the soft balloon

behind me in the safeway café
a man spends his days
talking to an imaginary god

i listen to him
tracing his words with
my plastic fork

shoveling shrimp and
black olives into my mug

this morning he
is especially lucid
measuring his orations
with mumbled verses

calling out the police
and the cleaning lady
digressing into a magical
realm of personable
incantation

did anyone know
if the sun might die
when he waved a hand
and cried die sun?

had i heard of
sasquatch and d.b. cooper
a wild pair north of here
roaming the woods?

he was quiet for
a moment
reflecting on the chime
of his words

you do not know
he said and
fell silent again
before lifting himself up
like a soft balloon and
drifting outdoors

to talk to
another god
another stranger
in the rain


TS

Restaurant Work

Because my avocation is to address the cause of the underclasses as I swoop through the universe, reigning terror on the ruling class and fighting the good fight for justice, I'll occasionally write about real work.

You see, I have had many a job, and with few exceptions I have loathed them and the people I worked for (call me a malcontent; friends have and I respect their honesty). The worst of the worst jobs have been in the restaurant trade.

It is there that I have met some of the most ignoble swine that I have been unfortunate enough to run across.

The jealousy and outright pettiness inherent in the restaurant business is at times ludicrous. The skulduggery is morally corrupt.

Ownership can be a good thing. I'm all for small businesses, the artisans struggling to stay afloat in a marginal business that reflects their love for their venture. But even they are susceptible to the vagaries of power.

You have two choices when confronted with the fiendish capitalist. Swallow your pride and take it in the ass like a commoner, or fight back.

I tend to fight back, usually throwing in a few choice words to please my attention-starved ego and make myself clear simultaneously.

I once worked for a well-known jazz club owner in Portland. One time he charged me twenty-dollars out of my under-the-table wages because I accidentally poked a finger in a chocolate cake as I scrounged around the club's walk-in, trying to find an item. He withheld my money and used the cake anyway. No one noticed the small puncture I'd made, the cake was devoured, everybody seemed happy.

I didn't go in the next day. He had the audacity to call me and leave a message, in a cheerful voice, "Hey, where are you. You're late!"

I know for a fact he did not pay twenty bucks for that cake, the fucking swine.

I got into it once with a stupid general manager, recently hired at a place where I'd run the kitchen for seven years. He was too dumb to see things were fine, business was fine. He thought he might tinker with things. He asked me to write a new menu. I did and gave it to him. What happened next is an example of the petty bullshit which often accompanies the trade. The GM gave the menu draft to a friend at a local community college. That guy typed it up, printed it, and gave the GM a very low-end invoice. That was the point. My GM set out to save the company money. He thought he was really on the ball about it.

Problem. The new menu had twenty typos and misspellings in it. It was awful, barely decipherable, way below commonly-known restaurant standards. I mean come on, you want the damn menu to read like the kitchen manager (me) can spell soup (not soop), as well as make one.

(If you find typos in this blog, poor syntax, misspellings, remember you're not eating here and paying money.)

I asked the GM to send the menu back. He refused on the grounds that he'd already paid for the printing and he couldn't possibly reprint it. Too costly.

Too stupid.

Our relationship went down hill from there and he fired me. In turn, he was fired by the clueless owner three months later. To his credit, the owner finally figured out he had a dumb shit on his hands.

I later saw my ex-GM at a mutual friend's wake, and told him he'd screwed up. Without admitting it, he said, "I thought about that."

That was startling. He thought about it too late. The fucking swine.

I have more of these disgruntled musings. I'll share some of them with you along the road, unless you tell me you don't want to hear it.

No wait, I take that back. I'll write what I damn well please.

P.S. There is but one side to any story I tell you. Mine. I do not deal in half-truths as I soar in the stratosphere, seeking vengeance against the guilty and malignant boobs I have met in my life.



TS

Rene Denfeld

"Jessica Kate Williams was 22 years old and homeless when allegedly 12 other homeless youth and young adults repeatedly stabbed her, set her on fire, and left her to die under a Portland, Oregon bridge on May 23, 2003."

So Rev. Chuck Currie quoted himself in in 2007, as Rene Denfeld's controversial All God's Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families hit bookstore shelves.

Rev. Currie and others working in the homeless-youth-services trade, a growth industry in the '90s (like prisons today), were appalled by Denfeld's supposed sweeping generalizations of homeless kids painted violent and irredeemable.

(I'm reading the book now, and frankly I don't know what to think of it yet; it's riveting and well-drawn at least).

