Three Years Ago: Chronicles: Legendary Costume Designer Asks: Are You a Poet?

Today, on Three Years Ago, our legendary series where we repost a post from exactly three years ago, I've dug up a rare "biographical" blog entrée. Thank heavens this is an unusual occurrence:

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Last week, I was rejected from a graduate school program I had applied to, so I vowed to go on a 48-hour Steve Zissou-style bender, wake up next week, draft a new plan for the next few years of my life, then set out to find the shark that ate my friend & destroy it. Friday Night began with several pitchers of Piña Coladas with my friend Heather from Interlochen. The basic recipe for our concoction is as follows:

Mix in blender:
-Half of a delicious fresh organic pneapple
-Half a handle of clear rum
-The meat of a fine mango
-Pineapple-coconut juice (I used the R.W. Knudsen brand, which conveniently sells this mix)
-About five strawberries
-Ice

Saturday, Heather, who was singing in the pit orchestra for the San Francisco Ballet's piece Eden/Eden, with music from Steve Reich's Three Tales (the one about Dolly the Sheep, robots, & cloning), was able to get three free tickets to the ballet. As a tangent, did you know that Dolly the Sheep was named after Dolly Parton because the gene from which they cloned her was from the host's mammary? As Parton said, "I hope people realize that there is a brain underneath the hair & a heart underneath the boobs." There's interesting moments in Reich's score, but the ballet orchestra lacked the intense drive to keep the motion forward-propulsing for a full half hour. However, the original video opera was pretty mediocre, & rescuing the music & replacing the imagery with some amazing dancing & choreography is a great service.

Coincidentally, our friend Mr Golden was working next door at the Veteran's building repairing a model buffalo for an exhibition of ballet costumes designed by Willa Kim. After the ballet & some St Patrick's day beer, we crashed the art opening (as "volunteers", which we indeed ended up being.) One of my friends was free-wine-inspired to get herself a sugar-daddy in the guise of an rich older SF ballet alum. We missed the lecture, but when nonagenarian Willa Kim was being escorted out, the volunteers stopped her to tell her they had enjoyed working on her costumes. After some flattery, she turned to me & said:

Willa Kim: You look like you must be a poet!
Your hero: Well, uh, yes, I am.
Sycophantic escort: My, Ms. Kim, how prescient you are!
Willa Kim: He looks like a poet!
Your hero: It's all nonsense, tho. I mean, my poetry is nonsense.
Mr Golden: We're working on an epic with illuminations.
Willa Kim: Well, best of luck to you, &c.....

According to the imdb, Willa Kim is known by the nickname "Willa Killa". We then hit some schwanky downtown bars, & escorted my sloshy friend to the BART. The night ended by Mr Golden cleaning my clock at put-put golf at his Ingleside apartment.

Sunday Morning, I had arranged (despite a dead mobile phone) to meet a blind date at a famous Mimosa Bar in the Castro, The Lime. As a co-founder of the dogmatic evangelical religious cult, The Mimosa's Witnesses, I was morally bound to investigate this mecca of Mimosa transubstantiation, which has bottomless flutes for $7 at Sunday Brunch. The place is ridiculous & perfectly over-the-top, with a bright-green nightclub decor, thumping music, packed with revelers at 11 A.M. Many of our fellow witnesses looked far more L.A. than S.F., with plastic breasts, &c. We should tithe them.

Waiter: Hello, I haven't seen you here for awhile!
Your hero: I've never been here before. This is my first time.
Waiter: Really!? You look just like one of our regulars.
Your hero: No, perhaps I have a Doppelgänger? Or perhaps you're mistaking me for Ralf from Kraftwerk.

As for my blind date, she had enormous false eyelashes & drove an orange Mustang sports car! Anyway, we must plan an official service with the regular Mimosa's Witnesses at this bizarre Castro day-club. As I explained to my date, just like there are hippie Christians & conservative Christians, these fake-boobed coked-up proselytes were worshipping under the same, broad tent as the Tahoe Mimosa's Witnesses & the Berkeley Mimosa's Witnesses.

My day proceeded by sobering up at Philz Coffee in the Mission & having my clock cleaned at chess with Mr Golden. The San Francisco semi-regular Sacred Harp singing was at an episcopal church on Fair Oaks (one of the cutest streets in that neighborhood), & was well attended, including two members of the awesome group Anonymous 4 (who, with their background in St Hildegaard, now have two excellent albums of American harmony, & are working on continuing that project. Listen to them!) Singing exultantly, mission accomplished, & I'm now accepting suggestions for what to do next with my life.

Three Years Ago: There Were Alligators in the New York Sewers

Moving into 2008 for our feature Three Years Ago, where we re-post a hot post from EXACTLY THREE YEARS AGO:

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Jan Harold Brunvand, in his famous book on urban legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981), debunks most of the teenagey scary-story myths on which he reports. One of the most bizarre ones tho, about alligators in the New York City sewers, he finds corroborative evidence proving true. The standard urban legend was that kids all over the city had bought baby alligators (imported for sale or brought back from vacation from Florida), &, when they grew too big or dangerous, flushed them down the toilets. Whereupon, they grew to giant, blind, sometimes albino, rat-eating, secret monsters (the story, like all urban legends, has many variants). Thomas Pynchon - another reclusive blind, albino monster - elaborates in an episode from his novel V (1963):

Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought these alligators for pets. Macy's was selling them for fifty cents; every child, it seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown & reproduced, had few of rats & sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror.

