The Oct. 5 Blackbird Wine Shop First Wednesday reading was conceived as a celebration of Round Bend authors. Throughout Sept., as the event grew closer, I made occasional reference to it here and, a bit earlier, here.
I fretted over a lineup cut in half because neither K.C. Bacon nor Bill Deemer could be in attendance.
Oh well...
A week prior to the Blackbird gig, I recalled a reading I attended at the San Francisco Public Library in 1976 featuring Charles Bukowski.
It's 36 years later and I'm still under the influence of that night.
I was no Bukowski at the Blackbird reading and CD was no CD as he struggled with a voice ravaged by the flu.
We struggled through it in front of a sparse crowd on a stormy night, aided by Charles Lucas, who read from the Cold Eye anthology, ably handling the tough poems of Sam White and Mark Wilson, among others.
Lucas happened to be available for the reading because we were heavily involved at the time with piecing together his art book, a project I was growing increasingly confident in as it evolved.
While working with Lucas on Ubiquitous Serpentine, I began showing Buddy Dooley’s Paintbox/Clipart from his book Yes, But You Don't Understand!.
I explained the genesis of that odd book here, noting that Buddy’s propensity for keeping it real and “childlike” gives him considerable merit in an art world that otherwise doesn’t know him as anything but the cantankerous sometimes friend of Round Bend.
October was fading away when a bit of good news arrived--CD garnered a nice review of In My Old Age from former Oregonian theatre critic Bob Hicks, an ally from the art wars of the ‘80s.
In early November I announced the publication of Lucas’s Ubiquitous Serpentine.
(to be continued)
TS
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