I do have a few early hunches.

Denfeld's book seems a formulaic journalistic exercise in its scope, a micro examination of a complex issue, which is fine. Inasmuch as the book focuses on one particularly violent street family and its murderous, Manson-like degenerate leaders, a sub-subculture of a larger culture (homelessness in general), one may understand the clerics' and service-groups' apprehensions about the book.

The vast majority of homeless youth is unaffiliated with ultra-violence, and I think Denfeld managed to cover her bases regarding that fact. She plunged ahead with her story, perhaps overstating the breadth of the subject. Though her intentions are laudable, as she draws attention to one segment of a growing social problem, it's difficult to imagine how to eradicate child homelessness in the U.S. without overthrowing our present orthodoxy.

Denfeld doesn't touch that one (yet, in my reading), perhaps because it isn't within her journalistic scope. Such redress would have created an altogether different kind of book, of course.

As it is written we get something less than a socioeconomic analysis, with sensational underpinnings.

Neither do the youth advocates and clerics touch the dominate paradigm; the good-hearted ones are brave and making real effort against a systemic ogre. But they're poking a stick at a gigantic, two-headed version.

The murder of Jessica Kate Williams and Denfeld's expose drew worldwide scrutiny in 2007. In my early reading of the book, which I began last night, I think the author has accomplished something important--she has set the table for a lasting debate.

Whether that debate resides in the present orthodoxy or propels a new agenda remains to be seen.

I wish I'd read this book earlier.


TS

A Fan's Notes

One evening in 1979, in Portland's well-known Goose Hollow Inn, Peter Fritch told me about a book he'd recently finished called A Fan's Notes, by a writer named Frederick Exley.

Pete was a favorite customer of mine in the Goose, where I worked at the time, and I listened closely to his description of the novel.

He gave me a brief summary of the story, about a guy obsessed with Frank Gifford, the ex-USC and New York Giants football star, whom I knew about naturally enough because I grew up watching him play in news reels and on television.

Pete told me the first-person narrator in the book was a drunken madman, likely Exley embellishing autobiographical scenes from his life. You must read this book, Pete said.

The narrator fails at work and in marriage, obsesses about Gifford, drinks relentlessly, and repeatedly finds himself institutionalized for mental illness, Pete further informed me.

And, by the way, its funny, he said.

Pete's description of the novel struck me immediately as an interesting premise for a story.

As a kid just a decade earlier, I'd worshipped Joe Namath, the New York Jet whom famously predicted victory against the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. I owned a poster of Namath, resplendent in his clean green and white uniform, dropping back to pass. Scanning down field for his sure-handed receiver Don Maynard, daubs of black shoe polish under his eyes, the curls of his longish, dark hair protruding from the back of his helmet, he seemed God-like.

And this killed me. He wore white shoes. Namath was the first player to aver that the three elixirs--Johnny Walker Scotch, white shoes, and long fur coats--combined to help create his greatness.

Along with the strongest arm to ever play professional football, until Dan Marino and John Elway came along.

It hadn't occurred to me to write a novel with Broadway Joe as a central character though, but as I would eventually come to realize, I hadn't an ounce of Frederick Exley's talent and imagination.

Exley was, quite simply, a great writer. His reputation rests on the extraordinary book my friend Pete turned me on to, and two others that weren't as well received by his critics (his biographer Jonathan Yardley calls him a "one-book" novelist).

I won't dispute that. I haven't read Exley's other two books, but I'm of the opinion that if an author writes one great classic a shrine shall be reserved for that writer, and he or she shall have everlasting life.

Frederick Exley died after his long fight with alcohol and depression in 1992. He was 65.



TS

The Big Three and Travis McGee

It isn't always heavy-duty lit with me, day in and day out, studying the social and historical questions, banging away at injustice, insulting right-wingers, offering practical jokes and lame humor.

I'm about much more than that, folks.

Sometimes I stick my nose into a special kind of book and it stays there for hours, giving me enormous pleasure. When I do this I don't have to retrace a paragraph, consult footnotes, digress into arcane asides and associated minutiae.

All I have to do is enjoy the ride.

I may read the book through in one sitting, or forsake sleep to finish it. I'm hooked by the end of the first line, and I read the book cover to cover, the cleverness of the writing and the story reeling me in.

I'm helpless because the dialogue is riveting, often in the vernacular of the street, and the story unfolds with an organic seamlessness that cries perfection. That perfection resembles street poetry, real language captured by the recorder-like minds of a few genre specialists.