There is also the Alligator Patrol, which hunts them down. Brunvand then describes 1960's legends about a potent "White Weed" which grows "lushly in the sewer because of the nutrients," (pg. 92), but people are deterred from harvesting because of the alligators. As I said, he dismisses as having no origin most of the legends he describes in the book. But this one, remarkably, can be linked back to newspaper stories from the 1930s (this headline from the New York Times, February 10th, 1935):

ALLIGATOR FOUND IN UPTOWN SEWER

Youths Shoveling Snow Into Manhole

See the Animal Churning in Icy Water

SNARE IT AND DRAG IT OUT

Reptile Slain by Rescuers

When It Gets Vicious-

Whence It Came Is Mystery

The article continues with the full story. Furthermore, there are public works records corroborating the existence of alligators:

According to a former New York City Commissioner of Sewers there was a problem with alligators in the sewers in the mid 1930s. In his book on the development of utilities beneath Manhattan Island, titled The World Beneath the City, Robert Daley claims that recurrent reports of alligators in the sewers finally forced Sewer Commissioner Teddy May to investigate the situation personally. May told Daley that he did find alligators (averaging two-feet long); he immediately launched a campaign to eradicate them [like Pynchon's Alligator Patrol!], & was able to announce their extermination by 1937. [Brunvand, pg. 97]

There's more info, & a host of popular culture references, at this wikipedia article: Sewer Alligators.

''It's crazy, you know,'' Diana Odetalla said. ''I don't know where alligators come from. Out of nowhere, I guess.''

-NY Times, "Alligator is Found", June 29th, 1997.

Three Years Ago: "Bring Your Mug To-night" & "Live Blogging from the Pomegranate Raspberry Mulled Wine & Whiskey 2007 Sendoff Festivus Eritrean Party"

Once again, we bring you Three Years Ago, an always special segment which celebrates this blog's continued longevity by re-posting posts from exactly three years ago. TODAY, a double header, starting with an advertisement for the day's Christmas party, "Bring Your Mug To-night", followed by the "Live Blogging from the Pomegranate Raspberry Mulled Wine & Whiskey 2007 Sendoff Festivus Eritrean Party". If you so desire, you could make the mulled wine recipe I printed in the first post (which I realize now is quite different from how I did it this year at my War on Christmas party; I suppose it evolves each year, this one had more fresh squeezed oranges, black currant juice, no poms or berries & less zest. I also used something like 14 bottles of two buck chuck.) Then, starting at 17.15 Pacific time, for the hardcore, relive the party minute by minute.

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Several of the attendees who have R.S.V.P.'d to my invite for tonight's party are fictional, but it should be a smashing party. Bring a mug! I rather strained my back yesterday carrying a case of Charles Shaw Shiraz on the BART from the new Trader Joe's on College Avenue. In preparation for this epic mulled wine, I have had pomegranates & raspberries soaking in Jim Beam whiskey for two weeks in the window. In addition to the wine & whiskey, the following things will be added to the simmering Glühwein:

-The juice & zest from six large organic oranges.
-The juice squeezed from a dozen key limes
-Raspberries
-Red currants
-The seeds from a large pomegranate
-Many cinnamon sticks
-Nutmeg
-Cardamom
-Cloves
-Brown &/or unrefined white sugar, to taste
-More rum & more whiskey & more wine.

It's important, of course, not to let the cauldron ever come to a boil (which will decrease the alcohol content). Proselytes of the Mimosa's Witnesses will notice that Glühwein in an evening, festivus-time cousin to the Mimosa, replete with all the ingredients for secular transubstantiation. Check back to this website later, there may be Live Blogging. Here is from the original invite:

You can come earlier if you desire, & help me mull the wine, & there may be food.

The following costumes are discouraged:

-Keebler Elf
-Condoleeza Rice Elf
-Aphid or other Sternorrhyncha
-Disney Princess
-Sen. Arlen Spekter (R-Penn.)
-Cole Porter
-Luna Lovegood
-Amos or any other minor Old Testament Prophet

While these would be allowed, of course, some creative variation would be appreciated this year.
Bringing a mug would assist in transporting the mulled wine from the large steaming pot to your mouth.
My apartment is conveniently located across from the Ashby BART station:

This is a picture of a Barack Obama butter sculpture, by Duffy Lyon, the famous "Butter Cow Lady" from Iowa fairs. She has endorsed the candidate.

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Welcome to the Live Blogging of the Glühwein Party, for all of you poor cold losers who decided to settle in other parts of the world. It's 5:30 P.M. Pacific Time, 40 degrees in Berkeley, somewhat ugly weather here. Life is short, but the Webb Block has been polished & dusted, roses are on the table. A dvd of a fireplace burns on the tv set.

