’s good grades, it was one of the only constants of those years--Blake’s pies.

For every instant, and every bite of those pies I am truly grateful. Life has changed, Ventura has changed, times and situations have taken on a multitude of directions which are different than those years we lived in Ventura. I’ll always be thankful for them, and even these lesser strawberries I buy at the .99 cent store trigger memories I keep in some crypto-transcendental wallet where good times are always available. Bloody hearts they are.





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While We Were At Bible Camp

This was the deacon who showed us around the camp.
He gave me the creeps



















This is the cabin Sandra and Jasmine slept in. There was no electricity but it was close to the shore.















The boys had cabins on the other side.
Here's one that Matt and Van shared.
Van played the guitar too.
















If you stood up on the desk you could see the water out of the window. It rained and leaked.

So Many Great Images Heading For The Trash