Newspaper types refer to this sort of indulgence as "summer reading," or "a guilty pleasure," or "pure escapism." They sell it short.

I call it reading Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain.

They are the big three in my mind, heirs to the Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald (pictured) school of hard-boiled righteousness.

Their anti-hero protagonists are detectives, private and public, realists, cynical, flawed and mystique-driven. They have a healthy respect for violence, unleashing it only if the situation commands it.

They get nicked-up, turn an ankle here and there, bleed, but they don't die. Their unfortunate clients aren't always as lucky, or smart.

Of the big three, Leonard is the only one still with us, and he's 85. McBain died in 2005. Parker died just a few months ago.

I'll miss Leonard when he finally departs. He may be the best of them all, and the funniest. But all of them enrich my days and nights.

Read the eulogy for Robert B. Parker by his son David Parker here.


TS

College Football

I used to be a big sports nut. I still am to an extent, but not the way I was as a youngster and into my twenties. I think my interest may have dropped off after I quit playing the games. I was disappointed I wasn't good enough to make it all the way to the big leagues in baseball, or the NFL or NBA. So sports lost some sheen for me eventually. At various times it might pick up again, off and on. I get absorbed in a World Series, or NBA playoffs, for instance.

I never really cared too much for the Super Bowl after Joe Namath retired. Broadway Joe. Drunken Joe tried to kiss Suzy Kobler on TV once. Pretty funny. Joe says he hasn't drank since then. Took stock of his life and all. Still, pretty funny.

I liked the San Diego Chargers in the seventies. They never made it to the Super Bowl, so I didn't have to break my disinterest in that hyped up madness.

I'd had a few classes with Dan Fouts at Oregon when he played there. He was a smart, friendly guy, so I followed his pro career pretty closely. Air Coryell, they called it back in the day. Pass, pass again. Pass once again. Then pass it. Fouts could really fling it around. Guy drank a lot of beer, too. In college, I'd see him at parties with a good looking girl on each arm. Then a couple more might come up to him. Give him a beer. Tryin' the magic on him.

I mosied along, wishing I could be a great quarterback.

I played the line, small college. Got the crap kicked out of me a few times. But I could dish it out, too. I learned how to cheat. An offensive lineman, right guard, I learned how to hold big time. I often got away with it. There's a technique for doing it right. But I do believe refs watch for it more these days. It may not be as easy as it once was.

Here's one thing I've noticed about football. Everybody is bigger now. And faster, particularly the really big guys.

I have great memories of the game, going down on a kickoff and hitting a return man so hard the ball flew 20 feet into the air. A teammate picked it off when it came down and strolled into the end zone for an easy defensive TD.

And I recovered a teammate's fumble once in open space, pulling to the left to block, thought I might score. Everything was in slow motion.

The great athletes talk about that, how time suspends when they're in a "zone." Feels like everything is in front of you, you're not moving very fast, but you're actually moving very quickly.

Michael Jordon used to talk about that.

Announcers say, "He's in a zone!" describing a series of great plays by a performer. You've played sports, you know what it is if you've been there.

Well, I was never really in the zone. I was just naturally slow. What I felt, the non-suspension of time, is what everybody saw with their own eyes, because that is what actually happened.

I couldn't run very fast at all. That's why I played the line at 190. If I'd had wheels, I could have been a helluva receiver, because I had glue-hands.

But Miss Piggy could have covered my routes as things were.

One coach told me, "Build yourself up." I had technique, I knew how to play the line. I was undersized, even for small college ball. I couldn't do it, I hated lifting weights. It might have worked, I often wonder about it.

But I had other reasons for dropping athletics. They were cultural, political. I played in the era of dissent. I couldn't identify with the jock mentality, never really. I just loved the game. I could take or leave most of my football playing friends. Well, not friends, but teammates.

There may have been a few others on that football team who attended a morning football practice before heading off to the anti-war protest in the afternoon, but I can't remember them.

It was definitely a different era, and I, admittedly, was kind of an oddball.

But, like I say, I still love to watch college football, and my team is still Oregon. It upset me to see Jeremiah Masoli mess up so badly months back.

Can you imagine the stupidity of that? Come on, you're likely going to win the Heisman Trophy, or at least be in contention for it, and you make that choice, to steal a lap top? That choice?

My God...

Only thing a Heisman winner ever did dumber than that was kill two people, slashed them to pieces.

Orenthal James Simpson was a hero of mine once upon a time.