5:15. I am alone & I wash my hands, & make my delicious Puffed Millet Cookies.
5:30. Liam calls from the recycled paper office & tells me he is on his way, bringing friends.
5:40. Six bottles of Two Buck Chuck Shiraz are opened & emptied into a large cauldron.
6:40. Liam & friends have come & gone back to the store for more cheese & more bread. The past hour has been spent slowly warming up the wine & adding many many delicious ingredients. The third movement of Gorecki's Third Symphony, coming on randomly, made the de-seeding of the pomegranate much more emotional than it might otherwise have been.
8:30. Ten people are here eating cookies, Stolen, pineapples, & drinking Liam's amazing Raspberry Whiskey (which has been fermenting for two months), & my mulled wine. Cheeks are beginning to look a bit flushed.
9:00. A brief interlude to watch Leopard Slug sex.
10:15. Virtue's hit the rum.
10:30. The roses on the table have been replaced by a Trivial Pursuit board.
11:00. Liam creepily correctly answers "Fifty-four" to the question "What was the number of Gunther Toody's patrol car?"
11:30. Sixty-six-point-six percent of the party up-&-runs out the door towards the penultimate BART train.
12:00 A.M. My upstairs neighbor makes an appearance with her husband, erroneously thinking they have interrupted something between me & the remaining guest. They drink a glass of Glühwein & borrow The Princess Bride.
12:45. I am alone with a few glasses of mulled wine to go. A few hours ago I rejuvenated it with dark rum, sugar, & limes. It's sticking to my teeth, but I'm determined to see the sun rise, so, Merry Festivus to all, & to all a googily opulent yarblat.

Three Years Ago: Catering Conversation: Candles in a Barn

It's time for Three Years Ago again, our Special Department of Re-Posting Posts from this blog from exactly three years ago. Today, Catering Conversation: Candles in a Barn.

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The premise for this conversation is thus: We were the temp staff for a wedding at a Napa vineyard / horse farm. I was separated from the other catering staff for several hours, while they passed out champagne & hors d'oeuvres to the wedding guests, & I lit hundreds & hundreds of candles in the barn where the reception would take place. The baker had driven up from Berkeley with a beautiful (but ultimately bland) chocolate cake, & this one lady who worked there was running around, sneaking white wine, fixing lots of small things. We'll call her "Paulette".

Baker: This all just looks beautiful.
Your hero: You know, there's a reason why you don't often see this sight.
Baker: What?
Your hero: Of thousands of candles in a barn.
Paulette: Ah, but this is a concrete barn. The candles distract from the concrete. [Note: there was still a lot of hay, & a strong wind blowing thru.]
Your hero (more of a statement than a question): You ever heard of Bessie?
Baker: Ah, ha.
Paulette: No, who is she?
Baker: The Chicago Fire.
Paulette: Was she a caterer?
Your hero: No, she was a cow.
Paulette: A what?
Your hero: Cow. A Cow. Bessie was a cow.

Three Years Ago: The Seven Deaths of Mrs Hallam's Seven Sons

This ongoing series celebrating this blog's longevity, THREE YEARS AGO, reposting posts from exactly THREE YEARS AGO, continues now with a nonsense poem - The Seven Deaths of Mrs Hallam's Seven Sons:

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My dog rolled over on his other ear when an infant yell shook up the night,
And ambulance sirens, a roller coaster,
Or was it the Cosa Noster?
Michael was scheming vengeance gainst the professor who rusticated him for plagiarism.
The men in the hummer understood
That usually it was a pretty safe neighborhood.
What the devils thought was God defenestrating a bastard baby was just a meteorite.
Luckily, Mr Hallam was able to return to work six weeks after his New Age Aneurysm.

The girl in brown who walked into the coffee shop on Thursday Morning had the eyes of an octogenarian.
In memoriam, it was her royal belief
That nature & nonsense could console grief.
She sat way over in the fifth corner & wrote hurriedly a novel about shiteater bunnies & testicles.
Robert's rhymed dissertation was tit-for-tat,
So why do the gay young men have to dress like that?
A father of such potency should have, quintessentially, been a Mormon, not a hippy, you know,
For every December there had to be screaming arguments about iconography & revolution & tinsel icicles.

Governor Schwarzenegger was sitting across the aisle at the afternoon baseball game;
Henry had brought his antique Daguerreotype,
But overexposed the governor amid the hype,
And a question materialized from the tainted folds about the longevity of ancient mammals.
When the tumor squeezed the trigger,
Where in hell was this sad figure?
Ah, Mrs Hallam, your late nights in the confessional have become the vicar's nostalgic shame:
Henry's Roman nose was among his final thoughts when he cast off their earthly shackles.

In the basement bathroom, she blew him like desert dust.
Joseph's immortal ill will be
Never finishing his Third "Lost" Symphony.
He was reanimated like Erasmus Darwin's electric rocks on the steps of city hall.
And the newt's tail in her cauldron
She might never feed to her great-grandchildren.
The judge was a welder of finite proportions, preserved as a marble bust,
But I cannot be expected to remember the details of an artistic perjury trial that pitiful.