TS

P.S. I should explain the photo above. That's Oregon's Super Sophomore All-America Kick Returner, Kenjon Barner, beating down some woeful would-be UCLA tackler on his way to another astonishing return at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena last season. My buddy Charles Deemer grew up near the Rose Bowl, and he can't explain UCLA's ineptness of late, though fortunately for him he attended both schools, and therefore doesn't feel bad when one of his teams loses.

Henry Miller

I think Henry Miller influenced me when I found him:

"Since he eschews any importance at all to political movements, Miller feels free to say nearly anything in the way of criticizing the system. Many of his comments appear irresponsible. When he meets an ex-con on a train, Miller and his traveling companion later track him down to see if they can be of help to him. Miller fulminates that we are all as guilty as the ex-con, who has a heart after all, and that prisons only develop the criminal skills of his inhabitants. This is typical Miller: he does point out some of the worst aspects of the criminal justice system (as he does in other books), but of course cannot offer any practical alternative. He has only the idealists’ wish that war and crime would go away, and he apportions blame to society for causing these evils, and using naked force to maintain a corrupt society."

It's Dan Geddes critiquing Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, one of my favorites in Miller's great canon. Like most young American males, I absorbed as much of Miller's rarefied prose as I could when I discovered him. I admired his chainsaw dissection of everything, his energy and crisp, straight-ahead style.

Put him in the hero column of my table of Heroes and Villains.

Miller ground it out, in the best sense of the word.

I knew many women loathed Miller, so I was pleased to see Erica Jong embrace him years ago. She became his great friend and protector. Of course, many women thought Miller a misogynist, but I never understood that, and neither did Jong. I think she opened a lot of minds about Miller over time. She knew he worshipped women.

His provocative writing was designed to cut off the heads of the moralists, of which America has always had plenty. That's why he loved Europe in the thirties. He was free there, to write and say what he wanted without worrying about what others believed.

Naturally, his early books were banned in his own country.

Many people still only know Miller as the dirty book-writer. Sexus has, er, a lot of sex, it's true. It's great imaginative sex, too. The sex only a few lucky people (a few million) ever witness or indulge in. Most people have Milleresque fantasies, but they take them into confession and cleanse them, or hide them behind veils of propriety. We're strange creatures, annihilating our animal instincts.

Well, some of us. You never know about someone until you know. Clinton can't say it, but you just know Monica gave good head.

Jesus, Bill. We'll never forget you.

All that aside, Miller's best books weren't always lectures on sexuality. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is a a stunning travelogue of America, a place that hasn't changed in its mental recesses since Miller wrote the book, in 1945. The Colossus of Maroussi is another travel book, on Greece. Neither book is your run-of-the-mill travelogue, because Miller was a combustible writer. His ideas sprawled in every direction, but his control was masterful in the end.

But my absolute favorite? Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, a very personal book about marriage, family, and friendship, given in the spirit of a gift to his readers.

I revisit Miller all the time. He never grows old.

Here is a nice essay on Colossus.


TS

Sick 'em Chris Hedges!**

Americans read this book and took it to heart, throwing John McCain and Sarah Stalin to the curb in '08. The bee in a bonnet effect subsequently kicked in, when the right pumped up its claims that Obama is not an American and has a socialist agenda, outright lies that essentially mask the racism afflicting the most fanatical Christians .

Much of the right denies its racism, but they deny reality in general, in favor of the supernatural comforter they've drawn over their heads as they doze in perpetuity.

Like many, I am disappointed in Obama while understanding many of the compromises he's been forced to endure. Like any elite politician, he is beholden to the corporate gods, but any sensible person knew that going in. We're talking mere degrees of acceptability with Obama; until the second American Revolution arrives at he end of the the twenty-first century-- you can only estimate these things!--politicians like him will hold the center as best as can be expected.

It may surprise you, but I don't have a lot of faith in the system.

Seriously, Frank's book is excellent, a cogent reminder of where we were with GWB at the helm, and where we'll be if some shit clown like Palin or Mitt Romney takes control.

Which brings me to this, the highly excitable Chris Hedges rhapsodizing about the fascist somnambulists living among us ordinary Americans.

Somnambulist was one of Henry Miller's favorite words to describe the uninitiated. I use it here in homage.

**Sick, as in twisted.

TS

I Did Not Go To Vietnam

Today is the sixty-sixth anniversary of D-Day, and the Greatest Generation is rapidly dwindling. We understand that fascism needed to be stopped, and we rightfully thank the many Americans who made it happen.

Few Americans would disagree with that sentiment. Or this one: Had Hitler's racism been confronted before his war machine was fully revitalized, he may have been stopped cold shortly after seizing power in 1933.

Hindsight is beautiful. We can and do learn from it at times.

That said, if you have followed this blog with even passing interest, you understand that I believe war is folly. Barbara Tuchman’s history of war, The March of Folly, is a fine book, its title catchy and to the point. Wars, even the necessary ones, are folly.

Rudimentarily, we know why wars happen. We know they spring from inhumane impulses and ignorance. We know the corrupting nature of avarice and the geopolitical realities that propel conflict. We know that the lust for power is systemic, and that unrestrained nationalism plays a role.

At this late date, we understand the psychology of war.

But none of that sufficiently explains the neocolonialist impulse that sprang from post-World War II realities, particularly in the U.S. and Russia.

That impulse sat in front of us like a meal of strychnine laced with rat poison, yet we bit it off and chewed it down to a swallowable mass.

France clung to Indochina, and was routed by a people seeking the ideal we supposedly fought for in Europe--actual freedom.

The hypocrisy was astonishing to Graham Green, worthy of a novel, The Quiet American. Greene had seen the brutality of the French close-up in Vietnam, reporting for the London Times and Le Figaro. In creating quiet Alden Pyle, the naive and privileged American, Green wasn't about to let American treachery off the hook in 1955.

A decade later, the U.S. was in the shit up to its eyebrows in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands, South Vietnam.

Only fifteen at the time, I wasn't there. My brother, however, had served in Vietnam, in 1963 and 1964, building landing strips near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam. At the time, his unit couldn't return fire when in-coming mortar rounds crashed inside his Marine battalion's position. You see, America was not yet officially in the war, although Americans were being killed.

Ia Drang changed that.

After I graduated from high school, in 1969, I moved to Ashland, Oregon, to attend college and play football. My school counselor had suggested I nab a deferment and go to college instead of joining the Air Force, which had been my vague plan before I talked to him. He had asked me why I was considering the Air Force, and I had told him the truth. I saw it as an alternative to the draft and the Army infantry.

I was not fully aware at the time that Air Force—and Navy—enlisted men were also dying in Vietnam.

We studied current events in 1969. My instructor never went into detail about the war. He was a cheerleader, certain that crushing communism and blocking the falling dominoes in Southeast Asia was the right course. To please him, I wrote a paper on the evils of communism. I parroted his views, and he loved it.

I didn’t believe any of what I'd written, because I had no idea what the hell I was talking about.

My teacher had not done me a favor by accepting my weak, uninformed effort, but I doubt even he understood what was happening.

It turned out I was as naive as Greene's Alden Pyle about Vietnam. Here's what I knew about Vietnam. I knew I didn’t want to end up dead.

I have another example of how naive I was about the war. My mother hid a scary fact from me—actually, she simply lied to me. The entire time my brother was in Vietnam, she told me he had a desk job in Okinawa.

Maybe she wanted to believe that herself.

My mother did not want me to worry, for she worried enough for both of us.

My brother did ship back to Okinawa, unscratched, just before the Battle of Ia Drang Valley, in November, 1965, when the killing in Vietnam escalated. When he left the Marines a year later he didn’t return to our small Oregon town, except to visit briefly before settling in the San Francisco area.

By the time I visited him in Fremont, south of Oakland, California, in 1972, he was married and the father of a baby girl. But something was wrong.

We stood in sharp political contrast. I had been radicalized in college and I hated the Vietnam War. My brother hated war protesters.

Thus began a long stretch of hostility between two brothers, born six years apart, but separated by a war and rapidly changing American culture.

I looked for a long time for the root meaning of our differences. I had become politicized in the middle of a great cultural change. When he joined the Marines in 1962, there were a few hundred American advisers in Vietnam, and any number of Alden Pyles. At first, what they were doing there promised to be a short-term job.

That the U.S. thought it might supplant the French and save capitalist imperialism in Southeast Asia was, of course, folly. Few Americans knew it, however. Six short years later, even Lyndon Johnson knew that many high school counselors in small town America considered Vietnam a quagmire and were advising their students to stay clear of it if they doubted the cause.

Mine had, without tipping his hand. All he said was think about it. That was enough.

I did not get drafted and go to Vietnam, or join the Air Force.

I did not suffer a pang of patriotism and volunteer to save America from communism.

I feared war--not communism.