I hear George hearing a megaphone announcing Mr Hallam missing in the circle of Willis.
I never meant to be mean,
But I ended that relationship in the Oligocene
When six ton ground sloths swatted down magnolia trees like horseflies.
A naked newborn problem
Is no reason for a pogrom!
His youngest sister Phyllis had diatribed seven reasons not to kill us.
You see, George has waited his whole life to find the woman with the largest sagging breasts to demonize.

There were no towels left in the closet in Autumn 2006 when Mrs Hallam finished taking her last shower,
That moment the twelve-part crowing of Chanticleer
Marked the beginning of the getting filthier.
Is it unprofitable to put her in your bonds & use her remaining labor?
James has eaten elephant slugs & slumber slugs
And wallaroo slugs & cucumber slugs.
And the fallen leaves know more about higher powers than any higher power.
Chastise me, heretics! for the watchers grasp the invisible agony of the Stellar's Jay roar.

It was James who mistook his brother Daniel for a tasty underground network of mycelium,
A brigade of saviors will balloon us
Out of a lifetime of boredom in Khan Yunis.
Overpopulation & underpopulation are twin issues to be discussed at next year's global summit.
Daniel has become allergic
To the mosquitoes bred in the oil slick.
His antepenultimate act of indecency was attacking his mother with an Ego Paintball Gun loaded with Berkelium.
So they chose art & science over procreation, they all sold off the family stock before it was going to plummet.

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That poem is included in my 2009 illuminated nonsense poetry collection, Prophecy & Doggerel, for sale for $2.15 at scribd:
S. Sandrigon - Prophecy and Doggerel 2009

Three Years Ago: Shakespeare & Local Terrorism

For THREE YEARS AGO, this blog's celebration of its more-than-three-year-oldness, we repost some local drama & an interesting letter-to-the-editor:

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The local media was closely following the assassination of the editor of the Oakland Post, by some zealous bakers at a place called "Your Black Muslim Bakery" on San Pablo. They have been apprehended for other crimes, & the bakery was shut down for "sanitary" reasons. I think this guy's commentary in the Berkeley Daily Planet well grasps the scope of issues (both 21st Century & classical) in this public drama. Truly the stuff of a poetic five act play, with cookies - sort of "Merchant of Venice" meets "Chocolat".

Commentary: Your Black Muslim Bakery (Or What’s Left Of It)
By David Nebenzahl (08-14-07)

You’re gone now, it looks like for good. That’s a shame, at least for me personally. Let me explain.

For the past five years or so, my breakfast has invariably consisted of a single cup of strong coffee, home-brewed, and one of your sweet rolls. The same thing every day for five years. Actually longer: When I lived on the Peninsula in the 1990s, I used to buy these same rolls from the now-departed Palo Alto Co-op. Back then they seemed somewhat exotic, coming from a place called “Your Black Muslim Bakery” and labeled “A Taste of the Hereafter.”

In any case, they were damn good sweet rolls. I also treated myself to your excellent fish sandwiches from time to time.

So even though I will definitely not miss the actions of the thugs who were part of your organization—the terrorizing of small liquor store owners, the Carrie Nation-like smashing of refrigerated cases, the over-the-top, racist ideology, the ersatz pseudo-religious mish-mash of Islam, fundamentalist Christianity and black nationalism—even though I found myself stepping into your shop with a lot of trepidation of late—I will miss your bakery and its products (and even its historic San Pablo storefront).

I hasten to add that even though I witnessed your black-suited thugs smashing their way through local businesses on the TV news, and read about the criminal activities of your organization, I was always treated courteously in the bakery. The young people who worked there were very businesslike and treated their customers respectfully, no matter what color they were, and they all seemed genuinely concerned with running a neighborhood business properly. That, too, will be missed.

(I leave speculating about the cause and implications of the demise of your organization to others, as will be unavoidable in the weeks to come. To me, it appears to be yet another case of a well-meaning group of people, struggling against injustice, who fall victim to the usual human shortcomings—greed, hubris, religious mania and messianic visions, and plain old corruption—in a spectacular, Shakespearean drama, leading to a final implosion. You’re not the first, and you certainly won’t be the last.)

So let me ask some of you, perhaps naively: Is it possible that you might be able to regroup yourselves, shake off the dust of this scandal and reopen your bakery? Preferably in, or somewhere near, the old location (I say selfishly). If you could somehow shed the ideological aspects of the operation, and just concentrate on producing sweet rolls, fish sandwiches, bean pies, cookies, cakes, and all the other good stuff you used to make, I think a lot of people would appreciate it. I know I would.

And if running a bakery just happened to advance the cause of black economic empowerment in a depressed, predominantly black neighborhood, that would only be further to your credit.

David Nebenzahl is an Oakland resident.

Three Years Ago: Three Lamer Doggerels

And now, back to THREE YEARS AGO: this blog's ongoing series re-posting posts from EXACTLY THREE YEARS AGO, as a perpetual celebration of the fact that it has survived more than three years (with the occasional furlough.) From August 11th, 2007, we present Three Lamer Doggerels:

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It's a shady Saturday, & I'm looking thru an old notebook before heading to a wedding reception. I found one old poem scratched next to a picture of a cowboy entirely of beard & hair, below bumpy onboard reflections of Futureman's MIDI percussion playing from the 90's (The "Synthax Drumitar").