I couldn't see the rationale for sending nineteen year-olds off to fight a war that was not clearly just.

I did not go to Vietnam because I did not want to kill people for a cause I knew nothing about.

I did not go to Vietnam because I did not want to be shot at for a cause I did not understand.

I did not go to Vietnam because I did not believe the cause was just.

Sadly, my fortuitous time was a tragic time for many young men in my cohort. As is this time, for many other young men and women. They are soldiers now... and young.



TS


P.S. The rain let up as I finished this entry. Happy days!

Why Read?

In my quest to discover how and why things happen, I read. I like to read. I'm all for it. Surprisingly, not everyone is. I know a fellow--I won't mention his name--who in all seriousness said to me, "Man, you read and all you do is regurgitate."

You see, in his mind, learning has been reduced to regurgitation. No exceptions. His claim is that to read and cite sources for your discoveries, as in an essay, is essentially a waste of time, a valueless exercise.

Well, perhaps he's onto something. Or perhaps not.

Readers, no matter their discipline, often are forced to regurgitate knowledge. For example, your doctor usually has a compendium or two handy to help him comprehend what ails you. He's no doubt read them, or you would hope he has. What does it take to be a doctor, twelve years of rigorous academic work?

I'd hate to be treated by one who can't regurgitate. If he knows the basics and is imaginative too, he may be a great doctor.

Regurgitate is an ugly word. It has an ugly sound. In the context of anti-intellectualism, it has an ugly purpose. It is designed to tear down rather than build discourse.

It is designed to blow up reason and enhance ideology.

It is the conservative mantra, a favorite word of those whom would ignore history, for history is purely regurgitation in the conservative mind.

Sadly, it is often taught that way to hungry minds, deadening them in junior high.

Here's what my acquaintance doesn't understand. Reading offers the basics, a foundation for originality. To gain knowledge you must read. If you can then take what you have learned and create by taking a step ahead, devise something new, foment revolution, then you have accomplished something.

But if you do not bother to read, you haven't even a chance to regurgitate. You haven't a chance to go beyond what you think you know.

You haven't a chance to truly learn and be creative in your own right.

I have two reactions to the sort of anti-intellectualism I've just described. First, it makes me angry. Second, I wonder how one lives without reading.

You may not die if you don't read, but you certainly won't live fully, either.

If you're so damn smart that you can get along without reading, you're a unique human being.


What A Writer

what i liked about e.e. cummings
was that he cut away from
the holiness of the
word
and with charm
and gamble
gave us lines
that sliced through the
dung.

how it was needed!
how we were withering
away
in the old
tired
manner.

of course, then came all
the e.e. cummings
copyists.
they copied him then
as the others had
copied Keats, Shelly,
Swinburne, Byron, et
al.

but there was only
one
e.e. cummings.
of course.

one sun.

one moon.


Charles Bukowski

TS

John Lee Hooker

As soon as the saccharine and damnable Rose Festival clears out downtown, workers can begin to clean up and bring in the gardeners to refurbish things--in time for Portland's best summer event, the Waterfront Blues Festival, a tradition since 1987.

Sponsored by a few very large businesses now, the festival has lost some of its rebel charm, but you can still find great acts in every year's lineup.

And, importantly, the food gathered at the festival feeds thousands of hungry people in Oregon.

If you're in Oregon on the weekend of 4 July, be there.

The picture is of John Lee Hooker (1917 -2001). He headlined the first blues festival in 1987. Seventy years-old at the time, the master had the energy of a kid. I took my four year-old daughter, sat her on my shoulders above the huge crowd. Stood there, mesmerized.

To this day my daughter remembers John Lee and listens to him all the time.


TS

A Dangerous Place

According to Christopher Brauchli, Newt "Nuke" Gingrich is backing off his claim in his new book that the Demos are Nazis.

"In coming up with a comparison to Nazi Germany (that he has subsequently sought to soften) Mr. Gingrich may have been thinking of the new law in Arizona that permits the police when making a “lawful contact” with someone who gives them reasonable suspicion to believe the person is an alien, to determine, when practicable, the immigration status of the person. He may have thought that Arizona’s law bore a faint resemblance to Nazi Germany’s requirement that Jews wear yellow stars in public and may have forgotten that the Arizona law is a Republican creation that he should not criticize. The Arizona law is, of course, quite different from the Nazi law since the Arizona law places the burden of identifying the person on the police."

Brauchli works at Harvard University, that bastion of radical thought, where a mere 50K a year buys you an exclusive membership in the Big Boys' Club of America.