Two men use their talents:
One buries his money,
The rich get richer,
but bees make honey,
& ain't that funny
if you're a bunny,
sonny?

I think I really solved some of life's mysteries with those rhymes. The second poem I collaborated with Mr Hadar Hart on a walk up to see a 70's b-movie about smart killer bees ("Phase IV" by Saul Bass), after discussing how it's too bad the Homeless Newspapers don't have creative writing:

Haiku About Homelessness & Heartlessness

Home's where the heart is,
Homes is where the heart is where,
Therefore, I'm heartless.

Kind of Gertrude Stein meets Wayne & Garth. This last doggerel is a fragment - instead of blabbing on about Orson Welles & the thinning of themes, as Christopher Hitchens did today in his review of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, I just wrote a short poem thanking our beloved author:

Thank You to J.K. Rowling

Thank you, J.K. Rowling, you've made the Bush years more bearable,
You've made 800-page novels more carryable,
You've made wizard cloaks more wearable,
And you've made Hollywood more Harry-able.

Three Years Ago: Music Review: Dr Ralph Stanley in Berkeley on his Eightieth Birthday

Continuing with our celebration of this blog's old age, the series Three Years Ago (started on the blog's three year anniversary, more than a year ago), which re-posts from the history exactly-to-the-minute three years later, will continue on thru this year, digging up from the pivotal year 2007. Now a classic music review:

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Last night, the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley hosted Dr Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys at St. John's Presbyterian Church. The opening act was Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands, from round here, & they were great. Then, when the headliner & the eight men he plays with made their way to the stage, Laurie ran up & announced that it was 9pm here, so therefore midnight “Clinch Mountain Time”, Ralph Stanley's 80^th birthday. In lieu of Mayor Bates, the mayor's senior aide read a proclamation, hilariously & formally worded, that because of his eminent career in the arts, & because he has played in Berkeley so many times for the past five decades, February 25^th would therefore henceforth be Ralph Stanley Day in Berkeley. (I wish I could quote the proclamation here, but other bloggers have also had no luck finding it.) There was a cake, too.

The evening after that was fairly short, it seemed like he only sang three or four of the dozen songs. He let each member of the band do something from one of their solo projects, & introduced each one with an old-fashion Grand Ole Opry MC style, dumb jokes & all. His son & grandson tour with him. His grandson loves Jesus, & also bling, & sang a mediocre gospel tune in three-four about how Jesus is “more brighter” than the stars. Dr. Ralph sang “O Death” from O Brother Where Art Thou, for which he once won a Grammy. It sounded pretty much the same. The music was great, mostly, but there was a bizarre self-congratulatory tone to the whole evening, with Nathan Stanley reading out a long list of awards & honors his grandfather had won, & James Shelton spending fifteen minutes explaining in great detail everything you could buy in the back (including two of the instruments on stage). My favorite musician was Jack Cooke, the “bass fiddle” player, who's been with Stanley for thirty-seven years, & sings upper harmony. He sang a beautiful song with Laurie Lewis about how the cookie crumbles. I smiled at him as he walked up the aisle, & he put his hand on my shoulder as he passed.

You can hear them play "Angel Band", also from the O Brother soundtrack, on the Prairie Home Companion website, here.

Three Years Ago: E-mail: Apocalypto

This concludes our 2009 celebration of this blog's Three Year Anniversary, wherein, in a special section called Three Years Ago, we re-posted posts from Three Years Ago, exactly three years later, to the minute. Three years ago was a sparse time for www.itwaslost.org, what follows was the only post in December 2006. In celebration of this community weblog's four year anniversary, all thru 2010, we will be publishing posts from exactly Three Years Ago...! (2007 might be a more fun year to repost from anyway. Till next time. -ed.)

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Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2006 20:17:33 -0800 (PST)
From: "James W____ ________@yahoo.com
Subject: A.O.Scott
To: "Gerald Nick Nelson" _________@gmail.com, "James Quill" _________@yahoo.com

And it is, all in all, a pretty good show. There is a tendency, at least among journalists, to take Mr. Gibson as either a monster or a genius, a false choice that he frequently seems intent on encouraging. Is he a madman or a visionary? Should he be shunned or embraced? Censured or forgiven?
-A.O.Scott, N.Y.Times review of Apocalypto

His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child.
-Tom Stoppard, Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, Part II)

Three Years Ago: Essay on Distance

Our continuing series, a yearlong celebration of the three-year anniversary of this blog, we reprint what I wrote exactly three years ago, to the minute. This essay is interesting because I still feel similarly; & I've made drinking friends in Berkeley, some of which are the Brooklyn friends who slowly realized I was on to something by moving to Berkeley.

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After college, many of my friends settled in Brooklyn, the only place in America I have no interest in living. I went away to one boarding school for four years & one college for four years (including one year abroad in England). Relationships are, of course, measured in both time & space. During my eight years of education, I developed many close friendships, all of which were displaced every spring. Few people, when they are deciding where to go after school, would take into much consideration where their friends will be moving. Ambitions, art scenes, employment opportunities, desire for travel, love – these preside over keeping “the gang” together. Drinking companions are best found around the corner, anyway, & are easily replaced. Still, some friendships are more mystical, inspiring, collaborative.

Look what happens to the average “long-distance relationship.” Either the couple is together, then moves to separate locations, & there is a gradual idealization & growing apart, resulting in catastrophe; or, they move apart, & then move back together after a time, & the gradual idealization & growing apart results in an awkward period of disillusionment. This is an extremely generalized over-simplification: some long-distance relationships have ended in the happiest marriages. What about friendships in the age of e-mail, cellphones, & MySpace? Perhaps, because there is no pressure for ceaseless love & daily communication, one can make these connections in college, for instance, & continue to receive the mystical collaborative elements thru e-mail, whilst receiving his drinking-companion needs around the corner (if around the corner offers no conversations about Bartók or Thomas de Quincey.)

My high school & college friends have settled in a startling plethora of locals – New York, London, Liverpool, India, Hainan, Alabama, Massachusetts, L.A., Brazil, & even Texas. I was saddened that few of my close friends visited me when I was living in Tahoe, a place I wanted to show off, but who can blame them with travel so inefficient & expensive. I've moved to the bay area to increase the feeling of community, & already surprising people have visited & plan to visit. I'm not having much luck establishing regular drinking companions, tho, but that comes with patience & employment.

The book I am reading is by William McDonough & Michael Braungart, a chemist & an architect who propose redesigning how things are made. Valuable technical materials & chemicals are regularly mixed with natural materials, & disposed in land fills where both are useless. They suggest that everything can be made to be infinitely recyclable or immediately biodegradable, separating the biosphere from the “technosphere”. Newspapers, for instance, are made from recycling things things that were not meant to be recycled, & are printed on with toxic inks, & bleached with more chemicals, & are useless after one or two cycles – everything is always “downcycled.” This book, Cradle to Cradle, is not made out of a tree, but of high quality plastics & safe inks. It is extremely durable & waterproof; but when it is thrown “away”, it can be washed & melted to create another equally high quality book. They suggest that current methods of recycling are merely “less bad”, & often placate the liberal masses with righteousness; however, it is possible to a create a system that is “good.” Slowing down the current destructive industrial system could actually be worse in the long run; & preaching “efficiency” & being conservative with resources just pisses off capitalists obsessed with growth. It pits environmentalists against industry. In nature however, growth is good. (Their example is of a cherry tree, whose excess blossoms & fruit are not “waste” but nourishing & beautiful.)

I just got to a part where they suggest that all sustainability is local. Diversity, adaptability, culture, dialect: these are successful reactions to location for both nature & human society. And this Earth offers an almost infinite variety of locations, all of which life has adapted to inhabit. Sustainable local systems nourish your community, & add up to a fully nourished macrocosm. Liberals often point out that Super-Walmarts in sprawled suburban areas hurt every aspect of society: “Main Street” culture, the local economy, the quality of your neighbor's jobs, lack of support for local agriculture, the quality & ethics of distant agriculture, the amount of fossil fuels burned to transport the products, all the unnecessary packaging waste, and the list goes on. I would never imply that long distance friendships are the Walmarts of Modern America. But, your average white post-college American liberal tends to be semi-nomadic, befriending people everywhere, & settling in a baffling array of places. I would like to see a statistic for how many settled where they grew up. Conservative Midwesterners, as a stereotype, are much more family & hometown oriented.

Plato often evokes love for God by discussing love between humans, & mystics use the language of the natural world to describe the subtle heavens. Human connections – a web of nourishment, waste, & sustainability – can perhaps be understood with a model of community, agriculture, energy flows, and Walmarts. Or, more likely, they are a synecdoche (an inclusive metaphor, a metaphor which is included in what it stands for.) Friendship & love are as much a part of a balanced, healthy society as the politics, food cycles, architecture, & everything else. Indeed, this spiritual interconnection can be seen as the soul to a town's body. The Electoral College in a huge county deprives local communities of an actual democracy (in California, for instance, I know we'll get the democratic presidential vote, so there's no reason to campaign or canvass or even argue with my neighbor.) Could the combination of cheap travel, easy relocation, the Internet, and sprawl add up to a modern civilization where friendships are like the disposable diapers that fill up our landfills?

Three Years Ago: E-mail to Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden

We've got a series of reposts, republishing what was written from this website exactly three years ago, when I wrote pretty sparsely. Here's a charming one from the Correspondences Department, when Mr Olaf Mary was lost in the Brazilian rainforest.

________________________________________________

Date:	Mon, 18 Sep 2006 10:34:32 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"James Welsch" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Emily Dickson
To:	"liam golden"

He writes her, a sentence -
house? - juxtaposing parties -
drinking a mimosa the fall of man
And Liam a painter a drunk asswhore -
drink, asswhore, drink - return to the fatherland -
And the virtue was impregnated with another man's retard,
And the drunk asswhore - we have the keys
to your parents' house - and the songwriter & Lisa
And the rainforest monkeys fondled -
home? - he's become a technocrat!
He's sold his ass-soul to tutor morality's idiot child!
He foreclosed on his morgage & turned to Portuegese Literature!
Motherland? Sudetenland? Sudan? - sweep up, poor asswhore.