Someone should warn the famous list compiler, David Horowitz, about this latest example of how some academics speak too freely.

Give him a call, Newt. No wait, CB may already be on the list...

Read the full piece at CounterPunch.

TS

The Long Goodbye

When I moved to Portland in 1977, a segment of the city's literary scene was centered around the Long Goodbye, a cafe/bar in the heart of what is now known as the Pearl District, an upscale enclave of restaurants and apartments at the edge of Portland's city center.

In 1977, the area was a run-down district full of crumbling, turn-of-the-century warehouses. A few craftsmen and artists lived there on a dime and a dream, satisfied with its inexpensive rent and plentiful solitude. At night, it was eerily dark and quiet, with long shadows, dim streetlights, and a foreboding noirish feel.

The cafe's owner, Richard Vidan, must have felt that vibe when he opened the place, naming it after Raymond Chandler's noir novel.

The Long Goodbye was a music, theater and poetry venue, in the enduring fashion of fifties and sixties era New York coffee houses, a place where poets looked like poets.

I haven't owned a beret in years, but I know I had a black one back then, and I'd usually don it for Monday night open mic, when the poets gathered. I carried my precious poems in a leather shoulder bag and kept a G harmonica in my tweed sports coat, just in case. At times, I wore a beard, or I'd trim it back for the Beat feel. The place was marked with genius, I knew, because I was one of them. (Actually, I never really believed that. I was too insecure to be a genius, and wrote sub par poetry to boot.)

However, my friend H. Home really was a genius, and so was another friend, Mark Wilson. Walt Curtis (pictured) would become the unofficial poet laureate of the streets, so he definitely qualified. So did Katherine Dunn, before breaking out big time with Geek Love, and John Shirley, the sci-fi writer.

Shirley's energy shredded the cafe in the name of pure genius.

Jay Rothbell, who later ran with Robert Sheckley, sometimes dropped by to read something funny and outrageous. There were many others.

At times, the aura of genius in that place kicked my ass. I didn't really belong there, except I enjoyed the scene because it was an hilarious entertainment. And once, I whipped out my harmonica, improvising a scorching blues solo, which made people smile and gave me a jolt of confidence.

I had started a poetry supplement to the monthly newspaper I worked for at the time. I called it Cold Eye, named for Yeat's self-penned epitaph from Under Ben Bulben:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

The lyric always struck me as a righteous way a man might look at life and death--coldly. Not unfeelingly, but realistically. If one is fortunate enough to live for many years what else is there? In the Irish tradition, celebrate, laugh at the end. Be as cold about death as life itself. I mean really, what the hell else are you going to do? Sit around and feel bad that you're about to die? That would be a waste of precious time, it seems.

Running that little supplement, I managed to find a few poets at the cafe who gave me their work to publish. That is why I went there to begin with. I was looking for material. I assigned friends, such as H. Home (David Sevedge), to score interviews with the poets. Home befriended Dunn, and called his interview with her Portrait of the Genius at 33. He had read her books, Truck and Attic, and I hadn't, so he was the man for the job. The interview read like a kind of private joke from outer space, a couple of extraterrestrials shooting the breeze. Vaguely comprehensible, and definitely a big score.

See, the aura was indeed there.

Walt Curtis was a favorite of mine in the scene. His friend Mariam Wheatley did an interview with him for my supplement. Walt was a performance artist. He made me laugh uproariously, but many in the audience found him unbearable. I haven't seen Walt read of late, but in those days he was obscene and so determined to take things over the edge that he became self-parodying, which he knew. He thrived on it.

Laughing at his own stuff, appalled by it seemingly, he would break off a verse and apologize for its putrid nature--then plunge on, describing an enthralling moment of sexual love he'd had, extolling his Mexican lover's penis, or describing some other unspeakable act, some other undaunted emotion.

"This is awful!" he'd shout, protesting himself like a member of the audience, flailing his arms and running his fingers through his deliberately unkempt hair, before returning to his text and the next outrage he had in store for all.

Then, surprisingly, but not really surprisingly, Walt might turn a stunning phrase. Something that made profound sense and transcended the vulgarity of his act. And his readings were always theatrical. Always about Walt throwing off convention. I liked the act. But not everyone did.

H. Home despised Walt's exaggerations. He stormed the stage one night, knocking Walt's mic over and shoving him to the floor. Home's hat flew off punching, his shirt ripped open, and he took Walt to the floor sprawling, sat atop him and told him what he thought of Walt's dirty art.