Three Years Ago: Apology to Loyalists

In continuing celebration that I've been posting to this website for three years (that's one million years in blogosphere time & twenty-one million in dogosphere), here's another offering to the series THREE YEARS AGO, where I publish posts from three years ago to the minute. I forgot that, after I had moved into the building pictured below, I had briefly considered renaming this blog Live from the Webb Block, where I still live. Now, of course, we post to it from all around the world.
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Here I offer my regrets for the summer vacation of this weblog (I assure you I was listening to the below listed "summer listening") I will shortly return with a reknewed literary enthusiasm. In the past month I have been on an aimless roadtrip, with a hoped goal of settling in Berkeley, California, at the end. In the meantime I read Lolita & saw Shakespeare's King John at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival; I camped on several beaches & among the tallest lifeforms on Earth. I have finally settled at the historic building, 1985 Ashby Ave, across from the Ashby BART station in lower Berkeley. I am considering a revival of this weblog with the updated physicality, namely, "Live from the Webb Block".

Three Years Ago: "E-mails: Three Written Today in Alameda"

I never properly celebrated the fact that this weblog has been around for three years, no small achievement in blogospheric time. So we're spearheading an initiative for a new segment called "Three Years Ago", where the post from three years ago is RE-POSTED, to the minute, three years later. One of only two posts from July 2006, this one, from our Correspondences Department, is relevant because I am currently traveling thru Bulgistan with both the recipient of the first correspondence & the person whom we were discussing in that correspondence.

I'm also happy Mark Burstein's Jabberwocky lecture I linked to in the third e-mail is still online, & I recommend it. When I posted that scandalous exposé about rare punctuation (The Interrobang et al.) on May 14th, I proposed the creation of an Outgribation Point - & I laughed just now when I noticed in the French translation of The Jabberwocky below that "outgrabe" in French is horsgrave.

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:50:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>
Subject:Thomas Stearns
To: "Grace Marlier" <__________@hotmail.com>

"By this grace dissolved in place" -T.S.

"There is a time for Thomas Stearns Eliot / & a time for my middle name" -J.H.

"Don't talk like a book, Dad." -Dolores Haze to Humbert Humbert.

Grace,

I saw the tallest lifeform on earth, the tallest tree, "Giant Tree" in the Humboldt Redwoods. It made me think of Melville. We're trying to find a place to live, in the "bay area".

Did you know that Liam & Virtue are in Brasil! Did you know it's winter down there, but not the white kind. Jenny just told me: "you should write her back like you're a black person, too." I suggest that your entire nice, despite street-wise, e-mail to me was a formality to get Liam's information! Well it didn't work, my liege! Except that I think he does now possess an electronic mail address, including all of his middle names, ljowg at yahoo dot com. He refuses to answer my inquiries regarding the dubya. Thomas Fucking Stearns! Bah! Joanne Kathleen? I love her. L.J. Olaf W.G. contacted me trying to find postcard locations for Ben, Hannah, Melinda, Rachel, of which I had none, only e-mails for two. He falls off the face of the planet & then expects everyone to resubmerge from Atlantis when he's lonely in Latin Land? The scoundrel!

I'm house-sitting for my sister in Alameda, a carefully preserved mid-century community (tupperware & nuke scare) sausaged between "The City" & "The East Bay". We plan to use this old house as a haven while we do our reconnaissance into scary Berkeley, our perhaps new hood. Everyone has a different idea for me. All I want to do is stay in the mountains & live the life of the idle rich. Cosmic forces conspire to move me to urban Dis. Count me momentarily 'in' on B.A., despite the rigamarole which will keep me from you.

Peace & Robert Allen Zimmerman,
J.H.
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Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:16:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <________@yahoo.com>

Subject: Le
To: "Bonnie Whiting Smith" <____________@gmail.com>

Bonnie Anne,

First, some initial thoughts about the Jabberwock:

I recommend immediately securing a copy of Martin Gardiner's amazing "The Annotated Alice" which contains the most thoro introduction & footnotes to both Alice Books. The section on the Jabberwocky is pages of footnotes, definitions, & translations. I just found the wikipedia entry, which also has definitions & more translations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

It also has a long section on pronunciation, which you may want to study! before pronouncing it "wrong" for a bunch of nubiles.

The French:

Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave.
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux
Et le mômerade horsgrave.

Several suggestions for other things you can do or add to the play:
I would recommend using the Humpty-Dumpty dialog as a framework, because it's hilarious & explains the idea of a portmanteaux. Perhaps you could make a humpty-dumpty costume into an instrument!

Look into Joyce's Finnegans Wake - it quotes the Jabberwock repeatedly, & the whole book is inspired by Carroll's innovation of the portmanteaux. If you were interested in quoting other nonsense besides the Jabberwock, perhaps you could sing the quotes from FW. (I'll look them up for you). The major themes of the Joyce are the toppling of the tower of babble-babel-baba, i.e. the nonsensization of language, & it is overlapped with the fall of Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, & fall of drunk Tim Finnegan from the old Irish song. (Finnegan falls off a ladder & wakes up at his own wake, i.e. Jesus. The whole nonsense novel is supposed to be his dream-death-drunk.) Look for references to Humpty-Dumpty on the first page!

If you're interested in other nonsense verse, there's a good dover edition of Carroll's complete poetry. You might want to include the "Mad Gardner's Song" to your act, always a favorite. Edward Lear is the other famous nonsense poet. I also love Robert Burns, the Scottish bard, & I was going to send you this poem I recently found:

Ye gallants bright,
I rede you right,
Beware o' Bonnie Ann;
Her comely face sae fu' o' grace,
Your heart she will trepan:
Her een sae bright, like stars by night,
Her skin is like the swan;
Sae jimply lac'd her genty waist,
That sweetly ye might span.

Youth, grace, and love attendant move,
And pleasure leads the van:
In a' their charms, and conquering arms,
They wait on Bonnie Ann.
The captive bands may chain the hands,
But love enslaves the man:
Ye gallants braw, I rede you a',
Beware o' Bonnie Ann!


Secondly, our party:
It was mostly people from my work, afterall, plus James Quill & Darren Southworth, my only old friends who made the journey. Three of my ex-coworkers got into a dramatic threesome, rife with yelling & crying, which complicated my simple festivisties. Jenny & I are looking for a place to live in the bay area, house-sitting for my sister in Alameda this week. We were just up in Ashland, Oregon, seeing Shakespeare's King John, & then camping in the redwoods. We saw the tallest tree in the world, the tallest life-form on eath, "Giant Tree", a humbling experience; then drove down the coast, beautiful! I'm reading Nabokov. More later - stay in touch - I have help my sister with the newest baby, one month old, baby Will, already twelve pounds.

Love,
James Henry

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________


Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:52:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <_______@yahoo.com>
Subject: P.S.
To: "Bonnie Whiting Smith" <__________@gmail.com>

I found the great lecture I saw, where I was first introduced to the Carroll-Joyce connection:

http://www.lewiscarroll.org/bander.html

Scroll down to the section called "Joyce Carroll Notes" for the quotes.

But, if you have time, that whole essay might give you a lot of inspiration & suggestions. Also, I can put you in touch with Mark Burstein if you want to ask him for ideas. There's already been a lot of music/theater/addition writing about the Jabberwocky, & I'm sure he knows everything inside out. There's also a movie based on it from the 70s, directed by Terry Gilliam (Monty Python / Brazil).

Too much information?

James

Three Years Ago: "List"

Premiering, today--, hello readers--, I would like to spearhead the initiative for a new segment called Three Years Ago. We never properly celebrated that this website weblog has been posting for more than three years. So as an extended anniversary party, I'll be RE-POSTING from the exact past, EXACTLY TO THE MINUTE THREE YEARS LATER, the post I had posted three years ago. This post from May 27th, 2006, at 3:51pm, was simply called "List".
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1) Girls who think Sandinistra is the best Clash album.
2) Snow in May.
3) The 1976 elections.
4) Neil Diamond’s "Soulimon".
5) What Hawthorne thought of Melville.
6) A googly during a Sticky Wicket.
7) The deleted ending of Dr. Strangelove.
8) Popcorn cooked over a fire.
9) When, during the last Calvin & Hobbes anthology, Rosalyn (the babysitter) beats Calvin at Calvinball.
10) David Byrne dancing with a lamp.
11) White tea with steamed rice milk.
12) Turquoise found in the hills of the Nevada desert.
13) New York hipster drone music played at deafening volumes on the Hurdy-Gurdy.
14) Good flan.
15) Lily Langtree.
16) The names of Al Franken’s books.
17) Half Moon Lake in Desolation Wilderness.
18) Petzl Headlamps worn at inappropriate times.
19) J.D. Salinger’s longevity.
20) People who smile to themselves at you.
21) Joan Baez singing both parts of conversational songs.
22) Jokes about Sven & Ollie.
23) People who are humble about having read all of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen.
24) Sexagenarians who think The Man Who Wasn't There is the best Cohen Brothers movie.
25) Poor students who would prefer to spend more than $50 on a bottle of good tequila.
26) Mimosa’s Witnesses.
27) My friend who said she saw Wagner’s Siegfried on acid with her father.
28) John Denver’s Greatest Hits, Volume Three.
29) Children who use the word “obtuse.”
30) Life-long vegetarians.
31) Tan M&Ms in a wine glass.
32) Toughannock Falls.
33) The first few chapters of First Chronicles.
34) Houris.
35) When Elizabeth Bishop interrupts & corrects herself in her own poem.
36) Seeing an old friend in a new light.
37) Having a large number of dimes.
38) Jokes about what’s black, white, and/or red.
39) Corn Lily.
40) Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida.
41) Butterbeer & Firewhiskey.
42) Caleb Burhans.
43) Merlot drinkers.
44) People who take black & white photos on digital cameras.
45) Jimmy Buffet’s Jamaica Mistaica.
46) Reading Robert Burns out loud with an American accent.
47) Christmas caroling on Halloween.
48) The one who gets to play 4’33” during a John Cage Music Circus.
49) David Bowie as Andy Warhol in Basquiat.
50) Eskimo women chanting.