Damn, that was a funny moment.

My other good friend from that time, Mark Wilson, hated Walt, too. He and Home just couldn't handle the assault on good taste that Walt provided every time he took the stage.

Like I said, I found the scene hilarious, as much for my friends' reaction to it as for Walt's alledged sicknesses. Something in me simply wasn't adverse to people unleashing their peculiar demons on stage.

My time in the Long Goodbye scene eventually dimmed and faded away. I left the monthly paper, fathered a girl, and went to work in the corporate world as a scriptwriter. I didn't miss the poetry scene at all, probably because I never really enjoyed reading my stuff out loud to begin with. I was always too self-conscious and uncertain about my work. I realize that about poetry now. You know when you've done it right.

I think in the months I went there, I read twice. To mixed reviews.

I haven't been to a reading in years. I 'm not certain I have what it takes to sit through one now.

Whatever that is.


What Can We Do?

at their best, there is gentleness in Humanity.
some understanding and, at times, acts of
courage
but all in all it is a mass, a glob that doesn't
have too much.
it is like a large animal deep in sleep and
almost nothing can awaken it.
when activated it's best at brutality,
selfishness, unjust judgments, murder.

Charles Bukowski


TS

A True Story of Hearing Loss

What's all this business about Swine Fools invading the country? People are acting crazy about some sort of imminent threat from Swine Fools. Swine Fools are potentially deadly, nearly pandemic, blah, blah, blah!

Well, here's some news for you. Swine Fools have been here all along.

You can find them in dive bars and fancy restaurants to be sure, but they're no less preponderant in the halls of Congress, or among the so-called captains of industry.

I've met them face to face and on the pages of the local paper. I've listened to them pour out their contagious logic on television and radio. I've sat among them in classrooms, listened to their lectures, and passed them on the street on the way to the corner grocery store.

They've cut me off in traffic on occasion, and made me stand in long lines to buy things I don't need.

They ride bikes, walk, run, and talk trash on city buses. Their favorite cars are SUVs.

They’re obese and dangerously thin. They’re handsome and ugly as ogres. They’re witches and saints, courteous and rude. Funny, and boring as the City Club.

Swine Fools sin all week and go to church on Sunday. They’re atheists, but have a spiritual side. They’re Mormons and Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Yes, they are Muslims, too.

Swine Fools are all too human, in other words.

Swine Fools have used and manipulated me in the work place.

A good portion of them are in jail, others are headed in that direction. Swine Fools are also, ironically, the jailers and the judges.

Swine Fools will pop up anywhere when you least expect it, just when you think you're safe. But you're never safe. It's foolish to think you are.

I've even dated Swine Fools. So have you, admit it. You go out and the thing just doesn't click. Maybe you're married to a Swine Fool, or thinking about marrying one.

Better, you recently divorced one and feel good for the first time in years.

Be careful though, you might go home alone and confront the Swine Fool in the mirror. It isn't pretty.

War is the work of Swine Fools. Lord knows we have a dose of that, don't we? We've been sick with it for a long time. I hope you don't really expect to get well soon. You'll be extremely disappointed in the end.

Look at the economy. It is the work of Swine Fools.

But it's been around, like war, forever. What is this, your second, third, fourth so-called recession? It’s my fourth.

I laugh.

Ever placed a bet, thinking you know the score before it happens? That's a Swine Fool move, believe me.

Swine Fools are winners and losers.

Let me reiterate. Swine Fools have been with us all along. This particular pandemic has been with us since the Kennewick Man’s time.

So I don’t want to hear anything more about Swine Fools. I’ll turn off the television, turn off the radio, turn off my computer if I have to.

What's that you say? Swine Flu, not Fool?

Uh, I gotta go. I'll be in touch.


(Such was my response to the media last year.)

TS

Horowitz vs. Horowitz

Have you heard the one about the phony bomb detector in Iraq? An Al-Qaeda operative drives up to a checkpoint and an Iraqi policeman scans the car with the device. The car is cleared for passage, goes on down the street, and explodes, killing scores of people.

(pause, let it build, let it build)

You see, the device doesn't really work!

Patrick Cockburn works his magic at Counter Punch.

I've recently been reading Cockburn's 2008 history (pictured) of the Sadrist legacy in Iraq. Highly informative material, it should be required reading at the university level, if only to piss off this guy, not to be confused with the author of this.

The latter Horowitz teaches history at Portland State, and he's cool.

TS